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
From Cell Towers to Skylo: Connecting IoT Over Satellite with Cellular Radios
In this episode of 'What to Expect When You're Connecting,' host Ryan Carlson chats with Satender Yadav from Skylo, the Director of Global Sales Engineering. They discuss the intricacies and advancements in non-terrestrial network (NTN) satellite technology, which enables seamless connectivity for IoT devices no matter their location. Satender explains the challenges of connecting products and services to satellites, the ease of transitioning from cellular to satellite networks using Skylo’s modules, and the flexibility offered by Skylo’s solutions. The episode also explores use cases such as asset tracking in remote areas, cold chain management, and lone worker safety. Additionally, the conversation touches on the importance of efficient data protocols and power management in optimizing IoT device performance on satellite networks. Satender also shares personal anecdotes about working closely with Soracom, emphasizing the collaborative spirit in advancing IoT connectivity. The episode serves as an insightful guide for IoT professionals looking to enhance their devices' global connectivity.
00:00 From Cell Towers to Skylo: Connecting IoT Over Satellite with Cellular Radios
00:32 Introduction to Skylo and NTN Satellite
01:29 Simplifying Satellite Connectivity
02:40 Latency and Speed in Satellite Networks
05:18 Availability of Satellite-Compatible Modules
09:07 Use Cases for Satellite Connectivity
13:32 Asset Tracking and Cold Chain Management
22:43 Technical Considerations for Satellite IoT
24:20 Challenges with TCP/IP in NB-IoT
24:54 Introduction to Soracom Beam
26:08 Experimenting with Data Transmission
28:10 Power Efficiency in IoT Devices
30:50 Switching Between Cellular and Satellite Networks
32:20 Innovations and Use Cases in IoT
38:56 Simplifying Network Connectivity
44:17 Q: What is Soracom to you?
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 (Soracom):Welcome to What to Expect When You're Connecting. Today we've got Satender from Skylo. He's the Director of Global Sales Engineering, we're going to. Bring up some topics that I think that everyone would love to hear about. But Skylo, NTN satellite, which is non-terrestrial network, it's the satellites that are, in that geosynchronous orbit. It's triangulating around at any given time. So you're always getting coverage, except these satellites are really far away from the earth. It takes a long time for the signal to go from something in the field, out to space and then To the ground. This is what you do for a living dealing with the complexities of moving data and bits and bytes from the planet to space and back again. How's that been in the years that you've been at Skylo, which is five years?
Satender Yadav:Yeah. Close to five years now. Now when you're explaining this, it looks more complicated than the way I introduce the solution and the network to the customers. This is on the paper, it looks complicated, but leave the complexities Skylo. The way we, present to the customers is a pretty simplified, network on a plate for you. So generally the way it should use think of is pick up a sim card and the way you connect on cellular network should be able to connect on satellite network. But obviously there are things you need to keep in mind, because the network on the satellite and cellular is totally different, even though they are being positioned as, as an extension of cellular network. As you mentioned about, we are talking about geo satellites, you need to have a clear line of sight, to connect but it does not mean that you have to, look for a satellite network because always on, you don't have to keep pointing, the phones or the watches or the IOT devices to connect to the satellite network. If it's a straight line of sight and a clear line of sight, you should be able to connect as it is. Now, you talked about latencies, you talked about, complexities. It's very simple. I think those are physics to be taken care of. But, generally you're talking about less than five seconds of latency from data sent from, point A, which is Singapore to a person in, New Jersey, you're talking about less than five second of latency over base station, which is. Covering a data packet of 70,000 kilometers, 35,000 kilometers up in the sky, and then comes to a base station again covering 35,000 kilometers. It's a pretty simplified way of putting that out.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):You keep saying simple. And I think that in implementation, it's a lot more simple than the technology that goes behind it. Thinking of all of the advancements that had to have been made to get to the point where we can have coverage all around the globe with satellites in space, beaming packets. And I think it's important to point out that it's physics
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):to improving the latency and the speed at where the satellites are currently positioned, it's only by bringing the satellites closer and closer to the earth's surface that you are addressing the physics problem that allows for the speed of information to move quicker.
