Category: Connectivity

Delivering connectivity to the railway industry can be difficult. Over the last two years, LEO solutions have provided a much-needed link between the railways and the rest of the world. To help us explore this phenomenon, we spoke with Torsten John, who is the SVP of Sales, EMEA at Icomera and a top performer in the European railway industry, on Episode 29 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast. Read on to find out more about connecting the railways. 

The LEO market has arguably had the most direct impact on the railway connectivity market in the last 24 months. Why do you think that is? 

Digitalisation in the railways is a very slow process. They’ve always been behind the aviation and the automotive industries in how they adapt to technological shifts. That includes connectivity, Wi-Fi and passenger services, but getting the passenger connected on trains has been an ever-growing demand for travelers, particularly here in Europe, North America and also in vast parts of Asia. However, that area is unfortunately mostly dominated by the quality of the Wi-Fi. Yes, there is a lot of technology in the equation, but it’s still vastly dominated by geography, which impacts Wi-Fi. 

When trains travel in densely populated countries with good infrastructure, such as in the Netherlands, they have much better connectivity by nature than trains traveling in the Midwest or parts of Spain. There are areas where you don’t see 4G or even 3G, so there’s nothing the train operators can do to get a better service for their clients. For these clients, LEO solutions (with the exception of train stations with metal roofs and tunnels or areas with very high buildings such as Manhattan) remove the equation of geography. 

It almost feels like LEO is at the very beginning of what they’re doing. Starlink is a leader in that space, and what Starlink is doing with their current and the next generation, is use the cellular data spectrum such as the 700 megahertz the lower 5G bands, and channel it from space onto Earth. That means that you can connect from your iPhone or Android phone directly to a star. That technology has so much potential to revolutionize cellular networks, which is a dramatic technological shift, not just for connectivity on railways, but in many other areas too. 

Especially in the LEO market, where technology is moving at such a rapid rate, is there risk associated with relying more exclusively on satellite technology?

No connected railway or passenger infrastructure provider – or even freight infrastructure provider – should solely rely on LEO. The Starlink network is by far the most advanced compared to the other four solutions that are currently available, but the problem with Starlink is that their antennas are proprietary. If you put a Starlink solution on your train, you cannot connect to any other system, and if you put another system on the train, you cannot connect to the Starlink network. That creates extensive build and documentation costs around your starting solution. 

So, using only LEO is certainly not the right way to go. You still need to combine it with cellular networks. We’ve seen in our deployments and analyzers that cellular and Starlink augment each other perfectly along the railway. In areas where you have weak cellular coverage, you normally have good LEO coverage and vice versa, making them complementary technologies for the railway. 

To learn more about railway connectivity, tune into Episode 29 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

As technology gets smarter, our technology is becoming increasingly connected. On Episode 28 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast, Paddy Gogin, the SVP of Sales at Blues, joined us to share his insights on the future of connected tech, particularly in the IoT sector. Read on for his predictions. 

What impact have intelligent machines started to make on the industry so far?

“I think the IoT is dead, and our SVP of product would agree with me. I think we’re living in another world now, and that’s the world of connected intelligence. I’ll use the phrase ‘connected intelligent machines’ because I assume the machine is the asset. This connectivity has become commoditised, and I think it should be, but we are now in this world where there’s this ubiquitous expectation that any machine should be intelligent. That has not always been the case. Smart machines were very novel about 10 years ago, and getting temperature data from your refrigerator for example was still really cool. Now that’s expected by the customer. 

The future of that is vast and broad. The future of connected machines is accessible to all, and it’s accessible anywhere. Whatever you’re building, our mission is to help people transform physical things into smart intelligence services. People will have complete access to connectivity and be able to connect their assets in a way that is business-effective and cost-effective. 

There’s a great example of satellite connectivity, which has become commoditised too. 10-15 years ago, satellite connectivity was for rich people on boats using Motorollas. We’ve come a long way since then, and I think we’re at the beginning of another wave and inflexion point now. Soon, every machine you see around us will be connected and intelligent, and we will extract data from those assets to do a number of things, but primarily to add value to our customers or create new revenue streams for our own businesses. We will be getting greater insight into our customers than we ever have before, and we’ll know how they use things and what they care about, so we can tailor our businesses towards that.”

