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Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Building Resilient Energy Networks With Decentralized IoT
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What if every meter in a city became a tiny base station? That simple shift unlocks coverage where towers fail, slashes operating costs, and floods the grid with the data it needs to stay resilient under the weight of electrification. We sit down with Wirepas CEO Teppo Hemiä to unpack how a fully decentralized mesh lets devices make local decisions on channel, power, and routing—no single point of failure, no shouting across long distances, and no fragile tuning from a central controller.
We trace the journey from early cellular breakthroughs to an edge-first architecture built for smart grids, smart metering, and industrial IoT at massive scale. Tippo explains why electrification flips the data problem on its head: rooftop solar, EV charging, and dynamic tariffs demand millions of reliable data points and two-way control. Real-world case studies from Oslo’s million-node deployment to India’s 300-million-meter landscape show how the mesh holds up in basements, metal cabinets, slums with extreme density, and even container ships where multipath overwhelms conventional radios. By embedding backhaul into a fraction of meters, deployments get simpler, cheaper, and faster—devices self-form the network and keep it healthy.
We dig into economics and standards too. With NR+ aligning the technology to the 5G family, utilities avoid lock-in while gaining a path to sub-second reads and grid-grade reliability. A new low-power milestone—mesh routers sipping around 20 microamps on Nordic’s latest silicon—opens the door to battery-powered routing and multi-year autonomy. The takeaway is clear: decentralization, spectrum efficiency, and autonomy are the keystones for a resilient, data-rich energy future. Subscribe, share with a colleague building smart energy systems, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling IoT for the grid.
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Hey everyone. Really fascinating discussion today as we talk about smart grids for mesh networking and uh IoT at massive scale with a true innovator in this space at WirePass. Tippo, how are you? I'm well. Hi, Christopher. How are you? Uh I'm do I'm doing well. Thanks so much for joining. Live from Finland. So winter is upon us, both in Finland and here in Boston. So uh it's good to be indoors having this chat. Before we dive in, maybe introduce yourself and your journey to Wirepass. And how do you describe the vision, the mission at Wirepass these days?
SPEAKER_00:Sure, sure. So yes, um I have been I have been in this wireless and connectivity space since mid-90s, so quite long. Um I started my career in Nokia, uh, where I was in uh uh design of uh microchips, uh ZB connected design side. Uh spent there for 13 years. Uh had a privilege to be doing a lot of industry first stuff, like very first 3G edge modem in the world uh in Nokia phones. Um, and then um I moved to France, uh joined ST Microelectronics uh 2007, where I established Mobile Platform Business Unit. That was a nice time also because I had a more diversity in customers, not only one internal customer, but then you know all the mobile makers of the world. Again, many industrial first things. So, for example, our team did the very first multi-processor for mobile. So now it's like now it's obviously uh very hygiene, but we did the very first dual-core uh symmetric dual-core processor. And then um while being almost 20 years in corporates, I was thinking maybe something more dangerous, and uh and then when we moved back to Finland, uh I I searched for some startups that where I could make some impact, and then I crossed to this WildPass, which was recent spin-off uh from the local university, and uh I really liked what they had been researched in the university for a decade. Um, you know, Mess Networks has been under long, let's say, uh research for decades, but this particular one had a little bit of its own mission, which was that hey, if the IoT is one day really true, you know, there will be millions and billions of stuff connected. How on earth you can have enough spectrum, how on earth you can have mobility, low power, and so forth. And that led to this um uh innovation that we are we are taking further, which is fully decentralized uh uh wireless uh network architecture. So from there we have uh uh built a company to have uh this offering as a software licensing model. We are also doing in some businesses a service model where we even guarantee the performance in the field. Um, but that's the licensing is a main approach, and it's an ecosystem play. So we are a software company. Uh we team up with uh radio manufacturers, but also device OEMs and uh and also uh service providers around the world, depending on which applications we are with.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. And and fast forward, you have a big focus on electrification and smart grids uh among other applications, but why is that such an important focus of yours? And why does IoT connectivity matter so much?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um, you know, it's it's in the tremendous change, and this whole electrification is coming uh in a big wave. Um so if you look like you know, when we when we used to have more fuel, uh actually fuel was decentralized. You know, when you had the peaks of consumption, it was easy to organize because you had a tank next to you. And then you know, electrification started and you had a grid uh that was more centralized. Uh, but that was on one way, you know, from the production to consumption. And nowadays it's like a little bit of a mix, so it's more decentralized, you have more local production, you have solar panels, you have uh, you know, uh different types of um uh generation. Um so you need to have a more two-way approach. And where then connectivity comes into the play is that you need a lot more data points. Data points to build the visibility, visibility for the right analysis, decisions, and and and in the end of the day, resilience. Um, so there's two two main objectives with providing a good connectivity to smart grids. One is this kind of an overall visibility buildup, uh, so that the resilience can be built. Um but also it's it's really enabling uh new way of dimensioning the systems. So you can imagine that if you sum up all the peak consumptions in that type of a grid, and if you dimension it that way, it would become super, super costly. So all these data points, all these kind of a demand uh you know um uh production uh control and so forth enables then uh make optimized investments in the grid, but also build the resilience.