Saving lives with IoT | Guest starring on The IoT Podcast

Tom White
Welcome to The IoT Podcast Show. I’m your host Tom White. Today we’re joined by Dan Cunliffe and Dr. Arslan Usman from Pangea. Dan is the Managing Director of Pangea and co-founder. Pangea is a global recognised leader in IoT connectivity and a multi-award winning IoT solutions platform. Dan’s been recognised for his team first approach to leadership, resilience in the face of challenge, and commitment to helping Pangea partners optimise their results. And the numbers really do speak for themselves. Pangea, recently secured over 2 million pounds for their partners whilst saving them an equal amount of money, whilst keeping over 80,000 students connected to the internet during recent lockdowns. Dr. Arslan Usman is credited with over 40 academic publications within the wireless communications field with a key focus on 5G. He’s leading the in depth research of Pangea’s 5G project, a world first in video compression and data transfer capabilities. Welcome to the podcast guys. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Dan Cunliffe
Thank you for having us. We’re very, very excited.

Tom White
You’re welcome. Dan, if I could just kick off by asking you what led you to founding Pangea?

Dan Cunliffe
Many roads, I think, you know, my background is quite techie. I guess my my qualifications are in things like applied maths and computer science and a bit of engineering thrown in there. Just to top it off, I ended up being a teacher actually, when I came to this country to the UK back in what’s towards the 2007. So quite a while ago, but what led me there was particularly my kind of love for tech and working with people. So one of my kind of formative jobs in the UK was working for Telefonica O2 where I ran partners and strategy for their broadband business. So it was all about their broadband business. But we exited that business after doing fairly well to Sky, which is now Sky broadband Pepsi. And I then took the opportunity to convince my operations manager at the time Chris Romeika to co fine. Or with me on Pangea, so and and having that kind of interest working with, we had a very similar strategy to what we have now at Pangea, at O2, which was we were working through partners, everything we sell, everything we do is through a channel. So we don’t necessarily go direct. We don’t try and sell to direct customers, we work with our partners. And yeah, so I thought, you know, what, six, six and a half years ago that the Internet of Things, has got so much to give in various directions, there’s so much more to do. How awesome would it be if we could build a channel strategy and give at that time, I suppose, a kind of UK telecoms channel the opportunity to sell these products into their existing customers. And that’s sort of how we got started. And yeah, the the usual kind of interest stories is like, you know, we probably started with just playing golf, just like September when we sort of thought about it, and then we realised we’re playing too much golf and not enough thinking. So you probably think a bit more. And then yeah, just began in the sort of, you know, the whole bedroom story. And, and here we are seven years later, six years later.

Tom White
Fantastic. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a real varied background, certainly from an academic perspective, as well. So applied applied maths and computer science.

Dan Cunliffe
Do you know, it’s, um, well, I’ve always, I’ve always enjoyed working with people, like, I suppose, if you want to call it like in a bit of a sales environment, or an account management environment, and kind of call it my sort of pre Pangea years was a lot about that was actually about trying to get people to buy into technology, whether that be O2’s network, or before that I worked at a company called The Cloud, which is all about Wi-Fi technology. So it was always about like, Hey, you know, what, this thing we’re trying to, I suppose sell you is actually going to be quite good for you. And this is why, and these are the technical reasons. And I found that having that background and ability to speak, you know, fairly, sort of, I don’t know where you want to put it, but, you know, kind of kind of give the client the assurances, not just like, Hey, I’m trying to sell you this for that amount of money. It’s about this is the reason why it’s gonna be good, or actually buy this one of ours or that one of us because that’s helps you, people, people really buy into that if you are genuine. And so I think I think that was useful for me. And yeah, it’s a it’s a long way since, you know, working out some of the more random applied math reasons in South Africa where we would, we would do things like could you could you predict which vineyard is going to produce the best wine based on the last 50 years of rainfall? That’s the kind of stuff we used to do. Yeah. And then drink it. Of course. I mean, that’s the obvious answer the back of it.

Tom White
Yeah. I mean, if only machine learning right had it. Yeah. But no, it’s interesting. A bit. Well, my background was in computing for real time systems. So I think it’s something that kind of transcends where you are and where you grow up and what you do and where and where where you end up. It might not be that you’re actually there at the coalface. But you’re involved somehow in the industry. And that’s, and that’s nice to know, because I think it legitimises what you’re doing, doesn’t it? And fantastic, and Arslan yourself. So you’ve got a deep background in telco also worked at Kingston University. Is that right?

