In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Robert Hamblet, CEO of Teal, and Rob Tiffany, Chief Product Officer at Red Bison, join Ryan Chacon to discuss cellular IoT adoption best practices from a buyer's perspective. Robert talks about eSIM technology and emphasizes that flexibility and preserving options are crucial for utilizing eSIM technology effectively. They also refer to the possibilities with iSIM and touch upon the importance of making informed decisions about choosing the right IoT components. The podcast provides an insightful conversation about eSIM, iSIM, and the future direction of cellular IoT solutions.

About Robert Hamblet

Robert Hamblet is the Founder, CEO, & President of TEAL, a global networking company headquartered in Seattle, WA. Teal is the first US-based eSIM platform to be certified by the GSMA providing a cloud-native, Credentialing-as-a-Service platform that provides intelligent connectivity and networking solutions for IoT device and network operators. Prior to founding Teal, Robert developed some of the industry’s earliest eSIM platforms for several multinational connected car manufacturers.

Interested in connecting with Robert? Reach out on LinkedIn!

About Rob Tiffany

A Top Voice in IoT, 5G, and Digital Twin AI, Rob Tiffany is the Founder and CEO at Digital Insights, an organization providing strategic advisory services on emerging technologies to leaders in industry and the military. Rob has held global leadership roles at Ericsson, Hitachi, and Microsoft. As Vice President and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson, he drove 5G connection management with the IoT Accelerator and participated in global M&A activities. As Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi, he received the Presidential “Product of the Year” award for designing the Lumada Industrial IoT platform which landed in Gartner’s “Leaders” Magic Quadrant. Spending most of his career at Microsoft, Rob was Director and Global Technology Lead for the Azure IoT cloud platform. Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded NetPerceptor developing one of the industry’s earliest Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) platforms for smartphones. As an author and speaker, Rob is a frequently sought-after source globally. He's been featured in Wired, Forbes, Fierce Wireless, Inc. Magazine, Dataconomy, Thinkers360, Onalytica, Mobile World Live, Techonomy, and SXSW.

Interested in connecting with Rob? Reach out on LinkedIn!

About TEAL

TEAL’s patented, GSMA-certified eSIM technology connects any compatible device to any data network worldwide. With more network operator agreements than any other connectivity provider, TEAL gives businesses everywhere the flexibility and control to remotely switch between networks, ensuring the highest level of reliability and performance for any internet of things (IoT) deployment. TEAL supports applications across many industries including mobility, robotics, drones, industrial IoT, railways, and healthcare.

About Red Bison

Red Bison designs, builds, and manages high-speed networks with an integrated Edge Cloud and Building Intelligence Platform for commercial and large residential real estate. Their services empower building owners to streamline their operations, strengthen security measures, and ultimately increase overall property value.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(00:18) Introduction to Robert Hamblet and Rob Tiffany

(00:50) Understanding cellular IoT solutions

(02:07) Choosing the right connectivity

(04:27) The role of developers in IoT solutions

(05:05) The impact of network congestion

(09:38) The evolution of cellular connectivity

(15:20) The promise of eSIM and iSIM

(20:00) Scaling cellular IoT solutions

(36:34) The future of cellular IoT

(42:31) Learn more and follow up

Transcript:

- [Ryan] Welcome Robbie and Rob the IoT For All Podcast again. Thanks for being here.

- [Rob] Thanks for having us. 

- [Robby] Thanks for having me. 

- [Ryan] Great to have both of you. You've both been on before kind of individual episodes a couple times. So excited to have both of you together. I think the topics we have planned are very relevant right now.

Before we do that, I wanted to just toss it around and have you give a quick introduction to, about yourselves and the companies you're with, just for our audience who might not be as familiar. Robbie, you want to kick things off. 

- [Robby] My name's Robbie Hamblet. I am one of the co-founders, and I'm the CEO of TEAL Communications, which is an eSIM technology company based out of Seattle, Washington.

- [Rob] Yeah, Rob Tiffany. I'm a Chief Product Officer at a company called Red Bison, which is in Kirkland, Washington, and it's in the proptech space, so IoT, edge, and commercial real estate. What a combo.

