On this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Ryan Chacon is joined by two guests, Dennis Henderson, CEO of Ready Wireless, and Bruce Chatterley, CEO of Senet, to discuss how LoRaWAN has become the standard for Low Power Wide Area Networks. In the podcast, Bruce and Dennis discuss their partnership along with the top use cases and adoption drivers of LoRaWAN. They also provide advice on starting your IoT journey and the challenges they’ve witnessed in the industry.

About Bruce

Bruce Chatterley is an experienced business leader and entrepreneur. He brings more than 25 years of experience building successful high-growth technology businesses. Before Senet, Bruce was an Independent Growth Consultant and acting CMO of a global fiber optic telecommunications provider in London, UK. He also served as CEO of Layered Technologies, a provider of secure cloud hosting services for Government, Financial Services, and Healthcare applications. Chatterley is an experienced telecom leader, serving as CEO of cloud-based VOIP firms Broadvox and Speakeasy. In addition, he is a former senior executive at Ameritech and US West. Chatterley has also been an early leader in developing the Software-as-a-Service industry, having served as CEO of ViAir and President of eServices for Concur Technologies. Earlier in his career, Chatterley held Senior Sales and Marketing positions at GE and IBM. He earned his BSBA from Central Michigan University and his MBA from the Kogod College of Business Administration at American University.

Interested in connecting with Bruce? Reach out on Linkedin!

About Senet

With a multi-year head start over competing Low Power Wide Area Network providers, disruptive go-to-market models and critical technical advantages, Senet has become a leading IoT connectivity provider with recognized expertise in building and operating networks for the Internet of Things.

About Dennis

Dennis Henderson is CEO and co-founder of Ready Wireless, a leading IoT Managed Services Provider and Systems Integrator. In his 35 year career Dennis has been exclusively involved in telecommunications. He has leveraged that industry experience in building the Ready Wireless team as the company leads in the IoT revolution.

Interested in connecting with Dennis? Reach out on Linkedin!

About Ready Wireless

At Ready Wireless, they use small devices to solve big problems. They are technologists who bring extensive experience to IoT solutions. They couple that experience with the nimble spirit of a start-up to deliver simplified products to businesses. Ready was born technology-centric and has evolved as technology has evolved. Today, they are an end-to-end solutions provider that prides itself on serving clients with the same grit that started and grew its company.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(02:05) Introduction to our guests

(05:12) Senet and Ready Wireless partnership

(10:00) Top use cases in LoRaWAN

(13:55) What is driving LoRaWAN adoption

(20:03) Challenges to deployment

(25:27) Where does LoRaWAN go from here

(33:20) Advice for starting IoT journey

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. The number one publication and resource for the Internet of Things. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon. If you are watching this on YouTube, we'd really appreciate it if you would give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel, if you haven't already done so. If you are listening to this episode on a Podcast directory like apple Podcast Podcasts et cetera, please feel free to subscribe, to get the latest episodes as soon as they are out. On today's episode, we have two fantastic guests. The first is Dennis Henderson, the CEO of Ready Wireless. They are an end to end solutions provider in the IoT space we're using a number of different devices to create some really cool applications and solutions to solve a number of problems across varied industries. And then Bruce Chatterley, the CEO of Senet, they are a leading IoT connectivity provider with a lot of emphasis placed on LPWAN networks and solutions. Very cool company, a company that I believe we have had on the show before. I know I've spoken to Bruce many times in the past and he is a fantastic guest. So Bruce and Dennis do a very good job today, kind of talking about a number of different topics. We talk about LoRaWAN and how it's really become the defacto standard for Low-Power Wide Area Networks. Top use cases that are utilizing LoRaWAN, what is really driving adoption in this space, the key success and things that people need to be thinking about when adopting this technology to deploy solutions around as well as the challenges with LPWAN solutions, which obviously as great as some technologies are, there are always challenges that are important to understand and learn from in order to overcome them and increase the likelihood of success with any type of deployment. So we talk a lot about that, but overall, Bruce, Dennis, great guests, great episode, I think we'll get a lot of value out of it, but before we get into it, 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 Bruce and Dennis to the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for both of you being here this week.

- [Bruce] Thanks for having us Ryan.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, looking forward to this conversation. Let's go ahead and kick it off by having you both give an introduction about yourself, just quick overview of kind of your background experience. And we'll start with Dennis.

