(electric guitar music)
(audience applauds)
-: Good afternoon.
Welcome to the 5G Hub Summer Speaker Series,
5G for IoT and manufacturing.
My name's Erin Raney, I lead
the Tech Experience Program here at T-Mobile,
and we are excited to have you join us now
for our fourth session here at the 5G Hub.
And yes, it is still summer here in Pacific Northwest.
We're gonna get every day out of it.
And today we're gonna talk about how 5G enables
manufacturing to take advantage of technologies
around automation, artificial intelligence,
augmented reality, IoT, driving, operational efficiencies,
lowering costs, and increasing productivity
in a very competitive market.
And today we are going to talk about how 5G
is going to enable these technologies and help create
some of these applications and benefits,
again for IoT and manufacturing.
So let's get started and join me in welcoming
our incredible panelists out here on stage with me.
(audience applauds)
Welcome.
All right. Okay.
You guys are in for a treat this afternoon.
We have some incredible panelists
and I'm gonna do some brief intros.
So first we have Dirck Schou, who is CEO of Taqtile.
Taqtile is an augmented reality work instruction
and collaboration software provider,
creating the tools of tomorrow to improve processes
and workflows, train the next generation
of hands-on workers, and eliminate the barriers between
machine and operator location and time.
With strengths in starting and growing businesses,
Dirck is passionate about designing and delivering
new solutions to old problems,
enabling business continuity and growth,
and positively impacting people and industries.
Welcome Dirck.
(audience applauds)
All right.
Next we have Ajay Rene.
Ajay is currently the head of worldwide IoT business
development at Amazon Web Services.
His team works with leading communication service providers
to transform their IoT in 5G businesses
through cloud-related innovations to unlock growth,
Ajay is a customer obsessed veteran
of the telecommunications and semi-conductor
industries with a track record of delivering
value through innovation.
Previously, Ajay managed IoT ecosystem partners
as VP of business development at Sigfox
and led productive management for LTE Chipset
as VP of marketing and business development
at Ambit Wireless.
Welcome. Thank you.
(audience applauds)
All right, and finally we have Cameron Byrne,
senior member of technical staff here at T-Mobile.
Cameron is focused on IP network infrastructure.
Cameron joined T-Mobile in 2005 and has since led several
innovation projects including scaling the network backbone,
several innovation projects, I'm sorry,
including scaling the network backbone
a thousand times over the last 15 years.
Introducing MPLS to the T-Mobile transport backbone,
automated DDoS mitigations, and developing
the set of technologies that enable T-Mobile
to globally launch the first IPv6 only
Android and Apple phones, which has now been extended into
T-Mobile Home Internet Solutions.
Cameron has published three IETF RFCs
and has 17 granted patents.
Welcome, Cameron. Thank you.
(audience applauds)
All right, so we're going ahead and get started.
I'm gonna ask our panelists a few questions
and then I'm gonna turn it over to the audience
for you guys to ask some questions.
So get your questions ready. All right.
So let's start with how will 5G revolutionize manufacturing?
Dirck, you wanna start with that?
-: Sure, well when you start to think about bringing wireless
into the workplace, it's a very different thing
than when you're talking about consumers, right?
Consumers wanna watch their cat videos,
and it's okay if there's a little latency or jitteryness,
that sort of thing.
But when you're bringing connectivity to devices and people
in dangerous environments, that sort of thing,
it has to be extremely low latency.
It has to be very solid and, you know,
you have to take into account things that you wouldn't
normally for a consumer experience,
such as control of security and all these things.
So network slicing, all these things that 5G
is particularly well suited for.
And you have to do it at a much higher density
than you would for consumers.
And if you want companies to start to depend on this
infrastructure, just has to be rock solid.
-: Absolutely. Ajay?
-: Yeah, I think the same.
You know, 5G is going to be an inflection point
in the manufacturing industry.
There are many technologies that are currently being used,
you know, a lot of ethernet,
but 5G will help bring in the high throughput,
but also ultra low latency, and the reliability
that comes with a network.
So whether it's a private or public slice of the network,
the core benefits of 5G are really extremely valuable
to industries and especially in the manufacturing setting
where you need reliable connectivity,
where you need low latency.
And you look at the complexity in a manufacturing side,
there are many different applications, you know, right?
From video surveillance all the way down to autonomous
vehicles moving around, and each one requires a different
set of parameters which current technologies are not able
to support, and that's driving the need for 5G adoption.
-: Absolutely, thank you. Cameron?
-: Yeah, similar to what Dirck and Ajay said, you know,
when we engage customers today about our 5G solutions
in the manufacturing space, they come to us, you know,
saying things are mission critical
and it's very heterogeneous.
And these two words don't really go well together
because now you're talking about something
that's very complex and you're talking about something
that needs to be very reliable.
So, you know, 5G brings together several technologies
that help address those opportunities and those needs.
Specifically, we're able to scale bandwidth with our
different spectrum portfolio, whether it's millimeter wave,
whether it's our mid-band, CBRS,
we can bring all of those together to deliver bandwidth.
Additionally, we have identity based on SIM cards,
so it's a big differentiator from Wi-Fi solutions
because now we can take, you know,
that hardware-based identity that we know with SIM cards
today and drive that into, you know,
that heterogeneous environment.
'Cause if you think about a manufacturing location
like a Boeing or a Ford or somewhere like this,
it's not just Boeing and Ford employees
that are on the floor.
You have all kinds of partners, suppliers,
that are on the floor helping deliver
the mission of the manufacturing facility.
So being able to differentiate and identify and deliver
different network experiences to different folks
on the floor, machines on the floor, people on the floor,
that drives a lot of great value.
Additionally, we can bring in low latency compute
with mobile edge compute.
And, you know, so it's a very different set of solutions
that we can bring, you know,
that is compared to what traditionally
has been delivered with Wi-Fi.
-: Absolutely.