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):the things that you point out that I think is an important distinction is the difference between. What Skylo is providing for IOT devices versus what we
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):movies where people are pulling out sat phones and they're setting up their laptops with a little foldout dish and where they're like beaming things around or campers that you can hook your Xbox up to and play online games over satellite, entirely different technology, dedicated radio, dedicated antenna, dedicated hardware. And the hardware itself is expensive. Like those Iridium phones
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):The starlink hardware is ridiculously expensive for a reason, it's a high performant set of hardware for dealing with a high performance set of low earth orbit satellites. So I think the simplicity you keep bringing up, and the more I've learned about the NTN satellite is the simplicity comes in that can now have. One radio that you're building towards to use with cellular.
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):It's a SGP release or release. 17, a 3GPP release. 17 compatible radio, which is like current generation,
Satender Yadav:yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):use old radios. But current generation, there's a good number of modules. So tell me about availability of these that can connect seamlessly satellite or cellular, assuming the sim is authorized to communicate on the network, like anything else,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Tell me about availability of modules for people that are looking to build something that could have satellite today. And then we're gonna talk about applications. So let's talk about availability.
Satender Yadav:Ryan, you brought up two important aspects. One is the use of MSS spectrum, which means that we are using standard 3GPP release 17 compliance, modules. Second important thing is the availability of these modules for the general availability. Right now, you look at, there are two aspects to this. One is Skylo runs a world first NTN certification program. It means that we certify the modules to work on Skylo Network, and you can just pick it off the shelf. You can just pick up a module which is certified on its kind network. You can build a iot use case on top of that, you don't have to get into the complexities of, talking about different protocols, different antenna, everything. We do a lot of work in implementing those features, which are part of R 17 and R 18 and R 19 overall. We do a lot of, regress testing so that the modules are always available to use on our network, and the customer have a real, I would say, experience in terms of implementing, those use cases in our network. From an availability perspective, all those modules are available you can go to Skylo Tech, certification certified devices, and you'll see at least dozen more than dozen of iot modules already applicable. And I would, if I have to bring a few names here, then there are devices like Quectel modules which from Quectel who are sending VG 95 s five VG seven 70. Then you have companies like Marata who are certified, but then there are companies like Sierra Wireless, you're talking about tele, you're talking about X, Y, Z. There are lot of module makers where, the NTN modules are already available. From a brand perspective and from the people who are building modules we cover almost 80 to 90% of those companies already.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So it's the availability of developer kits and the ability to pick up satellite ready hardware. You can go to a lot of different places. I know at Soracom we've got a Murata, using, technology. So we've got the module with integrated iSIM, with the ability to talk to Skylo, and everything you need to test that. And so there's the availability of hardware piece.
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):when you're specking out your parts and components to your devices, it's just one extra step to see that you've got a compatible device, you can't buy some of the older radios off the shelf, but you don't have to buy a larger bulky, standalone, satellite only, radio to sit alongside a cellular one. The crazy part is when you're building these wireless devices is when you've got two radios of two different networks, you now have to certify that the two radios won't interfere with one another. Right.
Satender Yadav:it?
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):by having everything all in one, it reduces the number of certification steps and you can be building towards cellular and then think about satellite as the insurance policy. Now, before we talked about the design philosophy of what you need to account for differently thinking about satellite, because it's not about megabytes, it's about bytes,
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):It's not
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):let's talk about some of the use cases that you are seeing.'cause you travel all over the world
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):You've got a whole team that's helping implement some of these things. are the use cases right out of the gate that you're seeing a really solid fit for satellite as the primary means of communication? what are applications in which that's a good backup.
Satender Yadav:The way I think this is, bringing NTN and convergence of satellite and solar has opened up, all new possibilities for enterprise customers to experiment and play around with the use cases when I talk to a lot of customers, there are two ways I try to filter it out one is the customers, either they have a solution already and they're using a big bulk keys. Traditional legacy satellite player devices, which has got gateways, which has got maybe bigger antennas and something like that. Or there's other set of customer who does not know how to solve that problem because of x, y, z reasons. And the reasons can be cost variable. It can be big build, of the device, which is not fitting for the right use case. Just to give you an example we have one of our customers who is building, LPG cylinder, monitoring? It monitors the level of propane in that LPG cylinder, those cylinders are basically meant for, industry use cases. Those are meant for spaces where there's no connectivity right now,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):yep.
