So hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Emma Walsh, and I’m the senior marketing manager here at Taoglas. So today’s webinar will focus on LTE Cat 1bis and how it’s emerging as a key enabler for IoT applications. Here’s a quick look at today’s agenda. So we’ll begin with Soracom, who’ll kick things off. Then we’ll have Sequans who’ll provide an overview of LTE Cat 1bis, including expert insights on how to address single receiver challenges. Then Taoglas will present key information on certification requirements and tenant performance optimization and integration best practices. So finally, we’ll close with a summary of key takeaways and open the floor for your questions during a live q and a session. So I’m just gonna run through some housekeeping before we start. This webinar is being recorded, and we’ll share a link to view the on demand recording afterwards via email. If you need to talk to us during the webinar or if you have any questions or issues during the presentation, you can write to us using the chat function. We have set aside time for a q and a. If you have a question, please submit it via the q and a box, and we’ll try to answer all of your questions live today. But if we run out of time, don’t worry. We will follow-up with your questions separately, once the webinar ends. So now to introduce our speakers today, I know we’re all very excited to hear their expert insights on today’s topic. So joining us today is Imad, product marketing director with Sequans, alongside Baha Badran, head of engineering at Taoglas, and Nicola, strategic partnerships manager with Soracom. So our first speaker today is Nicola. I’m now gonna pass it over to Nicola. Thank you so much. Thank you, Emma. Hopefully, everyone can hear me well. So I am Nicolas Lesconnec, partnership manager at Soracom. For those who may not know us, we are a Japanese company with global presence, both in Europe and North America. And our expertise is offering IoT connectivity and connectivity management services. And as you can tell from the cover slide, our core connectivity expertise is on cellular, including Cat 1bis. Yes. So the key pillar of what of what Soracom provides is the connectivity, so, basically, a SIM card and a data plan, using various radio access technologies from legacy networks, such as two g, three g, LTE CAT one, CATM or NB-IoT for low power networks, and Cat 1bis as we see today as an alternative for several use cases. And we also provide some other additional connectivities when relevant to the customer, be it for very low data usage or satellite coverage. So this is the core of what we provide, but, of course, we’re only one piece of the puzzle. And usually, as, an IoT solution, designer or provider, you need to put together different pieces of that puzzle starting with the hardware, where we leverage the expertise of our partner network globally. So including companies such as Sequans and Taoglas that will be able to provide you with the right knowledge, the right services, the right product to build an efficient, solution. And we also provide a range of services on the cloud side, basically helping you build secure data management, data ingestion pipeline, segregated traffic, secure remote access, everything needed to build an efficient and secure IoT solution. So a couple key numbers, the first one is what we provide is global coverage. Imad from Sequans might be able to explain to you later on what global truly means when we speak about IoT connectivity. But all over the different radio access technologies available, we can provide coverage almost everywhere in the world to our customers today. And most of the time, especially in metro markets providing multi carrier service, making sure that you can benefit from the best network locally to power your solution, be it moving assets or stationary assets. Again, depending on what you do. And another key number for us is highlighting how we put the customer at the center of everything we do at Soracom, making sure that people that work with Soracom stay with Soracom as their business and their deployments grow. And part of the effort that we do, so beyond the usual customer service and customer support, is making sure we can put you in touch with the right people to help you design your solution, improve or redesign depending on which stage you are. So as you would see today, even if Cat 1bis is a great technology and will help a lot of the use cases that you plan to deploy, there are still pitfalls to avoid and that’s where we make sure that you have the right people to talk to early on to make sure you make the right choices, to have a successful application. You will be able to see that our customers, are across almost all industries. So be it, as I said, moving assets or logistics, telematics, asset tracking in all its flavors as well as more stationary use cases could be utilities, industrial IoT, agriculture, but you also have remote patient monitoring, payments services, Basically, everything that needs to communicate, either to extract data from the physical world or to relay information back and act on the ground is something we support. But as there is no one size fits all in the world of telecommunications, that’s where we make sure we can help you understand and decide if, for your design, is LTE the best choice, is LTE Cat 1bis the best choice, or is it CAT m and the IoT, and so on and so on depending on what you need to do, what you can afford on the hardware side, and where you need your devices to be deployed. So there are a lot of pieces, needed to build this LEGO set, let’s say. And we are here to make sure you find the best partners and the best information to build it. So if we zoom into Cat 1bis and why at Soracom we think it’s a great choice. So as I said, no one size fits all. LTE Cat 1bis will offer you a lot of advantages, such as energy efficiency, maybe not as much efficient as narrowband IoT, for example, but we’ll also provide you global coverage, meaning that you can start using it globally now without waiting for future rollouts that may or may not happen. So if you need a global deployment, and again, Imad will tell a bit more about global, then Cat 1bis can be a great choice for you. And it will help you also have easier integration. I did not dare write easy. Let’s stick to easier, and Baha from Taoglas will explain to you how there are still a lot of design constraints, to make sure that you have a well performing device, but it will still be easier than other network technologies. You only need a single antenna, for example, and lots of things we are going to cover today. Long story short, that makes CAT one this a great fit, especially for battery powered applications that need global coverage and and or that don’t fit well into the constraints you would have with a low powered network such as LT CAT m or narrowband. So this is about Soracom. I’d be happy to jump into more details in the questions. But now is the right time to hand it over to you, Imad, to, explain a bit more from a module point of view and a chipset point of view what Cat 1bis is about. Thank you very much, Nicolas, and hello, everyone. So I’m Imad Mikaiel, product marketing, director at Sequans. And the next the next slide, please. Yes. Thank you. So for those who don’t know Sequans, I mean, Sequans is a, chipset. We are a semiconductor company, fabless. We don’t do we don’t have our own fabs. We do our own chipsets, and we do our own modules. We are about two hundred people across the globe headquartered in Paris. The company established in two thousand and three. We started with WiMAX. We moved to LTE when my WiMAX ended. And, indeed, LTE, I mean, we are we have product shipping. And today, we are focusing, on the future, let’s say, on the next next generation, which is the five g, like, Redcap and Redcap. So just to to to to go back to to what Nicolas was saying, I mean, there’s no one solution that fits all. The beauty since the introduction of LTE, from the beginning, from the inception, they took into consideration that, no solution can fit all. So there are different needs. There are different, IoT, let’s say. There are different, demands, whether on energy side, I mean, how much energy they do do need, but also the pricing and, of course, the throughput that it needs. So this picture or this slide shows, how it fits together. And by the way, it’s showing both today’s four g and the transition to future five g because when we talk today about five g, sometimes there are mixtures between e m b and other stuff. So where we are going to focus today is definitely the LTE cat one slash Cat 1bis and which is why we put them all together. While you can see on on the lower end, the LTE-M and NB-IoT, and and from the cat one, basically, we can start serving, applications going up to ten megabits and so on and so on until category twenty six, which can gives one gigabit, etcetera. So and the future, let’s say, of this one day, that that will happen is the five g and our eRedCap, which will be the transition of this. It’s not the topic today, but it’s, let’s say, just to give some perspective to to to to this slide. So why Cat 1bis and where does it come from? Indeed, I mean, as I mentioned, there was the definition of the cat one, which is serving to ten megabit. But also after that, came the CAT one CAT m and and the IoT, which were serving, let’s say, the lower end or low throughput with very good energy saving, schemes for the applications. So the Cat 1bis is really the, let’s say, the combination of all the ideas that come between CAT one and FDM, NB-IoT. And you can see I mean, it has been decided in, release fourteen. So meaning it came after the definition of the of the LTE-M NB-IoT and LTE-M. And if we look at the numbers, in reality, it’s taking nearly everything exactly the same as the CAT one. So it’s a kind of a CAT one with some small modifications, and the major modification is to make it single antenna officially. Meaning, we we it is recognized as a single antenna solution inspired from the CAT m, let’s say, or from the NB-IoT. And, of course, I mean, the low power also is, coming from the CAT m. But why do we need this solution? Actually, I mean, all these applications can be served with the Cat 1bis. I mean, whether, smart smart meters, especially in electric meters because they need more, throughput, smart aggregators, telematics, connected audio because there are more throughput compared to CAT m. So it’s it’s, I mean, there are very long list of applications that can be served with the Cat 1bis. So here is really a snapshot of the kind of applications. When I put home security video, indeed, it’s not the streaming, with the with the, full full definition. It’s really a some some, let’s say, because we are limited with ten megabits. So but, indeed, I mean, it can some we have some customers using the Cat 1bis for home security, sending video over. So I’m going back to the to the globality, let’s say, or why the CAT one based solution? Why don’t we stick to the CAT m and NB-IoT despite we as we mentioned about the the throughput? Here is a snapshot coming from GS and I about the split between the the the how the world is split between LTE-M and narrowband IoT. Or let’s say, some places there are LTE-M only, some places there are narrowband IoT only, and some places they have both. So indeed, as you can see, it’s a little bit difficult to shift to everywhere with a single solution. The beauty of Cat 1bis that I didn’t mention is Cat one base is an LTE. Meaning, wherever we have a four g LTE, network available, this solution can work there without any change on the network. There is no specific support from the network side to support the Cat 1bis. So this is really again, I mean, they are we are not competing. I mean, Cat 1bis is not competing with CAT-M. It’s really the the let’s say the continuity of the, of the CAT-M, and the IoT, especially that we are we have some similarities in in behavior and in power consumption. So going back to the one antenna because, indeed, I mean, people knew the CAT one earlier, which was a two antenna. There’s no MIMO support on the CAT one, but it has two receivers channels. So, indeed, when you when you talk to experts and you say I’m going to remove one antenna, the first thing they would think about is the minus three dB that would they would lose because of the second antenna. So, indeed, what we did by design for with our Cat one base was to take that into consideration and make everything necessary on the hardware side since we own both the chipset and the module. So from there, we built a solution which is not losing much. And here, this table will show the comparison between our, get one, with two RX and our, get one base with the one RX. As you can see, I mean, the most impacted is the band thirteen where there are about one point five dB, difference between between the two, which is quite good because we expect, usually, people can expect up to three dB. I mean, with the logic of the math, say, three dB. And one thing also need that we need to to keep in mind that most of the time, in urban areas, the the the the deployment is, suffering from the interference rather than the reach. So that one point five dB won’t, won’t hurt much. So there are some comparison with other existing solution having, two r x and one r x, And we are quite happy with the results that we have on our existing module that any customer can measure by himself on on the on the feed. So before I leave the floor to Baha, just few words about indeed I mean, to when we need to have a design, that design has to be healthy somehow. Meaning, indeed, if the design itself is not healthy, the antenna will not be able to fix that issue because it is I mean, when I say healthy, meaning when testing this hardware in front of a testing equipment with a cable, at least it have the correct, levels. So what we do at Sequans to help our customers having this kind of solution, where it’s first of all our deliverables whether from datasheet or from, the module integration guide would give some hints what to do, what to do, etcetera, etcetera, and and the design checklist to to to help customers following some logic and to to avoid some mistakes. And, after that we they can give us their hardware and sorry. The the our the late, the schematics and layout review. It’s a it’s a let’s say two ways working where they submit to us and then we correct and then then we send it back, until everything is clean. And from there, we also offer some, RF testing and screening in our house just to make sure that the prototype is is working fine. And from there, I give the floor to Baha. And again, like like, Nicolas said, I mean, if you have questions, please feel free to ask them at the end of Thank you. Thank you, Imad. Nice to meet everybody. My name is Baha Badran. I’m the, head of engineering at Taoglas. Taoglas is a global company, headquartered in Ireland and USA. We have presence, all over the world with our offices and engineering support in USA in in Ireland, Taiwan, and India. So all our offices have in and engineering teams and equipment to support you all over the world. We specialize in RF and antennas. We also have or sell, magnetics and audio products. Speaking today, today, we’re gonna talk about Cat 1bis, as we’re gonna see in the next slide, and, you know, what it means for you in terms of antenna selection, and, as the team said, how many antennas you can you can use, etcetera. So things you need to know, as a green, you need one antenna, which is better than cat one and above. You where you need two antennas. So as we see on on on the right hand side, the, you’re saving space already. So in also, in addition to saving space, you’re gonna gain more, you know, space on the PCB and also having less, routing or layout you need to do on your PCB. Meaning, if you have a radio module with and you need to use two antennas, you need to think about your Rx antenna, for example, or diversity antenna to have, let’s say, a long transmission line, which can be, really a real problem in in in many cases. Where with Cat 1bis, you are moving into a single antenna. It means your radio module can be, close to the antenna, and the transmission, is, quite short. So easier integration, definitely. So, also, the things you need to consider is, certification. Okay? So if we look at, for example, the US, and we we take a deep dive into that in the next few slides, if you look at the US, then, yes, for North America, you need to have certification. If you are thinking to use your product globally, then you may not need to go through a cellular certification. So it depends on the, what you’re gonna use, or where you’re gonna use your product. So Cat 1bis follows also CAT, one when it comes to certification, detailed in North America. It’s different to CAT m one and m b IoT certification requirements, so it’s just something to keep in mind. So for example, for Catamaran and MB IOT, if you are using or developing a product that is smaller than a hundred and seven millimeter, yeah, called AT and T requirement here, then you you may get some, an easier approach to to meet the certification requirement. In in other words, your antenna efficiency or performance can be less. Now the only difference really and can be big difference when it comes to integration that you for North America, you need to target higher cat one performance requirements. So it’s it can make a difference, and we will see later what it what impacts it has. So this applies to embedded antennas, where if you are planning to use an external antenna, with a cable longer than twenty centimeters, then you don’t need to worry too much about PTCRB certification in in the US. So as we will see in the next slide, speaking of certification, so what requirements you have to meet? This is a high level overview for if you are developing any, wireless, device. So first, you need to think about regulatory certification. For example, in the US, you have FCC. In Europe, CE. So you need to think about, EMC testing, RF safety, including SAR, certain basic functionalities. This is what everybody has to do. The next level up, of course, is the industry cellular certification. It’s if we take PTCRB in the US, this is where they start focusing about some testing related to the network, as listed here. And and the focus, in this case, in the US, they start thinking more about over the air measurements where you need to look at the radio system performance. That includes the radio module plus the antenna. And the next level after that, of course, is the carrier certification where they they need to do further tests, and you need to consult with your carrier, whether it’s AT and T, Verizon, T Mobile, or others. This is they have specific requirements. Again, radio module and antenna performance is crucial in in North America to meet these requirements. So speaking of over the air requirement, as we will see in the next slide, we, there are two main parameters, we need to care about. First one is TRP or total radiated power, which equates to the, the output power coming from the radio module plus the antenna efficiency. So output power usually is around three twenty three dBm for power plus three. So you need to think about tolerance there, but then it’s the efficiency that could vary, too much. So you need to, when I say efficiency, it’s the antenna efficiency. So you need to control that antenna efficiency to ensure it’s always meeting the requirement. So the antenna efficiency for lower bands, for example, needs to be thirty two percent and above. For higher bands, needs to be fifty percent and above in North America. So if if, paying attention to antenna integration is a key. And in the next slide, we will look at the TIS, which is the total isotropic sensitivity. And this is, TRP is on the transmitter side. TIS, it’s on the receiver side. So we need to make sure we are receiving the signal. And this metric is used to, see how good the system performance is. So TIS equals the, you need to look at the conductive receive sensitivity plus the antenna efficiency. Another parameter is the noise being, you know, induced or transmitted by your electronics. So it’s important to pay attention to this as we will see in the next few slides. So this is an example of over the air test requirements for LTE bands. So we can see LTE cap one plus or and LTE cap one BIS share pretty much the same requirements. And the LTE cap m one, or NB IoT for smaller form factor do not apply, anymore. So these are numbers taken from AT and T requirements. We can see the, the band numbers and what TRP and TIS, limits that you have to meet. As I said, it’s the output conducted power plus the antenna efficiency. So we really need to pay attention to the antenna efficiency and see how we can maintain the best possible performance. So showing this requirement, and we have a link there. You can look at the all the bands and in more details, but, really, these are the numbers you have to meet. So let’s talk about the antenna integration tabs in in the next slide. So, antenna integration is a key. Focus here will be on the embedded antennas because they are harder to integrate. So we look at couple of examples, the things, you need to focus on, and and let’s look at these key considerations. So when you are developing a wireless device, you need to have a printed circuit board. This printed circuit board, act as a, a ground plane for your antenna. Then the antenna itself, as we can see, it has a keepout area. That area needs to be kept clear of any metal, any, copper on the PCB. And, also, the other thing, also, you need to keep it away from metal as much as possible. The ground plane is really crucial to have the right antenna performance, and it’s usually it’s defined to be quarter wavelength, in terms of electrical size. So it really depends on on your frequency of operation. So if you’re looking to as we will see in the next next slide, we were putting couple of examples showing the electrical length or the PCB length as well for to to operate at certain bands. So for a frequency, let’s say, band twelve at six hundred ninety nine or seven hundred megahertz, we quarter wavelength is around a hundred and seven millimeters. On the graph on the right, you can see why when we change the ground plane length or the PCB length, what we can see is, the antenna efficiency drops in the lower bands between seven hundred and nine hundred megahertz. It doesn’t get affected in the higher bands, band two and four, because it’s again, as as we said, it’s you need to look at the wavelength equation, the speed of light over frequency. So this is really something important to keep in mind. The other thing also important is proximity to metal. So antenna is made out of metal. It’s simply you know, we shape it in a way to to give us allow it to transmit and receive a signal. So putting it next to a metal object, that’s gonna cause, distortion to our fields and affects the antenna performance. And in this, slide, we will see the antenna on the left hand side being very close to the antenna. We will see quite reduction in the antenna efficiency. And as we move the antenna away from the metal objects, we see improvements in performance. As a general rule, we usually recommend to have more than twenty millimeters of clearance between the antenna and the, like, let’s say, metal object, like a big connector, or, you know, a battery, something like that. The other important part is in impedance matching. So make sure when you design your, transmission line, ensure it’s fifty ohm. And ensure you have matching components available to match the transmission line of the radio module to your antenna to ensure all the power coming from or through the antenna, or through the antenna is, you know, get most of it gets to where it should be. So the other thing also, if if you get really a good matching or return loss in this case, and you don’t still have done or you don’t have good coverage still, it’s it means you have some issue with the antenna performance. So not a good return a good return loss is not always a good sign. Next slide, please. The focus we spoke mostly on the TX side and the antenna integration. But as we discussed earlier, TIS or, excuse me, total isotropic sensitivity is a very important, subject. So, noise is a key, parameter here that could affect your system, ability to receive signal. And so electromagnetic noise, often caused by, you know, power supplies or voltage converters, can transmit or emit signal. And the antenna itself will be able to receive that signal easily, unfortunately, because it’s it’s designed to work at a certain frequency. And if your power supply transmit at that frequency, then that will cause a self interference. So how to mitigate for certain noises? A common noise, supply here would be the, switches, switch mode power supplies. So there are certain techniques that you need to follow. For example, ensure you have, tighten, or tight switching loops in your PCB, and make sure switching loops has clean and clear return path. And also think about shielding as well. Some few tips here we are adding, but, again, you know, adding high frequency capacitors also to both input and output parts to minimize broadband noise here would significantly help. So pay attention to power supplies. To be honest, nine out of ten TIS issues is because of the, power supply design strategies. Another important, way to mitigate noise is shielding. So consider shielding. I know it adds a little bit of cost, but it could save you, a lot of hassle. It could improve your coverage, and, also, it could help with the, your battery the device battery life. So consider shielding around high frequency digital electronics. Also, you know, minimize opening and gaps, in the shield. If you have multiple metal components in your device, think how you’re gonna connect them together as well to the main PCB. All that will help with the with the reception. Now, that’s the end of my slides, but at Taoglas, we have the the teams to support with, with the antenna selection and integration. Visit our website for, for the full details and see how we can help. Thank you. And I’ll hand it over to Nicolas for the to talk about takeaways. Thank you, Baha. So, yeah, First key takeaway takeaway, I may take them in random order, but I think what something key is to plan and test early on, especially considering all that Ba and Ima just explained to, to you. And hopefully, I’m not the one that did not understand all the technical details about antenna and matching. And I think nobody can can control one hundred percent of the IoT solution design. So one of the key takeaways, make sure that you get surrounded by the right experts to help you reach this level of performance, from your device to your your cloud application. So other takeaways of course is that Cat 1bis is a very useful technology to help you breach those coverage gaps by providing broader connectivity thanks to that existing compatibility with the already operating four gs networks, making it a key enabler for a wide range of applications. Imad gave us quite a lot of examples whenever you need reliable connectivity, mobility, efficiency at a power management level without getting into too much hardware and antenna complexity, then Cat 1bis is a great choice for you. And so I would say key takeaway for today is understanding that you have the right partners to help you, be Taoglas to help navigate complexities both of antenna design or antenna choice as well as all the certifications concerns that you need to consider very early on. Sequans as a chipset and module partner that can help you have the right solution for Cat 1bis but as well for other network technologies existing and future, again depending on your on your needs and constraints. And Soracom, of course, as I explained, we are here to help you pick the right solution, the right network solution, but as well the right hardware solutions and partners to help you either build your own custom, parts or buy them from trusted partners. I tried to go fast with those key takeaways, Emma. I hope we still have time. Thank you so much, Nicolas. Yeah. Because I was gonna say we have three minutes for questions, and we have a lot of questions coming through. So we might actually just even run over for an extra five minutes, and anything that we haven’t followed up with, we will do so, when the webinar ends. So the first question is, so the first question is, will LTE Cat 1bis be replaced by REDCap? Who wants to take that question? I can take it. Actually, I mean, it it, this question goes, back to the slide where I showed the technologies. And if you remember that one, actually, I mean, the REDCap as REDCap is a continuity for CAT four and above, CAT four, CAT six, because it’s delivering, much more, throughput to about one hundred and fifty, megabit per second, even more, While, actually, the real, follow-up for Cat 1bis or CAT one Cat 1bis is the e rate cap, which is enhanced rate cap, which is having equivalent to Cat 1bis, throughput and, of course, same targets in, let’s say, in pricing and in, in power consumption. Okay. Thank you so much, and, okay. So the next question actually is one for you, Baha, which I think maybe there might have been a little misunderstanding on the certification slide. So it’s why do you assume that outside of the USA certification might not be required? Well, we we are when we say certification, we the focus would be, carrier certifications. So it’s you still need to have CE certification, of course. But, for example, if we take Europe, the carriers on Europe don’t force certification or to use their network, unlike USA or North America. So this is the little confusion, but, for example, you could go to another region, like China or Japan. So they have specific requirements still. But North America tends to be the more the clearest and the the the most stringent when it comes to carrier certification. So apology for the misunderstanding. The the certification here is focused on on, or meant to be on carrier certification. Yeah. Thanks, Baha. So another question that’s come through. Is Cat 1bis support available in LTE carriers in the US, like Verizon, AT and T, T Mobile, US cellular, and LTE carriers worldwide? Maybe I can You would like to take that. Yeah. I like it. Well, as we also, as we mentioned earlier, Cat 1bis is nothing else besides a CAT one with a single antenna. I mean, from a from a protocol or from so from the carrier side, there is nothing really needed to to to to put in place in order to support the Cat 1bis. So wherever you have an LTE available network available, Cat 1bis is by default supported anywhere on the planet. This is the beauty of Cat 1bis, by the way. Thanks, Imad. The next question is also for you, actually. So it’s regarding the Sequans modem. Is it in the roadmap to support Ethernet PDU with REDCap? We announced, in, in the, publicly, our next generation. And our next generation is a continuity of of the Cat 1bis, let’s say, which is a dual mode, Cat 1bis eRedCap, which is under under design. That’s it. Okay. Thank you. Then there’s another question here. This one’s for you, Baha. Does Cat 1bis perform better than CAT one with no diversity antenna? I think Imad, touched on this in his slides. So, from having having two antennas with a diversity antenna, you will have, you have two antennas receiving signals from two two different places. So you’re gonna have better throughput as we saw also from the numbers. So, but we we understand sometimes a lot of customers tend to have limitation to put two antennas on the system. So in the US, sometimes they go and apply for a waiver from the carrier to add one antenna instead of two for cat one. But this is an additional process. Having the Cat 1bis allow them to have such, freedom, really. Now you can use the module, and you don’t need to worry about waivers or anything. So think about Cat 1bis. It’s it’s an improved CAT m one. That’s how I think about it. So you still have access to better data rate. And also in terms of antenna performance, you should still have adequate performance. But, anyway, it’s really the application that drives the the use case, why you need CAT one or Cat 1bis or CAT one CAT four. So, actually, that leads on quite well to the next question, which is also for you, Baha. I’m looking to use Cat 1bis inside my asset tracking device instead of CAT m one. Would I be able to certify that in the US? The the the answer to this is is, of course, you can, but the the you need to we or when you design your product for example, let’s say, if we are designing IoT device, these devices tend to be quite small. They they do have CAT m one cellular technology on them usually. So with that, as I said, if your device is smaller than a hundred and seven millimeters according to AT and T, you could actually have around eight dB difference in performance and ten efficiency at least, compared to a CAT one device. So you get eight dB differences quite a lot and will make things easier. But if you are moving to Cat 1bis, then, actually, you don’t have this option anymore. So you need to make sure your antenna efficiency is still high. But for that, you you may need to find another way to improve the antenna efficiency, and that could also require making your device bigger or the ground plane or the PCB bigger to compensate for any performance reduction. K. Thanks, Baha. And I think we have time for one more question because I know we are running over, and then we’ll follow-up with with any unanswered questions when when the webinar ends. This one is for you, Imad. And they’re saying, can we do chipset on board design with your solution? Definitely. Yes. I mean, the answer is yes as I mean, to answer to the question, yes, indeed. I mean, nothing, we can always do a chip chipset design onboard. The thing is, I mean, we do the modules to take, let’s say, all the certification ahead of the, the cost and and the effort to do the certification ahead of the customer. Because once you do, the chipset onboard, you have to redo all the certifications, not only the antenna. I mean, everything. So, it is much more, it will require effort, and and, it would be much more costly for for the customer who will do that. Okay. Thank you so much, Imad. And, yeah, thank you so much to everyone for joining. Thank you so much to our speakers. And if you do have any additional questions, please feel free to get in touch via our websites or our you can reach out to our speakers directly, and their contact details are on slide. And we’ve also included a handout on platforms, so you’d be able to download the presentation directly. I see a few questions. They’re asking if the webinar is gonna be available on demand. It will via email. And and, yeah, thank you so much everyone for joining. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and we’ll hopefully see you soon for the next one. Bye. Thank you.

