In today’s ultra connected era, how can we make every interaction frictionless? How can we make every experience safe? What if we all had within ourselves a secure way to access the world? Our identity is the key to securely accessing our future. We all are unique. Me, you, us, them. And protecting each uniqueness is crucial in today’s increasingly vulnerable world. That’s where our unique identity technologies come into play for everyone to safely embrace life. Because the more protected we are, the freer we feel. Unlock the world, make it safer. Hello everyone and welcome to this panel discussion, part of IDEMIA’s Connectivity event series. Thank you for joining us from wherever you are in the world today. My name is Jason Russo Hall, I head up the IoT business here at IDEMIA. I will be today’s moderator for the discussion, trying to keep some interactivity and keep the flow and keep the discussion moving and obviously providing some questions from the audience as they are coming. And on that note please feel free to add your own questions in the chat which you should see on your screens today. With me here today I am joined by Tomasz Wozniak who is Head of IDEMIA Product Management focused on eSIM and IoT. And also joining us, special guest Ken Otsuki, who is Business Development Director and Head of Carrier Relations at Soracom. Before we start, I’ll let you guys just do a brief introduction and a bit more detail about yourselves, your role and Ken also if you could give us a brief overview of Soracom. Thank you so much. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining the event and thanks to IDEMIA for such a great opportunity for the webinar today. I’m Ken Otsuki, based in London, in charge of business development in Soracom and also in charge of the carrier relations in Soracom. Let me just briefly explain about Soracom itself, if I may. We established our company in twenty fifteen, so it was almost like seven years. And by veterans on the telecommunications side, SIM side and also the cloud side of technology. So we established our core network connectivity management platform on the cloud side because we know all of the technology, including SIM card and the telecommunications side and also the cloud technology as well. And in the beginning, we started our business in Japan mainly for sure. But for the past like three or four years, we are accelerating our global expansion recently and now providing multiple connectivities in the global mass customers on the market as well. Thanks for the event. I’m really looking forward to talking about eSIM technology and its future. Thank you, Ken. Hi, Jason. And hello everybody. My name is Thomas. I’m an eSIM enthusiast. I love eSIM and everything that is surrounding it, that’s why my main occupation is with regards to the EUICC and its personalization and what you mentioned very briefly Jason is the security. Thank you both and again welcome, it’s good to have you here with us today. So, let’s begin. Let’s take a quick look at the agenda before we get into the detail. So first, we will take a look at the ecosystem, the IoT ecosystem with a brief market overview, obviously with a focus on eSIM and its evolution in the marketplace. Second, we will then take a look at the role of an MVNO service provider in the marketplace today with Ken and maybe take a little bit more of a detailed look at some use cases that are live today. We will then be moving to how to scale your eSIM technology or your eSIM solution in the marketplace today. And then finally, we look to the future. How will eSIM technology evolve? What will that product landscape look like in the future and the impact on the market? Right, let’s begin. First up, Tomasz, over to you. Please take us through some key market information and statistics. Okay, thank you Jason once again. So hello, let’s see the numbers. We’ve been talking a lot about the IoT market. We are talking a lot about the eSIM, not only from the M2M side but from the consumer side. I think the numbers will highlight some of the discussions that we are seeing in the market for the past few years. The first one is linked to the transitions of eSIM into really a digital product. So fifty four percent is the increase of eSIM profile transactions for all the markets, so not only IoT but automotive and consumer. This is not information gathered just by IDEMIA, just by Soracom, this is the information that we gather together within the Trusted Connectivity Alliance, TCA, that is gathering IDEMIA and other players from the SIM market. This percentage and this number shows an increase in the number of profiles that are running across the world that are being downloaded on the eSIM and it is also significantly showing the changes that are happening within the EUICC itself which are linked to the change of the operator, which is linked to the change of the ownership of the EUICC. With this number we are followed by the thirty eight percent of the growth of M2M eSIM shipment. Here I am going from the platform and digitalization mode to the hardware part where we see and it’s coming and it’s being followed by the IoT market when you see that the growth of iSIM interest is very big. It’s not only that we are replacing SIM cards with EUICC, we are also expanding into new IoT markets. At the beginning the market was very shy we can say, but now we see attraction especially in the smart metering, in tracking devices, in the health department, in the agriculture and something that I think we will touch also in the routing system where the EUICC is really finding its place. For the third numbers, perhaps I will let you, Ken, discuss that. Sure. Yes, if I may. Thanks so much. So actually, as I mentioned in the beginning, we started our business seven years ago, and that was in twenty fifteen. And at the moment, actually, all of our customers were using a plastic SIM card. So that means there was zero eSIM customers at the moment. But once the IoT became more mature in the industries, and we see there are lots of inquiries from the end customers, oh, we just want to use the eSIM for the devices. And because of that and in the beginning, actually, most of the end customers’ expectations was to try to get the advantage by using the physical side of the benefits by using the eSIM, mainly because of the long term operations on the device lifecycle, especially in the case of like utility side of use cases, which were expected more than like five years, like ten years lifecycle. And also, there are lots of industrial devices that were expecting physical endurance. That means more like high resistance to humidity and also like temperatures and also the vibrations and some others. So this kind of physical benefits for us was one of the big expectations from the end customers. And once the end customers started the actual deployment to the global market, then having multiple global connectivities and also having multiple profiles was one of the additional requirements from the customers as well. And as you can see here, on the right side of the graph, there are the actual numbers that we have with our customers. And this is the latest stats that we have as of this July. So as you can see here, more than fifty four percent of our customers are already choosing the eSIM. And we used to be quite low, as I mentioned. But every year, we see a high increase of actual eSIM adoption. So eSIM is being more like accepted by the end customers and also the OEMs and also the market as well. That is what we see currently in the market. And on that point, Ken, obviously, seven years is a short time in some cases in our industry, it can be seen as a long time. So over that period, you will have obviously seen change and maybe perceptions change and expectations of eSIM change. Can you maybe just give a little bit of context on the changes and on the expectations you’ve seen with regard to eSIM across the whole ecosystem? Yes. So in the beginning, actually, as I mentioned, there are lots of physical side of expectations from the end customers. But now once the end customers try to deploy their service to global deployment, mainly for the horizontal deployment to many of the countries, then having multiple connectivities in any part of the world is one of the important things. And also how we can try to have the cloud side of smooth integrations with a secure environment is the another side of the story. So how we can just try to make it happen in a secure way, not only from SIM side, but also including device and also the connectivity side and also the cloud side. So end to end sort of like security is another side of the expectations from the end customers. And Tomasz, what’s your view on that point over the last seven years in terms of market expectation? Yes, seven years is a lot. For EUICC perhaps it’s less. For me, it’s one third of my experience in the SIM industry. The EUICC itself found its place only ten years ago, we are already talking a lot about that. I am just wondering what will be the next and how long it will take, but seven years, seven years it will take, it’s a time that passed when we spent a lot of effort and experience to build the interoperability. The beginning was tough, of course it’s everything, it was ten years ago. Or it was everything, it was EUICC ten years ago or seven years ago even when I remember when we met first time with Ken, we discussed the proprietary solutions at the beginning and they of course emerged after into the thanks to the GSMA into some standards and we finally achieved interoperability and I think we are very happy to announce that interoperability for the past few years is already existing. The second part as I mentioned is the experience with the markets. EUICC from the beginning has been invented to support one or two use cases. During the past seven years we of course we found much more use in the EUICC and we developed additional features on top of that. First of all, is the security, but I’m not talking about the security inside the EUICC, it’s as secured as the SIM card, even better because we consider that we have to put, we added additional mechanism to that. But what is very important is the secure credential management. So everything that we are doing together with Soracom, I mean the profile download that is secure that something that did not exist before where we take care of operator assets, we encapsulate it in some kind of a security and we put it over the air and put it on the EUICC. So a lot of things has happened, first interoperability, this is important. Second, experience we gain in the markets and I think we will discuss that more today hopefully. And the third part is the security that we assure to the customers and to our clients. Okay, thank you both. And Ken, so maybe moving on in terms of the agenda and topics now from with all of that in mind and from a service provider perspective, what does that mean for the role of a Soracom, of an MVNO in the marketplace today? Thanks. As I mentioned today, there are a couple of points I think. One is how we can easily provide multiple connectivity throughout the world. So especially if the customer really expected global expansion. Then of course, one of the options that they can have is to just try to talk to each country’s MNOs one by one and just try to have physical SIM card connections and just try to have the contract with the MNOs one by one. Of course, that is one of the solutions for sure. But if they are really expecting to have multiple deployments, I would say horizontal deployment to many of the countries, then that is not a very realistic approach. And in that case, like us, the global MVNO can be more flexible, try to have multiple connectivity in many of the countries, and that is one of the solutions that we can bring value to them. So and the on top of that, having the connectivity itself is more of a fundamental point. So if the customer really wants to have the service, then just providing the connectivity is not enough. They also have to comply with local regulations, like certifications, regulatory compliance, law for sure and tax and so on. So that’s another side of this kind of more like operational and administration side of things, and one of the values. So the other side of the mission that we have is how we can just lower the barriers for end customers. And lastly, as I mentioned today, how we can make it more smooth for the cloud side of integrations in a secure way. So that’s the last part of the missions that we have as the global MVNO and the active platforms. And I think as we can see from the slide at the moment, from a use case perspective, there’s quite a range of diverse use cases that you as a service provider have today. Indeed. So as you can see here, we currently have more than twenty Ks, that means twenty thousand customers right now in the global market. And as you can see here, there are some quite typical IoT use cases. So like LiteON is the sort of like a utility and the gas metering project that we have with the end customers. And you can just see some other quite typical IoT use cases, like lift management, EV charging recently and warehouse management and the factory management and also like agriculture use cases as well. And recently, we do see more use cases with consumer related devices as well, like e-scooters, smartwatch, like healthcare devices. So these are the additional customers that we recently have. And if I may, Ken, obviously there you’ve got some non traditional use cases with Bee Hero and actually looking after the kind of insects of the world and the bee population. That’s quite interesting. Very diverse. Indeed. Very interesting. Yeah. So there are lots of agriculture tech companies that are now trying to tackle and try to resolve and address lots of the pain points by using IoT technologies. So this is really the unique kind of scenarios that we see recently. Exactly. And maybe on that, Ken, if you could maybe just give us more of an in-depth view on a particular use case and the benefit that the eSIM and IoT connectivity brings to that use case. Thank you. Yeah. So here is another interesting topic and use case that we have within the customers right now. So as you can see here, this is the Pocketalk and the actual company itself is the Pocketalk as well. And this is a sort of like a translation device and kind of like a consumer related device though. But once the customer just tries to use this one, the device just tries to record the data and then tries to send the data to the cloud side. And then the cloud side will automatically compute and translate the data and then send it back to that. So that means on the device side, it doesn’t do any of the computation almost. But the cloud side will do it on behalf of them. So it’s pure like IoT and quite like a mutual communication IoT device. And if I may, to be more specific, one of the missions that we have to do is the customer really wants to have global connectivity. And they just want to sell the products in any of the countries and they just want to support any of the languages in any part of the world. And also, just want to have connectivity all over the world. So that means we need to provide wider connectivity in that case. And just to try of course, our default connectivity has global coverage, but just try to have wider and better connectivity in any of the countries. We just need to have multiple subscriber management to try to have the better and suitable profiles into the device. So that is one of the use cases where we are using these technologies on the device. Thank you, Ken. I think it’s quite interesting to see actually the real diversity in use cases and actually with twenty thousand customers after only seven years is a huge achievement to be honest. And with that being said actually if we move on to the next topic from a scalability perspective and Tomasz I’ll come to you on this one to start with, how do you think businesses should be addressing their scalability when it comes to eSIM, when you consider the use cases that Ken has talked about here and obviously our experience, how you think businesses should be addressing that scalability topic? So, first of all, very interesting use case. It shows how you can implement eSIM or M2M EUICC in the consumer IoT scenario. So, this is one of the use cases I like because it is showing the variety of the solutions that we can have. And to answer what you said, perhaps we should first discuss three points. The first one Each time when we bring in something new and this is linked to the scalability we have three concerns. The first one is the security and the privacy of course. Is the new solution going to answer to all the concerns that we have on this one. The second is what I already mentioned indirectly with the proprietary solutions is the ecosystem fragmentation. So if I am for example an OEM I would like to build a device that I am bringing to the market and I am not caring if it is working with this operator and if this is working with this service provider, I would like that it work that it is interoperable. So this is the second one and the third one is the system or the challenges of the implementations. If I put EUICC inside, will it work from the beginning? Do I need something else? And that’s why we build not only EUICC but on top of that we build the platform that is enabling the download of the profile. So something that Soracom is using, something that a lot of our clients are using. And in this case, with the EUICC we answer to all three of them. And we direct of course the use cases towards the OEM factory, where we see big advantages of EUICC towards other solutions. First, we are bringing EUICC in different form factors. It’s not because we like that, it’s to reduce or to improve the PCB footprint that is requested. For seven years, so I will stick to the seven years of this period. For several years we saw the decrease of the form factor from standard SIM cards that was plugged into the smart meter up to wafer level chip scale package. That is one of the smallest packaging and also other packagings that can be even smaller than the chip scale package, which has two by two millimeter dimensions. So this is a big advance and then we can of course talk about the form factor that does not exist which is integrated SIM that you basically put inside the system on chip. The second enablement is the factory testing. In the previous years, in the previous life of the device, we just had to take a SIM that was tested and put it into the device and plug it in to test that it’s working. Now when we are soldering and this is what you mentioned Ken before we have fifty six percent of the increase of the embedded we have to give an ability to the factories to test it inside so that means switching from the test profile to the final destination profile and this is something that we are bringing. And the third point is the advantage linked to the security and to the concerns. If I am soldering a device I want to be sure that this device is working from the beginning. I cannot remove it after. I cannot go and to have my technician looking for the device to change the chip. So that’s why we are bringing with a design OS that is answering to this one that is having a built in self testing where you can check the memory that we are building the memory erosion mechanism to prevent from something like that. And this is how we scale from our side in terms of the chip, we are scaling the solution to answer to our customer needs. So really from your perspective then Tomasz, the scalability is around how you integrate that connectivity into a device. Much more smoothly and much more efficiently cost wise, space wise. Ken, from your perspective, how do you see that obviously being a service provider in the ecosystem today? Thank you. Actually, my scalability understanding is also quite similar to Tomasz. So the first thing is about how we can improve like PCB size and also footprint, because even with the current MFF2, which is the six by five millimeters, sometimes the customer just tries to complain about its size because just to consider in the silicon dioxide industry, even this kind of size is a little bit too big to them, especially in the case of like a smartwatch, some other utility meters and devices where the PCB size is really sensitive. In that case, even six by five millimeters is a little bit too big to them. And sometimes they are asking, oh, do you have the smaller size of the options for the eSIMs? Then they really want to make the PCB a much smaller size with that. So the first thing is about how we can just try to optimize the size of the eSIM. So that is one of the things for the further scaling. And next one is more for