How do you see the future being shaped by connected, intelligent machines?

“I think what you’ll see is a greater uptake of products in the space. There are a lot of old-school companies that have done amazing things, like creating generators or industrial machinery, which work, they’re robust, and they’re built for purpose. These companies are now being stress-tested to think differently about their products though, because they aren’t cutting-edge anymore. How do they become the face of innovation when they aren’t plugged into connectivity, data and AI? 

What we’ll see is a transition towards all industries thinking that way. And make no mistake, there will be winners and losers. There’ll be people who won’t see that transition or won’t necessarily want to believe it, and they will lose. Then there will be people who move first, and they will win. 

The future of intelligent machines means greater products for your customers. What it means for the organisation is that you are going to be closer than ever to your customer, and you are going to understand your customer like never before. That means we’ll have stickier customers as well. They won’t just be dating you because of the value you’re giving them now. Connected intelligence is a must, so if they don’t have you in their lives, there will be a big difference to their business.”

To hear more from Paddy, tune into Episode 28 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

The last eighteen months have been challenging for connectivity companies when it comes to their talent attraction. Finding and hiring qualified talent has become more difficult than ever due to many specialists moving into bigger tech companies in different sectors. On Episode 27 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast, we spoke with Ryan Carlson, the Head of Digital Marketing at Soracom, about his philosophy of talent attraction. He shared his perspectives, as well as advice for other companies who want to bring people back to the industry. Read on for his thoughts on the subject. 

“Well, my philosophy on talent attraction starts with understanding what the role is and what kind of personality you want. For example, I’ve always found that the best engineers want to solve interesting problems. It starts with the job spec and helping them understand what they will work on. I like to pitch the concept of the problem that they get to help solve. 

Beyond that, there are two different categories of jobs out there. There are jobs where you want a generalist who can take a problem and figure it out. Those are hard. And then there are the ring binder jobs. These are jobs where, if you’ve got a question, you just turn to page 13 to find our process on that. Turn to page 27 for a list of all the people you could talk to about it. They’re well-thought-out jobs where people come into them because they’re not sure of their own skills. They look like an entry-level job sometimes, but they’re often not. They also give people a false sense of job security because they think if they do the things on the checklist on page 1, everything will be fine. The reality is that anybody could do it. 

Individuals need to look at their skills and how they can constantly improve. The days of pensions are over, it’s unlikely that you’ll work the same job for 20 years and then get to be done. That’s not how that’s not how the job market works anymore. For all the time I’ve been in management, my job has been to put myself out of a job. That’s how you create your next role as well, not just job security. Trying to chase job security is a pipe dream, and it’s a false positive. When consolidation happens, people feel like they are invaluable, but a spreadsheet says that they fall into the 13.25% of staff that are being let go. You have to ask yourself how each job that you have reads as a chapter in the story that you want to tell. 

As a hiring manager, my philosophy has always been to choose the candidate who brings something to the table that we still need but don’t yet have. From a diversity perspective, I want people on the team who have different backgrounds, perspectives and economic situations. Especially if you’re in product development, you need people who can advocate from their own perspective. Don’t hire people that are the same as you. Determine what it is that they have that you don’t, and get diverse perspectives onto your team. 

The big telcos are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Where I see success is in those larger companies that have invested in incubators within their own four walls. They’re essentially creating small startup groups within their own company. They’re incubating smaller startups, which attract talented younger people who have unique skill sets, so the larger organisation gets to benefit from having them in their ranks without directly bringing them in. If their goal is to fill cubicle 37b with someone sharp and talented, I’d say good luck with that. That’s just not what the up-and-coming workforce is looking for. 

