Exploring the Future of 5G Networks

Transcript

Intro (00:01):
You’re listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye, that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, swings and misses, lessons learned and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT Leaders for your guide to IoT, digital transformation, and innovation. Let’s get into the show.

Nick Earle (00:31):
Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the IoT Leaders Podcast. My name is Nick Earle, I’m the CEO of Eseye, an IoT company. And this is the podcast that attempts to demystify the wonderful, but sometimes complex world of IoT. And in this week’s episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Mikael Persson, who’s the CTO of a very interesting company called Sigma Connectivity. Mikael, welcome to the podcast.

Mikael Persson (01:02):
Hi, and thanks for letting me join the podcast.

Nick Earle (01:07):
Now I want to dive straight in, because I went to your website. In fact, I encourage any people listening, as you are listening, if you can jump on a browser and go to Sigma Connectivity. Because there’s a whole series of cool products. And you guys are in the product design business, but you actually bring ideas to life. It’s much more than product design, and we will get into that.

Nick Earle (01:34):
And also, we’ll get into, in this show, where it could be going in the future and in particular, some of the amazing things that could be happening around 5G. So there’s a tremendous amount to talk about. But let’s start first by going back in the history. I know you’re based in Lund, in Sweden. This came out of a cooperation between Ericsson and Sony, isn’t it? Maybe just share the history of Sigma Connectivity.

Mikael Persson (02:02):
I would be happy to. I mean, the Ericsson and Sony made a joint venture 2001, called Sony Ericsson. And I think most people know about this company, and they’ve produced some of the coolest mobile phones.

Nick Earle (02:20):
I was just going to say, they were really cool at the time.

Mikael Persson (02:28):
I came from Ericsson to this company in the early beginnings. And at the time we were like 500 people here in Lund. In Indiana, we were at 6,000. I work with RF and antennas. And it was a really a journey, where we started with the dual-band GSM phones, and ended up with a 4G capable phones.

Mikael Persson (02:56):
And we delivered amongst starters, the first Edge product to the market, and we delivered the Walkman theme. And we rebranded that into mobile phones and so on. So it was a really cool journey.

Mikael Persson (03:09):
However, we got competition from amongst others, Apple. The market went a little down for Sony Ericsson, and eventually all shares were bought by Sony Mobile. And then shortly after that, Sony Mobile moved their center of excellence or headquarters for making mobile phones to Tokyo.

Mikael Persson (03:31):
This development unit in Lund, that was probably one of Europe’s strongest, was eventually sold to Dan Olofsson and the Sigma family. And that’s was in 2013, and our company was created with 174 of the strongest engineers on the market. That’s the start actually of Sigma Connectivity.

Nick Earle (03:59):
That’s interesting, because you had the world’s coolest phones. At that time, the Nordic area was the center for everything. Wireless, so much advanced. And obviously Nokia, and we all know what happened there.

Nick Earle (04:14):
And then with the move to Japan, and then reinvention; rebirth, and you’re the CTO. Now if we just jump ahead to today, and we’ll get into exactly what you guys do. But you’ve grown quite a bit. Haven’t you? How many people are you today?

Mikael Persson (04:30):
At 2013, we were 174, and presently we are 600. So we have a little bit more than tripled the company. We have also grown our sites. So we have today sites or development units in Warsaw, in Poland, in Copenhagen, in Lund shore being. We also have in Stockholm, and then we have a three offices on the West Coast of U.S., in San Diego and San Jose.

Nick Earle (04:57):
One of the things I read about you guys is obviously, you’re into design, and we’ll talk about the process for how you do that. One of the big assets that I understand that you’ve got, is a lab. A testing lab, certification, creating prototypes, et cetera. It’s one of the largest ones outside of the mobile phone companies, for example. Isn’t it? One of the largest independent labs in the world.