-: And so with some of these solutions and the technologies
that you guys have touched upon, whether it's, you know,
robotics, video surveillance, augmented reality,
what do we see as the,
I guess those having the greatest impact,
and the one that we will see first
when it comes to manufacturing?
-: For me, I see it as identity.
I think there's a real opportunity to segment different
players in the manufacturing space and being able to give
them a differentiated experience.
I think, you know, for example,
today anybody with a phone can turn on a Wi-Fi hotspot
in a manufacturing facility,
and all of a sudden now they're producing a Wi-Fi network.
You are your own Wi-Fi network,
and if you have a manufacturing floor with a thousand people
and they're each bringing a phone with them,
ooh, that's gonna be trouble.
So being able to differentiate those folks,
use different types of spectrum than what's available
on a commodity phone today,
and being able to lock down that identity
based on a SIM card, I think that's gonna be really critical
to providing a high quality experience that is also secure.
-: Another example I can give is, you know,
taking the advantage of, or the power of the cloud
and being able to develop applications that are cloud native
and be able to seamlessly bring them
to the manufacturing side.
And for example, when you're,
when you look at robotics, training robots and bringing
them up on a manufacturing floor is a complex process.
And if you're able to create those models and train them
in the cloud and then deploy them,
that reduces the time to onboard a new robot.
In the same thing with other AI/ML applications
and being able to take advantage of all the services
that you can deploy in the cloud and seamlessly bring them
to a local setup, whether it's it's an outpost
or some other type of cloud-native application
that can be deployed inside a manufacturing site.
-: Yeah, and of course I look at it through
a very particular lens.
You know, we're a tiny company compared to T-Mobile
and AWS and you know, our application is, you know,
is about getting that same sort of digital transformation
to these workers who've never had it before, right?
As knowledge workers, we've all been plugged into
our laptops from, you know, for the last 30 years, right?
And the frontline worker, you know,
they have a manual that was updated
in, you know, 1998, right?
And if you give them the same sort of,
well, the same digital transformation,
it's a different thing, right?
A frontline worker needs to capture knowledge,
they need to access knowledge,
and they need to collaborate with other workers, right?
They don't need to be writing documents
or Excel spreadsheet, at least not on the job, right?
The promise of wearable technologies, of ubiquitous high,
you know, capability networks, secure networks,
that sort of thing.
I mean, it's transformational.
I mean, you can, in many cases completely eliminate errors.
You can speed up the speed at which people
can do very complex tasks and you can use un or undertrained
people to do jobs at a much higher level
that you would need, potentially, years of training to do.
And maybe these jobs only need to be done
every once in a while, like once a year
or something like that.
Why do you want to train someone for that?
That's a waste of time, right?
You want them to do that job.
And so with this technology, access to resources,
either in the cloud or on the edge,
this is another very important thing,
how you bring a high-powered compute closer
to where the need is,
it fundamentally changes the way that manufacturers
and other industrial organizations can think about their
workforce, how they hire, you know, what they care about.
-: Can you maybe share what you're seeing
in terms of the adoption of this new technology
from the end user when it comes to training?
-: Yeah, so, training is obviously,
that's where it all starts because training
is a fairly consequence-free environment.
When you are on a manufacturing floor and you're bringing
a headset in, let's say, you've got OSHA issues,
you've got, you know, field of view issues,
you've got low light, loud environments, that sort of thing.
So you do have a lot of adoption there going on.
It also feeds into a lot of the digital twin work
that honestly is unable to be used
unless you have strong network and a strong cloud.
But you have, the bigger opportunity is to really change
the way that people do their jobs versus
how they train, right?
I mean, training, it's what many of our customers
are using it for today,
but the real sort of gold standard,
when you think about, you know, I mean,
there was this news report that came out yesterday
about Meta's new headset that was leaked.
We all know that Apple has been sort of tipping their head,
their hat at doing something
in the XR headset space sometime.
And once that world exists, where the safety glasses
has that capability built into them,
which we're getting closer and that that journey
is accelerating, it'll be ubiquitous.
And people will be using it for...
You won't have a worker on the floor without a network
connected device that has the power that they need
for their particular job.
-: It's gonna be so cool.
I think there's just such a great impact when that happens.
Maybe Ajay, can you talk a little bit
from the manufacturer's perspective
when it comes to adopting these technologies and making
these investments, what are you seeing?
'Cause I think there's definitely a significant investment
to pull this all together.
-: Absolutely. I mean, to Dirck's point, right?
Digital twins is another technology that is being adopted
globally by manufacturers.
And having the ability to abstract what's on the shop floor
and being able to manage it remotely and be able to train
that and then deploy whatever changes to that actual
equipment on the floor didn't exist until now,
or it was super complex.
But now, with the advent of digital twins,
that is something that manufacturers
are continuing to rely on.
The other point that Cameron mentioned around digital
identity, I think the advent of the eSIM and adoption
of eSIM, I mean, we all saw what Apple did in iPhone 14,
that's even more relevant in the context of IoT
and manufacturing and device identity
and being able to provision them remotely, manage them.
So those are the two technologies that we see.
And of course upstream now, once you have all this data
using the IML for analytics and drawing business outcomes
and inferences that have real impact to the productivity
and hence the bottom lines of manufacturers.
-: Absolutely.
So I wanna go back to connectivity and Cameron,
I'm gonna ask you this question, 'cause it actually was one
that was submitted during registration is,
"Why not Wi-Fi?"
-: Yeah, I think, you know, it comes down to, you know,
our ability to use different types of spectrum
helps us segment out different opportunities and slices.
So we're able to use millimeter wave, mid-band, low-band,
we're able to set up scenarios where things work great
inside the factory.
You roll out into the shipping area
outside the factory, it still works great.
You need to go to an offsite finishing facility
with a third party, it still works great.
So our ability to provide that connectivity in the factory,
outside the factory, at a third party location, is critical.
And then, you know, as we mentioned before,
identity, capacity, and then also being able to couple it
with network slicing technology,
which allows us to really bridge the gap between
the manufacturing shop floor and the cloud.