Dr. Arslan Usman
Yes. Thanks, Tom. So I have nearly nine years of experience in research and development all across the world, including recently in UK. So I came to UK three years ago, when I joined one of the biggest wireless communication related research groups here. It’s working under the umbrella of Digital Information Research Centre is in it’s in fact, one of the biggest research groups in UK not just in Kingston University. So I work with wireless multimedia and networking research group. And my expertise was always about quality of experience and 5G networks. So before that, I was working as a full time research assistant alongside working on my doctorate in wireless communication in South Korea. So I was leading six different industrial projects, mainly revolving around multimedia networks, and next generation cellular communication. So 5G right now is of course, it has got a lot of limelight, and it’s a lot. It’s in the heat of the moment right now. But back then, 10 years ago, when I started actually, you can say, just rumours about the next generation of cellular technology that is 5G. So I started thinking that I should sort of get back into r&d. And because my main studies were related to telecommunication engineering, and nine years ago when I was in Sweden, but it was mainly focused towards industry. And I sort of sort of had interest in research from the beginning. So I shifted my focus towards research and started working in 5G networks. So I’ve worked in different research groups across the world, in Sweden, in Nigeria with Alcatel Lucent, which is now Nokia, then in South Korea, then now currently in UK. So my title says, I am a system architect, but I do various different pieces.

Dan Cunliffe
Arslan belongs to the matrix, basically. Yeah.

Tom White
Yeah, I was gonna say it sounds like it sounds like a great catch doesn’t he? Yeah, which pill? Did you take the red or the blue? I, you know. That’s, that’s amazing. So yeah, so yeah, fantastic background, and, you know, very complimentary. By the sounds of it. I mean, guys, you’re so Pangea, your slogan is connecting everything. In your opinion, I don’t know who wants to answer this first. But what sectors are we seeing advancing connectivity right now for some of our listeners that may not be aware? And similarly, what ones could benefit from growing connectivity in your opinions?

Dan Cunliffe
I might, I might start Arslan, and maybe you can talk us through some of the areas that you’re probably looking at closer at the moment. But yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s the slogan. And for anyone who doesn’t know what the word means, it’s the kind of ancient Greek word of connecting all the continents back together, essentially. And so, you know, we came up with the name in a London bar, when one of my, then sort of shareholders asked me like, Hey, you know, What, are you going to call this thing? And I was, like, you know, I kind of like this word Pangea. And, and the point of that is, is we we are very proud of the ability to, again, help our partners connect to and connect things pretty much pretty much anywhere in the world now, across different I suppose sectors. So your question about, like, what’s leading the way what’s kind of going for us, we, we have to be prepared to work in any sector, because our partners will bring us a deal to connect, you know, a little device or maybe a very kind of high bandwidth device or something that needs you know, LTE-M, which is a different type of technology for lower power solutions. For me, I think we’re at a very interesting perspective right now where I think for the last Six years, it’s been a kind of relative focus on high volume of connections. So I’m kind of trying to explain the sector, right? So like high volume of connections, and probably lower amounts of bandwidth or, or amounts of data. So you’re sort of up to 20 megabytes per thing that you’re connecting. So what is that? Right, like? So that’s like telemetry devices, that is vehicle tracking, that could be asset tracking, predictive maintenance, which is really interesting market where you can, you know, if you kind of dumb it down a bit one of our clients sells a lot into construction. So if you imagine the construction industry is hiring tools all the time, yep, because they’re not going to buy all the tools they need to hire a bunch of tools in, they’ll use that drill, or that pneumatic drill or whatever it might be. That device is being used to within a certain tolerance before it breaks. Yep. But when you return that device to the shed or to the guy who’s rented it to you, how cool would it be, they knew what the tolerances was it hit. So that pneumatic drill’s been, you know, it’s done 95% of the tolerance for vibration, or 100% of the heat that it’s meant to take that kind of information that says, you know, what, don’t send this guy back out, again, like get it refurbished almost like a super sub right? Get a get a get him fixed before you send him out, again, because the biggest cost for these tool hire companies is going to fix something that’s broken, or replacing it. That’s where their big cost is because they make no return on it. So So that whole market has been super buoyant, you know, fleet management, telemetry devices, asset tracking, and globally, what I’m seeing now probably the last 12 to 18 months is this increase in, I want more data. Yeah, I want more information. That’s great that I know, the tolerances, but I also want to know, real time, the tolerances rather than telling me when you get back, you know what I mean? Like, it’s, I need more of the same, I need to know more. And now you’re kind of going up a stack where guys are actually, the devices are getting more powerful, the networks are more stable, and they’re just demanding more real time information to make better decisions. So now you’re moving up the stack to maybe, you know, sort of multiple gigabytes per per endpoint. And so those sectors are now starting, where you probably have better interaction with things like your you know, I suppose analytics driven platforms that sit in the device, almost at that point, like just giving constant information. So yeah, you know, earliest stages, I’d say, currently, you know, you’ve got your, well kind of last six years is that telemetry, asset management, monitoring, high volume low data. Now I’m seeing sort of medium volume, maybe even lower volume, but way more data required in those sectors, and then you’re getting into in-car Wi-Fi, vehicle-to-vehicle conversation. Even even improvements on digital screens, yeah, that need more bandwidth to deliver the services that people want. Does that make sense? In a sort of weird way right?

