How we built it: IoT connectivity to keep construction workers safe | IoT Insider Podcast Episode 26

Bernie McPhillips
Hello everybody, and welcome to this month’s IoT Insider Podcast. We have another takeover situation this month. So I’m Bernie McPhillips, Sales Director here at Pangea. And I’m delighted to be joined this month by Rich Crossingham our Business Development Director. Hi, Rich.

Rich Crossingham
Hey, Bernie, how are you on this fine spring day?

Bernie McPhillips
Absolutely wonderful. Thank you and all the better for being on the podcast with you. We should do these more often. So we’ve got a lot to get through. Going to talk about our capability, how it’s constantly evolving, kind of what we’ve effectively turned into and the the opportunities that we can help our partners to discover, qualify, and indeed win, and all culminated in a really great success story that we’re going to share with you all. One of the things that we wanted to kind of talk about more specifically on this, and the ability to kind of bring things to life a little bit more for, for our partners is one particular use case, isn’t it. And that’s largely centred around construction, and a client that’s been with us for quite a number of years now, of course, brought to us by a partner, because we’re really proud to be channel only here at Pangea. We never sell direct to end users, we only operate and help to win business through our partners. And this particular partner was brought to us this, this customer who had quite a range of different challenges. First of all, they’re multisite, I think it’s close to 500 sites across the UK. And they really struggled with just primary connectivity in some of those locations, due to maybe rural kind of landscapes. No fibre, really expensive to install or colossal delays just to get it in place. But instead, you know, we were able to roll out Pangea’s connectivity as I think 4G backup in a lot of their locations. But I think our capability on network performance was seen to be superior to what they were getting from some forms of fixed connectivity, maybe like ADSL, if they were quite far away from an exchange so outperforming in terms of upload and download. So they quickly pivoted and wanted to use Pangea’s service as a primary connectivity, not just a backup, and they now use around eight to 10 terabytes of data a month across our core network. So that’s where, a term we like using as well Rich right, like an Internet service provider, an ISP, another acronym. An ISP, but we’re not bound by wires. So these solutions could be instantly deployed, same day or next day delivery, plug and play with a choice of static IP if needed even.

Rich Crossingham
I think that’s one of the key things with a challenge, like they presented to us. It was effectively providing connectivity in a really fast paced, flexible environment. And whilst we’re talking about construction, in this case, I think this creates a rubber stamp that you can then apply to so many other things, be it festivals, retail, there are so many fast paced, flexible events, nowadays, environments that need this kind of stuff. And the key things they needed are, again, the key things that other people need, you need rapid, but temporary, so it needs to be quick, fast to deploy to enable the connectivity at the location. But it also needs to be temporary, because you don’t want to have a fixed agreement for X amount of months or years. You just want to pick it up and take it somewhere else. Rural a lot of the time, whether it’s construction, whether it’s festivals, whether it’s any kind of summer events that we’re hopefully going to see more and more back nowadays. The these kinds of solutions are perfect for them. Fixed really is out of the question. So when you look at their challenges and what they need, it is absolutely a move to mobile.

Bernie McPhillips
Thanks Rich, I really like the way you explain that because I also believe that you know, mobile is now seen as a really credible alternative to fixed. Also no longer segmenting customers by their industry or the type of business they’re in, it segments them based on their requirements, are they multisite? Do they move around? Do they have temporary sites? Do they potentially finish work in one place and move to another place and then could start a whole new project? So they say construction is a prime example, you move into a brownfield it’s going to take months to install a leased line. We can give them all the connectivity that that customer needs for as long as they need it with a choice of IP, but then they can effectively flat pack it and move it to the next construction site once that project’s finished. But you just brilliantly said there, you can apply that, forget the fact it’s a construction company, it can be any type of business; retail, pop up sites, seasonal based on sport, a lot of tennis products are sold when Wimbledon’s on. I’ve recently seen a pop up NBA shop in a local shopping centre when the season was about to kick off over in the States, so you get the same when it’s the NHL, the World Cup’s on later this year, lot’s of football jerseys. So pop up retail based on seasonality or based on what’s happening in the sporting world at that particular moment in time. Then it’s hospitality at race courses, at sports stadiums, motor tracks, festivals that you’ve already mentioned, massive amounts of connectivity, short space of time. Flat pack it and move on. That simply can’t be fixed connectivity. It cannot be bound by wires. We’re also providing connectivity on things like ferries. 1000s of vehicles all over the UK, these things can’t be bound by wires. So almost detach yourself from the type of customer that they are based on this segment. And start thinking about the customer base and their requirements, because you can quickly then identify further opportunities based on success that you’ve had, who else has your short term projects that can be in one particular location, and then move to another like porter cabins?