So Dirck was, before we came on stage,
he was telling us about a scenario where, you know,
there are very high fidelity CAD drawings
that need to be accessed.
And to be able to manipulate those drawings,
you need to have a high capacity GPU computer.
You're not necessarily gonna have access
to that on the floor.
But with a 5G connectivity and a slice dedicated
to accessing GPU's and, for example, the AWS cloud,
you can manipulate that drawing.
You can, you know, drill around, spin it,
and really dive into it.
And these different slices can be provided
to different parties on the manufacturing floor,
depending on their need to see it.
So we can bring, you know, the power
of the cloud into the manufacturing facility,
and we can bring it at a low latency
with really infinite capacity.
-: Okay, so yeah.
So many opportunities where it's safety, training,
and just saving time is gonna significantly reduce the cost.
-: Yeah. There's a lot of, there's, you know, it's a,
as I mentioned before, it's a very complex environment
on the manufacturing floor.
And just being able to enable these things,
this access to compute in real time,
just solves so many problems.
You know, trying to be able to get IT infrastructure
onto a shop floor, very challenging,
especially with so many parties involved.
-: Absolutely. Yeah.
So speaking of that, parties involved,
and talking about ecosystem,
when we talk about 5G manufacturing,
I'd love to hear from your perspective,
who's in this ecosystem?
I've heard a little bit about cloud, the workers,
the manufacturers, but who do you see coming together
in this ecosystem to make all this work?
-: Yeah, I mean, well, from our perspective, again,
we're very much at the application layer, right?
So we are, our application has to have a solid network,
has to have 5G in order to reach the end customer.
I mean, we're doing some stuff with
the Department of Defense that they're
doing around testing 5G on military bases.
These are tens of hundreds of square miles.
And you have a maintenance worker working on an aircraft
out there on the, you know, on the tarmac.
And they have an application, they have a headset,
they need connectivity, some of that,
maybe it's public/private, you know, 5G.
There's a whole lot of different players
from an application perspective.
There's IoT, there's typically a work order management
system that may be something like, you know,
IBM's Maximo or Salesforce or something that drives that.
That's the system of record, right?
Where the military has all of their maintenance equipment.
And then the output needs to go back into that system.
And, you know, it's a whole lot of different players.
I'm sure Ajay and Cameron have more low level folks
that you can think of that would play a part of that.
-: Absolutely, and you know, from looking at the ecosystem,
and if you're considering from just a manufacturing
perspective, there is a whole set of players
that come in there, but I'd like to also point out,
you know, there's the broader ecosystem,
which starts from the cloud, you know,
looking at ISVs that create applications
that can be deployed all the way to the edge
in the manufacturing.
Then on the network side also, right, having right
RAN vendors, the core vendors, the OSS, BSS vendors,
all of them need to be ready to be able to support
the transformation or transition to 5G.
And then once you go to the network edge
and move away into the near edge or the far edge, again,
there is a whole set of technologies and vendors
that need to be ready to be able to support that.
And we can see that the industry is evolving,
and every day there's progress that's being made.
So it's a very, very exciting time.
And then once you go out to the actual factory floor,
there's another host of ISVs and hardware vendors
all the way down to, you know, the folks
that make the robots, the cameras.
And if you go down further, the modules that enable
some of these equipment that currently may not have 5G
and be able to transform brownfield equipment
to connect to 5G.
And then all the way down to the chip sets where you need
to have core technology enabled in the chipset itself,
be able to seamlessly connect all the way from the device
to the cloud and everything in between.
So holistically, I think the entire ecosystem
needs to be ready, and we believe it is,
and more players are coming onboard every day.
-: Cameron, do you have anything to add to that?
-: I don't wanna get myself in trouble by mentioning
any specific names, but yeah.
You know, we're heavily engaged in several different
verticals, you know, across self-driving, manufacturing,
you know, petroleum, all these different areas.
It's very, you know, the common theme though,
seems to be connectivity, which is really table stakes
that T-Mobile knows well from how we run
our national network, but also latency.
So we see a lot of what customers come to us with
is requirements around latency.
How can I get latency down?
And so we're very tuned into how to address those problems,
how to have as much capabilities local in the facility
such that, you know, we can really meet
those diverse needs in the facility.
-: If you're talking, just to add to that,
if you're talking about latency, let's say that you have
a system and you're in an industrial environment,
you have someone out there in real-time trying to fix
something, working on something, connecting with someone,
either back at headquarters or possibly
on the other side of the world, right?
Latency is everything, right?
You have to address that.
-: And there's so many hops.
-: Exactly.
-: To get from here on the other side of the world.
-: Right. Right.
Absolutely.
Okay, audience, I'm gonna turn over to you in just a minute.
I have one more question, so get your questions ready.
So we talked about latency, but what are some of the other
challenges that we face right now.
-: In the industrial environment in general?
-: Yes. -: Well, I mean...
One of the biggest drivers of our business specifically
is that you have this sort of last great generation
of highly trained workers that went through the apprentice
program, you know, after they got out of the military
or whatever, and they're retiring
in major numbers right now.
So you've got 10% of these highly skilled workers retiring,
and you have to find a way to capture their knowledge
before they're out the door,
because the second that they're out the door,
they're just not coming back.
And so tools that make it easier for you to capture
the knowledge of these folks and deploy it
in a way that these younger workers who are digital natives,
you know, they understand this technology
and are comfortable with this technology,
even if they're not, you know...
Across the board, it doesn't matter if there's a high school
educated person or a PhD, they've all grown up
with a device, you know, at their side
from their entire life.
And these folks are very comfortable with this.
And so reaching these people through an application,
again, the type of which we make,
there's plenty of people that do that.
That can directly fill in that sort of skills gap
that is talked about, you know, across the board.
And I'll say one more thing is that this,
our technology specifically that's enabled through
this entire ecosystem, as opposed to robotics,
this is not a replacement technology.
This is an extension of the working life technology
because, let's say that you have an expert who's tired
of working on the factory floor,
they can be the remote expert.
