Melbourne's Wevo deploys Cradlepoint gear on Bunzl's network

Wevo has deployed Cradlepoint solutions to multinational distribution and outsourcing firm Bunzl to reduce its downtime and increase efficiency and security.

The Melbourne-based telecommunications provider said it won the contract to implement Cradlepoint's 5G adapters, managed SD-WAN and NetCloud across Bunzl’s 42 Australia and New Zealand locations mid-last year.

Wevo director of technology & innovation Paul Chakour said one reason it won the contract was through using interim Cradlepoint solutions to fix some on-site issues "even before Bunzl awarded the contract”.

“They had some really poor bandwidth at some of these sites, like two megabits, and they couldn't migrate to the team's network that they wanted to," Chakour said. "We were able to get them up and running within 24 hours on some 4G and 5G solutions.”

Bunzl operates in 29 countries across 4 continents and has acquired several manufacturing and distribution businesses. Its operations involve packaging and delivering B2B products across a range of industries, such as providing jaws of life to fire services and napkins to hospitality businesses.

Wevo had access to Cradlepoint solutions through its partnership with the Ericsson-owned LTE and wireless edge networking vendor’s Australian distributor Tech Data.

Wevo implemented Cradlepoint solutions over the VMware-based private tunnelling network that Bunzl had already installed to improve it without replacing it.

Wevo applied Cradlepoint’s managed SD-WAN and 5G adapters to replace a legacy system that was inflexible and poorly integrated.

Chakour said the managed SD-WAN provided Bunzl’s network administrators the ability to manage multiple connections through Cradlepoint’s cloud management portal NetCloud that all Cradlepoint protocols and devices talk to.

“NetCloud is a dashboard showing whether the devices are online or not, the GPS coordinates of the network and its connections on a map, we can see which cell tower they're connected to, we can log into devices directly remotely and securely," he added. "And we can then push the configuration down to that device.”

Chakour said prior to implementing Cradlepoint’s 5G adapters, managed SD-WAN and NetCloud “if there was a major core network issue, they could lose connectivity on all the links.”

“If we didn't have NetCloud’s visibility, we would be flying blind. We would have to rely on customers to say ‘our connections down’ or we'd have to talk them through troubleshooting," he said.

"Whereas we're in the cockpit here, we can see the signal strength, we can see if something's changed, or someone's moved the antennas, or if the cell tower is having an issue. It gives us a lot of analytics and intelligence that we’d be completely blind without.”