Welcome to a riveting exploration of the industrial communication revolution with Vikram from Ecrio, where the focus is on the transformative impact of private 5G networks. Ecrio's journey from pioneering messaging technology pre-IP era to spearheading real-time cellular solutions paints an intriguing narrative of innovation and progress. Vikram, leveraging his Bell Labs experience, unveils the role of low-latency communication in driving advancements across healthcare, defense, and oil and gas sectors. As we unearth the future of industrial communication, envision a world where voice-triggered commands and human-to-machine interfaces are not just concepts, but everyday realities enhancing efficiency and safety on an unprecedented scale.
As the world becomes ever more connected, the need for robust and secure communication networks is imperative. We delve into the strategic application of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) across US industries, creating communication networks that combine the complexity of a long-term construction project with the precision of a security-focused rock concert. We also venture globally, from the shipyards of Dubai to the buzzing streets of Hong Kong, showcasing the versatility of private 5G networks through fascinating case studies. Imagine a network that adapts to diverse environments, ensuring that whether you're managing a shipyard or orchestrating a mega-event, your communication is secure, efficient, and compliant with the highest standards.
Wrapping up our discussion, we cast the spotlight on the pivotal role of private 5G in mission-critical communications, examining its deployment from the high seas to the retail floor. We highlight a partnership with ADTL and the groundbreaking "communication network in a box" solution, which promises rapid deployment and unmatched agility in the field. Join us as we paint a picture of a future seamlessly integrated with 5G technology, where every voice and video feed can mean the difference in a high-stakes scenario, and the network you rely on is the unsung hero in your pocket. Don't miss this insightful episode as we chart the course of private 5G networks shaping the very fabric of our connected lives.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Welcome to a riveting exploration of the industrial communication revolution with Vikram from Ecrio, where the focus is on the transformative impact of private 5G networks. Ecrio's journey from pioneering messaging technology pre-IP era to spearheading real-time cellular solutions paints an intriguing narrative of innovation and progress. Vikram, leveraging his Bell Labs experience, unveils the role of low-latency communication in driving advancements across healthcare, defense, and oil and gas sectors. As we unearth the future of industrial communication, envision a world where voice-triggered commands and human-to-machine interfaces are not just concepts, but everyday realities enhancing efficiency and safety on an unprecedented scale.
As the world becomes ever more connected, the need for robust and secure communication networks is imperative. We delve into the strategic application of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) across US industries, creating communication networks that combine the complexity of a long-term construction project with the precision of a security-focused rock concert. We also venture globally, from the shipyards of Dubai to the buzzing streets of Hong Kong, showcasing the versatility of private 5G networks through fascinating case studies. Imagine a network that adapts to diverse environments, ensuring that whether you're managing a shipyard or orchestrating a mega-event, your communication is secure, efficient, and compliant with the highest standards.
Wrapping up our discussion, we cast the spotlight on the pivotal role of private 5G in mission-critical communications, examining its deployment from the high seas to the retail floor. We highlight a partnership with ADTL and the groundbreaking "communication network in a box" solution, which promises rapid deployment and unmatched agility in the field. Join us as we paint a picture of a future seamlessly integrated with 5G technology, where every voice and video feed can mean the difference in a high-stakes scenario, and the network you rely on is the unsung hero in your pocket. Don't miss this insightful episode as we chart the course of private 5G networks shaping the very fabric of our connected lives.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, Super excited to chat about the next generation of communication networks, in particular, private 5G, a really hot topic globally. Vikram, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing, Kevin? I'm doing great. Thanks for joining. You're a real expert in this field, so always delighted to chat with someone who has deep technology and know-how in this space. Maybe introduce yourself to the viewers and the team and its mission.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, thanks, evan. So let's see, I am at Acreo, which is a company that's been around for 22 years, a Silicon Valley startup that then grew. So my job is really, as chief product officer, to make sure that our products are pointed at the trends and you know, in terms of innovation, in terms of where we go with our assets, our expertise.
