Insights on Advanced Mesh Networks and Industrial Safety

Could the future of industrial communication lie in a technology that doesn't rely on traditional infrastructure? Join us as we sit down with the Director of Sales at Rajant, to explore the revolutionary world of mesh networking technology. Todd takes us on his personal journey of searching for dependable wireless solutions for industrial settings, ultimately leading to his discovery of Rajant's peer-to-peer ad hoc mesh network. Unlike conventional LTE and Wi-Fi systems that necessitate a dedicated LAN or backhaul, Rajant's kinetic mesh stands out for its flexibility and scalability. Todd shares how this innovative technology seamlessly integrates with various backhaul solutions and underlines its crucial role in industries like mining, transportation, manufacturing, and energy, where reliable communication can be a matter of life and death.

But the innovation doesn't stop there. We also dive into the cutting-edge wireless security measures and future advancements championed by Rajant. Todd gives us an insider's view on their proprietary Instamesh protocol, which guarantees end-to-end encryption for secure communications. Learn about Rajant's impressive track record of top-tier security certifications and the specialized devices they design for challenging environments, from hazardous areas in oil and gas to underground coal mines. As Todd highlights the ongoing improvements in the InstaMesh protocol and the importance of cross-generational compatibility, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how Rajant's solutions continue to enhance performance and security over time, providing an unparalleled networking experience for industries where every second counts.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

Hey everybody, fascinating chat today, diving into the world of mesh networking with an innovator in the space for mission-critical applications. Todd, how are you? I'm great. How are you today? Gavin, a longtime guy in wireless and 5G networking, really intrigued, interested in the technology you're inventing at Ragent. Maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your background and your mission and vision at Ragent?

Speaker 2 0:38

Certainly, my name is Todd Rigby. I'm a director of sales at Ragent. My name is Todd Rigby. I'm a director of sales at Ragent. Ragent is a wireless mesh networking manufacturer. It's been in business since 2002. I met Ragent in 2005. A technology integration company that sold technology into the mining and heavy construction spaces and saw a need for more reliable wireless communications in those industries and started probably a nine-month investigation trying to find the most reliable wireless solution that I could find, and it was a very frustrating experience. But at the end of the nine months I had all but given up that what I was looking for didn't exist when, by chance, I accidentally happened upon Ragent and, honestly, within 10 minutes I knew this was exactly what I had been looking for, and I've been involved in one way or another with them ever since. That was in 2005.

Speaker 1 2:05

Fantastic. So many of us have been in wireless a long time, like yourself, very familiar with Wi-Fi networking, lte, 5g and even mesh networking in the home. Many of us have distributed networks. But you're doing it in a rather novel way, maybe for folks listening. Describe your approach and how it differs from more legacy. You know approaches.

Speaker 2 2:28

Sure, I think a lot of people are used to LTE cellular technologies. You know we all have one of these or two of these. Both LTE and Wi-Fi are pretty much parent-child type network architectures. They have some similarities in that the network infrastructure in the case of Wi-Fi, that would be your access point, in the case of LTE that would be your cell tower they require a connection to a LAN for backhaul.

Speaker 2 3:10

Ragent differs from these technologies in that we're a true peer-to-peer ad hoc mesh network, meaning that any node can talk to any other node, any node can talk to any other node and, more than that, all of these nodes in a mesh network do not require a dedicated LAN or backhaul connection. They can backhaul their own traffic over the mesh, along with application traffic. So backhaul is really nothing more than an aggregation of multiple applications or multiple clients' traffic, but Ragent can handle that on its own. Or there are some circumstances where you're trying to maximize throughput, where you integrate uh different backhaul technologies with ragent and I'm happy to say ragent plays nice with pretty much everything that's available, whether that's uh point to point, point to multi-point, point-to-multipoint carrier, lte, private LTE, satellite, wired.

Speaker 1 4:31

If you've got it, we can use it. Fantastic. So businesses are, you know, really well served by an array of technologies today, often overlapping technologies but how do you see your unique differentiation or position? Are you going after certain size businesses or looks like mission critical use cases? How do you see yourself on this landscape?

