Send us a text

This was originally an internal conversation that I had with Felix Hsieh, a product manager and customer reliability engineer at Soracom. The discussion was during a monthly AMA (ask-me-anything) virtual office hours call. I came to the call with the desire to learn more about the ways in which private networking has been made more accessible than ever before for cellular data connections and entire networks of deployed IoT devices. 

In this discussion, Felix shares how private networking over cellular has historically been challenging, with lots of red tape, delays, contracts, and technical hurdles. We discuss the evolution of support for virtual private clouds, the role regulations can play on project requirements, and review scenarios of how different companies across a variety of industries implemented their private networks over cellular connections. 

Please keep in mind that this was an internal conversation, so Felix will often talk about how Soracom engineers addressed some of the traditional barriers that setting up VPNs and VPCs that most cellular carriers actually still struggle with today, so it's not a sales pitch, but I felt that it's worth calling out upfront. 

One other note to call out is three acronyms are used within this episode that are incredibly similar to one another – VPN, VPC, and VPG:

• VPN, which we all should know as a virtual private network
• VPC, which is a virtual private cloud; unique to AWS and its secure web hosting. 
• VPG, which is a virtual private gateway; a feature that Soracom leverages within its connectivity platform to bridge private networks from a customer device in the field to a customer's virtual private cloud instance or corporate VPN network. Seamlessly without touching the public internet.