What to Expect When You're Connecting
What to Expect When You're Connecting includes interviews with a wide range of industry subject matter experts who share their journey, advice, and the mistakes they've made along the way in IoT. If you're adding connectivity to your products for the first time or seeking to optimize and scale your existing connectivity operations – welcome to the conversation.
What to Expect When You're Connecting
Making Bluetooth Usable in Enterprise IoT Deployments
In this episode of 'What to Expect When You're Connecting,' host Ryan Carlson welcomes Felix Zhao, founder and CEO of Cassia Networks, to discuss the evolution and potential of Bluetooth technology in enterprise IoT applications. Felix shares insights about the history of Bluetooth, its challenges in enterprise settings, and how Cassia Networks addresses these issues with advanced Bluetooth gateways and routers.
The conversation explores technical innovations like increased range, cost-efficiency, and Bluetooth security, making it a viable solution for industrial and healthcare environments. The episode also covers the importance of cellular connectivity in simplifying deployment and reducing costs, with Felix highlighting the partnership with Soracom to enhance their offerings.
The discussion includes practical applications and future advancements in Bluetooth technology, making it an informative listen for IoT professionals.
00:00 Video: Using Bluetooth in Enterprise IoT Deployments
00:27 Introduction and Guest Introduction
01:21 The Evolution of Bluetooth Technology
02:29 Bluetooth in Enterprise IoT
06:09 Comparing Bluetooth with Other Technologies
09:06 Security and Power Efficiency of Bluetooth
10:59 About Bluetooth Security and Channel Hopping
13:52 Cassia Networks' Innovations
17:20 Technical Aspects of Cassia's Bluetooth Gateways
19:50 Integration and Application of Cassia's Solutions
23:57 Exploring Cellular Connectivity in Industrial Gateways
24:26 Challenges in Industrial and Medical Environments
25:14 Customer Feedback and Product Evolution
26:28 Cost and Maintenance Benefits of Cellular Gateways
27:02 Success Stories and Real-World Applications
31:20 Innovations in Bluetooth Technology
31:36 Bluetooth Roaming and Medical Applications
35:53 Future of Bluetooth in Industrial Settings
38:03 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Welcome to What To Expect When You're Connecting a podcast for IO OT professionals, ampy iot Curious, who find themselves responsible for growing, executing, or educating others about the challenges with connecting products and services to the internet. You'll learn from industry experts who understand those challenges deeply and what they've done to overcome that. Now for your host, Ryan Carlson.
Ryan Carlson:Everyone welcome to what to expect when you're connecting. We've got a great guest today. We've got Felix Xiao, who's the founder and CEO of Cassia networks. Not only is he an inventor of hardware that we all are aware of, like mesh routers is also happens to be the, the first company to have the world's first Bluetooth router. And we're going to get into the use of Bluetooth, which is commonly used in IOT applications, but we all immediately jumped to headphones and cell phones and pairing devices not actually thinking about it as a way to deploy wide scale sensors. Felix, thank you for joining us and tell me about your journey with Bluetooth
Felix:Thank you for having me ryan. Bluetooth is by the use for almost everything. It just started a consumer technology. Let me step back three decades ago. The the founders of Bluetooth started to research a shorter range wireless technology. then they didn't even have a name. And one of the founders of Bluetooth read a book about a king of Denmark and the name of the king, Herod Bluetooth really stuck with him. And the inspiration there was this King Bluetooth united the the tribes of Denmark and the founder was hoping that one day this new technology would unite the wireless communication protocols. For PCs and the internet for low bandwidth communication. That was the inspiration and fast forward 30 years later, Bluetooth has become a dominant technology for consumer. A low bandwidth short range communication. every smartphone has Bluetooth. Every PC has a Bluetooth. your speakers your earphones. Wearable devices but there's one place where Bluetooth has not really united the the IOT and the short range communication that is an enterprise space. Bluetooth was really designed for a very low band of a short range communication, one to one communication. And what Cassia came into play was for that space for a Bluetooth enterprise IoT. our inspiration was to really help, the founders of Bluetooth to realize his ultimate dream. To to make Bluetooth D protocol for shorter end communication, not only for consumer applications, but for enterprise IoT applications.
