Network and Voice
Wireless and IoT Connectivity
Wireless and IoT connectivity covers the ways to connect a site, a vehicle or a device by radio when a cable cannot do the job. The word wireless hides several technologies that solve different problems, and buying the wrong one is the common mistake.
- 5 companies on the shelf
- Coverage
Buyer's checklist
Eight questions that decide this purchase
Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.
- 01
Is the problem reaching the site, or coverage once you are inside it?
- 02
Who or what must connect: your staff, the public on their own phones, or equipment that moves?
- 03
Will this be the site's only connection or its backup? If backup, does it take a different physical route from the wire?
- 04
Are the sites fixed, mobile or temporary, and are any outside the United States?
- 05
Is cellular data pooled across devices or sold per device, and what happens after a set amount of use?
- 06
Do you need a fixed internet address for connections between sites? Satellite service cannot supply one without added equipment.
- 07
For private cellular, can your existing scanners and machines join the network, or must they be replaced?
- 08
Who runs it after installation: the carrier, a managing partner, or your own team through a portal?
No company matches every box you checked
That usually means the combination is rare, not impossible. Clear a filter, or add the service and we will go find who can do it.
Capabilities come from published supplier material. We confirm them for your addresses before anything is quoted.
More on what it is
Two questions sort them. Is the problem getting a connection to the site at all, or moving around once inside it? And if it is inside, who or what needs to connect: your people, the public's own phones, or machines?
Getting to the site has four answers. Cellular internet runs over a 4G or 5G network. Fixed wireless delivers internet over a radio link in place of a wired line. Satellite reaches places nothing else does, and low orbit services respond faster than high orbit ones. Any of these can be a site's main connection or its backup. Wireless failover is the backup case: a device watches your wired connection, moves traffic to cellular when the wire fails, and moves it back once the wire is healthy. A wireless WAN goes one step further and runs two radio paths together, typically satellite and more than one cellular carrier, behind one managed device.
Inside a building there are three answers. Managed Wi-Fi serves people, laptops, phones and guests. A distributed antenna system, or DAS, captures the carriers' signal outdoors and rebroadcasts it indoors, so a visitor's phone works on the account they already have, with nothing to log in to. A private cellular network is your own cellular system on a band the FCC opened for shared use, called CBRS, and the tier most businesses use requires no license. Only devices you issue a SIM can join. It exists for equipment that moves: cellular was designed to hand a moving device from one radio to the next without the brief drop a Wi-Fi device can suffer when it changes access points.
IoT, the Internet of Things, means connecting sensors and equipment instead of people. A project can be as small as data plans for devices you already own. It can also include the devices, the software that reads them and someone to run it all. Fleets that span several carriers usually add a management platform that shows every SIM and its usage in one place and flags unusual activity.
Who needs it
- Your site is somewhere no wired carrier will quote, or the quote involves months of construction.
- You run stores or restaurants where the registers must stay online through an outage.
- You operate in rural or outlying areas, as many energy companies do.
- Your warehouse or plant runs handheld scanners or automated equipment that must stay connected while moving.
- You are building or renovating, especially if the fire marshal has raised radio coverage for first responders.
- You run many sites on one circuit each.
- You need connectivity at a temporary site, such as a construction trailer, before wired service arrives.
An office whose only complaint is slow Wi-Fi needs a Wi-Fi redesign, which is the smallest project on this page.
Signs you need it
- Your last outage cut staff off from cloud applications, and nobody could say when service would return.
- Your backup circuit enters the building through the same conduit as your primary.
- Scanners drop their sessions when an operator walks between racks, or a machine stops when it loses signal.
- Staff and visitors have no phone signal in parts of the building.
- The Wi-Fi is fine when the building is empty and slows as it fills, and adding access points did not help.
- Your cellular plan slows down or runs out before the month does.
How IT Raven helps
Add Wireless and IoT Connectivity to your quote list and tell us the addresses and what is failing today. A person takes that to the wireless providers in our 500+ partner network. Coverage depends on the exact address, so we check each one. A carrier's coverage map describes the street and tells you nothing about the third floor.
Expect a site survey before any price for work inside a building. Nobody can quote a DAS or a private cellular network from a floor plan, and a building with a strong phone signal can still fail a public safety radio inspection, because responder radios use different frequencies.
We stay on one thread through survey, installation and the first deliberate failover test. A backup should be failed on purpose, on a day you choose. Otherwise its first test is the outage itself. The same team handles new sites, more SIMs and renewals. Wired circuits belong in Business Connectivity, traffic steering across paths in SD-WAN and SASE, and device management in Managed Mobility.
How buying works
The store is the easy part. Staying on the account is the job.
Anyone can show you logos. The reason to buy here is what happens on install night, and on the ticket you open nine months later.
- 01
Build your quote list
Add services and companies as you shop. No form stands between you and the shelf.
- 02
We bring back real options
A person shops the bench against your addresses, then walks you through what fits and what does not.
- 03
We handle the order and install
Paperwork, site survey, install dates, cutover night. You get one thread, not five vendors.
- 04
We stay on your account
Same team for moves, adds, tickets and the next renewal. That is the part everyone else drops.