Scaling Telecom Everest: Leading The Charge In Global IoT Connectivity

Hi. This is Nick Earl, and welcome to the IoT Leaders Podcast. I'm Eseye's CEO. So this week's episode is different, because, for the first time, what we're gonna do is talk to an operator, and it's Talus. And her name is Jodi Baxter. And she, has been instrumental right from doing her MBA, as you will hear, in pursuing a vision, which is a collaborative model between the operators to deliver global IoT. And this resulted in TELUS making a decision to white label our platform as a global eSIM platform for them to become a global operator, about four and a half years ago. And we talk about that on the podcast of what's happened since. And then we talk about what's gonna happen in the telecom industry, and five g in particular, because she's also responsible for five g and industry solutions for TELUS. And all the developments around multi RAT, five g, explosion of sensors, billions of devices, and how in her view, all of these developments which will play out, you know, satellites, will play out over the next few years, all of which require a totally new model for the industry, which is one based on inter operator collaboration. And how she believes federations or alliances, like Star Alliance model, are needed in order to deliver value to customers. So I think it's a very good one whether you're, from the enterprise, side of the world or very definitely relevant if you're in the operator. Well, Telus, we're the first people to white label our platform. Others have followed since. And so she's speaking from four years, of experience in in doing this and seeing great success outside their home markets in now selling truly global deals. So it is a really good one. She's a very good friend of SI, knows as well, and we're very pleased, that she agreed, to, do the podcast. So here it is, my interview with Jody Baxter, who's the VP of five g and industry solutions at Thales in Canada. Enjoy. So, Jody, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. Thanks, Nick. It's really nice to see you. Yeah. It's good to see you again. Now we've known each other for quite a while. TELUS and SI have been partners for quite a while. In fact, that's what we're gonna be talking about and the reasons behind that, and what's what's happened since then. But before we do all of that, I really want to kinda get to know Jody here for our listeners, and indeed any viewers watching it on video, because you're the, vice president of five g industry solutions at TELUS, TELUS in Canada. So what does that actually mean? Yeah. It's, it's a bit of a generic title sometimes. Yeah. People may wonder. It's good. It's a conversation starter. So, yes, at TELUS. I've actually been at TELUS for a very long time. I've got twenty plus years at TELUS. My current role at TELUS is leading our five gs strategy, which is inclusive of our connectivity strategy for, Internet of Things, as well as the industry solutions that we wanna bring into the market. So we're we're very focused in worker safety, as well as fleet telematics from a solutions perspective. And so my focus right now is how do we bring to market greater value for our customers and enable the significant investment that we've made in in five g. And and within that, that encompasses, IoT? IoT. Yep. And on the IoT space, we're not just looking at our and why we have had a long time relationship. We don't just look at our domestic IoT capabilities in Canada, but how we're enabling our customers to move outside of Canada on a global level and and, take advantage of eSIM and multi SIM, switching capabilities. Right. And that's what exactly where we're going to go. But before we go, as the Americans say, let's put a pin in that. Before we go there, now you didn't tell us twenty years, but maybe we can delve back a bit further without without, trying to disclose age. But I win anyway. I'm the older anyway, so I win. But, what were you doing before that? What's the background? How did you end up, at at TELUS, essentially? Yeah. So well, how I ended up at TELUS was honestly right out of university, and somebody told me I should apply for this role at TELUS. And I thought, okay. I'll go try this out for a few months until I get my office at this at the top. But, then that turned into actually a twenty five year career, where I've had many, many roles. But how I got into IoT specifically is actually a really interesting journey. I spent seven years in TELUS Health. And during that, tenure in TELUS Health, I was very focused on how we're bringing information and enabling solutions for our end, providers, specifically in the practitioner space, so physician and pharmacy. And during that time, I was offered an opportunity to complete an MBA through a program that actually TELUS put on. So it was with a cohort of twenty of my peers at TELUS, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. And during that tenure, of that, very stressful time in my life, I, I actually picked a keystone project, which was the evolution of global connectivity and eSIM, in the Canadian market and what we should do at TELUS from a strategic perspective. And, it just happened that when I finished the program, there was a leadership role in connectivity, in the business solutions area. And, so I grabbed it, and, I think the rest is kind of history. The rest is history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're the first person. I think we did about forty five, forty six of these, IoT leaders podcast, and you're the first person who actually did a thesis as part of their MBA on connectivity in eSIM. So, so, that's a great way of getting into the into the role, and I actually wasn't aware of that story. So, that's absolutely absolutely, great. So let's then let's go fast forward a bit. Now I've been in SI for about six years, and not long after I joined, we already had an interconnect, I think, at the time with TELUS, so we could access your network via our platform. But but pretty soon afterwards, the conversation