In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rob Tiffany, VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson explores the development of 5G and LPWA technology for IoT solutions, what it looks like for Telco’s to be successful in the IoT space, and how the Internet is playing the hero during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Download the Transcript Here

 

00:00 Pete Bernard: Great, so Rob, thanks for joining us today on the Unicorn, and really appreciate you taking the time. I was going to start by asking you a couple things about what your role is currently at Ericsson, kinda how you got there. I know that you and I did work together at Microsoft years ago back in the Windows Mobile days.

 

00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.

 

00:25 PB: Good times, good times.

 

00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]

 

00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...

 

00:38 RT: Yeah. And certainly by 2010 or around that timeframe I took an architect role in another group and probably started spending more time on Azure. I was at Microsoft for 12 years and so the first half was Mobile, Windows Mobile, CEE, Windows Phone. Second half was Azure, Azure IoT. And you know what? We had some good times in the Windows Mobile days when it was just us and BlackBerry slugging it out. We were making... When things like Exchange ActiveSync was a big deal to people.

 

01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.

 

01:24 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then no doubt, when we rebooted and did Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 and all that, I used to do so many EBCs for mobility and you noticed a difference and you had to get really thick skin. [chuckle]

 

01:42 PB: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Well, I peeled off after six... I think, so I went on to Zune incubation, I did Kin and I did all kinds of weird phone things and went off into the wilderness for a while on that while everyone else finished up with Windows Phone, but...

 

02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.

 

02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...

 

02:07 RT: You know what? I finished college on board a submarine, so when I was in the Navy driving subs I had what, maybe 30 or so hours to go to graduate, and so I've actually never set foot on the SUNY Albany campus...

 

02:26 PB: Oh, wild.

 

02:27 RT: But the military has programs with lots of different universities around the country and to show how old I really am, I was able to take college courses underway on the submarine using Pioneer LaserDiscs.

 

02:42 PB: Wow.

 

02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]

 

02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.

 

02:50 RT: That is fully old school.

 

02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.

 

02:58 RT: Oh, okay.

 

02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.

 

03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.

 

03:09 PB: Yeah.

 

03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.

 

03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.

 

03:14 RT: To say the least. But you know what? I think everything started back then with submarines and teaching myself how to code and do databases, and when you think about IoT, you're just remoting information that you had on these local sensors and we were surrounded by sensors on the submarine. There's the obvious things like sonar and things like that and this higher frequency one to see what your depth is below the keel, but inside you had CO2 radiation, all kinds of gas sensors and things like that to make sure we were still alive, which was kind of a thing. [chuckle]

 

04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.

 

04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

 

04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?

 

04:13 RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the Microsoft thing. I was recruited out of the Azure back when we were doing incubating Azure IT. There was that time... And actually Microsoft IoT stuff started in the embedded team with Intelligence System Service, but then I went to Hitachi actually to build an industrial IoT platform called Lumada, which was really interesting. But yes, I joined Ericsson a couple years ago. Up until recently, I split my time between Seattle and Stockholm. Normally I'd be in Kista, the Ericsson headquarters with the rest of my team. So yes, certainly disconnected these days.

 

05:00 PB: Yeah, interesting.

 

05:00 RT: And what Ericsson is doing in IoT is very different than my background both at Microsoft and Hitachi for sure, which was more data-focused, outcomes, analytics. Ericsson manages among... We have an IoT team. We have three products. Our big one is this IoT Accelerator, which is basically a global connection management platform. If you know what Jasper is, it's kinda like that in some ways. It spans about 35 or so mobile operators around the world and lots of enterprises. But the key thing, you know how we're always talking about that initial bootstrapping of devices to get them connected, right?

 

05:46 PB: Yep.

 

05:47 RT: In the event that you're using cellular for IoT, one of your options would be this IoT Accelerator thing we have at Ericsson, and so the narrative would be if a machine is being manufactured in Shenzhen and at manufacturer time, they're putting in the microcontroller and the software and the security keys and all that stuff, and there's also a cellular module, and if they're using our technology then when a customer buys that product and they turn it on the first time somewhere else in the world, maybe France, then it wakes up and connects to a local mobile operator to start sync telemetry.