The stereotype has always been people just work very hard, and they still work very hard, but this generation of workers isn’t going out for happy hours with their boss and coworkers. They’re going home to be with family, so bosses are like, ‘Well, how do I pass the torch?’ That’s where mentorship comes in. We’re in an interesting place with the large telcos, where the way they approach a business is to talk about the fact that they’re working with interesting technologies. That’s really hard, given the current socioeconomic and macroeconomic conditions that we are in. There’s an opportunity to appeal to 18-year-olds who just graduated high school, where lots of them are going into apprenticeship programs for electricians or plumbers because those skills are recession-proof. You always need a plumber. 

Young people are being put off other industries because you need four years of a liberal arts college just to get through screening. We have to find alternative ways to train people in these areas. In the energy sector, they’ve been very successful with programs that get kids into two-year technical programs right out of high school. They’re taking on these roles of senior-level individuals who are about to retire, and they’re saving skills that are about to disappear. We have so much field experience from people in that middle layer who aren’t executives or upper management, but they do the actual work and have that lived experience. In the telco space, AI is going to be addressing some of those issues through training. It’s not stealing someone’s job – it’s just helping the next generation work up to the certification. It’s training people on anomalous things that only a handful of people know. 

It’s surprising how many people whose goal is just a living wage, and there are far too many jobs that don’t provide that. Then others dangle the carrot of making so much money, but you’ll have to work so hard that you don’t get to have a life outside of that role. What if I like biking and having a family? That’s what people want to do. We’re in changing times. The gig economy has radically changed the trajectory of the job market since COVID, and tools like Zoom make it possible to do business from anywhere. In fact, the expectation of getting on a plane or getting in a car and travelling everywhere and doing face-to-face meet-and-greets is now the exception, not the rule. Personally, I think the next generation has their priorities far more in order than my generation ever did, and companies need to adapt to that.”

To hear more about attracting great talent in the connectivity sector, tune into Episode 27 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

As automation becomes an increasingly large part of workflows across the connectivity industry, how much control should we give AI over decision-making processes? On Episode 26 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast, we spoke with Wim te Niet, the VP of Global Sales and Service Assurance Solutions at EXFO, about his perspective on the topic. Here are his thoughts: 

What are your views on automation in zero-touch operations, and what are the benefits of moving to automation over manual testing methods, for example?

If you look at what’s driving automation, there are three factors. Look what happened to service providers. Over the past few years, their cost level has gone up significantly. There have been significant salary increases, and we’ve all noticed what happened to our energy bills. Now if you look at service providers and how much energy they use in their data centers, they are running a network that is very energy-intensive. Those different factors have led to a significant increase in OpEx. 

One of the key benefits of moving to automation is OpEx reduction. If tasks are automated instead of people doing the task, that drives your your OpEx cost down. The second key driver, from my perspective, is customer experience. If you think about things like time to repair, response time, and failures in the network, driving that down through automation obviously has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, customer experience, and customer retention. The third factor is network virtualisation. These days, they’re increasingly cloud-based. 

Previously, if you were in London, you would have a physical connection to a voice switch somewhere in the city. You would be able to pinpoint that, if your line is down, there’s probably something wrong with that switch or the connection between you and that switch. In a virtualized and cloud-based environment, there is complete decoupling of the service from the physical location. With the increasing number of devices on the network, and a decoupling of logical and physical infrastructure, network complexity usually goes up, which also drives the need for automation. 

What are the barriers to achieving zero-touch operations?

A major barrier is the psychological impact. Do you let these decisions be made by a machine? That’s something we need to overcome. If you use the analogy to self-driving cars, one challenge is to develop the technology that provides a fully self-driving experience. The producers of these systems say they are more reliable than human beings because they’re quicker and better at decision-making. But actually saying, ‘Okay, we’re now going to leave the decision to the machine,’ is a big thing because if it goes wrong (or when it goes wrong), then there is a real problem. 

If you use that analogy to the service provider network, if your OODA-based decision causes a massive network outage because it makes the wrong decision, as the CEO or CTO of that operator, you’ve got to explain. It’s a technology that is not completely mature, and there’s the psychological elements. Do you actually leave that to the machine, or do you still want somebody with human intelligence to look at it? I think the latter will still be the case for a while to come, which is actually a good thing.