started to become a little bit more, strategic. And you guys, and just for everybody, listening, tell us, we're the first company that actually said, no. We need a new global capability, and we're gonna white label SI solutions. So essentially, what we're talking about here is Telus have, I think, for three, getting on four years, I think I'm right, in that being white labeling our solution. And you really were, from our point of view, a visionary, in that. It must have been a hell of an MBA course. So I was just thinking in retrospect, because you went first, and, that we'll get it we'll get onto it later on in the podcast that there's an awful lot of people now saying, oh, I've always believed that. They didn't for a long time. But but but there's a bit of a stampede, behind you. But you were the first by by some way. I mean, we're talking probably probably between four and five years ago when the conversations first started. I think a lot of people listening to this will be very interested in that, because everything everything, when things happen, it's, it's obvious in retro in retrospect. But, when the first person jumps, then people say, why are you doing that? So maybe you can give a little color, a little background. What what drove that thought process inside Telus? So when we were and it actually did culminate out of the MBA thesis, a lot of what we decided to do. We one of the things that we were seeing in the Canadian market, and and there was a lot of hype and talk about five years ago about this, like, emergence of eSIM or EUICC and how everybody was gonna take over and move into eSIM. And what that meant for the carriers was this was actually a competitive threat because no longer were our customers tied to us, and and they could move. Right? They could move around. At least that was the thought at the time five years ago, that they would just simply move around and it would be easy and there would be millions and millions of these in the market. And so we thought, okay. We have to instead of holding our cards hold close to our chest, we need to think about how we become enabler of this capability. Because if you're an enabler of the capability, then your customers be you become the trusted advisor of your end customer, and you can actually grow in the face of competition. And so what that meant was we had to make a decision on whether we had that skill set to build this capability in house or we needed to go outside and look for somebody that already was doing that. And there there's a few players in the market that that were were doing ESIM capabilities. And and but what we were really attracted with with the SI solution was the fact that it wasn't just an EUICC capability that the SI team was able to provide for us. You had a a multi SIM switching capability that allowed you to put up to eleven profiles, have, like, eleven different carrier MZ, we call them, our carrier profiles, onto a SIM, which could be plastic or virtual Yeah. And and allow that customer then to move the device around the world. And and what we saw in the Canadian market is that, well, there's lots of global players in the market. A lot of them are entering Canada, and and and they're and they're working in Canada. So how can we attract some of those customers into our ecosystem via our TELUS global connectivity platform powered by SI? Or how can we enable our customers to move outside of Canada? And one of the biggest use cases that we saw was actually around inventory. So when we think about, like, a a fleet telematics, organization or even a health application with the device at the end of it, most of those devices are shipped somewhere overseas for manufacturing. And in the in the world original world, the the end user would have a relationship with every carrier in every country that they sold that device. And they would have to ship the SIM cards from every carrier in every country to their manufacturer who would then solder them in and place them inside, and they'd be in an air tight protected location. Then the manufacturer has to then ship that inventory to all the the distribution points around the world. And they would find that they have inventory surplus or shortage, but it's not like you can just ship a device from France to Germany or from Canada to the US or vice versa, simply. And so that was the use case that we grabbed a hold of, and we we kind of structured a lot of what we were doing around that use case and have started to have conversations with the original equipment manufacturers to see what their what their thoughts were. And honestly, Nick, we a lot of the companies thought they could do it themselves. Right? They said, we'll just we're gonna go and and do our own eSIM, and we're gonna create our own eSIM platform, and you guys just give us the connectivity. And and that's fine. But I think what we didn't think about five years ago is just how hard the device setup is and how hard setting up an eSIM and managing that eSIM ecosystem is. And so when we when we, you know, move forward with the SI platform, that was a that was a big piece of what we wanted to do was bring simplicity to the market and help our customers understand not just the device side of the business, but the connectivity side of the business and how important getting those put together were. You know, not not every listener, of course, listens to, every podcast, so I'm in danger of repeating some things for some people, but we actually going back to what you just said, Jody, we we've been obviously saying that that that you want a full managed service for this, not a not a set of tools. You know, you wouldn't build your own car. I guess some people do, but you won't buy a car. Right? But, actually, but an awful lot of people, they still say that. And and so, what I was referring to there is that we did a piece of research that you'll be, well avail well aware of, and people listening, it it's it's on our website. And we interviewed a thousand, customers. No. Eight hundred customers with a