Tom White
Yeah, it’s okay. No, I liked it. It’s sometimes you got to go with the flow. Right. No, no, completely, completely understand. And I think that’s a lot of what we hear on the podcast is a lot of what we see in the market right now. So yeah, completely. And it’s nice to take you take your view on that.

Dan Cunliffe
And, yeah, you know, as kind of going further, you know, there’s a there’s a big play in healthcare as well. I mean, Arslan will probably talk a bit more about that. But I find healthcare pretty, pretty interesting, because the technologies required the sort of, you know, when are we going to always get the thing we want, because it’s not always about, it’s great to think about healthcare, it’s actually about whether or not you know, the bodies who run the healthcare are able to actually deliver it, because the systems are usually behind what we try to deliver as innovative IoT businesses.

Dr. Arslan Usman
Regarding healthcare and other IoT related things, so it’s, for me connecting everything is it simply means when you, for example, you go out for a walk, and you see things around you, for example, just five years ago, if you went from Kingston, where we are based, you will see the garbage cans, they were always over flooded. So that was a big annoyance. But right now, they all have these IoT sensors. And they are connected with the headquarters, I don’t know the name, who were actually sort of responsible for collecting the garbage. So now they’re embedded with these IoT sensors, and they’re connected. So they all always know that, okay, the garbage can is full or not. And this saves a lot of resources as well. So it’s the concept of connecting everything comes in place from there. Regarding healthcare, so it’s absolutely I completely agree with Dan. The technology aspect of connectivity is far ahead than the actual the policies that you see in Government and in bodies like NHS all across the world. So connectivity based options, they’re already there. For example, we’re working on a project right now, which is about exchange of pre hospital information with connected hospitals or remote hospitals. We will dig in further about this later on in the podcast. But so it’s it has to go hand in hand, right? So the NHS policies, they have to be in kind words, these kinds of projects as well. Though, the pandemic situation in UK and everything it has played a very big role in UK’s policy shift towards telemedicine and telehealth. So I think the IoT play field is very bright, you know?

Tom White
Yeah. Thank you for that, guys. I mean, you lead me on quite nicely to the next thing that I was going to mention. So clearly, the healthcare sectors become highly ingrained within IoT. 5G in particular is providing a lot of value in many areas of healthcare. What solutions can 5G and IoT connectivity support primarily in this healthcare sector? In your opinion?

Dr. Arslan Usman
So I can take the lead here. Actually, there are plenty of solutions and ideas that can become a reality with IoT and 5G. But of course, I will just give you a few examples, not all of them.

Tom White
Just the top two of them, Arslan you know.