the actual operations. So the actual question is how we can ensure the interoperability itself. Because one sort of like benefit of the eSIM is the end, as I mentioned today, end customers do not need to purchase each provider’s or each MNO’s SIM cards in every single country. But on the other hand, so that means they don’t need to do the testing with, like, ten, like twenty different SIM cards anymore. But on the other hand, once the eSIM itself is soldered already, then we also need to try to ensure the interoperability and also the sort of like stability of the connectivity itself because the eSIM itself has already been soldered and that is sort of like the only option that they can just use. So what we are currently doing is having multiple tests with the various major IoT modules, so that we can just try to ensure the connectivity in any part of the world and with any of the MNOs. So I think these two are the key points here. And I think we’ve actually hit upon a very interesting topic because we have a number of questions coming in from the audience today. I think maybe we take a couple of them now as we move through. So one of the questions coming in is how do you choose or how would you choose between the eSIM or the iSIM as you kind of pick the connectivity form factor you need? Tomas I’ll come to you first. Okay, it is a difficult question for me because I would select either one or the other, both are very good. But from the customer perspective, there are customers that still prefer EUICC. It has been certified as I said, it has been a little bit longer than the integrated iSIM and they are waiting for assurance. And from their side they have typical needs that we can answer easily with soldered hardware where everything in terms of the lifecycle management is clear. On the second side, on the other side, when we are talking about specific markets like for example what you mentioned the tracking devices where the power consumption must be really correctly measured and also the size and the design is really limited in terms of the dimensions. The iSIM seems perfectly suited. It does not have any form factor, it’s transparent. I think it’s an OS that you put inside the system on chip and in this case I think the iSIM is perfectly suited. Of course when we will develop the market other use cases will come, but for both for the moment for me both are coexisting perfectly. And there is one advantage is either it is eSIM or it is GSMA approved iSIM. Your subscription manager will work in both cases. You can download the profile with no issue either it is a Soracom profile that is working on IDEMIA UICC or you take a module vendor that is having an integrated UICC and you downloaded it, it would work. So the question is rather what is needed on your side, what do you put more if it is a power consumption or perhaps you would like to have some other features that can be enabled with the EUICC. Thank you, Thomas. And Ken, from your perspective, how would you answer that question? Thank you. If I may, yes, I think I totally agree with Tomasz’s opinion. So size wise, the cost and the power consumption, these are quite one of the benefits of adopting eSIM technologies. But if I may, on top of that, what we can expect more might be like the process change. So currently, in the case of like eSIM the customer or like OEMs try to purchase the module from the different supply chain. And from the operator side like us, they will try to purchase the eSIM physically. So there are two different supply chains and logistics side of things. And also, of course, then the customer needs to solder. And we are doing a lot of training and technical support for how they can just do the soldering, how they can connect with their own module and so on. So but in the case of the world of iSIM technologies, the SIM profile is pre installed inside the module. And also, there will be no physical SIM anymore. So in that case, what a customer like an OEM has to do is just purchase the module with the iSIM embedded in a pre-installed version, which may be more beneficial to try to optimize the whole supply chain. And also the heating process or soldering process will be more optimized in the end. So this is kind of like the physical and the sort of like process change is what we are also expecting in the world of iSIM. So if I were to summarize those answers just quickly, we’re basically seeing iSIM as an evolution from eSIM, both from a performance perspective and from a new form factor perspective. And both should be part of any kind of customer portfolio, different use cases, different needs, but ultimately interoperable between each technology. One more question actually, back to you Tomasz, one related to eSIM profiles in fact. So do mobile operators or MVNOs need to adapt eSIM profiles per device? This is the question that we get especially from the industry players that just use connectivity instead of building that and so I think operators and service providers know very well that most of the time we don’t do anything with that so if you have an eSIM profile that is working on one of the devices it doesn’t forbid you to put it on something else and it should work. If it doesn’t work it is more a device issue I think rather than the profile. On the IDEMIA side we are testing, I think Ken you mentioned that you are working with the module vendors. IDEMIA exactly, we are doing the same. We are getting the module vendors from our partners and we are running them through the hundreds of tests linked to different profiles from different regions and I can once again say that there are profiles that are working on all of them. All of the profiles are working on all of them. Most of the issues that we can find if any are more linked to the power consumption or the lack of respect from some of the devices within the current or the voltage but the eSIM profile is working perfectly. And what I mentioned before and I’m repeating this once again is if I have an eSIM profile that is working on the UICC nothing prevents it from working on the integrated UICC. Of course under condition that it is GSMA approved. Okay, thank you both. I think we can conclude that eSIM technology is ramping up and changing the face of IoT connectivity as we see it today. But what about the future? What do we see on the horizon? What technology evolutions are coming next? Maybe, Tomasz, I’ll come back to you if you can start and just give your view on what the future does look like or may look like from your perspective. Yes, that’s a very key question and we’re having that once again, we’re discussing that a lot within the GSMA, within the TCA, with our partners, operator partners. As we mentioned from the beginning the IoT market is expanding. We have new use cases, we are having some security threats coming from the hackings from all over the industry that are linked with the fragmentation or with some other challenges. We are trying to answer them. EUICC or integrated iSIM seems to be the best match where we can put the security asset to prevent from that. But by doing that we have to tailor the solution. So I think there are two important aspects that we have to discuss and we have to align on. The first one is the IoT protocols. For the moment the specification is running on either on SMS or on HTTPS. We have to adapt other protocols to be really IoT proofed. And the second one is the personalization. We mentioned EUICC, it’s being personalized within our factories and then we deliver that to the company that is delivering that to the OEM. So this is let’s say a standard process but within the integrated we need to do the personalization externally. We are connecting already with our partners, have our service externalized or even the cloud where we do the personalization that’s not over the air but over the wire. But this is a very important aspect if you want to move on in terms of the interoperability. For the moment, it’s being discussed, but I think this is the near future that we are going to see. And Ken, from your perspective? Thank you. From the MVNO, global MVNO point of view and the platform point of view, actually, we do not see a big issue itself on the current M2M certifications. But just trying to consider the specific use cases or the technology wise, we may sometimes see challenges. I think there are a couple of examples. But one thing is about NB-IoT, let’s say. So in the case in the world of NB-IoT, there is no SMS support. Of course, it can support, but the industry specific specification and the GSMA guidelines supporting the SMS features on NB-IoT is optional. And so far, not all the operators who are running the NB-IoT network are supporting the SMS features. But speaking of the M2M GSMA specifications, using the SMS plus OTA is a mandatory feature to trigger the actual profile download. So there’s this kind of technology gap that actually exists. And also in the case of quite limited IoT devices, let’s say, like asset tracking devices, they do not stay awake throughout the lifecycle. That means once they really need to send the data, that’s only the timing that the device wakes up. So in the case of like a recent asset tracking case that we saw, it only wakes up when they really need to send the data, but it just wakes up for like twenty seconds. In that case, there is not enough time frame to complete the actual profile download. So the technology itself is not kind of like a mismatch, but just considering the actual customer use cases, actual device design and the implementations, sometimes there is a sort of gap between the actual standardization technologies and also the actual implementation on the customers’ and OEM side of design. These kind of things are sort of like the challenges that we sometimes see. Agreed. And I think just one question I know, Tomas, you will like, just coming in and I think everybody will be asking and thinking the same thing. So for the new evolution in the IoT specification, what’s the market expectation around timing and deployment of that? So the market is always as it is, always wants to have it ASAP, so as soon as possible. This is true, we’ve been discussing with our customers, with our partners. Whenever they hear there is a new specification arriving, of course they want to have it as soon as possible to implement it, it must be ready for now. And this is what we are going to do of course. But on the other side I wouldn’t be worried about the specification itself and on the complexity because it’s something that is going to be handled by us. We in fact, someone that is just using a connectivity, so taking our SIM, sorry the EUICC or the integrated EUICC and putting it in their device and putting it on the market, they don’t want to hear if it is EUICC M2M, if it is a working group seven, if it is EUICC consumer. What do they want? They want that it is working. So everything that is the complexity and the implementation should be transparent for this client. It’s us, it’s more IDEMIA-like companies and Soracom-like companies that should take this complexity and make it transparent, put it in an abstraction layer on top of that, not only on the UICC itself but also on the server side, provide the APIs, I’m sorry I’m perhaps too technical and basically make the world happen and if someone is pushing the button so they enable a new M2M, working group seven, SGP32 sorry I am throwing some numbers, acronyms but this should happen, it should be transparent for the customer. Thank you, Tomasz. So I think we’ve got a few minutes left. I think let’s go to maybe a couple of questions just to kind of finish off. So a couple more from the audience. So Ken, one for you maybe. Why is connectivity orchestration so important for M2M connectivity management? You have sixty seconds. Well, thank you. All right. So from our point of view, of course, just to try to provide the multiple and global seamless connectivity is one of our missions for sure. But if we try to bring any of the local profiles with the MNOs, then always the network integrations and including like subscription manager will happen. And sometimes it will take quite a lot of effort and time for that. And of course, we can just try to do that, but this is really time consuming and hard negotiations with the MNOs always happen. So but once we are ready for everything, so that means we can aggregate multiple profiles, then that is going to be quite a good asset for the upcoming deals as well. So this is kind of orchestrating and how we can just try to aggregate multiple profiles, which is really essential, and those are quite important points for the further expansion of the global business. Okay. Thank you, Ken. And just staying with you very quickly, what role is the public cloud playing in eSIM management? Okay. Good question as well. Yeah. So as I mentioned in the beginning, actually, we set up our whole core network on the AWS environment. So that means in our office, there are no servers, no equipment at all because everything is running on the cloud environment. And not only is this about the core network, but also the connectivity management platform side. We are also establishing the cloud environment as well. So and one of the other things is how the EUICC plus the subscription manager will be on the cloud environment. So really, we are also doing lots of investigations and research and we are really looking forward to how GSMA standardizations and how the security policy will be in the next few years. Can I? Yeah, okay. So, I can assure you that Subscription Manager on the cloud is working perfectly. So, that’s why I can assure you. I think recently we did some press releases about the collaboration that we’re having with Microsoft. I think it’s something and one of the key points that is linked to the expansion of the UICC and the needs that we see. Being limited to just one or two premises is no longer a possibility, we have to be available in all the countries, in all the continents and collaborating, partnering with a public cloud is something quite important. It’s not only on the subscription manager but we could think further about the personalization and other things. Thank you, Tomasz. Thank you, Ken. Well, we’re coming to an end for today’s session. Just before we wrap up, very briefly, if you were to kind of leave one message with the audience today within ten seconds, what would that be? We’ll start with you, Tomas. One message? Okay, but I have three, sorry. Okay, three of the ten. Three. First one is the partnership. You will not succeed in IoT without the partnership. The second one is the trust between all those working. We have gathered the trust with the banking, telecom and we want to expand it to the IoT. And the third is what I mentioned is the transition. In fact it’s a seamless transition which is linked with the trust and partnership so that our clients do not see the complexity that it from time to time may bring. Thank you, Thomas. And Ken, your key takeaway for the people today? Can I say three points as well? So, yes, from my point of view, I think we have three points. One is, as we have discussed today, technology evolution is one of the things. Of course, it seems it has been ready for like ten years. But now, the IoT specification is coming, the iSIM is coming and other form factors are coming. So there are lots of new evolutions happening in the industry for the further scaling on the road ahead. And secondly, it’s more like security wise. We are always trying to ensure the security within a quite secure environment. And of course, the eSIM and the EUICC work for that. So this is the second point. And lastly, as you mentioned, the partnership for sure is one of the important points. So not only just the eSIM itself, but the subscription manager is another side. And on the device side, as I mentioned today in the beginning, how we can try to ensure the cloud side, the Internet of Things side is still an important thing. So everything should be connected to each other. And IoT is really tough to just go with one company. So in that case, how we can just try to make the partnership safe, including the customers, is really an important point. Thank you, Ken. That was definitely more than three. Sorry, it was a bit long. It was a very long ten seconds. Thank you both. Yes, but thank you both. And there we have it, everyone. We’ve heard from two of the leading industry experts today. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for your questions. And we look forward to welcoming you again to another IDEMIA Connectivity event in the very near future. Thank you and have a good day or good evening wherever you are. Bye bye for now.

Right, hello, everyone. It’s a good time to get going. Sorry, we’re just running about a minute late. So hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar session with Soracom. Today, we’re going to be talking about EV infrastructure rollouts done the right way. I know it’s a really busy time for everyone on this call. I just want to say thank you, first of all, all of you for being here. It’s really great to see that we have so many people with us today. There’s gonna be lots of opportunity today to discuss everything you would want to know about EV charge, IoT’s role within the world of EV charge. And we have some genuine thought leaders and experts with us today who are gonna help answer any questions you’ve got as well over the next forty five minutes or so. So let’s make a very quick start. So hello, my name is Duncan. I head up the marketing team here at Soracom. But don’t worry, you’re not going to be hearing too much from me today. Actually, we’ve got a couple of really great speakers for you today. First of all, have Petar Georgiev, who is head of strategy and partnerships at Ampeko. He is a seasoned EV charge expert, I think it’s fair to say. He works for Ampeco, which is a charging management platform for EV vehicles. Petar himself was the 2021 winner of the EV Stars Under 30 award. And he’s also among the 2022 class of Forbes Bulgaria 30 Under 30, ranking in science, tech, and health care. Hey there, Petar. How are you doing? Hey Duncan, great to hear you Thanks. Thanks so much for joining us. Really looking forward to hearing your presentation in a few moments. And we’ve also got Yiru. So we’ve got Yiru Zhong, who works with us here at Soracom. Yiru is an M2M IoT specialist. She’s been in the industry for about twenty years in telecommunications. She works with us as a sales development manager, and really bridges that gap between, the language gap between the IT technology and the industry needs. And she’s really focused on net zero topics, covering everything from utilities, environments, cities, you name it. And she’s got some really great insights to share in a moment about IoT’s role in EV charge. So hi there, Yiru. Good to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Really excited to share. Awesome. Great stuff. Okay. Well, listen, let’s let’s not hang about too much. We’ve got quite a few things to get through today. I just wanna spend sixty seconds just giving a little bit of background to everyone attending today. Who we are at Soracom? Why are we even hosting this topic of conversation today? What’s the context for us being here? Soracom itself is a it’s an IoT connectivity platform that helps applicate that helps businesses who are launching IoT developments launch launch into the market. We provide reliable, affordable IoT connectivity that makes it very easy to connect any number of devices from anywhere in the world over cellular connectivity. Our background is we were founded in Japan in 2015 by former AWS and Telco veterans. And today, we’ve got physical offices in Tokyo, Seattle, London. And actually, our team is distributed globally all over the world. We serve more than twenty thousand startups, SMBs, global enterprises across every industry you can think of, agriculture, EV, energy, construction, you name it. And in fact, you’ll find a Soracom SIM card in over four million devices globally. We’re financially supported by KDDI in Japan. And we actually have capital investment from other technology innovators like Hitachi, Secom, and Sony amongst others. So that’s just a very, very brief snapshot of who we are, and just to add some context around why we’re presenting today. If you do want to learn anything more about Soracom, we’ve got a couple of members of our team on the call today in the live chat. So we have Nicolas. I believe Camilla has joined us as well. So if you do wanna ask any questions, not just about Soracom, but about anything that’s presented today, by Petar, by Yiru, anything that comes up, please do use that live chat feature in the Demeo portal, just to raise those questions. I promise