After several years of acquisitions that broaden the telecom infrastructure footprint of BAI Group in the U.S. and abroad, the company is re-branding under the name Boldyn Networks.
The companies that will be wrapped under the Boldyn Networks brand include Mobilitie, which BAI Group acquired in 2021; ZenFi Networks, which BAI closed on last November; and Transit Wireless, which operates cellular, Wi-Fi and fiber networks in transportation hubs/tunnels for entities including New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). It also includes Signal Point Systems, which provides telecom and 5G connectivity with a focus on military bases and which BAI acquired through Mobilitie in early 2022. Additionally, the Boldyn Networks brand will also cover Vilicom and BAI Communications’ operations in the U.K., Ireland, Hong Kong, Canada and Italy.
BAI is majority-owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
During an interview at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, group CEO Igor Leprince said that he sees a trend among transit authorities and venue owners to look at neutral-host ownership of infrastructure as well as private networks, both for their visitors and customers and also for their own operations. He sees opportunities for private network use cases to broaden over the next few years, as enterprise end users determine whether they actually need public or private networks for the use cases that they are interested in, which he said can range from ticketing to security cameras to smart city use cases and factory automation.
Boldyn, he said, has seen firsthand how network architectures and edges are evolving. In New York City, for example, he said that as Transit Wireless has nearly doubled the footprint of its network, the number of infrastructure “boxes” that it has to deal with has been vastly reduced due to implementation of virtualization, and less data center space is needed even as the footprint of the network expands further away from the data centers in the area.
“There is a lot of automation coming into play,” he added, particularly in the ability to access and manage equipment remotely—which has changed how the company manages its field teams, and ultimately results in less disruption in a transit environment like the New York City subway, where trains have to be stopped when tunnel equipment needs to be accessed physically.
Leprince said that putting all of BAI’s related companies together under the Boldyn brand is important to the company’s growth plans, particularly its desire to expand and operate at scale in the U.S. and Europe.
“Boldyn” is meant to evoke the company as both “bold” and “dynamic”, and the brand is using Pantone’s 2023 Color of the Year, Viva Magenta. BAI, working with Landor & Fitch, also brought artificial intelligence into the creation of the new brand assets—to create a series of digital images (as seen above) that play up the company’s expertise in communications infrastructure in transit, in-building and outdoor environments.
“We see automation and AI playing an increasingly vital role in the way we all connect, so using an AI-created brand felt like the natural evolution for us,” commented BAI’s GRoup Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Roberts.