Speaker 1:Lo and behold, the private mobile space has emerged big and we've applied all our assets into that over the last 24 months. That's fascinating.
Speaker 2:And 20-plus years is a lifetime in tech terms. So what was the genesis story that Acreo had at that time with respect to handwriting recognition, with respect to messaging this was before the time of IP messaging. We were still stuck in the SMS universe and yeah, so basically I moved over from Bell Labs at that time. We were building all kinds of things. I was actually responsible for the UMTS launch in Europe at that time, and so a lot of excitement around hey, what are we going to do with all this so-called high-speed IP cellular network? We realized that real-time communications was something that was needed when I moved to Acreo. Really, the real requirement was that we do messaging. Requirement was that we do messaging voice and, if possible, some video over cellular bearer and make use of whatever quality of service that was available. So we said, okay, we sort of jumped into the so-called next generation of IP-based SMS, which more recently, after many, many years, has turned into this thing called RCS. And you know, given that we remained in touch with the good old Bell Labs, they called us in and they said, hey, this is a good time for us to evolve the circuit enterprise services like push-to-talk to IP-based. If you recall, the history of push-to-talk was in public safety and whatnot, all based on circuit technology. Along comes wideband CDMA as it was called, and so IP-based push-to-talk. So they said, hey, you guys seem to know a lot about how this can be put on devices. At the time it was a little bit ahead of smartphones, a lot of this embedded software, class type of voice and video and messaging. So, yeah, so we created the solution and, as usual, right, bell Labs, so they were ahead of the game.
Speaker 2:We got a call from NTG Docomo saying that, hey, we heard you guys are doing something like this. We would like to launch IP-based push-to-top on our network, which we were, you know, suitably impressed because they were kind of ahead. We had the standardized stacks for what was later on called IMS. So the IMS-based push to talk was the first service we launched, ahead of anything that's done on US networks. So that was kind of an interesting scenario because you know, this was before Android and before iPhone and whatnot, and the ecosystem of these devices, whether it was Linux or Symbian. You remember all those things they required. It was almost an art form to fit something of high performance, like a live voice, value-added service, like Push-to-Talk, onto those devices. So yeah, so we wound up launching something like what 50 million devices over four or five years of that service.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. I remember Push to Talk well on the Nextel network back in the day. That's right and all these decades later it's come back to being a killer app again. Yes, and particularly. You know there are a lot of industries, as you know, that really have challenging environments obviously healthcare and oil and gas defense, where you know low latency, real-time communications is super important. So what are the challenges you're trying to solve exactly in those industries, for example?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is interesting, you know, I mean given. I mean fast forward another five years after that. We basically were called in by the wonderful Verizon AT&Ts of the world because they wanted to launch Voice over LTE, because it was moving to 4G and kind of on the sort of transition point from 3G to 4G they wanted to create a 4G-ready network for voice, voice calling. So that was kind of pivot for us.
Speaker 2:After push-to-talk it was Volte and they of course called it voice over CDM, white band, cdma and then moving to Volte and so forth. And so what we realized was we had assets that we could really claim were more like a protocol stack, swiss army knife, so to speak. We could do bidirectional regular voice and video calling. We could do push-to-talk using the same session setup. So basically you hop into the consumer space it is voice over LTE and now voice over NR for 5G and jump into the enterprise space it was all push-to-talk. So we decided, hey, why don't we sort of Take a look at what people are doing in the industrial verticals? You know, of course, things like defense and you know disaster response, you know other like shipyards and oil and gas. So by that time we had kind of accumulated. Interestingly, you know partners like Motorola Solutions in the public safety space, and so some of their push to talk was based on our stacks and so forth.
Speaker 2:And we said, why don't we kind of, you know, move into this area where the same medium of voice could be used to control?
