Using Broadcast TV to Deliver Multicast Data Streams for IoT Applications

Host Ryan Carlson talks with Conrad Clemson, CEO of EdgeBeam Wireless, about using broadcast TV (ATSC) signals to deliver large downstream data payloads as efficient multicast—sending one transmission to reach many endpoints—while using 4G/5G with a Soracom eSIM for control, acknowledgments, retransmits, and security. Conrad contrasts broadcast tower coverage and capital efficiency with cellular’s dense tower topology, emphasizing applications where many devices need the same content: digital signage fleets, software/map updates for cars, video distribution, LLM/model updates, and RTK GPS correction data for higher-precision navigation. Use of dual-radio M.2-style card presents as standard IP to host devices, supports common internet protocols, and can provide an “air-gapped” path for secure environments. The episode also covers scale economics (per-endpoint transmission cost approaching zero), flat-rate outcome-based pricing, and why Soracom’s cloud-native, carrier-grade platform helps EdgeBeam launch faster.

00:00 EdgeBeam Wireless Interview with Conrad Clemson

00:27 Broadcast Connectivity Intro

01:33 Why Broadcast Beats Towers

03:15 Multicast for Massive Updates

04:44 Smart Signs and Kiosks

08:08 Hybrid Device Two Radios

09:59 Security and Air Gapping

12:03 Bandwidth and Scale Math

15:09 Costs BOM and Car TCO

18:30 Business Model Outcomes

19:39 Sell Outcomes Not Savings

20:55 Multicast Hardware Onboarding

21:53 Flat Rate Pricing Model

24:33 New Signage Content Plays

26:38 Edge Computing Meets Multicast

28:24 Best Fit Use Cases

29:40 Enhanced GPS Corrections

32:16 Why Soracom Partnership

35:59 Wrap Up And Next Steps

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

Welcome to What To Expect When You're Connecting a podcast for IoT 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 (Tech Evangelist) 0:27

Welcome back to What to Expect When You're Connecting. We're here with Conrad Clemson, the CEO of Edge Beam Wireless, and this is gonna be a new topic, for everyone that's heard this. We've talked wifi, we've talked Bluetooth, we've talked satellite, we've talked more than enough cellular, we're talking about. Broadcast signal. So Conrad, thanks for coming in and telling us about the connectivity journey that Edge Beam is on and how you're doing something new delivering data over the airwaves.

conrad 0:59

Ryan, happy to he be here. Happy to be a partner of Soracom. And, look, we're doing some, we're doing some cool stuff, I think here at Edge Beam. The way I like to tell our story more than anything else. I think one of the things I really like is, if we go back, if we go back over the last 10, 15 years, the story of the last mile of wireless hasn't changed, right? Whether it's the Verizon guy, can you hear me now? Or Billy Bob Thornton. I don't know where I am, but I got signal it, it's the same story. Coverage is better. I can go faster. I'm cheaper. Buy my stuff. At Edge Beam. we're doing something fundamentally different because we've got a very unique network topology, and it becomes really powerful, especially when we're partnering with Soracom.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 1:41

I wanna break this down a little bit because we've seen, new network topologies that are there for, delivering data. we've had, there's big LoRaWAN like Sig Fox. Where they're putting up repeaters and there's mesh networks and there's trying to bring the cost of delivering data down and increase the reach with radio technology that can push through more physical objects can deal with interference better, but you are using the same technology that someone's, high definition television is gonna receive a picture signal.

conrad 2:17

Yeah, that's exactly right. And one of the cool things that I like about this is we start with, Hey, what does it cost to build a Nationwide 5G network today? And we

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 2:25

A lot.