Rich Crossingham
Yeah, and that’s what we, we often talk about that with our partners. It’s like you’ve done brilliantly in this vertical. But actually, what you’re doing is you’re providing this, this capability, enabling the workers to get online but also protecting equipment or empowering devices to report back, whether they’ve moved outside of a geofence location, or they have an issue. So they can pre warn them based upon a need to carry out maintenance or something like that. And again, it goes across all the different areas you say, right, brilliant, you’ve done some business in construction, you’ve won a bunch of companies and deliver those services to them. But if you just look at what the underlying capability is, you could replace cement mixer with coffee machine, you could replace whatever it is. So you’ve got a brilliant way to basically take a solution and then just reinvent it, rebadge it, reprovide it to a completely different sector. I think there’s always more than one solution or one requirement from a solution that’s delivered. So for this specific example, it was about getting workers online, but it was also about protecting their heavy duty construction gear be it power tools, generators, excavators, anything like that. So you need to be aware that typically, it’s not just one thing, someone might say, oh, I need to get my workers connected. But once you provide that connectivity, suddenly, it’s Oh, and I also need to log into my CCTV, suddenly you need a static IP, need X Y, Z, the minute you get the connectivity there, a bunch of other things will suddenly fall out of the air and be a requirement. And it’s always great because you can suddenly say, well, we can scale this as you need. And effectively when you start doing all of that kind of thing. You’re looking at really creating a flexible mobile WAN environment. And it just enables you to, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’re basically deploying mobile WAN so they can do all the things they need to do whether it’s IoT tool tracking, or the predictive maintenance I mentioned earlier, or it’s just people having a pop up office environment inside a porter cabin or similar in the middle of the field. And that’s where I think it’s really interesting. Anything we ever do, you can immediately rewrap the solution, provide it to someone completely different, and it’s yeah, it’s fantastic.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, totally agree with what you said about the one opportunity you’d solve a business problem for a customer. I can’t think of many examples where that has not spiralled into other projects. So like you said, for this particular client it was about getting their workers connected across their 500 sites or at the very least 4G backup and a lot of those sites 4G/5G backup. A stat well published now, is that the broadband outage has cost the UK economy 5 billion pounds last year. So every business out there should feel a level of vulnerability if they’re totally dependent on a single fixed line. 4G/5G definitely the way to go for backup. It’s not going to leave your building through the same piping ductor run back to the same local exchange. So it’s far more versatile and resilient than a fixed line backup. Absolutely the way to go then the PSTN switch off just driving way more demand, 2G/3G sunsets have been replaced with 4G/5G services, you’ve got this whole culmination of all these external factors and these things going on which is just driving this huge demand. Like you say one conversation with a customer about providing them with connectivity in certain locations invariably turns into a lot. What else can you do? What else can you connect? So if you’re providing predictive maintenance on very expensive pieces of machinery or tracking the vehicles or geofencing plant machinery, you get alerted if these things have moved and they’re not meant to. So IoT projects are typically very long term. You know, we’ve got 7 to 15 year contracts in our business, many of them. A lot of our connectivity projects are very lucrative and very early on in contracts, not the same as your more traditional telecoms projects where there can be sometimes a lot of CapEx cost. And having to provide hardware and mobile devices and that type of thing seem to be a very different approach to this form of connectivity. There’s something that we’ve spoken about in other forums and presenting at other events this year, I think maybe on another podcast, it’s a completely different mentality that is taken when we talk about something that we refer to as sweetening the deal. So in the past, with telecoms, sweetening the deal often meant giving something away to a customer, could be a shiny new mobile device, or a tech fund, or a hardware fund or an airtime credit. But here at Pangea, and certainly how we’re supporting our partners, sweetening the deal is about adding more value. But adding that more value often results in some form of a premium. So it could be a static IP, it could be Multi-network over single, it could be a flexible tariff, it could be data aggregation, it could be content filtering, all of these things that sweeten the deal, are chargeable. So again, it’s a very lucrative opportunity for our partners, and something that can be cash positive and profitable from a very early stage, which again, is very different to your traditional kind of telecoms model as well. I’m thinking of a lot of reasons why our partner’s should be doing this and very little reason why they shouldn’t to be honest.