Satender Yadav:If I have to build that, or basically build and track and everything to do with traditional satellite device, then you're talking about a big bulky device. Now the customer has built a smaller device because this LPA cylinders are cylindrical and pretty small. Small, but yeah, they are heavy and everything, but they can't take a load of a standing device or, you're talking about a big bulky device right now.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So I have a thousand gallon LP tank on
Satender Yadav:yeah,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):property. I'm out on a farm and we're within cellular range. But if your ranch or your facility, is of cellular range, have a cellular device that the company that monitors it lets'em know when I'm down to 25%.
Satender Yadav:Correct.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):it's how I heat my property in the winter.
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):And they just get a notification to send a truck out for delivery.
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):saying is the same form factor, the
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):have to re-engineer to have a larger. Piece of equipment, they wouldn't need the routing equipment.
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):it's that same footprint,
Satender Yadav:Yes,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):module. That same solution that they currently have could be deployed someplace else. The Difference would be how often do they want to check in? Is it event driven? We still need to consider how much data do you want to be sending because there is a value,
Satender Yadav:yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):me knowing that I'm not going to freeze in the winter,
Satender Yadav:Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):in, In the cost to monitor that tank.
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So if it goes from pennies to dollars a month Same small packet of here's the current volume, it's still worth it, right? it's
Satender Yadav:yeah,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):policy. The monitoring is there. To in the event of running out of a supply that I need, need to heat my home in Minnesota Because it gets to negative 20.
Satender Yadav:yeah. You are in cellular coverage zone. So you have the, liberty and flexibility to know all of this, think of a guy who's basically sitting in a place where there's no cellular coverage, today, he does not know He has to basically assume that my, LPG cylinder goes, or basically gets over in, let's say 40 days or 30 days of timeframe, then he basically plan it out saying, okay, I need to call on 25th today so that he's not going out of that LPG or else, he has to call the company and say can you come and look into that? What I'm trying to bring up is it has a lot of hassles for the customer, for the, enterprise customer or enterprise company. Once you set up a rule and alerts based on whatever works for each customer, and you're flexible to do that, let's assume that it's 25% for you, 30% for me because of distance and service if you can look at the broader picture, then you are solving the supply chain issue. You are basically keeping your customer informed. You are able to get your status of the assets much better, and you can do a lot of other stuff also. So just a simple solution, where we are not providing anything, we are not changing anything. The ecosystem remain as it is. We are just providing a set of new connectivity arm for them and the whole business takes a new turn for them,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So this is the idea of the person who's switching over from a current cellular, solution that is adding the capability to work outside of the normal means,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Solutions could now become maritime solutions. They could be usable
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):a cruise ship, a commercial ship, a shipping container,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):we're crossing a lot of different industry vertical lines here. The difference though is that solutions, for the most part, consume smaller amounts of data. Because some industrial solutions, even some asset tracking are very chatty, maybe it's got a camera, maybe it's some image asset, maybe it's got additional. Sensing information.
Satender Yadav:yeah,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):some industrial applications have time series database,
Satender Yadav:yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):sending a ton of data, but I would like to hear your thoughts on making the switchover, it's like my cell phone. When my battery hits 10%, it says, would you like to go into power saving mode?
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):it makes the radio talk less, it doesn't background update, there's no background updates. And it just tries to squeeze out all the resources it can. What's the equivalent, when you're talking to people that are wanting to add satellite as a backup to an existing solution, what type of architectural decisions do you consult with them on making, what changes do they need to make on how their solution works?
Satender Yadav:First of all, good question if I have to frame it in a very simplistic way, when you talk to a customer and you need to understand whether, what kind of data are you trying to send over cellular, how frequently are you sending it? One. And you need to understand the basic importance that the satellite network we are bringing is an iot network. So we are talking about a narrow band, which is a very small pipe. which allows you to send messages from your device to the, your server, which is point to point B. But generally when we, when I talk to customers, I say, what is the most valuable data which you wanna send to your network via network to your customer and to your server if there is no cellular connectivity, you need to decide what is important based on that you can choose to send less data over satellite and hold the data, which is not important whenever there's cellular connectivity, you can start pushing that data back to your server, what it gives you is assurance that you are always in coverage, you always have connectivity and you are always seeing. The value of the device in terms of what data you coming to you? It can be, to give you an example. Okay. It can be, just a refrigerated truck carrying pieces of meat, it's supposed to be in a certain condition, and it's going from California to, let's say San Diego right now. There's no network and, the temperature suddenly goes up from, let's say, 25 degree to, 45, something went wrong into the thermostat and the temperature suddenly went off. Your produce will go waste if you don't have the alert. If you don't tell the driver who's taking the truck from a place to another place, and if you can't fix the thermostat, then the entire produce is waste, it's a very small, event. But this can save a,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Oh yeah.
