The world’s first 5G connected forest | IoT Insider Podcast Episode 14

Dan Cunliffe
Hi everybody, and welcome to the IoT Insider podcast. My name is Dan Cunliffe, Managing Director of Pangea. But this month we’ve actually got a new star joining us; our very own Rich Crossingham has joined us as our Business Development Director. He joined the Pangea family this summer, and thanks so much for joining us Rich, how you doing?

Rich Crossingham
Thanks Dan, nicely, socially distanced over here joining you from my cabin in the back garden.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, that’s actually been an interesting market, hasn’t it? People building cabins in their garden for work purposes. I’ve spoken to so many of our customers and partners who have put a 4G service out the back, in the garden, usually a multi-network one, but have also built themselves a little office down there. And how’s yours going?

Rich Crossingham
It’s great. It’s at times like this when half term is now upon us. And you’ve got children in the house and you need to just be somewhere separate, to just concentrate on getting something done.

Dan Cunliffe
We should caveat that we all love our children and our wives and our partners very much so. Rich, obviously you’re new to us, maybe tell some of the listeners where you were before joining us?

Rich Crossingham
Yeah, so I’ve been with Pangea for four months now. Prior to that I spent eight years at O2, looking into all things connectivity from Wi-Fi to connected stadia propositions. And prior to that, numerous jobs working for other connectivity businesses.

Dan Cunliffe
Perfect, perfect. Well, like I said, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. So we’re going to be doing things a little different in this one, we’re going to talk a little bit about one of the interesting topics that was in on the world of 5G, which was about the world’s first connected forest, here in the UK. And there are very few forests more famous than the Sherwood Forest, of course, the home of Robin Hood and all his Merry Men. But actually they’re getting themselves a little bit of an upgrade where they’re going to be hosting the world’s first connected forest. Essentially, what it’s about is the Nottingham Council have deployed a private 5G network over the forest; enabling it to sort of connect to various different kinds of IoT solutions, and of course, devices on the back of that. Things like drones that could gauge health of the forest, soil, autonomous vehicles that can transport people around. Almost imagine without the dinosaurs, the whole Jurassic Park movie where you got a nice little sort of, you know, if you want to call them blimps with wheels, and sort of took you through the whole forest. I imagine that could be quite a cool experience. Maybe sort of ask you a little bit about that. We’ll take a look at the tech in particular, but what do you think of 5G in a forest? Anything interesting?

Rich Crossingham
I think for me, one of the key things on calling out 5G projects is what is the 5G really enabling over anything that could be achieved on 4G? I’ve read lots of scenarios and snippets on the internet where people have called out projects for 5G but the question is, does it really need 5G? Or could this have been done with 4G? I think some of the things that they highlight where they’re talking about autonomous vehicles, perfectly aligned onboard narration, testing state of the art digital technologies, drones and robots, as you mentioned, to look at monitoring the health of the forest. Whether it’s you know, precipitation, acid levels, people coming into the forest and how they are impacting the ecology of the forest. I think some of those things will really highlight probably what we call the triangle of 5G key benefits. Yeah, exactly. So those for me will be the things that really call this out as being absolutely a 5G project, as opposed to a 4G or 4G+ project.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. No for sure. I think let’s maybe take a look at how they’re going to do it and maybe talk about how much it might cost and what kind of the benefits are going to be. I mean, in terms of getting it right, it’s not easy, right? Because you’re in the middle of you know, arguably the forest. It’s not a strong play for any operator to go put, you know, 5G out there, but they want to have it as a bit of a testbed; something shiny to show the rest of the world. One of the important things I think here, is that they’re going to have to get creative with the way that 5G, and the base stations are there to make it work. What do you kind of think some of the challenges are going to be, other than you know, obviously, in the forest, but how do we even do this? Like, where do we start?

Rich Crossingham
I think to begin with, they’ve got to map out exactly where they want the connectivity. And why. Because not only to your point of ensuring you’ve got connectivity in a dense ancient forest; it’s also making the reason as to why, why connect? why bother, why drive people to use it? And I think it’s really important to make sure that the experience is something that people are going to want to use. I was reading a bit about the Robin Hood legend and bringing that to life. And having a 3D, 4D virtual reality experience that’s both available on VR headsets, and also on people’s handsets. So giving people the reason to connect to the available platform is as important as having the platform there. Because you can spend all the money on building a platform. But if you don’t have the creative content to drive someone to it, then you won’t see the uptake of usage.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. And I think what you mentioned earlier about the triangle of 5G, I think every one of those parts is probably being used here. You know, there’s a lot of what this project does that 4G could probably do at the moment, but there are some things I think future wise to those experiences that 5G does bring to life. So for example, you know, moving the sort of semi-autonomous Jurassic Park bubbles around that we mentioned earlier. They need to, obviously, have a sort of near instant response time when moving semi-autonomous vehicles. So the ultra low latency that 5G brings helps with that. The VR experience needs higher bandwidth, you know, so the enhanced mobile broadband, the really fast speeds will help to help that experience with people. And I guess the other part is because we’re in such a dense environment, and the ability to connect many, many devices; you can imagine the forest will, hopefully be obviously environmentally friendly devices everywhere around, but you could have drones, you could have sensors, measuring various aspects of what the forest health looks like, you’re gonna need that massive machine technology that the 5G spectrums will bring us. Those three together, I can see future reasons that 5G actually does make this an interesting project.