And it's an enhancement technology because you can have
newer people get up to speed faster, do more things
with less training, right?
And so, again, this ecosystem,
this entire ecosystem up here on this stage
is representative of how you deliver these solutions
to industries that are really in need.
You think about people that are talking about
how they can't find people to work, right?
This is one way that you do that.
Sorry for the long answer.
-: No, that's great. That's great.
So I think also too, maybe in terms of the challenge
of implementing your solution, so is it not having enough
compute, connectivity, the devices, what are you seeing?
-: I mean, it's all of that.
I mean, you have to, you know, it's like,
I was using the analogy upstairs,
like if you have a pot this big,
the plant can only get this high, right?
You have to make the pot bigger.
And so in order for these applications to really grow,
and that pot getting bigger is, you know, edge compute.
It's solid network.
All the security stuff that you mentioned.
It's cloud.
So it's, I mean, it is, we're starting with very specific
applications, but for this to reach its real potential,
it's devices, it's network, it's cloud, it's edge.
And applications of course.
-: (laughs) Yes.
Ajay, anything to add to that?
-: Yeah, I think one of the issues that we are seeing
across the board, and it's an industry-wide issue,
is around supply chain and availability of hardware.
Especially with the crisis that happen, you know,
after the COVID-19 crisis,
there have been supply chain challenges that are preventing
adoption because devices are not available.
So that's one.
The other thing is also awareness, right?
Being around 5G and what's available, what's not available.
It's you know, as an industry, I think there needs to be
a more awareness building as to what exactly
can 5G do for you, especially
in the manufacturing segment, for example.
Because it's not just about the next G right?
It's not just about high throughput and low latency.
I think the entire solution itself is quite transformational
and the entire ecosystem and the products and services
that come with it.
Then, of course, there is a question of pricing
which would solve itself in terms of device pricing
and hardware pricing will, over time,
as we know in the electronics industry,
will adjust itself and be much more affordable.
So I think all those things need to come together.
They're getting there.
But the supply chain issues have caused
a little bit of delay in the whole ecosystem.
-: Yeah, very much related to that is time to market.
A lot of our customers come to us, you know,
talking about how can we solve time to market?
How can we bridge the gap between, you know, our developers,
which are doing continuous integration,
continuous development, but I have a manufacturing,
you know, environment that moves at a very slow pace, right?
So how can I do all this innovation in the cloud
and in software and marry that to the real-world constraints
of what's happening inside the manufacturing floor.
So being able to have a 5G network there,
being able to use different types of spectrum and being able
to use 5G slicing to say, okay, you need, you know,
120 GPUs to do this task.
Okay, here's your slice that that gets you to AWS.
You need to access a Cosmos database in Azure.
Here's your Azure slice that gets you to that.
You need to support this vendor with internet access.
Here's a 5G slice that gets you to that.
So being able to dynamically deploy different slices
with different types of network connectivity
for different use cases, all of which are isolated,
being able to bring that in real-time,
such that you can unblock, you know,
what does it take to get a server installed?
You know, how do you get around your supply chain issues?
Well, we can solve that with the cloud
and we can bring the cloud closer
to the manufacturing floor with 5G.
-: Great. All right.
Audience, do you guys have any questions?
Yes, please step, we got two mics.
You just wanna walk up, speak into the mic.
-: [Audience Member 1] Hello? Is it working?
-: Yes, we can hear you.
-: Yeah, so a lot of what I see is around challenges
with complexity with IoT, and you talked about bringing it
all together, you know, connectivity applications
and devices.
So what are we doing to kind of help developers
in the ecosystem come together to build solutions,
innovate at scale, and kind of accelerate
the building of these applications
that we need in manufacturing?
-: I think, you know, one of the things is, you know,
our customers come to us with
very heterogeneous needs, right?
So, some of 'em are Azure Shop, some's a Google Cloud shop,
some of 'em are running, you know,
bespoke solutions on prem.
-: [Audience Member 1] Or AWS.
-: Hmm? I'm sorry.
Okay, so being able to meet the customers where they're at,
I think is a key ability to unlock their problems
versus saying, oh, we're just partnering with one
cloud provider, you know, we're able to facilitate
your existing development environment without, you know,
enforcing new requirements back onto the developers.
-: I mean, well, my observation,
obviously we're not a developer tool platform.
We're a sort of a no-code, low-code platform, right?
But like I look at what T-Mobile has done,
and you're sitting in a facility designed for that.
I look at AWS and I look at the way the AWS is supporting
the developer ecosystem with, you know,
credits and stuff like that for compute.
I mean, that's like, we've taken...
We're a result of the 5G Open Innovation Lab,
which T-Mobile was the very first investor,
I think I see one of my classmates over there.
And you know, we went into the 5G lab like in April of 2000,
which was just a crazy weird time to be in the software
business, in any business.
But for our business had its own challenges.
And, you know, as a small developer,
we've been incredibly well supported by, you know,
T-Mobile and AWS.
-: And one of the other ways to look at it is, and you know,
going back to what AWS is doing and and others as well,
is to remove the complexity in the entire system.
And looking at helping developers whether you are
a module maker or a device maker,
and abstracting some of the complexity by taking advantage
of some of the services that we have in the cloud,
that can help accelerate the development cycle.
And then on the adoption side as well,
there are many other things that we can do,
such as working with ISVs who are able to, again,
bridge that gap between taking a really complex problem
and breaking it down into some undifferentiated services
from the cloud providers and then bolting them on and making
it easier for the ISVs, for example,
to focus on what they're doing.
I mean, and one of the best examples is if you look
at what happened in the smartphone ecosystem
10 plus years ago where iOS and Android
were able to take away all the complexity that was
in the OS stack and the smartphone.
And that resulted in this massive ecosystem of ISVs,
and even high school kids who could launch
a million dollar app because all the complexity went away.
And then being able to monetize it through the app store
and in our case, the AWS marketplace, those are the,
some of the mechanisms we need to take from the past.