conrad 2:26

Yikes. It's a lot, right? Hey, I have a network that already exists. And the other thing that's really cool about our network is, imagine I live in Boston. Imagine we're driving outta Boston as you're driving out on the main highway outta the city. Every couple of miles we see those cell phone towers. Why? It's about as far as they reach. Like you look around in the hills of Boston at least, and you'll find two hills in Boston that have a handful of TV towers, and that covers the whole city. And that level of capital efficiency is something that we think is pretty unique to us. One signal coming from one tower that covers an entire city. The question that makes you ask though is you look and go, wow, so how are we gonna use this? And what is it about this thing that. Actually does something good other than, hey, it's very capital efficient. the thing that we are uniquely good at is when you have a piece of content you want to take to a lot of places, right? A classic broadcast or as we'd say in the data world, a multicast signal. If you stop and think about it for a second, we know a few things about the internet. We know most of the traffic is downstream, not upstream. We know today, actually most of the traffic is video and LLM and code updates. Gosh, those are all things that play right into our wheelhouse. Think about a, think about the problem of updating software to a car, right? Today, if you have a million cars in Boston, you need, and you need to update each of them with new software. You do a million downloads. Wow, that's a lot of downloads to download one piece of software. do it one time and we hit every car in Boston. That kind of efficiency really good for our end customers. It's really good for the people who are trying to get that data out to those end customers. Quite frankly, it's just great for the Last Mile Network. If we looked and said, Hey, we're gonna use up 80% of the edge of a network. To transmit a high value sporting event like Thursday Night Football. You go, wait a second. It's one video stream. would we do that? We go, the truth is we do it'cause it's easier. now as we start to think about what a true critical asset the edge of the network is, got a much better way to do that. And that's what we're doing here at Edge Beam.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 4:44

I think what we're talking about too is applications in which you are not just trying to, set up a, let's say it's some sort of like pipeline to a, commercial facility where you need to move a whole lot of data, but instead it's a distributed network of things like, like smart signs, right? Like we drive down the interstate, we see signs that are all digital displays now, right? The vast majority of the asset is downloading those video files. And what we do know is that those same systems just send a keep alive signal. Or, or an acknowledgement of download received. And then you can, push your settings, changes the, new advertising. Anything along those lines. I need you to help me address my own ignorance around next generation uses of broadcast radio signals. My understanding, and I think I'm right, is that my TV can only ingest a signal. I can't send back to, CBS or NBC. At least I hope not.

conrad 5:50

Yeah, that's a good thing,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 5:52

right, right, right. So what is this last mile, infrastructure look like? I'd love to hear why hasn't anyone done this before, what is it that you're doing that's unique to address these multicast? Essentially fleet deployments of things like smart signs or vehicles or things like that.

conrad 6:10

Smart signs, vehicles, precision, navigation. Those are all great examples, and let's do one or two of those examples and then we can use that to break down and go, gee, how does this really work.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 6:21

Yeah. Walk me through the path of the data, but also like where it all started.

conrad 6:25

So think about two interesting use cases with digital signage. Sometimes, especially if you're in the, the New York subway system, you'll see the subway going down the train, and there are these digital signs that are actually in the wall. And as you look, message is traveling with you. So what's really happening there is you've got a series of digital signs and you're taking the exact same picture frame, and you're basically transposing it as you move. That means all of these signs have the exact same file. Oh wait, we already talked about that problem, We're a perfect dancer for that. a second use case. You're walking through a mall and you see all these digital kiosks. Something you probably don't know is that most of those kiosks actually have a camera. So they can look out and they can go, oh, I have three teenage kids standing in front of me. Gee, I'm probably not gonna show the Budweiser commercial. Maybe I'm gonna show the, I don't know what it is today. Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtle commercial. Or likewise. Hey, I've got six middle aged men sitting in front of me. Save the turtles, put the Budweiser ad

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 7:31

Did you know that it was 24 years ago Minority Report already predicted this when Tom Cruise is a. Walking down in the movie and the sign says, he had to swap out his eyes for someone else. And it's like Mr. Yamamoto, we've got jeans just in your size as he's standing in front of a digital display, right? Like years ago. So this is a whole idea of like science fiction predicting where things are going. So you now, you're helping deliver on a solution that is only limited by its ability to get bandwidth.

conrad 8:07

It's exactly right. That's exactly right. Now you hit on one of the really interesting points though, and let's talk about that one, right? Because this is also where I think our partnership with Soracom comes together as well. I have this great infrastructure. goes in one direction. I go out. what we've actually done here At Edge Beam is we've created what I sort of lovingly describe as a set of magic devices and these devices. When you look at the host side, hey, it just looks like a host adapter. Gosh, in this day and age, every single host goes, oh. You're a connection to the internet. I know how to use you

