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Managed Router Case Study

Gardonville is a member-owned cooperative in west central Minnesota that provides voice, video, and broadband services to approximately 5,700 locations in their ILEC, CLEC, and wireless areas. Gardonville connects homes and businesses using a number of platforms including VDSL, Fiber Optic, Wireless Point-to-Multipoint, and Wireless Point-to-Point.



SITUATION - As Gardonville’s subscriber’s bandwidth consumption and number of connected devices in the home grew - something else grew too - trouble tickets. These trouble tickets all had something in common - the fact that it wasn’t Gardonville’s network, rather the residential grade routers in the subscriber’s homes was to blame. Over the previous 10-12 years, Gardonville had resold wireless routers of various models to its subscribers or allowed subscribers to provide their own. This model was failing to scale with the co-op. Not being able to source a consistent model of router, not being able to ensure consistent configuration of devices, and the lack of single pane of glass to monitor and troubleshoot routers was creating major operational issues. Gardonville needed a solution that would solve these issues.



SOLUTION - While finding a WiFi router is not hard to do - finding reliable, feature rich, affordable managed router is. After months of researching possible solutions, Cambium Networks’ cnPilot R-Series Router with cnMaestro cloud management was chosen as the solution to be deployed. The Cambium R-201 routers provide Gardonville a single version of hardware that supports their needs, boasting a 4-port Gigabit switch, Gigabit WAN interface, simultaneous dual-band 802.11 n/ac WiFi, a 2-port voice ATA, and a USB 2.0 host port for printer or storage sharing.



Cambium’s cnMaestro is a cloud-based or on-site software solution for secure, end-to-end network control. cnMaestro allows Gardonville staff to perform daily preventative trouble checks, router configuration changes, in-depth troubleshooting of subscribers’ in-home networks, and bulk firmware upgrades.



RESULT - By switching from an outdated model of reselling residential-grade wireless routers to subscribers and moving into a model of leasing Cambium’s cnPilot R-Series routers, Gardonville was able to turn a support expense into a recurring revenue stream.


By using the cnMaestro cloud management platform, Gardonville’s support staff is able to proactively check for subscriber troubles and performance issues, keep routers up-to-date with minimal effort, and quickly respond to support and configuration change requests from subscribers.








*Originally posted January 6, 2018


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