To hear more from Wim, tune into Episode 26 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Within the connectivity industry, talent shortages and lack of diversity are rife. On Episode 25 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast we spoke with Jennifer Montague, the VP of Growth at Onomondo, about how she is expanding her team. Here are her insights.

How has hiring been in the last 12-18 months, from a high-level perspective?

People are having a lot of trouble trying to find the right role. As a manager, I don’t want to say hiring has been easy, but there’s been a lot of talent to choose from, which can be good and bad. If you go to a restaurant with a 60-page menu, you can’t really decide what to eat. It’s the same with hiring. I’ve had up to 300 applications for roles, which is a lot to choose from. 

My advice, particularly when it comes to startups, is to know your numbers. In this environment, the money is just all over the place, and it’s growth at all costs. We’re hiring left, right and centre, but you have to prove the value that you’re bringing in, which is why I say ‘know your numbers’ and make sure you keep track of your hires’ outcomes. Look for people who have had an impact, but also for their ambition and potential.

How has your hiring process changed since you’ve grown as a business? 

When you’re a startup, you want generalists who can wear a bunch of different hats. As you get into scale up, you want specialists. You want the people who only do one thing, but they’re damn good at it. That’s always an interesting transition for me. You hire people who start the marketing from nothing, and they’ve done all the hard work and heavy lifting, but suddenly, you reach a point where you don’t need them anymore. That is a really bad feeling for everyone because you want to show appreciation, but you also need specialists in SEO, paid search, or full-stack development and no longer have space for those generalists. 

You’re now hiring based on applications rather than headhunting. How has that affected diversity?

It’s definitely brought out the importance of looking for the potential of each individual. Now, when you’re looking for one particular role, and you see all these people can do the job, then you have to assess what else they bring to the table. Frankly speaking, I live in a very homogenous community. Denmark isn’t really known for a lot of diversity. At the moment, my company’s policy is not to hire remote-only positions, so you have to be physically present and able to commute to the office. That reduces the pool of applicants that I can look for. 

When it comes to one of the things I have done, I’ve added a blurb to my job posts about not ticking every single box because traditionally, women and people of colour will not apply for a job unless they tick every single box. I always say that if you think you can bring something to the table, please apply. I can’t comment on whether I’ve seen a difference in the applicants, but people have been commenting that they were more comfortable applying, knowing that it’s okay not to tick every box. 

The other thing is not looking for a traditional background or education but interviewing for ambitions and motivations, like what you want to do and why you want to do it. That’s helped us take the blinders off. It’s not about whether they fit into this box or not. It’s actually about ‘Do I want to work with this person?’ That helps increase the likelihood of getting non-traditional candidates into a role. 

To hear more about hiring in the connectivity sector, tune into Episode 25 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

On Episode 24 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast, we were joined by Mart Kroodo, the Founder & CEO at 1oT, which provides global connectivity for the IoT industry, to talk about the company’s innovative solutions. From day one Mark’s goal with 1oT has been to make eating technology more accessible to companies worldwide and enable them to far more easily choose between different telecom providers. To do that, he’s had to drive more communication and collaboration in the industry. Read on for an inside look at his connectivity solutions. 

“The main thing we were thinking about is that there are 2,000 telecoms worldwide, so how could we create synergy between different direct companies? Back in 2016, it was clear that easy SIM would be the next big thing, because if telecoms could collaborate, then swapping from one telecom to another using the same technology would be a no-brainer because of the value for IoT companies. Right away we thought that there needed to be a neutral, independent telecom middleman who gathers telecoms on one service, because different telecoms were not getting long, and it was very hard to find synergy there. 

From day one, we have been aggregating different telecom deals on one service. In essence, we are a reseller. We negotiate with telecoms, and we resell their megabytes and gigabytes to our customers. The value we provide is that we have many telecom deals we can offer to our customers, and once they start using different telecom profiles, they still need to manage the service somehow. 

