Interested in connecting with Robby Hamblet? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Teal Communications:

Teal Communications is an IoT Platform built to help device owners access cellular device credentials and network operators distribute their credentials without the limitations of the past.

Teal offers OneChip, a globally programmable eUICC, and both SMSR/SMDP and SMDP+ solutions for operators including Private LTE.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(01:21) Introduction to Robby Hamblet and Teal Communications

(03:00) Use cases of eSIM

(04:45) eSIM platforms in IoT

(06:44) eSIM versus eUICC

(09:19) Private LTE

(11:45) Opportunities in Private LTE

(15:38) Challenges for IoT companies

(17:56) How active is Teal Communications in solution planning

(22:38) How are buyers thinking of connectivity

(24:45) Projections for IoT in 2022

Transcript:

- [Voice Over] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon, and today's guest, we have Robby Hamblet, the CEO and Co-Founder of Teal Communications. Teal, for those of you who may be unfamiliar is a IoT platform built to help device owners access cellular data credentials and network operators distribute their credentials without the limitations that they faced in the past. So on today's episode, we're gonna talk a lot about a lot of different things. We're gonna talk about the struggles and architecting a complete solution. Why it's an issue, how it can be solved. We're gonna talk about network connectivity and why oftentimes people are kinda checking the box there, but really what you need to be thinking about when it comes to selecting the right connectivity. And then finally, we're gonna talk about consumer eSIM. So this is more of a private LTE solution, how it's different, kind of how it compares, and kind of the benefits of it overall. So really hope you'll enjoy this episode, but before we get into it, if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market, but don't know where to start, check out our sponsor Leverege. Leverege's IoT solutions development platform, provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com. That's iotchangeseverything.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome, Robby. Well, I guess, I should just say welcome back to the IoT For All Show. Thanks for being here again.

- [Robby] Thanks for having me, Ryan. Always a pleasure.

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's great to have you. I know there's a lot of exciting things going on over at Teal. I wanted to find another opportunity for us to chat and now that we're into video, I think it'd be great to talk a little bit further from our last discussion. Could you start off, just probably some of our audience, maybe who the first time hearing you from you would be great to kind of just give some insights into your background, experience, and just introduce yourself.

- [Robby] Yeah, I'm really excited to be on webcam. I remember last time it was just audio only and the app had trouble with mic, so I can imagine this has made your life a lot easier.

- [Ryan] 100%.

- [Robby] I hope that quality is transferring out to the actual podcast.

- [Ryan] So far so good.

- [Robby] Yeah. So for people that don't know me, my name is Robby Hamblet, I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of Teal. My background was in eSIM engineering. So I worked on some very early connected car solutions for GM and for Daimler and working with kind of, what I would call the legacy eSIM platform that are out there. Figured out pretty quickly the problem that I wanted to solve, which is a lot of eSIM gets deployed as like a bespoke configuration specific and tailored to that one solution. It's very difficult for the operators, it's very difficult for the solutions to create these kind of wall gardens, where eSIM really only exists for one benefit and that's that single single product. So Teal is trying to democratize access to these network credentials, make it easier for people to get the public network operators, but also get networks enrolled for private networks as well.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. I'd love it if you could expand a little bit on the use cases that you all are kind of working on. I know you do a lot of work with the operator side and there's some interesting things I know have been happening on your end. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the use cases and applications of your technology to kinda bring it full circle for audience just kind of get a sense of how it all fits together.

- [Robby] Yeah, I mean, eSIM is all about multi-network and eSIM as a product, if it's delivered to just drive people through an MV and O-core, it's not accomplishing that kind of goal that it was designed for, which is to deploy multi-radio, but also multi-core solutions. So getting devices onto multiple radio networks is something that a lot of roaming profiles have been able to do for a lot. So you can roam between different branded public networks, but then what data center are you using? How is the data actually exiting to the internet? So a lot of the solutions that we work with, they a benefit solution first from eSIM. So there are domestic users that are within one country and they wanna access multiple data pathways within that one country, or they're deploying something globally and they want to be able to be a native user in the US and a native user in Spain. So sometimes it's about switching people between packet gateways inside of one country, other times it's about enabling access to networks they wouldn't get if they took an AT&T user here in the US and they brought it to Spain, and they would be an AT&T user in Spain.