Thank you all for coming to today’s webinar about the digital health data collection hurdles that you’re gonna see on on premise or in home health care deployments. My name is Ryan Carlson. I’m the IoT and technology evangelist here at the Soracom Americas. I’ve been spending about the last twenty years of my career prior to coming to Soracom building digital products. And about six of those different products that went to market were of the health care nature, both in surgery theaters and also in homes or in remote practice locations. There’s a lot of crossovers. Healthcare by no means is unique. It’s just a little bit different from from other IoT implementations, whether it’s industrial, chemical utilities, commercial, and so forth. This is brought to you by Soracom. Soracom is a mobile virtual network operator specifically for IoT with global cellular with over four hundred and twenty carriers over a hundred and eighty countries. In two thousand fifteen, Soracom was started by people at AWS, saw the power of the cloud, and felt that that needed to be applied to telecommunications infrastructure. Now the company exists to allow smart devices such as health care to easily send data out to the cloud, connect with multiple carriers, and most importantly, stay connected wherever deployments might take them. A single eSIM, iSIM, or removable SIM gets you all of these different scales from enterprise all the way to actual startup products themselves. You get mission critical connections for health care with a strong focus on security, and we provide private networking, automatic failover, and native VPN support without lead times or the contractual lock ins that you’ll find that come with local carriers. We’re here to talk about digital health data collection hurdles for on premise and in home health care deployments. This title is very specific in that if we’re talking about hospitals or some of these other networks, remote clinics, yes. Big huge health systems, maybe not. But a lot of these technologies are going to apply because there’s some changes in the trends in what we’re seeing in digital health. First and foremost, let’s all take just a few moments. Let’s reflect on the reactions that we will get when we would hear the words cloud and data used in the same sentence in healthcare settings. I’m going back going back years and years and years, probably around two thousand seventeen, two thousand eighteen. And you got a whole lot of no way, never gonna happen, not secure, and how the world has changed. And so I say this because when we bring up things like cellular or Bluetooth or, even even Wi Fi, we are now looking at next generation technologies in all of these different wireless spectrums. Constraints that are existing today do not guarantee that they’re going to be existing tomorrow. And we’ll even have some interesting reflections on the current day technologies and where modern innovation is taking them. The one thing that I can say first and foremost is that twenty twenty one was when I spent my time in the health care industry, specifically around health data. And I watched the entire industry through COVID being dragged about ten years forward into the future as we saw both data policies, technology roadmaps accelerated. My wife is a provider, does telehealth, and telehealth was not covered where we live by all but maybe one insurance policy to where all of them would then cover telehealth, which opened the doors to an entirely new set of treatment types, distributed clinical, research programs. And remote health solutions are now primarily cloud based since we’re seeing a decentralization of ownership over these types of technologies. So it’s third party vendors that are responsible for maintaining and improving or even facilitating the services. Remote patient monitoring is prescribed and home health is subscribed. So prescribed solutions in particular need the data in order to demonstrate patient compliance, and that’s where you’re gonna have your CPT codes and you need to show and demonstrate usage. Whereas subscriptions, it’s not so much about can you get paid by people just going through the motions. You actually have to have a product that is good enough to drive a meaningful user experience in order to justify making those ongoing payments to whatever that program might be. So the question is, how does this change business requirements and engineering requirements? I hope to dig a bit deeper into that. But if there’s only one thing you remember, it’s gonna be a common language for talking about remote data collection for digital health solutions. I found this very helpful for working with providers, practitioners, executives, business units, business development, sales, all the way down to engineering and product management. We’re gonna be doing this by talking about a water utility. This is the IoT utility model. We’re gonna be talking about water that’s being pulled from the ground. This is the point of collection in which a pump is placed. We’re gonna have the lines of transmission, so you have your large Super Mario Brothers tubes that are pulling the water to a point of aggregation. Sometimes it looks like a cute little tea kettle, but in the most part, you’re gonna be having water treatment facilities where all of that collected water, that resource is all in one place is where we’re gonna look at the alkalinity or the iron content in the water, and we’re gonna treat it right there. The point of distribution is where we’re gonna have all of the different requirements for inputs, output, size, pressure, and even some of the regulatory pieces such as wastewater. Utilization is the final point in this journey in which we’re gonna have homes, commercial businesses, or manufacturing facilities that all have different requirements for how they’re going to be using the water that’s collected. In the utility world, the first mile is the point of collection taking the resource from where it originates to where it is aggregated, and the last mile is from where that water is all in one place with our resource to where it’s gonna be utilized. So when we’re talking about resources, let’s now go from water to data. The data might be temperature, gallons, check engine lights, oil pressure on that pump. So at the point of collection is going to be the sensor that is going to be having a a variety of means of collecting that information. Transmission is going to be how that moves from the point of collection out to the point of aggregation, oftentimes satellite, cellular, Wi Fi, Internet service providers. It’s gonna go out through a public Internet connection to that point of aggregation. And where you’re gonna have instead of a water reclamation facility, you might have a data lake or your application servers. This is where you can have all the data at rest and do things with it while it’s all in one place. Distribution is often the rules, the permissions, the security guidelines, the APIs, the integration documents, software developer kits, all of those things that are going to align with the utilization of that resource. So mobile app development, administrative web interface, or an analytics platform that’s gonna be ingesting certain parts of data. The IoT world is going to be really broken into these two camps. So we’re gonna use some traditional centralized on premise IoT data collection as the example. We’ve got an on premise sensor at a at a hospital. IT controls the infrastructure. That data then flows into the electronic health record system sitting at the facility. The distribution is gonna be a VPN or a health information exchange where the utilization is either that EHR client interface or it’s gonna be a health record that might be pulled in someplace else due to a release of information or request of some kind from another provider. The EHR vendors themselves did a great job of creating walled gardens in that utilization space, and ROI requests have limited access to the data. And now what’s interesting is that when we’re looking at on premise facilities, on premise data collection actually has far fewer hurdles in controlled ecosystems, which makes sense. Whereas the sharing of electronic health information has been the focus of industry legislation since the two thousand fifteen. So we’re looking out to even specifically in the United States. The the idea of reducing data blocking and increasing data interoperability is a big focus. But now when we’re looking at remote patient health monitoring through the lens of the utility model, in the first mile, we might have that device. It uses Bluetooth to connect to a device where a patient is gonna answer questions about how they’re feeling that day. It’s gonna use the cellular radio within that mobile device to go out to the public Internet. It’s gonna put the data out into the cloud. An application server is gonna ingest it, and an API is actually what the app is using to bring it full circle, or it’s even gonna be using some sort of additional, maybe FHIR or some other means of pushing data into those EHR workflows. The challenge is that data collection issues most often occurred in the first mile of remote digital health solutions. This is where I see more and more stumbling, whereas data use is the common topic that dominates last mile development. We’re not here to talk about last mile. It is its own can of worms. And the more sensitive nature of the data, is it a clinical trial? Is it gonna actually have identifiable health information? So if you can’t collect it, it doesn’t matter where it needs to go. Let’s go ahead and define data collection hurdles in this space. This is a model that I’ve been using for years, after doing usability work and in field contextual research. And the first tier so think of this as if you can’t move up the pyramid, device functionality and user interaction, which is gonna be, is it is the form and functioning gonna be something that people can use? Does it have enough power to reasonably last throughout that use cycle? And it’s also gonna be the accuracy of the data itself. And we see this with wearables on the fidelity of the data is increasing year over year and becoming much, much better. The next step is network connectivity and data transmission. So if you aren’t getting enough signal where you’re deploying, if you don’t have a reliable means of maintaining a connection if something were to occur, or you don’t have the bandwidth to process that information, you may be having some issues. Moving further up the actual dependency chain is gonna be your data security and compliance, your HIPAA, SOC two, HITRUST. This is gonna be your ability to have secure transmission, encryption, and overall data integrity of that data that’s moving. Again, this depends on what data it is you’re moving, where you’re moving it, and whether there’s identifiable information in the first place. Next on this ladder is the cloud processing and systems integration. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky. Is our EHRs, HIEs, practice management systems, the processing of the data itself? Are we using AI for anomaly detection? Are we doing some sort of normalization of the data to create data liquidity? And more importantly, how are we dealing with data interoperability for the ultimate end goal, which is creating actionable insights and having a clinical response. This is the ability to send notifications to providers, the integration into what is thousands of permutations of different workflows even in the same EHR depending on the clinic? And, also, how is it that you’re having those closed feedback loops with the, care providers or a care team for, an end user? And we’ll go into some examples of what actual systems look like and and how they’re addressing these steps. Now when we’re talking about the actual data hurdles themselves, let’s go back to our utility model and layer these in. That first layer, it’s complex to use. It’s cumbersome to provision the device, and kitting requires multiple SKUs. We see this a lot in Internet of Things. This is not unique to health care by any means, but specifically around device provisioning and then kitting. And we’ll get into some examples of what that looks like. Internet availability, reliability, and failover responses is something that I see far too often. It is the afterthought in a Internet of things application. There’s a lot of times where you might even say, how are we gonna get the connection? Oh, we’ll just assume Wi Fi. And that is actually how most product development is done at the bench is that you’re gonna have an, development kit. It’s gonna have an Ethernet connection or a Wi Fi chip built right into it, and that’s what we build to. And this is the same thing even the video game industry went through with developers building on these immense machines, not realizing what the end user actually has. And so the experience and the the follow through, we we quickly learn. Maybe we’re not aligning to what our customers need. Going up the tier is gonna be device and data security. There’s always gonna be the gotchas. If you’re trying to get that SOC two or HITRUST compliance if that’s something that is is required. There’s gonna be the private network support. IT is the number one gotcha in so many of these scenarios. And so if you’re looking for a blocker, I highly recommend just ignoring IT and wait till the last minute and try and come up with a response. We’ve all filled out those security surveys every time you’re trying to go through a sales cycle and trying to sell your device. So there are some things. There are some tactics that can be used to address this. And data privacy and data handling, this is really on all of us in the health care space to make sure that we’re keeping on top of that. Tier four, this is in the last mile. It’s all the interop. It’s the EHR integrations. And, honestly, FHIR has super limited support, and it’s less than ten percent of the overall standard has been implemented. We’ve gotta find different ways. And, unfortunately, it’s the more complex our solution, the harder it is to implement some of these pieces. The last one is just the every provider’s got a unique workflow. So knowing that we’re gonna have to to deal with that. Last mile considerations, let’s go ahead and look at the low hanging fruit for today, and that’s going to be the first mile. We’ve got reduced complexity and extra steps. We wanna make connectivity simple and reliable. That second part is something that is nonnegotiable when we’re talking about telemetry for health considerations. And then the last one is skipping the public Internet using cloud native cellular networks. The low hanging fruit here is making sure we’re thinking about how are we gonna answer that security survey or how are we protecting the data that’s going through the system. Here’s some design patterns that are used in digital health solutions. So I’m gonna give you a couple of different examples. The first one is a Bluetooth device or the mobile phone as a gateway. This is something that IoT has been looking at from the consumer world for ages, and this is where most of the early remote patient monitoring equipment has gone. So a device gathers data. It uses Bluetooth to communicate to the device. The device syncs to the mobile device. It uses its own cellular network to connect to the public Internet. The data is stored in a private cloud instance somewhere, AWS, Azure, or even a private hosting. And then this data is securely accessed via either a portal or a push to a provider, into their EHR, EMR, whatever it might be. Now the setup process is we’ve all been here. Right? Okay. Put the device into pairing mode. Now we have to go to the app on the device, and we wanna pair it with the mobile device. We’re gonna have to put on the appropriate credentials. Then that device goes out to the cloud to authenticate, and it’s gonna exchange a handshake. It’s gonna get some new keys, and we’re gonna get the secure credentials to now allow every time we want to take that blood pressure, do the diabetes test, upload our our weight that we’ve been standing on a scale with, and and get the answers on the other end or send that information of a provider. We need to make sure that we’ve gone through that process. So if you’re not providing the mobile devices with the actual RPM device, these steps have to happen at the patient’s house. And so now you’re assuming that the patients have that. Now we’re gonna look at enterprise Bluetooth gateway. Now this is something that is super cool, and it’s for larger multi sensor monitoring deployment. So it could be elderly care facilities. It could be clinics. It could be any number of different locations. So we’re gonna have one to many connections. We’re gonna have lots of different devices. Bluetooth is encrypted. Bluetooth is super low power, and it’s really great at continuous monitoring and sensing without having to worry about the high transmission rates that Wi Fi or cellular might be having. And our friends over at Casia Networks, they’ve got a number of different devices. One of them even has a SIM slot right into it where you get to choose your backhaul. So including cellular is the primary failover, so you can deploy multiple devices rather than having to have multiple individual SIMs to manage. You can have yourself a bunch of Bluetooth sensors, and then all of the information then goes through the cloud out into the last mile. There’s also some interesting things that are that why I even put this in here is because Bluetooth roaming is a thing. So if you’ve got mobility as part of your package, if the if the sensors are actually looking at gait analysis and looking at how people are moving during physical recovery or occupational therapy, I mean, it could be any number of things or even asset tracking with a Bluetooth locationing. So by placing a number of these devices all in one place, you actually can set up an basically, an access point network very similar to Wi Fi, but at a fraction of the power, a fraction of the actual data that needs to be zipping around, and you can still have the secure backhaul that goes out. The other thing that is also really neat is the ability to have some edge computing in a containerized service. So there are some of these gateways that you can build your own native app or your server software into indoor or outdoor units. That way, it can greatly reduce the amount of processing that needs to happen over the airwaves, especially if you’re using cellular as the primary backhaul. There’s some, really neat opportunities to leverage where I see Bluetooth is evolving, and it’s not just for those one to one relationships, one device to one smart device, like a a tablet or a phone, like we would with our AirPods or whatever. Alright. Now we’re gonna be looking at device connection and data via Wi Fi network. So this is something that should be really familiar. Gather data, send it over the network, ISP moves it over the public Internet, all goes out, and so on. The difference here is that in order to maintain IPsec or the actual security, you’re gonna need special secure networking hardware. These are devices that you’re gonna be putting on premise, and they maintain that secure tunnel where it’s packaging up and and keeping that data from being accessible via public Internet. And that’s where you’re gonna have to pay to put the hardware on either end of this chain in order to maintain some of these secure connections. So we know that remote patient monitoring, by and large, is about keeping costs down. So every additional piece of hardware that needs to be provided, unless this is a permanent facility or something along those lines, it’s a harder ask. The other piece too is a lot of RPM devices or remote patient monitoring relies on batteries, and Wi Fi does use a fair amount of power. And so you you just need to be thinking about, is that is that what you wanna be doing? Because it’s gonna be for permanent installations. Security has to be addressed using specialized hardware, or you’re gonna have to have some sort of code added in. Now you gotta enter setup mode. You log in to the mobile app. You access the device’s Wi Fi. Right? We’re like, join the network of blood pressure cuff one two three, and you log in. You put in the network credentials for the Wi Fi. The cloud authenticates the app and the device, and then it sends its credentials, and it does the handshake, and now everything’s great. But who’s doing this? Is the Internet already at the location? Is this grandma’s house? Because she doesn’t have Internet. Unlikely. So we need to be thinking about using the appropriate technology. This is great for permanent facilities where there’s preexisting IT or support, but relying on Wi Fi in a home health scenario is difficult. If our goal is to reach the largest patient population possible, we need to be considering these things. Here’s just a a throw out here. You’ve got local Wi Fi networks with a cellular backhaul. So one of the things at Soracom we’ve done is we, created our own line of USB modems. There’s nothing fancy here. They just happen to be pre certified. You can plug them into a device. They’re global ready, and they already take advantage of, a bunch of our different cloud based services, which we’ll touch on a couple of those on how to make advanced data collection even easier and reducing effort upfront. Let’s look at built in cellular connectivity. So your device gathers data. It syncs to the cloud. It goes over the public Internet. The data is stored in your own private cloud instance someplace, and then there’s the secure access. But now because it’s a per prescribed device, the setup needs to happen at advance. You’re gonna pre provision the device. You’re gonna pull them off the shelf. You have to look at all of the unique serial numbers. Then you’re gonna have to go, okay. Where is this patient located? Are they gonna be in a AT and T, T Mobile, Verizon, US cellular, Orange? Are they a different part of the world? Are they in Canada? Oh, gotta put a Rogers in there. So you have all of these additional SKUs because you’ve got the device, its own serial number, its own pre provisioned credentials, then you’re gonna have to be putting the SIM in. You activate the SIM. You power on the device. The device then you ship it. Now you send it over to where it needs to be, where it’s prescribed. The device will connect. That authenticates the connection. The credential, the handshake all happens, but there’s a bunch of work that needs to happen upfront. One of the things that you can do in cellular, in order to alleviate the burden on security is you can do, secure transmissions via what’s called a private APN. This is where you’re contracting with one specific carrier. So here, you actually are getting married to one particular local carrier, and they’re gonna set up their own servers where and they’re gonna issue you your own SIMs. So you have to install a unique SIM that only works on that private APN. Again, I have the keys to your own Airbnb that all set up for you in their their data warehouse. And then your devices then will communicate over your own network. There’s no other shared traffic, and then you can configure on the other end your VPN, your private network. Then you’ve got all your other development effort that’s gonna be required, but, it’s costly. It takes three to thirteen months. There’s contracts. There’s minimum requirements. It’s a pain. I know because I’ve had to set up three of these. And so cellular connectivity with cloud native IoT network like Soracom. We’re doing some really neat things by changing telecommunications infrastructure. So we’ve got our devices. We’re gonna install the SIM, whether an ISIM, an eSIM, or a removable SIM. So iSIM’s integrated into the electronics. ESIM is soldered on the board, which is great for small, tiny, wearable devices. And so at the factory, it’s put in. The supplier sets the SIM to a ready status. So they’re going to all automatically receive it, and it’s ready to go. So once you power on the device, it then activates that SIM, a SIM that works on lots of different networks too. Now that the device is up and running, it can do secure transmissions via virtual private gateway, which means it can skip the public Internet. There is no private APN requirement. You can have this set up within minutes. It’s awesome. No minimums, no contracts, no requirements. You can do it for one SIM if you want. Devices sync directly to your private cloud. And so if you happen to have your application living out on AWS, your development team is gonna be familiar with something called VPC peering. This is how to make two clouds talk to one another in a secure fashion, and that, again, takes a couple minutes. Then you’ve got your secure data storage. It goes out all the normal places. One thing to point out too is that your device is gonna connect, but what if it loses signal? What if a carrier has an outage? Depending on the weather or what time of day, what what side of the mountains you’re on, one carrier is gonna be better than the other. Well, Soracom’s the radio within your devices will have the option to switch and and make sure that there’s continuity of service. And we’ll go into some examples of Soracom customers that have deployed the stuff in some of the most rural locations serving very large patient populations where they were unaffected by some of these big outages that affected millions of customers. The other special thing here is device authentication via SIM rather than requiring a bunch of credentials being loaded during manufacturing. You can use the SIM, and we’ll get into those details more. And then the credentials and the handshake happens. In data collection, you wanna know that the device is not cloned. You wanna know that it’s valid. You wanna know that it’s secure. And the only way to do that is actually having the credential and authentication process that happens, between an IoT device and your cloud application. Soracom’s secure networking is why IT loves working with our customers because it allows people to bring their own private network. And so whether that’s a direct connection through a fiber channel, AWS, Azure, their own VPN corporate networks, there’s a lot of large energy, health care, and utilities that all use Soracom specifically because it’s something that we natively support out of the box. The other thing too is that we ourselves are built on top of AWS, so we consume cloud services so we can quickly scale whenever there’s a need to ramp up traffic up and down. It also means a lot of native support for different services like Kinesis or Lambda functions or doing some function calling. It’s pretty cool stuff. There’s also a whole series of cloud data adapters for getting access to Power BI, various machine learning pieces. So what we found is that by sending small bits of data upfront and offloading processing on smaller remote patient monitoring devices, we can have the cheap processing of the cloud process data on your behalf. So let’s send small bursts of data from the IoT device out to the cloud and and and put the heavy lifting out there. One, it reduces processor. It increases battery life, and it reduces the amount of data that you’re having to pay for because that’s what’s transmitted, especially if you’re transmitting over cellular. So when you have a device, a user is going to register their device. This is just an individual user. They go to the they they turn on their device. We went through this on the utility model. It goes to the cloud service. It sends credentials back to their device to say, yep. Ryan, this is your blood pressure cuff. It then securely copies the credentials and the configuration down to the device, and then the device has to go back to the cloud, authenticate, and connect. That’s why whenever we’re setting up smart things, it doesn’t always feel super smart. Right? There’s a lot of extra moving parts, especially if we’re using older methods for doing this. When we’re talking about building a hundred thousand or even ten thousand units and we’re sending them out to a contract manufacturer, we, as the company, we need to make sure the device gets registered in the cloud, and we’re going to get a bunch of credentials that are created, and they’re gonna be put onto sometimes it’s a USB thumbstick, a zip file. We’re gonna have all of these credentials, ten thousand or even a hundred thousand of these credentials, and they’re gonna be sent overseas to our contract manufacturer. And they’re gonna be embedding each unique encryption key or the half of the encryption key into each one of these devices. This is, again, to make sure things are true, valid, and, we can trust the data that’s coming from the device. Then as that device gets turned on, it authenticates and connects. So, one, before we even get to do anything, this means that we’ve got a whole lot of operational overhead of just even putting the devices into the system. There are staff that you hire specifically. The more sensitive the devices that you’re creating, you don’t want backdoors. You don’t want people getting copies of these credentials. These are the launch codes. It’s you’re not launching things necessarily, but, right, like, it’s access to the device and the data. And so there is a chance for breach, and there are a lot of security contracts that will have clauses in, like, chain of custody. Are you keeping track of this stuff? And a lot of times, it’s gonna also have, you know, higher cost and lead time. There’s these HSM hardware security modules that are used to generate these codes. It’s a whole level of infrastructure that nobody building IoT devices actually is anticipating. I don’t wanna say anybody, but in all the projects I’ve ever been on over twenty years, this is one of those areas where, like, we have to do this, and it adds cost. One of the things we’ve got is secure provisioning and data payload services, with Soracom. It’s where the device initiates a connection in the field. Soracom Krypton registers the device. The cloud service issues the credentials, and then the credentials are loaded into the device at the SIM level. At no point did anyone have to load anything into a device because the SIM itself is already a secure encrypted hardware module. It already has a unique identity that can’t be copied. It already is registered within the Soracom system when you buy the SIMs, eSIMs, iSIMs, whatever it might be. And so you could create a hundred thousand devices. They’re all identical. There’s nothing unique that needs to happen to them to fulfill this part of the the credentialing process. So this is those if you know, you know moments. The last step is the device uses the credentials to access the cloud service itself, and it’s all dynamic. There’s also an endorsed service that Soracom has, which allows you to use the SIM, but it could also use Wi Fi, Ethernet, or another type of Internet connection to pass that final credential sharing. So talk to a solutions architect if you wanna learn more how that works. Let’s get back into some examples here. So direct cellular connections, they actually drive a remote patient monitoring compliance. In a podcast interview that I did with Darby Davenport, who is the operations for telemedicine at UAB Health Systems. They went from having devices that had to use mobile apps or tablets. They used another vendor to prepare and train, and they’d have patients being discharged from the hospital. And there was a lot of moving parts. And then they moved over to using, a, like, a scale as one of the most popular devices that goes out for monitoring patients, going through recovery. And, this device has a SIM chip right in it. It has a direct cellular connection, and I recommend checking out the interview. You can look at managing remote patient monitoring operations for rural areas. It’s on the what to expect when you’re connecting podcast. But you can hear firsthand. You don’t have to believe me. Listen to Darby, the person who lives in the trenches, and the adoption uptake is significant to the point where people actually use it. And she points out that CPT codes are how they get reimbursed for sending these devices out into the field. And if people are unwilling to use it, it becomes a paperweight, and they’re out the bunny. So the only way that they’re gonna get that reimbursement is by getting people to use it at least a minimum of, I believe, fourteen times per month. And so the easier you make it, the more likely they’re to do it. And this is where that that dependency scale, where connectivity really makes a big difference because a a a lot of the people out in rural Alabama, they don’t have Internet at home. Then we’ve got tracking patient behaviors without adding any extra steps. I think what doctor Nagesh Gadaba has done, he’s got a device called RxKeeper, And he was talking about this idea of this ninety ten rule. Ten percent of his of patients for medication adherence, they require something that’s a bit more sophisticated. There’s gonna be some additional tracking that’s required. But ninety percent of them, really, based on all the usability studies and all the real world evidence that he’s got, is that the more simple, the better. And people who are sick don’t need one more thing to worry about. What RxKeeper does is there’s a medication alarm. The lid on the device opens, and their inside is one of the Soracom LTE M smart buttons, and it’s got a stereo plug in there where you can have a sensor like a door and window sensor. And in this particular case, when the lid opens, it sends a preprogrammed response directly out to the cloud and updates the portal login and then can update workflows on the provider end. Because what we’re not looking for is did the lid open. What we’re looking for is did the lid not open for consecutive days. That will identify whether someone is interacting with their medication, period. There’s also some of the things that they’ve done as well where instead of it just sending a response, when you open the lid, you actually press the button for I’m not feeling well. You double click it. I’m okay. And a long press if you’re feeling good. And so this could be used in clinical trials for just how are you feeling as the medication is taken over time. So very clever clever application of Internet that’s just already existing. No one needs to touch an app. They don’t need to do anything. It’s just go through the normal motions. One of the things that we know is that great products fail if connectivity isn’t working. Andrew Aker of PatchRx, is also in the medication adherence space. And there, he points out that reaching very diverse patient populations with in home health care solutions requires that the products be well designed. But, like, a lot of these, even even with, RxKeeper, they started with Wi Fi design. So they started with trying to make make it so people had to bring their Internet, or the prescriber would have to send a preconfigured router with them, and then you have to hook that up and get that all figured out. And instead, it it’s changed to where they’ve got a one to one ratio of a smart cap per bottle. It’s gonna have an identifier inside. There’s a cellular ESIM inside of a gateway sitting over by an outlet, And so this is where it’s soldered inside. So you’ve got a very tiny device that is maintaining the cellular connection, and you just tap when you take your pills. You just wave it by the sensor, and it lets your doctor know that you took that medication. The thing that we we know, those of us who are making devices, is that cellular is going from add on to assumed. It used to be you always just had an empty SIM slot to fill. That’s if you decide to even spec it into the device. ESIMs are making it so you can solder right onto the board, which is great for vibration dropping, security, tamper resistance nature. But to reduce power consumption and processor requirements even more, there’s now ISIMS, which is the SIM that’s just inside the radio module itself. And so we’re seeing this trend that even if Wi Fi or a Bluetooth connection is the primary means of getting data from the sensor, getting data to the cloud, you need to have a plan for what do you do when things go wrong. Speaking of things going wrong, people worry a lot about, is this gonna be expensive? What if a device runs away and we rack up a bill? One, that will absolutely happen. The more devices you have, the more likely it is to occur. I’ve spent thousands of dollars of other companies I’ve worked for of their money during testing and pilot programs by having devices that kicked out junk data or they something was misconfigured. And next thing you know, you’re looking at a twelve hundred dollar bill. And so one of the things that Soracom has done having seen that happen way too often is they have got a whole tool, which is an event handler, which allows you to configure not only alerts, but also set in thresholds. And you can set blanket thresholds across each individual SIM at an account level, at a customer level, to where it can even throttle a speed class so you can get notified. It throttles a speed class to keep the stop the bleeding, or you can just have it pause a SIM until someone from a support team can just see what’s going on, do an RMA, do a swap out, whatever that might be. No more overages. It’s gone. If if you configure this, and and it’s something that’s by default when you log in to your free operator ID account at soracom dot io, go ahead and check it out. You can get a console account, get a SIM. Let us know if you wanna do some testing. We’ll hook you up. Couple other things that people love as far as data collection is on demand road access is one of the tools that Soracom provides, and we call it Napter. This gives you the ability to remotely access any deployed device with a cellular SIM chip in it. No code. No development. This is great for pushing firmware updates, for doing remote maintenance. You never have to ask anyone, okay. Go to your app. Click on settings. Go to this. Do that. You can log in. It’s just as if you plug a cable into it. We open up a port within the SIM, a communication port. And for those in the know, you can SSH in and just issue commands and look at logs. You can also do remote packet capture as well. It’s another tool that we have. Throw it right into Wireshark and diagnose what’s going wrong with your device in a secure fashion without opening up any public ports. It’s awesome. Soracom ARC is the ability for you to create hybrid networks of devices so you can mix and match cellular, satellite, Ethernet, Wi Fi, or they all can use that same virtual private gateway, that secure service that replaces a private APN. If you want all your data going through one secure pipe directly to a corporate network or a research database, this is your way to do that. And so as long as you’ve got, for devices like a SecureLink with any sort of WireGuard compatible, network appliance, you can make it happen. So, again, if you’re in that world, you’re gonna recognize WireGuard. It’s awesome. Super easy to do, and, almost all of the devices have the capability to do that with a checkbox for zero dollars. Cool stuff. So my question is, how does your remote health care solution stack up? Are you reducing the complexity in extra steps? Are you making connectivity simple and reliable? And are you simplifying security and private networking by looking at things like cloud native cellular networks or alternatives to, private APNs or having to have appliance hardware for doing IPsec? If you’ve got any questions, you can email me at ryan at soracom dot io. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have or put you in touch with the resources if you’d like to discuss, your project, your ideas, or things that you’re looking to accomplish, and and and close that data collection gap. Alright, everyone. Thank you so much. Take care.

