Enterprise 5G That Actually Works

A hospital breach can turn the network “dirty” in minutes. A fiber cut can take a grocery store offline at the worst possible time. And almost every CIO has said some version of the same thing: “I love the technology, help me find the money.” That’s the tension we dig into with John Tonthat CRO of Cell Hub, one of T-Mobile’s longest-tenured agency partners operating right at the intersection of telco, wireless, and IT systems integration.

We start with the real-world enterprise problems Cell Hub helps solve across healthcare, retail, and beyond, including how large organizations manage provisioning, procurement, and billing across complex wireless estates. John shares why hospital CIOs are juggling three mandates at once: clinical communications that work inside old buildings, remote patient monitoring and care that can scale safely, and security strong enough to withstand relentless attacks. We get specific about where Wi-Fi struggles and how enterprise 5G can be designed as a resilient backup network to protect continuity of care when primary systems are compromised.

Then we shift to the connected grocery store, where uptime, in-building coverage, and refrigerated warehouse connectivity directly impact revenue and customer experience. John explains Super Broadband, combining fixed wireless with Starlink to hit service levels at a compelling price, plus why retail media networks demand “always up” secondary connectivity that doesn’t ride on the core network. Finally, we unpack SCOT, a cost reconciliation engine that uses automation to surface hidden spend across wireline, wireless, and IT, and Design Next, a faster way to iterate network designs with a proper system of record. We close with what John sees as the next frontier: securing not just the device, but the communication itself with peer-to-peer encrypted approaches.

If you care about enterprise connectivity, 5G transformation, network resilience, and mobile security, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review so more builders can find the show.

Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey everybody. Really excited for this chat today as we talk about modern connectivity, AI-powered monetization, and what enterprise customers really need from their wireless partner in areas like healthcare, retail, and beyond, with John from Cell Hub. John, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me today. Well, thanks for being here. Really excited for this conversation. You're one of T-Mobile's uh longest tenured uh and exclusive agency partners. Uh maybe tell us about that. And um, who is Cell Hub for those who who may not be familiar? Super.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

So Cell Hub was actually founded uh 28 plus years ago when a fellow by the name of Andy Sinha established a relationship with West Street, which then over the years uh transformed into uh T Mobile. And so uh our distinction is we're very proud of having a 28-plus year relationship with uh with T-Mobile and have been loyal to T Mobile the through the entire uh period. Um Selva has, to your point, uh a number of different contractual uh relationships with Team Mobile. First and foremost, we are partnered under Team Mobile for Business, commercial Liable. We also can do uh individual libel, uh, because we have uh that that's really the basis of the company when it started, which was Andy had 82 stores up and down uh the East Coast. And so we maintain that contract. Um, we also have a wholesale relationship with T-Mobile, such that we participate in T-Mobile CSP uh uh go-to-market uh process. Uh and last but not least, uh we also are a systems integrator for T-Mobile and in fact deploy a number of portals that uh large Fortune 200 companies, I'll say it like that, use our portal to manage their uh enterprise uh estate, T-Mobile Enterprise Estate, uh, from a provisioning, procurement, all the way to managing billing and whatnot. So we're we're a full service uh shop. And last October, we acquired uh the team that was formerly with a very large Indian systems integrator called Tech Mahendra and have really bolstered our network capabilities. When I say network, think core corporate network all the way uh to uh sell a car from an OSS VSS layer. So today we're a full service systems integrator and primary agent all world up to.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Wow, that's quite a unique position. Um you're bringing together different technologies, vendors, even services for customers. How does that look sort of behind the scenes?