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 8:41

Yep.

conrad 8:42

What we've done is on the backside, we have two radios. One of those radios is an ATSC receiver that gets the big download payload. the other radio is a 4G 5G radio, by the way. And our card has a nice Soracom eSIM on it. Which now gives us a connection to the cellular network. So we use the cellular network for control signaling Act nac. I got it. I didn't get it. Here's a check sum retransmit. And then we use our mainline ATSC to transmit those big heavy payloads. And when we put these things together, we look and we go, gee, we run a network. But we're not really a mobile network operator. Hey, we're connected to a cellular network, but we're not really a mobile virtual network operator. We're something in between. what we would call a hybrid network operator. And when we bring these two things together, what I'm able to do is to take a television network make it work like the internet

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 9:40

Yeah.

conrad 9:41

And we have all the standard protocols, like we don't have to invent any of this stuff. The internet knows how to do reliable multicast The internet knows how to do UDP and FTP. We can, we bring all those protocols to bear. We just now implemented in a very unique topology that creates massive, potential for efficiency.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 9:59

I was gonna ask then, a Skylo's satellite system, anyone can point their antenna and pull down the signal, but it's the SIM that's providing the authentication. That encrypted secure hardware module. And so is this the similar thing like, signs get access to the feed. Like it,'cause you're not, it's being beamed all over the place. It's not unidirectional. Right. And so that sign with that SIM it, it's, it probably, unlocks the keys to decrypt the signal and then get access and pull down the assets.

conrad 10:32

a, there's there. So the, it, it ultimately creates a very secure network,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 10:36

Yeah.

conrad 10:37

I think as we know, satellite and cellular, look, look, I think we've done a reasonable job of creating secure transmission protocols. We've got good solid encryption, you've got rotating keys, all of those things are well understood. There's one other interesting variant that I would add here, which is a little bit unique for us, which is if you follow our air chain back and the source of the video, there's really an air gapping between our network and either the local area or the wifi network or the open, sleazy easy internet out there, which gives us a really interesting opportunity to operate in highly secure environments. Put a digital kiosk into a bank branch. The last thing you want is that sign on the internal network of the

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 11:25

Correct.

conrad 11:25

Boy, we're air gapped all the way back, a source of our content. and we think with our environment. The other thing that is coming on the horizon is we've got both AI and quantum computing, and these are gonna put really extreme. New requirements onto security and security updates. Boy, we have the perfect network to be able to push out not just new keys and new encryption models, but in some cases in the post quantum world, we're gonna wanna be pushing down much bigger modules to help us keep that content safe from, new ways of cracking apart encryption.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 12:03

Help me understand. What kind of bandwidth constraints we're thinking about. What is the latency look like? And I know that TV is, it's 4K, sometimes eight K, high definition video assets, right? So I mean there's a ton of bandwidth in that frequency that you're dealing with. So what are you seeing for a device that just sees the internet as the internet, what kind of speeds is it looking at getting for pulling assets down?

conrad 12:31

Yeah. What, so it's a little bit interesting too because, if you look at one of our individual feeds, you might see 25 to 50 megabits per second. We can bond channels together. But I would look and I go, that actually missed the point, right? The way to actually think about it is looking at that distribution mechanism versus what's actually happening at scale out there.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 12:54

Yeah.

conrad 12:55

And let's go back to the football game for a second. Boy, you're putting out a, five to six megabit per second feed to a million homes. Wow. How much network bandwidth did we just use? We're using exabytes of edge bandwidth. To get that one thing out there. How much bandwidth do we require to get a five megabit feed to a million homes? Five megabits. That economy of scale, the thing to think about

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 13:22

yeah.

conrad 13:23

oh, I got the biggest smile in the world. I go, okay, that's interesting, whatever you're doing, and trying to take it out to a large number of places, and we go just. Just look at the denominator on the