we’ll get to as many of those as we can before the end of the session. Okay, I think that’s enough from me for the time being. So, yeah, just a reminder, use that Q and A. Use that chat box for any questions you’ve got. We will get to the Q and A at the end. But for now, I’ll be quiet, and I’ll hand over to Petar for the first part of the presentation. So Petar, over to you. Yeah, thanks, Duncan. And, yeah, hello everyone from my end. I have prepared a really interesting presentation for you today and I hope you find it interesting, but I tried to really, you know, explain a bit more about today’s landscape in EV charging and also some of the main main challenges along the way and also how they open opportunities for companies in the whole ecosystem. So if you can go to the next slide, please. Today’s topic is really also with an outlook to what comes next. The electric vehicle transformation and the transition to cleaner mobility is already happening. We now see even faster pace of how that happens. So it would be really interesting to hear also your viewpoint. So indeed, don’t hesitate to use the chat section for any comments you may have. So the next slide, please. Today’s agenda is broken down into several different aspects. So first, I’m going to talk about the EV charging market, the landscape and the outlook. Then I will cover the different roles and market models in the EV charging ecosystem and the interaction that we see there. And I will also focus a bit on the deployment challenges with regards to charging. That can be quite broad, obviously, but, I’ll try to narrow it down to a few things in particular. Next slide, please. So a bit about myself and also the company I work for. Duncan kindly mentioned in the beginning, so I won’t spend time on that. But with the next slide, I wanted to show you a bit more on who actually represents. So I work at Ampeco and we are a white-labeled CPMS or charge point management platform software solution that is cloud based. And in the next slide, you’ll be able to see some of the functionalities, the features that we enable. So if you can go to the next slide. You can see here some of the features that our management software enables and that I’m sharing just to give you a bit of a context about the things that I’m going to talk later in my presentation. As you can see, I come from a very specific industry niche of providing those solutions to charging point operators, and we do that globally. As you can see on the next slide, we have more than fifty thousand chargers connected to our system with really different markets represented from, you know, the European market and the UK market then going into the APAC region and North America, but also some other parts of the world. And we see not just the charging points that are connected, but also the number of sessions that we experienced only last year. I would imagine this number would be times bigger this year, and that’s also a trend that we see growing more and more in the business in general. So in the next slide, you’ll see why I mean that. The EV sales, to begin with, we see the global EV fleet really growing in the next years, and that’s driven by several different factors. I mean, it’s true that there’s the policy element of it where governments are pushing in that direction, right? There’s also the technology is maturing in a way. Supply chains are consolidating, and we now see the battery supply chain being linked to, you know, also several manufacturers that are creating deals to secure supplies for batteries and then scaling up that production, making vehicles more affordable. This is all going to result in really major increase over the next years. And that’s just a short outlook here until 2025. Just to demonstrate also how the markets are being distributed. We see really quite a lot of vehicles being sold in China and Europe. The U. S. Is also catching up. But we’ll see also other major markets, like Canada, Japan, India, of course, grow even further going into the next decade and also going towards 2050. But also, you see how that is demonstrated in terms of the share of sales of new cars across those same markets. We see that right now in 2021, 2022, one out of five cars in Europe is electric that’s being sold, and this will be two out of five in a couple of years’ time. So I think we’re really on the cusp of that transformation, as they say, at the bottom of the hockey stick. And I think the only way from here is up. And we see that on the next slide also in terms of the numbers for EV charging. That’s a different sort of view here that you see with several different scenarios. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, One is regarding the economic transition, the other one about the net zero transition. So in the ETS, bars, you would see what is economically feasible. And in the net zero, you would see what’s the real optimum, need to get where we want to by 2040, by 2050, if we want to go on a net zero path for the whole economy and transport is growing clearly in the case of EV charging. So here, the global network, that’s millions and millions of connectors. We see also an interesting distribution. Most of them will be in home. Some will be also at work. Public slow and public fast, that’s essentially the chargers that are on street next to houses that don’t really have a driving lane where to park a vehicle and charge it. Public fast, those are the chargers which essentially would be on the highways, and we see that there are not that many in terms of the number of connectors. And that would also mean a lot of investment. And you see also in terms of ebus and e trucks, we expect them to grow also quite a lot in numbers as production ramps up. So yeah, we’re also going to need a lot of investment in that. But you see how the investment in home isn’t really that much, and there’s a lot of benefits to that. Luckily, what we see on the next slide, for example, is that really charging happens in about three main locations, but first and mostly it happens in the residential setting. Some studies suggest that anything between 60% or 80% of the charging happens there. And this is something that will also persist in the next years, according to several different reports from the IEA to, also IRENA, which is, again, an international body that looks into renewables and smart charging. But then going to workplace and fleet, that’s also where we’re gonna see a lot of vehicles being charged. And the main reason is also the longer dwell time there as well. And then also the last aspect, let’s not, of course, miss that point, which is the public charging. This is the charging that will happen when you need to do a long journey for the most part, and this will be also very fast power charging. So what does that mean for the business of EV charging? That’s also what I wanted to highlight now. So on the next slide, I’ll try to showcase not just the residential workplace and fleet, and then public, but delve into them a bit deeper and show the use cases that we see in those larger, groups. So starting with, I would say, first, the home charging, as this is where most of the charging happens. I think in that case, have longer dwell time that allows to enable the flexibility needed to provide additional services to the grid or the ability for the consumer, for the EV driver to charge at a cheaper rate. Then some of those drivers will not have that possibility. So for them, we need to consider the on street charging. This is something that, can be in the public domain and at the same time used, by the driver as if that’s their own charger. And there are different ways to do it. A company, in the UK called ConnectedKerb are doing a very interesting project on that. At the same time, there’s, a couple of companies, again, the UK, one of them is called JustPark, which is about sharing chargers. So again, it’s a very interesting, you know, range between where home and on street starts because there are some solutions in the middle. And then a lot of companies like housing associations end up using those chargers as well and providing them as a service to their customers. A lot of charging will happen at work as well. As I mentioned, we spent a lot of time there, and charging at work can actually align really well with the peaks, of solar generation that are during the day, especially in cases where we do have, commercial buildings now more and more required by policy, but also by economics to install PVs at their rooftops. And those PVs, those photovoltaics, they will really feed into the vehicles and they have to be targeted through the use of smart charging to, you know, be utilized when we need them the most. So that also happens through real time data analysis. You know, we look at the data that is available, the prognosis, the mix of the grid and the electricity sources that are in the grid and estimate the ideal way to charge those cars. In a way, the same goes for the next use case that I wanted to highlight, which if we can see it exactly the car parking. So in the case of car parkings, we have similar similarities to the work charging in a way that, it’s, again, considered a depot like charging. Then I wanted to highlight two more. One of them is the destination charging. There, we don’t have really a lot of, capacity for flexibility, but we really don’t need it because the idea with fast charging is really to use primarily, you know, fast neutral fast charging to enable longer range journeys and sometimes, you know, tourism. But also there, we need to look at the grid connection a bit more in detail, because it might need to be enhanced by on-site storage. It might need additional grid upgrades that oftentimes for charging point operators take a lot of time and not necessarily they have the time needed. And also, the business case for the destination charging is linked to a longer period of usage because of the utilization rates, because of the high CapEx investment that you ultimately make in that infrastructure. You need a longer period to breakeven, essentially. So right now, we see a lot of companies just putting chargers with the idea that we’ll have EVs coming down the road. Maybe now we won’t be making money, but down the road, we will. And they’re betting on that. So only now with the increased rate of EV rollout, we will see more and more utilization rate on those chargers. So yeah, there’s some to be said about the business model there and the tenders and the durations of those tenders. And then the last one is the depot charging, again, some similarities to what we see in the context of work charging of car parking, but also corporate fleets or, you know, last mile delivery fleets. They have different needs in terms of the functionalities that you need to integrate in that context. So you need to look at different telematics and routing specificities, but also the ability to integrate seamlessly EV charging into the fleet software. So that’s something that, you know, a lot of those big companies that are doing deliveries that probably you’ve used in the last month, that’s what they will need. And indeed, there’s a lot to be discussed in all those six cases. And that, in a way, has to do with location. And in the next slide, I wanted to even further elaborate not just the use cases define the business model, but primarily the location. And I wanted to highlight three main variables that we see universally, really, from our perspective as a management software provider for chargers. We really see it everywhere. So first, we have the type of charger. Here, you know, we’re looking at from anything from three point kilowatt to even three fifty now that some cars are able to take. Then secondly, look at the motivation for installation. There’s different reasons why businesses want to go into EV charging, and they look at the location in order to find the right fit for their business model. And the third one is the grid connection and grid services. I alluded a bit to the fact that sometimes when you want to have fast chargers, you need to make sure you have the right grid capacity next to them. Otherwise, it could be getting too costly for you. And also at the same time in the home charging business, do have Yeah. You do have different types of flexibility ancillary services that can be provided to the grid. And that brings the following considerations. I mentioned already the longer dwell time and the charging speed. So the type of charger would mean that if you choose a slow charger I mean, it’s probably logical what I’m saying but you need to have a longer dwell time in order to also, you know, enable the grid services. But, you know, generally, it’s a compromise on charging speed. So if you have a slower charger, you agree as a driver to use it longer and at a slowing speed slower speed and vice versa. If you just plug in for fifteen minutes, you need that faster charger. And that’s the real really the first moment where you where you start to look at the business model. Then it goes further because the motivation covers aspects like does your business want to cover a wider area so that drivers don’t have range anxiety? Or your business is more towards revenue generation from the point of view of providing different, perks to the consumers or, you know, providing your charging business as an added value. What I mean here, for example, is do you want to be in the context of supermarket chains? Do you want to have chargers at your location? You know, it’s not necessarily from the point of view of coverage, but really you want to have additional revenue generation from people charging and then shopping at your place. Same goes for hotels, you know, any type of tourism. So that’s the second consideration I would highlight here. And the third one is when it comes to the grid connections, if you want to extend there’s several studies pointing different numbers in different countries, so I guess it depends. But in Lithuania, it was something about seven thousand euros per meter of cable extension, and you don’t want that. If you have to extend by a kilometer, that’s a monumental sum that you don’t want to spend. So you have to rethink, okay, maybe I’m not going to put the charger here. And that’s actually one of the reasons why now also in Europe at least that I’m aware of policymakers started to look at those capacity maps of the medium voltage grid, of the high voltage grid and try to align the so called transportation corridors, the 10T corridors in Europe, to align the chargers that they’re going to put there with the respective electricity that’s available close to them so that, you know, businesses can have ultimately easier and cheaper sort of solution that they offer in the market. And in the context of home charging, I already mentioned the flexibility potential, not just in the context of load management and peak shaving, but also down the road when standards allow it because there are standards and protocols governing all that, also vehicle to grid. So that’s also something that, you know, is a strong consideration for the business model and also makes you choose the right brands of chargers, you know, the chargers that can support everything or the infrastructure that you need to integrate with that. And, you know, in the end of the day, it’s a big ecosystem. And as we can see on the next slide am I frozen or is it just me? No. You’re fine. You’re you’re doing great, Petit. Yeah. Alright. Alright. So just Yeah. You can you can see the new slide now with the orange orange template. Just just before you get into that, I did have a quick question about Capture. I’m not interrupting. You mentioned an acronym earlier on PV. Could you just explain what PV is and what it means? Yeah. Yeah. Photovoltaics. So I I mentioned after that. Yeah. It’s it’s photovoltaics. Yeah. So it’s the solar panels that we have on on on the rooftops. Cool. Yeah. So here, I’m gonna throw a few other, acronyms at you, but I’m not gonna really focus on explaining that slide. I just wanted to showcase the different roles in the in the EV charging ecosystem as described by ChargeUp Europe, which is the voice the voice in Brussels of a lot of charging point operators. And the so called charging point operator, the CPOs, they have quite a lot of responsibilities. And what we do at Ampeco is that we provide them the software to enable all the services that they want to provide. You know, it could be user management, tariff management, energy management, roaming, and all that happens through different integrations. So all those companies need to be talking to each other. And there’s a whole bunch others that enable different things. In your case, what you also do is part of that ecosystem. It’s more on the side of the hardware and related to that the integration with software. But it’s a really complex ecosystem, and everyone has to talk in order to really achieve the optimized charging experience. And I wanted to show you on the next slide how we kind of imagine that from our perspective. So think of a building and next to that building, you have vehicles parked. So you wanna charge those vehicles and give them the right amount of power and manage the load. So by managing the load, it’s really so called dynamic load management that is it’s a feature that can be achieved with limiting the power that is given to the vehicles. That can be static. That can be dynamic. It can be just shifting to, you know, to the next period when more power will be available and understanding, you know, the building. Then, you know, the dynamic load management also includes the battery. So on the one hand, you have the battery storage. On the other, you have the photovoltaics that really make the building a smart building. And indeed, that is ultimately governed by a back office. And in that back office, have all those different components getting together, talking to each other through a language of common protocols. And on top of that, you have a very interesting possibility to further integrate different type of analytics and data. And that’s really what gives a lot of value to businesses, not just to the drivers. Ultimately, the idea is to get everything as affordable as possible and get costs down. But that also happens through and only through business collaboration. So what we see, for example, as features being added on top is forecasts that could be related to the weather, could be related to the electricity mix. In some markets, there’s the possibility to contact energy utilities and exchange data with energy utilities so that they can also optimize their business. The situation that we kind of see on the left hand side, the so called smart building, it ultimately gives a really fertile ground to experiment with virtual power plants as well, especially for bigger buildings that have bigger capacity. And as I mentioned also with fleets that are parked next to buildings, the use of telematics and fleet logistics software that gives insights on how to operate your business are even making it a complete picture. And if we I hope we can see all the elements on the slide now. There’s a few others, basically what I was referring to. Yeah. So now that we look at this, it’s, you know, sometimes too easy to think, okay, let’s take a successful pilot in country A and apply it globally. Well, it would be great if we could, but there’s not really a one size fits all solution for EV charging. And that really shows the need for that flexibility to integrate with different elements and add what is needed for different markets. Quite often this is driven by regulation. But on the next slide, I wanted to highlight a few other points. Yeah, exactly. So the living arrangement and demographics differ in countries. We all know, how, countries like the Netherlands and Australia will compare in this regard. Then also looking at the vehicle type and the vehicle use, also, we see different patterns across different geographies. So it’s really important to have that understanding of the market if you want to really roll out EV charging infrastructure that is suitable for a particular area. I mentioned the grid capacity. I won’t focus on that. But also the stage of EV deployment is quite important. I’m just going to give an anecdotal example. I was talking a few years ago already to some people in Norway that had installed, at the time, considered fast charging of fifty kilowatts at a location that they considered to be very prominent, very important as a corridor, and they needed that charger there. But they installed it in 2015 when there were no vehicles and still Norway was way ahead. It’s not where it is now in terms of the sales. Now it’s like eighty five percent, ninety percent of all sales are electric. By the