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yeah, I think uh uh to answer the question, I I actually came to uh self hub uh roughly two years ago after spending uh seven and a half years at a small little IT distributor called Ingram Micro. And I say that tungly cheese uh because Ingram uh certainly isn't small. Uh I ran an enterprise business for Ingram and during that period of time uh had a portfolio of clients, which included systems integrators and network operators. So wireline, wireless, the entire portfolio was under my TNL. And it was clear to me uh back then by spending a lot of time with uh uh analysts uh from a go-to-market point of view, doing research, that if T Mobile could actually execute its vision of uh operationalizing the spectrum they bought from Sprint, T-Mobile would be a force to be reckoned with. So at Ingram, I uh spearheaded the group that uh rekindled the relationship with uh T-Mobile, with a fellow by the name of George Fisher, and uh uh and really re-established that relationship and shortly thereafter recruited a partner to uh come in and um execute that vision. And when I say execute that vision, it was Pixel, who we recruited at Ingro, that did the very first uh ANS deal for T-Mobile, which was the Boston Children's Hospital deal, which which now has become uh fairly famous on way you uh take uh T Mobile's 2.5 uh uh product offering and and then turn it into an enterprise grade uh solution solving for, in this instance, healthcare uh challenges. So uh I left Ingram uh after that to concentrate solely on T-Mobile, uh raised private equity, tried to buy cell hub candidly for nine months, and uh, at which point Andy and I got together for dinner and said, hey, look, if your theory uh holds up and what you say you can do holds up, then uh the only people that's gonna be wealthy's private equity. He says, I've got plenty of money, uh, let's self-fund the growth and let's let's uh see how that works out. So for the last two years, we've been uh bringing together a portfolio of partners to bring T-Mobile's technology to market. Um one of those partners, I'm happy to say, is we support CDW, uh, which is a fairly good-sized uh uh IT reseller uh globally. And so we support um CDW, and at the same time, we get to market breadth by supporting a distributor called DNH uh distributing out of uh Hershey, Pennsylvania. And so between the two, we we do business day in, day out with about 500 partners that are uh typically IT resellers um and MSP providers, and and that's how we go to market. So to your point, we uh we sit at the intersection of telco, wireless, and IT, and and we bridge the gap about solving for IT challenges with T-Mobile's tech stack. That was a mouthful, but I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Amazing, really helpful. What an incredible uh story uh over the past few years. And uh a lot of your focus and a lot of the excitement enterprise is in certain verticals around transformation. You mentioned healthcare, Boston Children's amazing institutions, particularly for us in the Boston area. We we love and appreciate the work uh they do, especially. So, what big picture, what kind of connectivity and other challenges are hospitals facing right now? Uh, give us the big picture from your point of view.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, I I think uh uh when you talk to any hospital CIO, there's there's really three mandates uh put upon them. Uh first and foremost is how do you sell for clinical communications, um, particularly in buildings as old as Boston Children's, right? So uh part of the challenge is when you architect your clinical communication strategy uh based on Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi uh has a very tough time propagating its signal through uh thick walls and or through very, very large uh space instances. When I say that, think courtyards, think really large uh campuses, right? It's very expensive to do that with Wi-Fi. Uh so political comms is the first problem. The second problem is um with the advent of trying to drive more revenue uh for hospital systems, uh, solving for remote patient, and I'll say insert the last verb, whether that be monitoring, care, or hospital, that's really the next phase that hospitals are driving quickly to figure out how could they uh deliver care uh cost effectively and can really turn a profit from it and do it in a safe, secure environment that gives the patient the same clinical experience at the hospital but at home. Uh and the uh third issue that hospitals uh have candidly is the underlying infrastructure. Um, most hospitals spend a lot of money where they should, which is in care, but not necessarily in security. And so hospitals are a terrific target from a uh bad actor point of view, and hospital breaches are unfortunately a very common occurrence. And so if you get breached, the first thing that happens is your network is now dirty. So, how do you keep up your clinical charting communication when your network is not as secure as it as it should be? And what we've done with T-Mobile is to help T-Mobile architect using 5G as a backup resilient network in an isolated recovery environment, which is a fancy way to say, God forbid, if the hospital gets breached, there's a secondary network that kicks in, that keeps that hospital hobbling along, to keep uh continuity of care um uh going while the systems are being restored. So when you put those three factors together, T-Mobile is in a really unique position to be able to help hospitals solve for some pains and challenges that uh otherwise would be very difficult to solve for, but for uh T-Mobile.

