Seamlessly Blending Cellular and Satellite Networks for Remote IoT Devices (with Tarun Gupta and Kenta Yasukawa)

We discuss how to increase access for remote IoT devices using satellite as primary or secondary connectivity with the same radio infrastructure. Guests Tarun Gupta of Skylo Technologies and Kenta Yasakawa of Soracom explain how recent advancements in satellite standards now enable devices to connect with both cellular and satellite networks seamlessly. The discussion covers the technical aspects, prime use cases, and the significant cost and operational benefits of integrating satellite connectivity into existing IoT networks. The episode highlights how this technology can improve service reliability, particularly in remote or hard-to-reach areas, and offers insights into how developers can future-proof their hardware for blended network environments.

0:00 Deploying Blended Connectivity Using Cellular and Satellite Networks (with Tarun Gupta and Kenta Yasukawa)

00:27 Introduction to Satellite Connectivity for IoT Devices

01:25 Understanding Skylo's Role in Satellite Connectivity

02:12 Technical Insights: Satellite and Cellular Integration

04:34 Building Skylo: Partnerships and Ecosystem

06:11 Soracom's Connectivity Platform and Satellite Integration

09:30 Use Cases and Applications of Satellite Connectivity

13:08 Technical Considerations for Hardware and Certification

16:35 Cost and Efficiency of Satellite Connectivity

24:51 Global Coverage and Future Prospects

29:31 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Ryan C: 0:27

Today on what to expect when you're connecting, we're talking about increasing access for remote IOT devices with satellite as primary or secondary connectivity with the same radio. Tarun Gupta, co-founder at Skylo Technologies, and Kenta Yasakawa, co founder and CTO of Soracom. What we'd like to talk about today is what's changed, how does it increase access, what are the options, and what are prime use cases? Sneak peek, we're also going to talk about how Soracom's connectivity platform services that layers on top of cellular networks equally complement satellite networks. Since it's all going through the same place. My first question, Tarun, I think cellular is an easy thing for people to understand, whether it's 3g, 4g, 5g, it's a tower in the distance that we can see with our eyes and know that technology just like, by experiencing it, that it's getting better, it's improving speeds. But when we talk about satellite, I know that there's, I know that there's different flavors of satellite data on the market. So how do you describe where Skylo fits into this ecosystem and how you're differentiating what you're offering. I don't think most people have that context.

Tarun Gupta: 1:42

Ryan, you're exactly right. When I look at satellite, the thing that really made the difference was about a year and a half ago. Now, the 3GPP, which is the standards governing body. Which helped to promote and it really provides those standards by which your cell phone can connect to a network in the U. S. or network in Europe or network in Asia. They adopted a set of. Standards that help for NTN, non terrestrial networks or satellite. So they brought that cellular technology, the cellular communication infrastructure to the satellite realm. And what that did is allows the same chip sets, the same hardware, the same devices to connect over satellite, just like they connect over cellular with the basically the same volumes that the cellular industry is using today. And by having that same connectivity, technology. So when I think about like my cell phone when I'm at home, I use WiFi. But when I leave home, I'm on cellular, and it's transparent to me. This solution provides the exact same opportunity where you can connect to satellites in a geostationary or low Earth orbit type of environment. So whether. The satellite is close to the earth or far away from the earth, it really doesn't matter. Again, it's transparent to the user. It's that providing that connectivity that allows a user or an enterprise to understand that Frankly, they're always covered as long as they have access to the open sky.

Ryan C: 3:03

So help me understand, I, I know I'm not alone in that when we think satellite, we think we have to point a dish at a very specific point in space and it's this big point to point type scenario. But it doesn't sound like that's the case at all if we're using cellular radios, which are kind of pulling in signals from all over the place.