 

06:24 PB: I see, so it's like a bootstrap profile kind of thing that phones home and then you guys connect it up to the right telco network.

 

06:35 RT: Yeah, and then it roams as well. But it's different than anybody who, if you... At least when IoT was getting hyped I was doing IoT-M to M in the '90s, but when it really started getting hyped after 2010, 2012, whatever, you started seeing these global SIMs and things like that that are just roaming all the time.

 

06:58 PB: Yes.

 

07:00 RT: But what the average person doesn't realize is mobile operators don't always want you roaming and just camped out on their network if you're from somewhere else.

 

07:08 PB: Yeah, yeah.

 

[laughter]

 

07:10 RT: And so our technology, aside from the technology and we're operating our own network, so even though Ericsson creates the technologies that mobile operators use, we actually manage our own network that spans the globe, that interfaces with all these other mobile operators, and then there's lots of contracts and everything. But the take away to make sure that it's all okay with them, that these devices... And we are also in the connected car space and we've been doing that for a long time. And so you can imagine a car manufactured in Japan and sold in Europe.

 

07:46 PB: Sure.

 

07:47 RT: And the whole infotainment, and then as we move forward, more and more IOT telemetry coming off, those cards may wanna roam from country to country, so we do a lot of stuff with those guys too.

 

08:00 PB: I noticed that recently I got an email this morning from account team in Finland talking about a telco, there seems to be this confluence of telco and IoT. And I've seen, and I think you might have had some commentary on that too or pointed some articles about 5G plus AI plus IoT, or there's something about... We're seeing some telcos have really... Forward leaning telcos, really investing and thinking about IoT as the next big wave for them. Ericsson is part of that story too. Is there some unnatural attraction between IoT and telco or what's going on there? Are you seeing the same thing?

 

08:40 RT: Yeah, I am. But of course, if you'll remember, we saw this before. When the IoT craze started taking off, you might remember a lot of the telcos built their own IoT platforms and waited for people to come...

 

08:54 PB: That's right.

 

08:54 RT: And people didn't always show up, and so it seems like most of the mobile operators actually took a stab at it back then. Of course, if we go back further in time, most mobile operators thought that it was their right to be the cloud as well and they gave a shot at that, but it didn't work out either. But you're right, there's a renewed effort. I think a lot of it's just numbers and money. We've saturated smartphones and people, and so we need... Lots of mobile operators for better or worse, think of the world in SIMs. [chuckle] Connected SIM endpoints, that's how they see the world. And so it's like, "Okay, we've maxed out all the SIMs on people. [laughter] Where are we gonna get some more SIMs?" And so they're thinking, "Oh, it's IoT." And so that's where a lot of it's coming. We've certainly seen some of them turning on, some of them like NB-IoT and CAT-M1, LTE-M networks to try to take a stab at that. And so that's kind of cruising along.

 

10:09 PB: I noticed that... And I love to buy all the gadgets and stuff and I'm also very invested in the whole LPWA space, I'm a big believer in that. And I'm curious and I see some things happening there, but it just seems like such a no-brainer for some of these WiFi connected things. Like I just installed a garage door opener in my house, I have a separate garage and it's WiFi connected for some reason, but I have to stand on a step ladder and scan a QR code and hold it next to it. I'm like, "Why doesn't it just turn on and connect through a little power cellular?" Just such a no-brainer, but it hasn't quite yet turned on.

 

10:49 RT: Yeah. No, you're right. Are you connected much with the SemTech guys doing LoRa?

 

10:56 PB: SemTech, not that much. No, no.

 

10:58 RT: Okay, okay. It's funny, so much of this is the people you work with over the years. When I went to Hitachi to build this industrial thing, I had a couple of compadres from Microsoft come along as well, but needless to say a couple of those guys are actually working for SemTech now and pushing hard on the whole LoRaWan thing.

 

11:23 PB: I see.

 

11:24 RT: And it looks like they're getting traction actually.

 

11:27 PB: Is LoRaWan, is that unlicensed or is that licensed? I think that's unlicensed.

 

11:31 RT: It's unlicensed, yeah.

 

11:32 PB: There's always those two camps, there's the licensed, which you got all your telcos with their spectrum and their 3GPP stuff, and then the unlicensed, which is probably a lot faster on the innovation side, but...

