Revolutionizing Connectivity: 5G, IoT, and Smart Cities – A Future Driven by Fiber

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wavelength. An Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast. I'm your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. Thanks again for joining us folks on another episode of the show. As we continue to explore the trends, the technologies, and the tectonic plate shifting themes and topics, that are shaping the world of broadband and the larger telecom industry. Make sure that you're heading to our website, amphenolbroadband.com. Again, that's am all broadband dot com for previous episodes of our podcast wavelengths, but also more resources on our solutions and services, but of course more thought leadership as well, including episodes of the podcast, but also videos, white papers, blogs, thought leadership. You name it. Alright, folks. Let's jump into the conversation. We've got a lot to unpack today per usual. Today's episode is gonna feel a little familiar. It's actually gonna be kinda continuing our tradition on this show of sitting down with industry experts to get their perspectives on how broadband innovations and specifically fiber are supporting the connectivity technologies and the networks of today and tomorrow. So with today's chat, we're gonna be honing in a little more specifically on the five g layer through a five g lens, understanding some of the downstream impacts on the development of IoT, deployments, the adoption of IoT, technology, and smart city use cases, but then really try to under stand why the future of all of those technologies is one that is driven by fiber and what role does fiber play. Right? So gonna get a pulse check on how these edge tech market segments. Again, five g, IoT in smart cities, are all developing today why these developments are so critical, how they're taking shape, and again, unpack the role that fiber is playing in facilitating the development of these segments. So let's get into the conversation today with our guest. I'm pleased to welcome Mr. Ritesh Mukherjee. He's SVP and General Manager of Products at 5G networking leader Inseego. So he and his team at Inseego are developing 5G and intelligent IoT device to cloud solutions. Recently, they launched SD Edge, which was specifically in response to an enterprise demand for cure digital transformation experiences that are being driven by adoptions and, advancements in 5G and IoT. So looking forward to getting this lens today, Ritesh. Great to have you on. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thanks, Daniel, for having me on the show. I'm excited talk about fiberhood and five g and how, you know, being mingled together to provide the best experience for customers and enterprises. Yeah. Absolutely. We appreciate your lens again on the show. Just so our audience understands the unique perspectives you're bringing to the table and how those are informed by your experience, but also in Seego's work, Give us that quick elevator pitch. Right? What is that lens that you're bringing to the conversation today? Yeah. I mean, if you look at Inseego, be provide intelligent device-to-cloud solutions. And what that means is we provide the last mile, to wireless or five g connectivity. So we expect extender five g network edge, enable broader coverage with multi-gigabyte speeds, low latency, and so on. I mean, also, our products are deployed and trusted by, you know, millions of users, or hotspots, modems, routers, and so on. Fiber is obviously essential for enabling this connectivity. I mean, the last mile, yes, which is tough to do with fiber. And fiber is one of the tools. You know, you can fiber to the home, fiber to the curb, fiber to here. But I mean, ultimately, it's difficult to do that last mile. Wireless provides a great solution for that, but having said that, Once you have that first hop to the tower, you are connected over fiber. So fiber does is the backbone for many infrastructures including the five g infrastructure. I mean, there's no single wireless connection from me to Amazon or me to Google or Gmail or anything like that. I mean, you know, ultimately is from me to the tower, which is then connected via fiber. So we we like the idea of having fiber and to enable our five g connectivity, but we also like to obviously think that the last mile is difficult to do with fiber and to pull fiber to every home is difficult. And so that's where this five g connectivity comes in. And together, five g m, fiber can together provide that, you know, solution which we need, to connect all these homes and enterprises and so on. And, you know, I think you bring up a good point there that we will expand on a little more naturally in the discussion, but I just wanna highlight it that, you know, in all these discussions I have with our telecom pros, it's become more and more and more clear that when we have these discussions about the role of, you know, let's say, expansion of rural broadband or development of five g infrastructure, or we look at recent, kind of proprietary IOT networks like Amazon sidewalk being launched. A lot of times the framework of those launches is around. This is why this is the best x, y, and z technology for this use case. What we're seeing what you just described and what will break down is that it's the ecosystem that really is the most important and that it's all about as these technologies develop, how are they playing their role better in