- [Ryan] Today, we wanted to talk a lot about adoption best practices, particularly relating to cellular IoT solutions. Framing this kind of from a buyer's perspective to help all those people out there looking to better understand, learn, and adopt solutions. Let's go ahead and start off, Robbie, maybe we can kick this off with just an overview of cellular IoT solutions, like what they are, what that means when we say cellular IoT solutions versus other solutions and kind of things like that.

- [Robby] Yeah. Cellular has been used mostly in like consumer devices for phones and tablets and to a lesser extent laptops. And for IoT solutions, cellular is popular because of its ability to be an actual wide area network. So a connection means you have an IP address, and it also means that you are able to be mobile.

So other technologies maybe don't maintain a high level of throughput as you're physically moving the modem or the device around. So cellular has been used in any kind of outdoor mobile application where there isn't a dedicated connection to a base station or something like that. That's where cellular has been most popularly applied. 

- [Ryan] When we're talking about utilizing cellular for a solution, how do you best determine the type of connectivity that is well suited for a solution? Because I know like before we even jumped on, Rob, you were talking about the work you're doing in buildings and skyscrapers and how cellular is not the best option for that.

And Robbie, you even agreed, so just how do you, how should people be thinking about evaluating the types of connectivity or when cellular is the right option, maybe when it's not, besides just the fact that being outside versus inside. Are there other factors that are involved there? 

- [Rob] Certainly as Robbie mentioned, mobility is a big deal. If you're moving around, going around the world, that kind of thing, you've got to have cellular. I think over the years, I think both of us, we've, we get pretty pragmatic about things, and you're like what's the use case that drives, instead of just saying, you should always use cellular or you should always use whatever. It's use case dependent. After years of doing fun science experiments and stuff in IoT, people have gotten pretty darn pragmatic and cost sensitive depending on the scenario. And so like when I talk about doing IoT in a building, if there's already a network there inside the building, which there probably is, there's ethernet inside the walls, right, and Wi-Fi and stuff like that, I'm likely just going to hop on and piggyback on that network, right? I need an IP network, just like Robbie was talking about. And so if I'm indoors, and there's a network, there's a good chance I'm going to hop on that one if I can. And it has a lot to do with just cost and ease, right?

- [Robby] Yeah. Use what's there. Best network is the one you can actually see and connect to. But yeah, definitely consider congestion too because there's been a lot of recent dialogue around Wi-Fi and the system of repeaters and channels that Wi-Fi use is just not really well designed for bulk mass device adoption.

Buildings could get a lot smarter, but they don't necessarily have the ability to access a radio spectrum that isn't already congested, I mean, Rob, I don't know, have you seen, have you done any kind of deployments on things other than Wi-Fi indoors? 

- [Rob] Definitely done Bluetooth and Thread and stuff like that in the past. You bring up a good point. I always like to put myself in the shoes of the developer who's actually building all these solutions. And developers, can be lazy or they want to take the path of least resistance. And so if you can give them an IP address right from their thing, their device, whatever, all the way to the destination, they're going to love you. As soon as you say, oh, actually here's some kind of weird protocol, and you're going to have to use a gateway and a translator. 

- [Robby] And there's no SSH. 

- [Rob] Yeah. And people are like, oh, I don't know, is there an easier one? And there's a lot of stuff out there, you said LoRaWAN and a bunch of others that you know just lots of them are not IP based, and so it makes it harder for the developer.

I also think it back to, when you think about congestion, we need to put the onus on a lot of developers out there to be efficient because congestion, there's this infrastructure, like Teal's building, a lot of other companies are building, and then there's these developers building solutions that are riding on top of that infrastructure to deliver whatever the solution is.

I remember having flashbacks to, if you go back to early 2000s, there was this big hype around SOAP and XML as a way to send data across the internet in a heterogeneous way, which we didn't have before. It turns out it was the most bloated, fat way to send data and call methods on other computers ever imagined.