Welcome to Understanding Cellular IoT, Technical Insights from Industry Leaders. My name is Chris Gammell. I’m from Goliath, and I’m here with some of those technical leaders I just mentioned. We’re going to go around the go around the horn and introduce ourselves. Why don’t we start off with Daan? And, Daan, why don’t you tell us about yourself and, where you’re from? Hi. I’m Daan. As you said, I’m the founder of DP Technics, and we build IoT solutions for our clients, but we also build IoT building blocks such as Walter, our, IoT multi radio module, and the Blue Cherry IoT platform. Awesome. Duncan, let’s keep it alphabetical. Duncan next. Sure. Hi. I’m Duncan Fraser. I, I work at Soracom. Soracom are an IoT cellular provider. We specialize in IoT connectivity, cellular based, a little bit of satellite and other options, as our customers need. And we provide global connectivity and integration services so that people can manage their connected devices on an enterprise-level, global scale and ensure they have the right security and routing controls in place to get the right, messages to the right places and cut down any attack vectors for people trying to get in. Awesome. Finally, Imad. Hello, everyone. So I’m Imad Makaiel. I’m product marketing at Sequans Communications. For those who don’t know who is Sequans, Sequans is a fabulous company focused on IoT, Internet of Things, on the cellular part. We are modem vendor. We are we do our own chipsets and our own modules, for 4G and 5G. And maybe you have heard in the, recent news that, Qualcomm have acquired the four g, IP from Sequans, which means it’s good technology. So it will help us focusing on the five g development, but also we can keep as before working with our 4G, IP, for commercial usage. Awesome. Well, I’m really excited to be here with all of you. I think, I’m gonna be kinda chucking some questions your way, and we’re gonna pick out who the best person is to talk about this sort of stuff. But why don’t we start with one that’s good for everyone? What are, what are some of the things that you you see in that space, and and what are some of the use cases you see on a daily So, let me take that one. So, LPWAN is, stands for low power wide area network, and it’s a technology which is vital to the IoT, because it’s all about being able to deploy things wherever you want. So that’s the long range part, not only line-of-sight connections, but also in basements, on the sea, in nature. And, of course, when you deploy things, in these places, you also don’t visit them as often. So, therefore, we need the low power part. So, these technologies, and there are a myriad of them, they all focus or the biggest use case that I see are, sensors and remote sensing applications. Maybe I can add to this, that we need to keep in mind that the engine of things or the IoT is the natural evolution of what once used to be called m to m or machine to machine. And the machine to machine, what started in the nineteen nineties, when we, started connecting local machines to each others to make them communicate, and that by that time, it used to use some local area network. And by the evolution of time and technology, the, those connected machines had to be further away. This is why we needed to have some, some, distant connectivity based on on, RF. And, not everywhere there was some connectivity, meaning the device had to work on a battery powered. So this is why we saw a development of several low power area networks, where they were targeting to have the connectivity at low power, the most low power possible because the device was working on a small battery, not always rechargeable, and not always replaceable. Great. So we’re kind of all floating around the fact that we’re all involved with cellular stuff here, but there are some other technologies, things like Sigfox, LoRa, Wi Fi halo, those kind of things. So, how does that stuff fit in now? So that’s also low power. That’s also often wide area networks, sometimes local area networks, but, I guess in the latter case, that’s that’s usually a more wide wide area network. Where does it start to differentiate from cellular? So, you know, in terms of power profile and, data connectivity and and and things like that? Mhmm. So the biggest difference between cellular devices, so LTE-M and NB IoT, and other technologies such as Sigfox and LoRaWAN are the most well known ones, but there are actually a lot of, technologies there, newer and older ones. Mioty is one that is coming up. Wi Fi halo is a technology that you could, see as an LPWAN, but it’s in between local wireless thing and LPWAN. But the big biggest difference is actually, the the bands that they use. You have unlicensed spectrum and licensed spectrum. So Sigfox, LoRaWAN, they are all in free to use unlicensed spectrum bands, while the cellular technologies are in licensed spectrum. So there’s a lot more regulation there. I would add to that that, I mean, when we are comparing these licensed band to unlicensed band, the one typical example is, is the interference. And and, I mean, what can happen is someone can deploy over an unlicensed band since it is unlicensed, meaning anyone can use it at any time. So you can deploy your network. Things start working. Everything is fine. And all of a sudden, it stops working. And by looking closer to the to the to the signals, you will discover that another device or another technology of someone is transmitting at the same, using the same frequency, meaning it will it will, interfere with your, own devices. And on top of that, I mean, the fact that the the the, license, license spectrum is submitted to standardization, meaning there is 3GPP, which is Third Generation Partnership Project, partnership project, which is, handling all this under standardization. So everything is really is following a rule, specific rule, meaning so everything’s standardized, even for these small things. And, also, we need to take into consideration the deployment management, meaning in in in the and the license bands, there is an MNO or there’s someone who’s managing the deployment, the infrastructure, all that in in in a place where the unlicensed band, when we need to have access to the technology, the device or maker has to make his own deployment, which is a burden, a a a lot of I mean, in in indeed, it is an additional economic burden to him. And one last point is let’s not forget about pairing. When we are using the cellular technology, we all know the SIM card where we put the SIM and it’s seamless. It works straightforwardly in a highly secure manner, while all the other technologies can require some complicated pairing using involving manual, information. Plus, I mean, the security is not always at the standard expected standard. Got it. Yeah. I always talk about, being a good RF neighbor and, sounds like basically, you don’t have a choice when you’re in the license spectrum. Otherwise, you get booed. In the cellular space, where is kind of the adoption of a lot of these different technologies in the LPWAN space? Because it is segmented as well between kind of traditional telephony and high speed data and also the kind of the more IoT focused LPWAN style stuff. Right? Yes. Indeed. That’s right. And so in the cellular world, LPWAN tends to, be either NB IoT or Cat-M1, and different providers in different countries or even the same country are deploying, different network support on their towers, and through their their routing, networks. And we see we see both growing very well. We look at our database. We have a a list of countries that we we we support people through forty plus of each. Sometimes they’re overlapping. Sometimes, they’re they’re one or the other. But, there there’s there’s good coverage certainly across the majority of the the the parts of the world that are doing a lot of our IoT work. What’s nice is, developers looking to start up with either NB-IoT or help or or Cat-M1. They have multiband options or multi, multi, standard options. So, actually, Daan’s Walter board, which uses, Imad’s module is dual. So it has both NB-IoT and Cat-M1. And, of course, you complete the circle with with putting a Soracom SIM in it, and you’re gonna be able to connect in any one of those countries on on on the list, one way or the other. So let’s zoom in a little bit onto the technology itself. So NB-IoT, is a little different than how, you know, CAT one, CAT four, on up to the the higher CAT levels. There are some some technical differences there. But what are some of the things in terms of, utilization of different IP standards and, how you’re talking back to server sense? So say I have a device say I have the the DP technics device, and it has a Sequans modem and a Soracom card on it, and I’m utilizing NB-IoT carrier that’s nearby and and going to the tower. What what do I need to consider in terms of how I’m talking back to the Internet then? Mhmm. Well, first thing that that comes to mind to many of the application engineers in IoT are the application level protocols. I’m thinking everybody is speaking MQTT, HTTP, other protocols. But, when we are doing cellular, it’s good to, go one level below that. And then we are actually seeing the two protocols that drive the mother Internet, so to speak, and that’s TCP and UDP. And they are both running on IP packets, which are routed all over the Internet. Also, NB-IoT and LTE-M are routing IP packets, through the MNO over servers and so on up to the final, destination where they need to be. So the two differences between TCP and UDP are are the reliability that’s built in in that layer. When you have, TCP, it’s a protocol that is built to get data to a location in a reliable way. That means, when I have a device and I want to transmit a TCP packet, it first sets up a connection by sending a connection initiation packet. The server sees the packet, accepts the connection, and then, the device, again, acknowledges that the connection has been established. And then when transmitting data, you have this continuous ping pong of packages. I send something. The server acknowledges that it has received, so you are one hundred percent sure that it arrives. And there are a lot of mechanisms in TCP, such as retransmissions when a package would have been lost because of bad radio situation or something like that. The server or the the receiver will, notice that there’s something out of order or a missing package, and it will request a retransmission, and the TCP stack of the sender will automatically retransmit. So there’s a lot of of control communication. With UDP, the focus is more on getting data somewhere as fast as possible, but the reliability is not so important. You make a packet, you transmit it, and if you’re lucky, it arrives. If you’re, if if you’re unlucky, then it doesn’t arrive. And these are two things that you need to be very well aware of when doing cellular. And many of the application level protocols that we know today like MQTT and HTTP are using TCP instead of use UDP because of the reliability. But in cellular, that’s maybe not the best case, to do. How do we stack on top of this maybe less expensive protocol or less expensive transport rather, with protocols on top of it? Yeah. When looking at at, many larger, platforms, you would tend to think that HTTP and MQTT are the only application level protocols there, but there’s a a lot more out there to discover. And, CoAP or Constrained application protocol is actually, built on top of UDP and not on, TCP, but still giving you the kind of reliability that you need in your, IoT device. You know, TCP was was designed when wireless connectivity was only at the beginning, and, it’s actually designed with Ethernet in mind where, especially with fast Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet, retransmissions are almost free. But with n b NB IoT, that’s no longer the case. So you really need the application to be well aware of retransmissions, and that’s what the CoAP and DTLS protocol, give you. The CoAP protocol, actually has or or takes care of the reliability, but on a much smarter way than TCP does. So while it might be a little bit more daunting than MQTT to set up, CoAP is actually, the route you want to take when designing, a cellular IoT device with LPWAN technology, especially if you’re going to use narrowband IoT and still get the reliability that you are used to, that you have with TCP. Yeah. You mentioned it’s daunting. I mean, what in terms of the kind of the other side of the the equation, how do you how is it daunting, I guess? How is it how is it you you have to implement them? Well, the thing is that with, with TCP, you have something between a client and a server that is called, a connection. So everything in between that link is well aware of that connection and allows packets to to cross the wire, freely. With UDP, you don’t get anything, like, as a connection. So, what is more daunting is that you, as an application and a server provider, you need to take into account that, the disconnection is not not there. So you need to know that you only have a limited time to process responses. Also, the protocol itself is not giving you the publish subscribe thing that you get with MQTT. So there’s a little bit more work to do in the application, and that’s what making the the entry point or the getting started point with CoAP, a bit more difficult than MQTT, but it’s definitely doable. Yes. Great. What about actually when you’re then routing packets to, you know, to some of the hyperscalers that don’t so, like, Amazon had a beta CoAP, interface, but they actually discontinued it. I think Azure tried it, but very quickly or maybe didn’t even didn’t even take off. So then if you’re trying to directly route stuff, so you’re writing your own application level stuff in CoAP, you’re trying to talk to these large back ends. What do what do you do then? Well, there are some some interesting solutions, and we have one at Soracom. So, when you consider the path that your messages are taking from, a device through the cellular network and then across the Internet to, whichever your hosting provider is, if you look inside the the the cellular portion, there’s a bunch of compute options that you can do you can make use of there. And so, Soracom offers a few different services, funnel and funk Soracom funnel, Soracom funk are the ones that spring to mind. They can repackage the the raw message that’s come from the device. So you can make use of your UDP, excellent fit for the the device, the device’s power constraints, the network type you’ve got. But once the messages reach the the safety, if you like, of the the core network, we can then process that. We can, re recode it, maybe move it to an MQTT, MQTTS type message. We can even add your platform credentials so that by the time it’s reached something like AWS IoT or Azure’s IoT platform, it it looks the platform like the message originated this format from the device, but you’ve taken advantage of a bunch of efficiencies along the way to, optimize what’s going down the device, make use of the platform in the middle, and make sure that you’ve got the the most appropriate message format when it that arrives when you you’ll call your application. Mhmm. We actually do, something similar in, Blue Cherry, which is good because it shows the need for it. Doing TCP over narrowband IoT is going to give you errors. We have, plenty of customers who did the cellular design, and they were using MQTT because that’s what they know. That’s what their back end, talks. But in poor RF conditions, they saw devices disconnecting, without any any reason, dropping connections, and so on. So what we did in the BlueCherry IoT platform and in the libraries of Walter, which is our multi radio, module, is we have some libraries that allowed you as an application developer to just to publish subscribe as if you do an MQTT. It dynamically translates this to, CoAP plus DTLS, then it sends this over to the Blue Cherry servers, and there it’s translated back into MQTT so that it’s actually completely transparent to the back end. And, this has helped various customers already where they had an application with cellular. They had a back end with MQTT, but seeing connections drop out. And just by replacing the communication part with our CoAP translator, things got much, much better. And it was as if changing the application layer improved, the radio performance of their device, but it was actually not the radio that was performing badly. It was the application that was not well suited for, this use case. Well, Daan, you and your teammate also just ported the Goliath SDK for the Walter board as well. We’re really excited about that. And, the Goliath SDK actually is CoAP native, talking to CoAP back end. So that’s another thing you could do is if you wanted to find there are some limited CoAP back ends as well, and Goliath operates one of them. And so you could talk directly and then take advantage of all the services that are out there. So I think we’ll talk about that a little bit more later. But this is great. And I think, you know, all these cases, you start to see a lot of benefits. You know? So we’ve talked about kind of the expensive nature of, TCP versus UDP. One of the things that I think about is the battery level. But if we kinda zoom back out kind of to the to the cellular level now and all the features that are part of, LPWAN networks in in a cellular context, all the capabilities that are in there, you know, my brain is still stuck in the early two thousands days of, like, GSM and, like like, I wanna put, like, the largest capacitors on every board that I designed because I’m like, well, this thing’s gonna slug like three three amps at a time. But we’re actually not seeing that, and we start to see some other benefits in terms of some of the power modes that are out there. So maybe we could shift over to power modes and and think about or talk about rather some of the benefits of, the power modes at the tower and on the and on the the device side that actually allow you to take advantage of of lower power communication, outside of the protocol and transport layers. Sure. Well, first, let’s it’s a good good good thing to look back. If we look at the, two g and three g modems back in time, they used to be the same modems which were used to set up call a phone call, and that same modem was used, to for for for data transmission in the case of machine to machine or M2M. And there was no differentiation between, what the application is doing and so the the modem was there and was, let’s say, full throttle using all the power available for for it for for the application no matter how is the usage of the application. Now if we look at those modern protocols like LTE-M and NB-IoT, they are completely part of 4G, which is somehow a recent protocol. And when four g was conceived, by definition, they it it was they decided to have different categories, meaning we will have different modems, and each modem would be addressing some different application. So when the the LTE-M and NB-IoT have been conceived or part of the four g, the idea was that there are some applications that will need this low power, and this is why they included what we call the PSM or power safe mode and eDRX or Extended Discontinuous Reception. And those are two different protocols. I can develop more why we have this and that, but both of them are important for very low power. And the budget for for for for this, PSM and eDRX, the power budget is quantified in microamps, meaning we target really devices working on batteries. That’s great. Yeah. And so the the these modes are both tower side and device side, but it how much so I guess a device designer myself, how much then do I have to actually, like, micromanage? And is it like a setup or is it more like wake up now, set a timer, do this sort of thing? Like, where where does where does that kind of, management layer live in the the in the modem and in just the application side as well? Sure. Actually, why do we have two two different things? First of all, because all the applications are not the same. Actually, I mean, some applications, they are there. They wake up, do some activities, send data, go back to sleep, and they don’t want to be bothered. Some other applications, they wake up, send data, then go back to sleep. But while they are sleeping, they expect to have some data from coming from the network from time to time during their, let’s say, kind of sleep way. Typical example, if we look at a gas meter, in in hazardous area, a gas meter if there is an earthquake, the utility would like to shut off the gas meter despite it has nothing to say, nothing to transmit, but it has to be aware that that a message is coming from the network to wake him up and say, shut down. Stop the the gas now because there’s something something dangerous. So this is where PSM and eDRX are really different. So the PSM is, by the by design, is made for the application. You just configure it that after I transmit, I go back to sleep, and it looks like I left the network despite the device did not leave the network. It’s still on the network, but it’s using very minimum amount of of power, let’s say, just to to help it come back to the network whenever it will wake up. Next time, it will it will wake up. While the eDRX is going to to sleep and then configurable indeed. I mean, you can configure the the waking up time. It will wake up, listen to the network. Is there any message for me? Yes or no? If there’s no message, I’ll go back to sleep. And and this is how how it goes. So so this is the difference between PSM and eDRX, and this is why we have both because they are complementary. Yes. Yeah. I think it’s like, I always think about, like, eDRX is like telling a tower, like, hey. I’m gonna go check my mailbox in, like, eighty two seconds or whatever the standard there’s like standard Windows too. Right? And just expect me around then. You’ll see me. Yeah. I’ll be back then versus like PSM is more like I’m a modem. That’s actually just modem side. Right? So you actually have to do handshake and things like that as well. Yeah. So Yeah. It’s pretty interesting stuff. Well, let’s shift a little bit to, things that have given me headaches in the past, as, at working at MVNO in the past. APNs. Mostly, users setting it poorly. That would be the thing that gave me headaches, but also, what what is an APN? I mean, actually, that that might be helpful to talk about. Sure. Sure. I can talk about that. So, I talked earlier on about the the kind of the architecture between a device and the Internet server that that is trying to send messages through. So the the device is gonna connect to a tower, and the messages will pass to the tower and on through a series of connections to get to wherever the destination is. And we’re all familiar with using APNs or maybe familiar with using APNs in phones, but also say the devices. The APN is the access, protocol name, access point name, which tells the tower and the cellular network which provider actually to route its data through. So we’re familiar with roaming, multiple carriers, multiple SIMs can work on the same tower. But between the tower and the Internet egress point and the host, you have the core network for the cellular provider that you’re working with. So the APN is the element that the the the piece of information that the device uses to set up the connection to the tower and say, and send all my messages over here, please. Setting up an APN, if you’ve got a unique APN for every device or every, should we say customer, not device, every every customer environment with different APNs, that can be a headache and that can be, something to to cause you struggles when you’re you’re managing it. But with something we’ve simplified with Soracom, we have we we use a single APN, and we do our routing control very securely at a later on point in the in the, in the core network. That very much simplifies things. So everybody that uses Soracom uses a single, a single APN and a single username password. I say everybody. I’m sure there there are some exceptions, but by and large, and so that’s that’s the role of an APN. Now the APN is the is the the the configuration that tells the the tower, the the the network, where to send, the messages in order to pass through the chosen, cellular provider’s network and then reach the Internet. Got it. Got it. And so what about the private side though? So the private APN versus, not? I mean Well, yeah. Private APN, in a traditional world, a private APN is, if you like, a a personal access point into that core network. Access point into that core network. It’s useful for, isolating people’s, customer use of that network’s data to make sure that it can’t be touched or has no overlap with anybody else’s data. So we choose to implement a slightly different, solution. So everybody uses the same APN and then we route just after the APN. That Got it. That represents a significant saving in the management they need to do to set those those pieces up. Got it. Multi tenancy and private kind of segmentation at the at the software level versus at the APN level as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That’s and that’s super useful too. I mean, like, it’s a very ridiculous, premise of the idea of, like, me sending, you know, data to Daan’s devices — that’s not going to happen, not a not a possibility, that sort of thing. It is something that we, you know, we are interested in data flowing in both directions as well. So in terms of, two way communication, you know, we’re often talking about sensors talking up to the cloud, sending stuff back to a, you know, hyperscaler or maybe just a charting program, things like that. What about then control down to the device? I mean, this is something that the Walter board is is good at. Right, Daan? So, you know, both data up, data down, that sort of thing? Yeah. Exactly. So, two way communication, as said before, is one of the perks that you get with cellular communication. But there are actually, it’s important to know there are two methodologies that you can use when doing two way communication. I like to call them the solicited two way communication and the unsolicited. And with solicited, I mean that you have a device. It talks to the cloud, and then the cloud can send an answer back. So it’s device initiated. The sensor example is perfect. You have a sensor. It uploads some data, and then it stays awake for a a small period of time to be able to receive an answer or a command, for example, to have an over the air update, to reconfigure itself with other calibration data or so on and so on. But you can imagine various other use cases. For example, if you would would take, Walter and put it in a street lighting system, for example, or or a pump control, then, actually, it’s not, the device that’s going to initiate communication, but it’s a a controlling system, a human controller, or some some cloud business logic that wants to control that device, put on the street lighting, close, some locks, switch on the pump. And then, if you are using solicited communication, you would need to have a device that sends out a request, do you have any command for me every second? And that would take up a lot of power, a lot of bandwidth, and you would still have a sluggish or nonresponsive system in the end. With unsolicited communication, you need to have the device continuously listening for commands so it will consume bit more power. But if you are only listening, it doesn’t consume any bandwidth. And that’s also possible, with with cellular. But it needs a bit of more configuration on the MVNO or, APN side. So like I mentioned, I mostly am looking for an IP address as a designer, but I have actually dreamed even bigger, even wider, even further. And some of the some of the stuff that has been announced lately is some of the NTN or non terrestrial network stuff. So where have you guys seen this kind of in the space? I mean, it is similar hardware, similar infrastructure type of stuff, but ultimately, again, as a hardware designer, I’m mostly just like, I just want a connection and I’d love for this thing to work in Sub Saharan Africa as much as, you know, up the street from my NBIO T tower. So where does the NTN stuff start to fit in here? Good question. Well, actually, NTN stands for non terrestrial network, which involve they include actually the the, let’s say satellites, which is a I mean, they didn’t wait for cellular to connect devices to to the ground, but also it has UAVs and it can include UAVs and it can include, some drones. So, indeed, we have more and more players coming into into into, into the game. So and we would like to separate, let’s say, the terminal from the, satellite part or the the, the transmitter part. And this is where we need to have some some some, let’s say, standardization, and this is where three g p p could come in place. And this is why we have the 3GPP Release 17, which which started to, I mean, which included some standardization in the NB-IoT, for for the for the NTN, but also on 5G NR for the NTN. So, indeed, I mean, it’s just not just a matter of, technical part because on the 3GPP side, has converged how to to do the technical side, but, also, we need to have the entire ecosystem moving forward in order to have, the all the players who’s selling what, etcetera, etcetera, in order to have your device connected in the desert as you have as you are dreaming. Yeah. Great. Great. And we and and so this is a traditional well, this is kind of like more broad based hardware, towers, m and o’s, all of the capabilities, all the things that Imad kind of laid out, all these players working together. What are kind of the comparative aspects as of today? Like, so if if I wanted similar capabilities to work in Sub Saharan Africa or on a boat or similar, what what do I what do I do? Yeah. So there are, various use cases for non terrestrial communication, but the thing is that they are typically really niche use cases. Some for science, for example, we once did an application with a proprietary protocol called Astrocast where we connected, a a a weather station on a vessel which which was sailing near Greenland, for example. And there you have other solutions, like, Swarm that’s now taken over by, SpaceX. And and really interesting to see what they are going to do with their, low orbit, satellites. But you have systems like Argos, which is, exclusive to to science. But that is, exactly what we see. The scientific use cases are big, but the commercial use cases are still, lacking or, maybe there are just not so much commercial use cases. I I hear, some customers talking, oh, we could track containers on on the oceans. But then again, if you have a container vessel, when you have a container inside the vessel or two or three containers, in the stack, you won’t have any NTN connection available. Metal boxes are not good for, for RF signals. Is that what you’re saying, Daan? Exactly. Just physics — RF signals. Alright. Well, we have covered a lot of topics here. We’ve talked about, different carrier technologies. We’ve talked about NTN and, you know, kind of future technologies coming down the lines and the practical implementations of UDP versus TCP and all that stuff. We’re gonna actually cut over to a demo right now, and all of you have an opportunity to build up your questions. You can put them down in the chat. We’ll definitely, we’ll get to those in the q and a section that’s coming up right after the demo. But wanted to say thank you to Dan, Duncan, Imad. This has been a great conversation, and it just kinda shows your industry and, even though it is it does sometimes feel like a very small industry, it it touches so many aspects of our lives and I’m really excited to see all the new things that are happening here. So thank you. Thank you for this today. Cheers, Chris. Thanks. You too, Chris. You too. Thank you. Alright. We’ll see you all after the demo in the q and a. Me and Chris have been preparing, a demo together with Walter and the Goliath IoT platform where Walter is sending, temperature and humidity readings to the Goliath platform, over LTE M. So we have here, your regular temperature and humidity sensor, and this is the Walter module. On Walter, you have the ESP thirty two s three, with sixteen megabytes of flash and two meg two megabyte PSRAM. And here we have the Sequans Monarch 2 cellular chipset. On the chipset, we have both LTE M and narrowband IOT, and we also have a GNSS receiver. That’s why you can see two micro FL connectors here, one for the LTE connection and one for the GNSS signal. To power Walter or to program it, you can use the USB C connector or you can power through, the header pins on the bottom. Also on the bottom is a nano SIM card slot, in which here the Soracom SIM card is connected. So let’s switch over to Chris, who is going to guide you through the Goliath platform. Great. Yeah. That hardware is really, really great, Daan. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about, this is the view of Goliath. And, this is kind of the view of the actual the device that, Daan has in front of him. This is individual device view. So Daan will walk through that in a second. I just wanted to go across kinda the tabs on the top here because each of these kinda represents a feature. One thing we could see is kind of this is, this is the usage and the status of this device, and so it is connected. Credentialing, we actually do have certificates, and we have, PSK ID and PSK, which is pre shared key. That’s basically like username password, and that’s what Daan used here because that’s usually the fastest way to get the device online. Firmware, Goliath has over the air updates, and we manage all that stuff in a tab over here on the left, but this one is running one point two point five. LightDB State is a two- sided database that you could set up to do an ad hoc digital twin as well. And so in the past, I’ve done things like, you know, send a request to update a counter, and then on the device, the device is actually controlling that counter. And then you’ll see that live update. But you you have a kind of a requested new version of the count of the counter value and then the actual counter itself. LightDB stream, Daan’s gonna be talking about this data here, but this is some of our time series data. Logs are default with, in the Goliath SDK, especially on Zephyr. We have, we have a compressed version of the logs coming through here. So this is CBOR, and CBOR-serialized logs that are coming through. And this is tied directly into the Zephyr back end. And so, basically, all of the logs that you see on your UART, you will also see show up on cloud. In terms of settings, you see, this is actually a fleet wide, a blueprint wide, which is kinda like a hardware, version wide or an individual device. And so this one’s running every ten seconds here. And then finally, a remote procedure call, this is actually, capability to go and, send custom triggers for custom functions that you’ve written written on your device. So say Daan wrote a new function for just taking a single GNSS reading on the Walter board. And then we did an OTA to have that function pushed out to the devices. Then we could go and call it from the remote procedure call, and you can even add stuff in, like, perhaps you wanna add, parameters, like how many, you know, don’t send me a reading until you see ten satellites or something like that. It’s really all up to you. And so all of this is the Goliath platform and Dan’s gonna show us a little bit more about this, live with with the hardware that he has in front of him. Yeah. So, you can see here, Walter is, streaming temperature and humidity data. So if I if I warm up the sensor, we should see the temperature rising. And this data is also, encrypted or it’s encoded, so to speak, in CBOR. So it’s really compact, and it’s using the CoAP protocol to transmit it to, the Goliath platform, which means that now we’re connected over LTE M, but we could switch over to narrowband IoT and don’t change anything to the code because we are using these optimized protocols. So as you see here, I just held my finger onto the sensor, and we saw the temperature, going up. So there you have it. It’s a really small example of a weather station, which is, IoT connected with cellular, and it’s only a module and four wires on a breadboard. That’s great. Yeah. So I think we’re gonna take some questions now in the q and a. So hopefully, people have been asking questions in the chat. If not, now is your opportunity. And, Daan, great demo. You and your team have done a really awesome job getting getting this thing talking to the cloud and, excited to see what you do next. Thank you. Same same to the Goliath team who built a fantastic platform with the right technology for cellular, which is extremely important. Welcome back, guys. Great demo again, Daan. Alright. So we have a little time left here. Questions have been asked in the Q&A area, in the chat. So as people are if you’re still sticking around and, see some something else you’d like to ask about, please do put that in there. We’ll we’ll start going through these. I think let’s go reverse order. So the first one from Prabhat was, how do you see the integration of IoT cellular technology with satellite using the 3GPP NTN? Do you see compliance with the spec as important, and is there a strong market demand for it? Yeah. So, I can take, that one. I don’t think there’s already a strong market demand. It’s probably you know, it’s the it’s the real beginning of NTN networks. There are some technology demos at the moment, but it’s still really specific where there’s one provider doing, a proof of concept with a certain cellular chipset. So the release seventeen is standardized and ratified, but we are now waiting until it is implemented. And as I said before, it’s also, are we looking here for a solution to a problem, or are we still looking for problems for release seventeen to actually solve? Only future is going to to, to tell. And we’ve got, an interesting tech preview status, if you like, with Soracom. So we work with our partner Skylo. We’ve, we’ve integrated so that, the the the Skylo, connectivity is is managed through the the same as our, platform as our cellular technology or certainly the routing of data. So some of the, the funnel funk, some of the other services that we have for, translating or recoding the messages that are coming for an NB-IoT NTN connection through to something, far richer to go up to the hosted compute. We’re we’re very we see great fits for those those complimentary services, working together. Satellite is so limited, unless it gets very expensive then, saving every bit and byte, it becomes a great value. That’s a good lead in the next question. Bruce asked about the bandwidth and being very low. Generally satellite is I mean like yeah it’s expensive and slow to talk all the way to space. So do you guys have, like, relative numbers? Do you know that sort of thing? And and do you think, do you think it’s gonna increase in the future to to something more like CATM? Mhmm. Well, the the developments are mainly focusing on narrowband IoT. And the reason for that is, of course, when you’re talking to space, distances are big, a lot bigger than when you’re a few kilometers away from a tower. And thus, the signals are weaker, and you need to have good sensitivity on your receiver to be able to decode them. And that’s where NB-IoT is is strong. And that’s also why at this time, we need to be really small bandwidth, low messages. So you won’t be streaming audio and video anytime soon over LPWAN, to satellite. But, of course, as technology advances, receiver technology gets more sensitive, speeds will increase in the future. But we’re not there yet. Yeah. I think a lot of people look at like the Starlinks of the world and say oh well I’m gonna have high speed video. It’s like these are not, these are not Starlink devices. But I think that’s We’re talking like devices with a single antenna, so no beamforming, no antenna arrays. That would be just too expensive for the IoT use case. That’s right. Yeah. Alright. One more question in chat here. What is what is the impact of five g gonna have in IoT? Let’s maybe take that at a high level, but, do you and then asking about bandwidth, in IoT as well in five g. So are we gonna see you know, we’re already into the five g era, but, like, are we seeing increases? Or I guess just to add my own editorial as well, like, you know, are we see are we going to see increases specifically for IoT devices? Well, maybe I can take this one. The way to look at this question and to picture what we call five g and, not five g in a sense where if I look at, the, let’s say, the proper technology point of view, CATM and NB IoT, which started from the four g era but are part of the release fifteen of 3GPP and went over and over, are definitely part of the five g. I mean, as as a five g concept. Of course, they do not use the five g new radio waveform to to to exchange with the with with the network. However, they are considered as part of the five g. And we need to keep also into in to take into consideration that this technology is used in some, smart meters where we expect the life cycle to be about ten to fifteen years, so we are not going to change this technology tomorrow. So this is one part of the equation. Now let’s go back to the five g, what people call five g. Actually, there was the buzz at the beginning when the five g NR or new radio was introduced, was definitely targeting the very high end, which is targeting several gigabit per second. Of course, this is not IoT. This is for very high speed, equipments like telephones or or videos or things like that. And, indeed, it was very, very expensive. So after that, there was a need in the market that we started hearing about five g red cap or reduced capability, which is targeting lower throughput but with indeed, lower cost. And the following generation, which is about Release 18, which is the e red cap or enhanced reduced capability, which is targeting what I would call today similar to CAT one or CAT one base existing in the market. So all in all, what I’m trying to say here is all depends where we put the bar about IoT or Internet of Things. Today, most of the time, we’re thinking about the LPWA, which is get them in the IoT. As of now, there is no, let’s say, convergence or we don’t see at 3GPP level any crossing between what’s happening with the, 5G NR and the existing Cat-M1/NB-IoT. Maybe it will change and release nineteen, twenty. I don’t know. I mean, it’s it’s in the future. Of course, one day, we will have a next generation. Nevertheless, I would go as down as possible to the e-RedCap, or the 5G NR e-RedCap, which is definitely a transition or transformation of existing devices from cat one base to five g n r. Now about the volume of connected devices, indeed, I mean, it’s not the technology which is driving this. It’s more the need that the people are counting more and more on connected devices because it’s easing our life. We saw this during the pandemic or other other aspect of our life where connected devices are really helping us a lot in many other and this is why we are connecting the out those devices and and increasing the IoT space. I think one thing we can agree on is 3GPP really needs to hire someone to name things better. Those names are really very confusing. And you know just know that like like Imad said you know they’re gonna talk about next generation. Someone’s gonna tack an NG onto something at some point if they haven’t already. They all do it. They all do it. It is interesting too about like the, you know, so there’s the so the question was really around increasing bandwidth and, you know, my take as a as a hardware designer, as someone doing like simple IOT devices is like that kind of like Imad mentioned too like the crossover between like these different technologies but then application space too. It’s like a smart meter doesn’t need to send that off and maybe in certain environments I think we talked about at some point maybe just the four of us, maybe it was, I don’t know if it made the, if we talked about the webinar, but like like maybe there’s certain like high bandwidth events. So like in emergency situations and things like that, maybe you do need it then, but most, you know, like a lot of these smart smart meters or low bandwidth things, there’s always the the trade off of battery and transmission and then you know, so you’re really just trying to do this one thing and go back to sleep to save your battery. But then also, like Imad said, to the cost of individual nodes as well, All these things start to interplay together and becomes this very complex mix of what technology, what hardware, what, you know, what protocol like we talked about, where it all fits together, and it’s it’s very confusing. But I’m glad to have you guys, helping helping to piece it all together, you know. It’s like webinars like these are are required to to make it a little, you know, to bring some more clarity, which is great. Alright, guys. Any other last thoughts before we wrap up this webinar? Well, I do see a small question asking if the Walter module is available and I’m glad to say that it is available. We have been working for more than a year on the module, and it’s now, in stock on Crowd Supply. We also have a European distributor called Tinytronics, and we’re working round the clock to add more distributors to the list. And soon, I think this month, a Walter will also be available through Mouser. Awesome. That’s great. Well, excited to see you. Walters out in the world and transmitting back using wonderful Sequans modems and Soracom connectivity. So, it pieces it all together and talking to Goliath hopefully and, yeah. Thank you all for, being here. Thank you to all of our our attendees for being here. But Dan, Duncan, Imad, great job. And, yeah. We’ll hopefully have another webinar like this soon. Thanks so much. Cheers, Chris. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Today’s webinar is part eight in our webinar series about hardware. And today, we’re going to be looking at USB cellular modems and the role that they can play with, IoT development and deployment scale. Should probably introduce ourselves and say hello to everybody. Let’s do that. My name is Dora, and I’m working as a device product manager within Soracom. I joined almost two years ago, and I’ve been working within the IoT field mainly dealing with, connectivity and product managing connectivity. In the past ten to twelve years. And based out of Stockholm, Sweden. Can I please speak to you? So I’m a technical product manager here at Soracom. I’ve also been at Soracom for about two years I have, I dare not count it up, ten, fifteen years’ worth of experience working with different companies providing different types of IoT connectivity and and device management or connectivity management services. I’m in the UK, and my main role is looking at some of the the the systems that we use to, provide the underlying services that we provide our connectivity platform. We can touch on what those are as we go later on into the call. Just a quick note then, to let everybody know that we are recording this, and we’ll be sending it a link to everybody who’s registered, either if you could join us now or if you have to come back and watch it later on. So yeah, do watch out for that link in case you want to watch back. In demo, the platform we use for our webinar, there’s a chat panel I can see a couple of messages up there already. Do make sure that you ask questions in there. We’ll we’ll pick questions up later on, and we have a section at the end of the webinar for questions and answers. So we’ll run a Q and A, at the end. Feel free to post your questions during the session. Most probably we’re gonna get back to them during the q and a. And let’s look at our agenda. Yeah. I mean, it’s great to to have slots to to look at cellular modems. We use them a lot at Soracom they they they’re helpful to, customers who may be doing a proof of concept in early phase or starting to understand what they can do with IOT connectivity and the Soracom Onyx one specifically. It can it can be great as a as a way of jump starting, first steps in cellular or first steps in migrating a particular topic that needs a problem solved where there’s value to add with IoT. So in this session, we’re gonna split in into two, sections. So, Dora, you want to, you’ve you’ve got some some topics on actual the topic of cellular modem, first of all. Yeah, we’re gonna look at, cellular modems or IoT dongles as we very often refer to them, in general. And then, step by step, we’re gonna zoom into our own product that we call Soracom Onyx, which is a 4G dongle. And we’re gonna look at, the technical features and the specifications and also some use cases that we see constantly popping up from from our own customers. And what we would like to to look at during the second part of the presentation is how we structure our actual offering how we bring into the connectivity piece to the actual hardware. So we’re gonna be looking at North America and separately also europe because we have two different offerings for these two regions. And, we’re gonna be showing you, purchasing options. And, towards the end of of the session, we are going to have the Q and A that we were referring to earlier. Shall we start? Yes. Let let’s do that. Why don’t you, run through what you think of when you’re when you’re talking about cellular modems? Yeah. Yeah. So we all know that we live in an increasingly connected world, and we are surrounded by by IoT devices. And an IoT dongle is actually to basically allow us to to connect to any device with a USB port. That’s what it all goes down to. This device can be a laptop. It can be a Raspberry Pi. It can be, a single board computer. And these dongles very often use, these devices as as their brain. And, these IoT, dongles should be much simpler but still give much more to the users than, for instance, a mobile broadband, dongle. And what we’re seeing as trending these days is some of the dongles come, with regional skills, with regional, units. That means that you need a special one to deploy for Europe, another one for the Americas, the third one for Asia Pacific, but there are some that come with global bands. And in that case, you don’t really need to worry about, your supply chain and you can you can just deploy the the global version no matter where you you require connectivity. These dongles have a same slot and very often it depends whether it’s an embedded SIM card that they are running on or if it’s, nano SIM, the 4FF form factor SIM card or maybe a micro-SIM. Some of them still have the larger mini form factor And, what also makes this dongle special is that other than having a built in antenna, for the module inside of them, very often they offer external antenna connectors in case you need to boost the signal that you require for for the module itself. AT command support, that’s also very, very relevant and important because you need to be able to send certain commands down to your unit, switch off IPv6 or IPv4 in some cases. And, it’s also very important to mention that, because the devices are very often using, and that all goes very often used is the host devices there is no external power supply required. And, what we see as main applications for these dongles are two fold, one of them is to bring backhaul connectivity to an existing installation. And that installation can be ethernet it can be WiFi. It can be LoRaWAN or Sigfox. So those use cases that are already connected primarily, with something that is not cellular. And then you bring in a USB dongle to get that cellular connectivity, to get that secondary connectivity, behind, behind the primary connection. And the second application example is when you want to retrofit an existing use case. That might not have been connected at all previously, but it has a USB connector, a USB slot, so you can very easily bring a dongle and give it some, cellular power. Or there are some two g three g devices out there that will be no longer viable because of the ongoing sunset activities by the different MNOs. By having an LTE or or four g powered USB dongle, you can very often give them, a few extra years of lifetime. Simply by reusing that USB slot that those devices have. And that’s why we put this, beautiful vending machine on this picture because this is a very, very classic use case, where you can actually use a USB dongle or a USB stick to to give itself that cellular connectivity that it needs, either as a backhaul connectivity or as a retrofit or upgrade to 4G from existing 2G’s 3G connectivity. What about other use cases that we we see cropping up? Yes. We also brought three additional use cases that are kind of, old, but, we also put, public transport that is not so old like, providing connectivity to payment terminals and and ATMs. So as as I mentioned earlier, the dongles usually very quickly connect to to industrial applications, and there is usually very little integration, effort required. And, that’s why in order to to give a peace of mind to, for instance, ATM operators, making sure that all the machines stay connected and safe and optimized, they very often need that cellular backhaul. And the same goes for, payment terminals that you can also see on the first picture. Basically, you can equip IoT sensors with, with the remotely monitored connectivity. And, with the, a USB modem or a 4G modem, you can enable, for instance, proactive maintenance and, and minimize the downtime of these devices. The next one is connected elevators. Those are also relatively old M2M use cases, and very often these elevators have been connected with a fixed line. And that’s how you were linking in to the emergency call centers, or you did some telemonitoring with them. But, usually, this indeed quite high costs. To install, for instance, wrapped, to to install retrofits or upgrades. And what we have seen is that even older elevator models, they are equipped with a with a with a USB connector. So, you can turn unconnected elevators very quickly into smart elevators. And then they collect data. They monitor the traffic flows, you can use the same card for, emergency calls. You can even run some advertisements, within within elevators. So it can be a pretty powerful way of of connecting them via cellular. And, the last example in this case is public transport where we can think about, a USB dongle, that can deliver, different experiences. And we can think about the drivers but also the passengers. So you can cover, for instance, electronic ticketing with cellular connectivity it can cater for infotainment within the bus. You can again think about, different advertisements, boards electronically running on the bus. And, there is a very big thing about real time passenger information display. Here in the in the Nordics, for instance, it’s quite common that every single bus stop is equipped with some digital signage where you can see how long you need to wait for the bus. And that is because there is, a cellular connectivity, very often provided by a dongle onboard that has the bus stop and the bus is arriving. And we’re gonna be looking at a few additional use cases in a few slides. Yeah. Very good. So, when we think about dongles and we think about other, methods of doing this, many many of our viewers or attendees might be thinking, what what is the difference here? We’ve had mobile broadband for a long time. We’ve got WiFi hotspots. What are your thoughts on on what makes an IoT, dongle, or modem, an IoT modem? Yeah. That’s a that’s a very, very good question. And maybe we can even bring in cellular routers and, gateways as part of this this evolution. So, what we have seen, ten years ago, maybe, is that mobile broadband’s were very often used for connecting IoT devices. And it was mainly because of their price points. And that’s that was the the high time for deploying, for instance, three g, modules in those mobile broadband dongles. And, a few years later, the 4G dongle also popped up. And, that’s how customers connected very often, some of of of the IoT applications. They also saw the widespread of of mobile hotspot when it came to providing connectivity to laptop which is, again, bringing us back more to the consumer, face. But with having the smartphone mobile hotspots available, that pretty much ended the era of of mobile broadband. And for a while, there was a little, gap then there were not yet IoT dongles available on the market, but that was also the reason why, for instance, us at Soracom, we started to look at creating not a mobile broadband, but an IOT specific dongle that can be used by by businesses. And, this is where I would like to to bring in the the the routers into this dialogue because there is a lot of pros and cons of of both cellular connections, be it a dongle or be it a router. And we know that a router is usually six, eight, maybe ten times the size of of an actual dongle. So you definitely need space to host those routers. But the dongle is much smaller in its size, but it’s it’s it’s not, such a complete solution as a router, for instance. And what is is gonna give me a kind of, shared connection. It it handles all of the backhaul. That’s right. Yes. You can have, ethernet running via them. WiFi, sometimes even, bluetooth capabilities are added. So, yes. And cellular is one of the options, one of the connectivity options. Yeah. And, I mean, when I think about mobile broadband, the the the kit that I used to use, it’s tied to a an M and O, a carrier. So the when we think about IoT connectivity at Soracom, we’re talking multi country, multi frequency, multi carrier, multi-cellular frequency because we have different frequencies being used by different towers in different parts of the world. So the the broadband stuff that we used to find from some of the major carriers, you it would it’s solved a problem. It got you online with your laptop or whatever you were trying to do in that region, but not great at moving around the world, not great at, providing some of the the features that we we think of using regularly now like network selection. We roam a lot at Soracom, so we need to be able to move between whichever network we need. That’s not that’s not really possible on an old style mobile broadband. No. And you couldn’t find AT commands. Or or application protocols that were relevant for those mobile broadband that were very often logged to a certain operator just as you said. And well, I think it’s probably worth saying that we we it’s kind of we we know that there’s different solutions for different environments to to come back to your router’s uh-uh point. If you’ve got a site that’s got multiple devices, then a router might be the the best option for you is you’ve got the space for it, you’ve got the power supply for it, but if you’re running a single unit, a single IoT device that just needs its own discreet sensor, it’s own discreet connection, and that’s where a dongle comes in. Excellent. Good. Can we look at additional, use cases or applications? Oh, yes. Good. We, brought four more, for you guys. The first one is EV monitoring and, charging. And what we have seen based on some of our customers’ examples is that, these EV chargers are very often equipped with fixed lines. Or built-in ethernet sockets. Plus, there is also a possibility to fit in either a router inside of these devices or there’s the the famous USB socket, and then you can very often plug in and very easily plug in, the USB dongle to them. I think it’s the type of manufacturer they get to choose, don’t they whether they want to build the costing for cellular when it’s not always gonna get used? That’s right. Yes. And, we see the the EV charging use case more and more relevant it’s absolutely something that’s that that keeps popping up around us. So it’s one of the use cases that, that we are pushing very, very much. The next one is, oil and gas. And this is, one area where the machines that need connectivity very often have a longer deployment, a longer lifetime. But also This is where you could use a dongle, for instance, for building a proof of concept other than retrofitting, existing devices. Sure. Sure. So trying to monitor what’s going on on a on a piece of works perfectly well, but frankly legacy kit in in kind of the IoT time space, but you still want to to generate to build a solution to monitor and start gathering data that you can use to extract value from. Yeah. Very good. Industrial automation and predictive maintenance, bringing us towards, AI and gen AI Here, the customer’s pain points, is very often about about the assets requiring reliable and high speed connectivity. And those might not be met by by WiFi or by LoRaWAN or Sigfox. We know that many manufacturers are covered by LPWA and solutions today. And in those cases, a, a dongle can bring cellular backhaul connectivity, again, to those Sigfox or LoRa solutions. And in that case, a cellular dongle would be providing a more reliable, a higher speed alternative even to WiFi, for instance. And a self managing that works, I mean, to go back to your your elevator example earlier on, if the the IT systems in in buildings now, the the the teams that run those are not particularly delighted when someone turns up and says, I’d like to plug in my whatever it is that needs to be sensed to be an elevator, be it a press or a conveyor or a sorting system. So to have the option to to bring your own connectivity in the form of a standalone cellular dongle, it’s a really powerful method that people can use to to manage. The the connected infrastructures of their system is built on. I agree. And we see connected infrastructure requirements from all over, if it with smart factories and wanting to to digitalize as much as possible, within within industrial environments. Shall we look at the last one which is, about smart agriculture? And, this is where we have, for instance, tractors or automated irrigation systems or crop monitoring systems where there is some kind of smart farming hardware that’s, let’s call them like this that need, again, cellular connectivity. Being for them. I really like the some of the experience I’ve had with with working with, tractor manufacturers or or some some of the larger farming machinery where these they tend to be in and out from from the central farm. So, yeah, not so much picturing, static crop analysis. I tend to think of those being solved in different ways, but when you’ve got a tractor being driven around, especially if it’s moving between farms or between fields, and you’ve got different levels of coverage. So having the option to be able to plug in say, you know, connectivity. If that suits that farm in that area of the world, then you can use it. But if you want to use that tractor with a different form of connectivity, don’t necessarily want the overhead of having to build cellular in, in the original equipment. So, yeah, the the USB plug in, modem is a is a real asset to be able to adapt to wherever it is your your whatever the environment you you’re deploying your equipment in. Agreed very, very much. Shall we look at onyx itself? Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do that. So let’s let’s apply that to to our products, the Soracom Onyx. And and and, let people know what what it is that we’ve got on why we think it’s a really good solution. Let’s dive dive and, there is a lot of text on, on this slide. But, what we what we like telling about Onyx is that it’s, of course, IOT optimized. It’s, an industrial grade, USB modem. And, it pretty much provides out of the box connectivity. And, at the bottom part, you can see four different, graphics. The first one says global LTE module, but what is good to mention here is, other than having a a global module inside, I like how how the the picture is actually stripped down And this totally reminds me of when you are actually starting your your your design. So they were talking already about global versus local, regional SKUs for Onyx have a lot of different bands available. We’re gonna look at the tech specs in a minute, in a moment, and then you’re gonna be able to see what are those those brands There is an internal, antenna inside of the device, but there are also two different CRC nine antenna connectors available. On the side of the unit. Yeah. You have to really look hard. Don’t you just see those, especially in the black on the black little plug on the black body Yes. It’s a Oh, that’s it. Good. I hope you can see it. Yeah. And we talked about the importance of of having, different protocols and AT commands available to to steer the dongle, even, even to to shut it down remotely, for instance, those are all there. I’m thinking about what to mention, but I think without further ado, I can just jump into the tech specs. And if there was a lot of text, there is even more. But, this reminds you of a datasheet, I think. What we haven’t talked about is the fact that there is two g and three g fallback available for our Soracom Onyx, and this is the list where the network bands are clearly listed. You can see that there are quite a few LTE networks available. And we we really see, that the unit is capable of from all across the world. They are using it in in the Americas. There are a lot of these devices deployed within Europe. And we also have quite a few in, in Asia. The download speed is limited at at hundred and fifty megabit per sec, and the uplink is, is having a cap at fifty megabit per sec. Its standard, LTE cat four. There are a few protocols, mentioned here. You can see TCP, UDP, MQTT. So there are the most standards on there and, supported. It’s good to pinpoint the the temperature range. Here we added two different temperature ranges. One is operational range between minus twenty. And plus sixty Celsius degrees. Sorry. We only have it in Celsius, not in Fahrenheit, and the storage is a little bit wider. Going from minus thirty five to to plus eighty five degrees. And it’s very important to bring in the certifications that we have on the device itself. We do have North America coverage so far with FCC and PTCRB. There are two Japanese certifications on this list. Those are the middle ones, Jade and Teleg, and we also have CE and UKCA for Europe, and, that includes UK as well. And KC certification for South Korea. The South Korean certification. And we also have some safety and environmental certifications like RoHS and WEEE. And in case someone is interested in deploying the unit, outside of of these areas of these regions, we are happy to discuss to share for instance certification costs. Excellent. Let’s move on and what we wanted to show on on this next slide is actual, examples of of existing customers. And I mentioned that we we do have several tens of thousands of these these units already deployed worldwide. We started selling, Sora Comonics I think back in in twenty twenty towards the end of twenty twenty. And, we see that there is quite some interest out on the market. And it’s a very, very scalable, and as we said, easy to start off with device. And and that’s why it is so optimal to to retrofit and also to future proof, existing IoT applications. So we brought a a few examples. The first one is is a single board computer, that can be a Raspberry Pi, for instance, and we had and we still have quite some some interest coming from, IOT makers and developers who are really in the beginning of their IOT journey. And all they want to make sure is that connectivity can be embedded into into their solution. And instead of purchasing an expensive, an expensive industrial router, they just, fire up their solution. With, with our Soracom Onyx. Then, we we have, a partnership with, CFOs and with different CFOs operators. And they use very often our Soracom Onyx to retrofit, so sorry, to provide backhaul connectivity to their microbase stations. They’re using they basically just plug in the the USB modem and, it’s gonna turn, a Safe Fox base station into a secondary, cellular, tower for them. What we also see is there is there are is that there are quite some, some routers and gateways on the market, that don’t have a built in SIM slot. But they do have the USB slot. So by plugging plugging in, the the the USB dongle, it’s very, very easy to to fire it up. It’s also valid for, existing, two g three g routers, in case you need four g connectivity, and the unit has a, a USB socket, you can very easily turn the device into for into an LTE, cellular connected unit. And, the last one is, again, a bit of cellular backhaul, to industrial routers. I think we covered that previously. Yeah. I think there is there is one additional sort that, I want to bring in. So, sort of, Soracom Onyx is relatively a small-sized dongle. And it is it is really really good to to connect use cases, without space without having space for fragile external antennas. So if you have one of those, it’s definitely worth taking a look at, at this modem. Let’s move on and, let’s check in on our regional propositions. Yes. We can talk to people about what they can order and where, between the well, let’s start with the US and and the the variants we have there. Thank you. We actually brought two very recent additions to our old model that we started selling in back in in twenty twenty. The We added two different types of SIM cards to the existing hardware. As you see, the first one, the top left is an embedded SIM card. And, and the SIM can’t be removed or tampered with. So it’s very much strengthening the security. Around, around the dongle. What one will get, with this version if someone is about to purchase it, is also access to our Plan 01s, SIM card, which we call, Soracom’s global SIM card. And also access to our IoT platform. And What’s also good to know about the Plan 01s SIM card is that you can use so called subscription containers on it. And basically, you can play a little bit with what kind of network operator you are ending or taking away with the help of it. I don’t know, Duncan, if you want to say a bit more about it. Well, I think, yeah, Plan 01s is the, as you’re saying, so our global plan, we we use it a lot in lots of different parts of the world. It is pay as you go, so there’s a a standard daily fee and then a per megabyte fee. And as you say with subscription containers, you can add in some of the plans that we have that are far more targeted to particular regions. So in the US, we have, plan US Max, which brings, coverage from, more carriers in, in the US. We also have plans, that will add bundled pricing instead of pay as you go pricing. So for a for a monthly fee, you’re going to get an an allowance of data which, if that suits our customer our customer’s business model and what they’ve provided their customers, then it’s great. We’ve we’ve got both different types of pricing model on on on that, and Plan 01s is a great, starter for for making that decision or starting that journey. Thank you. Thank you for adding that. And the additional, sim that is pre installed is a nano sim card. That’s the top right corner of the offering. That’s what we call, IOT nano sim that is installed. It comes with the same Plan 01s as our global model, you get access to our platform. You can do the standard troubleshooting, you can set up different, event handlers or triggers on the same card. And one add on is, you can replace the SIM card manually in case you want to switch providers. Yeah. It’s really worth this going up quickly refreshing the three options then. So you’ve got the the the original one. No SIM included. You buy it then there’s a secondary per purchased to to buy your SIM or, the the version with the SIM included. So we’ve already been preloaded this in into the to the modem. We put it in the box so you haven’t got to the customer has our customers don’t have to go and do that. And then with the eSIM version, again, preloaded, but it’s excellent. It’s tamper proof. You you can’t take the SIM out. Not removable. If you if customers are deploying it in somewhere where they’re a bit more, conscious of sims being tampered with, removed fiddle around with, then then eSIM is a great solution for that. Soldered down, can’t be removed. Nope. Cannot be removed. Excellent. Alright. So that’s North America. And then in Europe, we have another, an option that’s targeted to the to the way we we have a European customers come speak to us. It’s right here. We have a beautiful RN SIM that, we are going to be sending out to our customers. And, here we tweak the offering a little bit, and instead of offering a pay-as-you-go model, we created three different bundles. And these bundles include twelve months of data subscription. So you will be basically getting, the amount of data that you can see, hundred megabyte, five hundred megabyte, or one gigabyte, per month per SIM card for twelve consecutive months. And, the SIM card comes with not only access to the Soracom portal/platform, but also to additional services that are part of our bigger platform. And those include data handling, remote device access, and you can do some other pretty cool stuff all covered by the fee. And you can see the price on the right hand side in, in the table. So these prices include one single hard, very fun single, so our common example, the twelve month subscription, and also access to additional solar com platform services. And the RN SIM card is going to come prepackaged with the dongle, but not in the dongle. And they are planning to launch this offering in, less than two weeks time on the force of March two thousand twenty four. And next then, when I think, I think people, customers have been asking for a simpler solution to how they can buy it. Onyx dongle. This is great. And we have an overview slide because this can be a bit too much to take in. So we tried to, get all the pros together all the descriptions the first two columns are for the North American offering the third one with the RN SIM is, for Europe. And the last one is bring your own SIM, just the hardware itself. No SIM card included. Which we we sell from all our reasons, right, the the the original version. Very good. Very good to think. One additional sentence about our, valued partners, Mouser and Digi-Key. We are working with them on the North American, on the North American offerings, but they also carry the European version too. So feel free to to check those out. Dora, we’ve got a question about whether there’s a embedded SIM version for Europe. No. There is none for Europe, but what someone can do to use the embedded version, you can simply go to Mouser and order it from there. And they’re gonna be shipping to to europe as well. And, pay as you go plan is gonna be covering Europe. So we do not carry the plan-X EU version, the RN SIM version, it’s gonna be based on Plan 01s, on the global plan. Thank you. So what do people do then when they want to get hold of it? Or you kind of mention it there, order from Mouser or Digi-Key or from our store directly, and then then get started. Yes. We, have a very comprehensive, information or data gathered under our developer site. This is the second link here. Feel free to go there, look at, all the info we are a quite maker-friendly company, and we definitely do better than just providing with the hardware and say, yeah, use the PPP modem capability. So there is a lot of info there. There is also a very detailed blog post on, MQTT, as a protocol to be used with the Soracom Onyx. There is Python example codes. So feel free to look around. And we also brought in a quick product demo with you. Shall we show it quickly, Duncan? What do you think do we have? Yes. Quickly that. I mean, before I might I’m asking the question, but I know the answer already. For for for getting started, I used our Onyx dongle with a Raspberry Pi. I wanted to check that temperature and humidity at home. It’s super easy. You know, the the scripts on the on the getting started page to install modem manager for a raspberry pi, get it, linked up, and then captured data through to Soracom Harvest, which is storing it, which is our database service, and then visualized it with Soracom Lagoon for a dashboard. So Yeah. I was up and running really quickly. It it it works really well on the the setup guides that are easy to follow. Anyway, let me share my screen because I’ve got the video here, the short clip. The Soracom Onyx is a high performance modem that was designed to make it easy to give fixed and mobile applications cellular data connectivity. With built in antenna, you can count on easy installation without extra wires or accessories. The Onyx can be installed on various devices paired with the Soracom three-in-one industrial grade SIM, you’ll be able to easily add Global four g LTE, three g, and two g, cellular connectivity to your IoT and m to m applications. The Soracom Onyx, LTE, USB, cellular modem, and three in one industrial grade sim. A perfect match. Get both today using the link below. And if you have any questions, please. If you’re, if you’re joining us live and, you have more questions, please put them in a chat. I think at this point we’re wrapping up, Dora. Yep. Pretty much. I think all we have is, one slide about, our introduction, who we are as, oh, yes. We should run through that. Would you like to say a few words about who we are? I really hope you’re somewhat comfortable, for anybody who’s joining us, but doesn’t know Soracom particularly, and I encourage you to ask any any last questions before we wrap up. But Soracom, is a an IoT connectivity platform service We, we’re connecting six million, six million plus IoT devices globally, originally founded in Japan in twenty fifteen, our founders came from, AWS and bought a lot of their, AWS cloud compute insights with them to to add or or develop better solutions for connectivity than the traditional, data center based, core networks. So we provide not only connectivity solutions through through sims and through devices like onyx and the dong the sarcom, LTM button, and and other devices but we also have, quite a range of integration services, security or privacy, controls that that you can use to really take fine grained control of how, you’re using cellular to solve your IoT problems. And, I mean, sometimes seen as odd but the very last bullet point here for reducing power and IoT data transmission cost is quite unusual for a cellular company to want to help our customers reduce their data costs. That’s traditionally where companies make most of their money, but, the sorts of things that we have, we have services which we can work with you if you are developing a new product and you want to really optimize the amount of data to keep it as small as possible. It we will then process that when in which is our servers and turn into a much richer format, maybe into a JSON format before falling onto your service. The power of that is that you’ve had to power up your modem for a smaller amount of time. Therefore, use less battery because you’re bursting a small amount of data. The actual data you’re consuming is there, so your operational costs will be lower. So we we have some some really strong tools to help customers build a strong private, secure, and very optimized solutions. Or if people just want to come and see us and say, we want to we want your global connectivity solutions. We’re happy to speak to those sorts of companies as well. So a big thank you then. Thank you for joining us today to to look at, USB cellular modems and dongles and how we use them. Thank you, Dora, for sharing your thoughts and your experience with with with the modems. Thank you, Duncan. And I hope we could bring a bit of additional insights to what you already knew about cellular modems. If there is anything outstanding, please feel free to reach out via email via LinkedIn. We are more than happy to answer. You can contact us on the Soracom website. So soracom.io, if you want to come and visit the website, read more about the the, the modem or any other services that we have. And we thank you for your attention. And I think we wish you all a wonderful rest of your days. Yep. The slides are in the handout section on on the call. So grab that or we’ll be sending out a link later on this week or into next week. Thank you. Hope to see you in the next webinar episode, guys.