- [Dennis] Thanks Ryan, Dennis Henderson, the CEO at Ready Wireless. I've been a telecom rat, my whole career old landline or long distance salesperson. That was my very first gig professionally, transitioning all the way through to this current role in the wireless space. Ready Wireless is an application solution integrator, is probably the best way to say it. So it's a bit of a mashup of systems integrator and solution provider. At a high level, we utilize networks like Senet to be able to meet data where it's at by usually attaching a device, wherever the data is that the end customer needs to know about getting it via the network to our user interface, to our application layer, and then visualizing that data to allow the customer to provide or to make good business decisions. So it's gotta be meaningful, actionable data.

- [Ryan] Right, fantastic. Speaking of Senet, let's bring Bruce in here.

- [Bruce] Yeah hi, I'm Bruce Chatterly, I'm CEO of Senet. I've been a technology and telecom entrepreneur for the last 22 years here in Seattle. Senet is a actually headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Prior to that, I worked for really big telecom companies, Ameritech and US West and other really, really big companies IBM and GE. So unlike many people, I started really big and went really small. And now I'm growing companies which has been fun. So Senet is a developer of cloud-based software and services for the rapid deployment of IoT networks where they're needed, when they're needed and at the right cost. So in addition to the cloud based software and services, we happen to run one of the and own one of the largest publicly available LoRaWAN networks in North America. And then in addition to that, we have extended network services with interconnections with companies like Helium, where we've interconnected globally with the Helium network and then a developing capability with Eutelsat for a satellite based LoRaWAN network capability. So we play that middle role in Dennis' description, which is between the device and the application. And we help companies like Ready Wireless, connect those, manage them at huge scale and manage the devices and private networks in production in life cycle.

- [Ryan] Fantastic and could you or Dennis feel free to jump in here, just talk in, maybe elaborate a little bit more on the relationship that you all have and how you work together in a bit more detail, maybe feel free to bring up any use cases or applications that are kind of deployed and how the pieces that both of you provide fit together.

- [Dennis] Go for it, Bruce.

- [Bruce] Well, I'll just start by saying how we found each other and there's a business problem out there, which is our end customers come to us and send it because of the position we occupy in the value chain, we have a lot of top of the funnel leads that come in, people with business problems that are really vexing and oftentimes, they will have a device they'll say, hey, I got this device, but I got no application. Or I've got this partner here with an application that needs a device or neither of the two. And so, we struggle with those constantly on a day to day basis, trying to pull a matchmaker to say, okay, here's this device guy. And in some other country, here's this application provider here, we try and bring 'em together on behalf of the customer. And it's really complicated and really hard and takes a long time. And so we were introduced to Ready, I think actually I just made a cold call to you, Dennis, when I saw something on the internet and- It's a marriage made in heaven, really, basically Dennis and his team solve that problem. They come look at the reason we are working well together is we're both intensely focused on the customer problem solving the customer problem. And so Dennis has been able to bring the solution, which combines a variety of different things, including the device and the application. And I'll let Dennis talk about how he does that, but that's really why it's important to send to partner with Ready is they solve that problem of device companies, not having an application, application companies not having a device and companies trying figure out the two.

- [Dennis] Yeah, Bruce, I concur, it's a match made in heaven from our perspective, Senet really has been a terrific partner. And I think it's extremely complimentary given the kind of carriers carrier posture that Senet maintains in the marketplace. From our standpoint, we look at the three pillars of a solution as being there's a device that is harvesting some information. There's a network that gets it up to the cloud and then there's a user interface. Or in some cases, the customer has their own user interface, but there's a visualization of that data for decision making and braiding those three things together is messy. It's a lot of work and it's what we've chosen as our life's work. So Bruce, you hit it on the head. We focus on the customer problem and the customer challenge typically we'll begin an engagement with a problem. It's usually a vexing one for the customer. Hey, can you do this? I've got this problem. Or I need this information. And the beauty of working with Bruce and Senet and LoRaWAN generally, is that the ecosystem of device availability is so robust and it's so mature. It feels new to us in the US, but it's extremely mature having been around for a decade, across the pond that there are all of these wonderful devices created by great big companies or sometimes nutty professor types. You can get any data that you need to. And then it's just a matter of visualizing that data in a way that's meaningful. We purchase messages, we've integrated with Senet as a wholesale partner. So we are Senet's customer at a high level.

