IoT Insider Podcast | Episode 3: Mobile World Congress 2019 Highlights

Dan Cunliffe
This month, I’m joined by Bernie McPhillips, our Sales Director, and Chris Romeika, our Operations Director, and we’re talking about all the latest technology and opportunities we discovered at this year’s Mobile World Congress, which is the largest gathering sort of in the mobile industry. We were there from the end of February till the beginning of March. A good solid four and a bit days, depends how many hours you count in a day, if you’re going to put together as much as we were there. But yeah, guys, thanks so much for joining. Thank you. It’s good to have you guys with me on the podcast this month. Um, let’s just kind of get straight into it. So you know, we’ve been going for I think about four years now, Chris, probably me and you. Bernie maybe two years with us now?

Bernie McPhillips
Two years and two days to be precise.

Dan Cunliffe
Two years and two days. Exactly. So coming down to Mobile World Congress several times, but kind of the first thing is, you know, what was it like this year versus last year is really kind of the things that people want to hear. Just from my perspective, it is it is still massive, you know, well over 100,000 people, it feels like you could walk for days to get from one hall right across to the other hall. But there’s about eight of them. And some of them very much dedicated to things like IoT and applications. But this year, the underlying mantra if you want or the kind of focus was intelligent connectivity. And instead of me trying to answer that, straightaway, Bernie, what, what did you kind of find that intelligent connectivity was from your perspective while you were out there?

Bernie McPhillips
First of all, it was awesome that connectivity played such a big part of MWC this year. I think often connectivity has been kind of forever, the bridesmaid, never the bride, so to speak, and often outshined by the glitz and the glamour of new hardware releases, and software and robotics and AI. But this year, the overarching theme of MWC was intelligent connectivity. The year of the SIM is kind of what I’ve dubbed it, it was just really cool to see. The common thread that kind of just weaved its way throughout the whole event was the importance of selecting the right form of connectivity to deliver the best possible experience with, with your solution, the best possible experience to you as a provider in how you manage that connectivity, etc, going forward, and also the end user experience as well. And that’s very much about future proofing your technology, keeping up and staying ahead of the competition, etc. And, as always, at these events, a huge, huge focus on security as well. So for me the intelligent connectivity is selecting the right form, managing in the right way, delivering the right experience, future proofing your technology, and keeping it all secure. I mean, that was that was evident right throughout the event, wasn’t it?

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, massively. I think you’ve touched on some really, really important stuff there, you know, security, the experience. And a lot of times partners, particularly our partners, you know, they they kind of look to us to try and help them do that. Yeah, Chris, and kind of your your perspective on intelligent connectivity, especially there. What did you What do you reckon?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I mean, the GSMA defined intelligent connectivity as creating a world where connectivity is always on, always smart, and always available. They also coined another term, hoping to be a catchphrase, I suppose called hyper connectivity. Yeah. So um, so let’s keep our ears open and see if we start to hear more about hyper connectivity in the future. But with intelligent connectivity, you know, looking at the broad technologies out there. Obviously, it’s involving 5G, but it’s also bringing in things like artificial intelligence, big data, and of course, IoT as well. So what they want is to pull all that stuff together and just take connectivity to the next level, I suppose.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I mean, I kind of found it really cool. And like you said, Bernie, kind of bridesmaid. Never the bride for connectivity, and we’ve always heard that in IoT. But to be honest, you know, everything that you you actually need to consider when developing any sort of IoT proposition is how you’re going to talk the internet, right? That’s what it is Internet of Things, IoT. People need to be able to connect that device or, or that thing to it. So I think I felt pretty, pretty justified when we when we set out on this journey about four years ago. To start an IoT business, but seeing that out there was pretty cool. I think sort of the next part of what we want to talk about is really sort of what are some of our top highlights of this year’s Mobile World Congress. And in sort of the fashion it’ll be good to talk about, you know, the professional perspective, and maybe some of the, after the event perspective, it’s always good to kind of share some of the top tips of Barcelona’s fine places to visit, or maybe even kind of good restaurants to go to. But the professional perspective from my side was, you know, immediately you could see that every single brand or all the way from the likes of Cisco, to Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, even the kind of more unknown guys that we had never even heard of. There was some Russian telecom companies there. There were there were some Korean telecom companies, everyone had 5G, IoT, M2M, and artificial intelligence or AI on their, on their stands. I guess, Chris, what do you you know, seeing seeing that? What did you kind of think when you out there?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, looking around? Like you said, yeah, it was, it was very interesting to go beyond, you know, the typical companies from America or the big ones from China, there was a lot of countries specific areas in the event, you know, you know, Sweden, Israel, or wherever else. Specifically, with hardware, I think, I did see a couple of interesting themes. So the first one was going back to AI. So a lot of hardware manufacturers were building devices. For example, for example, sensors, let’s say, but they had more AI built into the device itself. So moving processing power out from the cloud, but distributing processing power out to the edge. So even we’re gonna have things like 5G in the future, there’s going to be a lot more data. And, for example, now with some sensors that I saw, they, you know, they convert the temperature and determine if it was worth sending that data or not worth sending that data.