And by the way, we are already doing that in this decade.
And that will help accelerate adoption as well.
-: Thank you. -: Thanks.
-: To the gentleman's question about what is happening
to help the developers.
I just wanted to add a plug to T-Mobile,
what T-Mobile's doing.
So T-Mobile has a DevEdge platform that we are building
and launching, and some of it is around IoT as well.
So hopefully going forward, just like how Cameron
was saying, the idea that DevEdge is doing is to take
the solutions where the developers are,
be it AWS or Azure or GCP or anything else.
I just wanna add my plug there. (laughs)
I work on DevEdge as one of my platforms.
The question that I have is,
you all talked about some of the key problems
that around latency or high throughput
that you're able to solve with 5G, right?
And it seems like it is not the public 5G
that will solve that, some of these problems.
As you tune some of this with slicing
or any other parameters, you know,
the technical solutions will come along the way,
but do you also see work coming along the way
in terms of solving the net neutrality problem
so that by the time the technical solutions
come into place, you don't then start to see hindrances
around FCC start talking about
net neutrality and other concerns?
-: Well, I think net neutrality applies towards,
you know, internet access.
So a lot of what we see in these scenarios is
it's a private network, right?
So it's a private network, private license spectrum.
So, you know, those things don't necessarily
come in into play.
But broadly speaking, I think our task and our approach
is that we wanna provide as much capacity
as possible to exceed what is required, right?
So ultimately, you know,
how does latency accrue in a network?
Well, one of the major ways it accrues
is by being heavily loaded.
So if you have, you know, too much load for a given network
build, that's where latency can happen, right?
So if you go into like a sports stadium
or somewhere like that, and you have a hundred thousand
people all in one area, it becomes a real challenge
to keep that load managed.
But, you know, that is something that we work on.
That's something that we do.
And certainly in a manufacturing space and IoT space,
we have a high degree of control,
and we have a lot of tools that we can use in terms of,
you know, more radios, more spectrum, accessing, you know,
both license and unlicensed spectrum and bringing that whole
toolkit available so that we have, you know,
the capacity to meet all the needs.
So I think, you know, specifically on latency,
you know, the solution, you know,
our first solution is always more capacity.
The second solution is, okay,
you can start using advanced schedulers and QoS
and things of this nature, but by the time
you're doing that, you know, now you have to create
trade-offs, right?
When you're doing QoS, you know, someone's high priority
and someone's low priority.
You know, we always try to design so that, you know,
we can service everybody at a very high level.
But then we fall back and we have those QoS
to make sure that those most critical,
mission critical applications get through first.
-: I see. So then just as an extension to that though,
if you are talking about dedicated spectrum and all that,
then the cost to a manufacturer presumably are higher?
And the same time, if you're talking about setting up
radios, etc. then the setup time is higher, right?
There's a-
-: Yeah, I think as, as you get more complex solutions,
you know, more complex radios, you know,
I think the cost will go up.
And then it's not even just the spectrum,
but it's also the number of radios, right?
If you can create more radios in a small,
in a larger space, you know, in each one has a lower
wattage, they have a lower output, you know,
you can really get that density so that you can get
a lot more spectrum.
So I'm not a radio engineer, but I've seen radio engineers
and I've talked to a lot of radio engineers
and this is what I think it usually comes down to is,
more spectrum, more radios, lower wattage.
-: Got it. Got it.
So how about others?
Any net neutrality changes that you are going along the way
to support some of these manufacturing changes?
Or is it same as before?
Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
Erin: All right. Wanna go over here? Sure.
-: Great point on latency.
As the kids come up, you're off handing it from the older
generation to the younger.
I'm gonna ask a question for each one that fits
into the whole ecosystem.
One, how do you allow for it to not just be a hub-and-spoke
architecture, and how do you allow for AI and ML
to train upon the training you started with
versus the training that they need.
Two, how do you instigate something that would be
peer-to-peer versus hub-and-spoke, like said,
would you use Greengrass, Snowball, something else?
And then the last question I get from manufacturing
companies is, why do we go with 5G
versus CSPAN in this whole ecosystem?
Erin: Excellent. All right.
-: Yeah, so I mean, as far as programming and training
systems, I mean, first of all,
you need to start where, you need to meet the workers where
they are and when they are, right?
Training a system, an AI system, you know,
you have to show multiple uses of doing it correctly,
that sort of thing.
So I mean, where this industry, from our perspective,
the XR workforce enablement industry,
it's very young and it's very new.
And so the first thing that you have to do
is you have to start creating content.
And you do that with video, you do that with photo
and audio and, and all sorts things.
In some cases you do it with models.
Yes, go ahead.
-: Can I jump in real quick.
Are you going to do that yourself?
-: No, I mean-
-: Or will you allow the dev ecosystem
do that on the fly as well, and also monetize it.
-: Yeah, no, no, this is a great, great question.
I mean, this solution, what we are doing,
this solution driving digital transformation
for industrial work is sort of an extension of ERP, right?
And how does the ERP ecosystem look right now?
Well, there's a lot of people that understand how to deploy
this stuff themselves, but then you have a whole vast
network of SIs, you know, the Deloittes, and Accentures,
and Booz Allens the world, that sort of thing,
who can do that for you.
And depending on where you're at in that maturity
of your deployment of this solution,
you might do it yourself.
You might, if you're just doing a pilot,
you probably just wanna mess around
with the technology, that sort of thing.
But when you start to get serious about it,
especially if you're a larger company,
you have to deal with things like security, and policy,
and SOC 2 compliance, and all this stuff.
And so, you know, eventually you're going to want to get
some help to do that.
But again, I'll go back to sort of the,
let's talk about an office suite of applications, right?
I can just go put my credit card in and buy an office suite
and start writing documents and spreadsheets and everything.
But if I'm PACCAR, you know,
I have to deal with active directory and I have to deal with
all these other onboarding things.
So this is why, from our perspective,
we actually took a very much of a partner-first approach
to building our business.
