Ever wanted to unlock the secrets of IoT connectivity? Brace yourself for an intense ride into the world of advanced technologies with Teal's founder and CEO. As the first and only North American company certified by the GSMA, Teal is revolutionizing the connectivity landscape. We'll explore the intricate tech behind Teal, their extensive network operator agreements and the transformative power and business value of network switching - think crystal clear 20 megabits per second uplink minimum for applications like drones!
But hang tight, we're not done yet! Let's dig into the puzzle that is eSIM technology, and unravel the challenges businesses face in IoT deployments. Robbie shares his insights on the need to demystify eSIM tech, the differences between consumer and enterprise deployments, and the imperative for more digitization to ward off SIM hijacking. We'll also delve into the critical role of compatibility layers and interoperability in keeping the tech industry unified. Plus, stay tuned to get a glimpse into the future of IoT connectivity, the exciting potential of upcoming technologies like SGP32, and the importance of adhering to GSMA standards. Buckle up - we're heading into the future!
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Ever wanted to unlock the secrets of IoT connectivity? Brace yourself for an intense ride into the world of advanced technologies with Teal's founder and CEO. As the first and only North American company certified by the GSMA, Teal is revolutionizing the connectivity landscape. We'll explore the intricate tech behind Teal, their extensive network operator agreements and the transformative power and business value of network switching - think crystal clear 20 megabits per second uplink minimum for applications like drones!
But hang tight, we're not done yet! Let's dig into the puzzle that is eSIM technology, and unravel the challenges businesses face in IoT deployments. Robbie shares his insights on the need to demystify eSIM tech, the differences between consumer and enterprise deployments, and the imperative for more digitization to ward off SIM hijacking. We'll also delve into the critical role of compatibility layers and interoperability in keeping the tech industry unified. Plus, stay tuned to get a glimpse into the future of IoT connectivity, the exciting potential of upcoming technologies like SGP32, and the importance of adhering to GSMA standards. Buckle up - we're heading into the future!
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, Evan Kirstel here, Super excited for this talk today about connecting everything everywhere with the Internet of Things. Today with Teal Robbie. How are you?
Speaker 2:Great Nice to meet you, Evan.
Speaker 1:Nice to meet you. You're a company I'm really intrigued by and I've been looking forward to diving deep with you, not just on the technology but your journey at Teal. Maybe introduce yourself and the technology behind Teal as we get started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm the founder, one of the founders, I'm a product first founder. I'm also the CEO. My background before starting Teal was in some of the very first ESIM deployments of the M10 technology working on General Motors, daimler, different projects and not really seeing the space accelerate like I wanted it to, not really seeing the full potential of ESIM brought out to market. So started a company together with my co-founder to solve that problem. And Teal is essentially like an app store. If you're an enterprise or you can install different networks, so we serve different cellular networks with a different approach to how you might see. Aggregators in the past use a lot of roaming. You've got the holograms and the Twilio's and the cores and those kind of companies that are doing a lot of roaming technologies.
Speaker 2:We don't run any infrastructure, so it's all about putting devices directly into those networks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's super interesting and your GSMA certified, so you've got the official seal of approval as far as interoperability goes. So how does the network work? How does your platform work? What makes it unique in the IoT space today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're the first and only North American company to be certified by the GSMA, so there's a very small number of software platforms out there that actually have source code for how ESIM works.
Speaker 2:Most of them are hard vendors based in Asia or Europe, and you know we're kind of the scrappy underdogs, right, so we're definitely the youngest company on that list. The technology works in a little bit a few different ways than how the default technology works. A lot of legacy systems or things built on the just raw standards use a lot of texts and SMS in order to to reprovision users. We think that and I had hands-on experience where using binary roaming text messaging I'm going to use a lot of acronyms.
Speaker 1:I've been in telecom for 30 years. We love for five letter acronyms are the best.