thousand employees or more who had done an I t IoT project. So it wasn't just that you're thinking of doing one. It was, an IoT project. And we asked them, a very, specific question set of questions, which is, in retrospect, when you look back, what was it that you thought was going to be easy and actually wasn't easy? And it's almost word for word what you said, and then if you look at the the findings, one of the the first findings was they totally, totally underestimated the importance of the device. And, of course, in a world where where, you can be to some extent diagnostic to the MNO, but we'll get onto that from a from a MNO white label. But the where the the the IMZ, the the, operator, the profile can be switched, you need intelligence in the device. The firmware, has to be optimized as a and and the the integration with the modem and the and the, the the restart, the switching, the timers. I mean, there's a lot of complexity there, and I always say I blame Marc Andreessen for for setting market expectations by saying, oh, well, software's gonna be in hardware. You know, the cloud the the cloud is a computer in somebody else's office, so you don't have to worry about hardware anymore. It's over. It's over. But, actually, with IoT, you were you not only had to worry about it. It it was actually, I think it was eighty one percent in the survey said the single biggest issue that they found was was the device. The the and and the second one they had was when they said that they, would do it themselves, The administrative overhead of managing multiple contracts, as you say, manufacturing open devices, inserting local SIMs locally, which, by the way, in in a region didn't give you a hundred percent connectivity anyway, and so that didn't solve the problem. Limited set of roaming agreements, roaming agreements failing, having to manage all those contracts, having to worry about, roaming agreements breaking. I mean, it's just a very dynamic sort of under the water set of parameters that that most people have never even thought about, but it's normal for people in the telecom industry. I mean, it's what it's what happens. And they said, oh my god. In retrospect, I why did I I'm becoming a telecom company, when I actually wanna be a vending machine company or a medical device company. And, as I said, that was in in in retrospect, people say no. That's not the case. But but it is interesting that that it it was kind of marketed, e, ESIM. Maybe interested in your view on this. ESIM and EUICC were almost marketed as the magic powder or it was a magic wand that were just with a simple shake of eSIM and the EUICC standard, you know, suddenly, we're all happy smiling people holding hands and and interoperability. That's what it was when I wrote my MBA thesis. Like, the research was, like, you know, millions billions of devices by twenty twenty were gonna be in an EU ICC. And that we all know is not the case. Right? So Yeah. It's it it I mean, the the the reality versus the the perception was very different in this scenario. Yeah. Do you think it was because you were you you TELUS are, a big player, but on the global stage, you're not one of the very, very biggest. So do you think you know, one thing I found when I was at Cisco for many, many years is that disruption is often embraced first by the challenges, not the huge incumbents. And so do you think that that played part of this? Because you were you have some very big neighbors south of the border in the US. Right? Yeah. We have big neighbors south of the border, and we have big big, you know In Canada. In in Canada and and even in Europe. Right? And so Yeah. For sure. I don't know if being, a more of a localized. From a telco perspective, we were we were definitely, you know, not on the global stage. But we had a few capabilities that we've also invested in that I think drove not only our need for global capabilities, but helped us with, you know, having those conversations, not just with SI, but potential other carriers on how we would work together with them. And that would be our foray into TELUS Health, which was absolutely a a a global strategy on affecting health care, at a global level. And then the second is our our push in agriculture. The the majority of our agriculture business is actually outside of Canada. And then we have TELUS International, which is our our, business process oriented organization, which has which has grown into a significant software development and, data services, capability over time. And so I think those three capabilities that we've got today within our umbrella, have helped to foster our growth on a global scale, from from a, like, a a tech company perspective, for sure. And one of our previous podcasts was was, like, in the Telus ag agriculture space with precision, animals who are, as you know, a Telus agriculture, company, either you invested in. But the the the, very, very ambitious project, as you say, outside of Canada in US, but then global to actually solve the problems of the number one killer of cattle, which is BRD, bovine respiratory disease, or cow pneumonia, and, that came directly out of that. So that's the type of deal which you which you and and we wouldn't have even been aware of. In fact, the deal probably wouldn't have happened. The the company wouldn't have been formed unless a solution was available for them to create a single global product SKU, in this case, a a specialist router or a router as they call it in the US, that that actually could be installed on a a fence post anywhere in the world and, can monitor. But I think that one is actually a really interesting use case that just actually solidifies the the whole complexity around the device. Right? Because in that in that situation, not only did we have to figure out how to get the connectivity on a global level, we had to figure out how to make that device work in the ecosystem that of which it was operating. And and I think that that is another piece which moves kind of into the professional services side of the And