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 13:33

Oh my gosh,

conrad 13:33

there, and that gives you our

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 13:35

Conrad, you are blowing my mind. So what it's not. It's not the infotainment screen where kids in the van are picking which Nickelodeon show they wanna watch. It's the taxi cab that has got the display that every taxi cab in the entire fleet is showing this exact same feed of data, whether it's updates, screens, whatever. So it's not individual data sessions, but it's multicast. So it's.

conrad 14:04

Multi-cast.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 14:05

Single device in my fleet is gonna be getting the exact same payload. so what you're just telling me there is from a cost perspective, I'm pushing a 50 megabyte update out to all my devices, rather than going out to start a remote session with 50 different devices all at 50 megabytes each, I'm doing one session for 50 megabytes. to N number of devices N is however many you have deployed within.

conrad 14:37

many you have to deploy, Ryan. That's

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 14:38

Oh my gosh, man.

conrad 14:40

So you hit a great one back of cab,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 14:42

Yeah.

conrad 14:42

Boy. Think about some of the public safety implications. Amber Alert. You can put that video incredibly efficiency in front of every public safety officer out there. imagine this. What if you could throw that same video on every billboard in the city? What if you could put that in the back of every cab as well? You want an capital amber capital alert? Now you've got the potential to get that out there and get that out there incredibly efficiently with a very rich experience around it.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 15:09

I've. Spent 20 years building devices, and it still comes down to when, in, in a hybrid scenario, it still comes down to bomb cost, right? Am I gonna add in a Bluetooth radio? Am I gonna add in an NFC reader? Am I gonna put in wifi? Yes or no? Are we gonna add a USB port for maintenance reasons, whatever. When we're talking about things like Bluetooth, it's such a mature set of electronics, the cost has come down astronomically over 20, 30 years. we're talking about televisions, sounds like to me, I don't know the answer, but that's one of those technologies where how many TVs are out in the world, right? Like already got quantity behind it.

conrad 15:55

That's

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 15:56

Larger, smaller than the bread box. Do I add wifi or do I add one of your, radios in there? Are we looking at a equitable cost or is it less

conrad 16:07

Boy, so I would go to Equitable to Less. This is a consumer electronics play. And we're gonna

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 16:12

I.

conrad 16:12

consumer electronics, economies of scale and that works to our advantage. The other thing to think about is put it in the perspective of opportunity cost as well. Let me pick on cars for a second. Boy, one of the car manufacturers who we've been talking with, who builds a value automobile, They go, Hey, we're gonna make a car and we're gonna sell this car between 20 and$25,000. a sticker price. That car's gonna live out in the, in, in the wild for 10 to

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 16:42

Yep.

conrad 16:43

While it is doing that, here's what we know about once a month, we're gonna want to download a new software load to it. Think of that as a gigabyte. Typically about twice a quarter, we need to update our maps. Think about that as five gigabytes starting next year, we wanna start putting LLMs that we can download into these cars at least once a quarter. Boy, we do a little back of the envelope math and we go, I got a$25,000 car over the life of the car. Car's gonna cost me about 20 grand current technology to upgrade the, the software to this platform, non-starter. Right boy. Now apply our economics to it. And you go, what if we divide that number by four? Oh, now we're done. That's easy, Those are. And now, so now when you look and you go, Hey, we're not gonna talk to you necessarily even about the BOM cost. We're gonna look at total cost of ownership, number one. And number two, we're gonna talk to you about how you take a problem that is impossible to solve with today's communication technology and make it something where you go, it's a rounding error.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 17:47

I feel like we're talking about cold fusion for energy production compared to a coal power plant.

conrad 17:54

Oh man, you're talking to a physicist. I can't possibly support cold fusion. Ryan. We'll just take plain old fusion, right?