Dan Cunliffe
So they’re making a decision on the edge basically. Right? Yeah.

Chris Romeika
You know, we’ve always heard about the billions and billions of devices, but I guess people now are starting to think like, yeah, that’s gonna be like, billions and billions of you know, things to compute. So why not move it out to the edge?

Dan Cunliffe
Why have billions of devices when you can have one device doing a few more things?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, exactly. So there’s another thing the other thing, main thing I saw was with IoT products as well. So from a connectivity perspective. I think it was two years ago, or maybe the year before, you know, it was always about IoT. As always, we saw that. Well, now I saw that the word M2M had disappeared a lot. Everyone’s just saying the word IoT. No one’s really bothering to say the word M2M anymore. Yeah. Back then, you know, you could call a device, an IoT device if it had a SIM card in it. And then you’d still leave the connectivity to Yep, you know, let’s just talk to your your SIM provider and stick the SIM card in and off you go. These days, pretty much any IoT device I saw would also include support for the upcoming narrowband technologies. So NB IoT, and also LTE-M. I saw a lot of that around too.

Dan Cunliffe
Where do you think in terms of territory, so Europe, Asia, etc. Where do you reckon that’s gonna take off first?

Chris Romeika
NB IoT as I understand it is operating in Europe already with Vodafone. We’re waiting for that to come out in the UK.

Dan Cunliffe
It’s not really come out here has it? We get asked, I mean, the partners ask us about it quite often.

Chris Romeika
Yeah. We went I remember going down to the Vodafone testbed at Newbury. That’s correct. Yeah. And you know, they had a demo there. But as for a rollout, it’s not there quite yet. I suppose on that, on that front. The other thing to think about is how far do companies like Sigfox have to go? Sigfox is you know, it’s covered in in Western Europe, especially in France, obviously, where it’s come from. But you know, is that going to sort of fall by the wayside as once we see it, NB IoT and LTE Cat M, and associated things start to really get into gear and kick off.

Dan Cunliffe
It’s a really good point, man. I think the whole you know, narrowband versus Sigfox versus LoRaWAN is probably a whole podcast on its own, to be honest. About what you could or could not do there. Especially when the when the parts are there. So you know, Bernie, from your perspective, any any kind of, you know, particular top highlights that you that you may have seen out there?

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, I think it was. 5G, as Chris has already referenced was such a big part of the event and a big part of the intelligent connectivity theme. And for me, it was it was awesome to be at such a large scale global event and to actually witness firsthand that 5G is much more than just another buzzword. I think the general chatter around 5G has kind of been in place pretty much since 4G was launched. But today at this event, etc, we’re genuinely seeing real world implementations. You’ve got all of these stands these huge global international businesses like Nokia, Intel, Huawei, Ericsson, Qualcomm, etc, all talking about their their plans for 5G, what it is that they’re actually going to do with it? And effectively what they’re all saying and is great news for all of us in not just in the industry or in any vertical that you operate in, is that it’s going to be the answer to the demand for faster, more efficient and more reliable forms of communication. And that, to me spells nothing but good news. But there was there were real life, real life examples about how it’s actually going to impact us. And one of the key things that we’ve spoken about, and we certainly speak to our partners about a lot is is is the the much improved latency that will come with 5G, and that’s critical with with real world applications where something that we read about an awful lot, right, driverless cars, autonomous vehicles, you simply can’t have any form of delay between one vehicle talking to another effectively, because you’ve got, you know, blue car at the front says, I’m going to break, you can’t have a delay before red car behind it goes, Okay, I’ll break too smash, the cars have crashed already. But, it’s much more than that. One of the highlights for me, which was just simply phenomenal, was the live demonstration of how it could have an impact on healthcare. So from MWC, they actually live streamed an actual surgical operation that was being performed to the hospital clinic, Barcelona in the city centre. So there’s a big crowd around, you’ve got the Chief of Gastrointestinal surgery of Barcelona, basically directing a procedure remotely. He’s in a different place, and is providing guidance to the on site surgeons. And again, that has to be in real time. Can’t have any form of lag or latency between the two. And there were loads more things like that just happening all around the event. So it was actual, real world, real uses of how this technology is going to transform the world that we live in.