Dr. Arslan Usman
Telemedicine and telehealth, both of them. They’re one of the vertical industries that 5G networks have enabled. So there are several vertical industries that are associated with 5G. So, telemedicine and telehealth they are, I think one of the key enablers. Because with 4G networks, there are certain bottlenecks such as speed, reliability, time sensitive application, all of this, this was a certain bottleneck with 4G networks and 5G. Because it promises with its unique use cases, it promises really high speeds, support time sensitive applications with latency as low as one millisecond and super high reliability. So we can overcome these bottlenecks through 5G. So in healthcare, for example, the project that we are working on ourselves, it’s so one of the projects is called a connected ambulance. So what we are trying to achieve is sharing pre hospital information with remotely connected doctors or physicians, so they can make early clinical decisions. So this is one example. So now there are basic things as simple as vital signs within an ambulance, that are totally not totally, but I would say pretty much useless if they’re being made within an ambulance, but their doctor doesn’t have access to it. So but it’s something very simple, right. But if it is transferred successfully, via a secure and reliable 5G network to a doctor, then they can make early clinical decisions. Apart from this, there is another project that actually became a reality. Because of the pandemic situation in UK, it’s called the Techiehub, maybe you have heard about it? It’s about it’s something similar, what they’re trying to do is share information about residents of care homes with doctors, so you know, the care homes were badly really badly affected. So just two simple GPs, they came up with this idea that, okay, we can have a very small device, which can at least give us access to basic things like temperature, blood pressure, etc, from the care of homes. So we don’t really have to expose those patients or force them to come to visit GPs if they need us. So these are very simple ideas. And definitely they have if you talk about technology, and IoT itself, it has all the capability to support these ideas. All we have to do is just convince the authorities and policymakers, and we will have a shift towards implementing these.

Tom White
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s fantastic. I think. Sorry, go on Dan.

Dan Cunliffe
It’s very true that you’ve got these sort of nuances that 5G, I know we’re going to cover further, but it is it is quite exciting. The reality is, is that we need the operators to keep doing what they’re doing. The guys are laying the foundations or building the roads if you want, you know, for us to achieve these really cool things. And sometimes they do get a bad rap. Because, you know, you know, everyone’s like, Oh, you know, that’s not good enough or good enough. But actually, they are the guys building these infrastructures for us. And we just got to keep delivering really cool ideas, particularly healthcare, whatever it might be, so we can keep pushing them to keep delivering those roads. It’s an interesting dynamic when you get to that side of it, too.

Tom White
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, Nick Jeffrey, when he was actually at the helm at Vodafone, put some quite emotional posts up on LinkedIn, about about people, you know, burning these masks. Right. And, and this is, this is one of the aims of me having this podcast show and having fantastic people like yourself want to say, hey, look, Do you realise kind of the benefits? You know, it isn’t this horrible monster that we see. And it’s unbounded through this weird kind of pseudo reverse propaganda that we see about 5G, it’s actually fantastic. And the benefits are fantastic. So yeah, I completely agree. It’s, it’s a reciprocal thing. You need to push the operators, and the operators need people like you to be pushing the envelope on these solutions.

Dan Cunliffe
Correct. And then make it valuable for them. Right, because it’s an investment from them. Yeah, investment from them.

Tom White
Yeah, absolutely. Guys, can we touch back more on the healthcare sector? So you’ve recently conducted a project into 5G in the healthcare sector? Can you talk a little bit more about this project and what it means for the way that we think about healthcare? And and this whole revolution of connectivity?

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I might, I might just Arslan and then I’ll kind of hand over to you at some point in that chat, because I think it’s worth just explaining where it’s come from, right. So this project was founded on something called the Knowledge Transfer Partnership, KTP. So again, a bit of a big up for the UK government, but there is there is funding available. If you can team up with a university, in our case, Kingston University, and the incredible you know, Professor Christos Politis, and Dr. Nada Phillip, who who are the guys and girls who bring their wireless capability and their and their knowledge. And then we as a business go, you know what, actually, you guys got some great knowledge, we’ve got some cool commerce, let’s bring that together with a bit of funding, we recruit someone who can lead a project, which we’ll talk about. Now, that’s someone in this case, Arslan, so Arslan’s come in, because, well, he’s just incredibly talented and has a lot of background in this stuff. But we then sort of try to fix the problem, which is like what’s happening? And you only briefly touched on, which we’ll talk about, you know, what happens when we are sending an ambulance to the hospital? Are we actually benefiting from helping what’s going on in the ambulance to tell people, hey, you know, what, we’re on our way to A&E. These are the very important vital signs real time using 5G and the capability to make better decisions. That’s what breaks it all down IoT is really about, can I make better decisions with machines making choices and helping me make choices, but the nitty gritty of that extends further and like Arslan will probably touch on that. But, you know, in terms of how we can take that into anything sort of camera related, or other things that we can do, using that technology for the greater good. I don’t quite remember the ins and outs of the stats. But I know and I think most people on this podcast would probably agree that you always wait a long time at A&E unless it’s super, super, super urgent, or there’s something wrong, but generally, that’s one of the challenges for the NHS is that they’re so bottlenecked at the A&E part where what we’re trying to create is a way to actually remove a lot of that bottleneck by making pre diagnosis or kind of in life prior diagnosis to prevent that bottlenecking. But to more about the project, Arslan can probably tell you a bit more the ins and outs.

