Connectivity Christmas: An Althea Private Cellular network for Santa

On this holiday night, it’s easy to imagine you may see Santa Claus, pausing for a minute…. Checking his cell phone in the north pole ahead of his epic Christmas Eve journey.

Connectivity is important to keep the toy making of the Christmas industry humming all year long in the remote, rural village at the North Pole and during Santa’s global travels and distribution Christmas Eve night. We can imagine that using public, legacy telecom networks have several disadvantages — in fact, we may even wonder if Santa’s list is not a list of children to send toys to, but is, in fact, a very long bill from a public carrier. With all the manual billing and friction of telecom interconnection, it’s not a bad idea to “check it twice”.

What if Santa could manage his own private cellular network, offsetting the costs and creating a more secure and reliable infrastructure for the community of elves and Christmas related hard working households? With Althea KeyLTE that would be easy and affordable!

This private cellular Althea network would enable Santa and the Christmas community to set up a cellular network just about as easily as setting up WiFi and would empower:

• Connection of local phones, sleighs, lights and other automated Smart Holiday IoT.
• Broadband connectivity to homes, for streaming of the latest Christmas movies.
• Payments enabled: Earning revenue from local visitors to Christmas town automatically.
• Smart Farming: Farming candy canes has gone automated! Connected combines, and farming tools, utilize the private cellular network, instead of costly public infrastructure.
• Resilient Routing: Inclement weather is something to contend with in the North Pole, so Althea’s agile and redundant routing keep the network live until Elves can be dispatched to fix.
• Hardware agnostic monitoring: Santa’s office is wired with the latest in monitoring software, and network monitoring is easier than ever with Operator Tools.
• Sim Roaming and Orchestration: Hawk Networks team works together with Santa’s IT team to identify their roaming needs, as Santa and the elves prepare to travel the planet on Christmas Eve night, or load up on supplies throughout the year.

Santa would start with a phone call or email to the friendly folks at HawkNetworks.net — the team behind the Althea protocol, who have expertise in building and supporting networks in even the most challenging and remote places — like the neighboring town of Ulukhaktok, in the Northwest Territories.

We aren’t sure what regulatory jurisdiction that Santa’s broadcasting in, but we’re pretty sure that all countries respect the RF sovereignty of Christmas town, and Santa can choose to broadcast on a frequency that works well for a variety of use cases. Band 41 is a good choice — it’s mid-band, has good propagation, and with a large channel width can provide high throughput. Radio hardware is readily available and most cellular devices will connect.

Then, it’s time to assemble the basic Bill of Materials (BOM) or ingredient list.

Christmas Town Network Ingredient List:
This BOM comes from the shop.Althea.net site and is priced right around $9k, including software configuration, for an “in-a-box” setup. Paired with Connected EV charging stations, Santa could even recoup this investment in just under a month in the busy tourist and visitor season in the summer, through Althea’s built in machine-to-machine payments. With the latest climate news, it’s no secret that even Santa is embracing electric sleighs and carbon neutral manufacturing. So, as the EV chargers and other infrastructure gets in place, it’s a natural fit to collect payments easily with the embedded Althea wallet.

It’s easy to see how Santa could not only offset those large carrier bills, but could easily create a cash flow positive network, that keeps the revenue from the network local in Christmas town and provides a better quality of life for the elves.

The kit includes everything you need to get a small private cellular network up and running:
QTY 1 — KeyLTE Smart Router with integrated EPC (Protectli 6 Port i5)
QTY 1 — ENB (Airspan AirSpeed 1030, including required licenses)
QTY 1 — Airspan AirSpeed 1035 Universal pole and wall mounting kit
QTY 2 — CPE (Global Telecom Titan 4000)
QTY 2 — CPE Althea Home Router (models vary)
QTY 2 — Althea SIM cards (pre-installed and registered)
MISC — all required patch cables, POE injectors, AC adapters, etc.

Althea is an “open access network”, decoupling the service of the network from the infrastructure, so Santa’s IT team is free to focus on Santa’s emails, while the team at HawkNetworks.net can provide the network services, enabling seamless operations 24/7, even on the busiest days of the year.

And, this year, the Althea team is unwrapping another gift to the tech stack, Liquid Infrastructure. Funding the build of networks has historically been a difficult and time consuming task, and, when you are as busy as the inhabitants of Christmas town, we can believe its been a barrier to owning their own infrastructure. But, just in time for the after Christmas build season, Liquid Infrastructure will be ready to allow Santa to build the network as crowd funded, or have funding options that don’t slow down the build. Because the gift of resilient and sustainable infrastructure, lasts the whole year long.