Following an announcement that Microsoft partnered with Emergent Connext to bring connectivity to the agriculture industry, Mike Roudi, CEO of Emergent Connext spoke to IoT Insider to spill the beans on the LoRaWAN network it is building, its partnership with Microsoft, and why agriculture is crying out for good connectivity.
How Emergent Connext came about
Emergent Connext was set up by three co-founders, Mike Roudi being one. The other two are Greg Jarman, who has worked at rural Internet service providers (ISPs) for years, and David Alpert, “our connection to the agricultural industry,” said Roudi.
Farming is undergoing a huge amount of pressure, as climate change, labour shortages and razor-thin operating lines make it even harder for farmers to grow their crops, and do so profitably. Automated IoT solutions are perfectly positioned for farmers to cut back on some of the manual work taking up their time. But there’s a problem: historically, agricultural communities are underserved by connectivity, which is essential for the IoT solutions to work properly.
To resolve this, Emergent Connext is in the process of building an IoT network, coming in to fill a gap posed by poor connectivity. It plans to cover 2.4 million square miles of agricultural land.
For Roudi, who has an extensive background in telecommunications and building networks, the agriculture industry represented the final frontier: an unconquered sector he characterised as reluctant to adopt IoT solutions because the connectivity, the foundation, hasn’t been there.
“Old habits die hard,” said Roudi. “The way I [a farmer] determines if my soil needs water is [to] stick my hands in the dirt. We hear that a lot. But from some of the younger guys, we hear that they have probes they put in the dirt, and they don’t work on their farms, so they have to get the data from their probes.”
In other words, even if younger farmers coming in are embracing the technologies, patchy connectivity means they aren’t working, and are perhaps turning them off from automating tasks.
Additionally, this manual form of collecting data from probes like sensors defeats the purpose of having IoT solutions to gather information on parameters that are important to farmers – such as soil moisture, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and so on.
“All farm stories start with ‘I send a guy’,” said Roudi, referring to how farms still operate using manual labour and don’t leave this work to automated solutions. “The problem is they don’t have as many guys [as they used to].”
Business model
Currently, Emergent Connext have launched three markets: California Central Valley, Northwest Ohio, and Mississippi Delta. The network will be owned and operated by the company, and the customers will pay only for the connectivity they use (i.e., connectivity-as-a-service) – which Roudi compared to as being no different from how an MNO like A&T charges customers.
The network is based on LoRaWAN, which was picked because of its long-range, wide area network capabilities, which lends itself well to farming use cases where space is limited and farmers are dealing with vast swathes of land that need coverage.
“In the telecom industry, a good operator … is thoughtful about what the application is, and how they should pair that to a technology,” said Roudi. “A lot of people don’t do that. They say, ‘Well, I have a fibre network, and what can I do with this thing?’ But fibre is not for IoT. It costs too much money to deploy it.”
It was also chosen because of its cost-effectiveness. The company will install gateways provided by its solution partner Tektelic, which are movable and scalable – which is important for the company’s business model, as it looks to expand across key farming regions, therefore attractive for customers who are not yet connected. This affordability would not be possible with a cellular network, Roudi said.
“When I’m talking to [a] solution provider who says, I’ve got a lot of customers in the Denver area. Can you help get me coverage there?’ Our answer is absolutely,” said Roudi. “Even though we didn’t launch into that market, we’re skilled enough to say … in downtown Denver, we could put a couple of gateways and help [the solution provider] generate customers.”
Working closely with solution partners like Tektelic – who manufactures carrier-grade sensors in addition to the gateways Emergent Connext are using – Sensoterra, who manufacture water sensors, and others, may provide guidance for Emergent Connext to understand what regions to launch into, beyond the regions they have already earmarked.
“If I have a customer and … they tell me, ‘I’ve got a really big customer in Kansas’ and Kansas is not on my list, I will ask how big the customer is and if they meet a threshold, we will go [and] build that market,” explained Roudi.
Partnership with Microsoft
Working on connectivity for the agriculture industry is rewarding, Roudi noted, because after a lifetime of working in telecoms and arguing about the value of whether to migrate to 3G, 4G, 5G, and so on, his focus has pivoted to solving “profound problems” such as helping farmers reduce their water consumption and labour costs.
Microsoft’s vision of bringing connectivity to parts where it doesn’t exist aligned well with Emergent Connext, whose partnership was announced very recently. As part of the partnership, Emergent Connext will work with Microsoft’s Airband programme and ISP partner Cal.net.
In working with Microsoft, an unofficial tagline for the project has become “the last mile to the first acre”, in referring to the fact that Emergent Connext is working with Microsoft to bridge a gap in connectivity – where Internet service providers are focusing on the last mile, and Emergent Connext are focusing on the first acre.
In July, an education and activation programme will be held by both organisations in California Central Valley, to bring together a group of farmers and inform them on the value of adopting IoT and how IoT solutions can be launched, as well as provide them with connected devices.
“The goal is to expose these farmers, both young and old, to the value and benefit of IoT solutions,” explained Roudi, “dispel the myth that they’re really expensive because they’re not. They’re far less expensive than when you’re paying for inputs.”
In comparing the early skepticism surrounding broadband when it first came out, and the Internet when it went live, Roudi demonstrated his personal savviness in working in the telecoms industry and understanding that technologies take time to be adopted.
“What drives my passion, because I’ve been doing this forever, this is the last industry that has not gone through a digital revolution,” concluded Roudi. May the revolution thrive.
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