- [Ryan] Gotcha. Okay. One of the things I think we've kind of, well, you know what, what would be good is if you could just quickly give a high level on kind of what we spoke about last time, we talked about eSIM platforms. Just to kind of catch your audience up from a context standpoint, can you just describe what that kind of means in the sense of IoT, just to make sure everybody's kinda following along there.

- [Robby] Yeah, so in cellular networks, there are authentication servers like an HSS, and that is something that authenticates a user and says, "This user belongs to this network," and typically that's matched to the SIM card identity. It's just statically mapped and you get like a regular plastic card or even an embedded SIM card that has these credentials just kind of programmed in at the factory. With eSIM it's about programmability, or at least it's supposed to be. So it's about changing the identity depending on whatever the provider requires. So whether that be switching between networks due to lack of coverage or expanding performance or avoiding like network EOLs, that's one thing. A large portion of our customer base are people that have been affected by 3G shutdowns and our transitions and mergers that knocked them off of the network and killed their prior credential into that network, which was delivered through kind of a static SIM card. But with eSIM, you can solve those problems. You can drive a lot more choice and freedom over what networks, both in terms of the radio network, but also the data path. That's the piece that a lot of people miss is there's a lot of ways to get onto AT&T's network. You're not always getting on through the native experience of an AT&T.

- [Ryan] Gotcha. And so this is a unrelated to any question that I anticipate asking you, but I wanted to bring it up because it's something that I notice there's some confusion between, and I'd love it from your perspective, when we're talking about eSIM, there's the eSIM and then there's the eUICC piece, right? So how are they separate? Just for audience how they are so they can understand it. I mean, I feel like eSIM is much more generally used to kind of encompass both pieces when they're talking about it, but how do you view it from your side? Because you're obviously working in day-to-day.

- [Robby] Yeah, to break things down, and I apologize if I use this joke on our previous podcast, but telco is an industry that has reused a lot of acronyms, like M-to-M used to mean mobile-to-mobile, now it means machine-to-machine. And it's like, gosh, that's such a fundamental acronym. eSIM itself suffers a little bit from that sort of thing 'cause you have eSIM meaning electronic SIM, then you have eSIM meaning embedded SIM. And most people when they talk about it, they mean embedded SIM, so eUICC, but then you have plastic eUICCs. And those are eSIMs, they're programmable, but they're still like the same form factor as a regular UICC or universal integrated circuit card. So there's two flavors. There's M2M meaning machine to machine eSIM, which is either plastic or embedded. And then there is the consumer eSIM flavor and a lot of people just refer to that as eSIM, 'cause that's like the colloquial, like consumer return for it. They don't say UICC, they say just it's an eSIM. There's an eSIM in my iPhone, right? And that is something that is controlled by the device owner. So it's GSMA chained. It's a poll mechanism for accessing credentials. So the phone requests them from the server in the M2M industrial eUICC world, there's a platform that's managing them. So I mean, both of those can be called a platform, right? 'Cause Teal offers both an SM-DP+, which is what's used for consumer eSIM. So our work with private networks is to make sure that if you enter a building that has a private LTE network, that you can scan a QR code and get access to that network. But our work with connected car solutions, that's to make sure that they can access public networks and program them from a platform or portal.

- [Ryan] So talk to me a little bit more about the private LTE side of things. When you talk about like, there's the consumer element is kind of the way you're referring to it as from the SEM as a solution. How does that compare? What is the difference? How does that work? That's relatively new to my I area of understanding. So talk a little bit about how that all works and the value there.