And then you had things like REST come along and JSON, which were smaller, then you had compression. Then you've got all these other cool binary formats. And the reason I say that, not just get too geeky, but developers and the choices they use when building these solutions plays a giant role in how all this plays out.

You could have perfectly great connectivity inside your house, but it could seem congested because a bunch of guys built some stuff with the wrong protocols of, that kind of stuff. That's a thing. 

- [Robby] It's really interesting like when you are so like, and there, there is a also interesting point there of sometimes there are like QOS limits when you're in a network, and you're using a network operator. So like cellular will have Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, they all publish like guidelines for what a machine device should be using, and they're less sensitive to a CAT-1 device, but if you've ever, back in the day, we used to like wait really eagerly for the latest phone update. And it was like why can't the carrier just let this phone update happen? It's they're going through all these tests. A lot of those tests are like network performance related. They're trying to make sure that the device is going to behave on the network. It's not going to open a TCP socket every second. It's going to, it's going to wait its turn in line. And there is like a really interesting thing I saw that Netflix was getting behind this week related to network congestion. But when you program your own network, right, it's my Wi-Fi network, I don't have some bureaucratic device performance behavior team testing my devices I as the developer in that scenario, although I definitely did not develop these solutions, I have to look at what's going on in the network, and I have, I almost become the bad guy. 

Just because it's a free lunch doesn't mean you should eat as much of it as you can necessarily. And things like LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi 2.4 and Thread and some of the other, Bluetooth, that we've talked about like, they still need best practices even if there isn't some network provider that's like enforcing that best practices. That used to be like that was the biggest annoyance, but now it's smart the way they did that. If everybody was just going hog wild, those devices would slow, or those networks would slow down a lot. 

- [Rob] I mean, you know what the thing that's eating the most bandwidth in your house of your Wi-Fi is actually your smart TVs now. The TVs are all a bunch of collection of apps that are streaming, and the streaming is just eating everything in sight.

- [Robby] Can I go on record as saying that like I, maybe I'm the first with this conspiracy theory on the internet, but if you have a Fire TV, in the last few updates, they have been like running the programs in the background while the TV's off, and they're getting ad revenue from that, and they have no way to validate to the end user, or sorry, to the customer of theirs which is the advertising platform, they have no way to validate that somebody's actually watching that ad, whether the TV is off or not, right? But by auto-playing ads, they're getting the views, right? Do, anybody else think about that? 

- [Rob] The same people who built those little things that you'd run on your PC during the dot-com era where you're looking at ads all day, and they were going to pay you money.

- [Robby] I remember getting a couple $5 gift cards in like fifth grade, just signing up for Progressive insurance quotes over and over, and I couldn't even drive yet. 

- [Ryan] Let me get back to something you mentioned earlier, Robbie, you were talking about, we mentioned cellular, and you were talking about, you were alluding to where cellular is now versus where it was before and what it's enabled. So can you give just an update for our audience of where we are just in the general scheme of things with cellular connectivity in the IoT space, like where we are versus maybe where we've come, the landscape, the differences between kind of the different types that are out there that people should be paying attention to.

- [Robby] You're starting to see networks prepare for the migration, it's not even a hard migration necessarily, but they're getting ready to ship their 5G standalone networks. And so much of the last five, even 10 years, I don't even know, has been based around LTE as a backbone and 5G kind of stapled on top in what's called 5G non-standalone. And so Cat M, NB-IoT, those are very much 4G standards. And there's now with the networks getting ready on the infrastructure side for standalone 5G, where they don't maintain 4G connectivity on certain subscriptions. There is a readiness for 5G RedCap, and the newer evolutions of Cat M and NB-IoT. 

- [Rob] What the heck is that RedCap thing all about? 

- [Robby] I think driven by like bill of materials. There's such a bastardization right now in the lower cellular module market where like you're doing NB-IoT, but you maintain a 2G license and a 2G subscription at the same time because you need to have 2G to do SMS, which is what a lot of protocols are still based around, and that's what you're using. RedCap's just reduce capability. It also means that the networks can deliver less features to a lower cost for the types of devices that don't need them.