Tarun Gupta: 3:27

Yeah. No, you're exactly right again. So just like your cell phone, you don't need to point your cell phone to point to a specific tower because now the antennas allow for those solutions there. this, this is the same thing again, where your enterprise device doesn't need to point either. We use omni directional antennas. We allow for linear polarized solutions, and this will take advantage of the geostationary footprint that have been in space for years that have a very big aperture. A very big antenna array, 9 to 20 meters, so they are able to pinpoint coverage and really take very, very sensitive signals that from devices that are pointing north, that, that can still connect to these geostationary satellites. So, by leveraging what's out there today in a geostationary environment, you can take advantage of, low capacity, bit rate solutions that don't change a user behavior in terms of those applications.

Ryan C: 4:21

So what does it take to put a Skylo together, I'm curious to know, like, what did you guys need to plan? Do you have, like, space agencies that you're working with? I'm super curious.

Tarun Gupta: 4:34

No, it takes a village to make this thing work. So we actually are working with chipset providers across the entire ecosystem. So we've announced partnerships with people like Qualcomm, with MediaTek, with Sony Altair. We are working with module vendors. So we've announced partnerships with Murata as well as Quacktel and we have others coming out. We have device manufacturers. We work with satellite operators. We work with oss vss. We have sim partners. We had to get our own plm plmn id I mean, we're basically a cellular operator So all the piece parts that the ecosystem has pulled together for years We had to do exactly the same thing And when we think about the other part which is go to market that's one of the reasons why we're partnered with soracom because Sorcom has a very good marketplace and a very good name and a brand and access to the end consumer, the end users. And so, what we also believe is, you shouldn't have to think about, do I want satellite, do I not want satellite? With a new contract and things, you should be able to leverage your existing partnerships, your existing sim, your existing, relationships to be able to add this new connection, connectivity medium.

Ryan C: 5:38

So Kenta, when I came to the company, it truly was unique in that you're, you don't care about the infrastructure, the towers or the satellites. That's not what you're maintaining. It's that, that core network for connectivity. Talk to me about the experiences of bringing satellite into this business. beast of multi carrier, multi connectivity, or blended network, I guess, support, from a cellular network provider's perspective.

Kenta: 6:11

Yeah, sure. So we are definitely known as a cellular network provider, but at the same time, what we want to achieve is to become a one stop shop platform for customers to connect their IOT devices to cloud environment. What makes us unique is we have built entire cellular core network and network elements on top of AWS cloud and all the devices connected at the environment through different network technology, cellular, like including 2g, 3g, 4g, 5g. We have supported, but in addition to that, we have also added like Sigfox radio and LP1 technology to be able to connect low power devices in a non cellular area. And satellite was definitely one of the things that we really, really wanted to add into our connectivity options. because, the terrestrial network covers where people IOT, you have to deploy devices and connect them in. even if they are in the middle of nowhere or middle of the sea or, somewhere in the mountain. And for that, satellite technology is the key solution. So, we are so excited to be able to, partner with, Skylo and Tarun and the team, and to be able to use their, satellite network, to integrate with ours. And As you said, Ryan, once the device connects through the satellite network, the data comes to the same core that we operate for cellular and LP1. So the data comes in and customers can have a choice to route that to their favorite cloud services, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft. So that's the beauty of the combination of these two companies technology.

Ryan C: 7:57

So I know that Soracom, one of the things that, you're really well known for is the automatic failover of if a signal degrades with whatever you're connected to, it might be a specific carrier that, the device moves or it's installed someplace else, it migrates to the next best signal. So do you see satellite as just one of those other options that if, another cellular carrier isn't available, is that that same underlying technology that allows for it to fail over on its own without a human telling it to fail over?

