Combining Satellite and Cellular IoT
Full Podcast Transcript
Ryan Chacon: Welcome Alex to IoT for All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.
Alex Kotler: Pleasure.
RC: It's great to have you. Before we get into it, I'd love, if you can, give a quick introduction about yourself and the company to our audience.
Alex Kotler: Sure. So, my name is Alex Kotler. I'm the SVP for Sales and Partnerships for North America. So, I'm responsible for all sales activity as well as developing new distribution channels in North America. The company that I'm with is POND IoT. We've been around since 2011. We started originally as Pond Mobile, focusing on the international roaming customers. And eventually in 2018, because the customers on behalf have been asking for a domestic product, specifically in the data-only sector, and that's when we kind of got into the whole IoT stuff, if you will. And we've been growing ever since.
RC: Tell us a little bit more about kind of your focus in the IoT space. When you're talking, you said the data sector. So what does that all mean? What is it that you're actually bringing to the market and selling to potential customers of yours?
AK: So, it's what's called a Multi-IMSI SIM. And I know there's a lot of questions about it, because this product has been called a number of different ways. Some call it a Smart SIM. Some call it a universal SIM. Some people even call it an eSIM. But essentially, a Multi-IMSI SIM, and the easiest way I can describe it, is it's a SIM card that has connectivity across multiple networks, across multiple countries, which gives you a huge advantage when you come to different countries. You get the best possible rate, because, again, you have multiple roaming agreements that you have access to.
RC: Is there a particular application, use cases when it comes to IoT deployments that your customers are using your technology and offerings for? Obviously, I imagine, a lot has to do with going between networks into different areas, different environments, different regions. What does that look like?
AK: So, I would say the biggest areas where we're seeing a lot of growth in is billboards, ATM machine, kiosks, everything that gets put out into different parts of the country/the world, where it is impossible to predict network coverage from a particular provider, including failovers. I mean, you have a bunch of routers that support multiple SIM cards. But again, you have access to two like this. You have access to three or four, it depends on the country that you're in. So, it eliminates any guesswork. It also makes it very easy from an operational standpoint, because you're not dealing with multiple carrier relationships, you're not dealing with multiple bills.
RC: How have you seen, and this is something that I've noticed over the last couple of years, we started to see, obviously, cellular IoT grow rapidly, but also satellite IoT start to kind of come into the fold here. And we're starting to see satellite merge with these terrestrial networks, whether it's cellular, LPWAN technologies to be able to provide greater coverage. How are you, are you all involved in that in any capacity, and kind of what are you seeing happen there, and what kind of value does that potentially offer to people you work with?
AK: So, I would say probably one of the biggest applications for this would be in the shipping industry, where you're transferring packages across the ocean, where you don't have access to cellular coverage as well as areas, where you don't have cellular coverage on the mainland. So, right now, I feel like the space is emerging. It's definitely coming up live. At the moment, we don't have a product that supports both just from a technology standpoint, but we do have something on the roadmap that is coming, which would integrate with cellular and satellite off of a SIM card.
RC: That's awesome. Yeah, I know there's a lot of agriculture-based use cases that are finding success with deployment and maturity of the satellite connectivity that's being provided, which, I think, is just very much in line with what you were talking about with shipping industry. When you're going in and out of networks, the range of networks, you need to oftentimes keep your devices online, reporting, collecting data. And this is a way to kind of have the best of both worlds.
AK: Yeah, so, you get to benefit from the cost savings of a cellular infrastructure, and you get a benefit from the coverage gaps from a satellite infrastructure. So, yeah, absolutely.
RC: Aside from the agriculture space, and kind of the shipping space, where do you see this partnership of cellular and satellite potentially going? Do you see any, is anything kind of stand out to you that, maybe is not commonly thought about, when it comes to just the fact that you're going to expand the coverage for potential applications?
AK: Specifically, in a not traditional IoT applications. Usually when somebody says IoT, they're thinking about sensors and GPS trackers. But, you know, technically a failover, a fixed wireless situation could also be applied in the whole IoT sphere. So, we recently became an authorized Peplink-Starlink solutions provider. And I feel like this partnership bridged a very important gap, because you have situations, one, in an RV environment, where you're traveling across the country, you're not going to have cellular coverage all over the place, but you still need that high bandwidth to do whatever it is that you need to do. And that is where Starlink would come in, and you get to benefit from the advantages of that satellite connectivity. But then once that's no longer available, let's say, you're parked under a tree, and now you're moving over cellular, and you get the benefits of the high bandwidth stuff across cellular. In the fixed wireless applications, the same situation. It's cheaper to have a Starlink product as your primary and to have your cellular as your secondary. So, in the event there's really bad weather outside, you cut out, you could still have access at a reasonable cost.