that ecosystem to be supported by fiber, let's say, or to support wireless connectivity or to, you know, help facilitate connections between x and y, that sort of intermingled, weight and desire to see competing, but really complimentary technologies develop, that's really the takeaway that I'm excited to lean on today, would you agree as we get into the discussion that as we see these technologies develop, really, we should be looking at their role in that larger ecosystem. What are your thoughts? Absolutely. I mean, ultimately five g and fiber are better together. Fiber provides the backhaul for all 5G deployment. I mean, like I said, I mean, there's no single file from single wireless link from us to Amazon or to Google or to cloud or to anything I mean, it has to ultimately go fiber. And fiber is fast and speed is better, in a vacuum in the sense without any other considerations. However, All applications we use in our homes obviously do not demand the high speeds which fiber provides. This means only investing in fiber is obviously not the only solution, a combination of FWA fixed wireless access, fiber, even boxes, or any of the technologies as well and evolution of that provides the best solution. And I completely agree with what you said that, you know, we are gonna look at it as a holistic picture of what the echo still needs. And this is one tool in our toolbox, five g or, you know, fixed wireless access or five g or fiber. They're all one tool in the toolbox, and we're gonna use all of them, to make sure that the best be at the best possible experience. So with that, let's get into recent developments in 5G. Obviously, Inseego, y'all are at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of five g deployed in practice and understanding how do we get this developing in real-time? What are you seeing right now in the industry, just some recent developments that are most critical in the underlying five g technology, and then I'll ask you some questions about how that's manifest thing kind of per industry. Sure. I mean, if you look at it, five g, I mean, it provides high speeds because of, you know, better data rates and so on. And an improved connectivity and all this. I mean, two of the leading operators in the US today have more than five million, you know, fixed wireless access connections today. There's about a little bit north of hundred million, I would say, fixed wireless access connections worldwide. And that number is continuously going up. This means about, I mean, twenty percent of all broadband connections, at some point, will be around FWA. So Obviously, the biggest use case for 5G has been fixed wireless access, providing these homes with connectivity, especially in rural areas, and even in urban areas where, you know, it's to pull fiber or there's older infrastructure fixed wireless access is a quick way to do that. We are seeing, the new use cases or the promise of use cases which were there with five g now coming into picture, like they're used seeing being used for, you know, AR VR and first connectivity to stadiums and connectivity in different use cases. In smart cities, many of the Lambos in some of these newer cities and newer structures are connected by five g. So we are seeing that happen, but still I would say about the biggest growth for 5G. Deployments has been in fixed wireless access. Which is connecting basically users and homes, with access. The other thing to know is that I mean, it does help solve the digital divide. I mean, recent reports show that about twenty-two percent of US and roughly, I would say forty percent of households, worldwide, out of the wrong side of the digital divide, with no high broadband speeds. And of course, that's because of, you know, various seasons, economic reasons, affordability, last mile challenges, ability to pull, you know, fiber and so on. So there we have seen a lot of deployment in of using five g solutions or five g hotspots or five g mobile routers being given out so that, you know, people can have connectivity. It provides a good way to provide quickly and affordably connect these families who are far off or, you know, don't have good connectivity. So those are the things we are seeing now. For us, I would say the biggest, use case has been fixed wireless access. Maybe even sixty to seventy percent of our entire deployments are mainly fixed to wireless access. The remaining, I would say are for connecting, private networks, manufacturing, industries, smart cities. They would be the next ones which are coming up we have not yet seen a so much of deployments for, autonomous vehicles and, you know, cars and so on. Oh, that is, of course, wireless connectivity for, what do you say? For getting traffic updates and music in the car and so on. But not so much being used for autonomous driving or anything like that today. We haven't seen so much of that. So that's what I would say. The main deployments have been. We are seeing also fiber and five g being used for connecting. AR VR headsets and so on. I mean, many of these things only make sense. If you're not, you know, plugged to a cable next to your next to the ethernet cable, I'll review your phone. It only makes sense if you can be mobile and if you can use them. So we are seeing use cases like that, but it's still an infancy. I also wanna make sure we intersect, again, IoT use cases and smart city development these are obviously all kind of separate phenomena, right, IoT. It doesn't all