So things like NB-IoT, which has been a disaster in many markets, they came with a lot more features than were required because they were based around a 4G ecosystem that had to have that backwards compatibility. 

- [Rob] If you go way, way back, a lot of this IoT on cellular was 2G or GPRS. 

- [Robby] And still so many use cases. They literally just need eight bytes to send a GPS header via UDP to a cloud somewhere. And that's all they care about. That's all they're doing. And I think with RedCap, it's really focusing on devices that are asset trackers or energy meters that are just reporting a voltage or something periodically. You don't need all the overhead of like a CAT-1 connection or a Cat M connection. 

- [Rob] Because if you think about where we been with cellular and IoT, if you go back to just like, when I used to work at Ericsson, and Ericsson worked with AT&T a long, long time ago, when you first started having the very first connected cars, and I don't mean connected like it's high tech, it meant, oh, hey, you can have Wi-Fi inside your car through this LTE connection. And so they used to, we used to run all that stuff out of our Plano, Dallas office for Ericsson with these data centers for all these cars in the United States because LTE was the first time that it was really good enough where people could share Wi-Fi inside a car. And it was interesting, but then it's just over time, so much of it back to pragmatism and price, the cost when it's a car, I always think about whatever that IoT bill of materials is needs to be less than 1% or whatever of the total cost of the thing that you're monitoring. And so it's easier to have a more expensive solution when it's a connected car, but if it's a little tiny thing you're tracking, it's got to cost pennies or people won't do it. 

- [Robby] Yeah, it's still not going to cost pennies in cellular, unfortunately, because of how the licenses go to actually put them and include them in a modem.

But yeah, it's, there's also a lot of pressure. It's happening right at the perfect time like with the Quectel ban from the U.S. markets, like that reduce, they're not outright banned, I don't want to say anything out, like actually, it's actually incorrect, but there's a lot of concern over Chinese vendors, like Quectel, and they're banned from certain applications, and there's concern that they'd be banned from further applications. That's going to create a lot less competition in the market, higher prices for cellular. 

It's been always frustrating to me as a fan of cellular technology, even in consumer devices like laptops, it's a $250 upgrade or something crazy like that. It should be ubiquitous. It should be just like that's your outdoor connection. Wi-Fi is your indoor, there's probably a whole thread we could go down and maybe Ryan has a question for us to prompt it about Multipath TCP. 

- [Rob] He's been waiting to ask about that all day. 

- [Robby] But like just a hybrid type solution, how it can use all these different applications because the best network is the one you can see and being pragmatic about do I pay 50 cents to a dollar for a LoRaWAN module or 20 to 50 dollars for a cellular module, and then you have a subscription type on top of that. If they're all doing the same thing, it's just how much dev work are you creating for yourself using a more proprietary solution.

- [Ryan] I did want to ask about the benefits of being able to, of what cellular brings to increasing adoption and helping increase adoption solutions. Before we do that, I think it's important to talk about a couple things that people are hearing a lot about, especially the non-technical audience, when they hear, when they talk about eSIMs and different kinds of I guess like true eSIM versus eSIM versus MNO eSIM, MVNO eSIM, like what, yeah, so when you're hearing that as a potential buyer, it can seem like a lot and not, to understand the details between them, I think that's sometimes overwhelming. What are, can you just like high level talk about the different types and then the benefits and limitations of each just so that our audience who is hearing this out there in their conversations around solutions will just understand what is being communicated to them.

- [Robby] Yeah, so I think this being a question for me, like I am the CEO of an eSIM company, and it's still, I understand how confusing it is for people because eSIM is a concept of a reprogrammable network identity. That's really what it comes down to is can you change the network identity?

What people think they're getting and what they actually get is so different sometimes. So because you slap an eSIM logo on something doesn't mean that it's going to actually support what you thought eSIM was built to support because the standards still preserve like a good amount of carrier autonomy with the approaches to the market.