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 18:02

plain old fusion. Yeah. I.

conrad 18:04

Plain old fusion, pour a little hydrogen in and you get the energy of a star. The thing that is just unique about our technology, and it takes just a second to think about this, but, for us, the most important or one of the most important points, and that's controlling the cost curve is every endpoint you add costs you zero in transmission costs.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 18:26

The,

conrad 18:27

It is infinitely

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 18:28

I understand this,

conrad 18:29

by

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 18:30

the capitalist in me is asking, what's your business model, right? Is it a hardware play with some backend data? This seems so good. This seems so good.

conrad 18:40

So look, there's always there and it's a multi-layer story here, right? We're gonna come out, we're gonna come out as a communications company, and we'll say communications like anybody else

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 18:48

Yep.

conrad 18:49

one of the things that we've really tried to do is to recognize today that at least most of the customers who we're talking to, this is part of an overall business solution that's creating a business outcome. So the thing that we try to do is to move that conversation and go, listen, we have this real breakthrough technology that allows you to think about the problem differently. So let's take a look at that and talk about how we can drive a new and unique business outcome for you. Let's go back to our digital signage model for a second, right? And go, Hey, I could talk about what your data plan is gonna be to download stuff to your digital sign. That's not really interesting. We actually try to do is to put a circle around the whole solution and go, listen. We want to help you make more money on a monthly basis and raise your actual ARPU, for that particular digital signage. And as soon as we go and say, wait. You're gonna help me make more money? That's, yep. We're here to make money. Now all of a sudden we're having a problem about how we help the top line instead of saving money on the bottom line. And it's a much, much stronger sale, and it's a much stronger value proposition, quite frankly, to our customers.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 19:55

You're, you preaching the good gospel, which is, it's so hard to talk about cost savings or that commodity buy, right? It's a race to the bottom when it's when you're talking.

conrad 20:06

to the Catch a falling

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 20:07

And that's where, looking at companies like even what Soracom has done in the cellular space is, it's not even how low can I get the cost per megabit? But it's also all of the protocol translations and the, eliminating the TLS handshakes and some of the overhead. It's but you can just reduce how much data you have to send pay for over a digital by net a network, especially for like small sensors and stuff like that. About like 80 to 90%. It's not about the cost per megabyte when everyone else, that's the only variable that they've got. They literally, it's like cost per sim, cost per megabyte, but not, how can we, like completely eliminate things like, private APN, Like the cost of having all of that set up infrastructure for security. So talk to me, like I'm really excited about the idea, of you introducing this multicast, data distribution technology. So what does it look like to get started? Let's say I let's say I was a clear channel, right? And I own, and I've got hundreds of thousands of signs all over the Midwest. I am assuming I have to put a new electronics package or have my contract manufacturer, whomever integrate a new type of hybrid radio. Into my device or A gateway of some kind.

conrad 21:26

Most of what we actually see Ryan in, in so particularly in the early applications that we're targeting right

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:32

Yep,

conrad 21:33

this is. Pick out a card. Maybe it's an M2

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:36

Okay.

conrad 21:37

right? Put in our card. That's another M2 card that's just got a different set of

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:41

radios

conrad 21:42

you're good to go. That's it. You're done,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:44

the device sees it as IP traffic and.

conrad 21:47

device is IP traffic. The look, look, the host device

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:50

Oh my gosh.

conrad 21:51

what the backend is and doesn't really

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 21:53

You're right.

conrad 21:53

and then as we think about how does that change the business model for our clients? Our clients usually go, what's it cost per gig? I need to know, what's your five gig? What's your 10 gig package? Look, we just come in and go, you're digital signage customer. This is your cost per month. We're done. Flat and there's that sounds a little glib, but what we're actually doing is we're transferring risk away from the end customer.'cause the end customer goes, look, maybe I have a big month and I loaded 200 ads instead of 100 add. Boom, my cost went up because I had to transmit so much more data.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 22:28

We're going to our client

conrad 22:29

in this

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 22:29

marketplace.

conrad 22:30

We understand your business and we're gonna give you a flat rate cost.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 22:36

Yeah. You're describing value-based pricing in healthcare, is instead of paying per service. Keep this person healthy by doing all the preventative things and we'll pay you this much per year to a provider, right? Diabetics or, so you just, you're gonna do all of the things that statistically reduces the risk by a significantly. Like a clinical margin, for the patient outcome. And what you're talking about is the business outcomes. Okay, as a company, you're what? Spending$1.2 million a year or a quarter on just transmissions, here's my flat rate and

conrad 23:12

That's right.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:13

all you want. It's

conrad 23:14

yeah.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:15

you're just, you know how much they're spending and so you can, you're not even having to have the conversation about cost per megabyte.

conrad 23:23

That's exactly right. Yeah. And look, think of it a little bit like the lease. Like when you lease a

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:27

Yeah.

conrad 23:28

You go out, you lease a car, you drive it around and you think it's really great, you bring it back. At the end, the guy goes, oh, you owe me$5,700.'cause you didn't read the fine print, right? You're like, what the heck just happened to me?

