- CEO Juho Sarvikas is driving fixed wireless access (FWA) growth in the enterprise
- Part of that strategy involves the recent hire of Ryan Sullivan to lead product management in the carrier channel
- In a nod to the tariff tensions, the company acknowledged it’s evaluating a manufacturing move to North America
It seems an understatement to say there’s a lot going on these days at Inseego, the San Diego-based company perhaps best known for the MiFi wireless hotspot device that delivers mobile internet via cellular signals.
Here are a few developments:
- The company underwent a major restructuring in the past 12 or so months, resulting in new board members and a new management team.
- In January, Inseego welcomed CEO Juho Sarvikas, a seasoned industry exec who previously ran Qualcomm North America. Part of his strategy involves seizing new business opportunities for fixed wireless access (FWA), one of the rare 5G success stories for mobile carriers.
- This week, the company revealed its newest hire, long-time Sprint-turned-T-Mobile executive Ryan Sullivan, who will lead FWA efforts in the carrier channel and drum up new FWA and MiFi business.
- Oh yeah, and then there’s the bit about the company possibly locating some manufacturing to North America. Stay tuned – more on that in a minute.
First, the latest hire, who happens to be a 2019 Fierce Network Rising Star winner. At Sprint and later T-Mobile, Sullivan developed global product roadmaps for connected devices like smartphones, IoT solutions, tablets and home internet devices – the kinds of things that are at the core of Inseego’s business.
As the newly minted SVP of Carrier Product Management at Inseego, Sullivan expects to use his carrier connections to help make further inroads for the company, which currently counts Verizon and T-Mobile as its largest carrier customers.
“That's really what I'm here to focus on is the carrier channel, having that experience of not only the network evolution, but also the deep contacts that I built up over the last 25 years working in the industry at Sprint and T-Mobile,” Sullivan told Fierce. “It’s a small industry. ”
He’s jazzed about jumping into the device innovation cycle a little earlier than typically happens when you’re at a carrier.
“Really excited to build that next generation of products on 5G Advanced, taking advantage of network slicing, uplink carrier aggregation and all those things that are going to enable us to not only supercharge the mobile wireless experience, but also really substantiate the tying together of the stack across the mobile and the home and the enterprise,” he said.
Manufacturing and keeping up with the tariffs
Next up: Of course, this being April 2025, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask Inseego about its supply chain situation. After all, back in 2018, Inseego moved its manufacturing out of mainland China to avoid President Trump’s tariffs on the sale of Chinese goods in the U.S.
“It's definitely been a whiplash couple of weeks, that's for sure,” Inseego Chief Revenue Officer Steve Harmon told Fierce late last week.
Inseego’s manufacturing is now done in Taiwan, with some manufacturing capability in other regions as well, he said. It's looking at Europe, India and possibly even bringing some manufacturing to North America. To be clear, it doesn’t currently manufacture in North America, but “we’re looking at that right now,” he said.
The company’s principal engineering, test and lab facilities are located in San Diego and that’s where its critical IP is created. “We are an American company,” Harmon stressed. “Although not directly related to tariffs, I think it’s an important point to continually remind our customers and resellers and partners about.”
Meanwhile, Inseego has some inventory that remains available domestically via its North American distributors. “We have our own warehouse in Dallas, Texas, so we’re kind of prepared for this and we already have been planning for optimization and redundancy, making a long-term commitment to supply chain resilience,” he noted.
Overall, “we run a pretty sophisticated supply chain. We've been doing that for a long time, and I think that's one of the reasons that we've been trusted by some of the big carriers to deliver for them year after year after year,” Harmon said.
Inseego’s strategy for growing beyond MiFi
Beyond tariffs and supply chains, the company’s ambition is to expand its share in the FWA enterprise space. Sarvikas talked about it at length in February during his first earnings call as Inseego’s CEO.
That’s where they see the next opportunity for FWA growth – extending the success that carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon are seeing in the consumer space to the enterprise market.
“We strongly believe that the enterprise FWA market opportunity is in its early stages, so we anticipate growth following an increasing number of use cases, both in terms of volume and diversity,” Sarvikas told Fierce via email. “Industrial, IoT, retail, enterprise WAN and failover/backup are all good examples of expanding applications for FWA.”
That doesn’t mean they’re ignoring the MiFi category of 5G mobile hotspots, which is the market segment that Inseego continues to dominate. Right now, Inseego occupies the higher-end tier of that market, “but you can expect us to expand into the value and mid-tier portion of this market as well,” Sarvikas said.
As a side note, while acting as president of Qualcomm North American, Sarvikas got to know Inseego as a customer of Qualcomm’s. Inseego, which employs about 200 people, prides itself in its close relationship with Qualcomm.
For example, Inseego was the reference development partner for Qualcomm on the X85 series. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, Inseego conducted the first live data call on its new 5G cellular router FX5000, which is powered by Qualcomm’s Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite platform.
While Sullivan's appointment is its latest personnel coup and its new leadership team is largely in place, Sarvikas expects to bring more industry experts on board.
“You will see us continue to onboard top industry talent as we accelerate our expansion into the enterprise, IoT, and industrial markets, particularly for ‘go-to-market’ and solution capabilities,” he promised.