- [Ryan] Gotcha, fantastic. Yeah, thank you for that overview. I think it's that those points help articulate. And this is something we talked about on the Podcast before. This is the power of partnerships in the IoT space and why they're so important. I think there are companies out there that try to do everything and it's because of how fragmented the industry is. At times there is a lot more emphasis lately, I guess, probably for a while now, put on the importance of finding the right partners, whether the partners already know about each other beforehand or a customer is able to bring those pieces together in order to build and have a successful deployment. So that I think your guys' points definitely kind highlight that a good bit. I did wanna ask, so when we're talking about the connectivity side of things and the areas that you both focus in, if we're looking at this from a higher level, when we talk about LoRaWAN becoming basically the defacto standard for Low-Power Wide Area Networks, are there any use cases or that are, I guess, leading the way or top use cases that you are seeing, maybe you all are in them or at the same time observing them, maybe 'cause they're not necessarily in your focus verticals, but what use cases are really leading the way when we're talking about LoRaWAN and utilizing that technology in the IoT space?

- [Bruce] Well, I can give you a quick if that's okay with you, Dennis, I'll give you a quick.

- [Dennis] Yeah, please.

- [Bruce] Overview of kind of our global business and where things are happening fast. The first is in the utility space. So we're doing a lot of work in water utilities to AMI enabled water meters. So that's the ability to read meters over the air in the gas utility space, we're working on a variety of applications. We just started a couple different pilots over the last month or two with major gas utilities on leak detection, methane leak detection at the meter, and then automatically shutting the valve off before the meter, if a leak is detected and that's a amazing public health benefit of a LoRaWAN network and the LoRaWAN ecosystem. So that's gonna be big, I think. In addition to that, we have a variety of applications and food safety. So we have four major partners that are selling into that space, where you put a gateway in a fast food franchise with five or 20 different sensors that are measuring the temperature of where the food is stored all the way to when the food is being prepared and automatically generating compliance reports for the FDA, et cetera, et cetera. Asset tracking is another major category that I think is really interesting. We've got major everything from companies that are doing safety and tracking within school. So when visitors come into a school, give them a tracker that's geo fenced within the school, make sure they alarm, when they go someplace all the way to a major manufacturer of offshore offshore oil rigs, that's tracking a two mile square yard where all the ingredients are stored and there's a 100,000 units there that they wanna put a sensor on. So everything in between, and then lastly, smart cities, smart building. So everything from environmental sensing to water leak detection, to sub metering, those kinds of things. So that's just a quick survey. I could talk all day about the individual applications. Dennis, I'll let you answer.

- [Dennis] For us what we've seen in terms of the most obvious case that is scaling and is gaining adoption where LoRaWAN's perfect. It's in the hospitality space primarily, but it overlaps into education in other areas, it's hotel, panic buttons, the nature of LoRaWAN and it's beautiful propagation means you don't have dead spots. And you also don't have to worry about certification from one carrier to another on the device side, which gets really messy. If you want to be able to offer something on a national basis, in some cases you don't wanna have to have multiple variants that use different carriers. This is LoRaWAN on a defined standard. That's perfect for that use case. So that's just one example.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, now I wonder if either one of you would mind jumping in and talking about what is really driving that adoption. What are the characteristics of LoRaWAN that put it in basically in the place that it stands right now in the market, why it's so widely used and adopted so perfect for so many different use cases. What is it about the technology that makes it such a good fit?

- [Dennis] I'm happy to take that, Bruce, if you're good or start, first and foremost, the natural capabilities that come with the technology itself in terms of its range and its propagation in buildings, it solves a number of environmental issues. Now that advantage is also in our experience, a bit of its limitation on some use cases, meaning in a campus environment, it's great for a relatively low cost. You can put an incredibly robust gateway or series of gateways in and cover the entire let's call it a campus for trans or inter campus use cases, we still lean on LTE because the ubiquity of that network is for use cases that require real live location at all times, for example, that'd be an LTE use case, but when you're inside of a campus environment, it's a no brainer that LoRaWAN is great because the network is solid. It's an established standard, there's a vast ecosystem of sensors that can be added to it and highly, highly secure, inherently, highly secure. So these are all really compelling reasons to use it. And by the way, one last thing in terms of the inter campus, or let's say an interstate use case, LoRaWAN's not far behind and for some use cases, you just need to be location aware as location specific, I think LoRaWAN's an option that you're gonna start seeing adopted in more and more use cases.