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. And as you know, from your journey from uh you know 1G to 5G and beyond, you you know, there's so many options for connectivity. I actually started in paging, so that was like kids don't know what that is, but it's one-way uh communications. Um but yeah, you have LoRa and all kinds of standards. But why is is mesh connectivity, your technology, great for the backbone of a modern digital energy infrastructure?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um it comes really from the science, I mean, and the physics. Um, you know, output power needed for a radio to operate is square to the distance. So that's a very, very simple law. And and if you can organize a network so that actually the device participating to the network becomes kind of a base station of its own automatically by software, then you build a coverage that is kind of uh uh superior compared to any centralized system like cellular or LoRa gateway and so forth. And smart metering and grid is a great place to be with that type of architecture. So, for example, we are in India now. India is 250-300 million metering points. And if you and if you look at the country, it has like a half a million cellular base stations, which is a lot. Uh, but still, you know, they leave you know black holes and you know uncovered places and basements and you know there are meters in metal cabinets and so forth. Um, but if you consider that if that whole 300 million would be connected with our type of architecture, you would have 300 million base stations because every meter is a base station, and that gives you the idea how it's so superior as an architecture.
SPEAKER_01:That's fascinating. Let's talk about the architecture. How would you describe the architecture? I mean, I we're envisioning what a mesh is, we're all technologists here, but what is the the architecture? How does it work, and what does it look like end to end?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh first of all, one very important aspect of it is that it's truly from the low level, from the low level up, uh fully decentralized. What it means is that all the decisions in the network are done locally by the devices who are participating. So they know the environment the best. So they are in the best position to choose the channel they operate, to choose the output power to just reach the next neighbor, not needing to shout far off and then you know creating interference. Um, so that's one thing. Um the second thing is that it's completely autonomous. So there's no single point of failure, truly. I mean, if you take a meter away or whatever device away from the network, it doesn't make it any worse as long as there are you know enough other net other devices that fix it up. Um and the automate full autonomy also means that the environment is always changing. You know, there's very different weather conditions, seasonalities, there are the buildings are building up, uh sorry, cities are building up, uh, there's a traffic, um, a lot of a lot of dynamic uh situations in the environment. And when the network is completely autonomous, it takes care of itself. Because in this type of massive scale networks, where we are talking about millions of devices in one network, if you need to ask the devices, how are you? Can I help you to configure your better? Already that would, you know, um uh date the capacity. So autonomous decentralized, autonomous operation is really a key.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. So, you know, we just figured out over the last decade how to scale you know millions of devices on 4G and 5G networks from a centralized standpoint, and the networks are pretty good. So you must have other challenges that that show up with your technology when you scale it to tens of millions of devices. What kind of challenges do you have?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, uh uh like nothing that works on paper, works uh out of the box in all that all the situations. You need to have a lot of field expertise. Um and we are lucky because we started as a stack IP licensor. Um and what does it meant for us was that we were and I'm still in probably in a hundred different use cases, you know, ranging from buildings, smart lighting, emergency lighting, uh to logistics, connecting containers, smart pallets, uh then smart metering. What does it mean is that there's probably no use case now that you know we wouldn't somehow be in there in a way or another, understanding what it means to then you know deploy it. Um so that's that's that's super super important. Um, but it's also like I said, it's it's continuous innovation. Um so so um I give you an example. Mes networks has also handicaps. Um if if you don't have the range, you know, the proximity between the devices, the connections are not building up. But you need to have uh uh you know different uh options for the radio uh physical layers. So in in one extreme, we can use cellular-like physical layer, which is ranging kilometers line of sight um between the devices. Then we have other extremes where we can use as simple as like Bluetooth chips, which are very low power but range only a few tens of meters, but you know, they are super uh affordable. So that's what IoD is a lot about. It's not like one size fit all. You need to have a little bit of ability to adapt and configure it for the purpose uh and then learn the use case and you know take it forward. Uh the other handicap of of MESS uh has been um the the gateway structures because you need to have a takeaway points. Although, you know, actually every device is a router, still you need to have a few gateways here and there that you know connect to the express sort of internet. What we did, for example, in smart metering was that we took that whole concept of gateway away as a device, but we put it in in some of the meters. So some of the meters with the ratio to like one to three hundred, for example, has capability of cellular connection for the backhaul. And then the deployment is super simple. You just deploy meters, they are look all the same, but some of them have a backhaul support, but the rest is messing, and you don't need to configure anything. So when you achieve that type of uh innovations, uh the TCO likes, you know, it starts from easy deployment, easy to maintain because it's autonomous, and then you know there's no sunset, nobody comes to shut down the network like in like in cellular, because it's run by the device itself and it's owned by the utility, for example, in this place.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, uh the economics are completely different. And speaking of that, everything in wireless, as you know, is the sort of three-dimensional trade-off. You have price, performance, you have cost, battery life, they all interplay. How does mesh network change that equation? I mean, what what sort of I wouldn't say endpoint, but what sort of devices can you get with what kind of battery life or or maybe uh performance?