Satender Yadav:like you're talking about a hundred of dollars, which is gonna save just for one small alert.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):There's a lot of compliance around cold chain asset management, specifically around things like meat and refrigerated food. And I believe four hours is the maximum amount. There's different foods with different types, whether it's fresh fish, which is the same thing, but they need to know that it's only been in that range that certain bacteria can grow for a
Satender Yadav:correct,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):of time and they have to prove chain of custody. The same thing is with pharmaceuticals.
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Within my household we've been picking up from the pharmacy, but we recently started getting it shipped to us. And inside is a small little tag, that has a sensor and it's a little tiny battery and it'll
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):blinks green. And it says if it has ever dropped below the certain temperature, the blink ratio changes. And so we get
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):cool little IOT device, that lets the end user know how does the insurance carrier or the transportation provider, or the customer who's shipping using that freight company as it's crossing the state or
Satender Yadav:Got it.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):across the ocean that their goods, if it's like, Wegu beef, if you've got
Satender Yadav:Yeah,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):uh,
Satender Yadav:yeah,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):an ounce or whatever it
Satender Yadav:yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):days,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):you know that shipment, which could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't going to spoil whose,
Satender Yadav:And, and,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):is gonna pay for it if it does go bad?
Satender Yadav:It's also about, the authenticity and the quality, if you're able to produce the viable, details about all this, important goods, then those, goods basically, or those produced, basically you can charge a premium on that, because these are the stuff which customer actually value, because this has been basically managed and tracked entirely from to the table, but again, this is, that's one of the examples, if I were take you to example, there's a customer who is in us for us and who's building, who built basically was a commercial on a network already is A cow track, is a cow, I would say ear tag, which basically tracks the cows. It has got a small solar attached to that, so it never ends on the battery. But it's a very creative way of saying that. How can they use, because cows are moving, like you can't control them. The ranch very large. So you don't control where the cell network is, where the satellite network is not there. So whenever the device is in Acellular network, they use cell network. But when the cow goes out of range, they use satellite network, they're able to. Track the cows, track the and basically create a geofence around that. Exactly. Where's the movement? Is it free fall people are going to, or that cow is basically using a scattered place, or they're all scattered to a single place and not so one. Before joining Skylo, I didn't know that beef industry is such a big industry that you actually track cows. Then I got to know and they're like, okay, there are customers who are saying that we have millions of cows in Australia and New Zealand and us, they wanna track because at the end of the day, those, cows are, I don't know how are the selling those cows, but it seems it's pretty expensive that a single cow can go up to 40,$50,000. That's crazy. If you have to pay$2 per month just to track a$50,000 cow. I think it's worth it.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah. I mean it's asset tracking, for something that can wander off on its own,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):But they do that for construction sites too,
Satender Yadav:yes,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):everything from tool chest to generators to all of these things. So we've got things that can wander away. Asset tracking, is a really strong use case for satellite. There's maritime, I think most people can see whether that use case is gonna be good or not. There is no way you can negotiate your way into making a data heavy application. Work under satellite. It just isn't feasible unless you're thinking
Satender Yadav:At least not today.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):All the telemetry, it stops it's store and forward. But it does send a keep alive signal, as something is moving outside of range, it can at least say, I'm still here, and
Satender Yadav:I, I,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):here's my coordinates,
Satender Yadav:the advantage is that this is not store and forward, this is actually real time for you.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yep.
Satender Yadav:payload becomes smaller. We are talking about 1200 bytes, not small, by the way. It's a pretty full fledged iot packet to make a lot of use cases, what we have, and already see in the cellular world, 1200 bytes is more than enough to send any kind of packet, which you wanna send, if you wanna send an asset tracking device, you wanna send location parameters, you might send the temperature information, you might send the diameter readings and all of those, but that will come into 1200 bytes. So small for documents, it's a big bulk of, bytes. You can send it over. You have to understand, you're not talking about video calls, you are not talking about, playing Netflix. You're talking about, 200 kilos channel through a narrow band network. You can pretty much do everything you do on a cellular iot network today. The only caveat is latency, if you intend to send data every second, that's not the right fit for the, this kind of network, yeah. But if you wanna send data every one minute, it's free to go. You can do that.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):especially if it's a small amount of data,
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Some sensory readings might actually only be. Bytes worth of data if it's just a small encapsulated text. Now, let's get a little more technical here. My understanding, and you are welcome to correct me, but the traditional data handshake with a lot of cloud platforms, using TLS, for the authentication handshake, going back and forth and back and forth doesn't really work when you've got the levels of latency, you'd probably time out in that five to nine seconds that the data's going. So you're stuck using binary like UDP or TCP,
Satender Yadav:so, so,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):packet and there's no acknowledgement.
