4G LTE Connected Retail- Part Three Lessons Learned

This was a challenging project to work on, primarily because we were blazing a new trail. In my opinion if you are going to perform a similar project I would only roll this out on 5G technology networks. There are several phases of the 4G deployment and they are quite unequal, at least in the USA. Below you will find my key takeaways.

1. Start with a plan, a Service Plan. When we embarked on this project our carrier's account team (lovely bunch of people) did not have a service plan ready for us. Depending on the size of your organization this can take some time due to negotiations and approvals. The importance of having an adequate service plan built to carry all of your traffic at the outset of the project is huge. This is going to save you barrels of cash in overage bills.

2. Coverage Survey. You have got to know if you've got sufficient coverage. In the quest for this information you may be able to contact a partner (like an aggregator) who will be able to give you reliable coverage survey information. It should be noted, that this survey data was taken at a point in time, and probably not inside your building, changes (construction, amplifier/antenna installation) may be required. You should really account for this upfront. Have an agreement in place with a reputable nation-wide firm that can perform remediation work. If you cannot find a partner for remediation, its possible your carrier(s) can recommend one.

3. Carrier Diversity is important. Sometimes a carrier just doesn't have sufficient coverage in an area. Don't get mad, get a secondary (or tertiary) nationwide or regional carrier with a separate infrastructure. This is not about the relationship, it is about the coverage, and you're going to want the best available.

4. Performance Testing and SLAs are hard to implement on a throughput-constrained network. During a particularly troublesome period we had our account engineer perform testing on our devices for throughput and latency at regular intervals. This impacted our user traffic and consumed our full months allotted data in a few days. A better approach to this is to use a device that automatically tracks these metrics with the metadata in the frames like a next-gen SD-WAN firewall/router. I think the data may be worth the expense even if operating as single-connected.

5. If you are rolling out new hardware, consider zero-touch provisioning, and management via API. If you don't how to use Postman yet maybe its time to get some reps. The old days of hardware depots and config templates in notepad need to go, we don't time for that stuff anymore, there's just too much work to do.

6. Lastly, find a nationwide terrestrial carrier to work with, and be prepared to pay for build-out costs. There are simply some areas that cell coverage cannot reach due to things like mountains and forests. Its better to plan for it, than to pretend it won't happen.

This was a whirlwind project that took a lot of effort from a great many people, and it required INCREDIBLE patience from our retail associates and leadership. It was the single-most challenging project of my career to date. I really wish I had a viable satellite-based option we could have employed here, especially in some of the more remote regions, but the technology wasn't quite ready for us. I think in another couple years the technologies provided by Viasat and Starlink could really change the game here, especially if being used for secondary data.