Ryan Carlson:So let's define short range since you know, we could be thinking about We could, you know, I could, I can go 30 feet away from my desk Bluetooth headphones will still, you know, get the signal in the minute I go on the other side of a door, know, everything will get
Felix:Sure.
Ryan Carlson:jerky, but that's, that's assuming that it's off of one radio in a laptop or in a cell phone. So when we're talking enterprise. I know that we've got factory floors, we've got warehouses, there's hospitals talk to me about range a, at an enterprise level. What does that mean for a Bluetooth device?
Felix:Initially Bluetooth only had a range of a few meters these days the technology has evolved. If you use smartphone or PC today, typically you can get a range for about 10 to 30 meters. Which is Big improvement, compared to what it was before, but it's still not enough for enterprise IoT applications. it's also one on one communication, typically, if you want to communicate to your, speaker at home, for example you may notice that your phone can only communicate to one speaker at a time, right? That's also not ideal for enterprise applications. For enterprise the people are used to like a wifi, like a wrench, right? Typically a hundred meters or more. The Bluetooth is far from that kind of wrench and Cassia can help on that to provide much longer rent for enterprise IoT. And also with, help solve this one to one communication issue. So we can achieve, for outdoor communication outside up to one kilometer today, actually that makes a Bluetooth unlike other short range communication technologies. It's pretty much on par with wifi or even longer.
Ryan Carlson:That's wild. And it's interesting to have seen the evolution of wireless technology. Having been someone who grew up in the early 9600 baud modem days, all the way to early broadband DSL, and then seeing wifi being more prevalent. It's not just a hard connection on early Bluetooth. We've seen in the IOT space over the years, things like LoRaWAN and ZigBee and these other, you know, lower 900 or 2400 megahertz Spectrums for for cutting through materials for dealing with environmental conditions, but and and the big one being power, right? Wi Fi is still very power consumptive to
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:radio. The cost on the components is going to be higher and. The challenge that I see is that, we've always wanted to drive costs down, bring down battery consumption, but the difference between like LoRaWAN and Bluetooth, help me compare these two in an ecosystem of devices. what is it that's attractive about Bluetooth versus going down the LoRaWAN ecosystem? Knowing that there's benefits to both, is it a developer decision or technology requirements?
Felix:That's a great question. First let's talk about the the comparison between Bluetooth and wifi. People often ask, why don't we just use wifi? Because it's everywhere, right? Already. Problem with wifi is that. A as you said the, it's very power hungry. If you use wifi, for example, for your smoke sensor at home or in the office with, the smoke sensor is typically a powered by battery. so every, you have to change the battery. That's not, practical. I like your phone. You can charge your phone every day, but for a smoke sensor that is mounted maybe at the roof of your house. That's that's too much work for most people. If you use a low power Bluetooth for the same sensor, don't have to change the battery for one or two years.
Ryan Carlson:Right.
Felix:that's the difference. So it's not like a, 100%, 200%. It's several hundred times power consumption difference. 99%. Of the IoT devices are powered by batteries any devices that are powered by batteries. For IoT purpose wifi is today is not a, an ideal solution. So what about LoRaWAN and Zigbee so those technologies are also designed for low power communication. In terms of power consumption, they're similar to data or Bluetooth, but they are today not very widely used for a very simple reason. I think, Bluetooth is the technology that is very open. Like Wi Fi, it uses the 2. 4 gigahertz frequency band that is universally available all over the world. You don't need a license. The protocol is very open. And also I think I think Apple made a big difference in the history of the low power wireless communication protocol. So while Apple made the first iPhone they selected the Bluetooth, to be the the protocol for communicating to to the wearable devices and the speaker and so on and so forth.
Ryan Carlson:When they said, we're not going to put a headphone port on, you headphones It's how mainstream is the technology have enough developers that are familiar with writing to that particular type of technology. Bluetooth is choice for IOT, other than just battery life, is there, a way of using this to create more secure communications that isn't having to use you know, wifi. Let's talk about the, some of those other needs of enterprise. We want to deploy things at scale. We need to have, lots of these devices it's going to be battery powered. It's low cost, let's talk about security and options for encryption or protecting the data that is being collected and centralized.