SPEAKER_00:That's a that's a really good question because uh people often uh look only the end device uh economics. That you know, how how how what what's the cost of the brain? You know, what's what's the battery size I need here and so forth. But when you look at the whole system, uh and if you look, for example, cellular, of course, cellular is based on very, very heavy infrastructure, which is great. I mean, we we both love it. I mean, it's second to none, but in some cases the subscription fees are just too high, you know. And and that's uh you know, monthly fees, like if you are uh smart light point, you don't want to be paying uh you know every every month a fee. Um, so it's it in MES in our our MES, which is by the way part of the 5G standards now, it goes with the name NR Plus. So the more official name is tech 2020 NR. Uh the beauty of that is that basically the devices participating in the network carry that piece of of infrastructure because they are access points to each other. So you don't need to have that service of of uh macro-based stations or or or or even smaller ones. Of course, the gateways here and there, but that's more like the takeaway point uh to the to the to the rest of the internet. So those are important aspects when you look to total cost of ownership, uh, how the how the whole architecture builds up, what are the OPEX uh elements, how much you need to run uh cost uh you know month to month. And then you start to see that actually mesh is very competitive. Um then I'm proud to say that we we are just now announcing, um uh I think it's not even out yet, but uh but I can share it here that we are announcing a world record what comes to what mesh router can be in terms of power consumption. We are releasing with our uh close partner Nordic semiconductor new chipset um uh NRF uh 54L. Together with that low power features and our very low power uh uh mesh architecture, we can have a router in the mesh network that consumes in the range of 20 microamps. Um that means that you know you can have a multi-year autonomy with a single uh commodity battery. And and uh again, normally mesh networks are mains powered what comes to routers, so this is this is unique.
SPEAKER_01:Really unique, and you know, so many opportunities you kind of touched on a couple in India, but care to share any more examples of performance in you know these dense interference-heavy environments.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I would like to maybe still continue India a little bit because it it is uh really extreme. Um I mean we have we haven't seen such such scale anywhere else. Um we actually did in Europe already before uh a network which is which was one million, one million as a one network connecting the city of Oslo uh for for smart metering. But now we are now we are breaking that uh record uh um many times in India. Uh the the biggest utilities are having 30 million meters as a single utility. So so they are they are very big. And so then so that scale is one. So so in our network, it works with n, it works with n. There's no limit. Um, and we have we have gone beyond one million, so so it's really proven. The second thing is that actually India gives you the highest densities too. You know, for example, slum area, there's a there's a meteor every five meters. And and and uh when you have a long-range radio, you are talking relatively very high density. Um and and if you if you cannot cope it, uh and if you are not having very, very high spectrum efficiency, the network collapsed if you don't scope it. So that is a very bad surprise at that point when you are almost done. So so that's a that's a super important. We are we are very good in in spectrum efficiency. Um and then then it's really the different uh terrains. I mean it's it's range from high-dens downtown, but also rural areas and anything between. Um, so those are the good examples. Um, but we do have also other other examples where we are solving problems that others are not, like, for example, in container business, um you you you know the biggest vessels in the world can carry something like 20,000 containers, they are side-by-side big metallic giants. Uh, no other radio can survive uh in that environment because there's so many you know, reflections, multipath, you know, uh propagations and so forth. And we have proven it. So that's really the power of this decentralized local decision-making capability networks that survive almost anywhere.