happen on five g. Smart Cities are developing without 5G, but the 5Gs advancement is very much sort of the vision for the next phase of a lot of these deployments. When we're talking, you know, let's say municipal wide IoT, which that point become smart cities, something reliable like five g supported by fiber infrastructure is gonna be key. So in that sense, it's useful to think of these as kinda downstream from advancements in fiber and five g. I'm curious how you see, you know, development of IoT, devices, the advancement of these devices, further deployment of them, and then that kind of evolution of IoT ecosystems into smart cities is interacting with advancements in five g and fiber, tech, and deployment, especially because a lot of smart city deployments that are imagined have a lot of mission-critical functions to them. They're either smart cities for, you know, daily functioning of a downtown, let's say. They're smart cities for wayfinding and emergency situations. They're smart cities in a health care setting. Right? And so these aren't kind of one-off fun quirky deployments. They are mission critical and and bake into the quality of life for people living in those regions. So With that as context, what are you seeing as the important intersections between these market segments? And, why does it matter to kinda study the downstream effects on IoT in smart cities, from, you know, where five g and fiber are developing and advancing. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at IoT, connections, then people talk about, you know, for using five g for IoT connections and, and of course, fiber as well. One of the challenges with IoT is obviously the cost of the device. I mean, you have all these Phillips hue devices at, at home, Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. And they work great. I mean, they're connected to the WiFi in your house. You can give voice commands can change colors, turn them on and off. But the main issue is they are not connected to five g directly, and that's because the cost of the modem. The cost of the modem is five g modem would make the cost of all these IoT devices much more expensive. Like today, they're around ten to twenty dollars. These bulbs are high-end on the lower end, they could be even cheaper. But if I put to put a five g modem in each one of them, they would become two hundred dollars and no one would use them. The issue with the same issue applies to the IoT devices. If I had IoT devices all over the city, or for monitoring, you know, sensors and so on in restaurants and houses and buildings and manufacturing and so on. I can't have direct connectivity to the five g network from these devices mainly because it would increase the cost of those devices significantly. For one or two devices, I can do that. I could pay more, but if that's hundreds or hundreds of device of IoT sensors I gotta deploy, then obviously increasing the cost of each device makes no sense. And what we need then is, of course, connectivity from there to the backhaul in the sense You need maybe you can have those connected over WiFi, like in the case of the valves, and they're connected to, let's say, a five g CPE, which can then do the backhaul or they're connected to fiber. To a CPE, which is connected to your fiber network, like, to an O and T, which is doing a WiFi signal and so on. The other option is we could have a large private network in manufacturing. Like, now you have these manufacturing plants which are deploying big. Private networks where you're connected, with low cost, modems and so on to the CBRS network. And, that is forming the, the network around it, and then you can back all again, that data as you need. One of the things we notice is five g for IoT makes sense, till the time you think of it, like I said, as the backhaul. The time you think of it as that's going to be the connection to the end. Will that only make sense in some, real mission critical infrastructure where you want to have, you know, the modem built in into the IoT device as well. Otherwise, you need to have some sort of way to reach the five g backhaul or a fiber backhaul you should be thinking of it, all of using all of these solutions together, which is why our products, if you look at them, they all come in built with WiFi six or six e, today. That's because we want that we understand that the last mile after the the, even the 5gcpe will connect to devices, which are, you know, Iot devices and so on, which will be more mainly over WiFi today. We would love it if all our laptops had, you know, you could plug in a SIM card, and just have connectivity directly, but then the cost of each laptop would increase by two hundred dollars or so, and that makes it a little cost prohibitive. So, that's where, you know, it makes sense to just rely on WiFi at the end in your homes and, and in manufacturing and in facilities to connect it to the wifi network and then use it as a backhaul. This does bring, of course, security as a challenge. But there are solutions available for providing security over the the WiFi network, you know, separating your home WiFi from your corporate WiFi and so on. And it was a long way to answer, but I hope I answered, I gave you some context on what we think of how we think of fiber and five g in relation to IoT. We want them to the backhaul, and the but not directly to the IoT device. Yeah. And I think that's what we're seeing, play out in practice. Right? I think some of