Felix:Sure. Besides being extremely low power, Bluetooth is also extremely low cost. That's another huge advantage. Why it's a cost is so low is because the quantity is so large. So last year. More than 5 billion Bluetooth devices were shipped worldwide. By comparison, the number for wifi is about two, 2 billion. 4G, 5G, everything combined for the cellular part is another 2 billion or so. And for LoRaWAN and ZigBee, they're probably, a couple of hundreds of millions. So not same magnitude at all. So Bluetooth. know, in terms of the number of devices shipped each year, it's actually more than all the other wireless technologies combined. If you ask a manufacturer, they will tell you, if the quantity is so large, right? The cost will go down, right? So that's a huge advantage of Bluetooth. That brought us back to Apple, right? I think the decision made by Steve Jobs and Apple when they introduced the first iPhone actually was the moment when Bluetooth started to take off, right? Because the number of smartphones is so big, right? And it grew so fast. And that's about the quantity and the cost about security. So it's very interesting. the the founders of Bluetooth made a very smart decision about three decades ago they chose a technology called channel hopping for a Bluetooth protocol. What this means is that the the communication channel for Bluetooth keeps changing. It's actually a military technology. To avoid, hacking, right? Founders of Bluetooth adopted that technology initially not for security reasons. They they Selected that technology to fight the interference from other, sources like wifi and cellular and things like that. Because the transmission power of a Bluetooth is so much lower. compared to other wireless technologies to save power, right? To prolong the battery life. very interestingly, that technology also greatly enhances the security, because if you are a hacker, if you don't know, Why, which, band the sender and the receiver are using to communicate. It's very hard for you to hack.
Ryan Carlson:Like in Star Trek where they modulate the frequency of the shields. So you can't penetrate it's the, you know, it, it, it makes a lot of sense. And so this probably is why when devices pair with one another, I imagine they're synchronizing on how the frequency hopping is going to occur, or they're agreeing on what that frequency would be or how it's going to hop from one channel to the next.
Felix:That is correct. Yes.
Ryan Carlson:We've got all these smartphones. We've got a ton of devices in the world now with Bluetooth and developers are in a paradigm where they use wifi. Where they've got routers that can one router can a whole bunch of devices, smartphones with Bluetooth and they're always thinking pairing. And I know that the work I've done in, in healthcare, in, in medical, Of those initial in home telemetry, all of the remote patient monitoring, all of this stuff, it starts with having a phone in someone's hand, pairing it with a device, having these one to one relationships and being tethered to the device in order to, for those sensors to get out to the internet requires there being a phone or an iPad or Android device that's in range of these sensors. And if they're Got people walking around their clipboard and their industrial Android device. Walking the factory floor, doing their inspections and pulling the information from the sensors, because those sensors themselves, unless they have a wifi chip in them, aren't being able to connect to a network and get out to the internet. So let's talk Cassia and, that, that gap that you're filling and allowing developers of these sensor networks or applications that break that tether on a mobile device for that gateway you guys are
Felix:Yeah. Yeah,
Ryan Carlson:router, it's a Bluetooth router
Felix:That's that's a great summary you just made there. Was designed for the end of the device to communicate with either a Smartphone a PC is one to one short range communication. if you use it at home in most cases you are, you're okay. But if you want to use it in the enterprise environment In most of the cases, you would find it extremely, hard to use. Because then you require, the user to have a phone or a tablet to walk around your factory, your office, your hospital, to communicate to each device, one on one and pair with them first. And then, collect the data. This is for most users just not practical solution.
Ryan Carlson:Okay.
Felix:a wifi router or wifi ap, whatever you call it. it is always there, it communicates to the end device 24 7. The user don't need to do anything. So they just get the data.
Ryan Carlson:bye.
Felix:we did actually. To design a Bluetooth router or Bluetooth gateway to be put inside enterprise or office or hospital or factory to communicate with many, Bluetooth and the devices and communicate with them in real time. without the human intervention.
