Hold tight; you might want to catch your breath. How’s business? It is only conversational; a casual salutation at the start of a pre-MWC call to coordinate diaries. But Peter Cappiello, chief executive at US system integrator Future Technologies, has a whole lot to say. So yeah, be ready – because his firm is on a lightning-paced tear-up in the new private 5G market, it seems. The firm’s ‘pipeline’ jumped 575 percent last year (2024, versus 2023). “We do not have a problem with lead creation,” he laughs. Word gets around; its bookings are 41 percent, and its revenue is up 23 percent.
Alongside, Future Technologies has brand new (2025) deals with elite-level vendors Ericsson and others (tbc), to mix-up its long-time love affair with market-leader Nokia; as well, unnamed ‘tier-one’ operators in North America are using it as a go-between for pre-sales (‘day-zero’) consultancy and post-sales (‘day-two’) management, he says. There is more, too: it has just signed with Dell and Intel for direct edge-infrastructure supplies to Industry 4.0 customers. Indeed, such is its run-rate, multiplying both sides of big purchase orders, that it has started to offer financing and monitoring services to boot.
“We expect to grow revenue by 30-40 percent this year. And that’s a conservative estimate; with some luck, we might go faster – higher than 50 percent. We’re doing it organically, out of cash-flow. We’ve raised zero money, and we have cash on hand. We are just disciplined operators,” says Cappiello. He has a bunch of headline contracts to crow about, too. Future Technologies delivered private 5G networks for no fewer than 29 different sports venues last year – “for a major sports organisation”. He can’t say who, or which sport; but they’re “large stadiums”, he says.
Stadiums? But what does that even mean – in America? “Ball parks,” he says. Enough said. Other recent 4G/5G works include: a five-million square foot electric-vehicle (EV) plant for a Fortune 100 car maker, trailed in these pages before; a mid-sized northeast maritime port handling two million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) per year; a multi-site industrial complex for a Fortune 200 chemical company; and a three-tier project for a Fortune 200 energy outfit, including networks for gas production, ‘digital oil field’ recovery, and carbon capture and storage.
All of them are US-based and “fully delivered, implemented, in live production” he says. He goes on, adding a note about further international expansion, as if just to underline how its horizons have expanded: “We have a couple of new wins, as well, which are in-delivery: with a global port operator, covering a west-coast facility to start, but with potential to expand to other ports in the US and abroad. That was a contested RFP, and we beat everyone. And then, most recently, we won a deal with a top-10 US airport for indoor and outdoor coverage. It’s five million square feet of in-building coverage, and 120 million of outdoor coverage.”
See what I mean? It’s a lot to digest. Of course, the figures at the top of the piece are all relative, and a big jump on next-to-nothing is still not-very-much. But Future Technologies has concrete form already: it said a year ago it had taken $14 million of orders from the US energy sector and $30 million from the Department of Defense (DOD). And Cappiello clarifies, here, that its five-times expanded “pipeline” – effectively describing verbal (rather than written) customer contracts, quantified in dollar terms – was $270 million at the end of 2024.
“We expect that to go to $400 million this year,” he says. “And then the bookings, for which we’ve received a purchase order or contract, depending on how the customer wants to do business, trail from that – and then the revenue, the result of the services we deliver, goes from that.” The business had 800 “inbound leads” in 2023, he calculates; it had 1,600 in 2024. Its leads are mostly peer-to-peer referrals from enterprise customers, or else from the vendors themselves (mostly Nokia, at the time). Hence the ‘no-trouble’ quote about lead generation at the top of the piece.
But Cappiello is also a straight-talker. “This is front-line stuff; it’s a different vantage point to the carriers and vendors, and all the digital infrastructure folks. Because we are doing the work at these sites,” he says, and provides another tangible measure. “All those deployments are industrial. On the federal side, we grew our private-network footprint to over 3,500 square miles inside DoD [properties].”
He adds: “We don’t think anyone else is close to that, and that’s a major watermark for us – the largest private-networks footprint in the federal space… And to be clear, all of these projects are based on dedicated private networks; there is public network coverage in there as well, but the anchor in each case is private 4G/5G. The core is behind a firewall every time. Most are geo-redundant, or, at least, high-availability. So they are not cheap systems with a single server. They are mission-critical and industrial-grade – even more so on the government side.”
Volumes, footprints, suitors
So how many federal bases is that? Cappiello won’t say; but he says an average-sized base is about 500 square miles, so… do the maths, and maybe get it wrong. But he claims serious numbers in terms of device volumes across most projects. “One base supports 10,000 connections – ruggedised smartphones and tablets, industrial routers, plus more sophisticated use cases with AR/VR and drones, and stuff like that.” The EV maker has 200 autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) on its 5G system, apparently, expanding to “more than a thousand” when it goes full-tilt.
Its port customers are connecting between 250 and 500 devices. The digital oil field customer plans to “scale to thousands”, he says. What about IoT sensors, and so on? “We don’t count that. We have industrial routers to provide capacity to sensors in a LoRa network, say. But that’s where the numbers get exaggerated because the sensor is not connecting natively back to the private 5G network. So it’s a nonsense stat otherwise. I’m giving real 3GPP device-counts – not everything else that is connected behind the router.”
Some momentum, though. “Yeah, the difference now is that, if you don’t have a real production site, we don’t want to know. Whereas three years ago, we were happy to do trials, and then to move to production. But as we go up the bell curve, and across the chasm, we are dealing with customers with real production sites that want to blueprint and scale in quick-time. The deals we’re doing are single sites that will quickly multiply, or else very large and complex single sites, like ports. We’re not doing proofs anymore. We’re just too busy; it’s not a good use of our time.”