Dr. Arslan Usman
Yeah. Thanks, Dan. So you know that we sort of right now we live in the era of big data. So you see data being generated all over everywhere with everything associated to you. So in in ambulances. So the motivation of the project is basically something like this. So an ambulance is you have a lot of data, its vital signs, ECGs. If the paramedics are capable, they do ultrasounds as well. All of this data is only useful to doctors in A&E’s especially if it’s a 999 call. It’s only useful once the ambulance actually hits the A&E. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s, for example, the London ambulance services, their waiting period or the transition period from the scene of emergency to hospital is around 15 to 20 minutes. So in that 15 to 20 minutes, which are super crucial if it’s a critically ill patient, they’re very important. So if in those 15 to 20 minutes, the doctor has access to all this information and sort of has access to a in ambulance video streaming, of course content based then we can make early clinical decisions to have benefits which are three fold. So the first one is of course, enhancing health care so you have the opportunity to save someone, It will not maybe result in some sort of a fatality. But at least you can give someone a chance to not develop some disability, for example, in the cases of strokes, certain cardiovascular diseases, then second is, as Dan mentioned, alleviating the pressure from A&Es. So the thing is that you have, like, even if you have very simple symptoms, which you can sort of, you can treat them at home, but because you have sort of like a panic that you need to go to A&E, and you sort of go there, and you just stay there, you wait for four or five hours, and then you’re attended. So all these cues, they can easily be avoided, if you have remote access to a doctor. So this is one of the key benefits that will unfold with this project. And finally, the last one is about hospital avoidance. So sometimes there are panic calls, for example, I know when I won’t share the details, but there was one panic call from a care home, which was, which could easily be avoided and could there could be, you could save a lot of resources in terms of the paramedics, the time consumed, etc, all of it. So these can be avoided if you have remote access to doctors, so ambulance visiting a patient, the doctor can simply say that, okay, you just give this very simple medicine. And that’s it, then you don’t need to really bring in the patient to A&E. So all of these combined, they are the motivation of the project. And the in ambulance video streaming that I just mentioned, we are developing our own compression algorithm that will be super friendly, in terms of bandwidth. So it’s bandwidth consumption is always a problem, right? So this question comes to mind that if you save resources and and everything with this project, but at the same time, you’re increasing some costs associated with bandwidth consumption, connectivity, but this is our main focus, we will make sure that our in ambulance video streaming uses a certain compression algorithm, that it will be super band bandwidth friendly, and it will cost very less in terms of bandwidth consumption.

Tom White
I mean, yeah, incredible.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I mean, I don’t want to big it up which is why I let Arslan do it. But I’m still pretty humbled when he speaks about it to me. Because, you know, what we’re trying to do is, you know, he, you know, hopefully we can save lives or prevent certain, you know, not so great things happening to people. But equally, can we make it accessible so that it’s not just the UK who can use it, but it could be a global thing we could do, right? It’s, it doesn’t matter where it goes. So you’ve got to deliver something that’s gonna have huge amounts of benefit. Not be crazy in terms of costs that can be easily deployed. And that’s sort of part of this, this journey we’ve been on right. So we’re sort of halfway through the three year plan. We’re getting soon to sort of commercialising parts of it. And, you know, we will, Arslan sort of underplays it, but, you know, we are creating our own IP on this, you know, there’s a lot of things we’re doing the we own, we’re very keen to work with a lot of our partners today in the UK, who’ve got NHS contacts, and we want to be like, Cool, let’s like, test this stuff out and start to see, because it’s not easy. We spoke about policymakers, you know, and the and the policies being a bit behind technology. And we understand that, you know, we understand that, but actually, yeah, the outcome could be quite, quite dramatic.