- [Ryan] Right, yeah and Bruce has a follow up to that. I think it'd be good if you, could you talk about the network side of it a bit more? So we're seeing more networks created, you have your public available network. We've talked about satellites being involved in our previous conversations. Can you talk about how those elements are really driving the functionality and the ability for this technology to be more widely used that potentially use cases that were in the past, not really a fit for it that we've kind of maybe leaned more towards cellular and other technologies to use, but it seems like with satellites and with more widely available networks, we're able to do more than we were before. Maybe kind of tie on to what Dennis was saying about that being an element that's driving success and adoption for LoRaWAN.

- [Bruce] Yeah, I think everything Dennis said was spot on in terms of being an open standard, being a huge ecosystem and having virtually limitless options in terms of devices and now applications, which is why a business model like Ready Wireless is really needed because there's so much choice that someone has to start making choices and on behalf of the customer to solve business problems. So to answer your question specifically though, the way this started was we were building networks for specific customer opportunities. So we started in propane monitoring and we built these regional networks primarily in rural and suburban areas. And then we started saying, okay, there's more we can do with those networks. And so let's put a company called Senet over that and let's start building it out nationwide. And that process really looked like building on behalf of major customer installations on a metropolitan basis. So that's where the utilities came in. They started driving these dense major metro network deployments. And now, we're starting to take those dense major metro. And by the way, we built out a market like Tampa bay with over 50 towers, which we think is one of the most, if not the most densely populated LoRaWAN networks in the world. And so, now we have those around all of the United States and beginning now to broaden and we're starting to say, okay, we have customer demand to connect those islands. I wanna track something that's going between the islands. And then when it gets to the island, I wanna track more detailed things. And so, that's where the Helium interconnection came in, where we said, okay, the business case as a network provider right now for building dense network between islands is difficult, but what Helium's done is they've built a model to stimulate the crowdsourcing of the filling in between the islands. And so what Senet has done is we've done a unique interconnection with Helium to, and we offer access to the Helium network at no charge to all of our customers by default. So you get that in addition to the Senet network. And so now, you have the ability to not only do what you can do on the densely deployed Senet islands, but you can also work between islands using the Helium network and then ultimately with the satellite network. So, all of a sudden asset tracking becomes a killer app for LoRaWAN whereas as Dennis said, the only option for you previously was the cellular network. And so, I think that's starting to pop up a variety of different new applications and use cases that are gonna be really exciting from a LoRaWAN's standpoint.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, so let me ask you this. We talked about obviously all the great things about the technology, the applications of it, we're the characteristics of it that help it are helping really grow the adoption of it. Let me ask you on the other side of it, are there any challenges that you've seen with the customers that you've worked with when it comes to the deployment or the successful deployment of a LoRaWAN based solution? Have you seen any challenges that maybe are still yet to be fully solved or things maybe that people should just be aware of when they're kind of going down this path? Because it seems like there's lots of obviously positives for utilizing this technology to launch an application on, but I'm curious if there's maybe other challenges that kind of come up that are being worked on or you feel are really important to continue to work on addressing.

- [Bruce] Yeah Dennis, I'll let you go first if that's okay.

- [Dennis] Yeah, of course. I would say the biggest challenge around penetration, deployment scale is ROI. So I mentioned there's this wonderful ecosystem of devices. It just becomes so you can measure anything. It's the same thing your IT department tells you. Yeah, I can build it just how much you wanna spend. And that really has been the key, which is why Bruce's initial comment that it begins with, what's the cut. What problem is the customer trying to solve is really the linchpin. So we've taken kind of a bifurcated approach. We have certain solutions packaged up. We have LP tank monitoring. We have fleet and asset tracking. We have hotel panic button, those are three examples. Those come from and so those can be replicated. We also do a ton of bespoke work on the other side of the coin, where we come in and are blessed to be able to be shared, have a customer, share a problem with us. And we have the ability to then start to attack that problem alongside the customer. And when we can find an ROI, in terms of technical challenges, the only one that really comes to mind is if the use case is going to spring out of the campus of the coverage area. And that's where we have a different experience, I think in terms of campus, 'cause we do a lot with enterprise and building centric deployments, Bruce builds whole networks in whole cities. And so it's a completely different perspective that we really enjoy when we're in those cities, on those islands, let's say.