time it wasn’t the case, and still that was the business decision. But then with the growth of the market, it was evident that this charger is not needed and is not used. Instead, a whole different corridor was created and a lot of people were charging in home and residential settings. So in fact, the utilization rate of this charger did not increase and they had to decommission it and move it, which is a costly exercise, as you can imagine. But it shows really how the stage of the EV deployment is a very important consideration, knowing how the market will mature and understanding the above conditions and also urban planning and the transportation policies that we see locally and also at a broader level, for example, in Europe through the European Union. Those ultimately impact the business decision, how and where to put your charger. And I wanted to focus here a bit more while we’re on this slide on the transportation policy. I mean, just, last night, there was an agreement by, EU, leaders as represented in the council where all the ministers meet. There was a decision to really ban the sale of new combustion engines post 2035. Previously, the European Parliament agreed to that, and essentially the two institutions are the co decision parties in the EU. And the European Commission has already proposed that, what they agreed upon. So now it’s more than clear that we will not see the sales of those vehicles in thirteen years. Of course, we need to look at the secondary market and fleets are a very good opportunity to speed up the battery electric vehicles entry into market. But in the end, it’s really that type of policy that gives signals to OEMs, so the producers of the vehicles. It also gives signals to companies that want to invest into charging. But then once they do that, then different countries have really different policies on EV charging. And that’s what I want to show in the next slide. You would see here a map, and the colors don’t really matter. It’s just to see the different countries. But there was a recent analysis by the Regulatory Assistant Project of about one hundred and forty different smart charging tariffs in Europe. And what really struck me as a glaring gap in Europe is that one third of the markets that were examined, so nineteen out of thirty one countries actually only support that type of smart charging tariffs through their legislation or rather the rest. So twelve countries out of those thirty one don’t allow for this type of services to emerge on the market. So it’s really about stifling innovation here. And instead, governments have to put supportive legislation to especially here in this context allow the basis for flexibility. But then, you know, we see also other troubling developments that could be solved, and I’ll say how, but just to mention a few. In Germany, you have the so called Eichrecht, which is a Germany specific regulation. In Portugal, you have Mobi.E, which is about roaming, and I won’t go into the details of those. There’s a few other markets that have their own specifics that require, especially on the hardware side of things, manufacturers to create a completely different product line. Or as we have right now in the U. K, the upcoming smart charging regulations, they require both software and hardware providers a way to improve their product, which is good. It’s in the right direction. It’s the right type of policy that is really proposed. But it would be a problem if a neighboring country, let’s say Ireland in that case, decides to do something completely different. And this ultimately can create barriers for the drivers, but it’s really about slowing down businesses to roll out infrastructure. So what I would really plead here is to have a harmonized framework. And Europe is going in that direction through the alternative fuels infrastructure regulation, which is now being discussed by the policymakers in Brussels. And I really hope that we will be able to get to a really harmonized single market, which is an open market with the use of open protocols and open standards and a market that supports innovation. And, you know, I think once we have that as a direction, just to think in that direction, I think, is already important to build a really good experience for the drivers. I think I’ll finish here, but I’ll be happy to have, you know, to try and answer some of your questions. And thank you again for your Thank you, Petar. That was great. Thank you so much for going so much detail on all of that. Really, was really amazing to me is how many variables there are when it comes to EV charging. There’s so many different considerations to make when it comes to your rollout. You showed the map on the previous slide there. Do you feel that there’s one country in particular that’s maybe leading the way compared to the rest of Europe? Well, I would say in different aspects you have different countries that they’re leading but clearly Norway is a is a major leader in that category when it comes to EV charging. Also in the Netherlands we see a lot of flexibility being enabled through the role of different actors enabling different smart charging tires, vehicle to grid. But also the market there, for example, in the Netherlands allows that to happen. So it’s really about also not thinking in silos about electric vehicles, therefore transportation. No, it’s really electric vehicles are part of the power markets. And in the cases that are kind of outliers, but you know, in the Faroe Islands for example, there’s a project about leveraging the vehicles as frequency reserve just because they’re not connected to the continental And you know this is really showing how much vehicles are integrated into into the power system and how much they can be if needed. So, yeah, it’s not just transport Well, we’re gonna save some time at the end for for more questions for for Petar. But for now, we’ll just pause and say again, thanks again, Petar. Fantastic presentation. If you have any questions about anything Petar presented there, anything that is even outside of that presentation, please do throw those questions into the chat here in Demio. I promise you we’ll get to those in a few moments. I want to bring in Yiru now. You’ve been very quiet for the last half an hour or so, Yiru, so thanks for your patience. Because I think what I found interesting in Petar’s presentation is, yes, at home solutions make up a bulk of EV charging. But actually, there’s this whole world that requires connectivity and EV charge connectivity outside of the home and work environment as well. I think your presentation is gonna talk a little bit more about the sort of the smart side of EV charge. Is that correct, Yiru? Yep, that’s right. And I think today’s webinar is really timely because as Petar mentioned, the the UK’s electric vehicle smart charge point regulations are gonna come on tomorrow even though it was kind of dated 2021. And what is interesting and and from today’s webinar, I am kind of bringing in the IoT perspective on on the role of IoT in EV charging infrastructure. So kind of taking a step back with the upcoming regulation in the UK, there is a requirement that it is talking about smart. But what does smart mean? And I think as Petar mentioned earlier, the majority of charging happens either at home or at your your workplaces. And, also, he kind of talked about smart where it’s kind of by light led bidirectional electric electricity flow between the EV itself or and the grid. And I think from our perspective of IoT, it is really enabling kind of a bidirectional communications between the charge point and the cloud. And so effectively this regulation is saying, let’s make the charge point communicate with the server so that it is able to then also communicate signals back to the grid. And what this picture is trying to show is the office and the residential homes, which is where this regulation require for all new chargers installed at residential homes and offices to be smart. And what this means is data communications. It doesn’t actually say you must use a particular type of connectivity. So you can use your standard Wi Fi that you have at home anyway, or you could also consider cellular. You will also have the possibility of making sure the charger has a automatic meter reading so that it is able to do the smart metering and smart grid capabilities, which is being able to shift your load, whether it’s happening now or you actually you are required to randomize the start time so that it doesn’t suddenly everybody comes home at five, and then you kind of shock the grid with with all the other demands into the electric vehicle. And I think what is interesting here is we need to have connectivity to actually facilitate all these automatic actions. And this could apply to whether it is managing the charge point, knowing what’s whether your charge point is available, but also facilitating if there’s something wrong that I can see, oh, this is not behaving as it should, should I already send a field engineer to the field, or should I kind of investigate to determine, can I do something remotely, or do I need to kind of escalate and have the fuel engineers to do it? And at that point, you would want the fuel engineer to be empowered with all the information that is needed so that you’re actually doing the the maintenance in one go as opposed to having several trips. And from my personal experience of trying to make my smart electricity meter connect to the server, I would say that I’ve installed them in September 2021, and I am still not connected, and it’s such a sore point. But the point is about the field engineer sending them, knowing what they need instead of having this back and forth and rescheduling. You’re So what’s IoT’s role there? Is is it more around sensor detection and just using smart smart inputs to work out when when action is required, or is it is it something else? Yeah. I think fundamentally is having the data communications between the charge point and and your server, and that’s a requirement as stated in in this 2021 long regulation. But also it also specify some of the security related requirements. You don’t need to have them by tomorrow, but it is going to come on at the end of the year. And I think now is a good time to actually start thinking how could you be facilitating the ability to know what’s happening in your charge point infrastructure, but also having the ability to know what’s happening and then do something about it. I think if maybe we can go to the next slide. Essentially, are saying the IoT, because you are able to have remote access to the ChargePoint, you can do a variety of things. And as Peter mentioned, it is about the real time data and analysis that allows you to do simple things. So from from the the easy ability to know whether it’s available, whether it is happening, to the fact that if I know something is not behaving right from my platform, cloud based platform, I can I have the ability to say, I automatically shut down to a trigger an alert happens and I trigger an event, or the the person managing the console can say, this is something’s happening? I escalate, and then I say maybe this needs to be shut down so we can kind of do something about it. Besides that as well, I think coming back to one of my favorite topic, which is IoT security, is we really don’t need to have a lot of new security software and solutions. You through managing through your standard IoT connectivity management platform or even device management capabilities, you can straight away know what’s happening, and then you can start inferring the status of your of your charge points. I think this is very important because in the end at the end of the day, we do not want to, you know, impose and that’s one of the things about the regulation. It doesn’t actually say what you need to do. It just says the end outcome is is to have a a secure charge point. We’d actually then say depending on what your requirements are and how you have deployed, maybe you have deployed charge points sold in 2018, how are you going to manage all these different iterations? And our IoT should be able to say, I’m able to look into your your previous investment. You don’t need to have new CapEx to kind of invest and then throw out your old deployment. We actually can have all the incremental capabilities that also doesn’t have any burden on your your your designed device. And actually, all of this happens in the cloud so that you’re able to provide layered security activities so that at the end of the day, you are not depending on one single solution to make sure you are secure and demonstrate you have practiced good security hygiene. So I think at the end, we want to say IoT by connecting the charge points to the server, you can actually derive a lot of data that allows you to achieve several of your business goals as stated by the regulation. Thank you for sharing that insight. Do you think when you’re choosing IoT to help you with the regulations, is there How do you make the right decision between, say, cellular connectivity versus WiFi? So this is this this always feels like a loaded question. And I always say that I am not here to, you know, say, oh, you must use cellular or you must use Wi Fi. I really think it is up to up to the to the customer or the enterprise. And I think as Petar says, there is no one size fits all. Everyone actually has their own existing architecture. Are they in Azure? Are they primarily in Azure? Basic things like what is their cloud environment to actually we are we are all very well versed with Wi Fi, and that’s how they go with it. So our solution and any good IoT service provider should say we can actually work with your existing environment and let’s look at so you’re saying my my devices are kind of lacking in in computing capabilities. We don’t really want to further overload our device. We want to have a relative easy integration into management software capabilities like Impeccos. What can we do with it? And I think the ecosystem is important. And from kind of Soracom’s perspective, we kind of say we can work with your constraints and your business goals, and then we can see what happens, what can we offer from there. But, essentially, we want to make it easy to integrate and actually tap into the tap into the wider EV charging ecosystem so that we link to the billing and billing capabilities that Ampeco has, and they facilitate EV roaming capabilities. So in that end, we don’t want to dictate. We say what you have and what we can work with. That’s great. Thanks, Yiru. Well, we’re coming up to the final ten minutes or so of time allotted, and we’ve got a few questions here. Great questions, guys. Thanks so much for giving us those questions. Please do add anything into the chat box if you want, and we’ll try and get them in the next ten minutes or so. I’m just gonna I’ll just stop sharing the screen for a second. So just starting from the bottom down. So Stephen, you asked at the very beginning, is this going to be shared? Is this presentation going to be shared? Yes, it will be. So everybody who has registered for this webinar, whether you’ve joined us live or not, will get a recording of this session and a link to the presentation slides. There’s a message here from Kieran. He’s actually based out in Japan. And he’s got a question for you, Petar. So he says, In Japan, there are around fifty seven thousand convenience stores who are theoretically potential EV station providers. He says, If all of those convenience stores are eager to introduce EV stations respectively, construction and maintenance of these stations will increase electricity consumption in term. How should the station installation be optimized considering these commercial players apart from petrol stations? Wonder if you have any thoughts on that question. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for a quite interesting question. I think we’ll see a lot of those, supermarkets, not all of them, but quite a lot of them turning into, indeed, as you mentioned, EV providers, EV station providers. What we’ll see is probably slower charging that is in the realm of seven or eleven kilowatts and also managed charging. So, you won’t be really able to get, a lot of, electricity there unless some of those chargers are ultra fast and you just go there and you tap into the charger for ten minutes knowing that you leave in ten minutes and also understanding that if you don’t pick up your car you get penalty fees for that. So there’s quite a lot of, you know, opportunities to fully utilize those those supermarkets especially with the consideration of, as I mentioned, photovoltaics solar panel installations on top. So I think I think we’ll see more and more of them indeed becoming serious players. Good question. Okay. Thank you, Petar. And there’s actually a follow on question about the Ampeco platform. Is the Ampeco platform compliant with the new UK smart charge regulations, Peter? Yeah. Actually, the the regulations have stated for the most part, cover the private charging. And in that context, they’re very similar to the previous OSF grant, which was given for smart chargers that are to be connected. So the functionalities that they’re being asked to be supported, from the software side are really okay. It’s really about the hardware vendors that also have to enable those profiles. And here, of course, we’re talking about OSPP, you know, connected chargers. But from the software side of things, there’s no real hurdles, you know, for the operation of those chargers. Question here from Imed. Yiru, maybe this is one for you or Petar, step in if you feel you can answer. So Imed asks, just one question. Do you think that edge computing has a role to play in the charging info? Any thoughts on edge computing, guys? I can say a few words, but I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in edge computing. But if I understand it properly, it is the fact that could we put, could we make kind of edge devices? So whether it’s your sensors in the house or your EV as an edge, keep that device where you can have computing capabilities and run all those machine learning algorithms and so on. So from that perspective, I can imagine that the EV already has a lot of machine learning algorithms for managing the battery device. And if we think that with the EV regulations, are having future views on increasing grid flexibility, then we would need not only the EV itself, but maybe dumb dumber, less less computing heavy energy assets, whether it’s my solar panels compared to EVs or whether just an energy storage or heat pump. How how would they kind of go contribute to a flexible grid. So I think that would be that would be essential in order to make sure you don’t kind of overrun. You can actually facilitate dynamic load management of the grid. Oh, thanks, Yiru. Yeah. Anything to add there, Peta? Not edge computing? No. Fantastic. The last one we’ve got here is from Colin. It’s another one from for Petar. Colin says, So many platforms say they’re the easiest to integrate when it comes to an EV charge point. Can you share any key requirements that are actually essential for charge point operators? Key requirements, So what would the kind of main key requirements be you are deploying an EV charge solution at scale? Alright. So perhaps starting with with the business model itself, you know, think what a company that starts need to understand is what type of challenges they’ll have along the way of their deployment and discuss the whole context of setting up their charging business. Then I think it’s quite quite relevant to look at how you integrate all those different pieces that you need and what’s the basis for it. So ideally a platform should allow to have those different features being added, be it, a specific requirement for smart charging in a given market or specific tariff reimbursement. You know, this has to be, very easily integrated. So this is, you know, something that I would I would hear also also flag. But yeah, perhaps also one other thing is when it comes to operating a business, we see a lot of providers in the market that are using proprietary technology or proprietary protocols. Those are slowly being phased out because also they see where the trend is But you know as much as possible CPOs should be in control of their business. That from my point of view also includes processing of payments and you know different fees that are being added to the bill. For example, there’s a lot of you know, platforms that charge for example for a fee per transaction. Know, that’s something not a lot today, but when you ramp up your chargers it will be so probably won’t be as as good as a as a business idea. So, yeah, there’s different there’s different elements, I think. But understanding the business model and, you know, your progression down the road is very important so that you you make your balance sheets set Well, it comes to the end of the questions that we’ve been given. Thanks so much to everyone for throwing some questions at Petar and there. Really great things that came up there. We’re kind of at time. So just time for me to quickly wrap up here. So I guess what really remains for to say is a big thank you to Petar and Yiru for preparing to do great presentations. So much, guys. We really appreciate it. And now it’s over to you guys joining us today and watching this on demand. It’s your turn to take charge. Soracom can help in a number of ways. We’ve got a number of articles that can help you understand a little bit more on the EV charge market. We’ve recently published content around OCPP, why that’s important for EV charge solutions. We’ve got content around ways to structure your EV charging infrastructure. And we’ve also got content around IoT connected charging stations for EV adoption. If you’re ready to take the next step and interested in understanding not only just EV charge, but also IoT’s role within EV, then we have a team of experts here at who can help. So you can just visit soracom. Io to discover more about the broad range of use cases that we support and the ways that we can help in different areas of your business. That is it. So once again, thanks so much to Petar and Yiru for joining. Remember, if anyone here has any kind of questions about Soracom or anything they want to know about IoT in general, visit Soracom.Io, and we’ve got a team of experts that are ready to speak with you. That brings us to the end. So I’m just gonna say once again a big thank you. And we’ll hopefully see you at another Soracom webinar in the very near future. Thanks very much everyone. Goodbye.