Mikael Persson (05:25):
Yeah, it is. We really got a strong asset. So at the time Sigma bought out, outside this development unit, we also get all the labs with us. So at that time we had a really fully developed labs to do mobile phones. Everything from acoustical chambers, to antenna chambers, on the x-ray machines. We even got the small prototype lab.

Mikael Persson (05:58):
It’s actually a lot easier to talk about things we don’t have compared to what we have. However, since 2013, we have of course continued to develop this lab. Since it’s a really strong asset we have. We don’t need to send anything anywhere where, or even lend equipment from anyone. We have both of it in-house.

Nick Earle (06:24):
As far as you know, and we don’t know what perhaps might be in China. But as far as you know, it’s the largest lab outside of China. Do you think that can actually be hired or contracted with by enterprise companies? So you are essentially the world leader, let’s assume for the moment, that there’s nothing like China, but again there might be. But you’re certainly the world leader for Western countries, where you can actually engage to design an IoT smart enabled product, but from scratch. Let’s talk about that.

Nick Earle (07:02):
I’m going to use an example. Yesterday in the house, my wife and I were in the kitchen, and there was a song that came up on an advert or an old TV show. I can’t remember what it was. And my wife said, “I remember that is Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Stool Pigeon.” She couldn’t remember the name. And so I just said, Alexa, played Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the Stool Pigeon, but instantly it started playing.

Nick Earle (07:34):
As it started playing, I just said to her, I said, “15, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, that would have been magic. That would have been unthinkable.” You just remember something and it appears, and you can of course ask it questions and whatever. But the point about it was that, there was a design process.

Nick Earle (07:54):
Yes it’s technology, but there was a design process, and it starts off with imagining something, previously impossible. I saw a phrase you use, you call it from a post-it to product. So it’s not just the labs, is it? But maybe you can just talk me through what’s your process, high-level from the beginning to the end. If someone comes to you with an idea, what happens?

Mikael Persson (08:25):
Obviously we have customers that are rather small or new, and then we have of course, customer that are very mature within the electronics business. Often the company, they have an idea, it’s this napkin drawing. They have an idea of how they would like to win the market.

Mikael Persson (08:53):
Then we typically take this idea into a innovative forum, where we have a couple of really innovative persons that are skilled with the latest technology out there. So our seniors. And trying to lift this idea, and also sometimes kill it, if we don’t believe in it, so I’d say.

Nick Earle (09:20):
Not every idea is a good one.

Mikael Persson (09:27):
Exactly. What I would say is that, we are very good at understanding what is technically possible. And if it is technically possible, then we can fix it, so I’d say. But if it’s not, then we can’t. So from that point, we move this product idea into a concept. And that’s where you start to elaborate with components.

Mikael Persson (09:54):
You start to look at which platforms it should be on, the software baseline, where to produce it, the risks and the mitigations. So essentially when you go out of concept, you would have the recipe in your hand. It would be the perfect decision material to push the trigger, and go into development or not.

Nick Earle (10:19):
Excuse me. You’re doing this in Lund, in Sweden, primarily. But your clients could be anywhere in the world. People in the U.S. listen to the podcast. So people in the U.S. who are thinking of creating something they could engage with you guys remotely, and they don’t have to send a team over to live in Lund for a few months.

Mikael Persson (10:42):
No, no, exactly. So that’s a really strong benefit. And this is, of course, the reason why we have offices in U.S. So this customer would get a contact person that is most likely an American, and they could talk daily during their time zone.

Mikael Persson (11:04):
And this person would for us then translate the information back to Lund, in a technical way, and making sure that the team here can work efficiently with this client. And then of course we have late evening meeting with U.S. team. Actually, we have seen several problems with this setup. It works very, very efficiently.

Nick Earle (11:34):
It’s not just the technology, but also the Scandinavian design, the Scandinavian chic. Some of the products you make are beautiful, frankly. Some of the features on the website are amazing. So you have roughly, how many clients? How many products have you designed since 2013?