So we want to focus exclusively on the software platform
and work with other partners, you know,
both T-Mobile and AWS being two specific types of partners.
We also have device partners and SI partners.
And this becomes, again, the new ecosystem to deliver
this digital transformation to our customers.
So some of our customers manage the stuff in house,
especially the more sophisticated ones,
the ones that actually really know this,
because there's certain customers that know this stuff
better than the SIs right now,
because that's how new it is, right?
But we have worked with a lot of the SIs again,
like Booz Allen Hamilton being a very strong partner of ours
who's done a lot of these implementations
in Department of Defense, who by the way,
is really leaning into this technology hard.
Erin: All right, next question.
-: Sure, so if I were to, if I understood
your question correctly, in the context of latency,
you were asked about hub and spoke model versus,
you know, how do we deploy that?
So the way to look at how AWS is enabling low latency
and in general, 5G,
the focus is on developing an application
that's designed to run in the cloud and be able to deploy it
either in an availability zone in the cloud
or move it to the network edge, whether it's a wavelength
or an outpost.
Or go further into the, far into the edge onsite,
with Snowball Edge, for example.
And now the latency that you get from from running
the same application at different instance
is gonna be quite different.
And that's how we address that.
And then on the device side itself,
we have multiple technologies.
So if you're a chip set maker or or module maker,
then we have FreeRTOS, which will enable you to connect
those devices directly to the cloud.
Or if you want to go one step above,
where you have devices that run Greengrass.
So those are pre-provisioned and will connect
to our cloud directly.
So that's how we look at this,
and it's not exactly an hub-and-spoke model
when you talk about the cloud, 'cause there are different
latency parameters that come into play
depending on where you launch your application,
where you're running it, and also on the device side,
which type of devices you're trying to connect
using the different technologies that we have available.
-: So, you know, talking about the peer-to-peer as well,
and just getting that latency down is,
it was funny, as we were backstage talking with Erin,
and she said she's been with T-Mobile for 22 years.
And I was like, oh my god,
I usually walk into a room, I tell people,
oh, I've been here for 16 years and they're all,
you know, oh wow, you old timer.
I'm just like, no, now I feel like a short timer.
But my anecdote for that though is when I first came to work
at T-Mobile in 2005, all of our traffic from the entire
nation came to Seattle and Atlanta.
We took every bit of traffic to Seattle and Atlanta.
And when I first got here at T-Mobile, I was like,
but everybody lives in New York and LA so, I dunno,
it didn't make sense.
But anyways, I went on a mission to fix that,
and you know, we've become much, much more
distributed over time.
So, you know, we terminate traffic in, you know,
every major city in the United States and more,
so, you know, we're very proud.
I believe we are the most distributed
national cell carrier in the United States.
And we take that to the next level now in the IoT
and the manufacturing space by being able to terminate
those connections within a facility, right?
So instead of, you know, we have the capability now
with our 5G solutions to have the mobile devices
in a manufacturing facility, complete application
transactions, interact with compute within that facility
such that, you know, we use 5G technologies,
but it actually never leaves the facility.
We also have the ability to expand that out to the cloud,
use the public cloud.
And something we've been tracking very closely is, you know,
with our partners like AWS, you didn't mention local zones,
which is one of our favorite technologies at T-Mobile
because we are able to directly connect our network
with their network now in 20,
I think it's up over 20 cities now.
So usually people think about AWS East, AWS West,
but there's now AWS in Denver and Chicago and Miami
and all these cities are, you know, you can deploy instances
in all these different cities.
And not only that, but when you're, you know,
we set up the T-Mobile network so that if you're in Miami,
you're using your phone in Miami and you deploy
your application in Miami, it goes directly to Miami.
Which is very different than, you know, when I first came
to T-Mobile and all the traffic went to Atlanta and Seattle.
But it's also different than how the cloud
was initially developed.
Whereas, you know, you have AWS East and AWS West.
Now there's many AWSs, you know,
distributed across the country.
There's many ways T-Mobile breaks out network traffic
across the country.
And that even drills down into a single facility
so that we can get that latency down,
we can enable the peer-to-peer communication between devices
within a facility, but also within a metro area.
-: [Audience Member 2] Thank you.
-: Thank you. All right, next question.
-: Thanks. Question for Cameron.
So I think the digital SIM identity-based authentication
is really compelling.
What tools does T-Mobile have or might be in the pipeline
to help business customers to manage those identities?
-: I'm not an expert in that area. (laughs)
But I am aware that we are able to, you know,
slice and dice different roles, different accounts
and different entitlements.
So we can entitle people to different types of network
access based on their identity.
So, you know, for example, if you are in a manufacturing
facility and you know, you have 20 different partners,
each one of those partners can have a different policy
tied to their SIM.
So your identity is tied to your role, and then your role
is entitled to certain types of network access.
So some folks may get internet access,
some people may get access to Amazon VPC
with specific resources.
Some might get access to, you know, Taqtile's resources.
So, you know, those are certainly all capabilities
that we have today.
And then, you know, we are looking to partner with customers
and other partners to develop more features.
So this is, I wouldn't say that, you know,
T-Mobile maketh and you taketh, that's not the case.
It's more like, let's partner together,
see what the problems are and then work through 'em.
'Cause I think we have a lot of building blocks
that can be put together to meet a diverse set of needs.
-: Great. Thanks.
-: Hello.
My question is on how does 5G and IoT in the manufacturing
space leveraged to enhance employee safety?
And how would you see it being used going forward
with technology that exists today, from the identity SIMs,
tracking people, to existing camera systems,
to the augmented reality technology that you're using today?
I'm curious to know your thoughts.
-: I mean, yeah, this is a huge part.
I mean, every one of our customers in the industrial setting
specifically, you walk in the door and there's a sign above
the door that says, it's been 50 days since our last
accident, let's stay safe out there.
So safety is the number one thing, right?
And so, you know, when you have an overworked workforce,
if you have a lot of retirement of older or skilled workers
and you don't have enough people to come in
and you need to have people do jobs that they weren't
specifically trained for on industrial equipment, right?
