Amir: We support both models, CapEx or OpEx. We’re seeing a lot more customers moving to an OpEx model. It helps them scale, it helps them reserve capital.

Pradhyum: Celona also has a subscription model. We offer three-year and five-year subscriptions, and you can buy a subscription incrementally. But candidly, working with an INS or something, we can work with whatever model you’re comfortable with. That’s the role INS can also play. Lane, why don’t you say what INS can do in terms of financing models?

Lane: We do offer, in many cases, an OpEx model spread over time. But in most cases, OEMs are offering subscription-based models at three, five, or other terms. You can select your term. We’ve also seen month-to-month models. We can basically customize it to your needs and to your situation. Many companies want to use their capital budget on these kinds of projects, and other companies want to limit that CapEx hit and turn it into OpEx, spread over a year, three years, or five years.

Pradhyum: There are a lot of questions about whether you can do three years, five years, one year. The $25,000 figure you saw was for a three-year subscription for an indoor radio. The goal behind robot connectivity as a service, and having that kit, is for you to kick the tires on this and see for yourself how it works. When you’re actually going to a customer at scale, or if you are the customer and you want to deploy at scale, that’s when you work with an INS and figure out what’s the right model for you. We can be flexible on many of those things.

Lane: It’s also important to add that in that MSRP price, we have not only INS support, but we have dedicated man-hours to help you, either remotely or onsite if needed, but generally remotely, to bring up the system if you need assistance. Whether it’s a Celona-related issue or a Digi-related issue, INS can help solve that problem. We include three years of support in that number, and a bucket of eight hours of remote engineering support. You can call as needed when you have challenges, questions, or run into issues. We can also help you develop test cases for yourselves, if you want to understand better what test cases might work or how to apply this more accurately. When you see the follow-up links to the INS website, we certainly encourage you to reach in and talk with us about the various ways we can vary this kit for your needs.

Lane: That’s pretty simple. It’s much like what we did at the food and beverage company. Their robots had embedded Wi-Fi modules. We simply disconnected those, added a 5G router module, and off to the races we went. There’s also work going on, on the Digi side, to modularize the Digi product so it could be embedded into your robots before you ship them. But if you want to retrofit, that’s super easy — we’ve done it and proven it successful.

Amir: The infrastructure is there. You just need to plug in the access point. On the robot, you can easily use one of our finished gateways today, and we can build a path to embed it if that’s where you’re focused.

Pradhyum: Lane was talking about the robot side — how to make the robot a private 5G robot. But making the infrastructure private 5G is also simple enough. You’re essentially pulling off a Wi-Fi access point and putting a private 5G radio in. It works exactly the same way, with Power over Ethernet, connecting to your existing LAN. And you may have had 200 access points before. Now you only need 20, because the range of private 5G is higher.

Lane: We’ve also seen several cases where the customer leaves the Wi-Fi system intact and simply starts slowly migrating pieces of their OT and IT use cases over onto 5G as devices are written off the books. We overlay a Wi-Fi network with a PCN network — they don’t interfere with one another. You can run all your robots and mission-critical systems over your PCN network, and leave the Wi-Fi up for average users — visitors to the plant, or anyone who just needs to check email. As the Wi-Fi access points start to die, or as more use cases migrate to the PCN environment, they may decommission the Wi-Fi at that point.

Pradhyum: Mining is one of those areas where this question is very relevant, because the landmass that exists today will be completely different tomorrow. There are a couple of ways to approach it. You’re literally talking about an access point on a pole — you can move it wherever you want. In those kinds of scenarios, we design the radios and their quantity so that if coverage lapses from one radio, there’s overlap from another. In cases of mines, we can go relocate the infrastructure. We’re also doing tests with satellite operators like Starlink, where you backhaul network connectivity via Starlink but provide private 5G locally, wherever you need it. All you need is power.

Lane: We did a recent mining project with Celona where they absolutely wanted to move things around as their slag piles and the mine itself changed shape on a regular basis. We helped them design a movable vertical asset with solar and batteries for power, and used a wireless bridge to haul it back to the core onsite, which was connected to the internet via Starlink. I would add as a caveat that we do encourage engaging us before you start moving access points around, because there’s desktop design work we can do to make sure handoffs continue to work as expected. In many mining environments, it’s very difficult to run power or fiber, so we often see point-to-point and point-to-multipoint solutions to connect the access points to the core.

Pradhyum: The point I was making in that slide was about taking whatever bandwidth you have and distributing it across multiple robots. The requirements vary quite a bit. On one end, you have autonomous robots like a Roomba that require very little connectivity because once the map is laid out, the robot operates largely on its own. On the other end, in safety-critical industrial applications, you want all cameras, LiDAR, and other sensors constantly transmitting so the robot can operate safely. So there’s a wide range. What we’re trying to say is that you need a network that supports your specific use case, and more importantly, one that works reliably at every single location inside your manufacturing or industrial floor. That is what a private 5G network can provide.

Lane: If you can send Ethernet over 5G, you can send time-sensitive networking. That is absolutely the case.

Pradhyum: Wired connectivity is the holy grail, and I believe private 5G will eventually reach that bar. Where we realistically are today is that even in the OT space, there are super-critical applications at one level, and others where people are becoming more open to wireless. INS has actually done work on this — replacing wired connectivity with wireless as a backup. When the wired connectivity fails, you can use wireless as a failover. We’d be happy to share a link to that webinar, which includes actual latency measurements from a full lab demonstration.

Amir: Digi takes cybersecurity extremely seriously. We adhere to standards set by the government — FIPS 140-3 and SOC 2 Type 2. We’re compliant on both. These are typically not required for industrial customers, but because we serve a wide range of customers — including government — we go above and beyond. As one example, every intersection in New York has a Digi gateway controlling the traffic lights. That cannot be hacked.

Lane: On the radio network side, the access points and the core are all developed under the same 3GPP standards as your traditional outdoor macro network — the same standards that T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T build on. Those standards include a comprehensive section on security and encryption. On top of that, when we put in a PCN system, all the gear and data stays behind your OT or IT firewall. The only reason to connect to the internet is so you can see the Celona and Digi dashboards and monitor your system. It’s inherently secure through 3GPP, and we add belt-and-suspenders protection by keeping everything behind your own firewall, integrated within your own network.

Pradhyum: The way Celona designed our private 5G solution is to leverage your existing firewall, AAA, NAC servers, and existing security infrastructure. You’re not reinventing the wheel. From a visibility standpoint, it works exactly like a Wi-Fi network — but now you’re on a private 5G network. With our tight integration with Digi, through technologies like supernetting, you get full IP address visibility by robot. The other important point: some carriers will promote network slicing and other technologies that actually route your traffic through a public network over a VPN tunnel. We don’t do any of that. The data stays local — from your robot, into your enterprise network, into your AI and machine learning domains. It never leaves your facility.