SPEAKER_01:Incredible. So this year, resilience uh has been a big topic, you know, whether you're you know, an impact of a storm or you know, in the US, a hurricane or earthquake or other natural calamity, or in Ukraine, not so natural calamities. The energy is gonna have to be rebuilt one day. I imagine that's a big part of your solution, is is building resilience into the network.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I mean, of course, I give all the credits and merits to the to the to the guys who are building the grid itself. I mean, it's amazing, amazing uh work, um, what the world leaders are doing there. But what we what we uh bring to the mix is is the ability to uh have these uh data point collections uh in a reliable and highly resident way. Uh you mentioned many good examples. One more is the what happened in Iberia, uh, Spain, Portugal uh last spring, you know, the whole nation was down uh because of the blackout. Um total outage. And by the way, in India, in some areas you can have like 10 outages during the day. Um and and and what helps to to fix those is really connectivity because again, connectivity provides data, data gives you visibility, and then you know you start to see where the leakages are, where the problems are, and you go and fix, and you know, you get get towards ninety-nine point nine eventually uh in. In all the metrics. So that's our mission. We we want to be facilitating and enabling and helping on this massive electrification that is ongoing around the world.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. Maybe talk about your go-to-market on the commercial side. I assume I can't go to your website and just buy a bunch of radios, or can I? How do you go to market and with whom?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we have a B2B business. So it's really the go-to-market is uh first of all, uh go with the ecosystem partners. So we have a radio partners and and and some design partners, and then you uh find the right service providers in different businesses. That's typically our go-to-market. So, for example, in smart metering, there are uh specialized uh service providers who really are tackling that utility business and they are collecting the you know the team, if you like, for every opportunity, and then we are part of that and we are helping to integrate the meter with the connectivity, the head end system that is part of that architecture, and so forth. Similarly, if you go, for example, uh hospitals where we are uh having service providers that are providing location services. So they put sensors to the wheelchairs, beds, whatever assets uh the hospital is having, and then you know, we together help to make the guide guides how you install those systems without interrupting the operations. That's really, really powerful in our uh technology that uh the deployment is super easy, and that's what IoT projects very often uh overlook. Uh they they focus on end device costs and they focus on many other things, but deployment that's really costly if if it's not efficient. So, service providers, in short, is our goal to market. And then, of course, we choose our segments where we double down more because you know where you have the value, where you have the fit, uh then you then you grow there. Um, but like I said, we have a great number of use cases also beyond those uh examples.
SPEAKER_01:Fantastic. So you're at the cutting edge now. Amazing, but where do you see yourself going over the next year or two? What's exciting in terms of roadmap or new opportunities um out there?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so maybe uh maybe Kyle got quick quickly back where I started. So about the wirepass. So what I'm very proud of uh of our team is that we are really a research uh uh organization too. So we are in the in the frontier of this part of the wireless story. And what it means is that we research, we contribute to the standard, so this tech 2020 NR, uh, which is uh you know in Etsy, European Telecommunication Standard Institute. So there's a specific group where we are the biggest contributor of that standard. Um and and and with that we kind of give it to open. So we we are you know wireless veterans as as a team. We have we are holding more than 500 patents uh in the team. Uh, there are people who have a background from cellular, from Bluetooth, from Wi-Fi, and so forth. So we know that you know to be able to scale is an ecosystem open play. So that's one important part. But now when we see this market moving to especially electrification, um you you cannot scope anymore uh with centralized connectivity architectures like cellular. Uh you just cannot build the scale, you cannot go to the difficult places. Also, there's another technology which has been dominant in some countries called power line communication, which is using wires. But that also uh gets the limits. So, for example, in Finland, we are now five-minute reading interval. As a consumer, I can see my consumption five-minute interval, and and my tariff is every 15 minutes changing. So, guess where this is going? This is going, you know, more and more frequent reading, and with NR Plus, we can already uh demonstrate sub-second reading intervals uh on the grid side. And and that's where I see where we are going. So the whole world is electrification, other other areas um are developing the direction that you really need those data points in an efficient manner, and then that really explodes the you know the platformization for the AI on top of it, which is happening uh in parallel. But you know, AI is as good as the data in uh carbage in, garbage out. We try to avoid that. So so therefore, I see that the symbiotic uh play between um kind of embedded AI, uh physical AI, uh, you know, uh our connectivity, which is decentralized, uh uh, have a have a very interesting intersection point, and uh and the volumes will be massive.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. Well, what an opportunity. Thanks so much for sharing the vision and mission, and uh good luck along the journey. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Christopher. It was uh it was a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me today.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, and thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode. Also check out the TV show, Tech Impact.tv on Bloomberg and Fox Business, and see everyone at CES. Hopefully, there'll be a lot of IoT innovation on display there as well. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks everyone. And Merry Christmas talk.