 

11:45 RT: Yes, they can get to market faster. You may remember, gosh, how many years ago was it when we were at Mobile World Congress and Sigfox launched out of nowhere. And they raised a bunch of money and they... But they weren't gonna do what the LoRaWan and guys did, they tried to be their own mobile operator as well. And so yeah, it's been interesting watching that. And you're right, they can get to market faster. They were using Sub-1 GHz and some rules, EU rules about how often you could send a signal and how big it could be, and they're like, "Hey, I think we can thread the needle here."

 

12:21 PB: Yes.

 

[laughter]

 

12:23 PB: Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to the LPWA stuff becoming more mainstream and just more turn key, if you will 'cause it just seems like it's such a low hanging fruit. There's the obvious metering and telemetry and that's parking meters and gas meters but even a lot of this current WiFi connected gear that people buy, it's just painful to get it all... I just installed a juice box level two charger for my house.

 

12:55 RT: Okay.

 

12:56 PB: And again, I had to download the app and the app... I had to connect the juice box to my phone and my phone to my WiFi and the blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, "What is happening?" It's just...

 

13:06 RT: Absolutely. You know what? It's so important, or at least from my perspective, to put yourself in the shoes of a developer and what they have to go through to get something connected, and I always think of the hassle factor. If I talk to people in the telco world and say, "Why is it cellular IoT is so far behind WiFi or other ways to connect?" And a big reason is actually what you just described. It's just such a hassle and it's expensive. A developer's like, "Oh, I gotta get some kind of SIM-based module thing and I gotta... Do I need to call a mobile operator and get a plan?" And you know what? The mobile operators, they still need to work on getting their prices down lower or at an appropriate amount for a IoT endpoint, because in many cases the prices are still too high.

 

14:01 PB: Yeah. Well, like my garage door opener, how much data is that sending? It's like either the garage door is open or closed. It's like one bit, plus 500K of overhead. A one or a zero, open or closed.

 

14:15 RT: Exactly. One or a zero, yeah. And so I think for telcos to be successful, while they would probably love to charge smartphone prices for plans for things, the reality is is no one's gonna use it unless they can still have an ROI. If I'm doing agriculture and I'm trying to put a weather station in a orchard and my plan with a mobile operators costing me $30 a month, I'm never gonna make any money on that deal. It's not worth doing.

 

14:48 PB: Yeah, I think you're right, there's the simplicity factor, the economics obviously drive the big deployments. But yeah, hopefully we'll start to see that take hold a little bit. I wanted to actually ask you a question about... I saw a post of yours the other day talking about 5G, and I'm sure you and I both get emails and questions about 5G on a daily basis or hourly basis, but you said that it's not just another G, which I thought was a good way of describing the other aspects of 5G. When people think of 5G, I just got this Samsung Ultra, Note Ultra 20 thing beautiful... It's a beautiful thing.

 

15:26 RT: How do you like it?

 

15:27 PB: Oh, it's fantastic. It's just like, it's hard to describe how awesome it is, but... And it's got 5G in it, and so fantastic, classic use case. And I work with Qualcomm all the time and Cristiano Amon and all these folks and they're all like, "5G all the way." But it's almost like the rest of 5G doesn't quite get the airtime about the high density and low latency. How do you see that impacting the IoT space?

 

15:56 RT: Yeah. Well, if the IoT space had actually been successful, 'cause we've massively underperformed across the board, it doesn't matter what company you are or what technology you built, everyone's massively underperformed, and so... But let's just assume for a second that we've been successful and we weren't in the trough of disillusionment right now, we would've found that we would've hit bottlenecks with lots of concurrently connected devices, if we were using cellular just over normal 4G networks and things like that. But we didn't hit those bottlenecks because IoT deployments haven't been that big yet. And so, the great thing about 5G is just with that same hardware, that same gear, all of the sudden you're getting more capacity. And you're right, that's what I wrote about, no one ever talks about the capacity angle. They talk about speed and they talk about the really low latency, and all that's super important, but for IoT capacity is gonna be the most important. And so the fact that it's a hundred times more capacity for the same cell tower, the same gear, is miraculous. And then that supporting a million devices per square kilometer is... That's how we're actually gonna have connected cars working well, smart cities, all those urban, a lot of those things that require a lot of density and a lot of devices all talking together over cellular networks, that's gonna make that real and make it happen.