Dan Cunliffe
I mean, talking talking about that. And yeah, that’s quite topical for us. I mean, we’ll we’ll probably do a separate podcast. But for those who’ve kind of stayed close to some of our news, recently, we we are talking about 5G quite seriously within Pangea because of our association with Innovate UK and Kingston University. And we’ve got our own 5G project on the go particularly focused on smart triage and being able to perform robotic surgery inside ambulances. But of course, other very, very cool situations coming off the back of that. So no, I agree with you, I think just the visual, phenomenal things coming out of there. Particularly the latency, I would say is probably the most important part, if we can understand how that goes.

Bernie McPhillips
I agree. One of the one of the phrases that I’ve picked off and kind of coined as my own, to some extent, go forward, you hear people talking about the rise of big data and how many devices and how much revenue is going to be around in IoT. Every little thing all around the world is going to be communicating with people and each other, etc. over the internet. Intel used the phrase at one of their big keynotes, they talked about 5G delivering the data tsunami, and I just I just love that phrase. Yeah, it just, I think it really kind of is a great analogy, for me really brings to life what 5G is going to do for for all industries.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, no, for sure. You know, just to finish off the what are our top highlights at Mobile World Congress? We’ve got to talk about the after event perspective, there’s probably two really important things that that we experienced. One was there is a fantastic rooftop bar sort of in the city. And we’ll try to add the link on the end of this podcast for you. But effectively, when the event closes on Thursday, it’s one of the best rooftop bars to go and have just a decompression, kind of drink and really reflect on everything you’ve seen. Because you would have seen about a million things, myself and Chris and some of the guys from the UK press. And some of our partners had a nice little glass of rose over there and just relax for a bit and really spoke about what the event was. And then the second one, which is which which completely blew our mind was there is a typical sort of New York speakeasy type style in the middle of Barcelona called Paradiso and I’ll give the secret away. It is actually a secret bar. However, something that you might want to find out on your own is that there is a secret bar inside of the secret bar and we could not actually believe that that was true. And so we ended up inside it didn’t we Bernie and Chris?

Bernie McPhillips
It’s like a Russian doll. I think there may be a secret bar inside the secret bar inside the secret bar, but I’ve got no idea where this is going to end. I’m going to keep going back until I find out.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. What did you think of the secret bar? What was your opinion?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I thought it was very secret. Obviously we can’t talk too much about it otherwise, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.

Dan Cunliffe
Best to do is try and get yourself a very kind of, you know, good chance at getting it to go and see if it’s worth doing. And probably the only thing we will drop is that it’s got a very interesting Scottish type of flavour to it. Once you get inside. Cool, just moving on. So, you know, what are the best opportunities we saw from this year’s event? You know, from my perspective, I was really impressed with the way that many countries kind of sponsored a lot of their local businesses or young tech startups to get funded to be at Mobile World Congress, because it’s a lot of money to get there. But particularly you had countries such as Israel, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, had its own presence there. And some of the companies who were represented were just incredible. And I quite enjoyed just spending, you know, a decent amount of time in those areas. Because, you know, these are some really interesting tech startups with some amazing products, and particularly wanting to bring some of those ideas back into our partner channel was quite a big thing for me. Chris, what about you? What did you kind of find was some of the best opportunities from this year?

Chris Romeika
The best ones from this year, were basically just seeing what’s going to happen with the AI in terms of the edge devices, so I’m very interested in finding devices that are LTE Cat 6 or above capable, so we’re looking at bringing those into our portfolio, a lot of the bread and butter routers out there at the moment that you can get are just going up to LTE Cat 4, whereas some of the networks support the highest speed LTE standards.

Dan Cunliffe
What would you say is the difference between Cat 4 and Cat 6 for those guys who have no idea? Just faster? Yeah, I mean, just the just the two more cats. Right. Two more cats, basically more cats.

Chris Romeika
Well, that reminds me of, you know, someone from the fixed line and broadband world talking about 5G and they just mockingly said, well, it’s only half of 10G. But yeah, you know, with some providers out there supporting Cat 6, so you know, and above. So for example, EE will call it, you know, Double 4G or 4G Plus, you know, if you’re in the right place at the right time with a phone, like a top end iPhone or something you can get, you know, 200 megabits per second. Yeah, I’ve seen it myself. And you know we’re seeing that so it will be good to bring those type of things into our portfolio.