and specifically, how do you how do you get tags smart tags onto, sort of a an eight hundred pound cow, and keep it there. And so the whole hardware had to be designed from scratch. And, how do you get the data, and how do you do use artificial intelligence to look at anomaly detection behavior in terms of the way the cattle move. I mean, it was a very interesting podcast. But again, that that they wouldn't those two, vets, wouldn't have started that business unless there was a global capability. So that shines a light on another thing, which is people ask us, oh, is this replacement business? And, actually, what we've said is because I IoT was so very difficult, which you've talked about, actually, you're addressing an unmet need. So it's incremental business. It's business that nobody is getting because people say, unless you can give me a single global solution which works with all the devices and could work be agnostic across the operators and it's a single threat to choke, then I'm not just not gonna do the project in the first place. So the great thing about this is no one's trying to replace anything. What we're actually saying is we're actually gonna win brand new business, which is where the money is because the money the inverse parade over the the money is in the twenty percent of companies that make eighty percent of things. And so it's the big companies, the big opportunities that need the single SKU. So so it all makes sense, but, again, you were a visionary. So let's go back to that. That was four years ago. I think we concluded it. Mhmm. And, you know, full disclosure, you guys made a a an equity investment is in us at the same time, so I'm talking to a shareholder. Thank you very much, an investor. But, also, you know, there's been a lot of learnings on both sides. We were both plunging in, together for the first time. So maybe we could share, share the chill learnings, maybe a couple of war stories. I don't know. But, it's been a journey. Shall we put it that way? Yeah. I'd say it's been absolutely a journey. And and, honestly, it's been the the tuition value, is immeasurable, right, from from the journey that we've been on. And we can say we've we maybe hopefully have paved the way for for for others that that are that are gonna go on this journey for both parties, right, for for SI and for TELUS in in some of the learnings. I think we were maybe a little bit the first learning is that we were perhaps a little bit, overconfident in the number of customers that we're gonna flock onto our platform. And so one of the things that I think we learned is unlike your simple, smaller domestic business, the the the sales cycle, the implementation cycle, and the amount of time it takes for the devices to actually become live, on your network and billing generating revenue is significantly longer. And so, thankfully, we have patience, and we learned because we we are seeing that traction now. Right? And and and I think both SI and Telus are benefiting from some really significant wins that we've made in the market, and and we're able to address client needs. But I think that was the first learning. And the second learning is as much as I say how difficult the device onboarding is in this conversation right now, I think at the beginning, we didn't really understand, as a as a carrier, just how complex putting a global EU eSIM is into a into a device and just the the complexity of that device onboarding. And I know there's been a lot of less learnings on the SI side, and and you guys have we can talk about the capabilities that that SI has built in to simplify that device onboarding capability. But I think that culminates into frustration, right, on both party sides that we had to kind of get through. And and that that was probably the second learning. And then the third learning, I would say, is, and I I don't think we did this wrong. It's just a learning, is we went, we went a little we we built processes that were meant for a small number of of deals. Right? So we could support a small number of deals between both organizations. And then it took longer to win those small number of deals, and so we became complacent in the current processes as they stood. And now we're seeing success, and so we're gonna have to we need to amplify. Right? We need to amplify on our processes. We need to generate more automation. We need to get better skill sets in house, all of which we're working on. But I would say those are those are the three learnings that that, I would that I have have come out of of this. And then just it's not a learning, but it's an opportunity. How do we take what we've what we've done that these two organizations and and make it bigger so that we have more carriers collaborating on a global scale? And I think that can lead us into some conversations around just the importance of localization. Yeah. So let's let's, let's go there because I think that is as you say, that that this is a it has been a journey, but it's been a journey it's sort of like, you know, climbing Everest. Actually, it's been a journey to base camp. Yeah. And, so you finally get there and go, which is great. And then you realize, I'm only at base camp. It might have taken eight days to walk to base camp, but then you look up and go, oh my god. And the point is that that, as you say, the real issue here, and I've talked about this in other podcast, is that the the the mobile network operator landscape, which I think is eight hundred and twenty or something like that companies, it it has been for forty years the dominant model, but based on the proprietary SIM. So not the eSIM, EUICC agnostic approach, but a proprietary SIM with a lock in model, which is works for consumer consumer data, consumer voice, consumer video works just fine. But it it doesn't work for IoT for various reasons. And, and and therefore, the moment you enable interoperability, agnostic interoperability in a virtualized switching from the cloud down to the device or even from the device out, to the cloud, then disruption