Hello. Welcome to this webinar, improving power efficiency with network-side control for IoT devices. I’m Markus from Soracom, and I will guide you through this technical What will be part of this webinar? I will give you a short introduction to eDRX Then we will take a look at the Sony Spresense board, which is mounted on its LTE-M extension board. As well, we will take a look at the used Otii Arc measurement device, and the Soracom API, which is used to change the desired values. After a short, wrap up, we will take a look at the key takeaways. If you ever had the need to change an implemented eDRX value for devices in your field due to maybe changed environment. This demo is quite interesting for you because we will show you how to change the eDRX value for a device via network-side control. What is eDRX in general? eDRX is the extended way of discontinuous reception, which is nothing else than switching off the receiver part of a cellular module. And due to this deactivation of the receiver part, you will save power. By default, this is every one point two eight or two point five six seconds in standard LTE-M network. And, to be able to extend this time to, for example, five seconds, ten seconds or up to forty-three minutes, eDRX was introduced into the standards. Taking a closer look at the eDRX timing now. We will see, the power consumption over time behavior, for a device, which is not using any eDRX, you can see this idle mode on the right side. So we have a specific power consumption over time. And, within that time the UE is reachable. So when we activate or enlarge the eDRX setting now, we will deactivate, the receiver part for a specific time. And then it will be activated again for a specific time. So the deactivation, cycle length is the eDRX cycle length and within the so- called paging time window, the receiver part is enabled and is able to receive data. So we’ve got a non reachable part then when we activate eDRX and a part, where we are reachable, which is within that paging time window. Which tools do we use, in our setup? So we do have the Sony Spresense microcontroller board. Which is programmed, in our example, using the Arduino coding environment, which is mounted to the LTE-M extension board. That board has an on board antenna, for example, and contains a SIM slot in which we put, the Soracom SIM This pack is able to connect to LTE-M networks worldwide and of course, use the eDRX power saving functionality. The whole setup is powered by Qoitech Otii Arc. And, we use that device and it’s going to visualize, the changes and the power saving. Functionality, on the Sony Spresense. And, of course, we use, the Soracom SIM card, which is inserted, the LTE-M extension board of the Sony Spresense, as well as the Soracom console and the API. There are some prerequisites to be considered. The device and the visited cellular network need to support eDRX. Some network operators, define a minimum eDRX value. We would not be able to be below this minimum value. And of course, the device itself needs to have eDRX enabled. So the key feature now is that we will push eDRX values to a device via an API call. This is done via this normal network behavior that the network is a master and will overwrite, the requested value from the device. This will give us a possibility, especially for old implementations to anyway change the eDRX settings. Finally, it gives us a flexibility in the application setup, making it able to lower the power consumption, extend battery lifetime and have some cost savings. Soracom API can be accessed via its GUI or via a simple command shell. To set the values, we will use the put configuration parameters command. And, we need to enter the related group ID as well as the requested values within the body section. And after pushing the values, we will see the reply of the API if the values are adapted accordingly. So what will happen after we set the values via our API, the UE, the Sony Spresense board. As soon as this, powered on, it will attach, to the LTE-M network. And, this will cause an update location request to the Soracom HSS, which is kind of home location register. In the answer to that request, we will put the desired values. Which are then delivered, to the Sony Spresense board in the attach accept message. So and how can we be sure that the device is, setting the requested, values? Of course, that’s only possible via a suitable measurement device. In our example, the Otii Arc from Qoitech. This is a Sony Spresense board with a soldered, plug for the power supply. At the bottom is the LTE-M expansion board. You can see the module here, and I will insert a SIM card. To the SIM card slot. That’s it. Now, I will connect the power cable to So sort of plug like this, and we are able to plug the power supply. Okay. It’s now connected to the Otii Arc. Plugging the power supply cables into the Otii Arc is not an issue. Just red or not. And black on black like this. So this is our setup. Now I will show you the technical demo part. On the upper left of the window, You’ll see the hardware setup. The Sony Spresense board mounted to the LTE-M extension board. Where the inserted Soracom SIM card is, powered by the Otii Arc. On the left side of the screen, There’s the Otii Arc application where I can activate the device and start the recording. On the upper right, we have the Soracom console showing the status of the inserted SIM. I called it Spresense, which is assigned to a group called eDRX two. And in the lower right, let me see, GUI of the API. Which we use now to check which eDRX values are configured at the moment. As well. I’ve opened the Harvest window because the application which was running on the Sony Spresense board will connect to the network, read the value of the eDRX, which is set. And we pass it to Soracom Harvest. So currently, I was in the last run. The eDRX value thirteen and the paging time window three was passed to Harvest. So let us check if this is still the configured value. For this, I need the group ID of the assigned group. This is a group ID. Copy it. And search for The group functions. Alright. Get group. Then set the group ID and file. And what we see here is the paging time which is set up. And, the eDRX cycle length, which is exactly what we saw on Soracom Harvest: thirteen and three. Let us now adapt these values and start the device. For this, we need to use a put configuration parameters function. I paste again the group ID And the name space is Soracom Air. I’m entering the values which should be set. So I want to set eDRX cycle length, value three, and paging time window cycle. Three as well. What? The values of this setting. The eDRX cycle length value was thirteen. So one eDRX cycle was two thousand and forty-eight seconds long. Now I change it to three, which is forty seconds. And the paging time window. I want to change to three as well. So the paging time window will be five point one two seconds in the wideband LTE-M mode. Okay. So I fire this command. And I see a positive response, which with the changed values. If I now power the device, the changed values will be pushed to the device. In the answer to the attach request. Okay. So let us check. So, for this, I will start a measurement. And I will power on. Now, let me see. That’s the device starting. These controls, I can mark an area, for example, and extend it. Okay. Device has started. This is connected to the Rx interface. And now it’s already in RRC release status, so not connected anymore. And here, see our first, yeah, paging time window. If I check the Soracom console. It shows me the online status of the device. And if I check Harvest, There is the new data push. eDRX value three, paging time window three. So let us check if, there’s already a second paging time window. And as we can see, paging time window is exactly as requested, five point one two seconds. And between two paging time windows, there should be the eDRX cycle length, which is forty seconds. Yes. So in case we push another value, of course, the changed value will be displayed here. To shorten this a little bit, I already recorded different paging time windows and eDRX values. For example, eDRX value eight and paging time window three. So the paging time window is the same as in my last measurement, five. Five point seconds or eDRX value seven and paging time window seven, eDRX value four, paging time window six. As you can see, the device is adapting to the changed values. Which shows that we are able to change the eDRX values from the network via an API push. If we are now comparing the different measurements, Let me enlarge this application. Let me first show you how it looks like without any eDRX. So this is how power consumption is looking like without any eDRX setting. So this standard value from one peak to the next is for LTE-M, one point two eight seconds. And I mark, a sample time frame. Let’s take one minute. Thirty seconds, for example, within that one minute and thirty seconds, you can see in the upper right corner, the energy consumption is one point four five milli watt hours. So we are able to move this, and it’s always around one point four. Five to four milliwatt hours. Let us now use the first eDRX measurement, which I recorded here. You can already see a difference. Where eDRX is active, there are no receiver peaks anymore. And in the paging time window time, we see the receiver peaks. So having this value set within the same time frame. It’s still one minute thirty seconds. We only have one milliwatt hours power consumption. We can move it from so it’s always around one milliwatt hour. Let us enlarge the eDRX value. Okay. Catching two paging time windows. Checking. Small reduction only, but it’s less, it’s nine hundred eighty six micro watt hours. Let us take another one. eDRX eight, paging time windows three. As you can see now, it’s not possible anymore to get two paging time windows within our one minute thirty time frame. That’s why it only can take one, and it’s going down to nine fifty micro watt hours. And there’s even a simpler way of comparing the different measurements. We just need to click and activate all these measurements here and then go on to the upper right corner and here you see the comparison for the selected window, exactly all at the same time. One of them. So what are the key takeaways? The power saving capabilities of eDRX might not be that drastic as what’s achieved via PSM where the whole device is put into the sleep mode, but every single piece counts. So the more you are able to reduce the power consumption via eDRX, the longer the battery will last, and the better your carbon footprint of your IoT application will finally be. eDRX is mainly good for devices which are mainly sending data and rarely receiving them because we disable the receiver part. And especially devices which need to adapt to certain conditions, they will benefit from being able to adapt their eDRX settings via this API push. This is a link to our Soracom store. Where you are able to purchase the used device together with a Soracom SIM, within the available countries. If you’re interested in the used power analyzer, the Otii Arc, we are searching for information regarding power analyzers, battery testing, on battery life estimation, visit our partner’s website, Qoitech.com. If you are searching for more information about Soracom or you want to get connected, just visit us on our website, Soracom.io. We can arrange your consultation with a specialist.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome Andrius at the Let’s talk IoT devices webinar series. And I’m really excited about, this morning’s topic, which is industrial IoT routers. And I’m really happy to have you onboard Andrius. Yes, me too. Shall we do the introduction round? Alright. So as as you see from the slide, I’m Andrius, I’m working at Teltonika Networks, for approximately seven years. My journey started as a sales manager. So, So, yeah, so I’m the head of operation marketing project department, and and I’m happy to be there. Great. Super happy to have you as my cohost today. Good. Let’s look at what we have for today. The main topic is industrial routers or IoT routers. And we would like to talk a bit about the importance of, of why it’s important to have IoT routers installed, especially at industrial locations or for smart agriculture instead of going with off the shelf consumer grade routers. We still very often see customers who actually pick up those consumer grade ones and start using them within IoT, and then they want they wonder why they cannot scale. Or why they have some, some security loopholes. So we’re going to look at the benefits and also some use cases we can actually check out what are the dominant vendors, for IoT routers. And then we’re gonna close the first section by looking at the key factors, which will be a kind of summary of, of the entire first session. What we, what are the key factors when choosing an IoT router? In the second part of the webinar, we’re gonna deep dive in Teltonika’s router portfolio, we are going to zoom in to three different devices, the RUT, two hundred, two forty one, and nine fifty one. we are also going to talk about the Teltonika Networks RMS feature, which is a remote management functionality. And I’m really excited to to learn a bit more about it. Good. Let’s start. So industrial routers, based on the definition, an industrial IoT router is is part of the network infrastructure, and it’s used to send data to and from IoT devices. And some of the routers actually went through quite some evolution over the past decades. They used to be regarded as very simple networking elements. And, they turned into more aggregation points for devices. Implementing advanced functionality such as security, edge computing, and we’re gonna be talking about, support pieces and different connectivity options as well. Industrial routers, and I hope end users, you’re gonna agree on that. They they’re really excellent in harsh environments. They offer robustness and high reliability. We’re gonna be talking a lot about security as well, and that performance is so much more above standard consumer grade ones. Consumer grade routers can be very good for home environments or for small and medium customers, but I I think whenever we talk about IoT, we highly recommend going with the industrial routers. You’re on board with that? Yeah. For sure. For sure. For sure. Yeah. We have actually prepared, a quite detailed chart, and we were zooming in on three different specifications. One is the actual hardware part, the hardware piece of the of the routers. And we talked about the robustness and durability. Consumer consumer routers are very often about compactness, small size, and also the look and feel so that they actually blend into the home environments. While the industrial routers, they need to stand, withstand those those harsh environments. Here in Sweden, temperatures can easily drop to minus thirty or forty degrees, especially up in the north, and then you definitely need some routers. Routers that can be placed also outdoors in different, for instance, construction areas. The environmental considerations are very, very important IoT routers need to tolerate. Temperature is very, very high end load temperatures, humidity, moisture, we can think about vibration as well in certain applications. And the redundancy and fault tolerance is also just as an important factor. Consumer routers very often have one or two, connectivity options. Usually, it’s ethernet or Wi Fi. But in industrial environments, redundancy is vital. you need to make sure that your downtime is minimal or even non existent. So you need to have a router that is gonna have different backup options, connectivity options, and also backup power supplies. Let me jump to the second section on this slide, which is about performance and reliability. We can talk about bandwidth and throughput requirements because consumer grade routers are very often designed to take care of moderate network loads. They don’t need to, stand high bandwidth, or low latency, while the industrial routers have to be very, very specific, especially if you have hundreds of different endpoints connecting to them. Network resilience and uptime, needs to be also prioritized for industrial routers. And and the the the absolutely agreed that consumer routers just don’t offer the same level of resilience. And the last one is I would say the most important piece which is, firewall as well as VPN option capabilities. We see more and more often that cyber security is becoming part of, of local, especially country based, legislations. So whenever you, you are about to pick your router for for IoT use cases, you need need to make sure that, it’s gonna be resilient against security threats. So, yeah, having VPN support, allowing the router to have a network layer protection additionally can really mean a lot. This is, I think, yes. I’m amazed by by the information that is in the slide because it’s like, you know, the the main main features and basics of, understanding what’s the difference between industrial ones and consumer ones. So thank you very much. I hope you didn’t get very overwhelmed by it. It’s a lot of stuff, but the main takeaway is, I think, do not pick a home grade router or a consumer grade router for your industrial application. For sure. My agreement. Are you ready to look at some use cases? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Let’s go. And, this is where I hope to to get a bit of, input from from you since, you’ve been with Teltonika Networks. For for quite some time time now. When it comes to actual use cases and and applications for routers, what would you say? What are the industries that have shown the most interest or potential in utilizing your routers? Well, there are hundreds of different applications. I would say probably thousands of them. If somebody doesn’t believe that, just visit Soracom’s web page or our web page, and that’s it. But basically, there are main six industries or we call main six industries. It’s, energy and utilities, industrial and automation. It’s, smart cities, transportation, and two others, you know, So I think we can move to the topologies where we able to describe, more or less a few of them. Right? Yes. We’re gonna have four specific use cases. The first three are explicitly using the RUT around those areas, from Teltonika. And the last one is going to go more towards 5G. Let’s see the very first one, which is about providing connectivity for self-service Parcel terminals. Thank you. Can you tell us a bit more about this one of the importance of of providing reliable connectivity? In this case. For sure. You know, if you would look into the research of of, let’s say, self-service terminal. You would see that, countries like UK is is probably number one or at least number in the top five countries in the world that has the most, lockers or parcel terminals, in in one country, and specifically in UK, mostly, it’s called Amazon lockers. I think it’s the number one country, that has the most Amazon lockers in in in in that specific country. So, talking about reliability and connectivity, it’s, it’s a must to have a cellular router. One one for for the backup or, or to have, like, a main connectivity if the parcel terminal is more like a mobile one. So why do you need a router? Because, you have, three things that needs to be connected. It’s the payment terminal. Right? It’s the security cameras, and usually there’s an HMI, for user experience for, adding the the the correct code, etcetera. So for all these, things you need to have the internal connectivity, and you have to have a control like a cloud, where you can reach the camera to watch the security, live stream or, or, just recorded one. For the payment terminal, you need to have the connectivity because you won’t be able to make the payment, right, without internal connectivity. And, you all know that those parts, the terminals. Most of them are standing outside at least in my country in Lithuania. All of them are standing outside. Outside of the shopping mall or or any other building. And the the products that are in that parcel terminal must withstand different temperature ranges, different humidity ranges. So if, for example, now I think for two or three weeks in Lufina, we have, from minus one to minus twelve fourteen, something like that. Yeah. Really imagine like a consumer grade product in the parts terminal. It it will stop working, and that’s it. You won’t be able to make the payment. You won’t be able to to watch the camera, the live streaming. So basically the solution will be, useless. Indeed. When I look at this actual picture, Andrius, what I really love is how you distinguish between wireless and wired connections. And you can see that the actual router is connected most probably, by ethernet cables to the actual parcel terminal, while the actual maintenance or repair personal has a Wi Fi based app that they can control the terminal with. And the router itself has nine fifty one has, I think, a dual SIM holder. So you can actually have two different cellular SIM cards inside. And two different operators to to have as a as a backup. Yeah. Yeah. As a backup, for sure. And the wifi is needed, basically, for the on-site management maintenance or management. When, the parcel, let’s say, worker comes to the parcel terminal and he needs to just scan all the barcodes to check against the tablet. If all the parcels are Let’s see. It should be in this parts terminal or not. So for this purpose, you can use either the WiFi of the router or you can use, like, I know the same router in in in his car, or he can use, a tablet with with SIM cards. So there’s different options. But if you have one device for the past terminal, then, why could you buy another device for for the tablet? Beautiful. Great. Let’s move on to the next one, and I would say that this is my my favorite from today’s application. Mhmm. Okay. And this is about energy storage management. Right? And it’s connected to one specific customer Mhmm. Redors in Australia. Yeah. So in this, use case, in this applications, who, we are also partnering with that company, I know that for the connectivity, they chose Soracom. Right? Yes. Yes. They are running with Soracom SIM cards and their routers. Yeah. So for this purpose, basically, you know, that solar panel was generating electricity. Right? And in Australia, it is very popular to have those solar panels because the weather is way more beautiful. Sorry to say, but then okay. So, when you have a lot of electricity generated, you need to have batteries where you can store them, for, let’s say, different purposes. In Lithuania, most of, those, panels provides electricity to you, like, a national provider of electricity. But in Australia, it’s very popular popular to have, like, a backup batteries where you can store at least a part of the electricity it generates. So the router, provides a possibility to reach, the controller of this old solar panel farm or or or even the battery system, to reach them remotely because imagine that there are thousands of those, endpoints, right, which you need to maintain. And rather, a company offers the possibility to provide the maintenance to them. So if something happens to the system of the solar panels, you get the notification. You connect to them remotely using our remote management system. The functionalities of of our mess connect, and basically you can do whatever you want with them. So in this way, you, save a lot of money, cut your expenditures by not sending the engineer to the location, but just by sitting at the table and managing everything. And I also understand that they brought in quite some data analytics aspect. To Yep. To the maintenance on top of the maintenance of the actual solar panels and, energy storage systems. Because they are even showing to consumers how is the availability of of the actual electricity coming from these green sources. Yeah. You know, every every physical person because most of these solar panels are located at the, at the households of physical person, or not, like, a company’s all of them have the application made by the company rather. They can track how many, how much energy they are generating, how much energy they are using real time and how much energy they are storing. So Yeah. It gives a lot of control to the actual consumer as well. Beautiful again. Let’s go to retail, and this looks like a, supermarket. Large supermarkets? Yeah. It can be a supermarket or in any other perspective. It can be like a closed store, bigger closed store, etcetera. Which has the inventory, like a warehouse area, and they have the retail area. Right? So, for the same purpose, you can have, let’s say, one router or ten router of our company. You can provide WiFi for the barcode scanners, because you need to know how many products you have in your warehouse, real time, not like you sell everything in the retail area, and then you check if you have any other products in the warehouse area. It doesn’t work like that. So, you have all the information in real time, and you know what you need to order and what you don’t need to order. And on the other part, the retail area, our products are providing Internet connectivity via ethernet cables, to payment terminals, for the same purpose as in the parcel terminal machines So, just, you know, for for the connectivity, for the backup, for the connectivity. And, obviously, can check all the information, you can reach all the devices through the the same operating our management system RMS, which provides quite, wide, great user interface, and it’s very simple to use. And I love again the fact that on top of the wired connections, you are bringing in the WiFi connectivity, which is utmost for for barcode scanners. We know that they are falling back usually on on WiFi. Yeah. So that’s how the the warehouse and stock management is fulfilled. Mhmm. Thank you. Thank you for that overview. And the last, practical use case for today is from smart agriculture. And, I think when we think about smart agriculture, it’s more and more about connecting not only IoT, but also artificial intelligence. Right? And this is where the five g part of the RUT series comes in. So, what people should understand about 5G products that, it doesn’t offer only higher speeds, but it offers zero latency. So you can get the answer, which you want in in less than milliseconds just just by a simple press of the button. So in this particular topology, we have, like, a smart tractors like, and you send them into the field. And, you have the controller controller in it. You have our product connected to the controller. And in this way, you can check if the tractor is, moving to the right direction if all the sensors are working because those sensors are connected to the main controller, meaning that they are connected to the router in in simple words. And if something is wrong, you get all the notifications And if you need to, let’s say, stop the tractor, you do not go and run, just, to the tractor. You just connect your tablet using the WiFi from the RUT M50. And, basically, that’s it. You can control the tractor. You can, turn it back to you. You know, you can check all the sensors. You can clean them and whatever you want to do with that. So what you are saying is that the tractors actually run autonomously? Yeah. Yeah. It it runs autonomous. Wow. This is really the future. Yeah. It’s not the future. It’s a reality right now. Excellent. Really really cool. Thank you for these insights again. No worries. The next section is, looking a little bit at the actual IOT router market. And we brought a pie chart to you that has a lot of different colors but what we would like you to notice is that the more than half of the of the actual IoT router market is dominated by five different vendors. And I think you, Teltonika Networks, should be extremely proud because the growth that you have achieved, that many, many fault growth that you have achieved in the past few years has brought you to to be the top the the the third biggest, IoT router manufacturer in the world. Yes. We are very proud, and we will be in the first one in the first place. So It does the matter of the time. The sky is the limit. Yep. The first one, when we when we quickly, deep dive into this chart, chart Cradle Point, is is number one. They are very, very dominant in the North American market, and they have been purchased by, Ericsson, I believe, during twenty two. The second one is Sierra Wireless, again, a US based company, and, they were acquired by SamTech earlier this year in two thousand twenty three. Then comes Teltonika Networks, earning almost ten percent of the market, Cisco, and then Digi International is the fifth one. And then there are quite a few, companies coming from, the Asia Pacific market from China, from Hong Kong, Tokyo, sorry, Taiwan. And, yeah, there are a few, for instance, Swedish companies on the left hand side. At hand side. Another very, very interesting, part is, the actual pricing of this router. And then linking back to the previous, slide, what we wanted to visualize here is, how much more the price sensitivity is relevant on the European and, and also on the Asian markets. What we see is that the pricing for for US based manufacturers, such as Cradle Point or Sierra, they are usually higher than, what that only cause price ranges. On this page, by the way, we were, comparing Cat4 capable routers. And then we reach the, end slowly of the of the first section. What we wanted to do in the next few slides is basically sum up what someone needs to think about when wanting to the first thing that comes to mind is that the actual router should have a to into someone’s mind is that the actual router should have a robust design to withstand those environmental conditions that we were discussing earlier. Also, the speed is very, very important. You mentioned, high bandwidth low latency for five g. Or almost zero latency. And, it is also just as important for four g applications. Range is extremely important. No matter if we are talking about an an a smart factory or back to to the smart tractors on the field. Whatever you are choosing, it needs to cover the the expected range needs to cover the actual area. Where the connected devices will replace that. We haven’t been talking about different standards yet, you’re gonna deep diving those, within the next section, but the different communication protocols and standards are very, very important. So make sure that your chosen router is gonna be definitely compatible, with those communication protocols that your systems are using. Security. Again, we cannot talk enough about it, firewalls, options, encryption, VPN tunnels, bring it all in. And, what the Teltonika RMS also helps with, but also just the general user interface where you, where you set up an actual router is the actual ease of use. And I have to say that I tried to to connect the Polycom routers before, and you have recently done quite some improvement to your interface. And you made it into a very customer centric, site. So we’re done on that. Let’s look at what Teltonika Networks is about. Andrius, can you introduce us to, to that one? Yeah. And can you tell us a bit about what Teltonika routers stand out on the IoT market? Yeah. So, Yeah. So, everybody should understand that Teltonika Networks is a part of Teltonika Group. Like another company, you know, having five other companies inside of it, not inside of it, but, together with it, So Teltonika Networks is a company that, produces, networking devices, industrial networking equipment. We have everything in one single country and a small country of Lithuania. So we have r and d, manufacturer, We have management teams. We have sales teams, support teams, everything in one country. What does that give to us? Well, flexibility and speed. Imagine that there are competitors who are just if you want, let’s say, to buy a device in UK, you need to make an order to the manufacturer, which is located, let’s say, in Czech Republic, then they send a device to another lens because then the there’s the main logistics center, and then this on only then they sent to you to UK. So we do not do that. Basically, so, it gives us the speed, and the speed not only to send devices and produce them, but to make decisions faster. If, we want to make a new product, it won’t take us three years two years. It will take one year or even less to make the device from the scratch. Yeah. The main key point of our let’s say, strategy is cost efficient devices. Why? Because, many years ago when we went into the industrial cellular gateway and router market. We saw that this market is a very greedy one. Everybody was so greedy that we thought why the hell they are selling this device for this much and we thought, okay, this is a good opportunity. And we came to the market with the very cost efficient devices, and now we are in the top three in the world. So this is our short history, how we, you know, how we dealt with dealt with that. And, what you remember when you are choosing the the electronic networks device is not only the price. It’s, about the reliability security and ease of use. Because these are the three main pillars of our product, philosophy. We are producing reliable devices. We have examples, that devices are already in use for approximately ten years, even in my city in Kaunas, Lithuania, we have lifts, that are using our first products. I repeat one hundred and I repeat one hundred and four. Mhmm. So it it gives us, like, a view that they are very reliable. The security, because we even have our security department, which tests the device’s security and approves them and ease of use is that our operating system is very easy to use, and we have remote management system, which is for managing the device remotely. So I think we can move to the second slide. Right? Yes. Let’s do that. But before we we we we jump to the next one. I actually have a question to you. Okay. Since yours at at Sayers previously, you probably know what is the average warranty time? For your routers and gateways? Warranty time or a life expectancy? It could be interesting to bring up both because they very often deal with with customers from smart metering, and they have very long, expectations on on a lifetime would be ten to fifteen years. Mhmm. Yeah. So So let’s take here the example of of the ten plus year from the corner. Elevators. Yeah. Yeah. So, obviously, when we stated that, more than five years of what the expectancy would take, like, a a safe telling. Right. We cannot tell that, they will, live for more than twenty years. I know because we are not making, let’s say, the device for thirty years or twenty five years, but, regarding the warranty, we provide the standard warranty, which is, like a must in European Union. So we are the European Union provider. So you must follow the rules. So we give them that warranties. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. And In the rest of, of, the presentation, when we talk about routers, we are deep diving in three different RUT models. But on top of routers, you also have gateways and modules and access points and also switches. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So we are, let’s say, we are very strong in industrial cellular market. We are moving also to industrial switching market. And, we are thinking not thinking, but we are starting to go into enterprise market with access points and the other devices that you will see in the future. So talking about these particular three devices that we will check today. We should understand, not understand, but, think about, the RIT two hundred as probably the device which is used in most applications by our clients because it is very simple. Very friendly to use. It has two ethernet ports, and there’s a very interesting story behind that, behind that two ethernet ports is that I think five years ago, we have launched to the market the RUT 240. The product, the first ever cellular router which had only two ethernet ports. There was no other device that had only two ethernet ports in the market. And what we saw that it was probably the best decision that we have ever made because it it instantly became our best selling product. And, why we produced two hundred. And even the product, we which we will see or detail later, the RUT 241, because of the COVID, why COVID? Because after COVID, there was a component crisis. There were manufacturers which did the component crisis seem to you different perspective than we did. So there were manufacturers who told the, the buyers of their that, okay, with one year, and you will get your devices. No. We didn’t do that. We made analog devices. So we we were checking. We were looking for different, vendors of components. We found them, and we produced two devices, not one, but two devices basically for, for changing the RT two four zero for having a products which we can sell to the market. Right. Which we can satisfy the needs of our clients. And talking about this specific product, it has the four g cat four connectivity. It has the Wi Fi. Our Wi Fi comes with the hotspot functionality and access point and station modes. Not every manufacturer offers that. With the hotspot, you get default landing page. So you do not need to spend additional money on just configuring that because it comes directly from the it comes directly from the manufacturing plant. Right. And as I understand, r u t two hundred targets, mainly the European as well as the Asian and Pacific markets. Yep. Yep. While the RUT 241, has even the global, SKU available. Yeah. So the RUT 240 can be used globally with different versions of it, but basically, these are very similar devices. I think we can go to directly to the graph where we compare these two devices because it Okay. Not those two devices, but, it’s gonna show, the difference between RT two four zero and two four one. You can see that there are not many differences in it. It has the same features, It has the same operating system. The differences in the CPU. The component which was basically due to pandemic due to COVID, which had the shortage of that. And we switched to media tech, and with that, we got a little bit more rams and, a product which we can sell. And which turbines we use? And which models do we use? it’s about to be end of life. At the end of this year. But I think our RUT 240 was a phenomenal device that actually helped Teltonika networks raise to to the top three position where where you are. I think this used to be, as you said, the the best selling device. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s still right now. So it’s the best seller device. Looking forward to look at its successors, Andrius, are you to two hundred forty one and how are they gonna perform? Oh, basically the same. Everything is the same. Just, if your components are different. So Yeah. Yeah. When you will take the RUT 241, you know that, you can use it the same as you used the RUT, it’s two four zero. Thank you. Let’s jump over to to the nine hundred series, which is, targeting more industrial applications. How is nine fifty one compared to two forty one, for instance? Yeah. So the main differences is that the RUT 951 has two SIM cards. Instead of one, that the RUT 200 series has why dual SIM cards are, let’s say, a great thing is that you can use two SIM cards. Basically, you will have more options for the backup. You have, all time connectivity, and for industrial applications, it in most cases, it is a must, not in most cases. In in some of the cases, it is a must. You have two SIM cards. And r u nine five one has four ethernet ports. So you can connect up to four different devices. Also it has the same Wi Fi. The same, let’s see, pacing from from, the same, I don’t see. Let’s see. From the same things. Like, it has an aluminum casing with the with plastic panels from the front and back. Yeah. With, possibility to mount on the din rail. You can see from the side there is, like, a scratch on the casing which you can use to mount it on the DIN rail. You can see simple accessories. Yeah. and the nine fifty one is the actual successor of the nine fifty. predecessor of the nine fifty. And here as well, you did a, chipset swap, but the rest of the dimensions, the form factor is just the same as it used to be with, with the nine fifty. Brilliant. And this was the page that you were referencing earlier, very, actually, zoom into the hardware specs of all three devices. We are not gonna walk anyone through this, but, the main differences are clearly marked. So this is gonna be included in the in the handout material. Feel free to compare these three routers. And as we said, there are many other types of routers as well as gateways and and, other applications available, where I would like to take an extra minute is is talking about your RMS system. Because it brings a lot of additional features for for remote management. So if you can introduce us very briefly to Teltonika’s RMS would be great. Yes. I will try not to steal a lot of time, from from you and from the participants. So, Teltonika RMS is the remote management system created by us. It is constantly updated, developed, and because we have a team of, for more than twenty people who are responsible for that, it has four main parts, management, connect, VPN, and API. APIs like a simple term and probably everybody, if you understand what what’s the purpose of it. So I will stick to the management, connect in VPN. So with management, you can control our devices remotely from any parts of the world. But you have one thousand devices in the Lithuanian Republic and you’re sitting in UK office, you can control them, reach them, do whatever you want with them the same way as you would sit next to them. So, management provides also functionalities like multi configuration. So, again, thousand devices, you need to put the same configuration, you can configure those thousand devices in in the same moment in in a single window. Yeah. Yeah. You just select all the products, and and that’s it. Then you put the the configuration. Going to the connect, with connect, functionality can reach third party devices. So, through different protocols. So if you have, let’s say, no. Like a laptop or or a TV or whatever, you can reach it, via connect. You will see the same window as you see, right now. Talking about VPN. You can reach any probably any device in the world that, that that supports the VPN. And, and yeah, and do whatever you want with them. If you need to reach the sensor, you you can reach it. If you want to reach the tractor, You can reach it. You can control it. If you want to reach, no payment terminal and restart it, you can do that easily. So, basically, it’s it’s a perfect system for managing the whole network, industrial network, or any other network in the world. Great. Thank you for that quick, walk through. We are reaching the, end of of today’s session. What we wanted to say is is that we are we are extremely proud to, to be a Teltonika Networks value added reseller. And, I’m gonna be talking about Soracom in a minute. What we usually offer is is connectivity services. But by having, Teltonika Networks as our very, very valued partner, they turn into a one stop shop. Because we bring together an IoT device, the platform services behind that, and also the, the connectivity itself. So in case you are interested in, the price tags and our offering, you can see three different Teltonika products up on our web store as of today. However, if you are interested in any other Teltonika products, we are very open to to discuss, letting them test it or even ordering something as than than what we have available as of now. to our sales team. And some of you might actually wonder what Soracom is it might be the the first time that you hear about us. We are a connectivity and platform service provider, we’ve been up and running for about eight years now. We are rooted back in Japan to Tokyo, and, we also have physical offices in Seattle as well as in London. However, most of us are actually working, digitally and remotely. And we are happy to to give you a taste of our connectivity offerings. So please feel free to to reach out. And with that, we are reaching the Q and A section. And the reason why I was pushing, these last few slides is because I’m very curious whether we have any at your questions coming in? Not much. Andrius, I actually have something for you. I’m very, very interested if you if you think that there are any barriers or or any drivers as of today for the actual cellular router market? What are the pits the the the pitfalls? What does someone need to think twice about? What you should think twice about maybe once, what you should think about once is that the market is increasing, and it’s increasing by, I think, approximately, from twenty to thirty eight percent each year. Meaning that, don’t miss the train right now, because it will be very hard to catch it in the future. And, obviously, check the recording of this presentation because it shows, the main information, what you will need and how how to choose the right device and then what you should know before entering the industrial the industrial cellular gateway router market. Great. Great. Great. Thank you ever so much for joining me today, Andrius. It was great to have you here. I’m really looking forward to our collaboration. And, I hope everyone will have, his or her takeaway from today’s session. Thank you everyone for joining us, and, have a great rest of your day.