Speaker 2:You know, machines and control cameras. So, essentially, human to machine interface consisted of, you know, speech triggered commands and you know, basically you're able to query your machine systems using your voice. So, on the edge, a small set of commands that can be recognized in terms of speech recognition is in fact feasible today, and so our next foray into this was, you know, to say we could use this and create, in fact, a server complement to it that could go on the enterprise. So we have an end-to-end solution. We kind of are able to say, using the solution that we have, including the expertise on the device side, we could have a private network of maybe 10,000 people served with an order of magnitude less cost, and, you know, it could be a network on an island, it could be a sort of hosted environment working with hyperscalers like AWS. So this is what we demonstrated at the most recent MWC in Barcelona, the same solution that we had in premises for the defense vertical, operating in the AWS region and serving a shipyard.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a fantastic use case, use case. It's amazing to me how many critical industries and even first responders you know police firefighters are using antiquated technologies. You know walkie-talkies at scale, and so you've taken a software approach right so you don't make the endpoints, but it's the server, the client, the running in the cloud. Tell us about your solution and how you sort of go to market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically it turns out that there are two avenues for us. One of the avenues, it seems, is just perfect for the defense vertical, where we partner with mission-critical hardware OEMs that you can think of as commercial, off-the-shelf but purpose-built for the defense and emergency response and disaster response verticals. So we have a set of hardware partners. So our solution would be kind of, you know, pre-integrated with those platforms and it could be something that the industry calls MANPAC, which is basically a backpack-sized core network running our communication software in it and the devices that have SIM cards that register into that radio of the MANPAC. It could be a unit, maybe one cubic foot size, that could be deployed on a vehicle or, you know, driven to a sort of theater of action or whatever and planted there for a period of months. So this is also an interesting scenario for the construction.
Speaker 2:You know all the sort of infrastructure work that's going on on US soil. You we're leveraging the fact that CBRS is an unlicensed spectrum that's available and most of these are like three-year-old sort of engagements at a site. Think of it as a three-year-old rock concert that's happening. People set it up and you know they want the 100 or 300 workers to be able to communicate with each other. They get information from cameras. You know whether it's security or otherwise and you know essentially it's a three-year engagement. Once that construction is done, the construction company moves its operations to the next project and we move along with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an amazing example there. You also talk a lot about resilience and cybersecurity and reliability in communication networks. I know I've seen in Ukraine, for example, how insecure their communication networks. I know I've seen in Ukraine, for example, how insecure their communication networks are. Everything's being spoofed and intercepted and it's quite scary to look at. How do you think about the world of security and encryption and reliability on your networks that you help?
Speaker 2:architect. Yeah, so tactically speaking, what people leverage is something called spread spectrum. For the anti-jamming part of it. It's not something that's supported in the 5G, you know routinely. So in most cases I think there is a certain amount of frequency hopping that can be done. We support, you know support 256-bit encryption. So as far as the end-to-end encryption is concerned, that's kind of the new level of security required. But you're right, there is a certain amount of problem with respect to signal jamming if you have sophisticated sort of adversaries.
Speaker 2:But what we have seen is, you know, this whole thing is designed for the sector. You know, in what's known as communication bubbles. So each communication bubble is powered by what we call communication network in a box, network in a box. So you know that has a small cell and it can basically serve you know 100, 200, you know that scale of users. And these bubbles, really they have a backhaul through some form of VLO satellite. So this could be Starlink or, you know, starshield or whatever it is that the sector is going to use. But essentially the fact that you could actually have these bubbles and they could act as not just, you know, bridging two different sites, but also being able to bridge the sort of the ranking, you know, management of that organization to the folks in the field. Also, if there's one of the bubbles that somehow, you know, loses power or whatever, they could be hopped over to the adjacent bubble. So those types of overlapping bubbles are kind of the fault tolerance here that is required.