Okay, guys, let’s make a start. So yes, once again, hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being with us today for today’s webinar session. Today we’re going to be talking about a low power mindset in IoT, exploring different ways that you can maximize your IoT device’s battery life. Really great to see so many of you guys on the call today. I know it’s a really busy time, so thank you so much for giving up time in your day to join us. I suggest, you know, we have a lot to get through, so I suggest we just make a start. So if we just jump on to the next slide. Just a couple of very quick introductions. My name is Duncan. I head up the marketing team, as I mentioned, here at Soracom. And today our speaker, Markus, is going to be handling most of the presentation. So Markus is our IoT connectivity specialist here at Soracom. He’s got more than twenty years of experience working within telecom industry with a particular focus on mobile networks. In fact, he spent the last five years working in-depth with cellular modules, specifically within the LPWAN technology sector. So he’s a true power saving expert when it comes to IoT, and I, for one, am very much looking forward to his presentation today. So, hi, Markus. How’s it going? Hi, Duncan. Thanks. How are you? Doing good, thank you. Yeah, all well. A bit cold here in the UK today, but apart from that, doing all good. Thank you. I’ll tell you what, just before I hand over to you, Markus, I’d just like to give a very quick introduction to who we are at Soracom and just give a sixty second overview of who we are, what we do, and kind of the reason for presenting the webinar today. So this is who we are. We are an IoT connectivity platform for IoT applications to launch and scale globally. We can provide you with affordable, reliable IoT connectivity that can accelerate the speed to market and we make it very easy to connect you to the cloud, sending data up to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and we can also help reduce your data consumption, and there are many other innovative features that we provide for IoT deployments. We were founded in Japan in 2015 by former AWS and telco veterans, and today we have physical offices in Tokyo, Seattle, and London, and in fact, we’re global team distributed all over the world. We’re proud to serve more than twenty thousand startups, SMBs, and enterprises across all different industries, from agriculture to energy to healthcare and electronics, and the list goes on. In fact, you’ll find a Soracom SIM card in over four million devices around the world today. We’re financially backed by KDDI in Japan, and then we also have additional capital investment from partners such as Hitachi, Secom, and Sony. And we also have a whole wide range of tools and platform services and features that can help you reduce the amount of power that your IoT devices consume, which is the reason for today’s presentation. If you’d like to know any more, you can just come to our website, Soracom.Io, and you can learn more about the platform. You can also email [email protected]. And we also have on the live chat, if you’re watching the webinar live today rather than on demand, we’ve got Nicolas and Camilla from our team who are in chat right now. So if you want to learn more about the platform, any questions about the products that we provide, those guys are going be available to answer those in real time right now. Anyway, that’s enough from me, and that’s enough about Soracom right now. Say, have we just gone to the next slide quickly, Markus? Great, okay. I’m gonna be fairly quiet throughout the first thirty minutes or so of the presentation. What I would like to say guys is if you do have any questions at all about anything being presented today, please do use that live chat feature that you can see on your screen in front of you. We’re gonna ask you to put as many questions as you like in there. I always feel that the Q and A section of a webinar is usually the slightly more interactive and engaging part of a session, so would really encourage you to put as many questions that you’ve got in there about low power mindset within IoT, and then I promise you we’ll get the chance to answer them towards the end. So I’ll now hand over to Markus. So, Markus, over to you. Thanks, Duncan. Okay. Warm welcome from Berlin where I got a kind of stormy weather, so if it gets some noisy outside, it’s April, you know. And so I will just start right away. Today we will talk about IoT devices and their battery life. So as you might have read already in the invitation, we will try to mention something about the radio access technologies, the RATS and some power saving features within the LPWAN technologies. LPWAN is low power wide area network devices and yeah finally I will be happy to answer some Q and A’s maybe from your side. So let us start right away. Okay, a low power mindset for me it’s I think it’s my life. So I always try to save energy. So I even remove my car and use my cycle to travel. So any energy, anything you do is energy related and to reduce it and to be aware of it I think it’s the most important factor. And to show you what’s it about with cellular technology, this is today. Okay. Everything is related to a use case. Yeah, so in IoT we’ve got so many use cases and only a few of them are listed here. And as you can imagine, are totally different parameters which are affecting your device related to your use case. So a medium device which is in your cellar or your flat has a totally different need than pet tracking device where your PET is running around and you want to see where it is currently or where it might be in a few minutes. And so all the effects we will show you in the next half an hour are related to the use case. So you could not map one use case to the other. So you really have to build your own setup related to everything which I tell you. What is the initial use case of cellular technology? So of course, it was totally voice centric. So you did a phone call and you were working walking around. That was a pleasure to not be lined up somewhere. And the need to have was that the mobile network is continuously sending signals which are received from the cellular device and then as soon as you reach a border of an antenna, it will just hand over to the next antenna for that your call is not interrupted. From that, it went more and more to be voice and data and finally to be mainly data. As you know your smartphone is I think has more data traffic than your maybe your computer at home because it’s continuously sending data. So what was done, the voice capabilities have been extended and with multiple antennas the speed was increased for the data and with that carrier aggregation, which is a nice term for putting two pipes into into your into your setup, this speed is even increased more. What does it mean? So carrier aggregation for example or higher speeds are one possibility to save power because it’s quite easy. Imagine you order a drink, big glass, and you got a straw and you recognize, okay, maybe I’ve got not enough time to finish that drink in time. So you order a second straw and but the barkeeper only hands over these small things, you know. Your first straw is like that, your second straw is like that. It’s only half of the size. But anyway, at the beginning, you can easily use both straws and you’ve got a boost factor of two and you can empty your glass faster and that is quite useful. But as soon as the liquid is below the length of your second straw, you pull some air and which makes it maybe more difficult to use the first straw because the second does not have any effect anymore. And this exactly is that section here where you you have a kind of carrier aggregation of two straws, but only the first one is used and the second one just consumes power because you have to yeah, to use it more and finally it has no effect. But with a full glass, your second straw is always a good help. So that’s the same with carrier aggregation. Yeah, even if it takes more power, if you increase the speed, you might be in a low power mode. And this is exactly what was done with LTE carrier aggregation. So high performance LTE devices like your phone. But how does it fit to IoT and all these small devices? Everything needs to be small, cheap and sustainable and there should be millions or billions of devices. Of course, this what I’ve just told you carrier aggregation and so on does not really fit to that use case. Therefore 3GPP and the cellular technology introduce communication or machine type communication to come away from the standard voice and data centric use case to be more centric to the machines because machines are talking to each other. That’s IoT. And these devices need to be power efficient and billions of devices need to be supported and the coverage should be enhanced and definitely the complexity should be reduced to make the devices smaller and cheaper and yeah usable on your wristband or whatever. So everything needs to be small. Okay, so what is the biggest consumer, the energy consumer in cellular technology? Of course it’s the part where you’ve got the biggest resistance and this is the air. So airtime is the biggest consumer. So everything we want is reduced the airtime. And first approach which is quite easy: reduce the transceiver activity, send less and then reduce the receiver activity. Just listen less or receive less data quite easy. And then as I have shown you a mobile phone with four antennas or whatever which makes it more expensive and more power consuming because every antenna has a transceiver and the receiver part and this needs to be powered. So one antenna only would be a measure. And then these handover scenarios for a metering device which is in your cellar there’s no need to hand over between cells. So this metering device is always fixed in your cellar. It will not move. So remove these scanned off neighbor cells to be able to do this handover. And finally there’s a possibility instead of shutting down and powering on a device is putting it to sleep and waking it up. So that might be a little bit easier. Okay, what are we talking about? So just don’t be afraid of this slide just to show you what is happening. So if you switch on an LTE module, now there will be a startup phase and scan and registration phase which is similar to the sending data phase and afterwards we’ve got a kind of so called connected mode and finally there’s the idle mode. In the idle mode nearly nothing happens but an LTE device is listening to the neighbor cells as I said because this LTE modules they come from the mobile world and this is useful for mobility. Comparing 2G, 3G, LTE which are mostly combined in one module type, 2G is quite old, 3G is dying in the moment, we all know it’s switched off. For example in Germany, in the US it’s switched off and in many many countries. So I think we do not need to pay attention to 3G anymore. But comparing 2G and LTE, as you can see here, there’s not such a big difference after switching it on. The 2G device will register to the cell and then it will be in a kind of idle mode. And the LTE device will do it right the same. And if you pay attention to the numbers for a four minute time, They nearly have the same average of power consumption. But of course the biggest difference here is the low speed of the 2G device compared to the high speed of the LTE and the latency. So everything is quite slow in 2G and LTE is so fast. But to send only a limited amount of data 2G is still an option. You can see here, I wrote down no IP address at this stage. So after switching on the 2G device and it will attach its it will it does not have an IP address in that moment in comparison to the LTE, which has an IP address wide awake. So there’s an automatic attached procedure and registration procedure. But what you can do in this status was a 2G device is send an SMS or USSD data which is going via the signaling channel. Signaling is quite the same as the procedure while while starting up. So it is still a possibility and in many many many countries 2G is different and will be the next three four years, five years until it’s switched off. So Markus, so just a very quick question on this slide. So in this particular use case where we’re sending a low amount of data, you’d actually propose that sending data via 2G rather than LTE would be the preferable option for reducing the power consumption. That might be an option. And if you are not moving, if you’ve got better signal strength from the 2G cell, Of course, it might be better than using a 4G device, which is which needs to power much more because the LTE cell is too far away. So with LTE, you should not have a problem within in city areas, but on rural areas 2G has the better reach. Yeah. So that might be an option. And of course to find out the best solution is to measure and to try to test your device with different technologies and this is the only thing you can do. You need to try it. Okay in comparison to this low power wide area network module and there are different kinds of modules where 2G is combined with LTE M and NB IoT. Some modules have only LTE M and NB IoT. Just to show you the difference of one and the same module on the same place, so it was on my desk, Of course, somewhere else in the world you could really it look different, of course. Yeah, because on every single place you’ve got different conditions. But on my desk, I switched on the 2G device and you have seen some peaks here up to one point two amp for a short time. Then I switched to LTE M where you can see it’s much less only peaks up to five hundred five fifty milliamp for a specific time. And if you see the comparison in this idle area, it’s much lighter here because there’s already a reduction of signaling within LTE M. So there are spikes only every one point two seconds, one point two five to be correct. This is the most used setting in the moment and if you switch to NB IoT you can see that the final peaks are even lower and these small peaks in the in the idle mode are even more on the time session even more far away. So it’s two point five seconds per every spike. And if you then switch on EDRX for example, you can remove some of these spikes which will be even lower power consumption. Let’s get into detail for these RAD technology selection. This LPWAN module, how does it know which RAD technology to choose? So it’s configurable. By default, I would say all modules should choose at EM first, NB IoT and only as a fallback they will switch to two The problem is that there is no handover between these technologies. So imagine your device is connected on LTE M and you move from one place to the other. So the pet tracker, for example, so the dog is running away and there will be a cell handover, which is quite good because this is mobility, which we need for a tracking device. But as soon as the dog runs out of reach of the LTE M cell, there will not be an automatic handover, for example, to NB IoT or LTE. But the module will start to scan the networks. First, it will scan for other LTE M cells. If there is no LTE M cell anymore, it will scan for NB IoT cells. And if there is no NB IoT cell, it will scan for 2G cells. So the scanning is done quite often maybe yeah depending on your technology and is consuming power. And as you can see here it’s even worse in NB IoT. NB IoT attaches to one cell and if you move an NB IoT device, it will be connected to that cell as long as it loses the signal and then it will search for a new cell and connect to that new cell. This is really not a mobility behavior. So we can say NB IoT is more for static devices. Right, so just to confirm NB IoT will consume potentially more power on an IoT device compared to 2G and LTE M? Depends. So if you are moving around and the device is always on, it will scan so much. Might happen, yeah. Okay, what can you do to lower the scan time and to improve this scan behavior? You’ve got frequencies within your module and depending on the amount of frequencies, the time the module needs to scan is higher. So you see here on the right, I did a scan where five frequencies are enabled And I use two different mobile provider sim cards and they are nearly the same. So to scan five bands just takes much more time than scanning only two bands. It’s obvious. Yeah. But there are some bands which are not used so much. So a decision would be to remove bands or frequencies which are not so used depending on your geographic location, depending on your provider to speed up this scanning time and to reduce the energy. And then of course it would be good to have more MNOs within one country for example with a SIM card like a Soracom SIM card for example. You will have the possibility to have multiple MMOs per country, means the module will be able to find a mobility provider faster than a SIM card which is from one single provider and searches for a signal of this single provider only. As I said, this will speed up the first attach and for moving devices this continuous scan. For static devices, it’s not so important because they scan one time and afterwards they always connect to the same cell. So this is not so important for static devices. But reducing the number of bands, of course, might cause that you reduce your footprint, your worldwide footprint because some countries you might exclude from your list with disabling some frequencies. Okay, then you’ve got this efficiency. NB IoT is slow, LTE M is faster and normal LTE CAT one for example is much faster. But depending on the amount of data you send, you can decide which or you need to decide which radio access technology to use. I read a nice paper where they really made a test and they found that there is a sweet spot of choice between NB IoT and LTE M of one hundred and fifty kilobytes. If you send less NB IoT would be power efficient, more power efficient than LTE M. But as soon as the amount of data to be sent or to be retrieved is higher, you should choose a better performing technology like LTE M. But as well with that one you might come to a point where an LTE CAT one module is a better choice and right in the moment in this time there is a new generation of LTE CAT one called LTE CAT one BIS and this BIS just says that it is an LTE CAT one module with one antenna only, which makes it less complex. Again, we save some energy which makes it less expensive, which is good for IoT. So there is a decision to make how much data you have to send and which technology fits best. So but how does it work sending with less power as we have seen three slides ago, but being able to communicate even wider wide area networks. Yeah. So this is somehow strange how this is done. So the technique behind is the so called coverage enhancement. So if you are outside with an LPWAN device, you might even send with low power status. If you go light indoor, like under the roof