SUMMARY
In this episode of The Five Nine podcast, Alejandro Pinero interviews Leighton Carroll, CEO of Baylin Technologies. They discuss the challenges of providing reliable cellular connectivity in large venues and events, such as stadiums and concerts. Carroll explains that the main issue is density, as the increasing data utilization of cell phones can overwhelm conventional systems. He highlights the limitations and high costs of traditional solutions like lens antennas and distributed antenna systems (DAS). Carroll then introduces Galtronic’ss multi-beam antenna technology as a cost-effective and high-performance alternative. He shares examples of successful deployments at concerts, sporting events, and airports, where the multi-beam antennas have outperformed massive MIMO antennas in terms of capacity and downlink throughput. Carroll also discusses the importance of connectivity for venues and artists, as it enhances the customer experience and enables new opportunities like micro-betting in sports events. He concludes by emphasizing the continuous evolution of technology and the industry’s ongoing efforts to find innovative solutions for unique use cases.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Welcome to The Five Nine, the official podcast of the Fierce Telecom and Technology Group. Join us each week for the latest insights on 5G millimeter wave, AI, electronics, sensors, networking, infrastructure, and more in the communications and technology space.
Alejandro Pinero:
All right, welcome everyone, and welcome after a brief hiatus to another season of The Five Nine podcast. As always, I’m your host, Alejandro Pinero from the Fierce Tech team. And what a way to start this particular season here with Leighton Carroll, CEO of Baylin. We’re going to talk a lot about what’s going on in connectivity and they’ve made some big steps here into new geographies. So, a lot to get through over the next little while. Leighton, thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the podcast.
Leighton Carroll:
Thanks for having me.
Alejandro Pinero:
Right, Leighton, so before we get into the matter at hand today, I just wanted to give you a chance to give us a brief introduction about Baylin and your role which I understand encompasses different brands and different companies within the group.
Leighton Carroll:
I’m the CEO of a company called Baylin Technologies and we have multiple businesses. As an example, we have a satellite communications division, and we do a lot of work where the cool thing is we actually just delivered some product for the NASA Artemis lunar space mission, which is pretty cool. It’s one of the many things we do. And then obviously we’re here today to talk about our Galtronics unit.
Galtronics does three things, we’ll probably only focus in on one. But just briefly, the three things that Galtronics does, if you’ve ever had a Samsung phone or know someone who does, there’s a high likelihood we made the antennas in those products. And we do a lot of things for a number of customers in IOT, wearables, tablets, PCs, et cetera. That’s one of our Galtronics groups. We have what we call our embedded division and that’s everything from if you get your wireless router from say an A&T or Charter communications right in the US, a lot of the customers will get their wireless routers from the carriers, and we make the antennas in those. We have wirelessly enabled body armor for first responders all the way to when the next SUV for a major brand name automobile manufacturer comes out for the 2024 model year (I’d love to tell you about it, but I can’t) the wireless enablement in that vehicle is us, so that’s our embedded group. Pretty diverse, pretty cool, and people think about it when RF quality matters and you have to have good quality design engineering. That’s where we get called. And then we have an infrastructure division, and our infrastructure division is macro cell tower antennas, outdoor small cells, in-building wireless, stadium antennas and now multi-beam antennas for AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Rogers, Bell, Telus, hosts of people in the ecosystem, all of the various third-party operators. And what’s interesting is everybody I just mentioned was North American focused. And that’s actually part of the story here is when you have compelling and unique product that solve use cases for carriers and customers in wireless infrastructure in a cost-effective or high-performance way, you can’t be a myopic and just think it’s got to be North America.
The world’s a great large place. I’ve had the privilege of being all over it and working all over it, and so we’ve really had a purposeful view of expanding that business as well. So anyway, that’s a really cool business, lots of diversity in it and I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing in infrastructure.
