Panelists: Many Ways to Connect with Digital Transformation DX Week experts say there’s a place for wired, wireless, satellite, edge and more

Digital transformation encompasses several innovations and integrates them into a seamless personal and business tech stack. Part of the discussion during day 2 of DX Week provided a preview of sorts to day 3’s Edge Computing topic, demonstrating that all aspects of DX are, well, connected.

Derek Peterson, Boingo, said understanding where the edge exists for each use case is critical for getting connectivity right. He cited the possibility of venue-based in-game betting on sporting events.

If I’m doing micro-betting on the next free throw, I need the technology that can let people make that decision while the players are standing at the foul line, right before they make the shot,” he said. “I need the edge as close as I can get it so I can grab all those bets and get them through before the shot goes up.”

The same idea applies to other verticals, he said. In a medical setting, some critical data should be housed on premises.

“So, you focus in on the data center at that healthcare facility and how you’re going to build it out for connectivity,” he said.

As the conversation turned to the innovation challenges facing the connectivity market over the next decade,?Matt Grob, XCOM’s chief technology expert, said edge computing could make smartphones obsolete.

“An edge-compute-enabled metaverse using new devices that are built with that architecture gets us away from the rectangles that we all carry around,” he said. “We don’t want to have a giant computer that we carry with us; we want powerful processors, but we really want to exploit the benefits of edge computing. We want to move advanced and heavy processing there so we can have lightweight [extended reality] glasses instead of what we have today.”

He said that day will come once connectivity devices achieve “more throughput, lower cost, less power consumption.”

Grob indicated that even the capacity to build private networks is not sufficient to satisfy these connectivity goals.

“If you have to split 100 megahertz between a couple of private operators and you want to have a lot of people doing metaverse and exploiting edge computing, then you need high spectral efficiency.?

That necessitates significant investment “in techniques like sensing and channel estimation to get a better use of that scarce spectrum resource,” he said. “In the 10-year horizon, I am hopeful and expect we will have a new set of devices. It won’t just be rectangles; they will be very compelling to use, and we will use the spectrum that is available-—private networks and macro operators are doing this—and then we will exploit edge computing.”

Michal Lipson, applied physics professor at Columbia University, seized on the sensing angle. She said optical sensing provides a solution in aeronautics and other applications where electronics, microwaves, and other monitoring equipment could cause interference. Detecting small concentrations and micro movements requires high resolution.

“Usually, any sensing based on wireless detects things that are relatively large—on the order of centimeters,” she said. “If you need microohms, you really need to go optic,” she said.

Moderator Henry Huang, TDK Ventures investment associate, turned the conversation to the role satellites will play in universal connectivity. Sanyogita Shamsunder, head of Google’s global edge networking, said she formerly worked on a geostationary equatorial orbit (GEO) satellite system. She said at the time there were multiple low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites that proved unsuccessful.

“Fast-forward to now. Satellite connectivity can be a solution,” she said. “Terrestrial networks have leapfrogged over the past several years, but I wouldn’t pit one vs. the other. We need all types of connectivity. Economics always comes into play with terrestrial connectivity. It doesn’t make sense in many locations, making satellites a viable alternative for much in-home broadband.”

Ajit Pai, a partner at Searchlight Capital Partners, served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2017 to 2021 when the commission authorized many of the major LEO constellations. He said major advance can be made if stakeholders can address myriad challenges.

“The least interesting one, perhaps, is residential broadband,” he said. “There are billions of people around the world today who do not have connectivity. For them, terrestrial technologies like fiber might be cost-prohibitive or technically too difficult to deploy.”

Maryam Rofougaran, founder and CEO of Movandi, is excited about the possibility of bringing broadband to populations that cannot get it from land-based systems.

“The cost of satellite broadband will remain a challenge going forward. It’s a great thing to have satellited connections because there are areas where it is very hard to access by any kind of fiber,” she said. “But because of the distance the terminal units for residential being $2,000 or, in the best case, coming down to $500, someone has to come to your house and put it on the roof, there are much cheaper solutions.”

She noted that most ISPs don’t even use 5G yet, instead exploiting millimeter-wave and WiFi modems. The cost limits satellites’ applications.

Pai acknowledged the cost issue and several other hurdles such as establishing inter-satellite links “so you establish a strong mesh network in space to maximize the amount of bandwidth and coverage that can be provided.” Satellite communications providers also have yet to bring the cost of user terminals reasonable enough for widespread adoption, Pai said.

Line-of-sight also can create a problem, he said.

“If you are in a heavily forested area or there are other obstructions, the service can be interrupted or degraded.”

Finally, he addressed the growing congestion in low-orbit air space. He said the U.S. is planning to forbid some controlled explosions of obsolete orbiters due to the debris they would generate.

“We are reaching a point that if you were to assume that if not just Starlink and Kuiper and other U.S.-based LEOs launch, but also Chinese and other LEOs start to launch, we will have a very crowded space environment,” he said.?

While satellite connectivity may be limited now, even those few use cases can create real value, he said.

“Given the propagation characteristics of the 5G spectrum that you could use satellite to fill in the color for some of those wireless networks. If your device senses that it can’t get connectivity to a tower, it would default to satellite,” he explained. “Places where you can’t see a terrestrial technology being useful—I think of shipping and agriculture—will make the space-based environment interesting and complex 10 years from now, serving a variety of use cases we can’t even conceive of today.”

Latency is another issue that will affect satellite communication and application. Shamsunder said certain applications are not latency-sensitive, making them prime candidates for incorporating the technology. We use them today and can ride on more traditional networks.

“Others that require low latency will be on-prem, whether it be private 5G, private MAC, or something else,” she said. “There will be a class of applications that will run on that architecture and a class that we need to support very locally such as VR applications.”

Grob said LEO satellite constellations will address latency far better than GEO can.

“In terms of cost, we talked about terminals and large antennae. You can shrink that, but then you pay a price for it. Or you can lower the cost of the user device, but you pay a price either in increased resources and space requirements or lower throughput,” he said. “The reality is that the satellite network has a certain envelope in which it is most advantageous—remote areas, of course, first responders. I’m excited about some of the non-terrestrial networks, where you can use the modem in a smartphone and handle the space channel for short or emergency messages.”

While the panelists come from varied backgrounds and interests and are working on diverse components of wired and wireless connectivity, they all agreed each communication medium has its place in the digital transformation. Satellite works best in some instances, fiber is king in others, and wireless edge devices makes the most sense in others.

Connectivity certainly has established itself as a major driver of the global digital transformation. The impact scalers featured in the discussion will likewise be instrumental in discovering, scaling, and applying the technologies that make it happen so the world’s connections become faster, more accessible, and more powerful. Like all the panel discussions presented during TDK Ventures’ DX Week, the conversations surrounding connectivity demonstrate that industry, academia, and the investment community can work together to harness transformative innovation.