- [Robby] Yeah, so there's even been some discussion about, and this is where it'll get super confusing even to people inside the industry. There's even been some discussion about using consumer eSIM models inside of IoT applications, right? Like you take the particle board that you have or you take the module that you've acquired that's gonna use cellular connectivity and you scan a QR code or enter a URL to activate it as opposed to like getting a SIM card that was produced at a factory and then using the platform to manage that. So that could even happen. But when Teal talks about consumer eSIM, we're not producing like a mint mobile or something where we're taking a public network and we're putting it in somebody's iPhone. It's not about the core MNOs. It's about driving network access and enrollment for private networks. So we've done some work with GenXComm, Salona, a whole bunch of folks in the private LTE space where, even the Facebook team, they're trying to have a user access their network without needing or set a physical touch point with that user of, "Here's a SIM card." So somebody goes into a private network environment, which could be a campus. There's a lot of discussions about like what makes sense for private networks, 'cause it's kind of a replacement for wifi. But stadiums, you'll see private LTE campuses, office buildings, those sort of environments, are all very applicable to private LTE. When you're a user go to that building, you scan a QR code, you tap in NFC tag, you download their app, you do something, that then transfers the credentials from our platform into that phone. And so that credential only works within that private network.

- [Ryan] And how, I guess, to give our audience a perspective here, how big is the kind of private LTE space and what are the biggest opportunities that you all are seeing on that side of things?

- [Robby] I think the CBRS Alliance, are you familiar with the CBRS Alliance?

- [Ryan] Yeah, we've we've spoken about it before.

- [Robby] Yeah, so all the spectrum that was basically freely allocated, that chunk of of 3.5 gig band space is driving a lot of innovation and there's a lot of business models being discovered. There are some people that think of private LTE as a way to do like split tunneling at the edge. If you look at the AWS outpost functionality. And so it's not necessarily a replacement for wifi or for a public network. In that case, it's more of like a hybrid edge, a way to equip a warehouse with all of the split tunneling functionality and slicing of 5G, but in a smaller environment. There are though a lot of companies like if you look at Helium and FreedomFi, shout out to Boris, they're thinking about it as a way to disrupt the public networks and to do a peer-to-peer network. Because it's private it's code that people can maintain separate from what an MNO would deploy. Those access points are distributed to people and then the network is enrolled in by people without needing to go to a retail store or something like that. But then there's also like the campuses and like indigenous people's land, there's lots of credits and systems for people to deploy broadband solutions in those types of environments, stadiums, places where wifi has really failed to address broadband concerns, it's for private LTE.

- [Ryan] Gotcha, yeah. I could see stadiums being a big piece. I wonder like I know the Dallas Cowboys Stadium with their connection with AT&T and focusing on building that entire thing to be very well connected if they are utilizing private LTE, do you have any idea there?

- [Robby] They have. Yes, and they've used Teal to enroll devices on that in very limited use cases.

- [Robby] And I don't think I can talk about which of our partners was doing that.

- [Ryan] No, that's fine. It's funny. The reason I mentioned it cause a couple years ago I actually spoke with Jerry Jones's, I think his daughter, who was out promoting kind of them becoming a well connected stadium and we had a call and just talking about that at a high level. So that's always been on my mind to understand how that connects potentially to this private LTE side.

- [Robby] Yeah, I mean, if you look at XCOM Labs, I believe is the name of the company, and there's a few that have like a similar name. So if I'm butchering it, I apologize. But the Sacramento King's owner also is a stakeholder in this private LTE company and so there's a lot of potential there for demoing like a wifi replacement. Private LTE has a lot to grow in terms of the go to market strategy and how users are gonna access the network and how solutions, how the people that are deploying those networks are getting compensated. Is it gonna be a price per square foot, like a wifi system or is it going to be like a price per user or do we even see the worst case outcome, which would be a price per gigabyte, like our existing public telcos.

- [Ryan] That's great. Well, one topic I wanted to have an opportunity to ask you about is if we pull out here for a second on specifically talking about the offerings, the private LTE side, when Teal is involved in helping put together IoT solution, whether it's through partnerships, direct relations with the clients, where are you seeing the biggest challenges kind of being had? Is it around kind of the planning process? Is there an implementation issues that you've seen a lot of? Is the architecting side? Like from your all side, where are you seeing kind of the biggest challenges that are worth kind of discussing?