or wherever, good reachability, good thickness range, but there’s something in between. You might need to switch to medium power and indoor maybe in your flat it’s already sending with full power. But as soon as this goes to the deep indoor, maybe into the cellar, it needs to send with full power and the coverage enhancement, which you always read in all over in all these articles is done by repetition. So it’s just like that. That’s a module is sending the same signal again and again and again. And in this example, the same signal is sent sixteen times. So if you have got three data points to send, it will be three times sixteen times, but the repetition can be up to two thousand and forty eight. So the coverage enhancement is realized by just repeating the same message in the hope that one of these sixteen or two thousand and forty eight messages will reach the final antenna. And of course this needs to be taken into account because sending the data once uses power twice uses the same power again and again and again. Okay, what can we do to reduce the power in the so called idle phase? You have seen these big idle phase in LTE and this is available in LTE M and in the IoT as well. The idle mode we can just shorten by not switching off the device, but putting it to sleep. The advantage is that at the beginning, at the startup of every module, you have this scanning phase and connection phase to get into the connected mode. This is shortened a lot if you put it to sleep and wake it up again. The disadvantage is setting up these timers, which can be quite long. So you can put a module to sleep for for hundreds of hours and you can define this active time, this idle mode active time as well to up to three hours for example. But it’s always a deal between the network and the device. So as a device, you’ll say, hey, I want to sleep one week and then I want to wake up for ten minutes. And you send this request to the network. But the network finally decides which values it will grant to you. Because as you can imagine, there are billions of devices, not within one cell, but let’s say thousands and all have the same wish for example. All say, hey, I want to sleep one week and then I want to wake up for ten minutes and then the antenna will have a problem and the network behind. So the network will just spread all these requests to a wider frame to be able to handle thousands of devices. Yeah. So in most of the cases, will not get the values which you wished or which the module requested, but slightly modified by putting a kind of slicing factor to that number. To set up these PSM values, you need a special command. And this command, we created a small calculation tool in our webpage. If you like, you can take a look at it, but only if you like AT commands. Thanks, Mark. I’ll just share the link to it in the chat as well. It was interesting. Okay. Then there’s a second possibility to reduce this idle mode and the consumption of the idle mode. The main consumer during the idle mode is the receiver. The receiver is continuously listening if there is some data to be received. So for example in SMS, if you get an SMS, the receiver continuously listens to the so called message channel and as soon as it sees, oh there’s a message for me, then the connection will be set up and the SMS will be retrieved. This is nearly the same here, but you tell the receiver to make some pauses in between. Yeah, so only listen for some pagings. That’s the word we we use for that. Listen to pagings only every twenty seconds and only within these twenty seconds only for three seconds, for example. Normally, as I said, it will be done in NB IoT every two and a half seconds and in LTE-M every one point two five seconds. And you just limit the amount of listening peaks to what is needed. And if you run an application which is not intended to receive data at all, yeah, there’s no need to receive data because you push only. So that’s depending on your use case again. If you push only, you can really minimize that idle time by setting the lowest possible values, and this will be best for your power [consumption]. Markus, how significant can those gains be when you’re using PSM and EDRX? Are we talking about small fractions or can it actually create quite a significant impact on the amount of power that a device is consuming? Yeah, of course, with PSM, if you put a device into sleep for two weeks and then wake it up for sending a data bunch instead of letting it run the whole time. And after two weeks, you send the data bunch. This is of course a big difference. Yeah. With EDRX, it’s more kind of fine tuning. Now you can minimize it, minimize it, minimize it. And this is a goal to give some more insight about some tweaks to minimize the power consumption. The connected mode here at the beginning and over there. Connected is right after this scan procedure. You remember from the one of the first pictures and after sending some data. To send some data, the module needs to connect. And unfortunately, there’s a so called RRC activity timer. So it just tells how long to be in the connected mode. As you can see here, this is a table from the GSMA. These RRC activity timer depends on the mobile provider and could be different. So some set twenty seconds. Normally in LTE, for example, it’s ten seconds. So you can say at least this connected mode is ten seconds. Ten seconds even if you just sent one bunch of data for one second, it will be connected in ten seconds doing nothing just because this timer is set to ten seconds. So these release assistance indicator is a possibility to tell the network, I send some data and I want to leave this connected mode right after sending the data because I do not expect to receive anything. Normally, they intend to be in connected mode like you send some data and you receive some data when it’s good to stay in connected mode, of course. But for some devices, depending on your use case, it might be better to leave the connected mode as fast as possible. And this of course will limit the connected mode which even comes a little bit more than the idle mode and yeah it’s good for your battery. Hardware. This is of course an amazing topic beside setting up a device. The antenna is the most important part towards the network and with a bad antenna you need more energy to transmit and receive data. So an antenna tuning is essential and we have some great tips available from antenna companies in the network. You can find it in the internet where they tell you the minimum sizes of PCBs or whatever and how far away an antenna should be from specific parts of your of your device. And this needs to be taken into account definitely. So antenna tuning, tune tuning the antenna to this to the bands which you have selected before, for example, of course, be the optimum. And there are many, many modules which have the possibility to do software defined radio, which means as soon as the module switches the frequency to another band, the antenna could be tuned to that specific band. So this is definitely one of the parts in the future to optimize everything and software defined radio is one part here. And the next part would be maybe to put the application on the wireless module itself. So there are many, many modules where you can run the application on the module instead of using a microprocessor, which is running beside and doing the calculation work or whatever. So it’s possible to do that on the module right away. And then one other point might be to avoid USB for example, USB is power even if there is a power saving feature. A serial connection I think would be much better. Okay and then of course sending data causes one of the highest peaks and the more data you send, the more energy you need. So quite simple is reducing the data is one of the key topics of course. And as you can see here, how many bytes are sent if you send for example forty bytes of data in SMS USD, it’s a pure data, forty bytes. For UDP you have to add eight bytes more. TCP is having a lot more because TCP is doing a handshake before and every single message needs to be acknowledged from the other side. So there’s a communication flow between the parties and of course everything is going over the air and we wanted to avoid airtime. So TCP of course needs more, HTTP even a little bit more and then if you add security over the air, it will be much more. Doing private key exchange is so many messages will be sent securing or trying to secure the communication channel. So this is mainly here the interface as I told you between the device and the base station. So why not just leave the security in the network so we can edit later on? Soracom, from my point of view, built a perfect solution for this. You can send, for example, data via SMS or TCP, UDP, so as simple as possible to the base station over the interface to save power. It will be transferred to the Soracom back end, private back end, secured communication. And then you decide what to do with the data. You decide to push it to your server and add some encryption afterwards. So this is wired. We don’t care about the power consumption so much anymore because the machines are on a power cord. A very nice possibility is as well to encrypt your data in your own way. So to minimize it, let’s say like zipping, data zipping. Yeah, so it’s you’ve got a data string where you want to send a battery value and the temperature and so on. And you might send a whole JSON frame, which is looking like that in the output area here With the possibility of our binary parser, you can define a format and send only the data. As you can see here in the sample data, which is as soon as it reaches Soracom backbone, will be blown up to a full JSON, which then can be securely transferred to wherever you want. There’s a nice tool available on the internet as well to set up your binary parser. Another possibility would be for example to use message pack. Message pack is a very common possibility to shrink your data, but shrinking data might produce some processing power as well. Processing power will again consume some energy. You have to decide if this is necessary. It’s constant trade off, isn’t it? Between how much power is going to consume and what the Always, always, you have to choose. And finally reaching any of Azure or AWS clouds is possible via Soracom by pushing the data directly into the cloud. As we talked about, we minimize everything which is between the base station and the device. The airtime needs to be reduced. Then we’ve got a secure communication over the mobile carrier into the soracom network and then we just blow up everything which we compressed before via binary parser, via choosing the protocol according to our needs and yeah, this is Soracom. Okay. Duncan. Yeah, so I think this comes to the end of the slide. We put this slide in at the beginning because we were talking about the idea of, before we, when we were prepping for the session, we were talking about this idea of turning a light switch off at the end of the night when you leave a room or when you unplug, you know, when you turn your laptop off, you unplug it. Know, you gave some examples, Markus, ditched the car and you used the bicycle. But actually, I think having listened to the whole presentation, I really feel that actually low power mindset is about much more than just switching the light off when you exit a room, isn’t it? Definitely, definitely. As I told, for me, it’s in every single part, optimizing, squeezing here and there a little bit to optimize the solution. But it always depends on the use case. So you could not compare one with the other. There are so many variables and it depends on use case. But, you know, the changes we’ve talked about today, it’s not about just squeezing extra one percent or two percent. You know, some of the use cases we’ve seen is where you have had a device that would typically last two or three weeks on a single charge. But actually, once you’ve implemented some of the ideas that you’ve talked about today, you could extend that battery life to or potentially even years. Is that correct to say, Markus? Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. So a device that would have lasted a couple of months or weeks or months is now actually lasting for up to ten years on a single charge. So quite a big difference. And what I like most is reducing the amount of data to be sent, of course, is not good for our business case, you know, because the people pay per use. You only pay what you send. So less they send, the less we get. But anyway, I have the ambition to save the energy, which is and to to maybe save the environment a little bit better, which is quite important. And so for for our customers should be a win win situation by Right. The amount of data, pay less for this data, and then have the effect to save the battery power. Yeah, absolutely. Amazing presentation. Thank you for those slides, Markus. You can just go on to the next slide, which I think is just the holding slide. What I’d like to do, guys, is just open the floor up. We’ve still got another ten minutes or so for any kind of open questions that people may have. Before we jump into the Q and A, there’s a handout that I wanted to share at the beginning that I’ve got. So let me just upload that. We have, like, a Soracom overview PDF, so I’ve just shared that in the handout section of the webinar tool. So, by all means, if you’re interested in learning more about some of the things that Soracom can do to help you with your IoT deployment, please just download that PDF, and you can learn more on our website if you’re interested in discovering a bit further. If you have any questions for Markus about power saving in IoT, anything about reducing the power consumption of your devices, please do use the live chat now. We’ve had a couple of questions that have come in whilst you’ve been presenting, Markus, so we’ll go through those now. And, yeah, by all means, if you have anything that kind of springs to mind, anybody else here that wants to ask, just put it in the live chat right away. The first question we had here came from Brad, and it was when you were talking about the different cellular technology. Brad said, Is 2G going to be phasing out in the same way that 3G is? Not as fast. So 3G is phasing out much faster. I think the dates for 2G in Europe, for example, is 2025. There are of course countries where it will be faster. But in other countries in Asia, Africa, South America, I think 2G will last much longer. But for Europe, it’s scheduled to be 2025. Okay, so we still have a little bit more time to use those technologies, do we need to? Gavin asked a question, which you may have actually answered already, Markus, but he just asked, what is EDRX? So you talked a little about PSM earlier on. Perhaps you could just give a little bit more explanation about exactly what EDRX is. Yeah. Okay. eDRX is for discontinuous reception. So the receiver part, as I told, is responsible for this energy consumption. And you just tell the receiver to make some pauses. There’s no need to listen every one second or even less for for paging messages, and that isn’t connected d r x already. But this value is set from the mobile operator. And in the idle mode, you have these eDRX value and the e in the beginning is for extended. Extended just means you can extend the value to a very high number and just tell the receiver not to listen to the network, which says power. But if you have the need for download data, like you want to switch on a light or whatever, maybe this is a wrong technology because if you push something and you want to switch on the light and the receiver is not listening to the interface for two hours, then the light will light up two hours later. That might not fit to the use case. So in every use case where you need to talk to the device and need to have a fast reaction, EDRX might not be the best solution. Here’s a question that I think you’ll like, Markus, from Simon. What is better for reducing power consumption on a cellular device? LPW1, NB IoT, or GSM? Okay, NB IoT is a part of LPWAN, but LTE M, NB IoT, or GSM, of course, one of the most difficult questions. But to make a kind of thumb rule, as I mentioned in the last hour, static devices are quite good within the IoT devices which sent data only are good within the IoT, but only if you have got low data amounts. Maybe we do see it via binary whatever. Which is moving is good to have on LTE M. Moving is so mobility is also possible with with GSM, but we saw GSM has high peaks of energy because they send with much more power. So it depends. It depends, yeah. I feel like we could do a whole webinar on that one topic actually, if we really wanted to. Here from Kieran. So fairly technical one. Maya, he says, My question is with regard to protocol selection. Where will COAP and AMQP be located in the figure of comparison of power consumption? Yeah, yeah. COAP is running on UDP and has a kind of acknowledgement mechanism as well. Yeah. So not as as TCP where you you need to do a handshake and and and everything, every single message, UDP message needs to be confirmed. And if the confirmation does not arrive in a specific time frame, the message needs to be sent again. So CoAP is a good possibility on top of UDP to make a kind of acknowledged communication. But as you have seen with coverage enhancement, if you sent a message which needs to be acknowledged, you’ve got download data, so you need to be listening. There’s a need to to listen to to the interface. So DRX is important here because you need to get the download data. And if this acknowledge is not received, you send it again. And maybe you’ve got coverage enhancement, but then you do not send it only once, you send it sixteen times. And you’re waiting for the acknowledge. And if the acknowledge is not coming, you’ll send it again sixteen times or two thousand times. Could be a cycle of death. So anyway, you have to try, you need to measure and you have to try to simulate as much as possible the different scenarios, like shielding your device and burying it, putting it into the earth. Yeah. So there are reduction mechanisms in the modules. If there’s no signal at all, how long should a module try to send? Yeah. So of course, there are some implementations in the module. It will try to search for a network for five minutes, then it will do a five minute rest, then it will do another five minute search, then it will do ten minutes rest and so on. So it will just enlarge in the resting time not to exhaust the battery all the time by just searching for for the network. Yeah. And this is already implemented in the module. So if your application then tries to interrupt this, oh, I have no network. I restart the module again and again. These mechanisms which are implemented in the modules are totally crashed. So it might be useful to get some details on how the module behaves in a specific situation and then adapt the application accordingly. Right. Great question, Kieran. Thank you for asking that one. And the last one that we have here, just because we’re just wrapping up on time, actually. So just from Yiru. Hey, Yiru. So her question is, What remedies do you propose if I’ve already decided on my device configuration? So she’s already deployed devices out to the market. She wants to now make changes to that device configuration. Does she have to completely revamp the hardware or does she have any other options? Depends. The hardware, hopefully not. There are possibilities. For example, it’s possible as a as a beta feature. It’s possible within Soracom to push eDRX values so we can override eDRX values from local providers in LTE networks, for example. With that possibility, you can kind of steer at least the settings of your device even if your device is already deployed in the field. If you are interested in that feature, please come back to us and we could give it a try. Reworking a device, yeah, as I said, if the application tries to steer the module too much, it might be hard because you need to change your application. Everything which is towards connectivity. So for example, provider selection within a specific country, are able so Soracom is able to to influence this selection criteria to change, for example, primary provider settings for specific countries via an over the air update of the SIM card. If somebody needs us, please come back to us and I bet we can arrange something. Can we can we We can a different operator in a specific country. We can just change the order of preference. That might be another possibility. Absolutely. I just want to squeeze in this very last one. It’s come from Daniel. So he says, how do I minimize the power consumption for large transfers to the device, such as with a software update? Do you have any? Okay. Okay. And IoT device should not have much transfers. That’s why most of the providers, they use incremental firmware updates, for example, for the modules itself, and incremental firmware updates or device updates should be one solution for your application as well. So think about doing incremental updates to minimize the amount of data. But really large transfers like for an Android phone or whatever, they are maybe boosting the power. So more powerful devices use less time. That’s one of the first carrier aggregation But depends on your use case. Great, great question. Thank Daniel. They’re really great. Well, we are pretty much at time, guys. So I think it’s time to wrap up. We’ve come to the end of the questions. All that really remains for me today is a massive thank you to you, Markus, for preparing today’s slides. So thank you so much for going into so much detail on everything presented today. And everyone who’s joined today live, thank you guys for giving up some of your time. Like I said, it is a really busy time of year, so we do really hope you found this discussion helpful, and we’d really love to see you again at another webinar in the future. If you do want to learn more about Soracom, how we can help your IoT connection connect to a application connect to a totally secure network, access tools for speeding time to market, reducing data consumption, transmitting data to the cloud, and a lot more, then you can just visit Soracom.io, or you can read more about our platform and schedule a call with one of our experts, and you can email us at [email protected], and a member of the team will be happy to have a chat with you about your application. That is it. So we are bang up on time. Thanks, everyone, again for coming, and we will see you again soon. Cheers, Markus. See you again, everyone. Goodbye. Thank you, and bye, everybody.