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:39

Yeah.

conrad 23:39

we look and we go. price is what it is. It's really simple. Sign on the dotted line. Now you know exactly what your com costs are gonna be. You control the outcome

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:50

yeah.

conrad 23:50

And go to, imagine a model. Let's peg this. Let's peg this to one side. Imagine a model where you're doing a high value sporting event.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 23:56

Mm-hmm.

conrad 23:57

And between the source and the endpoint, you've got a CDN, you've got transport costs over somebody's, cable network, over wifi network, over multiple cellular networks, and you're like, what's it cost me to, what does it cost me to transmit this game? And the true answer is. not gonna know until the game is done. gonna take that uncertainty away. We know this is what it costs, this is what it costs to deliver a game, period, full stop, right? That now allows you to make bigger bets as a customer because you actually know very deterministically what your costs are.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 24:33

For data down, you're essentially telling a signage company, and I know we're picking on signage. I'm gonna ask for some other examples, but if it were signage though, the, if data caps were no longer a consideration and you could pull whatever assets you wanted down to your signs whenever you wanted. What types of crazy things could you start offering? What types of like PR stunts could movie people do? Because, because right now ad buys are still limited in, here's the dollars and cents of, getting the assets out and you need to get enough money out of the, enough views or whatever it is. And here you could do just more,

conrad 25:17

look, there's a really interesting tie in here too, right? And I'll, I'll make a pitch for, our, my investors happen to be the four largest broadcast television broadcasters in the

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 25:26

Okay.

conrad 25:26

right? This is Sinclair. Nexstar Scripts and Gray, these are the guys who own all of the local radio station, all the local TV

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 25:33

Okay.

conrad 25:34

They also, hey, they do a lot of local advertising, right? So now imagine, you're walking into the DMV and, you walk in and you look up and you see the sign that says, now serving number four and you're number 872. Gosh, I've got a lot of things that I can show and put in front of you. And quite frankly, if you look at it today, it's like you turn around and you go, oh, here's an ad for lawn furniture. And you're like, I'm not really in lawn furniture. Okay, now we can look and go. We have a guy who's gonna be standing in the DMV for the next 30 minutes. We'll show'em the local Ford dealer ad. Why? Because we're already doing business with that guy, right? Hey, we know there's a pizza guy down the street. We can pull that ad in. Oh, you know what? Geez, it's getting on to be three o'clock. Hey, we're gonna cut in. We're gonna show a preview of traffic on from a local TV station. You can put much more high quality content in front of that customer than, the average Google spot is gonna get out there. And that, that also creates value, not just for Edge Beam, but for our end clients, when we look and we go, we have a lot to bring to bear and a lot of value to add on that

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 26:38

I'm hearing a lot of the work is now being pushed out to the edge in these particular applications as well.

conrad 26:45

Yeah.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 26:45

it's crazy to see the broad spectrum of connected solutions, those that offload as much to the cloud as possible to keep size, power, consumption, all this, all these things. But the applications you're talking about. not about shrinking, it's not about optimizing battery, it's, these are things plugged into the grid somewhere you just need to push data to them. And in being independent of the malls security, the factory security, the, every restroom stall in every target in the Midwest, whatever.

conrad 27:25

Oh dear.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 27:27

It's Big,

conrad 27:28

it's when we made the transition to 5G, of the things we started talking about was me, mec, me. Mobile edge computing. Oh,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 27:36

right?

conrad 27:36

stuff out there. Okay.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 27:38

We're still not there.