- [Robby] Yeah, I think the issue that has really affected IoT in general is like the complete solution getting deployed, 'cause there's plenty of like API companies that talk about a trillion devices connecting with their API and they raise a ton of venture capital, but they don't address like the connectivity challenges of getting a trillion things connected or like the hardware requirements of getting a trillion things connected. There's pretty much any IoT company that raised capital between 2005 and 2015, like they were focused on what is their niche, what is the thing that they're going to do? 'Cause like you could talk to an ag tech company and they could be very good at like monitoring the soil, but they might not be very good at creating a robot that can roll over the soil, right? Sure. Like they can design the sensor, but they can't design the vehicle that is delivering that sensor to where it needs to be, and then that vehicle provider might not be very good at addressing the connectivity challenges of where that vehicle leads. This is where like the complexities of an always connected solution really start to stack up, 'cause like for IoT to work, it has to be ubiquitous or near ubiquitous. There's plenty of innovation in like the satellite space to try to do that. But for like low power devices, that's not really going to help without a base station.

- [Ryan] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to see kinda how things evolve just across the board with all these areas going into 2022. How active are you all in that planning process? I imagine it's a very big area for you to get involved early on so that people are considering the connectivity piece and the strategy behind choosing to connect the correct connection for the connectivity as early as possible in a solution rather than just checking a box saying, "Yeah, we got it." It's working." There's obviously ROI perspective there, which relate to the cost, which relate to performance across the board for any number of use cases. How is that kind of handled and how do you kind of advise people on how to think about the considerations on the connectivity side before they really get into developing something, whether it's an individual sensor or complete solution?

- [Robby] Well, obviously this question is a little bit self-serving in that we're very good at addressing the connectivity issues. If people have hardware issues, we've built a really good like ecosystem of partners. And so if they don't know what module to use to connect, if they even are considering other network technologies, if you look at some of our webinars or conversations we've done with like Thingy and Scott Waller, like they're a LoRaWAN company and it's about creating this kind of mesh of solutions, where the LoRaWAN works really well with cellular and cellular works really well with satellite. Like how do we get to ubiquity within IoT to make sure there's not connectivity challenges. But to address your question, we actually, ironically, we would love to be involved as early as possible in planning out and understanding the connectivity challenges of a solution so that we can prevent somebody from going down a path that wouldn't deliver the full results that they're looking for. There's a car company that we work with that I can't name, but they're looking for private LTE included with their public LTE connections. So they wanna do private networks at the edge inside of their environments and public networks. When they made the decision to pick a single carrier SIM card, they didn't really think about how that would impact that future design choice. We send more opportunity in people that have already deployed at scale. They thought that getting a Verizon SIM card, not to pick on Verizon, we love all the carriers equally.

- [Ryan] But you're talking more just carrier SIM card, like specifically.

- [Robby] So when they sign with somebody like Verizon, they think that that's just gonna provide national coverage for 100% of their deployments. But the reality is they have to do a site survey. If they're mature enough, they go out and they do a site survey. They see like what's the appropriate network at this site and they might even physically swap the SIM cards. That can create truck rolls where potentially a tower changes or they deploy it at a border and the device is switching on off of a different network that it's not supposed to be on. But when they lock into one solution, like they think that they're getting everything that they need, but they're not necessarily able to cover all of the edge cases. And so complete solutions for IoT are very important, complete connectivity pictures are also important.

- [Ryan] So how do you work with companies who maybe have already gone and gone down that path and selected a carrier specific SIM card and then they're running into these problems that you're mentioning now, I assume it's not too late for them. Like how do you kind of go in and adjust that to kinda optimize them to where they probably should be?

- [Robby] No, it's never too late and we work kind of hand fist with the carriers. So the carriers see and bring us into solutions now, where there's a really strong need for doing like an eSIM-type product. Those are traditionally the projects that I used to work on, right? With GM, it was GM needs eSIM, they can drive a requirement to the carrier and then they can integrate several carriers into that platform. But the carriers aren't very good at managing or delivering those projects. Teal's kind of solving this issue for them of needing to do that maybe 100 times. Instead they do it once and then Teal's able to provide that complete solution to everybody. It's never too late to add additional solutions 'cause it's pretty plug and play right with a plastic eUICC that we offer. But yeah, I mean, there's definitely a longer cycle to product development and integration of our product if it's using an embedded chip.