Dan Cunliffe
100% that’s a good one. Bernie, what about you mate?

Bernie McPhillips
I think that the most pleasing thing, from my perspective is, since I’ve joined Pangea for two years working with our, with our partners and reseller channel, is I’ve always said to them, you don’t need to reinvent your business to develop an IoT strategy, because there are opportunities in every sector. Because people always ask, where is the biggest opportunity? What type of sector should we be working towards? And I also say to partners, just don’t, don’t try and reinvent your business, do what you’ve always been good at. If you’ve been really strong in certain sectors, then there are opportunities within that sector, maybe based on your geography, the people that you’ve hired in the past have had a tendency to sell to certain types of customers. So what was so pleasing about Mobile World Congress, is that there are genuinely opportunities across every possible sector you could dream of. And there wasn’t one that seemed to be any more prevalent than another. So whatever your traditional business is, whether it’s telecoms, ICT, hosted cloud, software applications, etc. If you’ve sold primarily to public sector, private sector, in industry, in retail, in transport, in security. It genuinely doesn’t matter, there are opportunities in IoT, equal opportunities across all of those verticals, and all of those sectors. There wasn’t one for me, any one particular sector that kind of jumped out and would make everybody gravitate towards that particular industry. So I think it kind of strengthens the message that we’ve been delivering to our partners for all that time. There are opportunities and whatever sectors and verticals you put stronger in the past just about asking the right questions to open up those opportunities, that are the solutions there that will deliver efficiencies, cost savings, environmental impact, make people safer all the cool things that IoT does. The opportunities are right there under your nose.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, that’s a very good point. And I think that’s been one of the methodologies we’ve we’ve been working on for ages is you know, understand your sectors. A lot of our partners will will trade across many sectors but pick the ones you pretty strong in, understand the device you want to connect and then kind of work it on from there. And our and our team kind of work with you to do that. So you know, by all means, get yourselves involved there. Okay, um, you know, overall really good event would you guys be keen to go next year?

Chris Romeika
Na I don’t think I want to go any more.

Dan Cunliffe
Now that you’ve seen the secret of the secret bar? You’re done now, had enough?

Bernie McPhillips
I’m willing to go and try and find the next Russian doll. One of the highlights for me aside from IoT and industry and even some of the bars, I actually queued up like a giddy child to have my photograph taken with the Champions League Trophy. The actual Champions League Trophy was at a MasterCard stand, they were there talking about their, their contactless payment solutions, etc. I actually queued up for quite some time to get the picture taken. Because I figured you know, as back home I’m an Everton fan, it will be the closest I’m going to get to that trophy in quite some time. So yeah, that’s, that’s amongst one of my most prized possessions. That was my photograph with with the Champions League Trophy. Do you know what made a massive difference this year guys as well. So 2018 was my first Mobile World Congress. And then this year, my second year, it was the weather. Do you remember 2018 it snowed in Barcelona in March and it snowed. Some of the meeting facilities, etc, outside they’re open air, which generally in late March in March would be quite late in Barcelona, but we’re huddled with blankets and everything so this year weather was much better and it made a world of difference to Mobile World Congress.

Dan Cunliffe
That’s a very good point. I think you hit the nail there because yeah, you know, sitting in the snow in Barcelona does not make sense to me at all. And being able to kind of go forward. Very cool, guys. Yeah, just just to wrap up as we normally do. So bit, of sports fans around I guess we need to congratulate Wales for winning the Six Nations pretty convincingly in my view, pretty much the best team out there so they did they did really, really well. Chris anything on the F1, Australia kicking it off?

Chris Romeika
No, just glad Bottas, you know, put a dent in Hamilton. Nice change to see you know, both the Mercedes, a nice change to see someone else you know, at the top for once.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Bernie anything interesting Cricket World Cup coming up. lots going on.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, absolutely. Big cricket fan. So I’m looking forward to that. It’s gonna be a great event and hopefully might even get to a match or two.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, that’d be quite cool as well. And just as we close off, want to say thanks so much to everybody for listening in, this podcast was obviously a bit longer than before. But you know, it’s nice when we got the three main guys on the on the call talking about various things; Mobile World Congress. If you are interested in what the Internet of Things could do for your business, particularly how Pangea can help you maybe we can kind of give you some advice or even just you want to partner with us to be able to, you know, really attack that market. Please do get in touch all the details will be on the podcast. But other than that, gents, thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate your time. Thank you chat to you all later. Cheers, guys. Bye.