Kenta: 8:31

Yeah, so, yes, as you said, we support multiple carriers in each country so that we can maximize cellular coverage in each area. and we also support automatic failover if the modem scans another network that we also support, the modem can switch to that network. The. Bi iot 3G PPP NTN is, slightly different in a, in a way that the mode configuration and how the timers are set up. So it may not be, implicit to switch from satellite to satellite. there needs to be awareness from the modem or firmware to switch to satellite. but certainly the beauty of this technology is that you can use the same module and same antenna, to switch from satellite to satellite. so the, as far as, if the modem or firmware recognizes there is no cellular, it can search for the, switch to the satellite mode and fall back to, Skylo satellite network. And again, the data comes to the same core network that we operate.

Tarun Gupta: 9:29

Yeah, it

Ryan C: 9:30

types of, I was going to ask, what types of applications does this open up knowing that satellite covers like the 85 percent of the globe that cellular does not?

Tarun Gupta: 9:43

It's a great question. I think that, this opens up a lot of different, not just geographies, but also use cases. So think about standard tracking, for example, so tracking a truck or tracking, any ship or tracking those types of, other types of devices, you can measure brand new geographies that are there. But also like, it's interesting, I'm getting requests for people to track things like cows. There are a billion cows on the planet and they want to be tracked because of not just location, but also are they sick? Are they not sick? Are they eating? Well, those things we ran into a company a couple of weeks ago. They obviously will have a cattle tracking system, but from their iPad, they're able to draw a digital fence. So they're not spending money now to build a fence to keep the cattle in their area, but they're saying, hey. We'll put a, we'll make sure we can build a digital fence that if somebody were a coward to leave this boundary, there's an issue, or they'll be able to bring the cow back in just like, your, your people do with their pets today. So, I see a lot of applications that are coming out for tracking for monitoring. We're talking to people to measure. The, how much oil is in a storage tank? How much grain is in a storage tank? we've, I think, NTN to me, we're at 1G when the cellular world is at this 5G going to 6G. So right now, it's that sort of that standard rudimentary, how can we get sort of 50 bytes of data through the system and through the network, but it'll definitely expand and use cases will continue to grow.

Ryan C: 11:09

So we're not talking about pushing video or, doing large amounts of data, but IOT in the, the more traditional low power, small bits and bytes, maybe even like binary languages or protocols, which are traditionally very small.

Tarun Gupta: 11:26

I think there's two things here. One is you're absolutely right for there's not at this time over the Skylo network. It's not video or Internet. We're not trying to compete against the Starlink service where you have to buy another device and do something else and plug it into the wall. These are low power, low cost sensors. So, because of the work that we've done, we've been able to connect devices directly to satellite the size of an apple air tag. So think about that. And we don't require much power at all. So the power additional power we require, it would basically take 4 to 10 milliamp hours for 10 pings to satellite. And what that means in English is you can take something the size of a an air tag type battery, and you can get almost 1000 pings to satellite. So these are things where it's no change in user behavior is Ken to mention. And, can't to mention that. Yeah. the devices will will send traffic to their own. There's the same sore com end point today, but it's also coming from a sore com sim. So there's nothing else. The user has to do and sign up a deal with Skylo or set up a Skylo profile. Any other things. This is a Soracom service and how, the existing Soracom customers and future ones can take advantage of this additional mode of connectivity.

Ryan C: 12:39

I think that's actually a really interesting point. It's something that we talk about at Soracom all the time is. You don't have to go to Verizon, and then AT& T, and then T Mobile, and then Rogers, and then TELUS, and have all these independent relationships. You have one relationship with Soracom. You have one SIM card. I'm hearing that the whole goal here is to just be one more option for coverage, and you work with Soracom and say, yep, I want to make sure I've got the satellite failover. Talk to me about the The process that people that are currently designing hardware that what are the things that they want to make sure that they're paying attention to during the design process right now to future proof themselves to have this option.