Ryan Carlson:A fleet of, a fleet of sensors and devices that used to require many applications, you know, running on all of these different mobile devices, they could be running on PCs, they could be running on the equipment that was near sensors but was Right. driving your total cost of ownership for a solution up it required you have these devices that you may not have had before. You know, consumer world can see low cost of Bluetooth. They assume that you've already got a phone or you assume you have a PC, like assuming that they're already there is a big deal. Big assumption, especially for in home healthcare or, you know, on the factory floor. one of the things I find really fascinating about the work that you've done one, I would like to hear about what was the hardest part about changing the paradigm of Bluetooth into, having its own AP or its own gateway, talk to me also about the. the partition that you're putting in these devices where you can put the application on one of your gateways. So people that are building solutions, they don't even need to deploy devices at all or extra And can run things entirely cloud based. Mm
Felix:There are a few things that we did to make this work. the first we need to extend the range, right? The 10 to 30 meters the traditional Bluetooth range is just not going to work, in, in the enterprise environment. So to do that we have to the gateway in a way that it can greatly. extend the range without asking the end device to do anything,
Ryan Carlson:hmm.
Felix:because we don't make those end devices. We cannot increase the transmission power of those end devices or change their protocol. If we can, we actually don't want to do that would defeat the whole purpose of using Bluetooth, right? The purpose of using Bluetooth is to make it a super low power and super cheap, right? If you have to increase the transmission power of the device, then the battery life would be much shorter, than why don't you just use Wi Fi? So it doesn't make any sense. So the trick is to increase the receive sensitivity of the Bluetooth gateways
Ryan Carlson:How much of that creating a new kind of radio and how much of it is designing specialized antennas? Because I got to imagine it's a, it's a
Felix:Uh, Okay. Good question. It's really about three things. First is to design a smart antenna for the Bluetooth gateway, right? So that will certainly help, but that's not the only thing. The second is to a hardware and a software combo to greatly increase the the radio receive sensitivity. To be able to detach a very weak signal from far away. So that's that's a Cassius a patented technology. And the third one is to basically make the gateway capable of know, detecting the signal from the noise. So all those are patented, if you are interested, you can just search for Cassia networks. And because those patents are already granted, you can read the paper. And see how we actually did that. So together they extended the range from 10 to 30 meters all the way to up to one kilometers. And without requiring any changes on the devices. Yes. Yes.
Ryan Carlson:IoT solutions that are leveraging Bluetooth sensors or technology, or maybe they've already created a series of sensors, Since there's no changes that are required at the device level to be compliant, I'm hearing that by leveraging these gateway systems or access points they, they have a special sauce in order to just basically extend the range of existing Bluetooth Systems. I would also imagine that these devices, would you be able to build your, the app rather than being on. You know, an iOS or an Android device, which most people have done, they just create some sort of port that like a porting that software to live on the Cassia gateway? And then the devices think it's got a phone near it.
Felix:That's another very important question. I mentioned that our technology doesn't require the end device to make any changes. But the user do need to do something on their side. That's not on the end device side, but on application software side Cassia has a open API for our routers and also for our access controller software. The users can use that API to make some minor changes on their application software to be able to with their other devices through the Cassia gateways.
Ryan Carlson:So there are two different ways that I'm aware of, of having, an application talk to that sensor data. And the first one is. In an on premise offline mode would be like using a containerization, like either a Docker or Kubernetes type style container that lives on your device. And then I'd have a version of my application. Living within the factory, but if I have got a multi site situation where on premise security isn't the requirement you've got a platform of some kind that communicates with all your devices and then pushes that data out to the cloud.
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:just use, have your application point to that cloud endpoint and then pull information from there. Is that, is that right?
Felix:In most cases unless otherwise required by the customers, the Cassia gageways are mainly doing transparent, relaying of the data. The Cassia gateway is like a relay point, collected the data from the Bluetooth and the devices, and then relay that data to the application software of the customers.
Ryan Carlson:Whether it's in the cloud or it's
Felix:or locally. Yes.