Hello, and welcome everyone to Soracom’s Let’s talk IoT devices webinar series. In today’s session, we are going to focus on low power LPWAN Wireless modules. My name is Dora. I’m going to be today’s host, and I’m working as an IoT device product manager at Soracom. Let’s look at some housekeeping items. The most important thing is in case you have any questions, There is a built in chat functionality within this webinar tool. So please feel free to raise your question there. We will be more than happy to answer during or after the webinar. It’s also good to know that we are going to send out a link to this recording as well as the deck that we are sharing over here. I’m very happy to have two Japanese IoT experts today with me. Shohei Kawanaka from Murata, as well as Ken Otsuki. From Soracom. He is a fellow employee. Sure. Hey. Would you mind introducing yourself? Thank you for introducing me. Hey. I my name is Shohei. Shohei Kawanaka. I’m a product manager for connectivity module, especially LPWA modules for Murata. I’m based in Munich, Germany. And I’m really happy to to have this opportunity with Soracom. Thank you. We are also very happy to have you here today. Ken, would you like to say a few words about yourself? Sure. Thanks, Dora. Hi. I’m Ken, Ken Otsuki, based in London and UK. In charge of the business development in Soracom and also the head of Global Carrier Relations. We are already looking forward to have this webinar with Murata today. So let’s get started. Let’s indeed get started and look at what we have on the agenda for today. We are going to look at LPWAN and have a brief understanding about what it is, then we’re gonna take a look at Murata’s LPWAN modules and your portfolio. We’re gonna take a look at some use cases as well, and we’re gonna talk about how we can future proof cellular, low power wide area from the same point of view. We’re going to also leave some time a few minutes at least for some questions and answers towards the end of this webinar. So once again, if you have something to ask, please rate within the chat. A few of you might not know Soracom, so let me give a very brief introduction about our company. Soracom is an IoT connectivity and platform service provider. We have been founded in Japan over seven years ago, by former AWS, SaaS, veterans. We have three physical office locations. One in Tokyo, another in Seattle, and the third one in London. We are very proud to enable over five million different IoT devices, as well as over twenty five thousand different businesses worldwide. From startups through small and medium enterprises to large enterprises. We are also very, very proud to have a strong relationship and partnership with Murata. And Murata has actually recently joined the Soracom partner space which is our partnership program. Shohei, would you like to say a few sentences about Murata? Yes. So let me introduce Murata itself briefly. The Murata is the main file manufacturing electrical components and the solutions. Our strength is that we are innovators in electronics. We have a bunch of product portfolios like passive components, capacity, EMI filters, and application specific products, like RF components, connectivity module, sensor, timing device, battery, and the solution as well. The we have a bunch of manufacturing site and the sales network worldwide. Our company was established in the nineteen forty four. So it’s been almost eighty years. Our net sales is around over twelve billion US dollar. That’s sales ninety five percent of our sales is out outside from the Japan, even though our company headquarters is located in Japan. The number of the affiliate is over eighty, and our employees number over seventy three thousand people. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Shohei, for this introduction. Now look at let’s look at what is LPWAN technology. LPWAN or low power wide area network, it’s actually a wireless, a network technology, that connects low bandwidth and battery powered devices that send low byte rates over long ranges. It consists of a diverse range of differing network technologies that compromise of both licensed and answer unlicensed frequencies. We have a more detailed overview of what type of technologies, what types of low power wide area, belong to this technology umbrella. And on the left hand side, you see the cellular low power wide area networks. LTE-M and Narrowband IoT, we very often refer to these two as license bands. License band. On the right hand side, you can see non cellular, low power wide area, LoRa and Sigfox, and these are the technologies running in unlicensed bands. And on the absolute right hand side, you can see LTE CAT one, or even CAT4 can belong to this terminology, to this technology type. These are the four g’s of the networks. Four G is also a licensed band, similar to LTE-M and Narrowband IoT, and it’s offering a quite high data transfer rate and how it compares to LTE-M and Narrowband IoT. Basically, you equip the LTE base stations or antennas with a different software, and that’s how you enable LTE-M or Narrowband IoT. So the licensed band cellular low power wide area is actually based upon the four g technology. But we very often call LTE-M and Narrowband IoT as technologies paving way already for 5G. Those of you who have been using 2G and 3G, a cellular connectivity for your IoT use cases or applications, You have been probably already eyeing LTE-M and Narrowband IoT because we look at these two technologies. As the successors of 2G and 3G. LTE-M, if we would like to deep dive in these two technologies, it boasts the highest bandwidth of the cellular LPWA as well as the highest data rate and also it offers low latency. It’s ideal for mobile applications and we see that LTE-M is the most widespread on the western part of the world. Narrowband IoT on the other hand offers lower data rates. High building penetrations, that means that it’s perfect for static applications that are deep underground or far far away or remote locations. And when we look at the unlicensed bands, LoRa and Sigfox, they are they serve similar use cases. LoRa is regarded as a bidirectional technology that supports both uplink and and downlink. Sigfox is very often referred as a technology that supports uplink. Both of them have relatively narrow data transfer rates. Then we look at the different considerations of our customers. The technology always brings us to a different choice, depending on what type of use cases you are trying to solve. The as a cellular network connectivity provider, we very often say that Sigfox and LoRa are actually not competing technologies, but they are complementing cellular offers. Kelly, when it comes to tough considerations from our customers, can you summarize for us? What are those? When it comes to choosing one of the right technologies, what are our customers should look at? Yes. So Today, we do not need to say which one which technology is the best. As you already mentioned in the previous slides, each technology has the advantage and the characteristics successful. So it depends on the customer’s use case and applications. The best fit in technology might change. So we put, like, five bullet points in here. So, like, one of the biggest thing is the how much, like, consumption will be important to the customer’s device and applications. So especially since if if you have to deploy the IoT devices quite far away. And if you don’t have any chance to replace the battery, and if we are expected to run more than three years, like five years, then using the the quite high bandwidth technology, like Cat M1 or Cat 4 doesn’t make sense because it consumes much more data and much more power consumptions. So maybe you can run, like, well, up to, like, one week, but you you you you can’t expect more to work more than, like, one year, like, two years in that sense. But in the case of, like, using the, LTE-M or NB-IoT or perhaps, like, say folks’ technologies by having the low power consumption technology. Maybe you can try to utilize these technologies and so on. So and also depends on how much, like, the frequency that you need to send or what’s the actual life data consumption or how much like you would like to make it richer for your application side and so on. So for instance, in the case of, like, a utility device you may simply require to send, like, one byte, like ten bytes per day. So that’s gonna be the lowest data consumptions. But in the case of like asasset tracking devices, you may try to send more data frequently for instance. So so it depends on your target applications, the best fitting technology by change in the end. Thank you for that summary. And we actually collected five different benefits or advantages to cellular LPWAN. Very briefly, they had power efficiency, as you mentioned earlier, long range, wide area coverage, cost effectiveness, and the coverage of of diverse applications. We will deep dive into each and every one of these. Would you mind to to walk us quickly through each and everyone. Yes. Let’s try to take a look from the first one. So the first one is the power, as mentioned. Right? So, yeah, that’s right, as the name says: low power. So power consumption is one of the crucial point for any IoT deployments. So if you have the the power supply with the with that capacity, then, of course, you don’t need to care anything about about consumptions. But in many cases of the IoT device deployments, you always need to work with the battery. And I think the most the the mission critical, the use cases will be, like, utility, like a gas metering, like a smart metering project. So and once the device will be deployed, perhaps you may expect to work the device more than like five years or ten years. So just to try to reduce the power consumptions and how efficiently they manage the power consumption will be one of the crucial points. So this is the first bullet point. And the the next like, two items will be how far you can communicate with your communication modules. So the long range will be one of the the important points. So, of course, if you manage inside with your office, then your existing WiFi or Bluetooth might be fair enough. But if you’re expecting to install your IoT devices quite far away, like, say, like, a mountainside or, like, a country, like, a farm side or even, like, marine marine time, something like the sea or, like, a pea farm fish farming or something like that. In that sense, there is no having the long range, the communication will be quite important. So and that you need to have more wider communication from your module to the actual base stations. Thank you. How about the wide area coverage aspect? Yeah. I think this will be also quite important point as well. So you could try to deploy your IoT applications or devices by using like WiFi or like Bluetooth, then you need to prepare the corresponding, like, base stations to your target areas and the kind of like a coverage so that you can have the the nationwide or the better coverage with your IoT devices. But the installing and the preferring, those the enormous number of these, like, WiFi hotspot like base stations are not so much like a realistic realistic approach. So if you have any plan to deploy your IoT devices, to any of the world like Nationwide in, like, UK, nationwide in the US, nationwide, in Japan. Then the just to try to utilize the existing, like, sale base stations will be one of the best solution. So in that sense, like like LTE-M, like NB-IoT, since the local carriers already have deployed and upgraded their base stations in any of the world already. So And so that means the you already have the the quite wide area connectivity. And you can more focus on your device side of the implementation and the development by having did not buy the area coverage. Brilliant, and the cost effectiveness is also a very important factor. Yes. I think there are mainly, like, a two points for this. So one is the since the LPWA module is been greatly simplified, the module structure inside. So the module price has already been decreased quite a lot. And the one, like, the straightforward thing is the we don’t need to use, like, antenna, like, to which used to be, like, to when it comes to, like, legacy IoT like Cat 4 modules. But in the case of, like, a LTE-M, like NB-IoT, we can reduce the antenna from two to, like, one. So and of course, the module inside the structure has also become quite simplified And because of that, the actual module of, like LTE-M, like NB-IoT has already decreased quite a lot compared to the previous day modules that we have. And therefore, the rest of the cost effective points will be more for, like, the monthly recurring fee. So if you send, like, one gig data, ten gig data for that, of course, you need to pay quite a lot for the data consumptions. But in the case of typical IT device use cases, it’s your expected data consumption will be up to some, like, a kilobytes, like, after like one megabytes or, like, ten megabytes. So in that sense, you can optimize your monthly recurring payment to the carrier’s, like, our carrier partners, and so on. So having the low data consumption will contribute to your data consumptions, and the power consumptions as well. And, also, you can save your course as well. Thanks for this summary. Great. And the last one is about the different and multitudes of applications. Yes. So yeah. As we already have seen the characteristics of the LPWA technologies, there are many applications or the use cases that that we can think about. For instance, like, asset tracking, environmental monitoring, or smart metering, or any other, like, agriculture use cases or perhaps like industrial automations and so on. So but problem next size, we can take, like, more for the details together with Murata. Exactly. And our next slide is actually showing three different layers that consist of of the connected world by LPWA by Murata. Sure, hey, would you mind giving us a glimpse into what’s the base? Of these three different layers? Yep. The actually, we’ve rather has but through covered for each areas, as you can see the first infrastructure, the the we’re very good at the business for the such infrastructure area, like a smart meter, water meter, gas meter, street lighting, gas station, EV charger, such kind of infrastructure. We’ve used several LPWA connectivity. The as a second point, the industrial market the, like, a factory automation, as Kim mentioned, warehouse tracking smart building monitoring, and each of the assets tracking also could be used. And also, the last point consumer grade, existing technology are using the conventional WiFi Bluetooth technology using the smartphone. As you can see. But, like, home health care devices, smart appliances. And also, the wearable devices can also use several API technology. In that case, they don’t need to use the smartphone anymore to transmit the data to the cloud. That also has a rod to make a more happy future. Thank you. Before we deep dive in five additional use cases, LPWA use cases, let’s look at Murata’s modules and how they are different compared to the competitors’ modules. What are the key advantages, Shohei, that you bring on the table? Thank you for bringing up these topics. Though we have mainly four good points as a Murata LPWA module. The first feature is supporting measure word worldwide operators like local m n o’s and also m v n o’s Also Soracom is one of our partners, and those operators can cover really worldwide area that is of a very good point. And the second point is the mobility the Murata module is quite tiny, and it makes a small form factor as a device level. In the sense, the like a a mobility use case, for example, wearable devices, asset any types of the asasset tracking they can make a small phone factor at the end. The certain things is the stability and the reliability point of view. The industry the industrial and infrastructure market, they really need the high reliability devices and good stability as well. You know, smart meters require five to ten years as a lifetime. In the sense yeah. In the sense is such a high reliability module is needed. Murata tested a bunch of reliability tests in the production line and in the design phase as well. So I’m sure that the Murata module is a very good match and a high priority for sure. And the last point is the strong security. The thanks to the our chipset’s partners, the they’re having a very strong security, not only the chipset and also the same connective is related to the same Soracom provide very good security and module level itself. The we have a bunch of the lineup of the secure connection to connect the real server API connectivity. So those four yeah. Thank you. So those four points are combined into the one merge. Indeed, and all of these four points are really valid. And there is one additional, very important aspect of of the Murata modules and that is the size of it as you can as we can see it on this slide. Yes. So the as you can see, It looks like a not metal lid package, but the normally Murata used a resin mold seed, it makes it much more smaller than the existing module existing module using the metal lid construction. That helps to make a small form factor. The model also using the many of the in house components to miniaturize our module in the design phase, the partner also makes a smaller chip sets the such kind of the technology can be utilized. And we also have a very wrong experience to develop the WiFi, Bluetooth, and also, you can see the LoRa module itself. So such kind of the technology are also related to our small cellular connectivity module. Great. In this miniaturization that you are bringing up is gonna be especially relevant. For the first target application that we’re going to be looking at, which is wearables. One brilliant example for variables is when you are trying to track your kid via a smartwatch, for instance. Do you want to give us a deeper example or a or a, yeah, more detailed example on this use case? Yeah. Sure. So for as you send as you can see, the the child location detection or even the elderly monitoring itself, the you can imagine that the every children or every every people not have not have the smartphone every time. So It’s hard to detect their location or their condition continuously. For example, sometimes they don’t have the smartphone and and to go outside, and the smartphone’s battery is low Such things often happen. The compared to that, the where the device having the cellular connectivity can directly transfer the data to the base station the that helps a lot in case of the emergency response system, the and improving health care monitoring to enable the more independent living. And it gives a peace of mind to parents, wider family or even caretakers. Right? Yes, indeed. Cool. Thank you. Let’s look at the next one that is smart metering. What are the main applications that you see under smart metering? Yeah. Sure. Of course, the smart metering has a lot of the devices. But mainly, we are targeting gas metering and water metering. Because electricity meter has the power supply, of course, But the gas meter and the smart water meter doesn’t have it, and they normally use the battery. So in the sense that when data is transmitted, the battery consumption is a really important thing. The if such a connectivity doesn’t have it, a field worker or data collector need to go to the each meter, whether it’s not sufficient it’s not effective Of course. So that’s why they having the connectivity is needed, but even though such connectivity is having a data collector may still be needed in some cases. The having said that’s the cellular connectivity solved such a issue at all. The and in in that case, the I’d say, the efficient monitoring and the high level management of the utility could be possible. And the automation of the of the reading as you said. Yet another brilliant example. Thank you. How do you see asasset tracking and smart labels that Murata is quite famous for. Yes. Exactly. The smart waybill is one of the most notable active products that I can show, the for it is exactly the light solution using the cellular connectivity. Because each postal parcel and each truck should be moved to all all over the world, and server connectivity can only cover such a wider area. For sure. So it makes precise tracking with real time, monitoring condition of the goods, And our system can be possible. The like a theft anti-theft system is really realistic using the such as cellular connectivity. The but our our problem is the low power consumption and the size. The a Murata can help the boss, the consumption power consumption wise and small form factor wise, such features really contribute, help make smart labels smaller. Just out of curiosity, what’s the average life cycle of your smart labels? It depends on the use case, but it’s right create a more than one year, two, three years. Yeah. And — That’s awesome. — transmitting is not so frequent, but for sure, the emergency, timing, and For example, that once the parcel is opened, the transmit should be needed. Such kind of the transmitters could be covered. It’s so important for those companies that keep on resending the same material, the same boxes, for instance, and they still want to keep on tracking it to multiple different destinations. Yeah. A brilliant example. Let’s move forward. We also have environmental monitoring, where low power wide area can play a very important role. And here again, I think we can talk about monitoring the temperature, the humidity, the the wetness of the soil with different sensors. Right? Yes. Exactly. The as Ken mentions the rural area and the count countryside and even the course site, that’s the area the cellular LPWA connectivity cam cover. So in the sense, the as you can see, the like, cargo ship tracking, the bridge inspection, monitoring, the the soil cent so so sorry, monitoring for crops could be possible with a very wide area. And the last one is about point of sales or payment equipment. We see this all over us these days, be it in restaurants, in shops, boutiques, food stands or taxis. We have these mobile terminals, equipped with low bar of wide areas and guards. Right? Yes. Exactly. The we we can see a lot of the POS even every today. As of today. But they are using the WiFi Bluetooth or existing LTE like a Cat M1 or Cat 4 detectors. Mhmm. The that makes really costy. And compared to that, cellular LPWA, like Cat M1, can save a lot of money. And that’s becomes more popular And even for the taxi, like, mobility use cases, the coverage should be really sufficient. So such taxi drivers can also use the POS even for rural area. Without — To — the cell cell phone as well, of course. Indeed. Thank you for sharing these five examples. These were just some of the examples that we have for low power of wide area. We can go on and on, but we saw that these five are some of the most important ones. Moving forward, we would like to talk about how we actually future proof, cellular, LPWAN from the SORACOM site. And what we prepared here is a little overview of how SIM cards has evolved over time. And what we would like to bring up is the future. What it’s gonna look like, and it was hands in hands with that compact miniature word that you have been describing earlier, Shohei, about the modules. Kenny, would you like to to introduce us this slide? Sure. On top of the typical LPWA advantage that we already have discussed today, I think the size was another side of hot keywords today that we talked. And let’s take a look briefly what was the previous SIM evaluation was. So in the beginning, many years ago, the SIM card began as the credit card size, which was really the big one. But as you may know, it became 2FF size, 3FF size, and now it’s 4FF, which is also called nano size. And probably most of the end of customers are using with your smartphone with this one factor. And that these are more for, like, a consumer side of customers and smartphone use cases. And in the case of the IoT, like in-device SIM, Of course, they can still use the plugin card type of sim card, but recently embedded so that type of the e sim is becoming more popular in many the productions and the mass productions devices and all applications, which is normally called MFF2 the size is six by five millimeters. So and so this is the current the evaluation and the kinda like history of SIM card. So the question is what is what’s next? So how it goes? That’s been like becoming much smaller or the that fully virtualizer like a software based solution. So so let’s take a look for that. And What we can introduce today is about the iSIM. The iSIM stands for the integrated SIM. And the as you can see here, the previous plug-in SIM or like eSIM solution was based on the the actual physical connections between your cellular SOC or the between cellular SOC and the cloud SIM or, like, eSIM. So And the other concept of the iSIM is the as you can see, the name integrated The same functions will be integrated inside the cellular SOC and the module. So that means, you don’t need to have the physical SIM card anymore. But eventually, the SIM card functionality will be moved and put into the the module. But the technology will try to keep the same be deliver with the previous SIM card, like eSIM. So that is briefly the introduction of iSIM technology. Out of curiosity, what will be the major benefits of iSIM other than the small size, the compact size and being embedded into into the actual module. Yeah. Let’s take a look about what is the the advantage of, like, the end of hit seven. That’s as well. So, yeah, as we already have discussed, the size will be one of the the benefits. Because the even like eSIM, it’s already became much smaller compared to the call size of SIM card. But for some specific use case for the IoT customers like utility or, like, wearable devices or some other, like, asasset tracking devices. Sometimes, then the customer feel the current MFF2 of 6 by five millimeters still too much big. And they just want to make it smaller to make available, their device will be much much smaller. So and having this kind of iSIM footprint was the one of the challenging. So but in the case of the iSIM technology, we can get rid of all the footprint to, like, sim card slot from your devices. So just to try to make it small will be one of the the biggest the advantage of the icing. And, of course, not only about the size, but we can expect that’s the the whole the the total cost reductions. From the cost point of view, of course, you will not purchase the physical SIM or eSIM anymore. So simply you can reduce this kind of like the physical component cost. And also, you can get rid of all the, like, soldering or SIM card handling. Cost from the from what you had with eSIM, as we’ve seen before. So this kind of physical footprint and getting rid of the production the part of the production scheme will be another side of things. And the also, since you will not purchase sync other like eSIM. Then you can also skip many, like, the a somewhat complicated supply chain wise importing, exporting using, and try to pay, like, tax wise, and the shipping, and so on. So so this can, like, supply chain simplified in the supply chain will be another side of the cost effective and the merit by using iSIM solution. And the also, we talked about security a bit today. But since iSIM itself is the standardized technology, and that which also mandates to have the physical secure element inside as the hardware solution. So so I assume it’s not the fully, like, software based solution. But we can also still ensure the security level from the software point of view and also the hardware level. So that’s another side of the benefit by using iSIM technologies. Thank you so much for this summary. I think this is something that many of the IoT ecosystem players are looking forward to testing and commercializing as well. Yep. Alright. What’s left is to look at our next steps. We would like to show you where you can find more information about Murata’s products. And you see this link here which is going to bring you to the developer documents of Murata, where you can see the data sheets, the hardware design guides, frequently asked questions, different videos. So feel free to come here, click around, and familiarize yourself with one of our own products. On top of this, we are also inviting you to come and look at our soracom dot io website There we have multiple blog posts as well as another webinar on loop our wide area and how you can maximize your IoT device battery life. Via PSM and EDRx. In case you have questions, about our soracom products, feel free to connect us to contact us via soracom.io/contact, our colleagues will be more than happy to to reach out to you. And I think this is the moment where we can take a look at if there is any unanswered question in the chat. Feel free to raise Any type of question, we are here to answer them. And for today, this was the last piece. We thank you for your attention for staying with us. I thank you, Shohei and Kenny, for the interesting discussion. And I hope many of you will join us for the next episode of the Let’s Talk IoT device series, which we will air most probably during the early autumn. Thank you, Dora. I’m really proud to have this collaboration with Soracom. And as you said, the next autumn we will have a a next session, next webinar regarding the iSIM module. The that means that the listener, literally, it can get the real iSIM module on your site and enjoy the our module with Telkom connectivity for sure. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Thank you, Shohei. Thank you, Kenny, once again. Thank you. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you so much.