Tarun Gupta: 13:24

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've done and we have now, I think, I was corrected this morning, I think we have 87 or 88 patents now on what we're doing here. And we want to make sure that these bands are still, even though they're different frequency bands, we still want to make sure that the bands are still in that hardware. Okay. We want to make sure that the antennas are still a good antenna, so we can still deal with small antennas, but obviously the larger the better, but we want to make sure that there's a good lna in the device. So, the biggest mantra that we have internally is no change in user behavior, but it doesn't mean that your existing device will is guaranteed to work. And we, but we want to make sure that those devices can. Have those satellite use cases built in. So, as an example, if the device is, let's say, doing tracking a truck, but sending a picture every 30 seconds, but over satellite, it might make sense to do track the location tracking every minute or so every 2 minutes. That's fine. But maybe store and forward the pictures until you get onto the cellular network or until you get onto wifi. So, for us, on the hardware side, we do have a, set of requirements that we do for certification, and that goes from the chip set certification to the module and ultimately the device. But realistically, we haven't seen many changes from the hardware side that, would be needed to run onto or work on the Skylo network.

Ryan C: 14:41

That's, that's fascinating. I was just talking to one of our customers who ended up switching out wifi for cellular in they've got a kiosk that dispenses like these phone charging modules. And he mentioned something about the certification process about having two different radio types in the same device. If you had Wi Fi and cellular in the same device, it both changes the certification profile, it can have interference, you're creating different radio types. Do you see the ability to use cellular, it's that same radio, does that both reduce the risk of creating interference and then does it add any additional effort that's needed on the certification side, or is it that you've already worked with the hardware companies?

Tarun Gupta: 15:30

No, I mean, I think you're, you're right on. I mean, the, the ability to use the same radio today is huge because not just does it reduce the overall certification timelines or costs and, and complexity, but what it also does is it allows the same device to go on cellular or satellite. So you don't have to have a 2nd radio. You don't have to have a. A second antenna set. You don't have to have a sort of a, Hey, now do I, how do I think about satellite versus cellular? It's really an and the other part that's there that people haven't really, I think, appreciated yet. Is this eliminates an entire set of skews from your system? So it's 1 less inventory piece to have. It's 1 less set of training. You need to have for your technicians in the field. It's 1 less device. when I go out there and. Okay. Okay, which one do I install? Do I install the cellular one or the satellite one, and which one, you have to have a meter and all those things. You can just deploy one device, and you're pretty much guaranteed to have coverage regardless of where you are.

Ryan C: 16:25

So I know that,

Kenta: 16:27

sim,

Ryan C: 16:28

that Kenta?

Kenta: 16:28

sim, as

Tarun Gupta: 16:30

For one SIM. one SIM. absolutely.

Kenta: 16:32

One set of sims, so yes.

Ryan C: 16:35

So I want to address the, the elephant in the room and that we all know that cellular and satellite have two very different cost profiles. It's just the nature of the level of infrastructure, of how those things are built. But, We, we, we all know in this virtual room, know that Skylo plus Soracom offers something that's truly unique above and beyond just, it's a cellular radio provider that can also do satellite. Kenta, we do a lot of stuff in oil and gas, like with, our friends over at Toku systems. Talk to me about the, the platform capabilities that you see that can bring. The cost of satellite down without actually impacting the level of service that's being provided, leveraging those platform services that you've built on top of Soracon.

Kenta: 17:30

Yeah, sure. Right. So the, for the hardware side, we've emphasized that the customers can use one single hardware and the same, same SIM for accessing both cellular network and satellite network. Thanks to the partnership with Skyloft. That's the, that's the, that's the, connectivity option we are adding, to SolarCom platform. But still the, the customers also need to be aware of the different characteristics in terms of the latency. and cost. So these are the two things the, the application developer, firmware developer have to be aware of. So, when it comes to even, even this app, this applies for cellular network as well. It's compared to like a five, optical fiber or free wifi. Cellular is certainly more expensive and costly and satellite has a different price, range. So the, of course, the, the right architecture would. But the firmware developer should be aware of the cost and optimize the communication link depending on the, area or locations or, radio situations. So, for cellular, we have developed a feature to receive a packet or once small, the data, by using low overhead protocols, which could be unencrypted text based HTTP or MQTT, or it could be, even, TCP UDP raw socket, customers can send data to Solacom Endpoint over secure network that we manage, which could be cellular network or our wire guard VPN, and then we take extract the payload and forward that to, customer specified cloud service. So, we basically call the cloud service API on behalf of the device so the customers can send data by using low bind protocol. And we can authenticate the client by using either SEM or VPN client ID.