Ryan Carlson:a container locally. So this means that people can use their preexisting network if they want to put the device on their local network. Right? So if we're in a
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:Or an industrial situation, IT would just this router any other access point onto their physical network, either Or, you know, other than Ethernet, is there, does your device go from Bluetooth to Wi Fi? Or is it primarily going to want a hard connection?
Felix:So currently our enterprise gateway support ethernet, wifi and the cellular as backhaul. So
Ryan Carlson:To talk about that because of my years when we're talking industrial health care, energy, utilities, access to the network is actually harder and harder to get and
Felix:Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:a, if you're like a a maintenance company that's doing predictive maintenance on equipment, you Own the sensors or you're deploying them on a customers. Location
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:or letting it give you access is sometimes challenging. Take me back to when you first were looking at Cellular connectivity on your industrial gateway. Cause I know you're using a cellular modem inside. There is a backhaul option Your, your new cellular gateway to actually have one right here.
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:Talk to me, talk to me about the, the decision process and that evaluation process as you were deciding to have a backhaul option for cellular
Felix:So initially our our first generation enterprise gateway way only had, wifi and ethernet as backhaul. But We heard the feedback from many of our customers, some are industrial customers, some are medical customers. What they are telling us that it's often very difficult for them to get the permission from their customers, right? Whether it's a factory or a hospital, especially a hospital, right?
Ryan Carlson:The hospital. That's
Felix:because most of the hospitals have a very strict security requirements. They don't like they are, like suppliers to put a, they are like a gauge ways or, staff inside their, hospitals and connect to their network. I think our customers are telling us, right? So this is Making our life so difficult. Can you guys make a gateway, right? That doesn't need to connect to the hospital network. By the way, that, the small gateway you just showed that was the part that we made for that purpose, and it quickly became of Cassia's best sellers because it's so easy to use. You basically, you plug that gate small gauge way into your power grade and you're done basically.
Ryan Carlson:And then you're
Felix:You are that. And no installation, no, tds it work. And our customers just love that. for industrial applications, it'd be more complicated on that because, it's typically the environment is much more challenging. You are also talking about like outdoor or even. For indoor applications it can be very dusty, very, hard or cold, whatever very challenging environment. So the gateway has to endure, very challenging conditions. The idea is the same. so if you have a cellular modem inside your gateway that will make the user's life so much easier and actually the biggest cost of deploying these gateways is not the equipment cost itself. it's the deployment cost
Ryan Carlson:it's true.
Felix:and the maintenance cost,
Ryan Carlson:hmm.
Felix:So by having a cellular gateway, we also greatly reduced the the total ownership cost for the customers.
Ryan Carlson:We've, we've had a number of Soracom customers. and Share their stories. And one of the things that keeps hitting me is a company that does leak detection solutions. And they said, my installers are not network engineers or telecommunications professionals. Once we switched away from needing local network access and started just having a gateway that uses cellular, like we could set up everything up in the warehouse, we could send the installer out and they're just there to mount things on walls, which is the thing, the skill set that they are, you know, they, they are best at is. Putting the things where they need to be. They
Felix:Okay.
Ryan Carlson:and Now everything was pre pre provisioned. It was, you know, set up in advance. We had another healthcare company that went from 15 minutes per device for setup down to three. Making it easier for the end customer. With cellular, was there ever a point where had customers were on their own for picking which, which carrier or which tower is going to be best for their particular solution? Or at what point did you start having conversations with Soracom?
Felix:We started to have a conversation with Soracom a few years ago because, as mentioned, our customer were asking us to have a cellular backhaul for the gateways,we, really enjoyed our conversation with Soracom because, Soracom is very supportive. and and Soracom solution can be used in like more than a hundred countries in the world. That's also a great I think advantage for us because we have customers like ABB and Fujitsu, those big multinational companies that uses our gateways in many countries.
Ryan Carlson:Mm hmm.
Felix:want them to be able to use our gateway. All those countries without changing the carrier, without worrying about, hey, for this country, we use this carrier, for that country, we use that carrier. There's too much work for them, right? Soracom really, of I think found a smart way to solve that problem for us. Some rare cases, the customer would make make a request, say, Hey, you have to use this carrier, right? Because we have a contract with them, right? We can support that too, right?