Hello everybody and welcome to today’s Soracom webinar session. Really great to welcome you all here for the session on how IoT is reshaping the sustainability debate. Thank you so much for taking time out of your diary, and I know everyone’s very, busy at this time of year. So excited to have you all here and excited to get started. There are quite a few of us on the call today, and we have quite a lot to get through. So let’s make a start. Listen, here’s what we’re going to be covering over the next forty five minutes or so. So yes, a very quick introduction from me, and then I will hand over to our guest speaker, Saverio here, for majority of the presentation. Like I said at the beginning, today we’re going to be looking at the role of IoT within the sustainability debate. We’ll leave plenty of time towards the end for any questions. And actually, would really encourage you to use the chat window that you can see here for any questions on any of the topics that are raised throughout the presentation. So yeah, just a quick introduction. My name is Duncan. I’m head of marketing here at Soracom. And today, really pleased to welcome Saverio Romeo, who is an IoT lecturer and researcher at Birkbeck University in London, who is going to be doing majority of the of the presenting today. Hi there, Saverio. How are you? Hi, Duncan. I’m well. Thank you. Thank you for and I’m sorry everyone for for my mistake. It was my mistake. Sorry. That’s all good. Thank you so much for being here, Severio. We’re really really looking forward to your presentation shortly. Thank you for inviting me. Just before I hand the floor over to you, I’d like to spend no more than ninety seconds, guys. I just want to give a very brief introduction to who we are at Soracom, just to provide some context around why we’re hosting this session today. And just to say everyone’s aware of who we are and what we do. Now Soracom is a IoT connectivity and platform service for deployments and applications to help you launch at scale, basically. We provide affordable, reliable connectivity that can help you accelerate the speed to market. We make it easy to connect to the cloud. We can help you reduce data consumption and costs. And actually, there’s a very broad range of innovative solutions that I won’t go into detail now that we can help provide. Founded in Japan in 2015 by former AWS and telco veterans, and today we have physical offices in Tokyo, Seattle, and London. And actually, are a global team distributed all over the world. We’re really proud to serve more than twenty thousand startups, SMBs, and global enterprises. And we work with people from industries such as agriculture, energy, construction, consumer electronics, manufacturing, real estate, healthcare. The list goes on. Really, there isn’t any industry that has IoT requirements that we’re not able to support. And actually, you’ll find a Soracom SIM powering over four million devices around the world and providing connectivity via our IoT network. Financially supported by KDDI in Japan, and we also received investment from various technology partners, such as Hitachi, Secom, and Sony. I won’t go into any more detail right now, but if you would like to learn more about the services we provide and how we may be able to help you with your IoT project, you can just visit us at Soracom.Io, where you can learn more about the platform. You can arrange a consultation with one of our product specialists, or you can even create your own account and start experimenting with the platform today. Okay. That’s enough about Soracom and enough for me for now. Let’s hand it over to Saverio for the main event. Just a final reminder, if you can just use that questions, that chat panel on the right hand side of your screen for any questions, and we’ll get to those towards the end. And without any further ado, I’ll hand over to Saverio. So Saverio, over to Thank Duncan, and welcome everyone. Hope you are having a good day. Thank you, Duncan and Soracom for having me to talk about this specific topic I’m running researching on. If you can go to the next slide, Duncan, please. Just a few words about me, what I’m doing at the moment. I have an associate lecturer at Birkbeck in which there is a centre for innovation management research. And in this centre, I’m the one with another two and I’m the only one who is not academic who looks at the adoption of emerging digital technologies. I bring into the story, let’s say my experience more in the industry and in the deployment of IoT solutions. You see a couple of projects I’m doing, I’m obviously I’m also a lead expert in the city of Derby, London Derby, Northern Ireland for a specific EU project in which we are looking at various angles for smart cities including sustainability and skills. More specifically linked to this presentation is my work I’m doing on IoT and other technologies can be used for territorial management. I’m referring in particular to wildfire prevention, water shortages and other topics in this sense. I’m also part of an expert group for European Union on new labor policy for the future of work as an expert on advanced technologies. If you go to next slide, I’ll try to gain the minutes I lost with my mistakes. So what I want to discuss today, I’m bringing together a bit of my experience in field and a bit of research we are doing in university and try to understand the role of the high OT in the debate in sustainability. One of the arguments I want to put forward is that the IoT or M2M world somehow was always a bit sustainable. Or another way, they had in mind even indirectly the role of environment and the potential role of M2M and IoT in environmental issues. Then I want to emphasize that the new socio political economic scenarios are guiding attention towards sustainability in a completely different way, creating momentum for technologies to become an important enabler for green policy, sustainable policy. Then I’ll give you some examples on how the IoT and these are primarily examples on which I’m working on on how the IoT is contributing to the sustainability and sustainable debate. Also, highlight some problems that the IoT can have from a sustainability point of view. And towards the end, a bit of a discussion on the convergence of IoT with other technologies and also their potential impact. And then I have two questions at the end which I would like to hear your voice and your opinion about if it is possible to talk about sustainable by design IoT and what the actual IoT world should do, the IoT community should do in order to embrace and become more protagonist in the sustainability debate. So, if you go to next slide please. The definition of sustainability starts from the UN SDG. Obviously, the UN SDGs are not all directly related to the environment. In fact, if you go to next slide please, Duncan. I know these slides you cannot read very well, but when you will receive the PowerPoint presentations and you will see in these slides the link below, this is basically a progress report from the UN on all the initiatives that are environmental related. The report basically says that the environmental angle in the SDGs is more or less in all the SDGs and under the SDGs there are lot of activities to do and a lot of activities in which technologies can have an important role. Please go to the next slide. Now, as I said, in my opinion M2M had a sort of unknown environmental nature and this is George Paraskevakos, as kind of widely recognized as sort of father of M2M. In nineteen seventy seven, he designed these technologies to move data from one machine to the other and he was also a very prolific entrepreneur and he founded one of the first companies founded, it was called Metrotech and was basically doing remote metering reading. So, the one that then evolved into what we know today as smart meters. And smart meters, they have an environmental angle, which is the one that optimizes, measures the consumption of energy in order to optimize that consumptions and reducing the misuse or the excessive use of energy. I think the M2M world evolved a lot around these ideas. Yes, there was a strong focus on telematics, but if you go back a bit on the history of M2M IoT and you go and see case studies around the 2000s or even before, there were already cases of environmental monitoring through M2M technology. So there was an environmental nature into the M2M. There was not a business reason for doing it probably. Because the actual revenue reason was elsewhere rather than on this type of application. Also there was not the momentum for driving maybe more attention specific topic, also to think about a bit more about the business models maybe on how to translate environmental applications into something that would also be revenue generating. In fact, if we go to next slide, this report is one of the many very nice Ofcom reports on M2M and then IoT. I’m sure in the audience, this is an expert audience, imagine they know who OFCOM is, know, OFCOM is one of the most cutting edge regulators worldwide. I remember being in meetings of the regulator group authority in the European Union in process on how the word of Ofcom was recognized as the most relevant one, maybe in a certain sense. And there is this report in 2014, it is about spectrum because for a regulator the spectrum is a key topic, but it’s about M2M applications and what are the necessity of spectrum for M2M applications. You go and see the report or at least you just see the table of contents and you see how often recognizes certain type of applications that today we put under the umbrella of sustainability. So, intelligent buildings, smart cities, utilities, the metering of water, the metering of energy and so on. But in this report, the word adjective sustainable green or the word sustainability does not appear at all. There is zero, there is not you go to do the search, there is nothing like that. The sign is that, in 2014 we were kind of moving from the M2M momentum towards the idea that DieHamtung was moving towards the high UT. Despite the term ‘Internet of Things’ was established in 2009, we started really to get the momentum there. It was felt by the industry, there was a lot of activity in the automotive. So, it was a good phase for the M2M IoT world. And there was, at the same time a lot of consideration to the type of applications that today we will consider sort of green applications. But there was not the awareness of it. There was not the momentum for it. Basically, primarily for business reasons. There was no business around it. You have heard many times at those days on conferences: Yeah, you work with the public authorities, but the public authorities are slow. The procurement process is endless. So, don’t want to really deal with it. So, if we go to next slide, I think today the story evolved a bit more. And I think there are a couple of technologies in the world of IoT that maybe had a bit more of green nature, of sustainable nature. And I think one of these was LPWAN. And not just because as the acronym says, is looking for applications that consume less energy at device level and enable device to stay in the field for a long time. But what I’ve experienced a lot in the recent years is that LPWAN has really given motivation to local authorities, for example, to look at the IoT in a completely different way. Why am pressing on local authorities? Because local authorities are the ones that are really deploying, more than others, sustainable applications in cities, in rural areas, in relation to agricultural policies and so on. LP ONE has created a sort of opened the door to the IoT for organization which did not really have the skills, the know how and even the will to engage with those technologies. So, we go to next slide, we go to today and I think the really turning point, it is the political environment. The political environments that we have in several countries and in several intergovernmental organisations has changed this approach. I’ll take as an example, because I know it quite well and I’m working around it, is the recovery plan for Europe that was designed basically to respond to the Covid challenge. And this recovery plan, the amount of money is in the slides, has two fundamental blocks. One block is the sustainable side, the green policies and the green tech and the other side is the digital. With the understanding and the strong stress that digital technologies are an enabler for green solutions. And therefore, if you go to the next slide, I think we have changed. This is a momentum for the IoT. Because IoT, what it does, the IoT basically, as we all know here, it sends the space. We have an environment and through the sensor deployed, we gather the data and this data give us the picture of this space. And this data and the analysis of it will enable us to take decisions. So the IoT does not directly impact sustainable solutions but enable the development of sustainable solutions. I’ll give you some examples starting from the next slide. The next slide, Yes. This is taken from OneM2M. Again, I think you all know what OneM2M is. OneM2M has done a study on IoT sustainability. The link is on the bottom of the page and testing something pages. It’s a good reading, it’s a good way to look at it. And they used a bit the SDG angle, they used some SDG and then they say what are the significant role of the IoT technologies? As I said before, it’s the sensing of the space, the data, maybe the cross data, also the fact that I can have different type of data about a specific space and they can influence this IoT, the development of solutions that aim at the objective of the UNSDG in order to basically reduce energy consumption, optimizing resources about water for example and many others. So, I’ll give you now from next slide, Duncan, if you could Yeah, I’ll give you some examples. Some of them I lived in a sense that I was in the field with the organizations working on it. Some other are more based on research rather than in field experience. So this is an in field experience, it’s a water resource management. This is a little town in south of Italy with a strong agri food sector. Six thousand inhabitants during summer time, there is a bit more. But there is a lot of high quality agri food activities. The problem is that recently, as you probably have experienced or see personally, the temperature has raised. So, example, two summers ago we were around thirty eight, thirty nine, some peaks. And that has also caused lack of water. Lack of water so for days, actually for a week in one circumstances. And that is affected, but from the community, also the agri tech sector. Now, the main reason why the water was not there, firstly was the high temperature and therefore the lack of the resource, but was also an obsolete water network system. And the situation was that there were a lot of leaks and even the technicians in the agency who managed the water system were struggling to identify where the leak was. Identifying the leak was me looking the water coming out from a pipe and called them up, Me citizens. So the idea was okay, let’s use these potential EU based projects to modernize the water network system and bear in mind, this is a problem for this town, it’s a problem for many other towns, for entire regions in the area. So, the idea is okay, let’s also do a project that enables basically the substitution, if you want, the transformation, probably is better, of the water network system. And let’s also do it in a way that we can introduce technology that enable us to optimize this resource, primarily to manage the leaks, for example, to avoid the leaks at all. And also to have a picture of these water pipes. The picture with water pipes was in the head of a technician who was sixty one years old, who was the only one who actually remember, more or less in his head, where the pipes were. You can imagine the problems there. So, we started this test and the test of a replacement of the pipes in certain parts which were close to some agri food companies and with a system of sensors, two water sensors. They gathered the data about the flow of the water into the pipes and it was also nice to have the dashboards and the more young employees in water agency were really appreciating the fact that now I can see this picture in front of me, how the network is. Now, there is one consideration here. It is still a bit difficult to estimate the effect of these solutions. But if you go and see around in the literature of a host in the marketplace, this is a type of solution that’s being deployed for optimizing resources like water and therefore meet the SDGs number six as you see in the picture. If you go to next slide, I need to run a bit more. Yes, this is on the high quality noise sensors. This is on the project coming with Derby London Derby. And again, there is a link on the bottom. You see it’s a marketplace of one hundred and fifteen European cities and you can see all the projects each city is doing. This is a Spanish city and the project is about creating smart post, we can call it, in which we have basically air quality sensors and noise sensors. And this helps to planning traffic around schools and so on. And this is, let’s say, in the area of smart cities. If we go to next slide, the smart farming one. The smart farming is a big one. It’s a vast area. It is also an unbelievably innovative area. Let’s free ourselves from the conception that agriculture is a traditional sector, it is not. And actually, IoT is a fundamental enabler of this innovation into agriculture. On the slides, you see all the areas in which the presence of IoT can transform the farming process and transforming it in terms of quality, in terms of optimising again the resources in how you perform all the farming tasks. Should be said that farming itself is quite substantial contributor to CO2 emissions in particularly the livestock farming as we all know and all the dairy transformation side of it. Questions remain if Precision Livestock Farming in which IoT has an important role can help reduce these CO2 emissions from livestock farming or contribute to it is an opening question. If we go to the next slide, on the smart city debate, I think we have all experienced the debate of smart city with the narrative in which we applied digital technology to city to transform the city in innovation terms and therefore in an economic growth terms. So there was a more, let’s say, market company centric approach to smart city and also very maybe silo. In a sense, I’m going to do the smart parking project and that is the smart city for me. I’m doing the specific public sector camera network and that is a specific project for me. The move is on one side to see the city more holistically and therefore the smart city has a smart system of smart systems because you need to take care of the transport, the water, the