What to do with 104 decommissioned cellular routers

An agency decommissioned its fleet of cellular routers and sent them to auction as one lot. Not a few units. A hundred and four CradlePoint IBR600 gateways, plus a stack of IBR1100 and IBR900 rugged in-vehicle units alongside them.

We bought the lot. Here is the thinking, because a bulk buy is a genuinely different calculation from a single instrument and it is where a lot of people get hurt.

What these things are

A CradlePoint IBR is a cellular router. It takes an LTE connection and turns it into a normal network for whatever is bolted to it. They are the boxes that put a police cruiser or an ambulance on the network, that connect a traffic signal or a remote pump station, and that keep a retail location online when the wired circuit dies.

The rugged ones, the IBR1100 and IBR900, are built for vehicles: metal bodied, wide temperature range, GPS on board, tolerant of being shaken for a decade.

They are good hardware. Agencies buy them in fleets and retire them in fleets, which is exactly why they arrive at auction a hundred at a time.

Why nobody else wanted them

Three problems, and every serious bidder will have seen all three.

No power supplies and no antennas. The lot is bare routers. A cellular router with no antenna is not a functioning device, and sourcing 104 antennas and 104 power supplies is a real cost that has to come off the top before you know if the lot is worth anything.

Untested, and untestable at any speed. We cannot power on a hundred routers one at a time and call it a business. The lot has to be priced as though a meaningful fraction are dead, because we genuinely do not know yet.

NetCloud. This is the big one, and it is the same problem as the software gate on lab instruments wearing different clothes. CradlePoint’s management platform is a subscription, and these units are unlicensed. A buyer who wants the full managed experience has to bring their own licence. That is a real reduction in what most buyers will pay, and it is why the fleet price collapses when the fleet is retired.

Any one of those makes a generalist bidder walk away. All three together is why we got it at a price that works.

The arithmetic on a bulk lot

The mistake people make on bulk is to multiply. A hundred units times what one sells for is a fantasy number, and it is how you end up with a garage full of stock you cannot move.

The real questions are different, and there are three:

What fraction is actually alive? Assume the worst plausible number, not the hoped for one. If the lot only works when most of them work, it is a bet.

How long does it take to move a hundred of anything? This is the constraint people forget. A hundred identical units is not one sale, it is a hundred sales, or it is a small number of bulk sales at a much lower price. Both take time, and time is capital sitting still.

What does the per unit work cost? Every unit has to be powered, tested, cleaned, photographed, and packed. That is a fixed labour cost per unit that does not care how little you paid for it. On a cheap unit the labour is the dominant cost, which means a lot of very cheap units can be worth less than nothing.

That last point is what kills people. Cheap is not free. A unit you paid twelve dollars for and spend twenty minutes on is not a bargain.

What we will actually do

The plan is to test in batches rather than heroically, to sell in lots rather than one at a time where the per unit labour does not justify a single listing, and to be honest that these are unlicensed and BYO antenna, because they are.

There is a real buyer here. Integrators, WISPs, and people building industrial or remote monitoring who need a proven cellular router and do not need CradlePoint’s managed cloud to do it. For that buyer this hardware is a genuine bargain and the missing licence is not a defect, it is a discount.

We will publish the yield when we have run the batches. If it is bad, we will publish that too.