Speaker 1:That's amazing and the beauty of 5G. Of course, is the global standard and, depending on the country, there's spectrum available and supported by the regulators, like here in the US. Course it's the global standard and, depending on the country, there's a spectrum available and supported by the regulators, like here in the US. So you must see a lot of opportunity globally, from Dubai to Hong Kong and everywhere in between. Maybe you could talk about where you're deploying your networks these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So basically, I think what we were showing off in Barcelona this year was a solution that would be for a large shipping company, a shipyard company that would be deploying and managing multiple shipyards with the same communication equipment with the same communication equipment.
Speaker 2:And then the theme was that if the ship shows up in the port it almost like has a membership in that shipyard and is able to immediately avail of the services there.
Speaker 2:It's a bit like driving into a city and having a membership in the city bike program so you can check out a city bike and away you go and return it wherever you want and you get a bill.
Speaker 2:So you know, the scenario that we showed was that the billing, the communication, the ability to sort of activate a set of security cameras to be able to have communication with the personnel at the shipyard, and those things are kind of all part of the membership. The devices, you know, register into the private cellular network and the cameras are available to. Essentially, you know, rent out access to the cameras that the ship arrives and you could be enabling, you know, object recognition there. You could be saying you know my workers need to have their hard hats on and vests on and so forth, and alerts could be sent to whoever is in the temporary control room saying that hey, you know these guys are not following the safety requirements and you know there could be other alerts having to do with intrusion and safety while the ship is in the dock. And you know, at the end of its stay it basically gets a bill and says goodbye.
Speaker 1:Oh, what a great use case. That's fascinating. So, shifting gears to the DoD side, many of the agencies have been really aggressive about private 5G and deploying networks on ships and in battle spaces and various trials. I'm not sure what you could talk about publicly, but can you talk about some of what you're doing there, what your partners are doing with early deployments?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the scenario is that, you know, of course you have the CBRS spectrum here in the US. There are some recent announcements of the 3 gigahertz, you know, and shared spectrum, laner that could be used, so it could be LTE, it could be 5G. So you know we are agnostic to the actual, you know, generation of the radio. You know, I mean people are getting to the point where they say it's all G, which means, you know, lte or 5G, and in some cases it's really dependent upon what devices are available and you're talking about really ruggedized devices. You know tablets, you know smartphones that could be, you know, that have been available for a while, not something that is bleeding edge.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, so the announcement that we have with the defense contractor called ADTL, you know, basically involves a, as I mentioned, the so-called communication network in a box that could be deployed as a single bubble or multiple bubbles using a backhaul. You know this is something we realized could be useful in theaters where they want to repurpose, you know, sort of your usual. You know SUVs, I think the industry calls it FOSOV or whatever it is the vehicle that's not like a Hummer, so it doesn't look like a military vehicle, but it could be purposed for communication, installing this type of a box, and could be driven to wherever you want to set it up and you know you could have a coverage of about three kilometers around that.