Tom White
Yeah, I think, I think it’s, it’s really fantastic. And we’ve had a few people on the show where they’re doing projects that have a real world impact straight away. And this is what I love about having people like yourselves on because this is something that’s going to affect everyone, and affect people in their everyday lives, which sometimes when you talk about IoT, it seems like this kind of mystical thing that people don’t really understand. But when you actually talk about it in real context, that’s fantastic. The NHS gets a bit of a raw deal. And I think, and I think after the pandemic, you know, people have started to realise that, hey, this is a really great, fantastic service. So anything that’s going to help them be better at their job, some of the projects that’s happening with NHS X, you know, what you’re, what you’re doing here, is is fantastic. I know even from my personal point of view, I’ve recently got Bupa. And there was there was Babylon Health, which works in conjunction with Bupa. I’m able to see a GP 24 hours a day, within an hour’s notice without having to put strain on those services. And that’s really I guess what this is about isn’t reducing that strain.

Dan Cunliffe
100%. I mean, I think any way you can well, this is the purpose right of IoT like I said before, to make better decisions. It’s to influence, I guess sectors or markets where you can use technology to make it better. And you know, we spoke about the predictive maintenance example earlier, but this is more like a predictive personal maintenance type scenario, right? Where you where you are using different types of technologies. But as Arslan said, there are there are a lot of challenges, right? Like, you can’t just turn up and go, Hey, I’m going to put a new thing in in an ambulance, and I’m going to go forward with it. Because, you know, we may talk about the other aspects, we want to use this, or do we want to use this intellectual property for But yeah, I mean, Tom, it’s, it’s, it’s great to be in a, in this sort of environment we are where we can help things like the NHS and and other health organisations around the world. Because I do see this as transferable. I do see the ability to, to use something like you know, very few countries, who don’t have an ambulance, you could make one if you wanted to, right, but you have an ambulance, you generally have mobile connectivity, cameras are able to be put in there and doctors are able to be brought into this ecosystem. And so I think we can transfer it down the road. But yeah, I definitely want to prove our stripes in the in the UK market.

Tom White
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, Dan, I think you’ve just touched upon it there. But you’re you are making inroads. Right? And you’re conducting this project within in policing and firefighting, potentially, and this is something that you may be able to transfer this across.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I’ll touch a bit then again, like I said, and then I’ll pass onto Arslan so, so part of the business plan to to get the started was, you know, where else could you take the technology, so obviously, we explained the ambulance but body worn basically think of think of anywhere that a camera can be used, where we have a more, I guess, friendlier algorithm to compress, loads amount of high definition video into manageable sort of bandwidth for for mobile technology. That’s kind of the real dumbed down version of it. But it becomes useful when you think about body worn cameras using a single sim that connects to all the networks. Yeah, so you never run out like, Can you imagine? I mean, I don’t know the stats again. But I can imagine that, you know, policeman’s chasing someone down, and then you he runs out of connectivity. Or like, you know, he loses the network, what we’re trying to build is something that helps to move between networks that will choose the best that will also be the right level of bandwidth control to make sure we get the footage to make sure we can make the decisions. Yeah. So So yeah, so body worn cameras in the police 100% there’s a big play for that. And a lot of guys are interested in what we’re doing there, firefighting as well, for obvious reasons, you know, to be able to replay what happened or kind of what what what can be done. We’re particularly looking at the CCTV market where we can help situations there. I spoke to someone yesterday at my Rugby Club, because we’re now allowed to play outside again since this week. Yeah, yeah. Right. So super excited to go outside. And he is, he’s like an acting CEO for a computer vision company. And we’re talking about cameras that effectively for autonomous vehicles, when they’re learning the road, and they’re kind of trying to figure out what’s coming up as part of the AI piece. And I explained to him, you know, what, you need a strong algorithms to process all that stuff, and particularly to keep the bandwidth low. So you can deliver this globally. So yeah, quite a few markets. I’ll be honest, you know, plenty of place to go in terms of what you can do with it. But yeah, I mean, we just want to get this part done as well. It’s important to get those first milestones across the road. But you know, a few people are interested in it, which is great.