conrad 27:39

we are continuing to drive that evolution and you look and go, look, there's a whole bunch of stuff that should be up in the cloud, But there's a whole bunch of places too where you look and you go, that we have around us now has MIPS and pretty damn soon everything is gonna have MIPS plus GPU. So now you look and you go. Do I really wanna round trip something all the way up and back if the, if things can be appropriately done at different points through the network? And generally speaking with that, what that involves is pushing things out to the edge of the network. And as we're doing that caching things, oh look, there's that multicast thing again, one to many, right? To push them along the way. And in all of those cases, we bring value to that equation and make things happen easier and. More efficiently. The focus is on efficiency.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 28:27

So help me think about the types of things that I would best be served by this big multicast distribution. Media. Makes perfect sense. Firmware updates across a whole bunch of devices. What else?

conrad 28:40

Game update.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 28:41

Get game updates. I heard that LLM model updates.

conrad 28:45

Yeah.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 28:46

else?

conrad 28:46

And Pause, pause on the LLMs for a

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 28:48

Yeah.

conrad 28:49

Because, look, I'd look and I'd go, we are a company that is enabled by AI and supports ai. But I would look and I would go. That that doesn't mean we're making AI products, but if you look at what's happening in the universe, whether it's your microphone sitting in front of you or a laptop or the cell phone that we have over there, all of those devices now wanna run LLMs. They wanna run and they, generally speaking, wanna run LLMs that span a variety of sizes and capabilities. But a lot of those, quite frankly, get built on the same set of models. The ability to throw those updates out. And do that efficiently. Boy, all of a sudden you're making things that were very hard or very security challenge become much, much easier as we can get those things efficiently out to the edge of the network.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 29:34

Am I missing anything else? Software updates and,

conrad 29:37

I'll throw one other.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 29:38

yeah.

conrad 29:38

interesting one that's out there too. one of the other really cool markets that we play in is, enhanced GPS,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 29:45

Oh yeah.

conrad 29:46

You ever play golf? Okay? So a lot of people play golf. You got that little

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 29:51

yep. Or the little scope. Yeah.

conrad 29:53

you're. Scope, right? And you look at it says, Hey, you're 120 yards from the green and you look like in fact, I started a couple years ago carrying both a watch and a scope.'cause I'd look and go, I'm not 120 yards from the green. I pull the scope up, I go, I'm 106 yards from the green. How could I, how could my watch doing that kind of math be that far off? And the answer is, it's actually physics. Cesium clocks in satellites, drift satellites move a little bit, ionosphere, stratosphere, blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden, boom, you're 10 yards apart from where you think you are. Okay? You and I being average golfers, that doesn't really matter. We're still gonna hit the ball on the sand trap. But now let's think about a building for a

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 30:33

Yep.

conrad 30:34

If you built a building 10 yards apart from where it was supposed to be? That's a big, oops. Go one step further and go, what if you were driving a drone in between two buildings and you were 10 yards apart? Oops. So the good news is there actually is a protocol out there called RTK, which does real-time corrections of GPS. It basically says, this is where you think, this is where you think you are. Here's what you should know about the satellites around you, so you can change your equation and know where you actually are. gosh, there's that multicast application again. Now, just pause for a second and think about how many devices you're aware of that use GPS.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 31:12

A lot.

conrad 31:13

What if they could easily, almost for free, right? Know exactly where they are instead of where they think they are, and then start thinking about what's gonna be happening over the next couple of years. When you think about. about a roboto taxi? Is it okay if it's five yards apart from where it's gonna be? No, you just hit the kid. what about the delivery thing? Driving down the sidewalk that's five yards out and is suddenly in the middle of the street and stopping all the traffic. Okay. What if, and I would go, that's another one of our great applications that were out there and, and I close with you on this, Ryan. One of the things that we're finding is this is a little bit of a layer cake, right? And what we see is every time we sit down and think about it and start looking at it, so much more of the traffic that's out there is truly small numbers of content that want to get to large number of places. And that's a place where we look and we go, we have a sustainable strategic advantage in how we're gonna deliver that to our customers and quite frankly, to benefit, everybody in the US.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 32:16

So I've got a question. How did you, how'd you run across Soracom?