the best examples are that a lot of the, most accessible IoT networks that consumers now have access to. For example, Amazon sidewalk, that is sort of its own proprietary IoT network. It is probably supported by fiber and five g, but it's not consumers connecting their string of, Amazon devices to a five g connection or to a fiber line or something. Right? It's just taking advantage of that strong foundation, and then, having a sort of more short range, but still high power, IoT connection, for the day-to-day use. Right? Which then brings me to my last point, which is getting your thoughts on this relationship between wired and wireless links, for homes, but I think more importantly for enterprises, right? Because when we think about The use case is four five g for IoT and, smart cities and practice. A lot of them are mission critical like we've broken down. Right? And so having redundancy in links, whether they are wireless, whether they are wired, is key. Should one go down? You're not suddenly, you know, oops. I guess we don't have a network anymore. You have some redundancy in those connections. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on, maybe advice or strategy for how enterprises should approach, embracing wired links, wireless links and developing their own foundational infrastructure to future proof for some of these digital transformations that are still on the horizon. Absolutely. I mean, the best, like I said, the best redundancy is provided when you have wired and wireless connections working in tandem. And the reason for that is the last mile, if you have fiber, that's great. You have good connectivity and is future proof, but fiber cuts do happen. Things do go wrong. You have outages. And when that happens, you want to have a wireless connectivity. The thing to note is many people think that, you know, why don't I just get two wired connections? That would be great if they are from different what do you say, mediums being provided in the sense of remember that fiber, paths are similar, in the sense it's not like one ISP takes one side of the road and the other ISP takes the other side of the road. No. They're all on the same side of the road. And so when a fiber cut happens, you know, it cuts, it can cut both the fibers. It's actually a common, a common problem. In fact, in my previous role, I was at Reliance Geo, and we heard the national stock change of India had an outage, and, that reason was they had multiple five multiple fiber connections from multiple providers. But, both both of them were cut. So, I mean, that does happen. You need to have, redundancy and connections, and the best redundancy is wireless and wired. Now we are even, telling our our, in our retail enterprises and so on that you could have one of our outdoor units connected to a far off power, and the indoor unit, connected to a nearby tower, wireless tower so that even if the tower went down you or had had some issues in connectivity or was congested for some reason. Even in the wireless links, you would get rundancy with, you know, connection to multiple towers and then from there, being using fiber as the backhaul. The best solution is obviously to have a wired, have fiber, and five g as the as the last mile or dox's or whatever you have as a wired and five g as the last mile and then go over the fiber network from the cell tower or from the curve and so on. So a combination of those. We always tell enterprises, think of redundancy for combination of both. And don't worry so much about redundancy of end devices. People are people also tell us, like, hey, should we have two of your units? What if one of your unit fails? Yeah, but I mean, Do you have them connected to different power supplies? No. So what if the power supply fails? You're not really creating redundancy by doing that. What you want is redundancy in the links. And and the devices themselves, they have very high, you know, mean time between failures. So, or very low mean time between failures, they hardly fail. They're good for years and years. So don't worry about that part. Think of the connectivity and think of you know, how you're gonna get redundancy in terms of connections. And the best way to do that is to have wired and wireless work in tandem And I think that's a good point to, you know, to apply to general digital transformation investment There's so many competing areas of investment that are drawing enterprises attention. And I think knowing where to place those funds motivated by kind of what you're saying here, right, which is these investments should go towards areas where you know you're gonna have the most guaranteed return on your investment. Naturally, that's always a motivating factor, but when we're talking redundancy, for example, If building redundancy on sort of the the very end of that last mile means you have to invest in secondary power apply a whole secondary run of devices, nodes, etcetera, that seems like, you know, maybe down the line, go ahead. Do that great redundancy is always great, but if you can invest instead in the links in the infrastructure that helps to power your operations, your, oversight, whatever it might be, your analytics, your cloud, you know, your relationship to the cloud. All of that is probably more fundamental because that's where we see more inconsistencies, should a network go down, you know you have a backup network connection, or should one slow down, you know, I know a lot of enterprises have, you know, these links operating in tandem. So it's not one. And if it goes out, it's the other, actually sort of simultaneously pulling from whichever one is, up or is faster or better serves x or y or z purpose. Is that level of sort of granular, relationship with, wired versus wireless connections, something that you're seeing enterprises deploy and get strategic about, are you seeing on that front? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there's nothing called backups anymore. I mean, there's no point in having a building a second connection and just not using it or just waiting to use it. I mean, if you had Ronaldo and Messi on the same team, wouldn't use one at a time. You would let both of them go on the field and score as many goals as you can. So same thing. If you have wireless and wired connections, It's not like one is a backup of the other. No. You're using both of them active active. But of course, you're gonna load balance intelligently, maybe even combine the speeds intelligently so that you can get the best out of out of the, out of both, both the scenarios. There is a tendency to think that wireline wireless always, will be the backup mainly because wired is sort of, you know, the cost is included and wired, wireless and paying for data. Which is true in many cases, but now the data caps are so high with all these operators providing, connections. You don't need to really worry about, about, you know, not using the wireless connection and only using wired you could also set your threshold. I mean, nowadays, we can monitor of thresholds and so on that, you know, use this first, use this second or load balance them fifty, seventy thirty, whatever way you want, what we tell, our users especially the ones at home remote work or, enterprises is that your mission critical traffic, we give the best priority, and we put it on the best possible network. The remaining, we backhaul over the, obviously, the low cost or the cheapest possible solution. So if you want, you can have you'll use the five g network. Let's say only for your enterprise traffic, and the wired connection for every else, like, you know, your fun traffic, like guest WiFi, YouTube, Xbox, and so on traffic, or you could say send everything over the the wired network and MKV types of congestion move only the enterprise traffic to five g so that there has a clear path you can do all sorts of these combinations now. Most of our devices, especially the SDA solutions, they are very intelligent to do all of these different things you want. But yeah, definitely you should be using both active active, and utilizing the best possible scenario for your application so that you can, you know, load balance and aggregate traffic over these links intelligently. Alright, Ritesh. I think on that note, we'll go ahead and end on an actionable note for our audience Thank you again for your perspectives today, giving us your insight into, recent developments in five g, IoT and smart city technology. Use cases, but then again, understanding the role fiber plays in supporting these real time development you know, as folks are familiar with on this podcast, these are trends that are developing in real time. It's why we have multiple conversations with multiple efforts like yourself, Ritesh, at least once every few months to get another pulse check. So I imagine we're gonna continue to see you know, new fiber deployment, new infrastructure, motivation, whether federal, you know, funding or otherwise, five g infrastructure continuing to develop in the US. And as we see this, we're gonna keep posing these questions on the relationship between network technologies and how they can support, the endpoint use cases of today and tomorrow. So, Ritesh, again, thank you so much for your insights. Folks, we've been chatting with, Ritesh Mukherjee. He is again SVP and general manager of products at 5G networking leader in Sego. To learn more about Insego, you can go to Insego dot com and Ritesh. If folks want to learn a little bit more about some of the work you're doing or pick your brain a little bit, where should we point them? I mean, the website is obviously a good point. We have contacts. You can obviously come in and and we can talk about it. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. Or on Twitter. I do monitor them sometimes. And so that's one way to reach me. Fiber and 5G are better together. And fiber forms the backhaul for all 5G. So that's the main thing to know. And Daniel was nice talking to you. Thank you for having me It's been a pleasure. And, I hope I'll be back soon again, to talk more. Absolutely. Looking forward to that next conversation. Ritesh Mukherjee. Thank you again for your time. Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. And thank you again, everyone, for tuning in to another episode of Wavelengths and Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast. If you like what you heard in Saturday and you want previous episodes or you wanna make sure that you don't miss out on the next important conversation on future of broadband and the larger telecom industry, make sure you're heading to our website, amphenolbroadband.com, and make sure that you're subscribing to wavelength on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast content. I'm your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B, and we'll catch chew on the next episode of Wavelengths, an Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast.