For Fixed Wireless Access, performance is only as good as where the subscriber places it. Vantiva recently took home a Red Dot Award for the Condor 5G by solving a classic engineering paradox: building a high-performance router sleek enough that users won’t hide it behind a TV. We spoke with Paul Baker, Vantiva’s Senior Director of Product Management, about the design decisions behind the device, from angled cabling and thermal management to a two-screw outer shell that fundamentally alters the economics of device refurbishment.
For readers who may be less familiar with it, what does the Red Dot Award evaluate, and what does winning one mean for a product in a category most people associate with technical specs rather than design?
Red Dot evaluates design on several fronts: how well it serves the user, how well it supports product function, how the product is constructed — the materials chosen, how long it’s engineered to last, how it can be serviced and repaired over its lifetime. And of course, it looks at how well a product fits the environments where people live and work. For a connected home device, that environment is someone’s living room, bedroom, or home office. The product has to earn its place there.
What I find meaningful about the recognition is what it says about our team’s thinking. They approached this program with performance and presence as equal requirements from day one. We wanted a device that performed at the edge of a 5G network and that a subscriber would feel comfortable placing on a shelf or a side table, one they had no impulse to hide behind a TV. Getting recognized for both simultaneously shows the team got that balance right.
So does the design process begin with aesthetics or with engineering?
It begins with a problem. Fixed wireless is technically challenging because you’re connecting a device inside a home to a cell tower that could be anywhere in the surrounding area. The deeper into the home you go, the weaker the signal, and that directly affects the speeds a subscriber experiences.
Early in the program, we made a deliberate decision to build some directionality into the product. We have proprietary Indoor5G™ antenna technology and high-gain antenna designs we wanted to leverage, and we wanted a form factor that encouraged placement near a window — on a windowsill or on a nearby table or sideboard — where the device has better line of sight to the tower. The high gain antenna face outward from the back, combined with some 360 degree omnidirectional antenna. That combination is the foundation of the Condor 5G’s performance advantage.
Can you walk us through the chain of decisions taken for this kind of solution?
Once you’ve decided the product belongs near a window, every constraint becomes concrete. The device had to be slim enough to sit on a windowsill without taking up the whole surface. Ethernet cables needed to be routed at an angle to keep a plugged-in cable from pushing the device off a ledge. We have a multi-LED signal strength indicator on the front, exactly like the bars on your phone, so a subscriber installing the device without our companion app could find the optimal position just by watching the signal improve while making position adjustments.
Then the engineering layers arrive. The hardware and industrial design teams work very closely together throughout the process. Thermal management is one complex area needing a high degree of collaboration because the product generates heat, and how you vent that heat affects the shape and surface of the enclosure. Heat sinks help move the heat away from the components, but a large piece of metal placed without care degrades both cellular and Wi-Fi performance. The antenna also has to be mounted inside that enclosure. Every element can interact with unintended consequences, so the electrical, mechanical, and industrial design teams have to solve for all of it simultaneously.
One decision that came out of that process was the design of the external enclosure. We built it as a removable shell with just two screws, with no antenna to disconnect or internal components disturbed. A refurbishment center can replace just the outer shell — or just the front cover, if that’s all that needs attention — and return the device to service. We treated that as an engineering requirement built in from the start. A device with a fully functioning board should never be written off because its casing got scratched.
How significant is the performance difference between Condor 5G’s antenna approach and the solutions many competitors use?
Substantial. Many of our competitors use a cylindrical, omnidirectional form factor. The premise of omnidirectional design is consistent performance in all directions, but the trade-off is that you’re losing efficiency by radiating in 360 degrees when what you need is a signal aimed at the tower. Government regulations in each country specify that the device can only transmit a certain amount of power, so if the tower sits in one direction and you’re transmitting all around, a large portion of that power goes to waste, which means you need to be closer to the tower to achieve a desired level of performance, or you take up more precious cellular spectrum to get there.
Vantiva’s blended approach of having omnidirectional coverage with some added directionality, rather than treating all directions equally, delivers a 25 to 40% improvement over omnidirectional solutions, depending on the use case. That translates to faster speeds at the same location, or the ability to deliver service further from the tower at the same speed.