happens. Because what you really want is everybody ideally, if I'm a customer, I want everybody to offer this, not just one or two. Now since we've done the the the work with you and done the Telus deal, you know, we announced recently MTN. We're the second, you know, all of all of Africa, eighteen countries, or, MTN, which brings its own challenges. But we're but that's probably gonna go quicker because we're taking the joint learnings from from TELUS, as you know. And, and then there are some others that are in the hopper, and you're involved in helping us there, which we can't talk about. But but the point but the thing is that there are those same industry trends that are happening in in telecom in general are driving an even bigger need for this than there was four, five years ago, aren't they? So so why don't we approach it from that direction because this idea of of is the federation or the collaboration model actually the ultimate end game for the industry? So so what would you see what what the next big and, what's next for the IoT market? In your role, you're looking at five g. You're looking at I t, IoT. You're looking at industry solutions. So let's start again with the strategy and work backwards. What do you think is is the big challenges that are big things that are coming next? And why does that, increase the need for even more collaboration between the operators? So I think so let's start with five g. So five g is, I would say, for the most part, in carrier dependent. So the the way that the infrastructure is built in each region, by the carrier is is very kind of localized for that carrier. But the capabilities that five g enables are things like mass IoT deployments where we can where you can have, like, thousands and thousands of sensors operating, off of one cellular tower and and transport. And and and what that does is it creates increased capacity on the network. The second piece, though, that I think is starting to happen is actually not not so much on the carrier's technology side. It's actually the evolution of technology in the market. So if we think about, intelligent cars, if we think about intelligent, intersections, all of those aspects have video attached to them. And video requires high reliability and low latency. And that's something that five g can provide in country. Yeah. But in order to provide that capability outside of the country, roaming is not sufficient because the the way that roaming technology and I'm not gonna get into the roaming technology in case, but roaming technology has a greater latency issue than a localized network. Yeah. Because you're maybe you're back hauling the data. Back hauling back. By definition, you've got a latency issue. Yeah. Exactly. And so if we think about the fact that I think I've heard that the c a city the size of Paris, actually evolves every year in that that's how big, like, congestion is gonna become and and urbanization is becoming. And so in order to combat that, we need to think about how do we create automation in in our in our city's ecosystems. And in order to do that, this will be an EUICC or an eSIM capability because the OEM manufacturers are not gonna wanna operate locally with every carrier. And so as we evolve that, localization becomes really important. And in order for localization to occur, there needs to be a cooperation amongst the carriers, if that makes sense. And so the it becomes not even coopetition. It's it's really a a federation or, or a an alliance, if you wanna call it, amongst the carriers that allows them to operate their capabilities inside other countries. And, of course, reciprocity occurs, right, outside of that. And and, you've you've said a lot of things there. You unpack a few of them, and we obviously share that vision. And we in fact, to the point where our federation, which is currently, sixteen operators, is is kinda modeled on use the word alliance. It it it's modeled on the Star Alliance because, you know, we've seen this movie before. You had the airline industry very successful, growing hugely as travel boomed, but massive frustration that you that as a consumer, you couldn't book one airline ticket that took you on competing carriers. Or if you did fly into one city, they wouldn't let the gates be used by a competitive airline. So you you couldn't do your connection and and eventually an entity. It's not that they all bought each other, but but actually what happened, is that the new entity emerged with in fact, there were more than one federation. Star Alliance is is one example. United Lufthansa starting that off. But the idea of a a a collaborative, coopetition, model with people sharing infrastructure but having an agreed set of rules between the players. So they still retain their independence, and they can each sell their tickets and retain control of the customer, but they can access the the resources of the federation as a whole. And that's what we've certainly built with the sixteen operators. You talked about localization. It it it it was another aspect of what you said is that because if you're going to do, URL CC, so ultra reliable low latency connections, which is one of the key capabilities of of five g or network slicing, quality of service. It's one thing doing it as one one operator Telus to Telus customers. And then you say, well, but what if it's a multi operator solution through an aggregation platform? You then need those capabilities applied to to to everybody. And so you certainly are going to need, for the latency side, the localization, around a single network, because you can't do global deals and backhaul the video from a car, from, Asia to Europe or to the US, it's not gonna work. So so when you look at five g and the use cases and the explosion of sensors, then it's hard to come to any other conclusion other than collaboration between the operators in some sort of model, where they agree the rules, but they stay independent and the rules are executed by by an independent third party is the right way. Now other people have tried