Breaking Old Habits: Why Modern Industrial Networking Requires a New Mindset
Matt Klabnik, Sales Engineer at INS | January 2, 2026
I’m a part of the remote worker club, which means my commute is up the stairs of my 120-year-old farm house. My office is full of cellular routers and hardware I use to test ideas and concepts. If I’m not out in the field with an account manager, I’m talking with customers all day, helping them figure out the right devices, configurations, or architectures based on what they’re trying to accomplish.
If there’s one misconception I run into more than anything else in industrial networking, it’s this: People think we still have to do things the way we did them 10 or 20 years ago.
Customers cling to familiar processes. Not because they work better, but because they’ve worked before. New technologies and more efficient approaches get dismissed simply because they aren’t the way things have always been done.
And look, I get it. Change is uncomfortable. But it’s also where the magic happens.
One of the best parts of my job is working with customers who want to try something new. When you’re willing to rethink old assumptions, modern cellular solutions can do things that weren’t even possible five or 10 years ago.
Lessons From Three Decades in the Industry
I’ve been in this industry my entire career, closing in on three decades now. Early on, I had a mentor who loved passing along little nuggets of wisdom. One of the famous ones was the “seven P’s,” which boiled down to this:
Planning prevents poor performance.
You can’t just throw something into the field and hope it works. If you do, you’ll be back out there fixing it, usually at twice the cost. As I like to say (and hear myself repeating more often every year): “There’s nothing more expensive than doing it cheap.”
That mindset has guided me all the way from my time at a carrier to where I am today at INS, a few years into doing sales engineering. I came from the carrier world, and now I get to match real customer needs with the right cellular solutions.
One of the greatest things about INS is simple: you’re hired because you know what you’re doing. There’s a culture of trust here. Everyone’s cooperative. And when you have a team like that behind you, solving complex connectivity problems becomes a whole lot more fun.
The Biggest Problem in Cellular Today: The Race to the Bottom
If I could fix one major issue in the cellular networking world, it would be the obsession with buying the cheapest hardware. There’s a “race to the bottom” happening among carrier partners, and it influences how customers think. Too many people are trained to ask, “What’s the least expensive thing I can buy?” instead of, “What’s the right thing for my application?”
Those two questions rarely have the same answer.
Matching cheap hardware to demanding requirements is a great way to create downtime, redesigns, and mounting frustration. Hardware should fit the application, always.
Something that always helps resolve that problem: Knowing how your network is built today.
When a customer walks in with a clear picture of their environment (what’s in place, what’s working, and what isn’t), we can get to a solution quickly. Otherwise, we have to reconstruct the whole picture. That means research, time, and cost.
Good architecture always starts with accurate information.
Design, Monitoring, and the Realities of Cellular Performance
Cellular networking is not wired networking.
Wired environments are deterministic, with predictable bandwidth and predictable latency. Cellular is inherently “best effort.” You might get a certain speed at two in the morning, but at three in the afternoon? When a high school next door lets out and hundreds of kids are streaming on the latest platform?
Not a chance.
This is why design matters…and monitoring matters even more. You have to see trends. You have to anticipate issues. You have to build for variability, not perfection.
Even antennas can make or break a deployment. Good antennas don’t guarantee success, but bad antennas almost always guarantee problems. You can’t pick signals out of thin air.
A Recent Project I’m Proud Of
Without naming names, we’re working with a customer needing extremely low latency, zero packet loss, and true nationwide operability. Their application wasn’t designed to work remotely, but they’re reinventing it so it can.
We combined Peplink and Starlink products, and we’re fine-tuning the communication path as they prepare to install devices on the roofs of vehicles that will operate across the country. We’re not at full production yet, but it’s one of those projects that reminds me why I love this job. It’s unique, it’s challenging, and it requires real engineering, not guesswork.
Why INS Can Do What Others Can’t
We can integrate these technologies because we’ve seen so many different use cases. INS has built a real “talent stack” over the years—lessons, experiences, and technical chops from hundreds of projects.
When you work with someone who knows the ins and outs, you can deploy a solution that scales to hundreds or thousands of locations.
Multi-network SIMs are a great example. They let you switch carriers at any moment, instantly improving resilience. That level of flexibility is essential in environments where you simply can’t predict what a cellular network will look like day-to-day.
If you’re still a single-carrier shop, the best first step is simple: move to a multi-network SIM. It gives you access to all major carriers and dramatically improves reliability. And above all, work with someone who actually lives in the world of machine-to-machine connectivity. Consumer plans and enterprise IoT are two completely different universes.
Closing Thoughts
 |
INS hires good people, not just skilled people. There’s a culture of respect here, and a deep well of knowledge. We enjoy what we do, and we enjoy working together. Customers feel that. At the end of the day, industrial networking is evolving fast. You can cling to the old way, or you can embrace the new one. I know which side I’m on, and I’m glad INS gives me the space and trust to do it right. |