(Cont.) Enterprise 5G That Actually Works

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Amazing. Literally uh life-saving work there. Um shifting gears into another segment you're super active in and retail, specifically uh grocery retailers. You built a connected store program. You know, what is it? How does it work, and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Yeah, so we uh we uh went to market. Uh so the comment I shared with you earlier is that we go to market through our partner community. So we have a partner called ThinkBlue, uh who whose founder was a uh 20-plus-year head merchant for uh a grocery operator, a very large regional grocery operator. Uh Parag Shaw is his name. Wakeford was a company he worked for. And so Perag helped me understand uh two things. One, the intersection of where food is now uh equally as important to think about as health. So it in the grocery industry, believe it or not, what the onset of GLP wants, the literally the portfolio of products a grocery operator now thinks about selling has been dramatically changed because of our collective healthcare, both needs and desires. I didn't know that. I didn't, you know, I wasn't aware of any of that until Brad helped me uh connect some dots, number one. Number two, we then engaged with uh associations that operate in that space, which validated that need. So in grocery, there are essentially three core problems that grocery has had from a connectivity point of view. First thing is uh the uptime of their stores as it relates to cable or fiber cuts, right? And and I gently remind everybody that if you're looking at four nines of availability, uh, that typically results into somewhere between seven and eleven hours a year of downtime, which is fine if it happens at midnight. It is not, however, fine if that happens to you on Christmas Eve. Right? So continuity of uh connection to the internet is uh job one for most uh grocery operators. T-Mobile answers that call now with something called Super Broadband, where they fuse together a fixed wireless connection along with um uh Starlink to deliver a predefined service level and at a price point that tenderly can't be met by uh without the buying leverage of T-Mobile. So super broadband really solves uh that very first issue. The second issue that we now tackle with in food grocery is how do you improve the consumer experience when they walk into that supermarket? And the answer is you want to have the consumer be able to keep um the communication going with the app uh in the store so that wayfinding can occur, so that uh offers can be made. And so we solve for in-building coverage of supermarkets and grocery operators. We then extend that expertise to refrigerated warehouses. So if you think about large grocery operators or the distributors that serve them, we're talking anywhere from half a million to a million square feet refrigerated warehouses. And something that a lot of people don't think about is that uh what is stocked in those aisles change based on seasonality. So I'm making this up just to illustrate a point. In the summertime when it's really hot, you may have cases of water, go all the way up to uh to two uh stacks, right? And then you shift over to the next month, and now you're transitioning to uh the fall, and all of a sudden now dog food sits in that same location, but is now stacked uh 30 feet high. The problem with Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi doesn't like that varying change of the height of uh uh of the blockage of signal. So to solve for uh the pickers running up and down the aisles to accelerate uh communication and connectivity, the way you solve for it is to put cellular in-building coverage and convert uh the communication and those uh automated pickers to a cellular-based environment. So we do that. And then last but not least, um the thing that most grocery operators think about is how do they monetize um via their retail media networks. And most uh grocery operators are pretty savvy. What they don't want to do is they don't want those RMNs to be running off of their core networks, which means that we have to bring in, work with the RMNs to bring in uh uh essentially a secondary connection that's always up because uh the RMNs is one of the different ways that grocery operators are monetizing their foot traffic and their ad spend and whatnot. So um you wouldn't think of it, but I've now learned that grocery and food and health are very closely interconnected because many grocery operators actually have a pharmacy in them, if you think about it, right? So now you begin to see the work that we did in health uh in in the provider space at hospitals sort of spill over into the the next uh level of of uh uh helping consumers uh uh eat better and take care of themselves.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