Satender Yadav:I would try to put it in a different way entirely.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Okay. I.
Satender Yadav:think of this way, we support IP and non IP both. So advantage of you using non IP is that, you are not paying for the extra overhead, consumed by UDP or TCP, okay? In, in, at least in the non IP context. And that's advantage of using non ip, but we do understand that when you are building a use case for cellular and satellite and you're gonna use IP for cellular, then you're gonna use IP for satellite as well, that makes it easier because you don't have to think of different protocols based on a different network. Now when you're building a use case for a cellular and satellite and you're using ip. Then we obviously go and say, you know what, TCP has an extra overhead, you're talking about 48 bytes overhead. Instead of saying, why don't they use UDP so that it connects with what you're building for cellular, so that you can send that data packet from the UV to the server using the same interface and same protocol, but you pay less, for just the UDP header. And then the data package is sending out the difference is since we're talking about a 200 kilos channel, to be honest NB iot, was not meant to have session based connectivity on TCP. You can do that. We have seen success, but that's not the ideal scenario. So you will see a lot of data laws and packet laws coming up Europe. So that's why we say we do support TCP ip, we do support UDP ip, we do support need the. Ideal scenario is to, if you're using ip, then use UDP ip. If you're building it, great. You can use non IP data as well.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah. So one of the things that's wild is one of the things that we built at Soracom is Soracom Beam. Have you ever heard of that before?
Satender Yadav:Not part of it.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):is, you have not, it, one of the, since Soracoms is built exclusively for IoT, we sit, because we sit between the device, the network, and then the cloud where the data goes. It's all data in motion. Data at rest is on, client servers, application servers. We built a protocol called Beam, which allows protocol translations. You could have a device using UDP. you could send your UDP packet then it hit Soracom servers, and then we translate it into HTTPS and JSON. And then we do, and
Satender Yadav:Okay.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):the TLS handshake. Between Soracom's cloud and your AWS Azure or Google Cloud instance. And so we Authentication handshaking and the ACT backs all on the cloud where you're not paying for those bytes to traverse So you can use modern cloud, infrastructure and still have a device that's using UDP. So just one example. So I ran an experiment I had, a device that had three sensors or sensors, temperature, pressure, and humidity. And so sending that H-T-T-P-S and JSON alt to a S3 bucket, was bytes that was being transmitted over cellular. Okay.
Satender Yadav:Okay.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Now then using beam. To change just from H-T-T-P-S to HTTP, it knocked it down to 321 bytes. But then I sent the packet not as HTTP, but as UDP, and it still did the handshake on the other end with the UDP, with the authentication. It was 17 bytes.
Satender Yadav:Yeah. And if.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):so it's possible to build devices using the smallest, most efficient protocol possible, but without having to make sacrifices on the other end you can still have, off the shelf application infrastructure or cloud infrastructure, and you could even have all of that run over like a AWS virtual private cloud and never touch the public internet. So you can go from device to Soracom to do the protocol translation. And then the chitchat is happening right in the cloud instance. never touch the public internet.
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):really nice loop and you just dropped your costs on data transfer by 80% what you're paying, whether it's satellite or cellular. It's really cool to think about when you've got companies like Skylo who are focusing on IOT, then you've got providers like Soracom who are building infrastructure specifically for IO ot, how you can really see the benefits, even though it's
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):cost, it's about value, cost does matter at the end of the day sometimes,
Satender Yadav:I also wanted to bring out a topic of, the battery powered devices.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah.