Dr. Arslan Usman
So just adding a bit more about it. Just I will give you some scenarios, how police body worn cameras and similar situations for firefighters, how can they be helpful. So for example, if you have a body worn camera with 5G connectivity, and it’s just a use case, and it is something it’s which is it is a very hot topic right now all across the world. So you can easily identify people if you have connected some AI based algorithm running at the back end. So it it you can’t have AI based algorithms within the body worn cameras, because they’re highly complex. They require a lot of computational power, etc. And you need decision in seconds. So a tiny device can’t do that. So you connect them with cloud computing platforms. So again, 5G comes in. So 5G has things like Multi-access Edge Computing, MEC. They’re developing these platforms with Amazon with Microsoft different vendors. So what happens is all this intensive processing, it takes place in these cloud computing platforms. So you have this body worn camera, you are taking a live feed, you have like, I don’t know you’re in a chase or you are attending some emergency and you need quick identification of the people involved with the person In emergency, so you just feed that live video stream into the 5G, mobile edge computing. And it gives you a decision that okay, this is the person who you’re attending to, or chasing or whatever. Similar with the case with firefighting. So you can first of course, in firefighting, safety and communication, they go hand in hand. So the more communication happens with among the firefighters and within their headquarters, the more safer they feel. And of course, they can perform their duty actively if they have good communication among each other. So 5G comes in there as well. And if they have access to body worn cameras, again, some AI based algorithm that is happening at the back end that can help them to predict the speed and severity of a fire, that how fast it will spread, and what actions need to be taken. So all of this, it’s not just about 5G, of course, it’s definitely the back end, which is the artificial intelligence part as well. It all goes hand in hand and works out I think, absolutely beautifully.

Tom White
Yeah, without meaning to sound overly techie on this. I understand this quite well because I have a real personal interest in in video compression decompression systems, and also AI on the back end. In fact, we have at my house, we have a Hikvision NVR with AI based cameras, right? So the NVR will store the AI processing and would do image recognition, and even look to see if the object is not a human object, right. So if it’s your dog or something like that, it won’t set off alarms. Similar tech, I suppose, in a way. But But you’re right, Yeah, it’s really cool, right?

Dan Cunliffe
I mean, can you imagine how many people have like, you know, not to play it down, but like almost had a heart attack from the alarm going off and it’s the cat just coming home.

Tom White
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think i think i think you’re right. And I think you know, just to, just to clarify that point, then for anyone that’s listening, that doesn’t understand this. This is the advantage as well of 5G and IoT, isn’t it? Because when you look at software compression, of video codecs, where it’s difficult to get that high quality video streamed back to the cloud, over a 4G, and you need that in order to harvest that AI bank, to be able to then start predicting and doing facial recognition. And that’s the limitations of having a 4G, you know, real world, what, 40 megabits something like that, at best maybe. So this is this is a fantastic thing, isn’t it?

Dr. Arslan Usman
Yeah, it’s very well put.

Tom White
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So it guys, I’m curious to know where, where this is all going? And again, this is such a wide question. So so maybe I’ll ask each of you. What do you think is is the use case of 5G in the future, something immediate that you see outside of what you’re doing that you’re personally looking forward to? Maybe start with yourself Dan?

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, happy to. So I’ll come at it from a telecoms perspective and a telecoms provider, because that’s one of my backgrounds in that and kind of thinking about things. And for me, I do, we do a lot of work with sort of, you know, I guess, tier one, tier two level ISPs. And for them, they’ve been traditionally providing copper services or fibre services to homes or to businesses for a long time. And they’ve been stressed a little bit about what 5G brings, because it’s so the potential is so powerful, that you can deliver these things over the year and within days, and it’s got a lot. And my mantra has been a lot about Look, the way we are helping them kind of address that is, don’t worry about like the competitive threat, think about the ability to just focus on endpoints on your service. Just think about endpoints, how many more endpoints are there on a mobile environment, and they are on fixed environments, like, you know, there’s one office with 20 people in but that 20 people have actually got 20 endpoints. So you can connect more things, you can drive more business, you can be more excited about it. So So for me, in terms of where that’s going is, and this is a benefit to all, you know, the man in the street, the guy running a business, the whole thing; is that we can use the over the air and underground technology, the over the air being 5G, right, but the ability to connect people much quicker in terms of time taken to get a service, but then also to be more reliable. If you combine those two together. It’s up to me and my customers. That way, I’m pushing it forward. I really believe that that is something that’s maybe not thought about that much but the blend of wireless and fixed together in what 5G brings is just going to be it’s going to be great because it means we can We can, we can do more critical deployments faster. We spoke about I don’t know if we mentioned but you know, we’re doing a lot of sort of blood donor vehicles or breast screening vehicles and all this sort of stuff using where 5G is available, we’re trying to use it for that or where we use combined 4G. And I can just see that becoming the norm, which is a great experience, because you just get more out of that service, and you can start to push more through it as well. So that’s for me is one place. I think it’s really exciting.