Ryan Carlson:You have to be able to react to that enterprise customer where the is they have a preferred contracted company that they're locked into. And sometimes
Felix:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:They have to pay a fee to go So, I mean, that's, that's, that's completely understandable. So there's the, the connectivity that works with all these Cassia devices there's also the, USB Onyx radio that I know that Cassia has made use of before. What gap does that fill in your overall product lineup? Was it a speed to market benefit or was it the licensing from a radio perspective?
Felix:That particular cellular modem is mostly used for our industrial customers. So we put that seller modem into the enclosure of the X 2000 of industrial IoT gateway. Because that product can support the cellular networks of many countries. That's really convenient for our customers. I think the cost is also, quite reasonable. That's another advantage there. Mm.
Ryan Carlson:Looking piece of equipment. And knowing that you need in, some of these really dirty, hazardous environments, you almost need to have the option for disposable. Sensing equipment knowing that the cost is so low on those Bluetooth devices, I can see some significant advantages over having to go with wifi or hard connected when you're going to be in, whether it's oil rigs, whether it's going to be on In transit or pipelines, These different areas that I'm seeing Cassia, providing a new solution, but it's a new old solution, right? It's the Bluetooth, which everyone's aware Greatly extending capacity, And more importantly, the range of preexisting devices.
Felix:Right.
Ryan Carlson:Is there Improvements that they saw, whether it was deployment speed to market cost? Was there anything in particular that you consistently see?
Felix:In terms of technology innovation, besides, about inventing the technology to greatly extended the range without requiring end devices to do anything. There's also this thing called Bluetooth roaming.
Ryan Carlson:Tell me more.
Felix:basically what it does is it makes the gateways very similar to the Wi Fi gateways and the cellular towers in terms of supporting roaming, right? Roaming is basically the technology that allows you to move from the coverage area of, say, one cellular base station to another. And you can drive from San Francisco to San Jose, for example, right? Your cell phone will be covered by multiple cellular base stations during the way. There would be some handoffs happening along the way, but the users wouldn't feel a thing, right? So your phone call is never interrupted. So we basically did the same thing for Bluetooth. this was actually required by our medical customers like Medtronic. So several years ago, they started to use our gateways inside the hospitals, to collect the data from their continuous glucose monitoring wearable devices.
Ryan Carlson:Where patients are going to be moving from one room to the next room to,
Felix:Exactly. Yes.
Ryan Carlson:therapy to wherever it is. And so I I was wondering, how are you getting past that, that idea of a one to one relationship, even if the one
Felix:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:A sensor to a gateway. So you're saying Bluetooth roaming. Is what allows you to hop between nodes on
Felix:Yes. Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:To Cassia?
Felix:The Bluetooth roaming is another patented technology. Of Cassia. Actually there was not even this word of Bluetooth roaming. We invented that very word, but it's interesting. So it's Becoming quite popular. And our customers love it because that solves their problems. Allows the the users of or the or the person who has those Bluetooth end devices with them to move around freely. And this area covered by the Bluetooth gateways and never needs to worry about the connectivity. It's all seamless
Ryan Carlson:I can think of a lot of, situations in which you're going to have multiple locations that aren't on the same campus
Felix:Okay.
Ryan Carlson:Say it's like an asset tracking type situation where are going from one location to another location. Will it be able to span physical geographic locations? Multiple locations of the same corporate entity or, or company entity, or does it, is it just the nodes on the same physical location?
Felix:That can be supported too. We typically don't call that roaming in our use scenarios, but gateway and the access controller can certainly support that That kind of applications.
Ryan Carlson:So you're whitelisting all of the Bluetooth devices that are recognizable all of these locations of the same
Felix:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:user or the same customer.
Felix:Yes. By the way, our latest the gateway also supports GPS. It can not only, collect the data from the and the devices, it can also tell the user in real time where those devices are.
Ryan Carlson:So you're saying this is a device that has a Bluetooth radio. Does the device also have GPS or is it a triangulation of
Felix:the gateway has the GPS.