conrad 32:21

Gosh, so well. So couple things. I am, look, I am a Soracom fan. I'm a Kenta(Soracom CTO) fan. We knew from the get go, that we were gonna come out and build this hybrid, network architecture. And what that meant is we were gonna have to create an environment that created an MVNO. Now there are a lot of people with a lot of different approaches about how to do that. The thing that we really liked about Soracom, cloud Native. AWS first, and there's a heritage and an understanding inside of, of Soracom of building, quite frankly, carrier grade solutions. And when we started talking with the team and going, we care about things like TR 369. I'm, quite frankly, I'm never even exactly sure what that is, but my CTO says that's telemetry. And. And we care about things like high availability. And then the customizability of the platform and all those places. Soracom is just hands down one of the best solutions and, as something that is fundamentally a cloud native approach, which is where we are too, fits together, hand in glove. And, we, and I'll tell you, we looked at a lot of solutions. We put the sales team and the tech team at Soracom through the ringer, and consistently we saw two things that really mattered to us. One is, one is it was a great technology solution. The other is, the Soracom team was really direct in being able to say yes and no to us. We don't do that and we never will. And we go, gosh, and you told

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 33:50

Isn't that refreshing?

conrad 33:53

Really refreshing. And the other thing is, there were a couple places where we said, this is what we wanna do. And they were like, that's a really good idea. We're gonna take that and add that to our roadmap and that kind of collaboration. Those are exactly the partnership that, that we're looking for. And we're really excited to be engaged with the Soracom team. And I know we're gonna do really cool and super stuff together.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 34:12

know our CTO Kenta is also a big fan of the work that you guys are doing it, it's breaking new ground. That greater mission of just trying to find a way to, connect all the things and, help bring people together

conrad 34:29

how do we bring people and things

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 34:31

yeah.

conrad 34:32

I agree with you. That's the ultimate mission, Ryan.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 34:35

Question for you. What is Soracom to you?

conrad 34:42

I think there are two answers to that question. One is a great technology partner and co-development partner, who creates our end-to-end experience and end-to-end platform. And I really focus there on the relationship and the engagement and how that works together. Fundamentally, the other thing it is, for us, it's money. Boy, you guys help us get to market probably 18 months to two years faster than we would be able to do it without Soracom. And what that means for a young company is irreplaceable. When you have a startup, a pre-revenue startup company like, it's a lot like having a patient. In triage in the OR and they are bleeding out. And that blood is our investor's capital. And the faster you can stop that bleeding and start the patient getting better, hey, now all of a sudden you're on the road to growth and prosperity and Soracom is probably the most important element to get us from here to there.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 35:40

awesome. That's cool.

conrad 35:41

And we've got the same kind of rich telecom heritage

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 35:44

Mm-hmm.

conrad 35:45

Both in our organization, in yours, and it's, it makes for a good partnership and it makes for a team where, we challenge each other and we push things forward and we create things that have never existed before.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 35:56

All right. All right. this has been so cool. This is the first time I think anyone will have ever heard of using broadcast television signals to deliver internet grade downloads, and then using the cellular just for the upload for, all of those keep alive and acknowledgements and ACK backs. The SIM technology that. Devices already know how to handle for authentication, so you know that the data's only going to that particular device. Think the biggest like eureka moment is the understanding of what multicast really means.

conrad 36:34

What is the power of one to

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 36:35

Oh my gosh.

conrad 36:36

look, you've captured it,

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 36:37

Yeah.

conrad 36:38

And I'll tell you, this has been a great. I really, I think, I think you've really groked what it is that we're trying to do and, it's a lot of fun. And I'll tell you like, like the first time I heard about Edge Beam, I was like, they're gonna do what? Internet over the tv. I'm like, wow, I can't wait to tune to that channel. Turns out it's a pretty good show.

Ryan Carlson (Tech Evangelist) 36:58

Awesome. Alright, thank you so much and we will keep this conversation going and for all of our listeners, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna have probably some additional, writeups that we'll be doing on this specific topic. Look for videos that we'll be posting on social media. But until next time, this is, Conrad with the Edge Beam and Ryan at Soracom.

37:19

This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time.