Speaker 2 4:55

Well, if I can go back to what you first said, evan, about businesses, have a variety of different technologies. I think you're absolutely right and one of the most important things for businesses is to maximize ROI on technology investment and because of that, most businesses are loathe to rip and replace everything they have and put in something new because it's the flavor of the month, right. So we're very cognizant of that and that's, as I said earlier, where we play nice with other technologies. In most cases, we're not asking you to do a wholesale rip and replace of everything you have, but we can add and strengthen particular problem areas and then over time, what we find is customers typically rely more and more and more on Ragent because of our reliability. So to part two of your question, about you know what industries and who's using Ragent kinetic mesh and why we tend to be the strongest in industrial applications.

Speaker 2 6:23

So, what is industrial? Well, it's not home, it's not your office. It tends to be where things are made from ground zero, starting with mining all the way through different transportation, different material processing, all the way through different transportation, different material processing, full manufacturing, warehousing, as well, as you know, the energy industry for energy production, energy distribution, utilities, any place where you have equipment or processes that cost a lot of money to start up and keep running, that you don't want to ever be idle or have to go through shutdown because you lost communications or you know. I guess the extreme of mission critical is anything involving life safety. You know where people's lives are at risk If you're not able to notify them of some danger or you're not able to say, hey, get out of harm's way, you could die. All of these things are times when people are focused on a mission critical solution because there just isn't an option for not having successful communications.

Speaker 1 8:19

Great point 5G radios that are being deployed for private 5G. What's within your technology that is really appealing to those customers?

Speaker 2 8:32

So I typically describe Rage and just falling somewhere in between Wi-Fi and point-to-point. Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint are generally considered infrastructure technologies. Lte and Wi-Fi are more along the lines of application or client communications. Ragent is also in the application client communications type space, application client communications type space. We are generally considered a last mile solution, though we certainly have networks that span hundreds of square miles, so there's really no limitation to the scalability of Ragent.

Speaker 2 9:24

One of the reasons Ragent scales so well is because we have distributed intelligence across the mesh. Every mesh node has intelligence and manages its own routing. We don't rely on any kind of central or master control node. So typically networks that have central control or master control nodes may have some limitations when it comes to scaling larger or scaling up with lots of data traffic. Ragent's very adaptable that way. Ragent is very adaptable. That way we have mesh networks as small as three nodes and we have hundreds and hundreds of nodes in other mesh networks and, as I mentioned, covering extremely large areas.

Speaker 2 10:28

You can choose to add a backhaul connection literally anywhere you want, wherever it's convenient. I've often used the phrase a monkey can do it. You literally take an Ethernet connection and plug it into one of our nodes, and we call all of our nodes breadcrumbs, so if I drop the term breadcrumb I'm just talking about a Ragent mesh node, and all of our devices have an Ethernet port or two. All of these other technologies that we've been talking about can also interface by Ethernet, so it's very easy to create interoperability between our solution and an existing network solution that a customer may already have on site Got it.

Speaker 1 11:17

Yeah, let's see your question.

Speaker 2 11:19

Robert Lee.

Speaker 1 11:22

Yeah, the beauty of Ethernet. I was going to ask about interoperability and integration with existing network infrastructure. There's a lot of aging technology out there, stuff that's been around for a long time. How quickly can you introduce your nodes and extend, grow, enhance the network?

Speaker 2 11:51

your nodes and extend, grow, enhance the network. We can deploy a Rageant network extremely fast. Customers, when we come out and do demonstrations or proof of concepts, are often shocked how quickly we can get a mesh network up and running. Kind of a fun fact you can take breadcrumbs out of the box, plug them in, flip the switch and they will connect and start communicating, just with the default configuration out of the box, whereas a lot of competitive systems engineers are going to spend hours and hours trying to set it up and make it work. Rage, it will work out of the box. We are ultimately creating a layer two network.

Speaker 2 12:35

You can think of the Ethernet port in a breadcrumb and all the Ethernet ports in all the breadcrumbs as one big virtual switch. So it's very easy to pass data. We don't change data. We don't manipulate data. We are just a conduit, a very reliable conduit, a very reliable conduit where we basically give you the same kind of Ethernet level reliability, but wirelessly, through the use of breadcrumbs. Layer two versus most of our competitors are all layer three. Wi-fi LTE point-to-point can be layer two or three. Most point-to-multipoints are layer three. You end up with much less latency at layer two than you do at layer three, and Ragent is also full duplex. We can utilize different radios in our bread, extremely low loss of throughput and extremely low latency, whereas if you've ever worked with any kind of wi-fi mesh solution, you know it's very common for people to say oh well, we lose half our bandwidth every time we hop. That is definitely not the case with Ragent. You essentially start a multi-hop transmission and end with virtually the same amount of throughput.