Rich Crossingham
I agree, I think a lot of the time outcomes are very similar as well, because the outcome for this solution was that setting up connectivity, no matter where that new location is, is quick, it’s either, as you said earlier, a flat pack of an existing site going to a new site, or it’s just setting another one up on a mobile WAN environment so it is quick. And that’s what you need, you need speed, you don’t want to be worrying about these things and how they might be derailing project timelines. The alerts indicating when tools need to be recalled when they need to be refurbished, helping reduce maintenance costs, all those kinds of things, again, brilliant outcomes, saving money, sometimes hard to absolutely discern how much you saved from it. But you can absolutely see the amount of alerts you get from maintenance requests and refurb indicators so that you can look at it and say, if that had broken, and that bit of kit was out for a week, and it took us three or four days to get another one over to that site, and they’ve lost three or four days worth of work. I’ve got no idea myself how much that will cost on a construction site. But I would imagine it’s significant. I know, when people build new retail environments, you’re talking hundreds of 1000s depending on the brand and the size of the square footage, but it’s a significant investment and being able to save that from happening is really key, and is again, replicable across all these different verticals.

Bernie McPhillips
It certainly is Rich, and not just across verticals, how about across continents? Because we’ve actually done this internationally, haven’t we, for global airlines, huge global confectionery manufacturers, that type of thing. As we mentioned earlier on, our capabilities are just replicable and applicable to so many different verticals, but it’s not even bound to the UK, Europe or even indeed, in any particular country, we have access to 960 networks in 185 countries. So the things that we’ve talked about today, including this kind of mobile WAN scenario, we can do that globally. So it’s just yeah, I don’t want to blow our listeners minds too much. I’m getting too excited about the kind of international side of things but yeah just really cool just to drop in the fact that we’re not we’re not bound by geography literally can do this, connect anything anywhere.

Rich Crossingham
The future is really exciting. When you look at the development of 5G, latency and all the things that will go hand in hand with it as the network’s fully upgrade their architecture. It’s going to be amazing what can be delivered, the speed at which it can be delivered. I know Ethernet’s going through its own developments. And you’re now moving from the glass base fibre to tests with hollow core fibre and the speed at which data can be passed through that. But it’s still a fixed thing. So you’re still constrained by the pure nature of the fact that it is a fixed thing. Whereas 5G isn’t, you want to do network slicing, you want to create VPNs in the sky, brilliant, here you go, we can do it. So 5G, and the things that we’ll be able to bring moving forwards. It just makes it such an exciting place to be involved in.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, it certainly does. I’ve spoken for a long time about three very specific questions that resellers tend to ask themselves when looking at new opportunities. First one is, is the opportunity real? I think now with the PSTN switch off, people are feeling vulnerable if they’re tied to a single fixed line. And even just now the amount of devices that are connected around the world, there’s close to 8 billion people in the world, almost 30 billion connected devices this year, and 18 billion of them are deemed to be related to IoT. So I don’t think there’s any question now that there might be an opportunity in IoT and intelligent mobile data is real. The next one is can you win? And I think we’ve got far too many success stories available to our partners, and on our website, to possibly suggest that you cannot win, you absolutely can, and in partnership with Pangea, because we’ve invested so heavily in our time, our effort, our resource, and our network, and infrastructure, all solely for the purpose of enabling our partners to win in this particular market. And then the last one is, can I make money? Because there’s no point in an opportunity being real, and you can win in that space, if there’s not money to be made. Everybody’s running a business. And again, as part of those success stories, we articulate the size of these opportunities in terms of contract value. And there’s some that roll up to £6.5 million, and many more way over a million pounds and above. So to be able to answer all those three questions. Is it real? Can I win? Can I make money? So confidently, should just give our partners so much comfort, that they’re in partnership with the right people here at Pangea, they’re in safe hands, if our partners are looking for a supplier who’s going to send them a box of SIMs and a price list? Then we’re not for them. We love getting involved standing shoulder to shoulder, running deal clinics, really getting under the skin of our partners business, to help them enable them not to do it all for them. That’s the important thing, it’s long term. Enable our partners to find, qualify, and win these very lucrative and long term contracts. And we just implore people to either existing partners, reengage, get in touch with your account manager, or myself or Rich, and we can set up these deal clinics, we can do all of this work with you and really help you to make the most of this wonderful market opportunity. And if there’s anybody listening in, who’s not currently a partner of Pangea, and probably now asking yourself, Why, then again, just do the same get in touch. We can get you signed up and get you all of the support that you need to, to make the most of this market. Anything else from you Rich before we we close off?

Rich Crossingham
No, I think that was a brilliant summary.

Bernie McPhillips
Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, delighted to take over again. Always delighted to be on a podcast with you Rich, I always find it very fascinating. Hopefully our listeners do too. We implore people to sign up to our mailing list, you can access that through our website. Please register and sign up and subscribe to the podcast. Get in touch with us via our website, the Contact Us section. And just in any way possible. We’re here ready to support you, either our existing or potential new partners and that’s all we’re geared up to do. So thanks again for listening everybody. Thanks again to you Rich, huge contribution today and as always, cheers. Look forward to hearing more from you soon. Bye now.