Mikael Persson (11:54):
I think we have in the order of 300 to 400 clients, and we have done… We would typically do like 30 projects a year.

Nick Earle (12:04):
And just as a final question on the process. If I came to you with an idea to change the world, I don’t know whether it’s possible, but I started this process. From the typical, if there is any such thing as typical, how long does it take from the initial first meetings through to perhaps a working prototype, let’s say?

Mikael Persson (12:28):
We believe in… How do you say it? Put the shovel in the ground directly. So we try to get rid of the paper exercise very quickly, and we do not move in so much into this PowerPoint philosophy. We believe in building prototypes early. Since we know that IoT is… From a prime marketing perspective, it’s a very easy, but in reality, it’s quite complex.

Mikael Persson (12:59):
So we want to move in very quickly into prototypes. So our customer very early can look and feel, and touch the device, and test it. As long as we still are within the conceptual framework, then you can do any type of changes to the product. However, when you push the trigger and go into the real development, then of course all the costs start to come in. So we rather like our customers to feel safe before moving into development.

Nick Earle (13:38):
Is there an average time it takes before they have to press that button? Are we talking six months or…

Mikael Persson (13:46):
If you want to do a mobile phone, I would say the conceptual phase is probably 12 weeks. And then you have-

Nick Earle (13:51):
That’s fairly complicated, not everybody does a mobile phone. An IoT device, is that less complex than a mobile phone?

Mikael Persson (14:00):
That it’s a little bit less complex. But I would say, there is no concept shorter than four weeks. So you are between four and 12 weeks.

Nick Earle (14:09):
You and I first met, we were introduced by Thomas Gemalto, because we’re in the related field, of course, at Eseye on the connectivity. The point you made there, I just want to go back to about IoT being complex. It’s come up in every single one of these IoT Leaders Podcast. The reason we started the show, it is unbelievably complex. Just the cellular connectivity alone.

Nick Earle (14:39):
One of those common things people say to us, but it can’t be that complicated, that it’s just a case of inserting a SIM card in and it’ll work all the way around the world first time. Because that’s their perception that they think, “My phone works.” Doesn’t it? It’s not the same, is it? IoT, the connectivity part and it’s intrinsically linked to the device design, and it’s not ubiquitous just by putting a SIM card into the device.

Mikael Persson (15:07):
But I’m using a module today, obviously you save a lot of energy in the NRE. And you also save-

Nick Earle (15:14):
Non-recurring engineering.

Mikael Persson (15:15):
Exactly. And you also save a lot in the testing phase, and also for the operator approvals and stuff like this. However, you still need to take care of your board design. You could still run into EMC issues. You could still run into a lot of issues with this design. We are really pro working with the modules, we think it’s excellent actually to do that. But you will not get rid of all your problems.

Nick Earle (15:50):
And just for some Leaders who wonder what we meant by there, the modules. So for example, in the Thales module that we were talking about formerly with Gemalto. Eseye ‘s connectivity software is embedded inside an application firmware inside the module. But as you say, the module then has to be designed into the device.

Nick Earle (16:10):
But the intent is, and the reality is, that then you switch the module on and you get ubiquitous global connectivity through a single platform. And just to finish off on what you do. Also take you through to certification, because that’s a big, and can be an expensive process. We’ve also helped design, not anywhere near the extent that you have, but we’ve done over 300 projects.

Nick Earle (16:35):
So we’ve done about the same number of projects. But we don’t do the certification side, because that’s really very specialist in a GSMA certification, various other local countries certifications, MNO, mobile network operator certifications. It’s a complex area, isn’t it?

Mikael Persson (16:53):
Yeah, it is. And it’s really tough as well. We often get this question, to what level do I need to certify this, and how much can I do myself? And so on. It’s very hard to answer. You need to look into each specific project every time. So what we offer is, we do all the pre-certification.

Mikael Persson (17:19):
So we know that the unit will pass, a hundred percent, when going to type approval. And then of course we have certification houses that are partners through us. So we get very fast answers coming back. Since we are a hundred percent NRE driven, we try to be very efficient to our customers.

Mikael Persson (17:47):
Because that’s the only way to keep the cost down. If we’re efficient and we work fast, the project come out faster and then the overall cost will be lower for our customer, so to say. So we have of course internal type approval, preparation, documentation, what to look at, and so on. And since we have done it so many times, we know it by heart.

Nick Earle (18:11):
Let’s pivot. Because when we were talking prior to the podcast, you dropped into the conversation then, something an area that you’re moving into aggressively going forward, which is the area of 5G. 5G, the last podcast I did with the guests, we were talking about the Gartner Hype Cycle. He was an ex Gartner consultant.

Nick Earle (18:37):
What’s interesting is that, 5G is absolutely today at the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle. It’s the magic powder that can do everything. 5G is the answer to everything. And of course, we know that after that, it comes down into what they call the trough of disillusionment. But then you get the final adoption.

Nick Earle (18:58):
But it will be an incredibly important set of technologies. And you’ve decided not just to be able to have 5G expertise, but you’ve also started to license some of the core of the technology yourselves, which have a differentiated approach. So before we get into the use cases that you see of 5G, or the early use cases, maybe you can just share a little bit on what you’ll be doing with your relationship with Qualcomm.

Mikael Persson (19:26):
Absolutely. I think I would like to start that, around… I think we are in our fifth year in our 5G. So we started out very early, and it’s still very early, I would say, within 5G. But we started out with cooperation with Ericsson, and started out helping them with 5G development. And of course, then we helped ourselves as well in terms of competence.

Mikael Persson (19:56):
During these five years, we have been very devoted. We looked into 5G, and which areas to focus on, where we believe there will be actually customers in the end coming in. We started four or five years ago, since then we have developed of course, mobile phones on 5G for some of our customers.

Mikael Persson (20:26):
But now we think the market is ready to start to realize Industrial 4.0, and private networks, and all of this. Se we, a year ago invested in our lab, so we now have a fully developed 5G lab, including antenna chambers for FR1, but also antenna chambers for FR2 bands, the high-frequency bands. So we bought a scepter chamber. Of course we also have the communication testers and network analyzers, and all of the above. So we have the capability now to test any device within 5G, with all tests needed, basically.

Mikael Persson (21:14):
So next step for us was to acquire licenses. Obviously when working with mobile phones, we don’t have those licenses. There we have worked under our customer’s licenses. But for IoT, which we believe will be one really strong market for 5G long-term, we invested in Qualcomm licenses. So we’re now, I think quite early actually, into this private network. But we would like to be on top of this since we really believe in it.

Nick Earle (21:54):
So you’ll have the Qualcomm licenses, you’ll have many components of that budget value chain, if you like. And so, let’s talk about the early use cases. The area of factories, certainly something that we’ve seen here at Eseye. The factories with huge amounts of legacy equipment are predating IoT.

Nick Earle (22:21):
Potentially millions of sensors and the whole area of private IoT, private 5G networks, is being talked about a lot. Is that also where you see some of the opportunity, and if so, how are you going about trying to find out where the first projects?

Mikael Persson (22:44):
We believe in private networks, especially for the millimeter wave frequencies. And the reason is, all the benefits out of it. Today, manufacturers are actually run on WiFi, or cabling. WiFi is a really good thing. We develop a lot of WiFi. But it’s not stable enough for running a factory. And cabling, then you’re a little bit stuck. I think for the future, you would like to have a very flexible and scalable production facility.

Mikael Persson (23:25):
So you would like to be able to move your equipment around, and reuse your robots or whatever you’re developing there. And then 5G is a really good possibility here. So when it comes to private networks, and I don’t know if people will be angry with me, but I see it, 5G in that sense, would be more expensive but super efficient WiFi network of the factory.