So today you get an eSIM either from one of the eSIM tech vendors, and that would be like a Telus or an IDEMIA or a Teal or a GND, one of those kind of names. And then you go out, and you build your different operator connections into that, or you're getting it from a carrier, and a carrier eSIM is not going to do the same things as an eSIM that is yours, that you purchased and a platform that you're running. It's also similar to what we were talking about with who's the operator. Sometimes people think about who's the eSIM operator. It's really like who is the eSIM management platform. And if it's managed by your MNO, or it's managed by somebody not you, you don't get to have a say of what that device is going to do. You don't have as much flexibility. You might be a little less insecure and a little more confident about the chances of a roaming change in the market affecting how your device works because you might think that carrier or trust that carrier has your back, but the MNO, to the most, to 99% of use cases, the solution that's being provided by an MNO or an MVNO for eSIM is not the real expectation of the customer, but they just check in the box of oh it's got an eSIM in it. I can change it. How you're going to be able to change that is where it becomes a pragmatic issue. Like, how can you actually get Verizon to install an AT&T profile into your card? It's never ever going to happen, and they've even made that clear. 

- [Rob] Choice.

- [Robby] So is eSIM just about freedom, is it, should we make a movie about it? 

- [Rob] Yeah, absolutely. You should have a painted face and like freedom. Yeah. 

- [Robby] Yeah, it's like open internet. It is, it should be like more of a foundational technology. And some of the new standards do open it up more because today why you have this problem of you get a chip from somebody, and you don't own it really at the end of the day. You can't force Verizon to change anything in your Verizon global eSIM. You can't force an MVNO to change anything in that MVNO eSIM. It's up to them at the end of the day. 

The new standard, SGP.32, going to use an acronym there, but the new GSMA standard for eSIM does allow you to change what platform you're managing that eSIM with. So it's going to create a lot more competition. It's going to leave a lot of uncertainty. The EU really doesn't like it right now, which is why it's been delayed a little bit, or not why, but it's one of the reasons, and it's going to create a lot more responsibility on the devices to use the technology appropriately. But the new standard I think will make it so that most eSIMs behave the same. It's just a command to change it to something else instead of being locked into somewhere. 

- [Rob] I feel like so much of this is just about education. It seems like the consumer is just not educated enough to know that there's a difference.

- [Ryan] Yeah, absolutely. Which I guess brings me to the next point is, now that we've given an overview of what eSIM is, how is it leading or how is it contributing to IoT adoption across industries and what are some of the issues that you've seen with scaling cellular solutions in the IoT space?

- [Robby] I'll let Rob take the latter half of that and just general cellular scale problems, but with with eSIM, what it's been mainly trying to solve is like your access ability. Do you have the rights to access a network? And if those rights change, do you have an ability to get around that? Because things happen, regulations create new compliance issues, like Germany, Brazil, we've talked about all these examples a lot, Turkey, UAE, China, they all have evolving data regulatory legislation. And if your device is planning to go global, and most IoT solutions think about the internet as a global concept and not something that's completely local to one area, like on-prem or even a country, eSIM can open up a lot of borders literally and figuratively as far as where you're going with that device and where you're able to stay in compliance with local internet regulations. 

- [Ryan] So it's basically enabling more use cases and solutions to exist because of that flexibility.

- [Robby] Yeah. The other thing I'll add is like the new satellite technology is very much eSIM capable. So really 17 NTN networks after decades and decades of not even duplex type satellite networks, but the ones that essentially relied on a trust based authentication mechanism of I'm not going to receive any data from something that wouldn't benefit from sending me that data. That's literally how like satellites were like I'm just going to authenticate everything that's coming to me because why send me something I can't do anything with. Now they're using cellular authentication. I think at some point we might even see a cellular, sorry, not cellular, eSIM based Wi-Fi authentication, but there's just not great tooling available. I think iSIM will change the story for that, and the SIM card will exist as a separate enclave of memory. Much like your TPM chip on your laptop exists to validate hardware, the iSIM, eSIM environment would exist to validate your network identities separate from the actual operating system. And yeah, I think the second half of that question from Ryan, Rob, was around just in general historical issues with scaling. I laid out like the network access problem, but I'm sure you have a lot more like application level experience too. 

- [Rob] Before I jump into that though, you said something interesting just about how the SIM m