Ryan C: 19:20

So, is it possible to eliminate some of that TLS overhead with the authentication and, encryption that would, instead of having to send that over satellite and pay for that, are you saying that we could reduce. The how much data you're sending over satellite, therefore reducing the cost to, to,

Kenta: 19:41

right. So, if the, Exactly. If the use case allows a compliance, of the, allows the, the, the customers can use the, unencrypted protocol, over, cellular network because, because cellular radio is already encrypted and secure, so they can send data to our endpoint and we can take care of the TLS, between us and cloud services. Otherwise, the device have to do TLS negotiation all the time. All the way. And you would, they would have to have a. unique credential set inside the device. And after the authentication, they can finally send a few bytes of data. And next time the device wakes up and sends data, they would have to do the same thing. It's still okay, and it works on cellular if the overhead is okay. But when it comes to satellite network, the latency is much longer. So if you would have to do handshake all the way, it would take time. Sometimes some, some client application may just timeout, it may not work. so it's important to have a feature, like what we do, to receive data by using right overhead protocol and for the data to cloud services. By using that, customers can reduce the cost because you don't have to do all the overhead communication. And also it can reduce the end to end latency because you can just send a single packet and the data is received by the cloud service.

Tarun Gupta: 21:13

just maybe 1 thing to add there to what Kenta was saying completely agree and support what Kenta is saying. I think the other part here is when you look at the, it's important to look at total cost of ownership. Because again, for when I look at oil and gas companies, we are talking to companies today that have a. a meter every sort of every few miles or so or even longer and in areas where they're remote and they don't have satellite or they don't have cellular, they put them, put even sensors even further apart because the cost structure is there. But when you look at the same hardware, the same training and the same sort of modem and those things, and again, a radically reduced cost per byte. What you find is not just is it a lower cost total, but now you can put more sensors. Every, every couple of hundred yards or maybe half a mile or so. And that'll allow for much better visibility and granularity to the end customer so they can make better business decisions.

Ryan C: 22:05

That's an exceptional point that I didn't think of is if you're limiting your, your, let's say it's a leak detection along some pipeline and it's every 10 to 20 miles. All you're doing is when you have a sensor on one, it's saying Pressure is dropping on this end of the sensor. So It's somewhere within this next 10 to 20 miles, between this and the next sensor. So, by improving the fidelity of the data, by filling in those, those data gaps, I'm hearing that it's, it's not only improving the reactivity, but especially if it is a leak. I mean, the resource cost, the environmental impact, the cleanup, the, or potential risk. Of, of things happening when we're talking about like fossil fuels or natural gas. I, I did not think about that. That is actually a really good point.

Tarun Gupta: 22:57

No, I mean, think about also like, okay, if, if your leak is somewhere, somewhere down the line, you're sending the truck, where are you sending the truck, the technician to, that's a, it's a 20 mile run. They've got to drive through and then think about the gallons of resources that are lost every minute. These pipelines aren't, a foot in diameter. They're quite large, right? And so they have many, many, there's a so, so there's a tremendous economic benefit here. That has to be weighed and more data and more information is better than less. So I, I think there's a huge opportunity here and again, that's just energy, but I see every vertical having this benefit.

Ryan C: 23:34

So Kenta, how do you describe Skylo to others?

Kenta: 23:39

Yeah, definitely the revolutionary connectivity option, that, they are providing. And we are, this, the partner who makes the, us to, offer that option to our customers. So, strong partner in technology space. That would be, my take. Yeah,

Ryan C: 23:59

you on this one, but how do you describe Sorakam to the people that you come across?