Mikael Persson (23:56):
So we believe in that. And then also, there are functionalities that will come out of 5G, that we haven’t seen yet. But that I think will make a whole lot of difference, like URLLC. You will also get indoor positioning, which is time to make a position. Apart from that, you will have low latency and high throughput.

Mikael Persson (24:21):
So with this, I believe there will be a lot of undeveloped things today that will be for the future, so to say. So companies going in early, they will of course have the possibility to explore these possibilities early, and then probably take their patents on those use cases, so to say.

Nick Earle (24:48):
We’re clearly talking about things that have just not been possible before. As you say, WiFi is great, but definitely isn’t as robust as you need right now. It doesn’t do the precision location. If you have some small robots moving around, let’s say in a warehouse, moving goods, and you see those pictures on the TV of all these robots, these swarms of robots moving around. WiFi was never built for that.

Mikael Persson (25:16):
No, no.

Nick Earle (25:16):
All the legacy equipment, the millions of sensors, the latency issues, the bandwidth. The amount of data that we’re talking about per factory, is just enormous. Isn’t it? If you really want information about everything, it’s way beyond anything that we’ve seen so far, the requirement.

Mikael Persson (25:34):
Since we are NRE driven, we charge our customers for our competence. Then we train and focus on areas we believe will be the next big area, so to say. Industry 4.0, there is a lot of companies talking about, but I see very little actually happening physically. And that we as a company, would like to help out with.

Mikael Persson (26:07):
So we have set up internal teams focusing on the indoor positioning part. We’re focusing another team on security within 5G. We’re focusing on machine learning, because we think that will be a very vital part of this, taking decisions already out in the Edge node.

Mikael Persson (26:27):
And of course, we’re focusing on 5G, since that will be, or very likely to be, the main carrier here. And if you combined all of those teams, then you have Industry 4.0, according to me. It’s only the use case missing. And for me, the use cases is most likely it will be self-driving robots, lifting goods, moving it to another place.

Mikael Persson (26:52):
You would like to have the automatic control over your stock in your warehouse. How many devices you have and articles you have, and so on. We don’t control the use case, that our customers control. But we at least think we are one of the better providers that could help out realizing the use case.

Nick Earle (27:15):
These private IoT networks, and we’ve… Again, at Eseye, we’ve spoken to a lot of people. The factories is one use case, but might people’s minds, isn’t that the use case, oil rigs, oil refineries, anywhere where there’s a huge amount of equipment, very dense area, tightly packed together.

Nick Earle (27:36):
The private 5G network starts to make more commercial sense. Just to explain to listeners, the network would be managed by a third party. So the factory owner or the enterprise that has the factories, they may be doing this across almost certainly multiple factories, multiple warehouses.

Nick Earle (27:57):
But a mobile network operator would play a role in managing these networks. And there would be also cellular connectivity as well, back holding that information back to the corporate infrastructure.

Mikael Persson (28:11):
Absolutely. If you take the WiFi you have today, that’s managed by someone. So if you have a problem, or your data doesn’t come through, or whatever, you need someone to take care of all of this. So I think that’s how you should probably see it, like a super advanced high feature WiFi, kind of.

Nick Earle (28:36):
Super advanced high feature WiFi, is a simple explanation of 5G that’ve heard.

Mikael Persson (28:43):
Here’s for the private network part.

Nick Earle (28:46):
Mikael, not everybody has a factory, not everybody has a oil refinery. Do you believe these 5G devices will start to get into some of what I call public IoT devices? The use cases will actually become more narrower and into certain industry verticals, where there’ll be use cases of 5G. Because that’s what a lot of people so far have been talking about. When you’re talking about vending machines, or remote devices for maintenance of complex equipment.