A huge part of our economy as well and uh uh underinvested in, I'd say, for many decades. So it's great to see these solutions coming to market. Speaking of solutions, I'm on your website here and I'm intrigued by something I see strategic cost and optimization, uh sort of AI-first cost analysis platform called SCOT. Uh we love our acronyms, don't we, in tech? But how does it work? How does it help customers find savings and help offset the cost of modernization?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Yeah. Um one of the challenges when we uh address large transformational projects is the cost to do so. And almost always our discussions with CIRs pretty much end up like this. I love the technology, but help me find the money to actually afford it, right? I know I have latent spend and cost buried into my existing either infrastructure or uh the way that I deploy IT. Uh you know, use your capability to do that. I shared with you earlier that we had acquired a team formerly from Tech Mahindra who developed essentially a super sophisticated uh uh data, I'll call it a data reconciliation engine. I want to stay away from AI, yes, as it uses AI, but I don't want to uh uh overuse that term. What it does do, however, is it will bring in cost and spend cost, however, the end user has it. It could be in filing cabinets, it could be in a CMDB, it could be with a telecom expense management company. Part of the challenge is that these different disparate pools of data are just that. They're disparate. So having one place to ingest it and having the expertise to look across wireline, wireless, and IT, we we get to drive cost out. So let me give you an example why a traditional 10 only would have a diff a more difficult time than the way we do. Typically, when you're dealing with a 10, they will say, hey, you have a one-gig circuit into this building, you're paying X for it. Like for like, you would go out and try to get a like for like SLA at a low cost. Well, what if I said to you, Evan, the way to solve that is not like for like, but to change the technology that you're using for that connectivity? What if I said to you, I can now drop in and create a point fixed wireless router, and then I could bond the connections, get you the same or near the same level of the uh service levels that you uh stipulated for literally half the cost. And that's what we do. So, yes, we look at pure cost in its its you know uh basic lightful like uh reconciliation, but we also look at the world of how do you adopt different technologies, all enabled by 5G, to to lower costs. So that entire process is called uh strategic cost optimization and transformation, hence Scott, and we do it on a game share basis. So there's very little risk to the end user, and there's an enormous amount of upselling uh the way we structure it. And we work hand in hand with uh folks who are uh uh 10 providers as much as folks who are uh I'll call it in the ITSM space, uh, with CMDB true-ups and whatnot. So we we stitch together a capability that we think is pretty compelling.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Sounds like it. And so Scott helps find the savings, and then you need to kind of design what comes next. And I understand you have a platform for that as well.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

That's right. So one of the challenges with uh network design is historically it's been I have an engineer or CCIE that's gone through the level of certification to help me uh uh design a network. And then that network design gets iterated back and forth with the end user. And so from the time you started network design until you finish a network design, you've probably gone through, on average, 20 to 30 iterations. Here's the challenge. The challenge is that when when you don't have automation, all of that is via emails back and forth, which is a terrible way to update systems of record. So our system uses. Is yes, a little bit of AI to help configure it. But really, what it does is there's a system of record that allows you to maintain the changes made from each design so that when you go, when you roll it back and you go back to figuring out uh what is the right design that the client likes versus what the recommendations you make. Uh, we infuse uh automation from a design point of view with a system of record, with our ITSM capabilities. And what you then have is an ability to design uh uh, I would say, mid-market uh network, uh mid-market networks rather, um, and and do it with uh with speed because you've you've literally cut down that back and forth with the client. So you can literally be sitting on the phone uh on a video call, not unlike this, with the client and say, let's let's look at the real-time changes that you're looking for. And here's the uh here's the impact. So that's uh that's a product called Design Next.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Amazing. Well done. So uh just to wrap up here, looking ahead. Um what are you excited about over the next weeks, quarters uh uh in helping partners and and customers? What's on your mind, you and the team?

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yeah, we we've been working uh what we believe is the single biggest problem uh in the mobility space, and that is security. Uh partnered with a company called Modius, where we can lock down um uh the communication from a governance and compliance point of view. But in the days ahead, what we'll be able to lock down is a peer-to-peer uh identity-obfuscated communication system. So what what I'll be able to come back to you and say, Evan, not only can I lock down your physical device, right? Your phone with an MDM with a multi-threat defense system, but more important, I can actually secure the communication that the two of us have because we've authenticated. And we can do it in a way that is peer-to-peer, which means that it's very hard, never say never, but it's practically impossible today, even with quantum, to break through the uh encryption layers that we've built. So we think that the next layer and next generation of solving for mobility is uh locking down that mobile device, both in terms of uh the apps that you're using, but as well as the communication you have through it.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Well, well done. Uh amazing work and keep it up, much needed in the enterprise and uh onwards and upwards. Thanks, John.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

You bet. It's uh been a pleasure and thank you so much for having me on today.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Thank you, and thanks everyone, as always, for listening and watching. Also, check out our TV show, Techimpact.tv, monthly on Fox Business, and Bloomberg Television. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, John.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Take care.