Hello. And welcome to today’s session where we are going to discuss IoT myth and realities. So I am Nicolas Lesconnec if you wanna know everything about me and my career, you can just hit pause right now. Otherwise, we’ll speed fast with that. So I’m in charge of partnerships at Soracom. I’ll be happy to get in touch if you want to discuss anything related to IoT and partnerships. So who are we at Soracom? We are a Japanese company, founded a few years ago in 2015 by AWS veterans and our goal is to help the IoT revolution, and we are providing connectivity services. And right now, we are powering a bit over five million IoT devices and serving several thousand customers. So let’s jump right into today’s topic right now. What is IoT? So let’s start with the official definition from the ITU. So the IoT can be viewed as a global infrastructure for information. enabling advanced services by interconnecting things based on existing, enabling interoperable information and communication technologies or otherwise known as ICT. So we could end the presentation right here Oh, let’s try to go beyond this long and detailed definition. What’s behind this IoT buzzword? This IoT thing has been around for, let’s say, ten years. Even more than that, if you consider the formerly this out is probably known as M2M machine to machine. And you may think that, okay, you know already everything about IoT, you attended all, you heard it all, let’s set the record straight. The first thing is, usually, people saying to me that the no IoT will speak to me about The useless crap, let’s say, frankly, that’s around, a lot of useless IoT devices, I was not allowed to put any images here illustrating that with concrete, products. So all you have is a little comic about coffee machines and what the points of connecting them. If you want to, have a look and discovering what kind of Very useful. I don’t see what devices have been around, and it’s appeared very quickly for most of them. You can check out online. You find Southern of examples, You have a Twitter account for the internet of that’s go that was a lot of those useless Let’s put a chip in it, solutions that in the end doesn’t break anything. But today, what I want to think about is the actual IoT internet of things solutions. This is an old analogy that I’m using a lot. But I still think it fits, which is the whole iceberg thing. Considering that those shiny consumer IOT gadgets that I just mentioned without naming anyone, Are the tip of the iceberg. So, yes, you’ve got plenty of consumer IoT solutions around. Great. And are very valuable and are very successful. I’m not denying it, but what I’m saying is that this is the, actually, the tip of the iceberg. And the majority of what you get in the IoT world are B2B solutions, usually what I would call boring, B2B use cases, boring in a sense that they are not all that exciting. Their value is not in positing the last new thing. Their value is what they are going to bring. Two businesses. Be it by bringing a whole new revolution or incremental improvements. But things that are actually going to improve and to add the value to business operations in a lot of different activity sectors. And what we are moving towards, I would say, is from this technology centric revolution, a lot having the last new thing, basically, wanting to do IoT to having something that is a tool, methodically, being used for your activity, your business, your solution. Same as we had a few years ago, I don’t want to count. Which is being used to all. You’ve got this personal computer revolution that is now everywhere. Now a very limited number of businesses that could operate without those computers that were not ubiquitous forty years ago, but you just forget about them now. Then you got the internet revolution. Exactly the thing. Most of you today could not, let’s say, survive the working week without internet access. You don’t even think about how a re how much of a revolution it has been or it is. For your use cases. It’s just here. Then you have the mobile devices, smartphones, tablet, you name it, and That’s where I’m putting the IoT. And maybe I could already update this, chart by adding this all, AI conversational AI that is, moving like a tornado, across business operations, in the recent, few months. So my point here is basically IoT is not just only a technology thing for technologists looking into the new technical thing if you if you make. It’s more about bringing something new, a new way to do things, a new way to access information just as you had with all those previous, technology revolutions. And the more you forget about this technology in the end, the better because you’re just thinking about what’s it bringing to you. As you don’t see that much about how your computer is working or what’s the magic in is inside. It just the tool that you are using to achieve something. While we are in the analogy, so I did the other thing, now and if another one that you may have heard a lot, even a bit more, even a bit too much, if you’ve been in the IoT space for a while, which is this ‘data is the new oil’ catch phrase. So that’s an old thing, not especially tailored for IoT. That’s something that has been, say, by, Clive in 2006. Thinking about that I’m not in this context of IoT, but worldwide and how it’s changing, the landscape in terms of platforms and so on. But it’s really fit to what IOT is bringing. So reading the full quote, it’s not only data that you, it’s that it’s valuable, but If refined, it cannot really be used. Same as crude oil. It has to be changed into something else. Gas, plastic chemicals. To create a valuable entity that then drives profitable activity. Exactly the same way with data. It needs to be broken down refine, analyze, and then it can reveal its value or bring value by enabling a lot of things. That’s very similar to me to this old oil extraction, refinery, transport, exploration that you have in the end. So what does it mean? Is that IoT, basically, is here to help digitize, the physical world. Let’s say kicking all that. A lot of things have been done for a while. Good enough. So, in this example, is it better to just someone kicking tires. It’s a it’s a good a good mechanism to have an idea if but a flat tire or not. That may not be the most accurate one, but you you get the idea. A lot of things are still done out of all the habits, human checks. We all know we’ll have issues with that. We make mistakes. We misrepresent, on top also not the reality of what’s happening in the activity. Then you have to gather all those scattered, data points. That are coming from someone writing something on a notepad, someone, phoning in a report, It’s delayed. You have to consolidate all of that fragmentation of the data. You end up with Excel monsters that Actually, most of you have suffered with or are still suffering with at the moment where you’ve got a lot of data that you somehow need to make make sense of. It can work each work most of the time, but that’s where IoT can bring us something. Is making sure that we are moving to this, let’s say, all the way of collecting aggregating, analyzing data to something more structured. So digitizing the physical world, meaning that you will Through technology, measure something. Whatever makes sense. It could be a position. The temperature, voltage, a level of noise, of detecting events, something has been moving, a door has been opened. Time has passed to its time to send another data point and so on. And then you will get information, which is more trustable, more consistent, easier to process and with this more precise view of the context, and easier to build analysis, that should bring you to a more in or a more inform the better informed decision making. So what What for? What what could that bring? You may have seen a lot of things about the smart city, smart roads, smart grid or smart city. Yes, IoT will contribute or is contributing to have, to be correct, a smarter world, even maybe a smart world, but let’s say smarter to get start this great great illustration, by the way, has been sourced from Libelium, company doing IoT Solutions, lot of, great devices. So, check them out if you’re interested. And I took that illustration from them because it gives a a good view about vertically everything could use or could be impacted by IoT, be it maritime operations, infrastructure monitoring, garbage collection, parking monitoring, wildlife or what, of white donuts monitoring of events industry, City life, building management, road management, traffic management, you name it. You’ll have a lot of business vertical or human activities or anything, but it’s in our physical world that’s going to be either impacted or will get value from IOT solution. So you’ll get a lot of examples on that. Again, hit pause if you want to spend time reading each of those items. But not everything has to be smart. So smart CD is is powered by a T smartphone, powered by a TNTS one and so on, but it’s Not just about that. You’ll have also a lot of dumb devices in the sense of sensors things that we not need to have this, let a local brain that will just collect data or detect events pass them over to something that we should we could consider like a decentralized brain, which is going to make sense of this aggregated data and then maybe trigger, change of operations, change of behaviors either to the same devices, just send them an order, shut down the this valve, raise an alarm, or maybe it’s going to just push information or orders through other parts of your business because based on the information that I don’t know. This shipment has been delayed or is properly damaged, because of what we are detecting, then let’s put the information to the to the team or to the factory that was supposed to receive that so they can just they can adjust what they are doing right now. So in all, it can contribute to a literal smart factory, smart operation. The devices themselves can be smart. They can have CPU, whatever you need to have high, compute locally. You have even AI on the edge, what you call edge AI is basically having these artificial intelligence on the edge, on the device itself, but in the loss of situation, the devices by themselves, as them as they get, they are just here to be the interface between this physical world and let’s say digitized, world. This is, the combination of all of them that will this hide somehow effect that will make, something smarter and improve the smartness, let’s say, of your operation. Because don’t think I see. I again, and I will maybe repeat a bit too much, today. Your devices themselves your IoT devices do not need to be smart. They can be, but in a lot of case, they are redone. Maybe all you ask from them is to tell you where is your trader right now? Or where is it? Where was it when it was last seen? Where is your shipments? How hot is your fridge or your refrigerated unit. That’s the basic information, a temperature. How bad is the air in the classroom that’s c o two monitoring? Again, that’s a basic information. You don’t need the device to be smart. Maybe the device itself doesn’t know that the hair is good or bad. It will just tell you the number that it’s monitoring. And up to you, to interpret it to your application, to interpret, and to take action, and maybe make a LED blink send a notification so windows gets open, and we get a better classroom here. So what’s in an IoT device? That’s a whole rabbit hole. I love technology. As you may have seen, if you if you read my bio, at the beginning. So I love technology. I love getting deep into those, technical, topics. But it’s somehow handless in the case of IoT because inside, thing connected or communicating thing, So I’m sorry. I’m using those words interchangeably. IOT devices thing connected communicating things because that’s what it is, and I’m using thing on purpose. It’s Maybe not a a full object that you interact with, or smart, whatever. It’s, I think, could be a chair, a table, whatever. Which is communicating and sending information. But basically, if you zoom out or if you think about these IoT devices, well, or this IoT solution. What you’ll have is something to sense the environment. Again, temperature and movement, CO two, in here, really basic information, the basic sensor. You have the power source, of course, either your thing is plugged or is powered by batteries. You’ll get either a CPU or the microcontroller I think that’s that’s where you have your local logic, your embedded software, depending on how dark or how smart it is. It will change this level of complexity. The kind of code you can work you can write are using a full blown operating system are you walking up with a MCU? Are you, writing low level code, that kind of things? Again, on each of those layers, so in the new f communication, You’ve got the antenna for the data to get out. You’ve got this connectivity layer. So this data that is sent by the thing can be received. And processed by a centralized brain. Okay. But each of those layers can be again open and split into a dozen or half a dozen layers each way, and you’ll get full expertise. And it’s very odd. Not saying impossible very odd to have real true expertise over this full spectrum from the sensor to the cloud side and the computing and the decision making part of things or the dashboard. Whatever you are using at the opposite end of that, IT spectrum. So each of them are all all the can of worms are rabbit hole that you could get into and so on. What I just want to say here is basically understand those layers understand where you have expertise where you can yourself or your company bring add value and where you should, seek help. Don’t try to build again a new sensor. Look for the one that is the most fit to your purpose. It probably or maybe not exist on the market or close enough. Again, but if that’s your expertise, then you can dive into and offer something new. But if you’re an expert in sensors, chances are that you are not going to be experts in cloud computing. Same you will have or you would require expertise to write your embedded software, but you require something else again to have a proper antenna. So all this clever thing that you built in your embedded software can be actually sent out there. So to sum it up, lots of components in an IoT device. Each of them requiring Very precise and different skill sets and with the whole set of constraints that you’d need to take into account. The saying is that the chain is as strong as the weakest link and that’s very often the case. It’s very easy with IoT to build something, which is great on paper, great idea, but one of those layers has not been taken into consideration seriously enough. You didn’t have the skill set for reason or another, and you end up getting something that if it doesn’t work, or require lots of overhead, maintenance. And in the end, tanks your project because it’s not efficient enough, and you bleed time, you bleed money, you’ll bleed the effort, trying to fix that. So just take that into your account, and something that might be missing here is security, Again, thing often, goes or white hopefully that the S in IoT stand, for security, because of bad blood, bad history of people not taking security seriously enough in the IoT world. Apologies, Again, I won’t, dive into this specific rabbit hole of IoT security. One thing to really take into consideration or have in mind is that Security is not a feature. It’s not one of those layers. You cannot just add security on top or at bottom whatever. You cannot just add security as a feature. It’s a process. It’s a evolving process. It’s not something that you could just simply turn on or off. It’s not either I have security or I don’t have. It’s risk arbitration, meaning that you need to do, risk assessment, risk management, to make sure that you understand that each part of your device, you have good understanding of what is the attack surface, what is the risk associated, what is, the probability of something happening at that stage, what is the associated impact, the intensity of something that could happen. And again, chain is as strong as the weakest link. So you have to take charge about the security of the device side of things. What what happen if someone gets the hand on my device? They get they get physical access. Do we have a the do we have a debug port that I let on my production device that makes it very easy for someone to, to get into. Do we have, anti tampering mechanism in place at the hardware level? Again, we have been connected or co connected and all communicating devices. So what could happen in case of remote access? Could that remote access mean that my whole fleet is compromised? Your usual mistake is adding a shared set of credentials or private keys that are installed on each device, and and if someone gets access to one of them, they can compromise your whole fleet. What happened in the past is devices being turned as attack vectors to third parties, being part of large botnets like, what happened a few years ago with the, mirai botnet that was, based on thousands and thousands of devices such as security cameras, badly protected that were infected and turned into attack vectors. So in that case, in your risk arbiter risk arbitration, The thing to consider is what can happen to myself. How bad can it be for my own operation if my fleet of devices are compromised? But what are the kind of damages it could do to other people or other company businesses if my devices are turned into attack vectors. So you have this security on the device. Again, that can be broken down into plenty of different things to take care of. Then you’ve got the security of your your data. And after that, when it’s on the move, when the data is in motion from your device, to your, what I call the central brain, early on, most probably, your cloud application. And then what happened what is your security level on your data at rest once it’s stored in your database or in your home system? Because that’s kind of a typical mistake to spend plenty of effort of taking charge of the physical security on the device level. Making sure you have hardware secure elements, anti tampering mechanism, safe management of your device memory, You take you encrypt whatever, data flows that you have to make sure that nobody can listen in the middle and intercept your data. And then ends up being installed in an unsecure database with admin admin as credentials, for example. And it makes it very easy to anyone to just access or even alter, the data of your whole system. And lastly, maybe it’s the business application itself. Who gets to access the business application that interacts with the data? How good is it protected? Again, is it available online to anyone with, default credentials that kind of thing? I’ll finish by mentioning the elephant in the room, which is this nasty picture that is on the right, I have been trying to find a better version of that one for years now, but I’m still using that one in my slide decks. Because I I find it’s a good illustration of what I’m trying say in regard to IoT security. But if in that case, just imagine this is a very important, isolated, control room whatever is inside. It doesn’t matter if you put the best built in class, world class locks. Everything is great. Highly secure. Access control is top notch. You name it. But if your actual door is made of cardboard, attackers intruders won’t lose, the time trying to fight your world class lock. They just push through the door and get in. And let’s apply the same to an IoT system. Think of it as a system. And again, as a security, that’s something that is never, done and finished. If you don’t take sufficient care of one part of this whole chain from the physical device to the business application through data transmission and data storage, then do not consider your entire system to be secure. That’s really a whole thing that needs to be well covered. And of course, from the outset of your project, I said this earlier, but I’ll say it again. You cannot just slap security on top of your IoT system. It needs to be a consideration from day one and again a risk arbitration. Not every not all IoT system in the world need, world level on. Sorry for my English. But not all solution needs military grade or whatever level of securities. Again, risk arbitration because What are the risks for your for you, your company, what are the possible liabilities you open yourself to? And put in front of what it costs to have top security physical in motion at rest and so on. Cost in time, in money, in energy, sometimes, and so on and so on. So this is what I was about this, side comments about security. But another common kind of mistakes that is off is still often done in the IoT world is focusing on technology for the sake of technology. So good example of that are communication protocols. I’ve been working in the world of communication protocols for a while now, and you see that people that get all excited by their own. All encompassing are that protocol is the best. You need to use NB-IoT. NB-IoT in the future, or you need to use satellite based communication because it should be ubiquitous. You need to use Zigbee because that’s the one thing, rate performance and whatnot. So I won’t go into each of those blocks. You’ll have different means of communication, different protocols, I’m not comparing similar things in that picture, but just give you an idea of there are a lot of them. NB-IoT — should I use NB-IoT? Should I use LTE? Should I use LTE? Should I use this or that? That should never be the first question or the first decision in an IoT project. The questions you need to address are, what do you actually need What do you need? And and with emphasis on the need, because very often what I’ve seen is people focusing on what they’d like. I want live information about everything in my system. I want to know where are every one of my shipments on my truck real time? But do my business really need that real time? I’m not sure. And maybe it’s too expensive. And maybe having a report every hour, or whenever something something some of the shipment stop or depart is enough. It’s really about not the technology, but really about the business need and what’s going to actually bring something to it. And then, are you able to fit this IoT project, this IoT solution that you are trying to build into business operation? At the end of at the end of the day, if it doesn’t fit, into business operation, and by of it means if you don’t adjust your business operations to adapt to this, new solution that you’re pushing, then it’s going to be ignored, not going to be used, and you’ll end up with yet another useless IoT project. That was maybe great. Maybe the device that you built was amazing, but If the data that it’s sending or the orders it’s supposed to receive are not linked to your actual business systems. It’s going to end up useless. So the key thing is about the specific use case and thinking hard about What do I need to do? What can I afford to do? Because it still need to make economic sense in the end. And then you can enjoy and get deep into all those technical rabbit holes and getting into the right technology and fine tuning everything. But first and foremost, what do you actually need? What are you trying to build? Why are you trying to build it? And what is it supposed to achieve? And how is it going to fit into the growing scheme of things? So a few factors, and that’s going to be the last part of the, today’s video. A few factors that you need to consider to have a successful roll out of an IoT project. And go beyond something that go that works well in the lab or well on paper and never gets used in the end. Staying in the infamous proof of concept or PoC limbo that a lot of IoT project over the last years have ended up in. And really, all in all, it’s about business consideration. IoT as a set of technologies should be used to serve those business considerations. You should not try to force your technology of choice into the business because it’s most probably not going to work. So this checklist is about what are your goals, what are your limitations, Where are you planning to deploy your IoT things? Are they going to be deployed in a location? If you know in advance and you control, So are they going to stay stationary? In a factory, in a building, and then you can use local communications and so on and so on, or are they going into areas you don’t control, meaning that in terms of communication, if I get back to those connectivity issues, you need to use operating networks because you cannot just deploy your own gateway, in the wild, and maybe you don’t even know in advance where your thing are going to end up going or moving across. How do you need your deployment to scale in terms of How much and how fast? Are you looking to have a few dozen devices, and it’s going to say it like that? Are you going to need tens of thousands hundred of thousands. Is it going to be a fast ramp up? Is it going to be a a steady growth. That kind of thing that is going to change maybe the way you do things and your ability to scale also on the cloud line of things, how are you going to scale those operations? Because you are not going to manage a dozen sensors the same way you are going to manage a million devices that may communicate at the same time and so on. Where where are you? Maybe not have passed on this other company at an organization. Where are you in terms of digital maturity, and that goes back to what I was saying about fitting into business operations because there is no point in building the Let’s say this shiny new version, this new connected or IOT, X, this IOT solution. If it cannot fit in your organization because you’re not there in terms of digital transformation. Third, and that’s something that maybe should be worked on first. And so how are you going to integrate your deployment with your processes operations and existing technology solution. Because most probably this IoT project you are building is not going to exist in a vacuum. It will need to fit into your organization. Either you need to adjust things, speaking about digital transformation, or So making room for this new, project, or you will need to make sure that this new piece of the puzzle will fit right in. And of course, consideration should you build your own or buy either globally Oh, at each part of this, multilayer’s, multilayer, vision that I shared earlier on, basically, Should you build again a new device, or will you find a device that will fit your needs? Maybe not a hundred percent, but maybe eighty five, ninety percent of the units at a great cost, availability is tomorrow morning, and maybe that’s the right choice for you to, to buy. So again, not getting technology first or technologists first, and making time to assess, this build up by, sorry, making time so you can take the right decision about building everything yourself, building part of it, or by buying an existing IoT solution, turnkey, already does everything or part of it part of those, tech technical bricks in your IoT deployment. That’s really a critical one because That’s an old adage in technology, but you may have the temptation to reinvent the wheel because existing wheels are not as great as you’d like them to be. But you’re going to most probably lose a lot of time trying to redo something incrementally better than what already exists. Instead of focusing on what is your key value and the key expertise you can bring in and focusing on why you are doing this. Instead of the tiny bits of the whole. And so speaking about use cases, we can get you a bit into details, today about what are the top consideration that you should have. One is the data volume itself. Because I’ve been I’ve been speaking about devices, sensing devices, but you’ll have you’ll have a wide range of ways to transmit data. That’s going in some of them are going to be very tiny amounts of data. As I said, the temperature of just a one or a zero basic information. Door is open. There is closed. Maybe you are going to send a full video stream that’s, always on camera. Maybe you are going to send a lot of telematics information and this will change the way you are going to, build your whole solution. In terms of technology choice. Local local computing needs, the kind of connectivity you can use. Of course, you are not going to use, LoRaWAN or Sigfox to stream video. That’s not going to fit. But if you are just sending a temperature measure, it’s good enough and not waste your time, your time using LTE to send the information about the temperatures. Fourteen degrees, for example, not even doing that. So think about that. And if you are using a few kilobytes, a few megabytes or gigabytes of that are every other week or every other month is going to change the wall architecture of your system. Another consideration in terms of the data that you’re, communicating, it the what I would call the refresh rate, basically, How frequently do you need the information? I give the example early on about ship shipping and monitoring and track operations and the need or not to have live information. In some cases, you will need a constant stream of information. Because as soon as something hits a given threshold, it’s going away from your usual operating conditions, then you need to act. But in some cases, everything the only thing you need is a proof of life every other week, every other day, or maybe, every other month. It’s just okay. This remote pump of whatever is still operating. All these, remote warning sign is still up, and that’s good enough. You don’t need more than that. You don’t need, a video view of this equipment. What you need is a cheap thing that is going to send information every now and then. So and then you can add all kind of granularities in between. Hourly updates, daily updates, every fifteen minutes. What, you name it. But again, that’s very important because that’s going to change a lot of things in terms of connectivity technologies that you’re going to choose, but also in energy management. Because of course, something that we is going to collect and transmits constantly is going to use way more energy than something that just send a very basic information every other day. So that’s going to change again the way you think about your device and about its deployment, maybe you’ll need an energy source. So Of course, where is your data sent from? Is another consideration to have in mind? Stationary, moving, you are not going to do the same thing or you are going to build differently for gas meters that most probably will remain stationary. If they start moving, you have a whole new set of issues, but it’s going to be way different be between those stationary devices. So utilities, building management, that kind of thing, those devices will remain stationary on the factory floor or moving assets. Are you monitoring the whereabouts of your spare parts across factories? Those assets are moving or you’re monitoring your fleet of cars. They are moving either in a semi closed environments in a city or in a region or they are moving globally internationally, that’s going to change a lot. Again, stationary moving, control and control. So it could be a closed loop in in logistics, or it could be unknown locations, Again, that’s going to change the way you think about your project and the way you build the technology solution. And then in term of the radio transmission, if you use wireless transmission is is your data being sent from Hodo? So you have little constraints in terms of propagation of your signal of initial attenuation and so on. Are you going to have a sensor which is deep indoor in a building or even underground. I was speaking about utilities. A lot of cases, your me meters are going to be underground. And then you let high attenuation of your signal, which means that you need either to boost your signal. If you agree if regulation allows you to, which means more energy, or it means that your signal won’t travel as well, and then you’d need a higher density of receivers. So gateways. Base stations, why whenever you call it. So that’s, third consideration is actually very important. So we already have How much volume? How how much data do you need to send? How often? And where are you speaking from? And as I mentioned, transmission distance. Most of the time, you should not really care about that. That’s your radio benchmark, that is communicated by connectivity specialist such as hers or others, what you care about is that the data that you need to transmit from your device is received as it should. But in a ballpark, big families of communication technologies can be split about unit communication in a personal range. So, for example, if your thing your communicating thing is a device which is a attached to a person, and that will stay with this person. So thinking this watch, for example, you can bet that you would have this kind of gateways somehow that are you going to use BLE because my smartphone is going to be a great gateway for my personal devices. But that wouldn’t be a right technology solution if I were using to monitor animals that shouldn’t have a smartphone or even people that don’t have a high, rate of technology adoption, thinking about elderly care, environments, for example, and then you maybe you need to set local gateway to receive this information. But basically, will this data be sent from a few meters, from the source, and then you are going to use ble Wi Fi, smartphone protocols Or are you going to work on something which is on unknown? I was going to say long distance to unknown distances. And then you’ll rely on operating network responsibility because you don’t really know where you would need to and maybe you cannot set those gateways yourself and then you are going to use operating network from your local operators, most probably. But as I said, the concern shouldn’t be that this protocol can send data at ten kilometers, fifty kilometers. You don’t really care. What you care about is how much is it going to cost you to use this technology. Maybe it’s great that it sent the information so far because it means you need to have only a few a limited number of gateways. So lower cost of deployment, lower cost of operations. That’s why you’d care about is how much it’s going to cost per iteration wise. So maybe either in your home operations, let’s say you deploy your lower one gateways, in your subscription because you are using either an operator or on operated CFO network. And the other concern is how much is going to cost you from an energy point of view because do you need, to use a high, power output To send this data very far, and in that case, your batteries could be depleted very fast. Are you able to send at with only a few milliwatts? That’s, again, will make a whole lot of differences in how your designer solution. So how much data, how often How how far and how fast do you need the information? Pretty often you’ll start your project thinking all your customer if you’re building something for a customer, we’ll tell you they need the information right now, and it would be real time. Real time is a very precise meaning, but even if we extend that and consider that a few milliseconds is real time, Is it really that useful? Do you have that level of safety concerns is is that business critical to receive the information? So the last data point of the event detection within milliseconds. Or can your system afford to wait a few seconds? And in some cases, if you really look closely at the business case, you realize that Well, in fact, the only thing I I need is to get the information at some point. If it’s it’s five hours, It’s actually good enough because what I’m using it is to build intelligence that is going to be processed, and going to build my whole background of information. It’s not something where I will act real time. So that’s why you have solutions that, for example, are going to be installed very remote places, farm monitoring, cattle monitoring, forestry equipment monitoring that are going to use satellite networks, the new kind of satellite IoT solution where Yes. Your device will need to wait for a satellite to pass over to collect the data, and then you need the satellite to go over ground station to deliver the data on earth, and then for this data to take a few seconds to get you to your cloud application. So long story short, you have a few hours between measurements and reception. But in a lot of cases, it’s good enough. It’s not good enough if that’s, gas valve that you need to shut down right now because the leak has been detected. In that case, you need real time. And that’s a whole lot, again, all the other choices in terms of data protocols and communication technologies. And data resilience, what do I mean with the resilience is again getting beyond the, the want to get to the need. Is it that bad or that critical if you miss of if a few of your data transmission are lost? In some cases, yes, there is high criticality and getting a one hundred percent delivery rate. And bear in mind, especially using wireless, one hundred percent doesn’t exist interference will happen, fading will happen. So you could have replay mechanism. You could, reconstruct missing data based on what you know and what you can infer from previous and future communication. So in some cases, you can afford the ninety something percent delivery rate, even lower in some cases, and that will again change your technology choice and the way you design your software. So will you implement those replay mechanism or are they built in the protocols that you decide to use? Can you, on the receiving side, reconstruct or infer missing data points, and is this approximation accurate enough for your need. And in two cases, five or four gates is good enough. I was, talking about classroom here, for example. Let’s say you send the value every ten minutes. If you miss one of it, it won’t change a lot of things. What you want is to understand the trend and of course from time to time to improve open the windows and so on, but the key thing is to have this whole trend, and you can afford missing one. It’s not going to be critical. In the true meaning of it. So that’s again, about arbitration. If you will need to achieve a hundred percent delivery rate, then that will mean extra cost in the way you build your system and you build this resiliency. And again, arbitration between how much is it going to cost and how much do I really need it and how much can I afford to miss, a data transmission every now and last but not least, power management — I already spoke a bit about it in the other points because that’s what’s behind a lot of choices you are going to make with IOT building IOT solutions? And it will depend a lot about Where is your device? Does get access to free energy? For example, I spoke about a refrigerated unit, early on. You want to monitor the condition of your refrigerated container or reefer. You can plug your device into that. The energy you are going to draw is most probably not going to change a lot of things, but that means that, okay, You can afford having something that is maybe not highly optimized in terms of energy consumption. But if your device needs to be in the wide with no human intervention and no access to free energy for months or years. Then you need to get really deep into this, rabbit hole to say it, one last time of power management and the whole life cycle of your devices. Because that means most probably at some point you’ll want to replace the battery recharge the battery of your device if it’s not on the most one. In some cases, you should have, deploy and forget devices, but that’s generating, unnecessary electronic waste and so on, and that’s not something I would advocate for. So let’s say ninety nine percent of the time, you will need to recharge or replace batteries of your devices. And the cost of doing that can tank a whole project because If you did not design, your whole system, precisely enough in terms of of power consumption. You can end up with very bad surprise with the battery that is supposed to last for years and has actually lasted half of it, ten percent of it, and then you need to send people on the field to fix that, and it’s going to cost you a lot. Or you need to recall your devices again, huge amount of loss. So that’s really critical because every time you need to do something, That’s not a technique, technology related. It’s having someone physically plug put on the charging dock or opening and replacing, the batteries of the device. That’s human effort. That’s time. And of course, in the end, that’s money. So the best thing is to be able to build predictability as accurate as possible about the life cycle of your battery and feed that into the life cycle of the device itself. It’s like thinking about a tracking solution. For example, making sure that, okay, you know that every X rotations, you need to replace batteries in the devices before they are deplete, depleted, but that way You just have to do it in a controlled environment when they when they come to base, basically, instead of having to go in the wild and fix things that are broken. And again, things to be considered is the environment of your device. The temperature it will operate on, are you going to be outdoor and very hot or very cold environment. It’s going to change the chemistry, in the end, and it’s going to have a huge impact. With your device and battery, withstand humidity, shocks, and then you get into certification. If you’re operating in harsh environments, you’ll get into a tech certification. That kind of thing that, again, will add complexity and cost to our project. And once more, on the topic of energy. So I’m not, an electrical engineer. I don’t I don’t understand a lot about electricity. If I’m being honest, But, basically, you need to, all batteries are not created equal. And you need to make sure you make the right choices of providers of battery technologies so your device will actually operate, optimally, between the, basically, the energy you will need for your continuous operation, but and then assessing the whole capacity of the battery, you need all the ability for your battery to deliver peak energy when you need to do something, either your device needs to collect physical information and very energy intensive. Could be gas monitoring that kind of stuff or communicating use a lot of energy and is pulling off. And in that case, you need to, have that in consideration as well. And last of those, consideration I listed today, is the wall. I already spoke about life cycle, but How is it going to do, be on your battery? What’s going to happen to your device along its life? And again, As often, I tend to frame that as a risk management approach, it’s not all white and black. It’s not on or off. You have to have this approach of listing the what ifs and being fully honest about them at each with each part of your solution and at each stage in the life, what if something bad happens here? What if this happened? How severe is that What’s the probability of that happening? Is it one in a million or is it highly likely to happen? And then in front of that, you will put the cost of prevention. And, basically, you have to do this assessment and to make the right decision about what are the mechanism you will need to put in place. So some example, I gave a little bit of power management, recharging, replacing, In some cases, you would just swap devices. I give the example of trackers. Maybe instead of getting into the effort of opening and replacing the batteries, we’ll just you will just remove the old one, slap a new one, making sure you update create a, identifiers in our system. And just deal with the old devices later on. But this way, the the track, the thing you’re monitoring can just, go on. Process maintenance, sort of partners. That’s just an example, but no magic here. You will need to think that your device will live in the wide. For a long time. And, basically, when you start deploying, it may feel like that’s the end of your IoT project. You made it to the end. You build a great device. You have perfect embedded software. Communication is top notch. You have the right, analysis process. You have business application, which is approved by the end users. Everybody is happy. And you can fit that at the end of your project. But, actually, same as with a software project that’s only the beginning of your issues is what’s going to happen in two months, in six months, in one year, two years, five years. You will need to upgrade your firmware. Maybe, again, maybe somebody else. Basic sensors won’t need that, but what’s in place already for you to do your device management remotely, firmware management, Can you do it remotely? Do you need to send someone on-site and to plug into the device to deliver an update? Can you afford to wait for the devices to come back to control hub, to have, local management of that, and same with battery? How much can you plan? How much can you predict? And what’s going to happen in terms of emergency action when something really needs to be fixed or updated? So that’s again thinking about not only the lab conditions, let’s say, but how is it going to behave in the wild? How is it going to behave at scale? And how is it going to behave in time? And taking into account that you only know so much about what’s going to happen. So again, risk management. What could happen if even if highly unlikely. Take time to make sure that we identified assess and make this, this decision, this risk management decision. So it’s really a critical part, part for me is what’s going to happen across the whole life cycle of your solution. And we are, reaching the end of today’s presentation. I hope it was, enjoyable for all of you. And if you have an IoT project, or you want to get into details about connectivity because we at Soracom are experts in connectivity solution be the connectivity itself, but associated platform services to help you manage your fleet of devices, manage security, manage all network level, transmission, cloud integration. Would be very happy to, to have a talk with you get into a full blown consultation if you’re deep into your project. So please reach out. You have the generic sales address at soracom.io here. Don’t be afraid, it’s sales, but that’s still people that want Only that will not just push you and try to close a deal with you in the following hour, but we’re here to hear about your actual needs, what you are looking for, and start, helping you build. Our motto is: you create and we connect. So we are here to help you do that and we’d be happy to, to have a chat with you. Thank you for listening. This webinar is part of a whole series of online content, US from us. Please take time to check out the other, videos that you have available on a different channels, and I’d be happy to see you soon for another session.