Ryan Carlson:So the gateway has the GPS
Felix:So imagine you, you put the gateway inside the vehicle, right? The vehicle may move from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, right?
Ryan Carlson:And so Chain or asset tracking, all of the tagged pallets or devices or Bluetooth temperature gauges that are within that same vehicle are all communicating to that one gateway. And the gateway is saying you're fresh fish from, California, here's where it is and everything is in the temperature range that it's supposed to be.
Felix:Absolutely. So the cold chain management and supply chain management is a big growing application for for Bluetooth IoT.
Ryan Carlson:Awesome. All right. So, so what's, what's next? What do you see as the next leap forward for a 30 year old technology?
Felix:For a 30 year old technology, Bluetooth is actually evolving very fast. Because so many people use Bluetooth and the Bluetooth standard of the body actually has 30, 000 members that make, more than 50, 000 different types of Bluetooth devices. And lately, Bluetooth just announced some pretty cool new technologies like the technologies that to support very high accuracy locationing. And also, the technology that can support the communication with thousands of Bluetooth price tags for supermarkets and shopping mall type of application.
Ryan Carlson:all those little E- Ink displays.
Felix:The, yes if you go to a supermarket you, I think soon you will see some, price tags with a small screen that can show the price of that particular item in real time. Right? Imagine, the supermarkets can just change the price, in real time. In terms of use cases more than 90 percent of the smart medical devices or wearable devices use Bluetooth for communication. Those devices were initially designed to communicate with smartphones. in a hospital setting, for example, smartphone is not the best solution. Would like to have a bluetooth gateway to collect the data from those devices. So that's a very strong use case. The industrial IoT condition monitoring is another good example. It's interesting to see the
Ryan Carlson:Efficient technologies. Bluetooth was designed to be as efficient as possible at a time in which processing power is at a premium Now you could apply today's micronized and, and optimized processing with an already highly optimized tech stack. And I think it's, it's fascinating to see how much more we can do. I think there's a lot to digest here for anyone who not yet been exposed to the idea of enterprise level bluetooth applications. And has been stuck in the one to one relationship between a gateway device and which is usually a phone or a tablet and having the ability to deploy hundreds to thousands of their devices across a campus it's an elegant way to address a common problem in IOT, which is if we want to connect everything, cost needs to be low enough to implement it in all those places, it needs to be enough energy efficient and power efficient and processor efficient, in order to just get the data. At the cost at the power without having to change a bunch of batteries or hook things into outlets all the time. And I think the thing that I'm, excited about is the thought of the container. container service that you're putting in where people can
Felix:sure. Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:The heavy lifting of pushing all of the processing of data out to the cloud or over cellular. You can have a lot of on premise logic happening. just send the answers or the outcomes I'm excited as well to see Cassia and I imagine you've got all sorts of extra secret projects, given the number of patents you guys have on
Felix:Mm hmm.
Ryan Carlson:Lifespan into areas that one ever really expected. Felix, thank you so much for joining us. We've appreciated hearing the Cassia story, learning more about Bluetooth and look forward to the future of what you're going to be doing with it. And, you know, we're going to continue reporting on the advances that Cassia is making to make Bluetooth more accessible in the internet of things. So until next thank you so much.
Felix:Thank you, Ryan. My pleasure. Take care.
This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time.
Ryan Carlson:What is Soracom t o you?
Felix:Soracom to Cassia, is first is really important strategic partner of Cassia. We really appreciate the great support provided by Soracom over the years. As mentioned, today I would say 70% to 80% of the Cassia customer today prefer to use the cellular as backhaul and we didn't expect that. For Wi Fi, that was not the case, right? A Wi Fi by default is, connect to the Internet by Ethernet, right? But for IoT is a very different story. As you pointed out many of the users who deploy the IOT network, the IOT devices, they are not the IT people. They are the like factory workers, hospital, like doctors, nurses, so that because they are not IT people, they wanted this thing to be very easy to use, no configuration basically nothing, right? So just a plug and play. And and the fact that the Sora com service can be used in so many countries that's that's a really important for our customers. We appreciate the great work you have been doing hope to have a deeper and a better cooperation with Soracom moving forward.