Tom White
Thank you, Dan. Appreciate that. Arslan, how about yourself?

Dr. Arslan Usman
So for me, I actually want to sort of highlight one thing, which is always missing when we have 5G conversations. It’s about network slicing. So network slicing, it’s, I’ll put it in very easy words, it’s about sort of when you’re hungry, or you’re not hungry, you want a certain piece of the pie, like a bigger piece of the pie or a small piece of the pie. So that’s what network slicing is, for example, you have a very resource hungry business. So you tell the network operators that, okay, you need these dedicated chunk of resources in terms of bandwidth, reliability, and end to end delay, that I want these chunk of resources for a particular period of time. And you let me help you let me I don’t know, download something, upload something for this particular period of time. So I’m really looking forward to network operators having this capability of network slicing. So one application can be for example, self driving cars, Tesla self driving cars they have. So I don’t know what how frequent it occurs. But they do have to just like our cell phones, or laptops, they need to have software updates, right. So when a software upgrade happens, you need to have a very strong, reliable and a high speed connection. So it happens really quick, without a hiccup, even if you’re moving. So that’s like and sort of tell the network operators that Okay, we’ll pay you this much. But for these two, three hours, please make sure that all our guards, they have this dedicated chunk of resources, so they can just easily have the software upgrade. So I’m, as a researcher, I’m really looking forward to this capability of network slicing in 5G.

Tom White
Yeah, it really is. It’s often overlooked, actually, as you say, not many people. Not many people talk about it just despite, you know, the massive benefits. And just And just lastly, guys, because I know that we were slightly running over slightly on this, but it’s okay. Pangea. Where, where’s it going? What What can we expect to see you guys doing in the future? Doing some fantastic stuff at the moment, but what what should people be looking out for?

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I mean, I think I think for me, even though, I’m very, very humbled to be running a business for six years now. Yeah. It’s a lot of it’s a lot of effort for anyone who’s listening, and is running a business, whether you’re in year one or year 60, you know, yeah, I can relate. I had hair when I started. Yeah. And so it’s pretty cool to still kind of be here doing our thing, and being able to do this stuff with you guys, on the IoT podcast, you know, but I think I think it’s about constantly doing the things that we love, which is curating the ability to number one help our partners sell into many more markets, right? So, so it’s our job to keep bringing the right inputs in terms of technology, capability, and, and, of course, commercial capability as well. So you can sell and go out and do these things. You know, maybe bringing that into kind of, you know, specifics, you know, I’m, I’m pretty keen on always looking at what are the transferable products and services, we have so talking about Arslan’s product, you know, that does belong more than just the UK, we shouldn’t be looking at it further. Like, you know, we’ve got a lot of our solutions now. I mean, just as an interest, so yeah, so we can, we can connect them with anywhere in the world. But we have 51 countries that have a service with us in the world, which is pretty cool. Now, how’d you make that? I’m not necessarily that keen on having it to be 52 like that, that will happen naturally. But is how much in everyone? Can we do more? That’s what I’m pretty keen on. Like, how can we inflate per country? Like why is it working? How can we improve, but what that represents for the UK economy and for the most of our partners are UK based, is that is the ability to trade like that, too. So how can we help those guys improve their, their own environment, through post COVID and that kind of thing to actually trade more in many, many countries. So so that’s one thing that to me is about taking ourselves into the next you know, connecting everything in more places is probably is probably what it’s about. And yeah, like, you know, 5G is very exciting. It’s coming down the road, the various levels of it for us as a team, I think, you know, constantly looking at what’s the next bit of tech, you know, where’s the solutions around? You know, Arslan told me the other day he went to a conference and they’re talking about the 6G. I mean, it’s ridiculous. We haven’t even baked the pie in terms of the slice. We haven’t even done that part yet. Yeah, different kind of pie. So it’s a cool place to be in terms of, you know, thinking of the next tick. It’s, it’s our job to make sure it’s relevant for our clients, how we keep it relevant, whether it’s geography, or the type of technology or commercially. So that’s our sort of plan.

Tom White
Yeah, fantastic. Well, no, no doubt you’re going to be a success. You’ve done some fantastic things already. And looking forward to everything that you’re going to do in the future. Dan Cunliffe, Dr. Arslan Usman, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dan Cunliffe
Thank you. Thanks, Tom.