Satender Yadav:I don't think people would have appreciated, in the past that you can have battery powered satellite devices the field for a decade without, doing anything. Because narrow band was basically meant for power signal, it was meant for get up in the once a day or maybe once a month, send a packet and go to sleep. That's what PSM and a DS modes were all about, and the best part on our network is that we support both. We support PSM, which is power saving mode, and we support EDRX as well. So the power savings on your device on a cellular network, you can do the same on our satellite network as well. So there would be there,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):sleep mode is
Satender Yadav:I think you can have the same device, same battery, which is being basically deployed in, some remote places in the world. And it's, if it's trying to connect to cellular, if it's cellular, then and good, if not cellular, then the same device, same battery, can connect to satellite giving you the same performance it's not gonna impact anything because you have the leverage to change the PSM modes and timers on the network.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):I think that's an interesting distinction as well the amount of power that is required. You're getting multiple layers if you're designing for iot, satellite and battery. The fact that you're running on a battery, looking at this holistic self-reinforcing optimization process. You are already thinking. I'm gonna use a protocol that consumes, less processing power, if you're using UDP versus an HTTPS or M-Q-T-T-S, which is gonna have to do some, cryptographic, work the encryption on the device. So we're gonna get rid of that. we're gonna use satellite, but it's gonna be a Skylo, which is on the same amount of time as it would be with cellular, you're sending that same type of packet, the latency is just bounce back, but it's actually not device to the cloud and back to the device because Going to a base station somewhere else on earth that's then going up to the cloud,
Satender Yadav:yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):through Soracom or you're provider and then on. Because the device doesn't get a signal back.
Satender Yadav:No, it does. You look at, if
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):way.
Satender Yadav:no, if you look at, the way, the iot. Modules and devices work when you are trying to receive the signal from the base station, what is being broadcasted by our brand now most of the time, which basically is get, and used by Batterie is to once trying that attached process. Right you need to decide whether the mode has to decide whether is gonna connect to cellular, whether it's gonna connect to satellite. If it's lesson that it was not able to connect to satellite because of there's no, there's no signal quality. The signal is bad. Now it, can it go back to cellular try again Or should it wait for the satellite to connect again? How many Ries we're trying to do it before sending packets. But just to give you viable, in terms of one of a partner, they picked a smart watch a mountain view office, did a power testing on a cell and a satellite to give a comparison of. is the actual power consumption on satellite versus cellular is, and you'll be surprised that, we were close to 90% of what a cellular coverage, cellular network will provide. Listen, that you are able to get on 10 days on a cellular network. We were able to get nine days on a satellite network. So we are that close in terms of that.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Okay. So it's only that little
Satender Yadav:yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):where the radio needs to be on just a little bit longer is the only difference. But as far as like that it needs to ramp up, in order to get a signal in. It sounds like it's minimal.
Satender Yadav:it's
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):that's exciting
Satender Yadav:It's a,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):design, a hardware design perspective.
Satender Yadav:We are talking about 23 maximum 23 DBM on the power. There's a case study on our Skylo website. If anybody's interested, they should go and see that. It talks about how the entire test was done. And it's, and were, and this is, pretty much, the way I put it is that there are so much things, so much stuff we are building within Skylo we don't know how, the developer community or the OEM community will build the use cases on top of that, but they're pretty excited about what we're building as a company about consumer iot use cases and network around that. And we, as I said, the only thing which I wanted to bring out, last time, remember we talked about is that how can we make it easier for the developer community to start building iot use case on separate network? If we can have a very simplistic approach of building those use cases on network, we'll see. And as I've always come back to say that I, I don't even. Assume and experience that whatever use cases which we, you and me would've seen on a server world satellite will bring a whole new perspective on how and what kind of use cases can be connected to satellite. I'm not surprised that we will come up to a use cases where we will thinking, okay, is this even a use case? We are seeing millions of devices connecting on that particular use case.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):I think the first step is something that you had said earlier, it's the device and the firmware on the device that determines the logic on when you switch between two different networks.
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Your hardware already makes that decision of if there's no wifi on my list of trusted networks, then do cellular. I think the difference here and then there's probably even a decision tree in there of if the signal strength of the wifi is insufficient to maintain an appropriate connection, then go to cellular. the same idea, but it's a much smaller amount of data, because with the carriers, I know one of'em is just gonna be like. Deciding whether the ca, the certain, the cellular carrier you're connected to. it have an outage? Should I try another cellular carrier within range. People already have to do that with one of the, MultiPro profile sims where you have access to multiple carriers,
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):the logic is at the device level, of you telling the device to switch M Zs or anything like that, which is usually like a text message that's pushed down to the device. So here you're gonna have to decide, carrier, no signal on the carrier. Okay. This is my next carrier. The next carriers that we would normally use in this part of the world or a specific region. If you're building that logic into your device, you can In autopilot and just go through A-P-L-M-N list. At some point you have to build in the threshold for, okay, I'm willing to give up and just go to satellite.