That could hurt you or kill you?
I mean, like, these are...
Certainly you're not just gonna put someone in this
environment, especially if...
There's a lot of regulation around, you know,
who can do what, right?
You're not gonna pull this person off the street
and have 'em fix a jet engine on the tarmac, right?
But there's enough of these jobs out there
that you can imagine going into a facility and, you know,
operating a machine that you have to hit some buttons
and pull some levers on.
It needs to be done in the appropriate, you know,
in the appropriate order, that sort of thing.
But this is all about safety.
And it's not just about a headset as well.
It's a lot of different sorts of sensors.
There's all sorts of network connected sensors
that are out there that make the workplace more safe.
But you have to be able to support those sensors
from a density perspective and a latency
and an uptime perspective, right?
I mean, if you're gonna turn this wireless network loose,
right, it has to have a certain level of reliability.
And, but you know, given the tools that are out there
right now, you can drastically improve safety
in any industrial environment, given enough thought.
-: Speaking of IoT and worker safety,
so the obvious thing is now there's gonna be variables
that you can actually track worker movement as such,
but also think about everything else that the worker
is interacting with as they do their jobs
as well as they move inside the facility.
And there are other, you know, autonomous vehicles that,
you know, robots and other things that are also moving,
and being able to take a holistic view of all the different
sensors and all the inputs that are coming in,
whether it's from cameras monitoring the environment,
whether it's from vehicles that are moving inside
a facility, all sorts of environmental sensors,
even presence detection using Wi-Fi and other technologies.
Also having equipment, you know, where they have
a field of motion, making sure that they have that safety
zone created around them using both visual
and non-visual technologies.
And taking all that data and putting it in what we call
an IoT data lake for the customer,
and being able to extract inferences from that,
and be able to look at repeatable behavior or anomalies ,
and be able to do predictions as well as emergency alerts,
and be able to mobilize the right forces, you know,
for whatever, you know, worker incidents,
and preventing those incidents,
That's where the 5G capabilities come into play
because of the larger bandwidth that you have,
the amount of data that you can collect,
the lower latency that 5G brings to the market.
And again, the ability to collate all this information,
and be able to analyze it in real time, to draw inferences,
and be able to alert people, and of course variable
technologies for monitoring.
So a combination of all that is gonna be critical
to improving worker safety in a manufacturing facility.
-: Yeah, and I think, you know, just to,
those are all, all great ones.
The only other one I have is the most basic one,
which is connectivity.
If you're in a mining operation, or a port, or some other
remote location, it doesn't necessarily have great
network coverage.
You know, what do you do in an emergency
when you have a heart attack or something like this?
Can you call 911, you know, once you have this
type of facility available, okay now, you know,
no matter where you are in this pit mine or this huge port,
you know, behind a stack of containers,
you'll have connectivity, so you'll be able to reach out,
get emergency services.
Erin: Great. Thank you.
-: Hi. -: Hi.
I have a, I operate a SaaS that lives on AWS,
and one of the pieces that we need to track
is traceability of cold chain.
And a lot of obstacles are in that tracking of temperature
and making sure different kinds of perishables maintain
from farm to actual where they get delivered.
Now with the new Starlink spectrum, T-Mobile spectrum
being utilized to have better coverage,
is there any plans on the T-Mobile side to allow,
like AWS to have access and be able to track
that connectivity for IoT devices that might be, you know,
as a truck going down the road,
be able to get that information so we can have that
traceability on those kinds of products?
-: Still very early days, but the answer is yes.
I think, you know, our goal is to be able to, you know,
there's a set of priorities out there
that we're working towards right now.
You know, first goal of course
is gonna be those emergency services.
So that's front and center.
That's the use case that we wanna enable first
is being able to say, you know,
can you access emergency services?
Once we get the emergency services piece set up,
then you know, the stings start to open up in terms of,
you know, can we enable more of these applications?
And I think IoT is a perfect example of what we could do
with something like Starlink, because it's not gonna be
bandwidth intensive, but it is going to be
connectivity intensive.
So I, you know, I think that we're,
it's definitely something that is front and center
once we get through that initial mission.
-: Yeah, and that packet isn't really about latency,
It's about just notification.
-: Where is it?
Where was it 15 minutes ago?
-: What was the temperature?
Is it in range, you know, at all times.
Okay, cool.
-: And if I may comment, you know,
without getting into Starlink and what T-Mobile
is obviously I can't speak for T-Mobile, but as an industry,
I think what's foundational in this technologies is the fact
that 3GPP Release 17 for NTN, non-terrestrial networks
enables you to use your existing NB-IoT or Caram devices
without making any changes to them and be able to connect
directly to NTN networks, right?
Non-terrestrial networks with satellites,
and having a band that is assigned to it,
bringing that under the 3GPP umbrella,
we believe is transformational.
And for outdoor applications,
especially in the cold chain space and many others,
being able to take advantage of that technology
and then being able to send a message.
And then if you go even one layer deeper,
looking at network APIs from our CSP customer partners
and using them to do additional geolocation capabilities.
You know, especially if you're doing cold chain,
battery life is a huge concern.
Now, creating a device without GPS and being able
to take advantage of some of the network APIs
like GMLC or or SMLC, those,
and then in the future, looking at even more fine, you know,
precision geolocation using RTK for example,
we believe taking advantage of those network APIs
along with the 3GPP Release 17 NTN capabilities,
that could completely transform the whole cold chain
business and many other applications
including CV and AV type applications.
So it's really exciting what's happening out there.
-: [Audience Member 3] Thank you.
-: Thank you. All right, any last questions?
Oh, we'll do one more.
-: Just a quick manufacturing related question.
I know 5G IoTt for manufacturers early,
but what are some of the measures of improvement
that you're seeing, whether it's defect reduction,
quality improvements, reduce downtime or maintenance?
Are there some common ones that you're seeing from your
manufacturing clients?
-: Yeah, you mentioned 'em.
