Cellular-first, because facility wifi is where deployments die.

Before we shipped a single Companion, we benchmarked every connected-care product we could get our hands on. The pattern was depressing and consistent: the technology worked, the clinical case was real, and the deployment died on the facility network. Captive portals that re-auth every twelve hours. VLAN segmentation that quarantines anything new. An IT manager who only takes change requests on the second Tuesday of the month. A basement memory-care unit with one bar of signal and a concrete ceiling.

So we made the hardware choice that is really a product choice. Every Companion has an embedded cellular modem and an M2M data plan provisioned before the unit leaves our warehouse. It powers on, finds LTE, and registers with CareOS. Facility wifi is something we can use if it is easy, but it is never something we require.

The honest tradeoffs

Cellular is not free. We pay per device per month for data, and we engineer the audio and telemetry pipeline to live within that budget — local inference where we can, compressed uplink where we cannot. Coverage is the other real cost. A handful of buildings have rooms where LTE simply does not reach, and we plan for those with an external antenna kit. Both of these problems are smaller than the cost of one canceled IT meeting.

What it buys the customer

Install happens in week one. A nurse unboxes the Companion, plugs it in, and it is on the network. There is no ticket to file with IT, no credential to type, no firewall rule to negotiate, no we'll need to schedule a change window email. The administrator who signed the contract sees the device live the same day.

The product impact is that our sales cycle and our deployment cycle stopped being the same conversation. Clinical leaders buy Companion. They do not have to also sell it to their network team. The modem in the chassis is what makes that true.