Tarun Gupta: 24:04

Sorcom is a key partner of ours. They have a tremendous footprint in the IOT space. They continue to work across multiple different verticals. And for us, they're important as a go to market partner. Because I'm not going to go build these relationships with all these oil and gas companies and all these end users. And frankly, for me, like I'm a complementary technology. So therefore my customers and my partners have to be complimentary. I'm not at all trying to take away cellular. I'm not trying to take away Soracom or any of the work that has been done or built to this date. I'm here to support them. So to me, when people come to me and saying, Hey, I'm looking for a, a solution out in, pick country. Hey, who can I talk to? Absolutely. Soracom is the top of the list.

Ryan C: 24:48

People may be wondering as they're listening to this. Are there geographic restraints on where Skylo coverage, in the sky? Like where you've got coverage areas or is it like talk to me about how people would know whether or not they have Skylo coverage.

Tarun Gupta: 25:07

One of the reasons that we work with existing satellite operators is existing, our existing satellite partners have global footprints today. So we work with geostationary, geostationary satellite operators, which means technically that 3 satellites can cover the globe. So we can put our hardware into three different earth stations and have global coverage. Now we're doing that today. We're in three different earth stations today. In fact, I think we're in like seven or eight, but really we're trying to understand where do we turn on global coverage that makes the most business sense. We currently have live coverage in the United States. We have live coverage in Canada. We have coverage across Europe. We have other coverages that we're, and we're bringing up more areas in the first quarter of next year. It's important to understand, though, that we're not going to turn on coverage just just to have coverage. You want to make sure there's a use case. There's a there's a business model, and there's actually customers who want to use the service.

Kenta: 26:01

that is a reason why we, started, we reached out to Tarun and Skyloteam, when it comes to this satellite MTN capability by, added by 3GPP. Because the, if you, if our customers have to wait for the satellite to be launched and deployed, they would have to wait a long time to actually deploy their devices. And also, if the number of available supplies is small in the, LEO type, setup, the devices cannot communicate when they want to communicate. They would have to wait for the satellite to, become available, and then finally they can send data. On the other hand, geostationary satellites that the Skydo network use, they, they are available all the time. So, that is a big advantage of using Skydo network.

Ryan C: 26:53

One of the things I find. Go ahead.

Tarun Gupta: 26:56

just that example, we were talking about at the leaky pipeline, you don't want to have to wait. Now, 1st of all, you only, you already have the gap of 10 to 20 miles in the traditional sense, but you don't have to wait, 6 hours for a new bird to fly by to figure out where that leak was the advantage of the Skylo network is we are our satellite partners as we offer a continuous and contiguous satellite solution. Yeah.

Ryan C: 27:20

I'm like, I would much rather have. Slower, higher latency, like always on connectivity than to have faster, interruptible or, or, or, like non contiguous, because to me, the more I'm hearing about what you and your team are doing Tarun is that it is the ultimate insurance policy for scenarios that require knowing when something's going to happen. And you never know when a tower is going to go down or could be impacted. Knowing that an individual device or a network of devices on a, on a backhaul could flip over at the moment's notice and, pull in the data. I mean, I would much rather have low fidelity data than, than all the data to still know what's happening in these remote locations. I've, I've been watching a number of different, companies as they're talking about, like, even clean energy, and I saw the coolest thing, and it's these massive ocean based solar farms where they're floating. All of the panels and, the further out you get, so you can be in the calmer areas of the sea and you won't get like dashed up on the rocks. I think satellite's the only way you're really going to be able to get connectivity out there. And I think it's fascinating that we've got two people in this virtual room here that are in support of what we think of as the blended networks. It's using the best network for the job, wherever connectivity is trying to happen, and not living with the constraint of, well, only where I can connect.