Mikael Persson (29:20):
Absolutely. Already today, we know that the GSM and 3G will be removed. If you would like to have devices pinging smaller amount of data, then you would probably jump into Cat-M1 of the LTE, or Narrowband IoT of the LTE. And that is part of the 5G standard. So there you will have your feature for this type of devices. But then of course, you still want to have your car connected to 5G, and utilize V2X and everything else that will come out of 5G there.

Mikael Persson (30:08):
And of course you will connect your mobile phones to the 5G networks, because the history has shown us that there will never be enough data. There will just be another app that requires much more bandwidth in the end, than you have. We’ve seen that even from GSM, when we went to Edge, we had triple amount of data that wasn’t enough, and then we moved to 3G, and then we moved to 4G. So evolution is there. We’re more and more data hungry.

Nick Earle (30:38):
In particular, you’ve mentioned autonomous cars. I was reading up on some of the different technologies that are out there to get the precision for mobile cars and the amount of data. As you get towards a hundred percent totally with level five, or whatever we call it, total autonomy. No human involved at all. The next few percent, it just rockets exponentially in terms of the complexity and the data.

Mikael Persson (31:09):
Absolutely.

Nick Earle (31:10):
And it’s beyond. We’re not talking gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes. So we’re going to have to invent new words with the amount of data. And it’s all going to be connected, all the devices will be sharing all of the data. It’s probably beyond what we thought a few years ago. Even though we were dreaming a few years ago, it’s certainly we never dreamt that this was going to be happening.

Mikael Persson (31:35):
I’m also expecting to see quite data hungry IoT devices, like cameras for security reasons, or so. It’s probably likely to be connected also over 5G in the near future. So I think you have the really high data hungry devices, like car industry and mobile phones in the top.

Mikael Persson (32:01):
And then you have the low data hungry devices, like temperature sensors and stuff like that on LPWAN and they’re under IoT. And then there will be a huge segment in the middle, with devices looking like mobile phones, but they’re not mobile phones. They’re more like gateways or stuff like this, that will be within IoT as well.

Nick Earle (32:28):
In terms of the classic industry verticals, what we see, I’ve mentioned these before. Things like vending machines, let’s take that. Vending machines, we can actually measure it. Vending machines when we started simply doing telemetry, so deliver today. You are doing two megabytes of data a month. We’re working with Costa Express, and there’s 90 sensors in the machine.

Nick Earle (32:59):
And you can then easily get to 100 megabytes. And then you put advertising promotions, basically one that will push promotions, and you can get into 200 megabytes per machine. But it’s still relatively low. Then you start getting people saying, “Actually, I’d like to do advertising and you personalize the advertising to each machine, based on who’s standing in front of the machine.” Because they identify themselves with code.

Nick Earle (33:25):
And then you’re into three gigabytes and whatever, but it’s still… It’s what I call static video. But then the idea of then you have the video and… We have a client who we can’t name, who has got a vending machine that works completely on video. And they see you where you are, and you open the door, you take stuff out, close the door and you walk away.

Nick Earle (33:48):
But it’s cameras. It works like the Apple Store. And people don’t believe it does. You identify yourself, you walk in and open the door full of, take stuff out, walk away. Once you enter that, then the amount of data starts going absolutely crazy. You mentioned Sony early on. One of our clients is Sony, around the PS4 and the PS5.

Nick Earle (34:16):
The amount of bandwidth needed for the games and to download the games into the retail stores, it starts to stretch the top end, the 4G, it really starts. Especially if you have this burst capacity, and everybody does everything at the same time. And so I think there’s a lot of pent up demand for 5G. There’s a lot of use cases.

Nick Earle (34:37):
We believe there’s a lot of use cases out there that people have got their head around, but they’re waiting for 5G. And so we expect to see a lot of early adopters plunge in. Maintenance devices that give a Pokemon type experience, or vented reality, expansion of the bill of materials. And you can see all the data in the sensors.