 

17:29 PB: Yeah, I hear you. And yeah, you're right, we haven't really hit the bottlenecks yet so we're not quite appreciative of it, but when you think through how many billions of devices will be connected over the next few years, you just have to go there and you have to have that infrastructure. And then the ultra-low latency stuff, I think is fascinating. From the Microsoft side, we do a lot of commercial stuff, manufacturing, healthcare, a lot of things like that, and the ultra-low latency and some of those aspects of 5G are pretty fascinating, I think, and start to get more industry 4.0 type of scenarios.

 

18:06 RT: Yes, absolutely.

 

18:09 PB: I was curious what you think about... My next question around 5G and Release 16 for 3GPP. Do we need 3GPP Release 16 to really make this 5G thing work for IoT or do we need 17? Do you have any opinion on that or is that too esoteric of a question?

 

18:31 RT: It's a little esoteric, and the only reason I say that is I remember talking to folks in the past who would say ridiculous things to me like, "Oh, now that we're gonna get 5G, we can finally do IoT." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? We've done IoT forever and we've done it a million different ways, and we certainly did it over GPRS and it was fine [chuckle] and so I don't need 5G to do IoT." Is it gonna make it better and is it gonna help us with this capacity? Absolutely. And you're right, these subsequent releases, getting that ultra reliable, that low latency for mission critical stuff... 'Cause as you can imagine, you're talking about Microsoft being in the industrial world, Ericsson makes private LTE and private 5G technologies. And so that's complementary to what you're doing at Microsoft, 'cause we are certainly getting pinged on a lot by a lot of giant manufacturers around the world who, as they're heading into industry 4.0, they look at some of those use cases that require mass customization, flexibility around the factory...

 

19:47 PB: Sure.

 

19:48 RT: The notion of a fixed assembly line that doesn't change is gonna go away.

 

19:53 PB: Right, right, that's a novelty... That's Henry Ford style stuff. Yeah, that doesn't work.

 

19:55 RT: Yeah, and so therefore, they won't be able to use Ethernet anymore because it's gonna move around so they need wireless, they haven't had a lot of success with WiFi and so lots of people are piloting private 5G, private LTE inside factories, distribution centers, and so that's really interesting space there.

 

20:19 PB: Yeah. We've seen that as well, and we also see interest from transportation hubs.

 

20:24 RT: Yeah.

 

20:27 PB: Shipping ports, airports, places that have just a lot of acreage.

 

20:33 RT: Absolutely.

 

20:34 PB: So you're talking about oil refineries, places where there's 100 acres of space and they need a homogeneous, high speed network. You're not gonna stick WiFi repeaters out on poles down the runway.

 

20:49 RT: Right.

 

20:49 PB: So yeah, so I think that's another big area. We talked about the LPWA side is cool with the parking meters and garage door openers. And then the other side, you talked about there is gonna be this big wave of transformation going on with some of these big industrial players, I think using 5G or some kind of cell technology, private cell there.

 

21:12 RT: Yeah. And it's amazing 'cause I've seen it in action and the coverage is insane, the distance, the speed within a large building, instead of having zillions of WiFi access points trying to create coverage, you just have a few of these radio dots that we make and it just roams and it just works seamlessly all over. That's gonna be fun to watch.

 

21:37 PB: That'll be fun to watch, yes. Hey, I was gonna ask you kinda change gears a little bit, so we're recording this on August 25th so we've been in this pandemic mode for quite a while. What kind of insights have you gained from this pandemic?

 

21:56 RT: Yes. You know what? I think I put it together 'cause I have thought about it, I've kind of taken down notes, what's worked, what's not worked. And so I would say, succinctly, digital experiences delivered over connectivity is making remote things local and so whether it's you and I chatting here, the rest of the world on Zoom like you're seeing, it's kept people together. My wife is a school teacher and so she had to start teaching remotely and her school district uses Teams 'cause I'm right by Redmond, of course. [chuckle] So an Office 365 school district.

 

22:49 PB: Right.

 

22:50 RT: Yeah, as opposed to a Google classroom school district.