Speaker 1 14:42

Fantastic Sounds pretty revolutionary. Maybe talk a little bit about scale and range of kinetic mesh, scaling down both indoors or outdoors, as well as scaling up. If you're in a mining operation, you need to cover underground as well as above ground sites across many miles. How does that work so?

Speaker 2 15:08

let's maybe first talk about transmit power. So when you're talking about range, you kind of have to decide well, what's your use case and what is your transmit power that you have to work with. And by use case, for example, when you're dealing with point to point, you're trying to get signal from point A to point B. If we put directional antennas on a radio, on a breadcrumb, we can do the same thing. We can effectively do point to point. That's not what I would consider a real common application, but it works great and we do have people doing point-to-point over Ragent. Effectively, the most common is to put the nodes closer together so that you're not only getting signal from point A to point B but you have usable signal between point A and B. And one of the most popular applications with Ragent is to enable mobile connectivity that allows you to have continuous connectivity. Now that may seem obvious. That may seem like well, everybody can do that, and the fact is no. That may seem like well, everybody can do that, and the fact is no, everybody cannot do that. For example, you know, in the world of Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi mesh you have to lose your connection before you make a new connection. You know there's the whole break before make, where you have to drop a connection before you make the connection. Now there's some newer Wi-Fi systems. They go oh no, no, no, we have make before break. Even in a make before break network solution, you only have one live connection and you have to essentially disable that live connection before you take a passive connection and make it active. So there's a moment in time where you don't have a live connection. Ragent is different in that within Ragent's protocol, which we call Instamesh and this is proprietary to Ragent we allow every radio to have many active connections. Imagine, if you will, if you went into the Wi-Fi settings on your smartphone and, instead of picking only one access point, imagine if there was an option that said select all. That's effectively what a Ragent network does continuously. It selects all and it makes active connections with every possible similar radio in other breadcrumbs and it's continuously in seek mode. So even when you're mobile at an extremely high rate of speed, faster than 100 times per second every breadcrumb is looking for new connections and at the same time it's evaluating the quality of every connection, and that breadcrumb will always route data to its best performing connection. Now I understand that was a big word salad, and I said a lot of things all at vehicle. Regardless of the speed of the vehicle, whether it's going five miles an hour or in excess of 100 miles an hour, you're not going to outdrive the protocol. The protocol looking for new connections faster than 100 times per second will stay ahead of the vehicle and so you always have many connections and the network is essentially self-optimizing. So most people will understand that throughput and data rate is directly correlated to signal quality. Now, in almost every other network on the planet, you have a static configuration and you have a defined regardless of environmental and operational conditions, and that's why people love Ragent.

Speaker 2 20:14

And I once had a competitor I say once, it was three or four years ago a competitor from a very major networking brand. If I was to ask you who are the top three networks that come to mind, he works for one of those three that would come to mind. And he asked me. He said I can't figure out. Every time we run into one of your customers, they don't even want to talk to us. They're just so passionate, like a religion to them. They bought into Ragent, they love Ragent, they don't even want to consider anything else because Ragent works so well, how do you get such loyalty? And I said we earn it. We don't buy it, we earn it because our product is so reliable, is so consistent and is so easy to maintain. Why would they want to introduce something else?

Cutting-Edge Wireless Security and Future Innovations

Speaker 1 21:12

Wow, it's quite a mic drop moment. Well done there, shifting gears a little bit. Security is top of mind to everyone and wireless has made big strides over the years, decades, with Wi-Fi, 6 now and 7, and 5G has security and encryption baked in. Talk about your approach, philosophy to, and how do you support, end-to-end security.