Tarun Gupta: 28:57

No, that, that's exactly right. And I think, again, the value here of the partnership with Soracom is we're not trying to take away cellular or displace cellular. If cellular's there, use it, of course. And only if cellular's not there will satellite be a primary. One other point you talk about latency, just to give you a sense that our latencies are typically 15 to 25 seconds. So it's not like it's a, an hour latency or a half hour latency that they're, they're, it's quite near real time, frankly.

Ryan C: 29:26

Well, especially when it's just needing to know the pressure and temperature of something. thank you guys for your time, for, being here to talk about cellular. I think this is, is actually news to a lot of people, especially the idea of having one radio, one SIM, one provider, and having the flexibility to now not just have multi carrier cellular, but multi carrier including satellite. what is the term that people would need to be prepared to ask for, when it comes to having a satellite ready, a piece of radio technology, what's the key phrase or keyword

Tarun Gupta: 30:02

we are quite embedded into the entire ecosystem. So you can go to anyone and ask for the Skylo firmware or the Skylo feature set, or just ask for 3GPP release 17. They're almost synonomous. So just say, Hey, do you support 3GPP release 17 and go from there.

Ryan C: 30:19

I think that's like the easiest shorthand ever. So no, it's perfect. Perfect.

Kenta: 30:23

we have actually talked to one of our partners, your partners, to Tarun, Murata. And we got an EVK and we loaded Skylo firmware and it tested the end to end connectivity data comes to a Soracom network through Skylo satellite channel. So that was exciting. until you actually see it, you don't really, believe in it. at least I, when I saw that this specification and what these, what Tarun explained to me, theoretically, at first I didn't believe that, any device with standard cellular antenna can communicate over satellite. But actually, I did it in my hand by using the Murata EBK. The excitement was So significant. So the, I recommend everybody who is interested in this technology, we are, happy to talk about this use cases and we are happy to assist and that, also help build the right architecture, for sender plus satellite, blended network.

Ryan C: 31:23

Alright, no specialized hardware, no specialized knowledge, economics that make sense and failover for when cellular or your Wi Fi or your backup to your backup to your backup isn't there. Know that satellite is there to cover you. it's the ultimate insurance policy for your always on connected services. And increase the fidelity and reduce the the gaps between those super rural Deployments wherever those different scenarios might take you i'm super excited about 1g satellite over cellular radio technology I'm looking forward to seeing the next generation as this stuff improves I know that Soracom and skylo are committed to seeing A future world where more and more things can be connected with as little friction as possible Thank you both for your time for being here. I appreciate it so much.

Tarun Gupta: 32:13

Thank you.

Ryan C: 32:22

I have one last question for you Tarun. What is Soracom to you?

Tarun Gupta: 32:29

Soracom is a key customer partner of ours. They're, they are the path to market. They're the ones who are bringing satellite connectivity into the enterprise IoT space, they have a tremendous name, globally, quite honestly, and people would rather buy from a Soracom than buying from a Skylo. And has the ability to bring that converged service across cellular plus satellite. Whereas I'm just satellite by myself.

Kenta: 32:53

Yeah, so, there's another thing that is in common between these two companies. Soracom, Sora, means sky in Japanese. So, since day one, we dreamed of having a satellite connectivity and basically connecting everywhere. So we are now having a partner who has the same word sky in the name and we are working together. So it's, it's a great moment in our history as well.

Tarun Gupta: 33:19

That's

Ryan C: 33:19

Just as long as it doesn't mean it turns into Skynet. I'm fine with that.

Kenta: 33:24

Yeah. Now we have changed the end that's happening.

Tarun Gupta: 33:28

We have 1G We have a long way to go. Don't worry.

Ryan C: 33:31

when someone is sent from the future to stop Skylo from being successful, we all know why.

Tarun Gupta: 33:37

That's

Ryan C: 33:37

It was Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he looks much older. This has been another episode of What to Expect When You're Connecting. Until next time.