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):There's no silver bullet for knowing to switch.
Satender Yadav:No, You're right. You cannot, there's no one answer for all the use cases. And,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):exactly.
Satender Yadav:the logic, the logic of, switching between network is already, defined when A OEM is building a net device for the network, it's like you mentioned about wifi and cellular. That's pretty much the same logic here, that when you don't have cellular, you going to wait and try for three different, carriers, which are in the same. I would say coverage map bec in the coverage because cellular is cheaper than satellite. That sub concept, people still have that, or are you going to just look at, okay, this data is important? If it's an alert, I can give another try to cellular, but if there's no cellular radio, you can't try for another radio, so why don't I switch to satellite and start sending the packet right away? The value and the importance of the data is very important. And that's where you start making the decision.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah. I can imagine things like the leak detection for
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):natural gas pipelines that go across, different parts of the world. Here in North America, all the way from Canada, down to the south, of the United States, these pipelines are in places you can only get to with helicopters or a snowmobile
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):The ability to switch over, for a mission critical alert seems to make a whole lot of sense.
Satender Yadav:I think one of the use cases which I also like is, loan workers trackers. A worker who's basically alone and, doing some pet patrolling to, read data in remote part of the world. Let's assume he needs help because of some health emergency. Right now,
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah.
Satender Yadav:the device has capability of cellular, satellite, everything, the value of the data will define whether it's going to be cellular versus satellite, by the switching logic, whether cellular and satellite, you should decide and value. Let the. Value of the data. Decide what do you, what kind of network You wanna start putting out data
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):and then there's the emergency response type scenario, where when something is wrong, you really need to know it and there's so many of those things where it's remote workers, hikers, even recreation, and it's not just There's mountains, forests, plenty of places where we're stuck holding our phone up in the air and we're not getting any bars. Knowing
Satender Yadav:yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):get that signal out on the wearable device or, whatever it is that you've got, seems to make a lot of
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So I would love to hear, in the five years you've been at Skylo, what has surprised you that you've learned over those years about NTN and this evolving space for connectivity?
Satender Yadav:The one thing which still, surprises me is that every day when I get on a job, it's a new challenge because every customer who's trying to build a solution on NTN Network is coming up with a new idea. And Generally what I'm trying to bring up is the pace of innovation, happening because of adding a new network to the same extension of what cellular does it, but it has taken a lot of effort, by a company to basically build it. World class global network that people can start building iot use cases on top of what they have been doing till now for and just take an extension of that and build for global deployments and scalability. It also works with partners like Soracom, where until now you have been focused on working on cellular connectivity, but the moment when you have an existing customer say, you know what want to solve for my customer wants connectivity in a remote location, you don't have a solution till now, but now there's no problem. You can use the same sim card, which we are giving it to you for cellular connectivity and you should use the same device and you should be able to connect to satellite network using Soracom sim card. So one, it is a lot more complex than it is being projected in the world. But I'm excited that we are taking the complexities on our plate let us handle the complexities and bring out the network for you in a such a ease manner that you can build what you're building right now.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):It's been a real natural progression for Soracom. We've already been supporting blended networks. So we can assign a connection using ethernet or wifi. We can issue a
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):sim so it can authenticate and be on the same intranet that other devices that are on cellular can be on. And we also have, one of our customers, Nichi Gas has. Over a million devices and they're smart utility meters and they run off of
Satender Yadav:Yep.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):SigFox, and LTE. And so it's that same idea of we're gonna use the most cost effective way for these utility meters to connect. so adding in cellular was actually a real natural progression. The architecture already supported it. We're already thinking cellular is not the only way it is just happens to be the most prolific means for getting high data in lots of places. But then
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):feeling in the other 85 percent of the globe that has no cellular coverage, it's only 15 percent Of the earth's surface has cellular coverage. That's just where have population centers. And so now opening up the rest of the world, what I found fascinating that what Skylo is doing is you're not actually solving technology problems.'cause the technology has already been there. You are actually the hardest part is solving the business problems around licensing, regional access and, different communications certifications. And so there's a significant amount of lift that
Satender Yadav:world class
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):global, connectivity company like Skylo is building. Like you've got a lot of work
Satender Yadav:we do.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):that tech technically could work in a country, but you Authorization to offer it.