Good morning. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our next session as part of the Smart Mobility Summit here at Industry City. Today, in this session, I’ll be looking at how does delivery beyond speed sorry, how does delivery beyond speed get enhanced through the use of mobile technologies? We’ll be looking at smart inventory, looking at various different implementations and logistics, and very much exploring the logistics and services beyond connectivity and how that can be enhanced through that integration. So I’d like to welcome onto the stage Mark Thurman from IBM, who will be the moderator for this panel. Thank you. Good morning everybody. I’d like to invite my panelists to come up and as they take their seats, we’ll all introduce ourselves. Let’s pick a seat. Excellent. So before my panelists introduce themselves, we might try and do something a little bit different in the middle or in the end. If anybody has a question, a good question, because we’re going to select only the good ones, let us know. I think Irene or one of our colleagues will have a microphone so you can ask a specific question. If not, and you’d like to talk to any of us at the end, we’ll all gather at the end here because typically you might want to have a one on one exchange or exchange business cards. So with that, I’ll reintroduce myself. I’m Mark Thurman. I’m from IBM. I work in the CTO’s office for cloud and I look after innovation and very large initiatives. Good morning, everyone. I’m Gopi. I work for Axiata, MNO based out in Southeast Asia in South Asia, and I run the enterprise business for the group. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Tahira Kuhl. I’m the Global Vice President for Dassault Systems working in Business Services, which is logistics and financial services. Very pleased to be here. Hi, everybody. My name is Alan Hicks. I’m the CTO at Mana Drone Delivery. We are a drone delivery business that are delivering consumer facing goods to consumers currently fully operating out of Ireland. Hi, my name is Gianluca Redolfi. I’m the CCO at Satellite IoT. At Satellite IoT, what we’re doing is making sure that satellite connectivity for IoT can be for any use case everywhere in the world. Hi, I’m Nicolas Sconnect, I’m in charge of partnerships for SORACOM. We provide IoT connectivity services. Excellent. Thank you, panelists, welcome. And again, welcome to our audience. And thank you again to the AV team and the GSMA staff for helping us out today. So one thing that initially emerges is we’ve got a satellite provider, we’ve got a drone provider, and as I’ve walked through the event, I’ve seen that these are two big themes. Drones, there’s drones all over the place. We have one on our stand and also satellite. So maybe we’ll jump in on the importance of satellite, satellite with IoT and the mixture with cellular. Yeah. So at Satellite IoT, we have always been thinking that it’s not correct that satellite communication is not available to everybody. There’s something extremely expensive and not accessible. So since the beginning, we have been saying there should be a way to make it standardized and that the device that you need to use to collect a satellite have to be really inexpensive and that anybody can buy it, anybody can use it. And that has been the purpose of what we’ve been doing since the beginning. This pass through having a new standard approved by the 3GPP, which is the new release seventeen. And this allows actually the cellular devices that are connected now to cellular on IoT to also connect without any change to the satellites. So we launched our own constellation and we are working as a natural extension of network for the mobile network operators. And that’s the key thing because now drones or any different application can finally use IoT, even when there’s no cellular coverage. So we’ve got two operators actually, SORACOM at one end, you’ve got a large footprint. What’s your feeling about including satellite into your offer? So we’ve used multi mode to try and connect onto all of our logistics solutions which we’ve had, specifically examples like in Sri Lanka. Demining, as in active mines, which are there through the wars, need to be removed. And logistics become a huge part of that because getting fuel into these machines, which are sort of demining, getting people into the right sort of locations in, and getting the actual mines out is not an easy challenge. So we’ve used cellular networks. We’ve tried to use private networks. We would include things like satellite networks onto that to be able to map that out. And that’s really brought the efficiencies of being able to demine, be very clear about those areas which need to get cleaned out, and just the safety of people within that type of a logistics environment. Right. So you would use both standard licensed and unlicensed networks in a mixed offering? Both licensed, where it’s already been rolled out and a lot of private networks with private LTE and small pocket networks. Which would be licensed in any event. Yes. Okay. So SORACOM, what’s your view of this whole matter? Yeah, so satellite is an interesting extension because panel discussion is about beyond speed. So speed is great, but ubiquity of service, of coverage is key as well. And those non options are a great way to guarantee a continuity of service or service in areas that are not covered by terrestrial networks. So at Soracom, we are looking at expanding our footprint through satellite providers, be it licensed, unlicensed. We already provide access through traditional cellular networks, LPWA networks as well, unlicensed in some cases, and we also provide connections for IP based devices. Most of the times, customer use cases will require hybridization of the connectivity. There is no customer use case that will require only one flavor of connectivity. The whole game is to abstract this complexity and to provide an actual service to the end customer, whatever it is. Condition of the communicating devices and so on. No, it makes perfect sense. So Tahira, role of standards. You want to touch that one? Yes. You can say no. Why not? Ask me anything. I just did. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You have right across the logistics world, whether it’s rail, air, sea, cargo, freight, you have different standards that obviously have to be met. And as the gentleman over there talked about and the data that’s coming from all of these different technologies, that’s already a challenge in itself. So bringing together all of that data to meet with the standards that are out there changing, that are different depending on which geography you’re in, is a big challenge. That makes sense. So, Alan, drones. Yeah. How do you connect these damn things? Is it is it all on cellular? Are you doing Wi Fi? So so at at at the moment, it’s it’s all cellular. Our particular drones are cellular. And what we discovered is that that’s the best connectivity choice. It’s the lowest cost of entry and it’s the most broadly available. Regulators do like the idea of using satellite as a backup, but it’s costly. The latency is pretty poor on us at the moment. I mean, from looking around the conference over the last few days, I mean, it feels like there’s a lot of exciting things that are going to happen. I mean, five gs is going to be huge for drones in terms of reliability and connectivity. And that might replace the need for dual for multimodal, be it LTE and satellite. But I think what the telcos and the comms industry would need to deliver for drones is a turnkey solution that has the redundancy baked in because drones have enough things going on. Right. That reliable connectivity would be a major piece to solve. And so latency would be an issue. Latency is a big issue. I mean, if a drone is making a maneuver and you need to make a decision, The lower the latency and the lower guaranteed latency is what’s really important. That allows you to decide whether you do your compute on board, which is great, but it’s expensive if you’ve got a massive fleet versus off board. So if you’ve got that connectivity piece, actually reduces the economics of the problem. So are you relying on anything at the edge as a result to kind of lower your ingest endpoint, your drone pricing? Yeah. And is that available everywhere that you operate? This is so today it is, but that obviously limits the footprint of what you can do. So today we’re doing more onboard our drones than we would like to do in the future. And that is because of sometimes you can get really great connectivity and sometimes you can’t. There’s no consistency is the problem. If you knew it was always going to be slow, you could accommodate and work around But it’s that inconsistency that’s a real challenge. How do you guys accommodate drones? You’ve a wide and varied footprint. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I thought I won’t use the word five gs, but that’s really sort of what it’s designed for, in sort of short bursts of data but very quick, as opposed to sort of broad coverage which you get for consumers to do that. We try multiple mechanisms to try and guarantee some sort of bandwidth for industrial type usages. We haven’t done it very extensively for agriculture or drones per se, but in multiple use cases, we’ve tried to do that at least for smart manufacturing industrial type of applications to do that, where the environment’s slightly more controlled as opposed to, I guess, with a drone, you have a maybe two kilometer radius or so to do work with, which just becomes a bit more challenging. Yeah. But I mean, I think like the number one challenge and the reason that we don’t have thousands of drones in the sky or mobile tax or unmanned taxis. It’s not that like you could make this stage fly. It would look ugly and it wouldn’t fly very well and it wouldn’t be very aerodynamic, but you can do it. So challenge with technology isn’t getting the drones in the sky. The challenge is how do you coordinate all of those drones autonomously? So coordinating a fleet. And that rely or that swarm. Exactly. And that relies on comms because not all of the drones in the swarm will be from one provider. There’ll be multi carriers or multi drone providers. So this is kind of the notion of cellular V2X, but in the air a And is there a standard around that or is that you guys are just throwing these things up there and make sure they don’t collide? There are standards evolving as with everything. The ASTM organization has published a very, very good UTM standard, which is unmanned traffic management systems. And there’s things like remote ID and different sensing technology that is coming to help all of this. But again, it all relies on this fabric of comms. It makes perfect sense. So the reason we’re doing all these things is to get a bunch of data. So I guess the big question is how do we put the data in context? And I know, Tahira, that’s a question you and I discussed. So I’ll let you start and then maybe we’ll go see how our colleagues feel about that topic. Sure, yeah. Data is everywhere. It’s coming at us at speed. I like to call it the five V’s of big data. You have volume. You have velocity. You have veracity. You have variety. And you have value. And we spend a lot of time collecting that data, disseminating, integrating, storing that data. But we don’t spend enough time driving the value from that data. And that’s one of the challenges. When you talk about drones and different modes of transport, intermodal, and you’ve got data coming from your fixed assets, your rail yards, your storage sites, and so on. How do you manage all that data? And that’s where we talk about virtual twin, to put that data into context. Makes sense. So, Nicolas, how do you enable all of this? You’ve got a great network. You’re able to bring together networks from all over. Is data a relevant thing for your team to manage? Yep, exactly. And I love your several V’s. Yeah, we have to write down all the V’s. I forgot most of them chose the last one, which is maybe the key one, which is value. And that the key equation that we need to solve and to help our customers solve is: data is all around us. We have a lot of untapped resource to a raw resource to extract from the physical world. Our goal is to help our customers make it so that the total cost of extracting and using this data is below the actual value of it, which has been a challenge so far. So that’s why beyond acting merely as a connectivity provider, we try to work partners with our customers and helping them solve this TCO equation and making sure that this total cost remain good enough and the financial equation works. So it could be reducing the amount of data you actually emit, because then you’ll reduce your energy spending, you’ll reduce your data spending, which is somewhat counterintuitive as the MVNO, which we are. But using those services, you can then build something that actually makes sense and that is going to work in the long run and don’t, let’s say, die in the valley of death of the IoT POCs and so on that we’ve spoken a lot over the last few years. Ah, the deadly POC. So I guess same question to you from a satellite perspective. Are you just facilitating the ingest of the data or the control of the device? Or are you doing anything useful with the data? We just pass over the data. Okay. But there’s something very nice actually. So you’re like a trusted carrier essentially. Yes. You transport. But we are focused on what we call massive IoT, which is millions, billions IoT that you can connect. And this, we believe can just happen with something called narrowband IoT. And it is message based. And it’s completely different than what we have in mind because we’re not talking about gigabyte, megabyte, kilobytes, we’re talking about bytes. We talk about messages, very likely around thirty, thirty five bytes that the IoT device is sending out. So that’s it, is the pipe broken? Is the something not working? The alarm go off? Well, can be monitoring on agriculture. So it can be different level temperature, different levels under the soil level and up, wind, the moisture and so on. And with all this grid of information, there are companies that can provide better information to the farmer. Actually, they promise thirty percent to forty percent increase in production, if I’m not mistaken. So we’re just taking this information from everywhere it is back to the core But the key thing here is that they don’t need to send gigabyte. Right. With just a few bytes, and that’s the case where less is more, take what you really need, analyse it, and probably you have a lot. So again, same question to you, if you don’t mind. So our operator, LinkNet, in Indonesia provides the broadband connectivity for the East Java industrial plant of the area, full of manufacturers within it. The initial attraction for them were tax breaks that they had new pieces of land to build upon. We brought a lot of high speed broadband connectivity to all of them. And what we soon realized is that we could start connecting a lot of the cameras and installations around it, as well as the water table or water levels within Jakarta. Maybe most are familiar, it’s a bit like Holland or Amsterdam, where the water levels are pretty high. That started to affect the logistics of movement within the industrial park. So we correlated information from the cameras and those areas, and that’s just made the logistics within the center a lot more efficient than what it is. So now the attraction for people to relocate into those areas are because the whole industrial sites are lot more efficient compared to other comparable ones. So would you leverage a digital twin type technology? Yes, we would. I mean, we’re trying to do small POCs around that to do that, but there’s a lot of basic connectivity to get up to be able to get to that purpose. Because I know in some of our conversations prior to this, we talked about this notion of a digital twin or a virtual twin. And I know Tahira has a point of view on virtual twin, but why don’t we first define what is a digital twin? I know everybody knows, so keep it. Sure. Yeah. I mean, digital twin versus virtual twin. And a digital twin has existed for many years. Right? It could be a representation, a two d representation of something in electronic format, as simple as that, through to a replica of the real world. The virtual twin, which is really, you know, we’re Dassault Systems. We do a lot of work with our customers on virtual twins. It’s about bringing the real world, you know, really sort of the real world into the virtual world, bringing in the data, bringing in the actual activity that’s happening in the real world. So whether it’s running what if scenarios where you don’t know the results, unlike in gaming or the metaverse, everything’s coded already. You know somebody at the background knows what the results are going to be. Through a virtual twin, the technology will calculate the results for you. And that’s the power of a virtual twin. We’re applying this across, for example, maintenance. You know, when you’re talking about logistics, you have fleet, you have fixed assets, you have moving assets, you’re looking at maintenance and predictive maintenance, you’re looking at supply chains, improving your visibility, but also cost of logistics to reduce your cost of logistics. And of course, demand and supply. This is probably the biggest challenge that’s out there, trying to match your demand with match the supply with the demand, given the changing market dynamics. And that’s where a virtual twin can help you to really manage that data. So that’s in think that’s helpful. So I first would ask what verticals is my esteemed panel focusing on because they’re all going to be different. And then what verticals are you not doing? I can imagine with, for example, satellite, you’re not doing remote medical diagnostics. Parikh, can you repeat, sorry. I couldn’t hear him. If you can repeat the question, sorry. Oh, I’m sorry. What verticals are you focused on? But more specifically, what verticals are you not doing? I don’t think there’s any vertical we’re not addressing. Okay. So But there’s a there’s some some some verticals that are maybe take it, you know, with more intensity at the beginning. Alright. And, we see a lot on logistics, on agriculture, livestock, maritime, oil and gas, forestry, whatever it is, remote and doesn’t require really lot of data. We cannot transport video. So But you’re not transporting voice, are you? Or just emergency No. But there are solution that they can they can compress a few bytes, a small piece of voice. I’m stuck on the elevator or something like that. Okay, Nicolas, over to you, same question. Verticals that you’re focused on and verticals that you just don’t want to touch. Yeah. So as a connectivity provider, we are pretty generic in that sense. But in IoT, address, let’s say, the usual suspects. So asset tracking, which is maybe more horizontal than the vertical, but agriculture, medical devices, point of sale device, that kind of stuff. What we do not do, because we don’t do everything, of course, for example, if you need live remote control of your drone, that’s not something where we are going to work on because we don’t provide real time, a guaranteed real time solution. But if you are looking for where is the shipment of your new set of drones, the status of that shipment, the status of the drone itself, a kill switch maybe because it has been taken away by someone before coming back to base, Those are the use cases we are going to help you address. Over to you. Same question. Mining ports, airports, logistics areas are our sort of focus. Things we do a little less of is around healthcare, agriculture type of area, which we really don’t sort of focus upon. Is that because of where your footprint lies? On both sides. So one on the infrastructure side, because that’s really where the big spend is. There’s a lot of push from governments to try and modernize. On the other end, for things like fishery, agriculture, in our footprint, it’s a very fragmented market. It’s very small farms, small holders who do that. But it’s a lot of small farms. Yes. And we’re not really sort of good at that to reach out to do. So would you use partners to maybe help the small farmer or an aggregation of farmers? We would. And then that’s slowly starting to consolidate from an industry perspective too. We’re starting to see cooperatives or groupings of the smaller farmers and then it becomes easier to sort of implement tech, see some value around that. There’s a lot more vertical integration through that farming and poultry industry. It makes perfect sense. So one of the things I like to often say is that this is a team sport. Nicolas, I think, stated it in the right way, nobody can do everything well. So how do you partner? And we’ll just go down the line this time. How do you partner to deliver a solution? How do you team? So the easier ones for us are sort of around IT, ICT transformation that we can sort of do most of that ourselves. When we start to focus on industries, we rely on partners who are more consultative, a bit more strategic, which we do, as well as sort of hyperscalers. We rely with people like the AWS of the world. You’re reading over my shoulder for my next question. Thanks for showing it to me all of the notes to do that. We’ll come back to that as a question. And some go to market partners. There are people who are sort of stronger in particular industries to do that. So we use them or partner them to do that, especially for small farmers and cooperatives around that too. So you’ll create an offering and then land it on a hyperscaler or Yes. Okay. And that’s predominantly to sort of drive down cost in doing that. It turns out to be a lot more of an OpEx model than us investing into it. Makes perfect sense, Tahira. Same question. How do you partner? Yeah. It’s a difficult question actually because That’s why I asked it. Dassault Systems being in twelve industries. We have partners. We have a lot of partners. But if I was selfish and only talked about the industry that I’m responsible for logistics, focusing on that obviously, across the multimodal forms of transport, we have a lot of partners from data providers through to partners who even on the manufacturing side, where we’re involved with our partners. So it’s a very difficult question because we do have a lot of partners. We recently joined forces with Nokia on the five gs, which is obviously a very hot topic. And providing five gs through a virtual twin is one of the things we’re working on. Excellent. Alan, you make drones and you make lots of cool stuff. How do you deliver that? How do you team up with somebody? Yeah. We team up with a lot of people different factors. So like we’re, we do everything from manufacturing, designing, manufacturing the drones, testing to operating the drones. So at all levels, we’ve got lots and lots of partnerships. I mean, I think given the conference we’re at, I mean, I’ll talk about our comms partnership. And so we’re partnered with a company based out of Ireland, Cubic Telecom. And they actually simplify our comm stack a lot for us by working with the MNOs on our behalf. So that’s one of the good partnerships that we have that leverage the MVNO strategy, which I think Nicolas might like as So for us, it’s one solution that gives us access to a broad range of MNOs. Right. Well, in the world of today, actually, it’s completely different because maybe a century ago, you had to build everything yourself. Right. Now you need to be very good at one thing and do it very well. You have a a absolutely great ecosystem around on on what can be commodities that you can basically partner with and be the best one in what to do. So we are using a lot of partners. And what we do is unique and this is the only thing we’re doing, which is basically the software, the antenna and a big part of the satellite is done by ourselves. The rest is through partners. So what kind of partners would you want? Other operators? So you’re here. This is seventeen eighty buildings above. Can give you a lot of so you have partners helping you to build the satellites. You have partners like SpaceX to launch the satellite. Right. We cannot build our own rocket to do it. It will take more time than it it took to to SpaceX. We are partners for the ground stations. We are partners for all the the development of the codes. But specifically, one of the key thing when you are a satellite company, if you look around in the history, most of them are not here anymore. So that’s very risky. It’s a risky business space. Capital intensive. That’s a risky business. Yeah. I’m not saying that it’s the only one. But the the point is that you really need to be to be able to sell what you what you have. Right. And when you have a constellation which is LEO, low Earth orbit, you basically cover everywhere of the planet. A hundred percent of planet is covered. You need to have also your sales. They need to be global. Locally, very strong, but you need to have it everywhere. So one the key partners that we have commercially are the mobile network operators or the MVNOs. We are not just standard toward the devices. We also standard toward the MNOs. So we act like a mobile network operator ourselves. So any telecom operator can interact with us without any effort, like with a roaming interface. So we are just the extension of the mobile operators everywhere there’s no coverage. So you would work with his team as an example? I can work with basically everybody, yes. Nicholas? Yep, we agree about what you said about IoT being a team sport. A puzzle that we need partners, need to leverage this ecosystem to solve this kind of Tetris game somehow. And it goes from network operators for us, so like satellite, for example, that could help us expand our footprint, module makers, device makers, solution providers, system integrators that will help get deep down into the actual verticals with niche expertise. And last but not least, the customers themselves, which we consider a partner because we have a shared interest in seeing them succeed because we are not going to succeed as a connectivity provider on our own. And that’s sharing that value that we create, that we help the customer extract, so then we can be successful. But it’s not like one company can do the whole thing. Or could, but could you do it well, fast, and at a reasonable cost as well? Right, right. So I’ll again invite, if anyone in the audience has a question, just raise your hand. I know it’s difficult in this format. Don’t be shy if you do have a question. Irene over there has a microphone and we’ll take your question. We’ll keep moving, but in case you do, just let us know. So the big question of the hyperscalers. Friend or foe? How do we view the hyperscalers? You’re smiling, so what do you think? How do you work with them? How do you ensure they don’t eat your lunch? Frenemies. Frenemies. I hope there are no hyperscalers here. I don’t think we’ve got to the right balance per se, at least I can maybe speak for the region which we work in, where there’s a huge demand for connectivity. And so then the hyperscalers are clients of us because we need to provide them that. There’s a huge demand on the small and medium businesses, which then we bundle hyperscaler products, M365, GWS. And there, it’s a balance because we are really a channel into market. We then don’t own that relationship with the client when we bundle that. You co own it or you’re Yes, to do that. So it’s at a balance on both sides to do that. And I’m sure that there’s going to be a period of time where that co exists. And also some of the challenges. I mean, the compute side, I think that the hyperscalers are pretty dominant and then ubiquitous across the region. Around collaborate tools, apps around that, there are enough sort of local flavors, which provide innovative, competitive solutions to it. So might you balance between different hyperscalers? So there’s a workload on GCP and a workload on AWS. And we take that approach on both sides because we are also large consumers of hyper scalers. We always take a sort of a multi cloud approach and we do that to our clients. We position ourselves into the client as a cloud expert and we don’t say we’re a Microsoft expert or a Google expert. Are you cloud agnostic expert? Yes, to a large extent we are. And we help clients migrate from one brand to the other. Okay. To do that, we carry a lot of optimization tools for each of the hyperscalers to then show what that value is to the client and if they choose to move. Which makes sense. So Nicolas, I’ll go over to you. Hyperscalers, friend or foe? Well, I’m in charge of partnerships, so of course everybody’s a friend. That’s the easy answer. But of course, we are working with them, especially as part of what we provide is simplified cloud to cloud integration. And that’s the differentiator that we can provide. And as you said, being as agnostic as possible, even if our funding team is formerly AWS. We have this background as well. But making sure that for our customers, we provide the easy access to their cloud infrastructure as possible and continuity of service. You mentioned GCP. Last year, GCP discontinued part of their IoT offering. That’s right. So what we did is making sure that any customer relying on that can easily adapt the infrastructure, switch to another provider if needed, but making sure that in the end, in its ever changing environment, you can still have continuity of services and not having your business put upside down with any change. You bring up a good point, which would be an interesting different panel on what happens when the generic IoT platforms then become specific again. But that’s not this panel. But we went through the same struggles at my company where we had a very generic offering and now we’re very vertically targeted. So Alan, I’ll go over to you hyperscalers, friend or foe? Friend is definitely enabler. I think I would go as far as to say, we’re Amazon cloud users ourselves and that’s a massive enabler for us. But I mean, I think in the last five years and the cloud has become more of a commodity. And I think Google have caught up, Microsoft have caught up with Azure and I think it makes it much easier to shop around. So there’s now many enablers. But no, I think it’s a lot of business wouldn’t be here today without those guys. Well, AWS sort of or Amazon specifically the notion of drone delivery kind of created the awareness, I think, around the market from and I think you’d probably benefit from that a bit. Yes. I mean, like, yes. And not to get specific on the delivery. Yes. I mean, Jeff, I think, promised it, I think it’s thirteen or fourteen years ago now that Amazon would have drones in the sky. I think this year they’ve started a trial for the first time. I think they’re planning on about three thousand deliveries this year. So yeah, no, I mean, Google in the same vein have their wing project, which is probably the most successful drone delivery business. And they’re currently operating in Australia pretty extensively and small operation in Ireland. But friends of ours, they’re great. They help us with regulation. Big companies can open doors that we can’t. Interesting. Gianluca, hyperscalers, friend or foe? We are hyperscaler agnostic. No, I have no comment. Was that an option? Tahira? Yeah. I mean, we very much work with the hyperscalers. Yeah. I mean, of course, differentiation, very important. So they don’t eat you for breakfast. But, yeah, definitely. And will you manage between, as we were saying, a multi cloud, different hyperscalers? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Excellent. So I think we might land on kind of a fun topic, which is the applicability of metaverse to this area. I know in the satellite area might be interesting, but what are you guys seeing in terms of metaverse in enterprise and industrial when it comes to logistics as an example? I think we have quite a lot of at least tech, which is related to mobile or mobile usage. It’s the rah rah part used to be with consumer. People using it for gaming, for individual experience. And I think that’s where it’s going to take off initially. Initially. We’ve seen some industrial use cases where they’re manufacturing in areas where they’ve done that. And it’s a great device because you see beyond what the visual is, even through material you work with and in wax to do that. Can you describe a use case in that area that you’re actually, that’s not a POC? We were talking, Nicolas, I think mentioned POC earlier on. And this is not something which is in our markets, but if you end up going to like the Porsche factory per se, they’re a bunch of four, five technicians in a unit which are putting things together. And it used to be that they were very visual, they used to read monitors to what they were able to do. And today, they wear masks around them where the readings are visual to them. They’re right in front of you. And they’re able to then picture what’s within the devices as they fix that together. That’s just really sort of brought up the speed of the production, the quality of the production, bringing down the defects to do that. Now there’s still very niche and more higher end type of manufacturing, but I think it’s a period of time where that would start to get further down and into that. So Tahira, I think you want to jump in. Yes, because actually exactly what you’ve described. And these are not POCs. These are actual customers who are using These are real deployments. Yeah, real deployments. In fact, if you visit our booth, you’ll be able to see an example exactly that, where you have people working remotely in their own locations but collaborating together in a virtual world, whether it’s from a technician perspective. And we’ve got an aircraft example of sort of managing the whole aircraft, the build, the design, the whole equipment, collaborating, making decisions, but virtually. And that’s kind of a real world example. I think it’s interesting. From a drone perspective, would you imagine managing a drone swarm, for example, with Metaverse? Is that applicable? Have you tried Potentially. I mean, like currently regulation states it’s a one to one operation. And the permissions that drone companies are going for, particularly in the U. Is a one to twenty operation. So even if you get to a one to one hundred and fully autonomous, there will always be some form of human oversight. And, I mean, why not? The metaverse would be a perfect environment for that. I mean, do you get a much more rich sense of data? You know? So, yeah. No. It it would be it would be a great experience, I think, for remote pilots to be able to drag and drop and drag and see different Nothing could be more trendy than a dude with a ARVR headset managing drones in the air. This reminds me a little of a Tom Cruise movie many years ago where they’re swiping stuff around and waving their arms around. But but also then you can work at home in the metaverse Yes. Which is great for delivery. So Yeah. I like that thought. Actually, for us, I mean, we don’t we don’t have we don’t use metaverse, but the the the way the the the fact that you ship to space, the satellites, it’s like if we think all the time in the metaverse because the it’s in space. It’s a place where we I’ve never been. I I will never be probably. So Never been in space. It’s it’s a metaverse there. There was an old TV show that started out with Space, the final frontier. Maybe my American friends will remember that called Star Trek, the original one for us older people. Yes. I looked at you for that one. I’m sorry. So Nicolas, metaverse and the ability for your [customers] to — us that somehow just another interface with the data we discussed earlier on that we extract this data and that’s a new way to access it, interact with it. So be it metaverse, as you say, with a VR headset, be it a minority report interface, be it someone in front of a boring SCADA dashboard. Those are different interfaces, different ways to interact with the same data in the end. And then I would say it’s up to operational level what makes the most sense. Beyond the buzzword, maybe if you want to, you need to raise from investors, maybe Metaverse is the best choice than the SCADA dashboard. The whole thing is what’s going to be actually the more efficient and the more appropriate way to interact with this physical data. Perfect. We have ninety seconds left. So before I thank my panel, I just want to give and I didn’t prepare you for this, but quick hit. What’s the topic that we’re going to talk about next year? Gopi. Good question. And if you don’t have one, just move to No, I don’t have one. Virtual Virtual twins. Drones? Well, everything’s five gs this year, so it has to be seven gs next year, I think. Well, of course, the commoditization of satellite communication that is happening. Clearly, think non terrestrial options is going to be a big topic and a way to expand the footprint and the way you can communicate terrestrially. Excellent. Want to thank the audience. Want to thank my great panelists again. I want to thank the AV staff. You guys did a great job. Thank you to the GSMA. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show.