Speaker 1:A fantastic use case. So you know there's been some criticism around the 5G market around. It's slow to sort of take off and I always think well, tech is always slower to reach a certain scale. Just look at AI. We've been talking about AI for half a century, but only now have we reached this unbelievable momentum. What do you see of the future of private 5G being? Do you see it ubiquitous across industries? And of course, there's alternatives obviously Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi 7. That's right. My personal point of view looks like this is just the killer app for anything that requires real reliability and security. Yeah, what say you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, I mean we go, you know, with the requirements and we like Cellular because it has protocols and built-in ways of you know sort of quality of service management of video and voice. There are, you know, QCIs and whatnot they're called that could be managed. We provide the network server piece which is the IMS and voice and push-to-talk that can use these quality of service bearers. You know. So, until we have similar types of things in the Wi-Fi domain, you really want to otherwise just reserve certain channels for critical communication than others, whereas over here you could have this kind of thing going on.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, the 5G doesn't have to be kind of like a okay, let's upgrade everything to 5G scenario. In many cases, like I'll give you an example, there is a deployment where you have a shop floor and these cameras. It could be 360 cameras, it could be multiple cameras at various positions in the shop floor and you know you could really use these cameras where the people in the factory could walk up to the camera and basically you know, say their name and it starts a video call or push to talk session with the control room recognizing who it is. Basically, you know you could do facial recognition and so essentially it's like a hands free, you know, sort of we call it camera station where they could start a and you know, I mean basically it's like, hey, you know what do I do over here. You know three red lights on the machine on the left. So as far as we are concerned, you know, if it's a video streaming related use case, it's more suited to 5G If you're really talking about monitoring. So we have this thing called a digital twin engine inside of our solution, called a digital twin engine inside of our solution. So what it does is basically, you know, we want to call it the start of the metaverse. You know, the metaverse has got a bad name, so we call it the metaverse of things as opposed to. So essentially all the avatars in our metaverse are machines, and so it's easy recognition for somebody who is on a touchscreen or on a VR headset to say, okay, I'm now looking at this type of machine. It recognizes what the machine is and where it's located and if the machine is feeding the system, you know real-time information. You know like sensor information that pops up on that same screen like a dashboard. So you really have a triangulation of you know what you're looking at, you know what the status of the machine is, and this could be something that that is viewed by by an expert that may not even be on site. You know they could be basically getting the camera feed and somebody who's over there saying, hey, you know, I don't know what to do here. There's something going on here. Okay, let's look at it and let's attend to it.
Speaker 2:So some of the AI that we've employed are in very, very focused categories voice. You know spoken voice commands to be able to get status of systems, to be able to even command it to reset and reboot. So voice commands in a group. So essentially, you know you have these communication groups, as they're called in critical communications like Push to Talk, and you could have a camera that's part of that group and anybody in that group should be able to say show me live, and you have the live feed from the camera that is seen. So there are protocols around that. In Push to Talk they're called mission-critical video that could be enabled directly into that, called mission-critical video that could be enabled directly into that.
Speaker 2:So our contribution there is the object recognition, the speech recognition you know some amount of. You know let's call it humble gen AI to be able to do a little bit of predictive maintenance on those systems. So, like I said, you know, in some of these these are long-term systems, others they are, like I said, you know, in some of these these are long-term systems, others they are like, like, like I said, at a construction site. So the learning interval is, like you know, maybe one to three years. So you could, you could really learn from other. You know other projects the same company has and pre-populate the, the gen AI in the system with what happens at other places, saying that hey, around this time we encountered such and such thing at site number three and we are now at site number eight. So you know, maybe time to check a few things.
Speaker 1:Fantastic example. Yeah, I had a guest on from Icomera, a train equipment manufacturer for communications, and they're actually using the cameras for monitoring the lines as they pass through different stations and using AI to keep an eye on the reliability and availability of those lines and all kinds of other use cases on trains passengers for passengers as well as for passenger safety. So yeah, amazing opportunities. Well, thanks so much for joining. What are you looking forward to over the next few weeks? Any travel events or otherwise worth calling out?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, so there's lots of stuff going on. Like I said, we have partners that that are in this domain of critical communications for private networks, so there's a critical communications world where there are some some some very interesting things going on. You know, I think that the whole domain of mission critical communications, applied into, you know, sort of the public sector and the private sector because of the private mobile networks, is a theme, and you know, I mean everybody wants to hop onto the bandwagon that our communications are critical. Whose communications are not critical? In an enterprise? I would say it's critical at the level of it being a life threat versus a level of being a few million dollars lost to the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean retail. All kinds of industries could use your technology. Well, thanks so much for joining Really tremendous insights and I appreciate your time and good luck at Critical Communications World.
Speaker 2:Okay, evan, so thanks a lot for having us.
Speaker 1:Thanks everyone. Thanks for watching everyone and reach out to Equio and any questions you might have. Take care, have a nice week.
Speaker 2:Bye.