 

22:53 PB: Sure, sure.

 

22:54 RT: You've seen it in the stock price with certain tech companies, it's like, "Wow, we're really using this." But it certainly plays back to IoT and the taking an experience where I would normally be local in person and making it remote and I know it sounds really simple to say that but the hero in all of this is the internet.

 

23:20 PB: Right.

 

23:21 RT: It's held together.

 

23:22 PB: Yes.

 

23:23 RT: It keeps reaffirming that it's maybe one of the greatest creations ever and it's holding together for the whole planet, which is just miraculous.

 

23:33 PB: Yeah. The idea of remote everything, it sounds simple, but it's so complicated and...

 

23:39 RT: Yeah.

 

23:40 PB: We talk about latency and bandwidth and other things, and just... I think it's been a lifeline for so many people, to be honest with you.

 

23:49 RT: It has.

 

23:51 PB: Just with just the video conferencing, Satya talks about the acceleration, like two years worth of acceleration in two months, basically, just 'cause people have to start collaborating with these tools like Teams and Zoom and everything else, and so we've all fast forwarded a couple of years in our adoption of some of these technologies...

 

24:14 RT: Absolutely.

 

24:14 PB: And it'll be interesting to see what sticks. As we get out of this pandemic at some point, which of these habits will stick, that we'll get more used to, and then obviously... I think maybe also for me, I also now probably have more appreciation of the in person experiences than I probably did. And I did travel recently with my daughter to get her to school and I actually enjoy traveling, I enjoy being on an airplane, and these days it's a pretty high anxiety kind of thing with lots of face shields and wipes and things, but getting back to that mode, that's something that I'll probably, for the rest of my life really appreciate being able to just freely travel.

 

24:58 RT: Yes, absolutely.

 

25:00 PB: 'Cause of this situation we're in. So it will be interesting to see. I agree with you though, I think the internet has held together and that has been the hero amongst many heroes, but...

 

25:10 RT: Yeah. This internet infrastructure, fiber electricity beneath the cities and the country, and then little things popping up, either cell towers or WiFi access points, that let us roam around mobility and keeping us together. Obviously, we see a lot of stuff, there's been trends and things that we've had before that's just super accelerated, like you said, like tele-medicine, remote healthcare...

 

25:36 PB: Yeah.

 

25:36 RT: Just skyrocketed.

 

25:39 PB: Yeah. Well, I know that there...

 

25:40 RT: Out of necessity.

 

25:41 PB: Yeah, there was... I know there was a lot of rules in place for practitioners not being able to work across state lines and a lot of those rules were suspended during the pandemic to enable people to do tele-medicine, which I thought was fantastic, they were pretty... From a layman's perspective, they seemed anachronistic that you couldn't Zoom conference with a patient in another state and actually provide support or guidance.

 

26:09 RT: Yeah.

 

26:11 PB: And so yeah, things like that, where we just moved the whole ball forward, which is a good thing.

 

26:17 RT: Absolutely, absolutely. No, it's all good.

 

26:20 PB: Good stuff.

 

26:21 RT: I think you learned a lot. And I do miss traveling too. I complained about it when I'm flying every few weeks to Sweden or wherever...

 

26:30 PB: Sure, sure.

 

26:31 RT: But then that abrupt end of it and just the silence and being at home... You know it's weird, when you travel a lot and you're accustomed to all these international airports and maybe the place you go to get coffee or... This broad world, for a handful of us, it's like our comfort zone and then it just ended, and I miss it. No doubt about it.

 

26:54 PB: Cool, so, well, Rob, thanks a lot for the time, appreciate it. And good to see you again and...

 

27:01 RT: Absolutely.

 

27:02 PB: I see you pop up on LinkedIn on almost like a daily basis, so we'll keep communicating through LinkedIn and stuff.

 

27:10 RT: We're teachers.

 

27:11 PB: Yes, exactly, exactly.

 

27:14 RT: Spreading the word, absolutely.

 

27:16 PB: Exactly. Sounds good. Alright, Rob, well, take care stay safe.

 

27:19 RT: You do the same, it's great talking to you.

 

27:21 PB: Okay, thanks.

 

27:22 RT: Alright, bye bye.