I mean, you’re ripe for sale, too – right? Surely, given your track record, and given the recent merger-and-acquisition activity (!!!) in the private 5G space? Cappiello laughs. I mean, all sorts must be circling their wagons, surely? He laughs again. “Yes. But we like how we do it. We want to continue to scale, and to do it the way we do it. We are having too much fun.”
He adds, more cryptically: “The game is the game, and we’re good at it and want to play on. We are like David, surrounded by all these Goliaths. But we want to go big, and we think we can do it our way. And for sure, if we don’t think you can’t help with that, then we’re just not interested; it is a waste of our time. ‘Go away’.” Hmmm. Nothing doing; never say never – same with every enterprise. Cappiello won’t be pressed any more. More interesting, anyway, is the rest of his tale; about how Future Technologies is ramping up its capabilities and services.
Let’s start with its new vendor contracts – if only because Future Technologies has been so tight with Nokia all these years. The firm has just been picked by Ericsson as one of three “scaling partners” for neutral-host supplies in North America (more to come). The Swedish vendor has clearly been on a private 5G charm offensive in its sales channels, since finally reorganising its Cradlepoint business half way through last year. (As an aside, Future Technologies has appointed former Cradlepoint chief George Mulhern to its advisory board, three years after working-out his post-sale notice with Ericsson.)
“Leads are easy; we grew them a hundred percent, right,” he says. “But, as we cross the chasm, and put more jet fuel into this, we need more of them – if just to get the best deals.” (See example above, as well.) He anticipates the question about old loyalties. “You might say, ‘but you’re a Nokia shop’. But we let the market assume what it wants to assume.” But really, the market assumed right; it’s just that Future Technologies has changed.
Cappiello explains: “I mean, no question: we’re a big partner with Nokia. We are really tight on private networks; we spend the most with Nokia, and it is not even close. But enterprises want a private 5G-OT system, and they also want a new 5G-IT system for their offices. The holy grail is that customers want both – this high-value tech for production environments and this new in-building tech for corporate connectivity. We want to find where to do hybrid networks – to work with vendors and carriers to provide public and private network solutions.”
He adds: “We are a trusted partner for enterprises, and we understand the rules of engagement with vendors and carriers. It is like a multifaceted chess game. And there are only a few companies that can play – which have played and won. We work in different ‘prime’ and ‘sub-prime’ roles, directly and indirectly, to help customers modernise their infrastructure. We have been doing connectivity transformation for 25 years, and private networks for 15. We’re in the right place, right in the middle, to move the needle on this combination of private, public, and hybrid setups.
“We probably have more licensed private networks [in the US] than anybody outside of the carriers. Because we’ve been able to get licensed spectrum from the government, via the FCC and DoD, depending on the deal, and we do spectrum agreements with carriers, and work with the two vendors on the technical solution. We work with specialist spectrum holders, as well. And then CBRS is like the table stakes. We do GAA stuff, but some of our industrial customers have bought PAL licenses, as well. So we are doing all of the above.”
Consultancy, construction, management
In that context, the firm is formalising its advisory services and consultancy play, which it has effectively supplied via the enterprise sales teams within certain mobile operators for 18 months. “Listen, four years ago, we were happy to have a live body on the phone to talk about a deal, but when your pipeline grows 500 percent, you want it to pay.”
He explains: “Quite quietly, we did a few hundred thousand dollars of advisory services last year. It wasn’t really part of the plan. But we’ve now launched that as a more formal offering, and staffed up a bit. So we’re offering day-zero advisory services to enterprises, directly, as well as indirectly via large global system integrators and large mobile operators – in both the US and Canada. So we’re being paid by the carriers, and such, as subject matter experts to engage with their customers to define the requirements and specify the design of private 5G solutions.
“They bring the demand, and we do the work. We’re like a specialised transformation company – and an alternative to these big consulting firms. We deal with the day-zero consultation to define the requirements and the blueprint, and they deliver the day-one network – and then often bring us in again to handle the day-two management of it with a resident engineer to ask questions, define applications, source devices, integrate services, and scale the project. We could do wholesale stuff for the day-one, but it’s a terrible use of resources.”
And from there, it has been a skip and a jump to offer managed infrastructure monitoring, via local or remote network operations centre (NOC) setups, and even sponsored funding for choice clients. “We are going to be disruptive,” says Cappiello. But surely the first of these, at least, will put noses out of joint – among system integrators and mobile operators it sub-contracts with, and particularly with big consultancy houses. “Our arm has been twisted. Customers want us to support them on the back-end management, as well as the front-end consultancy.”
The likes of Nokia and Ericsson, it might be noted, are championing its efforts, providing Future Technologies with software and support into the bargain. And the firm has been providing local (“seated support”) and remote (from its own offices) NOC services for high-profile clients, already, one way or another, as required. “We’re doing all that today. We’re just formalising it as a serious offer.” But the financing is brand new. So how is a business, with zero borrowings, able to fund expensive private 5G deployments for industrial customers on the promise of future returns?
He explains: “So today, we work with customers with problems and money. They have capital dollars, so they pay us. It’s been good. That’s why we haven’t had to raise money. And we have now structured some things where we’re going to be able to provide a leasing option. So if the customer prefers leasing, we’re going to offer that; and if they want to take networks as-a-service on an op/ex model, then we are enabling that. We have made arrangements with a large US bank to be the funding source without having to take on debt or give out equity.”
The point is the company has gone, quite quickly over 18 months, from being a specialist private 5G integrator, most handling the sharp-end build process, to an end-to-end services provider covering the network design and management. It has always done most of the other bits in the Industry 4.0 connectivity mix, anyway. Future Technologies might not be up for sale, officially, but potential suitors, just like wannabe vendor and carrier partners, will be on its case.