Satender Yadav:I always go back and say that Skylo we are very small team, but we do a of effort in bringing all of those into a place that, the customer, should not even worry about whether there's coverage. They should not worry about whether there's regulatory clearance whether the device is certified or not. Do I have to take a license? No, you don't have to worry about this. You just have to build a device. And if we have commercial coverage, you should connect to the network using a service provider sim card such as yours and you should be able to connect without having to worry about all the other complexities which goes behind enabling a network on a particular country. Rest everything on terms of network planning, regulatory approvals, device certification, chip sets, features, and all of those will be taken care by Skylo within us.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah. That's actually one of the things worth knowing, is Soracom again, being purpose-built for IO ot, for people that are building devices, carrier certification is not required to deploy your devices out into the field. I now, if it's gonna be a, like something you're selling we strongly recommend a variety of different certifications. And if you're leaning on particular carriers, but you do go through that process, but it's not a requirement to put those, 10 units out in the field. You don't need it with Skylo, you won't need it with Soracom. One sim, one bill, one plan all the different carriers, including satellite. So a cool place to start. And the test bench doesn't even need to have a connection'cause you could use ethernet or wifi, and still send that data up for some of those early tests. Thank you for, coming in and sharing your expertise on Skylo. This is, always fun to learn more about this next generation of space-based communication.
Satender Yadav:Hey, Ryan. Thanks for having me. I always go back and say to our customer and partner that you build, let us handle the complexities of bringing that network to you. But let's start building because that's where the convergence of, cellular, satellite, and communication space is going. It's not far away that we don't have to worry about all of this, and we will just have a, we just have to worry about building devices, which is going to deploy globally, but everything is less, everything will take care of it all.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):So if you are listening to this and oh man, we've been thinking about building something, or we have something, we'd like to switch it over. know that at Soracom we've got solutions architects here to help you can, there's no cost to having that consultation and have them, help make recommendations. And then we've got Satender and the whole sales engineering team that can help make this that it is truly complex, but make it simple for
Satender Yadav:Yes.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):And add that extra global coverage, for your devices that are out in the field that may just not have reliable cellular connectivity. Until next time, thank you so much for joining us. This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time. What Soracom
Satender Yadav:Okay. This is personal to very honest with you. And this goes back to Kenta and relationship. I've known Kenta for about three, four years now. when we started he was trying to connect Skylo Network for the first time when he was at his house in Florida stepping out and say, you know what? I'm not seeing Network. He gave me a call and said, how can we connect? It was a customer trying to satellite connectivity to their end customers. Soracom is a partner to us, when you see a CTO, like Kenta is trying to get his hand on experience on building devices and trying it out end to end. I know it was Saturday evenings, Sunday mornings and me and Kenta was just trying to resolve this out and I, it took us about two, three days and Kenta is pretty smart, he knows stuff from from basics to end to end. He knows everything, so we managed to connect and we were like, Hey, this is super exciting and we while working with him, we build a relationship. And different time zone with different human beings. It's the way I think they take a step back and say, this is just a partner relationship, this is more than partner relationship. And that's why I always go out of my way to help anything what happens with Soracom, be it your customers, be it your, I have to do anything with, any of your sales guys. Happy to do that. I'm more than available support Soracom on that.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):That's awesome. I'm gonna recommend you check out in our developer docs, the Soracom Beam feature.
Satender Yadav:I'll do.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):is cool and it would address a gap in some of the more
Satender Yadav:Okay.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):you can't, you know, a UDP device just can't connect
Satender Yadav:Got it.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):where it requires a handshake and this actually It is super inexpensive. And a huge value for people that are trying to deploy, especially even getting legacy devices. Communicating over a satellite network, So we have a lot of people bringing older devices. Cloud implementation, just using something like Beam.
Satender Yadav:I'll read through that. I opened that one.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):Yeah. The cost savings doesn't hurt either when you're talking about being able to drastically reduce the amount of bytes that a device
Satender Yadav:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson (Soracom):be sending out to. This has been really great.
This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time.