Speaker 2:if you got a few of those, I mean hopefully M to M isn't just mobile to mobile, it's machine to machine. Now you got the AIOT, all kinds of things, but a lot of binary roaming SMS was used in the past but it meant that networks had to do like SMPP binds in the ESIM platforms and just things that really slowed down the projects, and so we built our own platform so that we could do things better. We use HTTPS, we use data only mechanisms, which means we're compatible with things like satellite and NBIOT and 5G essay networks that might not use CS connection anymore. So anyway, we've just kind of taken the next step forward to make things really scalable. We're building this kind of ecosystem of operator partners where it's not something that is replacing their go to market or it's not replacing how they're approaching high IT solutions, but it's being a value add to them.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Your claim to fame is you have more network operator agreements than any other connectivity provider. I think you talk about 3,500, if I'm correct. How on earth did you achieve that?
Speaker 2:3,500 different profiles in the system 3,500 is number of roaming connections that you could use.
Speaker 2:It's a number of possible radio networks. We have 30 plus direct networks. This is a big part of why we call it an app store and why we invent in this concept of a network app. A lot of times people just think about radio coverage. When they think of a cellular network, they're thinking I can get access to AT&T yeah, you're getting on the tower but who's infrastructure? What features does that come with?
Speaker 2:When we integrate a profile directly, we're getting all the features like 5G, standalone networking, slicing, ultra-wideband networks or ultra-wideband spectrum just features that you don't get when you're roaming onto something. 3,500 is the full footprint of how many network and paths we can deliver. Obviously, there's only 800 networks in the GSMA, so there's only 800 LTE or 5G networks possible, but there's redundant paths and each one comes with different features. Some might be able to connect on multiple networks. Some profiles can roam between different countries, but definitely our claim to fame is just that we're very easy to work with. We have a big ecosystem of these network partners. We just announced something with T-Mobile last week. We're the only solution in North America that gives you direct access to AT&T, verizon and T-Mobile, all at a click of a button. That means you actually get an IP address from those carriers. It's not our data centers, it's not aggregated through some wholesaler, it's literally from those operators and using their full technology stack.
Speaker 1:Well, that's so impressive to me as a geek. But maybe translate that into the business value. How does that benefit a business? Is it the switching across networks is needed? What are the applications that you're seeing?
Speaker 2:drive usage. It sounds really cool and it is For consumers like a regular user like you or I, on our phones. We can't really use this technology to its full approach because we spend most of our time in a full coverage area from one of those networks. The carriers don't really let this solution happen on consumer land. There's solutions like Google Fi that might use some roaming and some aggregation layers to pull it off, but you're certainly not accessing the real networks when you're accessing something like Google Fi.
Speaker 2:For IoT, the problems are different. A drone might need a crystal clear 20 megabits per second uplink minimum and some networks might be able to deliver that in certain metros and some might not be able to deliver that. So what are you going to do? You're going to build three or four different versions of your drone and pick and choose any site surveys as to what you're going to use in a geography, or you can use technology like Teal. You're going to get the native network. You're going to be able to switch in real time to whatever network is best at that moment.