RC: Is there a way to, during the early stages of a deployment, of a deployment and the planning kind of, I guess, phase of that to be able to understand what type of connectivity you're likely going to need, or how can a company best approach that? Because I'm sure people are listening and wondering like, well, do I need cellular and satellite, or do I just need one or the other? Like, how do you best evaluate whether or not you think that's something you're going to need? And I imagine it's something you try to do as early as possible.
AK: You should think about it kind of like insurance. And that's really all that it is. You have a car, you have to have insurance, whether you take advantage of it or not, hopefully god willing you don't, but it's there, if you need, and the cost for having cellular as a backup is so minimal that it doesn't make sense not to add that capability, because, if you need internet, you need to get online, you need to get things done. What is the cost associated with you losing that capability, with you losing internet to, what are you going to do?
RC: I just think it's coming up more and more in conversations with these deployments that companies have been trying to have and to make possible for a while, but maybe we're not, because the maturity of the technology from a connectivity standpoint wasn't always there. But, as we've seen, satellites start to mature more and become more available, it's something that I think a lot of these use cases that we're going to put on the back burner are going to start to come to the forefront, and that'll be really exciting to see for everybody.
AK: Yeah, I mean, in the IT space, redundancy is extremely important. For a few bucks a month, you to have access to this level of redundancy is nothing, in my opinion, at least, especially, when you're building out networks, and you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
RC: A number of weeks ago, a lot of people, from at least a consumer standpoint, really felt or ran into a situation, when, I think it was AT&T, huge outage. And it's just kind of something that we don't really think about, because we take for granted a lot of the connectivity that we have, and access to that in the US. Did that bring up any kind of topics to more, to the forefront with customers of yours on how to best kind of think about and prepare for things like that? Because that's something that a lot of people really have never encountered at a scale of that size. And, if you bring it over, to kind of the enterprise side, and you have all these devices that are online that are running on this network, and it goes down, what are you supposed to do? Is there a way to prepare for that? How do you think about those kinds of things? What did that situation really bring to the forefront for you and your customers, existing customers and potentially new customers?
AK: So, when this thing just happened, I want to say, the first couple of days, we had a lot of our existing customers reaching out and new customers reaching out. Existing ones said, oh, you know, there was an outage, but we didn't seem to have been affected. Is there something that we should be doing to be proactive? You know, that path is easy. The customers that happen to be on AT&T,
using our SIM cards at the moment lost connectivity for about a minute or so. And then, the SIM card, the device would connect to another network and life is easy. But on the new customers, they were like, well, what are you doing to protect against these types of outages? Did your customers experience these outages? You know, that generated a considerable amount of business influx. Now that it's been a few days past that outage, you know, the customers quickly forget what happened. But it is definitely something that comes up in conversations on a regular basis, because people don't think that an MNO could go down.
RC: I wonder how much also the other elements of an IoT solution, kind of, play into this. So, if we think about how often a device is collecting data, reporting data up to the cloud, and actually using the connectivity, I'm sure that it can influence how at risk a solution potentially is. Also, with what type of computing is being done, where it's being done, is it being done up in the cloud, is it being done at the edge? All those things, I imagine, factor into how much of a risk network outages are for a particular use case, which probably influences a whole number of things.
AK: Absolutely. And when my sales team speaks with customers, redundancy is something that we talk about on a regular basis. We know we're not the cheapest company out there. And it is what it is. And the reason behind it is we try to incorporate as many redundancies in our infrastructure as we possibly can. This goes not just at a network level, but to a support level. We offer 24/7 live customer support. This way, when something happens, not if, it's when. It doesn't matter how much redundancy you built in. Sooner or later, something will happen. But when that happens, we have people in place to, kind of, guide you through that outage.
RC: Let me change topics here a little bit and ask you, aside from the discussion around cellular, and satellite, and network allergies, and stuff. Are there challenges that you all have seen from your vantage point working with customers, and, maybe, even the customers of your customers that they're encountering in the IoT space at this, kind of, current moment?
AK: Most customers don’t really understand what IoT really is. And a lot of times they will try to use consumer-grade product to employ in their IoT infrastructure. Or they will look at a gray market product that they're trying to put on a network, that's a device that has no PTCRB certification. It came out of Alibaba or whatever the case is. And they try to use this product, and you try to explain it to them, you try to educate the customer that, if you're building, if you're going through the whole digital transformation phase, cheap is very expensive. That's a big challenge. I want to say another challenge that we face is in an IoT environment, most of the companies that play in this space, most of the companies that are experts in this space, they're not your household names. The customers feel that if they seek out a household name, they would be better suited. They would be better serviced. Which in the IoT space, that's definitely, not the case. In the mobility space, maybe. It's a generic consumer product. But IoT is more enterprise geared. It's more commercial. There is a lot of nuances.