Alejandro Pinero:
It’s impressive. All this is going on in just one of the areas you’re responsible for, so that’s exciting and Leighton, so the reason why we thought we’d bring you on today is you’ve been making a bit of noise around one of the divisions you were mentioning there. Right around the events in stadiums and the customer experience. Now I’ve been in telecom for nearly 15 years now and this is a topic that keeps coming up from a customer experience perspective. I think it’s something we just haven’t been able to deliver. The customer experience in these large-scale events and stadium concerts, whatever it might be, it doesn’t match expectations and requirements for folks, and it keeps happening. So, I’d like to get your thoughts on why we’re still talking about this. What’s been the big pain points to have this still such a painful experience for customers when it comes to cellular?
Leighton Carroll:
So look, if I can boil it down to a word, it’s density. Because you go to a football stadium, American football, proper football, whatever football you talk about, they’re packed with people, data utilization in cell phones, it hasn’t stopped. It just continues to grow. I think we’ve all had the experience of being in these large venues and it’s just spotty at times. The historical alternative to try to solve for that was something called a lens antenna. They’re super large, they’re super expensive. If you’ve ever seen the old Mel Brooks movie Space Balls, Rick Moranis’ dark helmet with the crazy large round globe looking helmet, that’s what they look like. The problem has been they’re insanely expensive and so a lot of carriers or venue owners don’t want to deploy them. In some cases, venue owners don’t want to deploy them because they’re super heavy and there’s a structural issue there.
We actually are in the process of going into Rocket Mortgage Arena, which is where the Cleveland Cavaliers play. One of the reasons we got selected was the structural requirements that type of technology requires versus what we actually have, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but the point of this is when you have that level of density, traffic throughput, the amount of spectrum that is able to be delivered by what I would call legacy systems, it can just get outstripped. The alternatives are to blanket stadiums with antennas, which a lot of people don’t want to do. There is an aesthetic reason. Where you had this really expensive alternative and getting that done everywhere when depending on the stadium itself, you may only have X number of events per year, there was a cost-benefit issue for stadium owners and or carriers to be involved, third party operators to be involved, in that type of expense.
Alejandro Pinero:
Sure. So it seems like there needs to be a rethink in terms of how that, or at least some sort of different technology there. Because the economics perhaps aren’t making sense. Aesthetics are challenging. I’ve heard many conversations over the last decade or so. DAS, we talked about beaconed for a while when it was popular topic, wifi and stadium events, none seem to deliver. Now I know that from Galtronics perspective you’re quite bullish on multi-beam antenna technologies. Is that the answer then to the issues that you’re describing here? Or do you have some experiences there that you can speak to in terms of how that customer experience may have been improved.
Leighton Carroll:
Yeah. It’s interesting to boil down the issue and why there’s been this problem. It’s density, customer utilization of cell phones and just the cell phone’s ability, to the mobile phone’s ability to use data, has just increased and increased over time. And when you have the level of density that you have, typically in a stadium, it can far outstrip conventional systems. When you look at the amount of cost to deploy some of the prior solution sets, you’re either blanketing a stadium with DAS antennas all over it or you have these really large heavy expensive multibeams, there’s a cost/value proposition that for a lot of stadium owners, a lot of third-party operators, and certainly for wireless carriers, that just didn’t necessarily make sense. Then even with what they did deploy, the amount of data utilization ongoing isoutstripping the capability of a system, guess what? You end up with a degraded performance.
We’re really excited about what we’ve been doing with our multi-beam antennas because they effectively work like those big crazy globe antennas and yet they cost as much as a panel antenna that a wireless carrier is used to seeing. Now, there’s larger versions of that for higher capacity and they’re a little more expensive. But when you’re, I don’t know, a fifth of the price of the legacy alternatives, it’s a good place to be because you’re helping carriers, third party operators, and stadium owners solve a real problem in a cost-effective way with a high quality solution. And I’ll give you some stories here. Some of the use cases where we’ve deployed this, one of our first major concert deployments was for a Harry Styles concert with 80,000 people. Guess what? Big density and this was deployed by a wireless carrier, European wireless carrier. Loved it.