Nick Earle (35:01):
And the point about 5G is that, you could be looking at that standing next to the truck.I don’t know the Volvo truck from Sweden. You could be looking at that hundreds of miles away, and the experience wouldn’t be that different. It is going to take our IoT world into a whole new area and the amount of data, of business opportunity. It’s going to be very exciting.

Nick Earle (35:28):
Back to the whole point about the podcast. It also adds a huge amount of complexity, which I think is why companies like yours are needed, because people say, “I don’t know how to design devices, or I don’t know how to certify them. I don’t know what this world is all about. I don’t know what mistakes I’m going to make, and I will make mistakes. I just want someone who can, at the very least, tell me what not to do.” As you said earlier on, “Not every idea is a good idea.” That’s pretty valuable information.

Mikael Persson (36:01):
I would say, I feel very lucky actually to work for Sigma Connectivity. I get to see all this, I think we’re in this shift now from a technology perspective, everything goes so much faster now than it did 10 or 15. There are so many really, really cool smaller components companies out there, developing their idea of the future. And we get the possibility to look into all of this, and try to map it to our customer’s use cases. So we are very early in, looking into the latest and greatest within more or less every angle within electronics development.

Nick Earle (36:46):
You don’t just get to see the future before it happens, you actually get to create the future.

Mikael Persson (36:53):
Exactly.

Nick Earle (36:53):
Less much predict the future is to create it. That’s what you do.

Mikael Persson (36:59):
I think this is partly why we have been so successful with keeping our engineers and keeping them happy with letting them explore the future. It’s really amazing actually. I feel it’s really amazing for me to work here around and get to see all of this, and also talk to companies like yours.

Nick Earle (37:19):
Hopefully we’re going to be talking a lot more together as part of our partnership, but maybe that’s a subject for another podcast, when we’ve got something specific to talk about, which I’m sure we will have shortly. But for the moment, we’re probably at the end of our time, it is a fascinating area.

Nick Earle (37:39):
Just to finish off for our listeners. When I first went to Sigma Connectivity website, my first reaction, and one of my colleagues who looked at my shoulder at the screen, said, “Wow! It looks like a really cool place to work.” Unless you actually go to your website, it looked almost like an advertising design house, not a technology company. I know that’s deliberate. But the immediate reaction was, “Wow! What a cool place to work.” And you get to work on exciting things.

Nick Earle (38:12):
Mikael, I’ll leave it there. Thank you again-

Mikael Persson (38:15):
Thank you

Nick Earle (38:17):
… for agreeing to be on the podcast. Very exciting time, especially with 5G coming. And as you said, right there at the end, “There’s going to be many more years of relatively exciting things to talk about.” And that’s the beauty of the world of IoT.

Nick Earle (38:33):
Just to recap, thanks to everyone for listening. This was the IoT Leaders Podcast. If you have any ideas, feedback, suggestions you can reach out to me, Nick Earle, E-A-R-L-E, on LinkedIn. Or you can send us an email, which is iotleaders@eseye.com. But in the meantime, it only remains to me to once again, thank you, Mikael.

Nick Earle (39:06):
I tell you to buckle up and watch out for some of the amazing things that his engineers are working on. Thank you again, and tune in for the next few episodes of IoT Leaders Podcast. Thanks again, and Mikael, thanks very much.

Mikael Persson (39:22):
Thank you, Nick.

Outro (39:25):
Thanks for tuning in to IoT Leaders. A podcast brought to you by Eseye. Our team delivers innovative global IoT cellular connectivity solutions that just work, helping our customers deploy differentiated experiences and disrupt their markets. Learn more at eseye.com.

Outro (39:44):
You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders, featuring digitisation leadership on the front lines of IoT. Our vision for this podcast is to be your guide to IoT and digital disruption, helping you to plot the right route to success. We hope today’s lessons, stories, strategies, and insights, have changed your vision of IoT. Let us know how we’re doing by subscribing, rating, reviewing, and recommending us. Thanks for listening, until next time.