Speaker 2 21:38

So I mentioned to you that we have a proprietary protocol. We also do support Wi-Fi. So even though breadcrumb to breadcrumb we're talking our Instamesh proprietary protocol, we also talk open standards, breadcrumb to everything else. So you can plug in standard TCP IP ethernet connections, you can plug in serial data connections through our USB port and we can also make Wi-Fi connections between you know, your favorite smartphone or tablet have a range of breadcrumbs as your Wi-Fi access point.

Speaker 2 22:22

The way we handle security is embedded within our networking protocol. So everything is encrypted device name, ip address as well as all the traffic. And in addition to that we have several other additional security encryption methodologies. I joke and say Ragent's the biggest wireless networking company you've never heard of. And the reason you've never heard of it is because you can't go down to the fries or the best buy and buy a Ragent device. You have to buy it from an authorized Ragent partner who's been certified to give you that support. But Ragent was also the first wireless networking company in the world to ever get a Suite B encryption certification from the NSA and until about 12 or 18 months ago Suite B was the highest encryption that the NSA had.

Speaker 2 23:36

We also have a device called the RISM, that meets FIPS 140-3 encryption, which can create essentially an iron pipe between two devices spanning public fiber. So if you have a business with branch locations that's passing critical data, there's an easier, better way than just standard old VPN or security tokens. We can set up with RISM devices a effective steel pipe between those locations to keep nefarious traffic out. Said, there are great threats to security that affect you know. Just look at all the Homeland Security warnings in the last six, eight months with regards to water utilities, right, and it's scary stuff out there and we want to help all of our customers protect their data and I'm not aware of a Ragent network having ever been breached Fantastic.

Speaker 2 25:05

Let's knock on wood.

Speaker 1 25:11

Well done. That's quite an accomplishment. Maybe let's talk about what's next. You're doing so much that is future forward. I almost dare not to ask what's in the roadmap, because you've done stuff that's a year or two ahead of the industry. But what is next? Are there things you can talk about in terms of what's coming? New products, new initiatives, new solutions, et cetera?

Speaker 2 25:35

One of the easiest ways to see what's next is to look back over the last, you know, 15, 20 years and say, well, what have we done in that amount of time? And one of the things that we've done is we've come out with specialized devices for specific applications. For specific applications, you know, we have a device that's class one, div1 certified for hazardous areas in oil and gas. We've made in the past we had a explosion proof unit that was certified for underground coal as a very specialty application. We've made very small I just happen to have one here on my desk a very small device that's man wearable, that can be battery powered. We also have an even smaller breadcrumb that's the length and width of a credit card for small warehouse robotics. So we continue to make specialized devices for specialized applications and at the same time we're continuing to make refinements and advancements to the InstaMesh protocol, to the InstaMesh protocol, which increase the reliability even higher, increase the dynamic settings that the breadcrumbs can make on their own to further optimize the payload and the data stream, as well as continual improvements to pass greater and greater amounts of data reliably.

Speaker 2 27:21

So I can say, having worked with Ragent for, you know, approximately 19 years, the product absolutely gets better and better year over year.

Speaker 2 27:36

Our developers are continually writing new versions of firmware and I've had repeated customers tell me your network is the only electronics I've ever bought that gets better with time, increased performance, increased capability. Everything else decreases in its performance over time, but region networks improve over time and I would say one of the features that customers love about us more than anything is our guarantee of cross-generational compatibility. We've guaranteed that when we come out with a new unit it will be fully compatible with the unit it's replacing and I don't know of any other wireless networking company that can say that or has done it consistently. And in the industrial world where logistically it's just so difficult to uplift your wireless network, that's super meaningful to companies, because to do a rip and replace of your entire operations because a network manufacturer came out with a new model and it now won't talk with everything you have deployed, it's not just inconvenient, it's wholly impractical for them to shut everything down and replace that.

Speaker 1 29:16

Great, great point. I may have to hit you up for a few units. I have, you know, like four repeaters and Wi-Fi access points around the house and I still can't cover all the like nooks and crannies and outdoors and indoors, so we'll take that offline. But thanks so much for joining. It's been an intriguing conversation. I thought I knew everything that was happening in wireless and clearly I had a lot to learn. Appreciate the insights and the time. Todd.

Speaker 2 29:46

Oh, it's been fun visiting with you and keep up the great work and thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 29:52

Thanks so much. Have a great summer. Thanks for watching everyone Take care.