Speaker 2:So, anything that's going to be performance sensitive, anything that's mission critical where you want to have backup IP addresses, right, you want to have redundant networking paths to use. If there's a regional outage Timo goes down in Texas you can switch over to one of the other networks. Also, just if you're thinking about energy companies, another application would be there. Such a broad deployment geography across the whole nation, maybe some areas, some neighborhoods, are going to be able to connect where other carriers can't. Instead of having to do a site survey and figure out what's better or best at that time, this technology lets people use all of it. So it's totally neutral. People can pick and choose what they want to do and configure it all remotely.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Do you have any use cases in an area near and dear to my heart, which is healthcare IT, remote patient monitoring in hospitals or hospitals at home? That must be an area that you're seeing some interest from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. We do some work in private networking too, like private LTE, so that's been something that's picked up. As far as the indoor cellular initiative in hospitals, there's a lot of devices that want to get connected but are hardwired because the radio is just repeating the same Wi-Fi bands over and over same channels and you're not able to enroll as many devices in the radios you'd want to. Certainly, we've seen some demand for clinical trial assistant devices, so like a tablet that goes home where somebody can report their symptoms back to the clinic or can video chat with a doctor very easily. That's something where cellular makes sense. I was alarmed. My father-in-law has a cardio therapy device installed and it uses Bluetooth to a Wi-Fi bridge. I was like why would this thing not be independently connected? Why does this go down at the same time? Netflix goes down in the house Having some kind of cellular failover? I think cellular technology is really good for mission critical applications. Certainly, healthcare is one of those categories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very nice. So the freedom to choose your network obviously pretty cool technology, but what about saving money and the economics of how that works without getting into actual dollars and cents?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we cut out the middleman, so typically you would have a subscription that comes in the particle boards. They're a pretty popular dev board for IoT applications. They include a SIM card. It comes from a Movistar in Switzerland, so it's roaming onto a US network using a Swiss identity, which is obviously not as economically beneficial as connecting on a US network with a US identity. So by making these networks more accessible, we're making better price points accessible.
Speaker 2:If you're a US business, you might not have the ability to get a Brazilian SIM card very easily, or you might use your or attempt to use your US SIM card in Brazil. It's going to pay higher rates. Just the same way you visit another country and you're paying higher rates for your consumer line. Iot devices have that same problem and as long as we can distribute as many different possible profiles at 30 plus profiles the 3,500 networks take that off the table for a second. But 30 plus profiles, that means we're able to optimize per region the cost, we're able to optimize the performance, but it can result in big deployment savings for sure.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Let's talk about eSIM technology. It's still sort of best kept secret out there, I think, despite being in latest Apple and Samsung phones. Why is that? And when I show my eSIM I have five different eSIMs to friends and family, they're like amazed that's even available. What does it take to educate businesses around eSIM technology and how it can be used? I imagine that's part of your sales cycle as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean for enterprise and for these machine devices. Esim is a leg in front of consumer devices because Just the way that contracts work in consumer land and the preservation of our poo and the way that the telcos Want to lock you into contracts, they want to lock you into their network, they they see themselves as like the one and only solution for a consumer. Enterprise is a little different, because you're not just covering one person, you're covering thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even a global deployment of technology. And Now there's regulations that say you must use a local SIM card when you're in Brazil or in India or in Germany, and ESIM, kind of, was developed at a necessity for those enterprise cases, as soon as Anybody deploying an IoT device learns that they can have the same commercials, the same access and performance that a native SIM card would give them.
Speaker 2:But with this digital flexibility, I mean it's pretty, pretty easy seller, it's a pretty easy conversion. So it's all about educating what access you get and what, why that matters. That's the whole network apps thing. Like do you, do you want to have a roaming connection, the AT&T that's not going to give you all the bands, or do you want to have like the real, the real deal, the full up link, all the packet Gateways, all the pops in consumer land. I Think it's gonna be like this For a while. I would like to see more digitization, because you still have to do like the in-store activations for a lot of a lot of stuff just because of SIM hijacking.
Speaker 2:Personal identities have a lot more Financial impact of somebody hijacks like a water meter they're not walking into a bank and signing a mortgage right with that water meter identity but because so much of our social media and digital footprints are tied to those phone numbers, people are just really careful about switching networks and Porting numbers around and I think it's gonna stay kind of at this pace for consumer land. But, like I said, enterprise I think it's more of a technology first solution. The the things are our Headless units that need to be able to go anywhere, so it's different.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, you solved a major challenge that businesses have in IOT deployments. What are some of the other challenges? Are you gonna take some of the other challenges on? You've got the one-click kind of provisioning and deployment. What else is hindering IOT? Do you think that, or what could be done to accelerate that?