- [Bruce] Yeah, I think from my perspective, the fundamental challenges is the reason why Dennis and I have struck a partnership and that is that companies know what their business problem is. They're not sure how to get started. They've done some research, they figure this, I know it needs to be a low cost battery powered device because I need to deploy 50,000 of them. So I know it's gotta be in this category, but I'm not sure how to get started. And so they come to us and we say, okay, what do you need? And they're like, well I think I need this device and I'm not sure what to do with it. Can you refer me to someone who has an application platform or can help me build it? So that's where we're really excited about the opportunities that we're working on with Ready Wireless. And so that's one of the fundamental problems we've experienced. I think the other problem that relates to what Dennis said in terms of ROI is once you get that constructed, given that it's generally speaking, a new category, you get these pox and the pox tend to take some time and we know the scale is there, but it slows things down because customers are trying to work their way through the ROI. We're starting now to get replicable ROI models, which is one of the things that Dennis has done with his business, is I don't know what the number you're up to now, Dennis, but it's like 80 different prepackaged applications that each have an encapsulated business case and approach to the problem that they're solving. So now, we're starting to see a shortening of those pop periods and a more rapid rollout. The last thing I would say is on the device side, where we have problems that can't be solved with off the shelf devices. There's a growing list of companies in the ecosystem now that are doing to use Dennis's word bespoke, custom versions of a device to solve a specific business problem. That's a really interesting category now of partners that both Dennis and I have been working with that will come up with a unique device and insert it into an end application. That's a problem that we've been struggling with 'cause if the device didn't exist, there were very few companies other than offshore manufacturers, you could go to get it. Now we have onshore companies that are really good at this and produce very high quality work as well as a couple offshore companies that are in the same category.

- [Ryan] Fantastic, so let me ask you about this, where's the future of the LoRaWAN's kind of technology space? I mean, obviously we've seen it go from or get to where it is now with satellites being involved, the public, a private networks talking about Helium on the crowdsourcing side, where does this kind of go from here in your guys' perspective? What are the next phases of development of this technology and what it will enable in the IoT space?

- [Bruce] I think I'll just jump in. I think we're all about scale now. I think we have all the ingredients we need as an industry to make this as large or bigger than the cellular industry. If you look at the three categories of IoT powered and wired things, WiFi high bandwidth, two way communication, and then the LPWAN. LPWAN is the fastest growing. It represents about 55% of all IoT devices. And LoRaWAN is the dominant global growth engine for that. And so I think we have all the ingredients we need now to scale these. And when I went through the application categories earlier, all of those categories are now scaling to hundreds of thousands. And in some cases we are quoting million device pricing for our partners. So we're starting to hit stride now it's taken, I've been in this since 2017, it's taken four or five years to get there, but we're there. So Dennis I'll let you answer.

- [Dennis] Yeah Bruce, I would agree. I was gonna refer to the old marketing adoption curve where you have early adopters culminating in laggards and you get to that sweet spot of mass adoption. And I think we're at the very, very, very beginning of the mass adoption phase in a number of use cases. One thing I would add is where I would see it going is by the way, one of the key developments I think is the location enabled chip that Semtech are putting out. I think that's a huge addition when you add native location capture on these devices, they become incredibly robust where you get out of the business and needing to triangulate or somehow otherwise infer general location. So you shift from location awareness to actual location reporting. Where I see this going, I think is a foregone conclusion that they're gonna be in most enterprises, at least pockets of LoRaWAN solutions that end up getting adopted. And the approach that we've taken is trying to get out in front of where I think the end state will be if an enterprise or a government entity's not careful, which is you go out and you solve a problem and you end up with a user with an application that solves the problem. And you say that was neat, let's do it again. And you go and you solve another problem with a different device and a different application provider. And you have a second one and a third one, and you can solve so many problems that if we fast forward two, three, four years from now, the average enterprise may have five to 10 of these. And th