We have built the connectivity management platform that enables them to control the sims, starting from switching on and off and sending SMS or setting data limits to actually getting notifications. Setting up that let me know if someone either consumes too much, too little, or goes to a blacklisted country. Also, the system learns from the behaviour of the sim, and if it detects something weird, then it notifies the customer right away. 

We put a lot of effort into building the connectivity management platform from day one, which has been super important because it’s not just about getting their connectivity up and running. If you are running thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices in different countries on a daily basis, then you need to understand what’s going on. If something happens, you need to debug it, and you want to go into details. You want to see all of the sessions, minute by minute in the right network, looking at how much it consumed, what might be the issue, etc. You want to do everything on a self-service basis through a platform or by using API’s. 

A few years ago, we finished developing our own ECM infrastructure as well. Now we are among the 33 companies in the world who have built the ECM infrastructure themselves. The main thing is good telecom deals, connectivity management platforms and infrastructures are owned by us developers.”

To hear more about Mark and 1oT’s solutions, tune into Episode 24 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Generative AI has already become part of the workforce. To help us understand its role in the connectivity industry, we spoke with Bruno Santos, the Global Business Development Director at Celfocus, on Episode 23 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast. He explained the impact that AI has already had on the industry and shared his opinion on the opportunities it offers. Read on for the highlights of the conversation. 

AI has come into the public eye much more significantly more recently. Do you see that as a positive or a negative?

I tend to see it as positive. If it’s a new technology and it’s disruptive, it will change our behaviour. I’m not sure if it will be equivalent to the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, but it is something that will change our lives forever. We are also seeing a lot of impact not only with our clients but with our own internal processes too. Our teams are using AI to accelerate their performance and delivery, like generating new test data without waiting for the client to provide us with it or having ChatGPT generate code. We then take that output and take it to the next level by fine-tuning the requirements and wording in order to build and deliver the solution. 

AI has been changing a lot of our ways of working internally. We even have a mandate from our board to start using more ChatGPT engineering in our daily tasks. If we can use it to build a presentation, we should do that as much as we can in order to become more efficient. We are also challenging some of the assets AI produces, but I think it’s changing our ways of working and will keep changing more. 

What impact has AI had on Celfocus so far?

We’ve been leveraging AI to increase advanced data analytics since 2018. When it comes to the clear benefits to our clients, it’s always very hard to demonstrate and explain what we do with the data, but you can predict things based on historical data, so while it’s always very hard to convince our clients, adopting AI is the right move. We have an extensive set of AI use cases to share with our clients, the most important of which is the very good positioning in the industry we have thanks to these insights. 

Over the last two years, especially with all the ChatGPT hype, it was very easy for us to change because we were already using AI. Now we’re extending our capabilities and solutions to use generic AI. Our team was already fluent in this kind of technology; now we’re just using a different flavour. We’re working closely with our clients to demonstrate the benefits of using AI. 

What would you say are the biggest opportunities AI presents for the industry?

There are a few of them, and we are already seeing efficiency and cost savings. We are currently assigning people to different tasks that are more beneficial for our clients. We are also rescaling our clients’ workforces based on our solutions. Going beyond that, AI is changing things around operations and automating things in order to be cost-effective. That’s where you have the key decision points for our clients, like “What is the business case? What is the financial benefit I can get from the solution?” Those are key drivers for applying those generative AI and machine learning use cases to our clients. There is a huge set of opportunities, but they all go in the direction of making processes more effective.

What are the biggest challenges around AI in connectivity?

The biggest challenge is confidence in the solution and the technology. The privacy and ethics of what we are delivering are some of the key topics because everything involves a huge set of data from everywhere, not only from public information but sometimes from critical and confidential information from our clients. There’s always the problem of trust.  Data and regulation is one of the key topics that we need to address. How trustworthy is the solution that we are bringing? Sometimes it’s it’s not straightforward. 

What we have is a first step called human-assisted AI. We provide insights and a way to automate without human intervention, but in between there is always a human validating that information. They can apply the recommendation that the engine is providing and certify its validity. Our end-user solutions are based on AI algorithms that work by themselves.

To learn more about AI’s role in connectivity, listen to Episode 23 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.