For operators, this goes directly to network efficiency. In 5G mid-band, many operators are already running into capacity limits. Every improvement in device efficiency means a single tower can serve more subscribers, and given the cost of deploying new cell infrastructure, that number carries significant commercial weight.
We also developed Rural Boost, which improves performance in the lower-frequency bands that carriers reserve for reaching subscribers at greater distances from infrastructure. Rural deployments have different economics. They have fewer subscribers per tower over a much wider area and high infrastructure costs. In those deployments, the ability to transmit and receive reliably over distance in both directions is what makes the service viable at all.
The Condor 5G also includes Wi-Fi 7. What does that add for subscribers?
There is, of course, speed, but that is only part of what Wi-Fi 7 delivers. Fixed wireless services haven’t reached fiber-scale throughput, so the peak speed ceiling of the latest Wi-Fi standard is a secondary concern for this device. In our testing, having a Wi-Fi 7 access point improves the performance of the entire home network — including devices connecting using older Wi-Fi standards. Coverage improves meaningfully, and in a number of our test scenarios, the home required no Wi-Fi extender.
There’s also significant engineering work involved in making cellular and Wi-Fi coexist inside the same device. The two systems operate in adjacent frequency ranges, and in some cases, there’s a slight overlap between certain cell bands and Wi-Fi bands. Having both perform without degrading each other required considerable effort from the hardware team. The result is a broadband experience that’s difficult to distinguish from a wired connection.
You mentioned that Red Dot also evaluates how a product is built to last — the construction, the materials, the energy it consumes over its lifetime. How does the Condor 5G hold up against that part of the assessment?
Every design program at Vantiva starts with the same questions: How should the product perform? How does it fit in someone’s home? How will an operator support it three years from now? Repairability, longevity, and power consumption are engineering requirements in the same way performance is — built into the program early and carried through alongside every other decision. The Condor 5G is an expression of that approach, but the thinking behind it runs across everything we develop at Vantiva.
Material selection is one part of it. We use recycled plastics where the specification allows, and the Condor 5G uses halogen-free PCBs — a deliberate choice that runs through component selection across the board. The PCB specification, the component tolerances, the types of parts the hardware team selects — all of that determines how long a product performs reliably under everyday conditions.
We also impose our own margins on performance. We test to temperatures significantly higher than what a device would see in a typical home — the goal is to understand how the product behaves at extremes, so that when it runs within normal parameters, it has substantial headroom.
Power consumption is an active area of work across our portfolio. The Condor 5G uses a fan-less passive cooling design with no moving parts and no additional energy draw to manage heat. It also includes data-driven power management that detects low-activity periods and reduces the number of Wi-Fi transmission chains in use, or can slow the CPU’s operating frequency, accordingly. We’re also developing additional low power solutions that are hardware assisted to reach even lower standby power levels for customers who require it. That work is already underway.
Then there’s the enclosure. When a device comes back from the field with a scratched or scuffed casing, the standard industry refurbishment process requires full disassembly that often disconnects the antenna, removes multiple fasteners, and opens the product entirely, and then reassembly with the risk of introducing a new fault in the process. The labor involved and the risk of damaging something during reassembly often outweigh the unit’s recovery value. So a device with fully functional electronics ends up being discarded over cosmetic damage.
We designed the Condor 5G to eliminate that outcome. The outer shell unscrews at two points and lifts off. The internal assembly, including every antenna, stays completely undisturbed. A refurbishment center can swap the shell, or just the front cover, if that’s the only piece that needs attention, and return the device to service in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. Refurbishment goes from a cost-benefit calculation to a routine operation. Devices that would have been written off stay in service, often for years longer.
How does the thinking behind the Condor 5G carry into what the company builds next?
It carries into everything. The Hawk 5G, unveiled at MWC earlier this year, is built on the same foundation — directional plus omnidirectional antenna design, our Indoor5G™ technology, the same attention to how a product performs at the edge of a network, and how long it stays in service once it gets there.
The commercial response reinforces that. We’re getting strong feedback from a number of our very important customers that the design decisions behind the Condor 5G are seen as differentiating features, and they’re keen to learn more about how the same thinking applies across the rest of the portfolio. Those conversations tell us this is the right direction to continue in.