- [Ryan] One question I have, this kinda ties into conversation I had with another guest recently around how buyers of IoT solutions are thinking about the connectivity and looking at it more as something that they just want to have kind of baked into the solution, not have to worry about all the different choices. They kind of view it as it's kind of a given, but obviously it needs to fit their solution in it from accurately, making choose sure you're choosing the right connectivity as well as how it's fits with the overall price and the ROI. How do you all kind of think about connectivity fitting into the solution being put together? 'Cause obviously you all are focused on your area. Sometimes it's either a systems integrator or a platform sort of pulling all these pieces together, working with you, the hardware companies, et cetera. How are you seeing the buyers? Those that are maybe not as close to it kind of viewing connectivity? Are they kind of just viewing it as something that is they just assume is gonna be taken care of? Or do they wanna know the details of how the connectivity works, what networks it's on, pricing, all the things broken down? Or like what is the view there or what are you seeing, I guess, from your end?

- [Robby] Yeah, I mean, there's different ideologies. I could probably guess who you're talking about, but there's not really a one-size-fit-all model, is our approach to connectivity. We're focused on the solution fit itself, not just enabling access. Like if we just wanted to be you the fastest, easiest way for you to access a network, we just throw you onto a roaming network. And there's a reason why those don't really stand the test of time. There's a reason why those aren't the most performant or secure networks. We wanna tailor and provide the tools for a customer to tailor their connectivity requirements specific to their solutions. So think of Teal almost like the Stripe of connectivity. We wanna put on API-driven programmability as opposed to, here's just something you throw in and you hope it works 10 years from now.

- [Ryan] Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So as we wrap up here, I wanted to ask you two things. One, because this is relatively early in the year, I wanted to get a sense from your all's perspective, how you kind of view 2022 in the IoT space. If you wanna connect it more to the area that you all focus on, that's great. Just what is the projection? What are you looking forward to? What are you optimistic or excited about happening this year? And we'll start there and then I'll ask my second one afterwards.

- [Robby] Well, I'm really excited about the actual 5G deployments that carriers are doing, the true 5G millimeter wave and standalone 5G are going to be big innovative drivers. They're gonna lower the cost of connectivity for people that are on solutions that don't take advantage of resources like compute. But they're also gonna open up a lot more potential models with AR, VR, and connected car becoming more and more smart every day. So I think it is really funny to watch the whole FAA FCC thing right now. I don't know if you have an opinion on that. Are you aware of that?

- [Ryan] Not to probably the detail that you all are. So you can go ahead and kinda share with our audience kinda what's going on there.

- [Robby] Yeah, sure. So most people that are reporting on this have no understanding of like what the channels are and what the frequencies are that are being talked about. There's this fear that true 5G, the millimeter wave stuff and and the C-band stuff is all going to cause interference with FAA approved communications. Like I even think radar is discussed.

- [Ryan] Yeah, I saw a big headline, I think, yesterday saying, I don't know, for whatever reason it seemed to catch my attention more yesterday about the FAA kind of freaking out about what's gonna happen with 5G.

- [Robby] Yeah, and this kinda loops into like my optimism about 5G in 2022. Like if we let people that don't know much about 5G like demand and change the conversation and deployment roadmaps, then we won't obviously accomplish as much as we want as a country or even as an industry.

- [Ryan] Sure. But yeah, the frequencies that they're talking about, there's like a 900 megahertz difference.

- [Robby] It's the difference between I think 3.5 gigahertz and 4.4 gigahertz. It's approximately one of the solutions. I think the equipment for the FAA is in 4.4 and the equipment for like C-band is in 3.5. And so there's like 900 men Hertz that separates the two. The FAA is essentially saying that they don't trust that the FCC certified the devices effectively enough to block interference from a 3.5 gig device connecting or broadcasting and transmitting on a 4.4 gig band, which is a huge gap, right? If you're familiar with wifi, it's at 2.4 gigs, plenty of walkie talkies, plenty of airport radios use equipment in the two gigs range. And the military itself has a minimum 100 megahertz gap between communications technologies. So we have a lot of devices that get certified by the FCC and even a lot of devices that aren't certified by the FCC that use wifi that don't interfere in other channels. I would not expect a device utilizing C-band to jump into the FAA's pr