I mean, in some cases complete elimination of errors,
really incredible enhancements in speed to training.
And again, like the idea of, in some use cases,
training is optional, right?
If you can follow along, if even if you're using an iPad,
if you have an iPad and you have a well designed application
that sort of uses the augmented reality capabilities
through an application like ours where it tells you
what button to hit, what lever to pull, that sort of thing,
you can have someone do rounds, do an inspection
if they've never been in this facility before, right?
You know, we had the...
This isn't exactly a manufacturing use case,
but it is a use case of doing a maintenance procedure
with the US Air Force.
They had a side-by-side comparison between workers
using a standard tech order, a TO process,
versus a TO process authored in manifest.
And in 92% of the cases, with the standard TO process,
there were an errors or there was
an inability to complete it.
And with manifest there was zero and everyone
was able to complete it.
This is a publicly published report, so it's...
All of the sort of KPIs, they're everywhere.
It's speed, it's safety, it's performance,
it's a reduction of training.
It's also that sort of feedback that you get
from when someone is using an application,
if you're using it to do continuous improvement,
how you drive that through the application
and through the capture and understanding of processes
that there's been no tool to capture that,
measure it, and improve upon it in the past.
And tools like ours are enabling that at this point.
-: Yeah, I mean some of the other metrics, you know,
when you talk about training also, not just people,
but training robots and other equipment using the ML models
and being able to reduce that time to deployment.
That's a critical metric in the industry
that people are looking at.
You know, overall efficiency of the entire operation,
being able to have inferences and reduce downtime
because of that analytics and AI/ML capabilities,
those are critical.
Worker safety, we just talked about that,
that's very critical.
Looking at uptime for all equipment in general,
that's also critical.
And then, speaking of errors, being able to use cameras
and other equipment to be able to detect flaws
or defects in line and being able to pull that piece
of whatever you're manufacturing out of the line.
And all those things are very, very important.
And those are some of the KPIs that we are seeing
from our manufacturing customers who starting to adopt 5G,
and the cloud, and being able to use IML
and other technologies and IoT.
-: Thank you, it sounds like a great platform
to capture the aging workforce's, tribal knowledge,
and then keep it into the cloud or train some IL/ML model.
So it's great.
-: Thank you. Great question.
All right, so I have one last question for you guys.
I always ask this question.
So we have an incredible audience here.
They're obviously our 5G ecosystem
and passionate about innovation.
What's your call to action to them?
What's your advice and guidance to help
accelerate these solutions for IoT manufacturing?
Cameron, you wanna start?
-: Yeah, I think it's kind of a,
as I was alluding to earlier, you know,
we are very open and flexible in terms of our platform
and our capabilities.
So certainly engage T-Mobile with what the use cases are,
what's the problem space.
And you know, I think you'll be surprised with
the capabilities and creativity that we can bring to it.
-: And from an AWS perspective,
I think one of the key messages I'd like to deliver
is look at what we've developed over the years
and then how our customers in the manufacturing industry
are utilizing both cloud capabilities as well as 5G
capabilities from T-Mobile, and being able to marry them
and take advantage of that, and help you transform
your business from a cost perspective, safety perspective,
and a lot of other KPIs that we talked.
I think that's the key and take advantage of.
There's a lot of information out there on our website
as well as I'm sure T-Mobile has that as well.
That would be my call to action.
-: So, I mean, from our perspective, you know,
it's very easy to make difficult technology.
It's very difficult to make easy technology, right?
And where this industry has come over the last...
I mean XR, augmented virtual reality technology,
it's actually been around for decades.
But we're getting to the point now where all of the hard
work has led to much, much easier to use applications
that require very little or no programming,
very little or no technical acumen,
and can be accessed very inexpensively and very quickly.
And the, you know, the idea is is that,
I mean you bring up the word ERP and everyone thinks,
like I was talking about earlier about like,
the large companies that are doing, you know,
multimillion dollar SI sort of based rollouts.
Well that's not where you start.
You start with technology.
It's actually really inexpensive and accessible today.
And you can build upon that, and iterate on it,
and find out what your use cases are,
and find out where this is applicable in your environment,
because this stuff is coming and it's coming fast.
And like, if you are not dabbling in this area right now,
you know, your competition most likely is.
And I think that we're gonna wake up one day
and all of a sudden everyone's gonna have
some play in this space.
And if you're not thinking about it now,
you'll be behind the eight ball.
I mean that's, our future-looking customers are jumping in
with both feet at this point.
-: Yeah, good point.
All right, so I'm gonna answer this question as well
and give a plug, and it's also answering the first question
from our audience.
Innovate with us.
So that is the goal of the 5G Hub.
We have this awesome facility,
we have all the technology, and we have the experts
of T-Mobile's technology organization here to support you.
So if you have an innovation, a project,
a 5G solution, bring it here.
You can submit, again on our website techexperience.com,
innovate with us and we look forward to partnering with you.
All right, and then I do also wanna give a plug
that actually next week on September 20th we are hosting
the Washington IoT Council here.
It's an all day session with panels, speakers,
and there are still spots.
So if you're interested, we've had some great discussions
on IoT but there's so much more to have.
So if you're able to join us, please go ahead
and register for September 20th.
And then we are not done with our
5G Summer Speaker Series session,
we're gonna continue into October.
And October 4th we have 5G for AR and VR.
So very excited for that topic.
Obviously some great examples of AR
when we talked about manufacturing today,
but there are so many more applications and solutions
and verticals that AR and VR can enhance.
So hopefully you can join us. Again October 4th.
You can register on our site, techexperience.com.
And let's go ahead and give a round of applause
to our panelists.
Thank you, you guys. (audience applauds)
Amazing great questions from our audience.
Thank you everybody.
And good news, the bar is still open.
We still have some food,
so please stick around for some networking.
We also have a tactile demo.
I believe it's right back there. Is that right, Salar?
Right over there. So be sure to check that out.
And again, have a great evening. Thank you.
(audience applauds)