waste and all that. And on the other side, there is an important hindrance of the sustainable variable. So the objective becomes quality of life of citizens and understanding the environmental situation in the city. You go and see and I participate to a couple of them, some smart city strategy development have changed dramatically because you have around the table all the stakeholders in the cities and the things that you discuss are not really technical at all almost, but you look at what you want to, which are the objectives of the smart city strategy and sustainability is a key one, is becoming a key one. In the link in the slides of the health sensor you can find a lot of sources if you want on the smart city and sustainable strategy. If you go to next slide. An example of city who has the core policy is the sustainability side is Espoo in Finland. Now Espoo is an unbelievable example as a smart city, in a sense that has embraced, if you want, all a bit the theory that there is a smart city from a technological perspective and they have an open data model of the local authority, which is quite something. And now the next step for them is really towards combining the smartness with sustainability. And these are in this picture, these are the four objectives of the city to go towards 2030. It’s an extremely incredible example. Generally, I have to say, the Finnish environment very rich in nice use case studies around smart city sustainability. Okay, if we go to next slide. Yes, this is all great and we can find a lot of other examples together and I’m sure you have yours. But, it’s important to consider that the IoT per se has a green influence then and that is about the energy consumption. This is a quote from a report from International Energy Agency in which analyze the devices connected in standby and estimate in 2015 a consumption of six hundred terawatts per hour, then the same reports does the estimation towards 2020 in which they assumed at the time we could have fifty billion euros for a double the consumption. So the energy consumption is an issue. But in defense, if you go to next slide, let’s take the defense of the IoT. The energy consumption has been always something in the mind of the IoT solution designer and developer. I think the LPWAN story gives a good hope there. There was a consideration effect on this. Apart from that, there is a lot of research standardization process to look at and that is happening today and that looks at, so they call it green IoT. Probably have seen it on the picture here, have some of the most well known standardization and research body. The ITUT, the study group twenty looks specifically at the sustainability of IoT in city environments. Then you have high triple E, high ETF and so on. Let’s also not forget the issue of waste or e waste. What do we do with all these devices when we need to get rid of it? Probably in that sense, in terms of legislation, are a bit more ahead probably. We need to find ways of better recycling our devices, if it’s possible to recycle or to see what to do with it. But the ‘W’, the waste from electronic electrical and electronic equipment directive is an interesting one. If you go to the next slide. So, the IoT does the gathering of the data, sends the space and then use this data in analytics term. This is a paper from Michael Posters and the CEO of PTC 2014 paper in which they looked at the evolution of the IoT. Obviously, you start to have the data from the IoT, you start to do the analysis of the data, you know, you get seeing the data creates more appetite for more data, analysis, for more insights. But this appetite can be satisfied if you create the convergence between the the IoT and other emerging technologies. And one of that is the artificial intelligence that brings up to some of the discussions and application we are seeing in terms of predictive maintenance, for example, automation of actions and so on. So, if we go next this way, just an example into the next slide, Duncan, is on wildfire detection. Again, I’m sure you’ve followed the news in the last couple of summers. A substantial problem for some parts of the world and there are a number of I mean, I counted in my work so far, five companies worldwide with an incredible presence in Australia. There are quite incredible ecosystems in this area, for obvious reasons. They have some quite substantial wildfires recently. The work they do, these organizations, based on convergence of technology. So, can imagine a sort of, if we want to use a bit of engineering stock that we like a lot, we have the IoT as the data collection layer and then we have on the top the use of applications that enable the elaboration of that data in a very sophisticated way. So, have the artificial intelligence company working in digital twins, with digital twins to have the heat map of the area, for example. Interesting to notice in this app also from a connectivity point of view, considering our host, there is an incredible combination of connectivity forms for this type of application. So, you have the IoT sensor network based on LPWAN but there is a lot of satellite observation that needs to be done. There are solutions that they put cameras into the forest and they create network cameras. Some other solution puts in sort of objects on the trees to observe the situation around the specific tree. And so there is a lot of innovative thinking that is enabled by the convergence of these technologies. The problem anyway, if you go to the next slide, yes, there is a huge potential in this convergence. There is also a problem on the energy consumption, particularly from the artificial intelligence side. And I invite you to read this paper, it’s very short Carbon Tracker. It’s five pages from a professor, I don’t remember his name, from Denmark, in which basically he is creating an assessment on how to measure the consumption of AI models in terms of energy. And if you see from the article, the AI meet to the moon, So basically, he is estimating in his assessment for carbon tracker that is equivalent, certain type of analysis are equivalent to go from Earth to the Moon and come back. So, energy consumption issues into the AI and generally into these technologies is becoming important to consider. So, if we go to next slide, almost there, think. My key conclusions are that the M2M IoT had always in mind or maybe in the back of the mind, but was always a bit there, the idea of technology for the environment. It was not the right momentum at the time. I think that today, with the new, the changes in the social debate about climate change, but also on political debate with substantial investments as you’ve seen from the EU. But the same you can come and see from the UK government, the US is quite common approach. I think there is an opportunity for the IoT to really stress its enabling nature of sustainable solutions and not just because you want to be nice to do sustainability, which is also good for a variety of reasons, but also because maybe there is also a new revenue stream there to explore. And this enabling capability is across the UN Sustainable Goals. So it goes a bit all over and the IoT we know is kind of the building block of digital transformation in any sectors we can imagine. And then going further, the convergence between IoT with other technologies also has a potential to contribute. As a community, I think you need to, it’s important to consider that you also have a green issue, if you want, and something to face, some problems, some challenges to face. So if you go to the next slide, these are the two questions that I’m exploring more. I’d like to know maybe your opinion is, what is necessary to change maybe in companies, in IoT vendors, in IoT solution providers in order to address these? For example, need to be a bit more friendly maybe with public authorities. Sorry if I say that, just joking a bit. As we talk, we need to do security by design and IoT solution development. Shall we or can we or maybe it’s not necessary talking about a sustainable by design IoT solution development framework? So these are two questions that I would like to know your view. And I think this is last slide from my side. I think we have some time for some questions. Thank you for listening to Amazing. Thank you, Saverio. That was a lot of information packed into a very short space of time. Really grateful for you throwing those slides together and talking us through your thoughts around it. Thank you very much. Wanted to save some time at the end of this for any questions from the people who have joined. We still have quite a few people on the call, which is great to see. Thank you for all of you all for being here. If you do have a question for Saverio around any of the topics presented today or anything around sustainability and IoT in general, please put them into that chat window. Actually, Nishi has left us a question here, Sverio, around. Are there any case studies where IoT use for electricity and natural gas are particularly relevant? Have you got any thoughts on that one? On gas, on gas obviously we can think about, I’m not entirely sure, but maybe I can do a bit of research on my side and answer it a bit later. But on the pipeline monitoring, as the example of water, when we want to avoid leakages and misuse. On oil and gas, I see a lot of application around pipeline monitoring, which again was a traditional M2M application, but it’s becoming more and more sophisticated in IoT. So, yes. Then, when you talk about IoT for electricity, if we want to talk about all the world of smart grid or smart energy and it becomes very big, mean the IoT is definitely a fundamental block there and just for smart metering, but also for on the transmission side, on the distribution side. Do we want to do, for example, remote monitoring of offshore wind farms? Yes, there are a lot of cases to look at. So, the answer is yes. It’s probably not a very complete answer, but on the natural gas specifically, I can investigate a bit more. And if you want something to look at, I can suggest it. Give me an afternoon. That’s great. Thank you, Saverio. I I actually had a question as well. If if anyone else has any questions, please please do enter them into the chat window in in in the screen. But you you presented a slide earlier on Saverio that was around smart farming. And you touched quite quite briefly on it, but I wondered if I could ask you a bit more more deeply about it. I wondered if when you were talking about precision farming, are there any examples that you can think of or any particularly good use cases of where IoT can help reduce CO2 emissions, particular within precision farming? Because, you know, obviously an area where there’s a huge carbon footprint. So just curious to know if there’s any examples that Yeah. So on livestock, which is the, as we know, one of the top sector, one of the top contributors to CO2 emission unfortunately. There is a lot of research work and trial on how precision livestock can help in that sense. But I’ve not seen commercial deployments. I mean, can look into it a bit more, but that is a very hot topic for farming in terms of CO2 emission. There is a lot of case studies about optimizing resources in farming, optimizing water, reducing fertilizing and there are a lot on the precision agriculture, for example, that use the drivers combined investors in big farm obviously. You look at John Deere, the center in Germany has a lot of case studies there. Company like GEA Technologies, always in Germany, yes, also a nice example. On specifically reducing the CO2, I think in the sense we talked before, there is a bit less, I think. There is a very nice collection of project, flagship program called the Demeter’, the Greek goddess of agriculture. Right. You go I found the link, I’ll send you the link, you can share with the audience. Then there are also a number of projects in which IoT is everywhere and in which maybe we can find specific ones on CO2 emissions. Primarily what I see, what I experienced was more optimizing resources in farming activities. Yeah. That’s great. Thank you for providing that answer. There are just a couple of questions here from Kataro. And apologies if I’m pronouncing that wrong. But the first question here is how can we keep the balance of energy reduction from IoT devices and the consumption that’s necessary for them to use in use cases such as transportation, installation and the maintenance of devices? Perhaps I’m not sure if you can see that question written in the chat there, Severio. You have any kind of thoughts around that topic? I think it’s a very open question. I don’t have a proper answer to that. It’s a research question that you go and see on the one M2M white paper is more or less stated the same. And there are a lot of activity in how to reduce the energy consumption of an IoT solution at the various steps. So how do you reduce the energy of a device? How do you reduce the energy of the connectivity? How do you reduce the energy when you elaborate the data into the cloud? But I do not have an idea on how on how we can balance that. But maybe Quite an open one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the the other one, the and and the final one I think we have here is how how can we gather certain amounts of data for for these business requirements? So you talked about the fire use case earlier on. Fire and a mountain will rarely happen, but if we can detect that with an algorithm, would it need at least ten thousand or more data for training purposes? Yes. The way of gathering this data at the moment, as I said, is primarily to basically populate forest of sensors and to enable therefore and to make these sensor networks very dense of sensors in order to gather as much data as you can. I think that in theory can be done. What I see is more the actual feasibility of it. How you actually deploy on vast forests which can be under threat and you know the speed, one of the variable you’re going to measure is the speed of the fire. And the speed of the fire is what it is. And how do you deploy in vast forests all these amount of sensors? In fact, a lot of the applications that are showed by these forty-forty five companies I’ve looked at are primarily proof of concept. And then there is the other option in which company says, okay, look, it’s crazy to put ten thousand sensors, twenty thousand sensors in all these. Let’s move up and so let’s use the drone. So you see applications in which you launch drones to cover certain area substituting, the covering of the drones instead of deploying, I don’t know, ten sensor within a specific part of the forest. All in progress. There’s a lot of work on that. I get the point. That’s great. Thank you for that. We only have a few minutes left and we’ve got a couple of good questions here that I’d like to get to if we have time. So this is really great one from Sarah, who asks about the environmental impact of IoT devices. And she says, Do you have any examples of where we can design or reuse or repurpose these products so that they are more environmentally friendly? Wow, these are great questions. Great question, yeah, thank you, sir. I have a case study in mind in which a device was reused. I think it was a water device. Let me look into it and I’ll send you the link. I’ve not seen many. In fact, there is a working group, I think it is in IEEE that looks specifically on this part. So not something that has been a huge adoption of, but potentially quite a good idea then? I think it is a great idea. I guess it is how do we do it. Right. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you for that, Sarah. I wanna get to Peter’s question since he’s a big believer in using IoT data to make smarter decisions, which I think we can all agree with. It’s a great point. Have you got any examples of where this has been the case for leading to more sustainable methods and integrated processes? Any thoughts on that one at all, Saverio? I think in smart cities, we start to see a change of mentality in the local authority and in the people working with technology. So, the mentality maybe is not the nice way of saying. A bit of culture change on understanding the importance of data has an enabler, probably the only enabler really for proper decisions on city planning, on lighting, on parking. You see cities like Barcelona or London that embraced the concept of smart city fifteen years ago, we are in a completely different level. I have experienced incredible experiences of which I’m going to a local authority and I’m asking them, have you done IoT based solution before? They say, yeah, we have a smart lighting solution. Oh, great. So, in my mind we can maybe reshape the post of the light where you have the sensor and put other sensor in it and so on. And then I asked, okay, what do you do with this smart lighting? What actually you do? And I said, what the data is? Can you show me, I don’t know, a dashboard, I don’t know, even Excel file, I don’t know, whatever. And the response was that the data I’ve never seen the data, Sarelia. The data is with the provider of the solutions. And this is one of the extreme cases. But this was four years ago. This is changing. You see now in this project in which I have, you see a lot of attention in Smart City on using the data, as you said, Peter, for smarter decisions, for planning the transport, bus systems for example, and traffic a lot in that direction, yes. I think if you go to that slide, to that link, in that link is a market place, you will find some interesting cases. We’ll be sending the slide deck around to everyone who signed up afterwards. So yeah, anyone will be able to explore those links in a little bit more detail. We have one minute left and I just wanna get to Andreas’ question very quickly. So Andreas asks regarding the business requirements for IoT systems, is there any research or collections of common requirements that you see always turn up, Severio? No. So I think because the IoT is very context aware, everything changes context by context, application by applications. I don’t see very similar common requirements. One common requirement that is increasingly getting to it also in the procurement process, for example. Sorry if I go back to SMARSEED, but it’s stuff that is very close to me in time at the moment. If you go and see on the procurement process in cities, one common requirement is what Peter said before. Right. Yeah, so you do these solutions. You do a smart lighting solution, then let’s discuss what we do with the data. So the potential analysis of the data and how we use it. Another common requirement maybe is I won’t post a post solution sub post, which is in my opinion is very good because sometimes you do IoT solution to someone and you implement, you do it and then you go and then the customer had the first problem and doesn’t know what to do. Today, a lot of IoT companies, a lot of them, they’re kind of not pushing but I think they’re arguing towards the customer, in this case with the cities, it’s important to have me. That you know you can call me if something goes wrong. And I think this post sales support, let’s call it like that, is useful. That’s great. Fantastic. Wow, these are amazing questions. Thank you so much everybody for asking them. I’m I’m glad you’re the one giving the answers and and not me, Severio. So great great job answering all of those. Listen. We we we are at time, so I I think it’s it’s now a good time to wrap up. It’s just about all we have time for. All all that really makes me say is is is just a huge thanks to you, Severio, for preparing today’s presentation and answering all the all the q and a. Thank you so much. You did a great job there. Thank you. Sorry for the beginning. Yeah. No. No problem. I’m all all all sorted now. And I I’d also like to say a huge thanks to everybody who’s who’s joined us live today as well for giving up time in your day. Like I said at the beginning, it’s an exceptionally busy time for everybody. So we really hope that you’ve found this session useful. And hopefully, we’ll see you again at a future webinar in the not too distant future. Remember, if you’d like to learn more about SIRACOM, how we can help your IoT application connect to a secure network, access innovative tools that help you speed the time to market, reduce data consumption, transmit data to the cloud, and many more things, please visit suracom. Io where you can learn more about our platform and set up a call with one of our experts. That is just about it. We are right on time. In fact, we’re one minute over. Sorry for that. But thanks again, everyone, for joining, and we will see you again in the future. Thanks very much everyone. Goodbye. Have a good time. Bye bye. Bye.