It was deployed by another European carrier for a Papal visit. Guess what? That’s not stadiums, but that’s a lot of traffic. That’s a lot of congestion. Another European carrier actually deployed it for a Bruce Springsteen concert and the feedback has been super positive. And then certainly, I’ll give you some North American examples. We’ve had it deployed at a NASCAR facility. We’ve had it deployed at large stadiums in Canada, in the US, and it’s even been deployed at fixed locations. As an example, JFK airport. Why is that interesting? You have a ton of people in and out. You have very bursty traffic with people landing on planes. Guess what? It’s a great solution and what’s… Forgive me for being a little bit of a geek for a second. One of our carrier partners actually compared the multibeam, apple to apple against a big 64T64R, massive MIMO antenna. 64T64R in for example, the US have been very dominant in terms of what’s been deployed on the macro network recently. If you go to Europe and Asia, you see perhaps a bit more 32T32R. But the 64T64R is the whopper and it’s supposed to be the Mac daddy for delivering performance and density. This carrier in a high-density environment, this is key. Because this thing isn’t going to be perfect. The multibeams aren’t great for every use case, right? In a high-density environment, they found that our multibeam had a 2.6 times capacity, than in a massive MIMO antenna. I was stunned to be honest.
The downlink throughput for the users was 3.2 times what it was on a massive MIMO. The point is massive MIMO, it still has a capacity threshold, and as you run through it, it starts to degrade the performance. Whereas the multibeams, because you have these in a single sector, all these various discreet beams that are clean with stability, it actually solves a very unique problem in a super effective way. We’re very excited about it. This is our first kind of carrier opening up the kimono and sharing some data with us results. And it gets us really excited because you’ve now got a solution that for specific types of use cases is cost effective. It works great and we’ve had nothing but raving customers for it. This is why I’m so pumped up about this technology and I think it’s so cool what we’ve been up to.
Alejandro Pinero:
Yeah, absolutely. And just to have an image in our heads, how does it compare then in terms of footprint? I know you mentioned it’s cost effective when compared to massive MIMO. Is the footprint similar?
Leighton Carroll:
Yeah, we had a major tier one US carrier replace a macro tower antenna at the NASCAR speedway and pump full power through that thing and had good coverage.
Alejandro Pinero:
Amazing.
Leighton Carroll:
Yeah, we were pretty excited.
Alejandro Pinero:
Sounds like a big upgrade. Something I wanted to ask you about specifically, Leighton, is these experiences you’ve had in Europe. And you’ve mentioned that the Papal visit, concerts. Do you see a difference in requirements or the issues very much the same in terms of that demand and the density causing issues with bandwidth? And what’s been your experience working out there when compared perhaps to even NASCAR and the Cleveland Cavaliers? Other settings where you’re already present?
Leighton Carroll:
I could talk about the way the fans are dressed if I’m comparing NASCAR to Europe. But I don’t have…
Alejandro Pinero:
More specific to telecommunications. Yeah.
Leighton Carroll:
But in all seriousness, so when I think of Europe versus say North America or the US. There’s not a lot of difference in terms of capacity requirements or density requirements. The places where you see differences are more on, I would say the zoning and permitting requirements that are for certain use cases. If you’re in Europe, certain areas, there’s a high degree of aesthetics as well there should be. And so the European carriers are going to be very careful about how they deploy, where they deploy and meeting all the local requirements. Within stadiums or venues or some of the things that we’ve been doing. They’re very apples to apples and it’s one of the reasons why when you have a compelling technology, we were able to move into Europe so quickly. It was exactly because of this. We have a good technology, we’re solving a very discreet set of use cases, high capacity, high density. That’s the same wherever people are going to have an experience at a concert or a sporting event.