RC: All of this stems back to where we are as an industry, when it comes to education. I think, we set out when we started IoT for all many years ago, we noticed there was a huge gap in just the ability for people to educate potential buyers in enterprises and commercial businesses, what IoT is, how it works, what it can do for their business. And obviously, the industry has grown a ton since then. But we still, at times, run into organizations, who are still trying to understand exactly what IoT can do for their business, what all these different technologies mean, what solutions even exist, and to your last point, who to work with. Because, you know, they see these big brands that say they do IoT. But in reality, a lot of these big brands actually work with partners, and some of these lesser known brands to build their solutions. They might white label them and help bring them customers. But companies that really focus and understand the area in IoT, which they work, whether it's the connectivity side, the hardware side, there's a system integrator in the IoT space specifically. Those are the ones that, I think, potential adopters need to understand, really know their stuff. Not the companies, who are just moving into the IoT space, because they see it as a good opportunity, but they've built their brand in a completely different space, or a space that's maybe not really as well connected. I think that's something that a lot of companies can benefit from trying to educate the market on of what that value is in working with those organizations. Have you seen that as a big challenge on yours end? And what do you feel like could be done about that?
AK: It's a major challenge. I'd say it's, probably, one of the bigger challenges. Educating a customer is not always the easiest path, because they will ask a friend, and that friend is a bigger authority than any Google, Chat GPT could bring to the table. You know what I mean? So that's the biggest challenge. Customers have a difficult time overcoming the environment that their friend is not an all end all be all. And, you know, when I used to work for the big three, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, each carrier had its strengths. And you will have three customers, four different opinions about these carriers. And this is a challenge that's very difficult to overcome. And what we've been trying to do with these customers is we'll give you a demo. Here's a free demo. Try it. Do X, Y, and Z. Experience the product for yourself. I'm not even going to charge you for shipping. Just do it. And then, when they try it and they see what it is, not all, but, I want to say, most of them do have a huge ‘aha moment’, and they understand the value that we and companies like ours bring to the table.
RC: The easier a company can make it to try something, to try a solution, to try connectivity, try hardware, whatever it may be, the better it's going to be, because, I think, that's how people, maybe, learn, and feel more secure, kind of, working with an organization. And then, like we said already, the education piece prior to even engaging with you, is just the more that happens, and the more that's done well, hopefully the organizations feel more secure about going down the IoT path, and seeing other companies with successful deployments and how they're kind of approaching it, what companies are working with, all that kind of good stuff. I think, it's going to just continue to compound on each other to hopefully make companies feel better, and, more likely, to want to adopt an IoT solution, because there are a lot of different pieces of it. And that can be very overwhelming for organizations for sure.
AK: Absolutely. I mean, I'll tell you a recent interaction that I had with a customer. This customer is building an AI-driven IoT solution for the agricultural market. And he was looking for connectivity. My team explained the different hardware that he can use and should use in this particular application, factoring in the vibrations of distractor, the fact that they're going to be outside exposed to the element. We shared pricing with them. And he's like, well, Alex, I get everything. I appreciate the tutelage in this space, if you will. But you guys are coming out to be almost four times more expensive than another provider. And I said, well, who's the provider? And then he shares the provider with me. And this comes out to be a company based out of China, using a cloud SIM infrastructure. I mean, you can't build a business using that type of connectivity. And there's no way one can educate that person until they actually find out for themselves that cheap is very, very expensive.
RC: And it also doesn't help their likelihood to start that IoT adoption journey again. You know, once they're kind of scarred from a deployment that didn't go well. Oftentimes it's their fault because they chose the cheap path. They chose the easy path. They didn't really do the research or take the time. They, kind of, just found something that thought it was a fit. Like you said before, they'll use consumer products in the enterprise space, which can lead to many different kinds of vulnerabilities and issues, when it comes to trying to build something beyond, you know, maybe a testing phase or a pilot phase. And I think that's something that we, as an industry, have struggled with. It is being able to get people to a point, where they can see the value to then grow to scale, and then hopefully adopt other solutions, which obviously everybody is really hoping they do, because that's where everybody kind of wins. Well, Alex, it's been a great conversation. I appreciate you coming on. A couple of topics we haven't discussed in quite a while. Some new ones, especially about the network outages that recently happened, and how companies can repair. For audience, who might want to follow up with this conversation, learn more about what you have going on at POND IoT, what's the best way they can do that?
AK: So, they could reach out to us on our website at pondiot.com. We also have a YouTube channel, where we're posting videos every week about different hardware, and just different things that are happening in the space. You could also look us up as pondiot on YouTube. That would, probably, be the best way.
RC: Well, Alex, thank you so much. I'm very excited to do more with you all going forward. I think what you have going on is great, and I'm excited for our audience to hear this.
AK: Awesome. Thank you.