Speaker 2:I mean fragmentation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but Fragmentation is like just in terms of compatibility layers. We've done things where there's like broker services, brokerage services where we can convert like a co-app protocol Into an MQTT protocol. So like co-app lightweight M2M is not compatible or sorry, is how NBIOT networks communicate, but MQTT is how a lot of the server applications were designed to receive messages. It's a easier Protocol to to integrate, so there's some compatibility layers. As far as what teal's focused on doing, you know we did that. A few customers need it.
Speaker 2:But fragmentation being such a controversial topic, I mean just design your solution with matching hardware and cloud designs right, if you have two different product teams, maybe you end up with that fragmentation. But just getting smarter about that. I think in IOT there's a lot more complete solutions being built, which is sweet, and then a lot more like deep, deeper, more specialized Solutions. I think people that get stuck in the middle where they try to do a little bit of everything but not very well, that's where IOT really crends to a halt because all of a sudden you have to pay, you know, a higher Materials cost just to have the right cloud application, because you have to buy the right equipment from them. I'd like to see more interoperability, and teal's always going to be trying to solve that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very nice. And what's on your mind on the future of IOT connectivity? You know what role do you see yourself playing? You know, over the next year or two or three, what's on your mind as far as where this space is going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a new technology called SGP32 Coming out, which is consumer eSIM For IOT, which is very confusing, because already it was confusing that there's two different versions of eSIM the one in your phone, consumer, and the one in a plastic chip or an embeddable chip called M2M. But they're push-first-pull, so your iPhone scans QR code and that's how it works. In M2M today, a server pushes a change to a card or a chip, which means it's remotely manageable, but it also means that the chip needs to be pre-configured with that server in mind. This new standard means that any ESIM in IoT land could join any management server, so Teal is building a lot of tools to make that very easy. I'm very excited about that. On our roadmap, a lot of companies pretending that they have SGP32 solutions. Today there's not even product certifications defined yet, so nobody can launch anything for the next year and a half. But that'll be a very exciting topic. If people are fans of the ESIM space, look at some of the dialogue that's happening with SGP32, with the GSMA standard.
Speaker 1:Of course they named it, as GSMA always does.
Speaker 2:Very catchy, very catchy name Rolls off the tongue.
Speaker 1:So you're in Seattle. Seattle has become the global headquarters of wireless innovation, of Microsoft and T-Mobile and Amazon.
Speaker 2:Are you a child of all that?
Speaker 1:innovation, you must benefit from a lot of the ecosystem that's in and around Seattle these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. My dad worked for AT&T here at Rebentown Center for a very long time, was at Macaulay and whatnot before. So people, yeah, 4g, 5g, 3g, all the way back edge. Even the Pacific Northwest has had a rich history of telco and I don't think it gets enough credit. I mean you've got Atlanta, new Jersey and then you got Seattle really as the areas, but obviously with the cloud providers being hosted here, I think it's a great place to be for the IoT and digitization future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would agree. So what are you excited about over the next few weeks? Any personal travel, professional travel? I know you're at the Big 5G event coming up in September, october in Las Vegas. Yeah, there's a lot of new speed coming up.
Speaker 2:That's a big one. There's a few drone shows and whatnot that we're going to. I've got a board meeting in the Coeur d'Alene or Spokane area, like Eastern Washington, so I don't have a whole lot of travel. I just got back. I was in Europe for a couple of weeks Still working, though Still working. So we do have a pretty big announcement coming on the SGP32 front, so that would be something to watch for. It's a partnership with a pretty big, established brand. But yeah, I'm a founder so I don't really take vacations. It's always working.
Speaker 1:I get it so much, appreciate the time sharing your vision and mission. It's super exciting and thanks everyone for watching. Feel free to reach out to Teal Any questions, comments, feedback Really interesting folks. Well, take care, bobby. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, evan, huge fan of the show. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.