Alejandro Pinero:
And let me flip this a little bit then to talk about the venue. Not from the… We’ve talked about the aesthetics, the challenges with weight and covering venues and areas with antennas when there’s large events. Are there other factors that kick in for them in terms of trying to achieve that connectivity? Obviously, there’s that customer experience. I imagine I’ve heard and read about artists looking at connectivity as a way of selecting venues and for these top-level acts that becomes a competitive issue. What are the venues leading on the table if they don’t address this issue beyond folks being a bit annoyed that they can’t immediately upload to?
Leighton Carroll:
So I’ll give you a view of where we are and where we’re going. Taylor Swift is a hot act these days and her concerts are crazy packed. You know what? It does matter to the artists that her fans have the ability because how many videos have you seen online of the Taylor Swift and the Swifties and the whole thing. So it does matter and the customer experience matters, and to be honest, it matters for the venue owners as well. Now, I’ll give you a sporting example because I’ve actually had this conversation with the owner of a major sport franchise. And it’s about where some of this is going, and this will not apply to every geography because there’s going to be some regulatory stuff in here. But the concept of micro betting in certain sporting events, being able to have a differentiated experience because you paid for something else. You get statistics automatically to your phone, you’re able to bet. You use American baseball, you can bet on will the next batter strike out, walk, get hit.
Believe it or not, there’s a lot of people in the sports world who are thinking about how can they develop these differentiated experiences for individual customers while they’re sitting in their seat. While they’re sitting in their seat ordering a beer or a hot dog or whatever they’re going do. Guess what, that’s all based on connectivity and the predicate is having high quality coverage and the capacity to be able to handle that for many people and provide a differentiated experience cleanly. All of that comes back to wireless technology and it’s part of what we do.
Alejandro Pinero:
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Leighton, to close here, I just wanted to look ahead a little bit. Now, we’ve talked about that density challenge, how multibeam technology that you guys have developed looks to address a lot of these issues. Are we there yet? Is there more to go in terms of having a seamless, full connected experience when there are these large-scale events or bursts of requirements and throughput and upload into the network? Or do you see this something that’s evolving and something that you as Galtronics and Baylin will continue to invest in?
Leighton Carroll:
Yeah, I would say it this way. I don’t think we’re ever done. It’s one of the reasons I love this industry. There’s so much all the time and technology continues to evolve. I’ll give you some examples. There was a big push by several carriers, Europe, but more to the point, US and Korea, very good examples in millimeter wave. And there was a big push trying to get millimeter wave as a small cell technology for outdoor. Guess what? Propagation characteristics of millimeter wave aren’t very good. You have challenges with blockage and they’re not really deploying that much. But what wireless carriers have started experimenting with is can we deploy millimeter wave selectively in stadiums and other venues to have higher speeds in certain locations? It’s interesting because maybe you’re not broadcasting that far, but guess what, there’s still limitations there. A major US carrier deployed it for a final four, the NCAA basketball, and because of the venue and the amount of metal, they didn’t have a very good… there are still challenges, and guess what? Those are technology problems we’re working on. And we, in the global sense of the industry, will work to overcome. And does it mean that it will be a solution for stadiums? No, but it does mean the industry broadly, and Galtronics in particular, we are experimenting, we are investing, and we’re looking to come up with other creative solutions to solve unique use cases for our customers.
Alejandro Pinero:
Brilliant Leighton, we’re going to have to get you back here in a few months’ time to hear how that has evolved. And also, I’ve piqued my interest with the NASA work and the automobile use case. So, when that comes into public light, we’ll have to have you back on. But for now, Leighton Carroll, CEO Baylin Technologies, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today. And giving us a bit of insight into what’s going on in these large-scale deployments.
Leighton Carroll:
Alejandro, thanks for having me.
Alejandro Pinero:
And to you listener, thanks again for joining us back here for this fourth season of The Five Nine Podcast. We’ll be back with you next week with yet another host to tell us all about what’s going on in the telecommunications world. Until then, thanks so much and take care. Bye-bye.