Rich Crossingham
Yeah, I think your point on one of the things there with massive IoT, if you’re looking at measuring different things, be it water precipitation, or the impact of things that are external to the forest. So you know, when people come in, they bring in things that they might not even think about. And when you’re looking at massive IoT, and you’re saying interesting fact, there are over 900 trees in Sherwood Forest, that are 600 years old, or older. So when you look at that, and 1500 to 1800 species of beetle; and 200 different species of spider. So you’ve got a really dense, you know, set of biological factors going on there, you’ve got all of the trees, you’ve got all the different species, you’ve got, what they termed abiotic and biotic factors to consider when you’re looking at what you want to monitor and how you want to monitor it. So when we talk about massive IoT, it could be really interesting as a testbed for all things, conservation, all things ecology, if you really want to drill down onto understanding beetles that live there, you know, having sensors, grid mapping tiny areas, and understanding more and more about these different species, could be really, really insightful and could help with just ecology across the UK and other nations.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, no for sure. I mean, let’s just turn our attention to what the business side of this is, for those partners or people interested in like, you know, what does it actually take to do something like this. So, the project is worth about 10 million pounds in terms of the investment and I believe it’s from three different areas, you know, obviously, we’ve got the conservation aspect, which will help to monitor various things, but essentially, you’ve got the government programme to fund it as part of a wider investment of 65 million, which is a 5G project sort of environment. You’ve got Nottingham Council, which obviously, are keen to make sure that they can keep driving one of their strongest assets around tourism. And then you’ve got a sort of private mobile operator looking at the privatisation of 5G service across there. It’s not easy to get government projects off the line. We know that ourselves, we’ve had a lot of work this year, particularly with government projects, but I think when they can come together to do something that is not just talking about the age old, what you know IoT and smart city, this is actually talking about a smart forest in a way, because we are trying to understand more and more about it. What do you think is actually going to be for someone else to try and do this? Like, what about, obviously, the greatest forest in the world, the Amazon forest? Like, what could this bring to those guys?

Rich Crossingham
I think it’s some of the things we’ve already touched upon; understanding species, I mean, they find from a biological perspective, they find new species all the time, both the fauna and flora, because, you know, mapping something like the Amazon is very, very challenging. Having these kinds of technological advances to enable that to happen can only be a good thing. Yeah, I think you always have to look at the two aspects, though, you know, is it a big revenue maker that they’re planning? Or is it more for social good? I think the two have to work together, because the immediate, you know, mapping of the Amazon, someone might say, well, that’s just gonna cost us a lot of money, and so you’re ticking the social good box. I think, ultimately, you can, well hopefully, be able to tick both. Because if you can look at reducing carbon footprint from what people are doing, and how people are interacting with these spaces, and you can also increase the knowledge and increase the understanding of the species that are in there. What was it the periwinkle plant in Madagascar that was discovered, is used to treat many cancers. Well if you find another one of those in the Amazon rainforest, and you know that it wouldn’t have been found, because it only grows in a certain location with a certain precipitation, and having these kinds of sensors enabled the finding of it, and then the tests of it to occur; then absolutely, there will be massive revenue and the social benefit from it. So I think, you know, what we’ve seen from mapping and understanding forests flora before enables us to kind of guess what might happen in the future with us being able to do this. I think, once you bring VR and AR experiences into it, where you can, you know, show real educational benefits for children and adults alike. I think there are so many opportunities and showing both sides; social good and good revenue earners, are equally important.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I would say that there’s probably a position you can take where some private sector could probably get involved, and support from a sponsorship perspective, you know, you can probably say, oh it’s a 5G innovation now, but you could just call it Conservation Hub or an Innovation Hub, without needing to use the word 5G to kind of get that out there. I think the way that Google maps the entire world actually creates a huge commerce influence, right? Being able to know where shops are, rate them, understand more about your own commercial environments. So you know, we should probably think about mapping environmental environments so that we can drive the right behaviours from those. It’s not an easy thing to do. But I think it does lend itself to IoT being the way to sort of help us understand more about our environment, to get the most out of it. And we’re talking from an environmental perspective here not necessarily, how do I optimise my warehouse? You know, it’s a very different way of thinking about it. Yeah, hopefully the guys at Nottingham and the forest and you know, can get some of Robin Hood’s luck and get it going forward, and actually kind of show some clever things. I think that probably covers a lot of it, to be honest with you. And for our listeners this month; as usual, if you kind of liked what you heard, if you want to hear Rich’s voice again, drop us a comment. If you are one of our partners listening in for the first time, thank you so much. We do encourage everybody to head over to our website, which is pangea-group.net or even subscribe to our newsletter for more stories like this one. If you’ve never worked in the IoT market before or you are keen to learn more, do get in touch all the details will be through the podcast as well. But for this month, thank you so much. Thanks rich for joining us. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. No problem and to all the listeners thanks again. Have a good rest of your month.