to solve it another way. You know, here in the UK, Vodafone, you know, started buying companies and buying companies. And they were gonna create a global operator by buying I don't know how many they bought at the end of Vodafone subsidiaries. But that puts tremendous strain on the balance sheet, and, you know, you can't buy there's a hundred and whatever it is, ninety countries. You can't no one's got enough money to buy a hundred and ninety operators to create one truly global one. So this it's not gonna work. And Vodafone have announced, you know, you know, the intent to spin it out, for various reasons, one of which is the strain on the balance sheet. But the the the the collaboration model seems to be inevitable. Are there other reasons why it's inevitable? Because you mentioned if I go back, you mentioned about skills and the device. Device skills, device knowledge, device optimization is do you think it's gonna get even more important and more critical in a in a five g world? And more I'm thinking about I think it absolutely will. It's not even it's the device, but also multi rat. So if we think about kind of the way of the future where all things everywhere are connected, and and and it's very likely that that's going to occur. Today, there's different ways of connecting technology. One is a five g wireless, network, which is definitely probably the most prevalent method. But there is Wi Fi. Right? So there's there's there's local fixed access. And then the the second one is is satellite, which when you think about satellite, there are five g satellite, policies, right, that are that are coming up coming to light. And if you think about the world, things move from areas of coverage to non areas of coverage. And so when you speak about multi rat, I think I think that it becomes a part of the federation, Nick, but I'm not exactly sure how how it operates. I think what it what it means is that the federation is not just necessarily MNOs or carriers. The the federation is a combination of carriers and, other providers. So so if we think of, like, satellite is is generally not a carrier provided service. Right? But I think those are we not that we have time, but they're they're the adoption of that is a bit slower. But it actually brings back the complexity of the device. So today, if if we don't kind of work together in including SI to determine how we make it simple for the manufacturers and the and the software developers to enable what we would call multi rat, I it it just it prolongs the real opportunity. Yeah. So if you think about agronomy. Right? If you think about agronomy and you have a farmer in Brazil that is shipping an avocado to London, they they they they have they want to be able to trace that avocado from the farm in Brazil to the store in London, and that will require multiple types of, access technology to do that. And One Absolutely. And one area that you didn't refer to, which I know is is big for you guys in Canada because you got, like, the mining companies is I would add to that list of multi rat, is to think about private networks. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, although a lot of the operators will offer both public and private networks under their brand, there are a lot of it's very easy. You you can walk into a store and buy a private network and turn it on. And, you know, there's a lot of private companies buying spectrum for private networks and implementing private networks. So now you've got this switch. The way the way it all makes sense to me is that, you know, when you're when you're in the cellular business, you think it's the center of the world. But actually, even today, cellular is only thirteen percent of all connections. And actually, the a lot of the growth, particularly at the low end, is non obviously, non cellular. And And there's a lot of other ones that we haven't even talked about, LoRa and and others. But but with is that the device in the ideal world, the device chooses the right connectivity for the use case and the conditions in which it binds itself at that time. So there's device resident intelligence, in other words, or or or does the switch, which is which is which, is in the case of TGC, we should have said your your solution white labeling, our solution is called TGC Telstra Connect. But the switch is in the cloud. It it's in our our connectivity management platform. It's in the cloud. But we the vision we see is the switch is going down to the device, which is our SmartConnect offering, which you're fully aware of. When the device starts ultimately, the device should choose its own connectivity and just handle everything. And that that then could be the one of the ways in which you can enable five g, you know, based on the use case, the data, the signal strength, the cost, the latency, a lot of, network state information, will determine the right type of connectivity, the right the right brat radio access type. And, ultimately, it's really hard to do that in a world of billions of sensors if you're trying to do it in an in a abstracted cloud based system because you don't have access to that data, and you'll probably be wrong if you try and make a generic choice. So you almost need a long tail personalization, device by device, network, switch capability, which which is which works across five g and all of the others. So that's actually many years' worth of collaboration and and technical, problem solving to get to that point. So I think I think that the thing that as you were saying, it's you know, the my base camp analogy, that's that's the mountain. We don't exactly know how we're gonna get there, but it's coming. Right? Because the the proliferation of proprietary technologies and proprietary approaches could get even we may have solved the SIM block, but the all these other proprietary, communication protocols could be coming out as implemented by different companies. So if I'm a user, the the the the the world could look worse rather than better going forward if I take a totally multi rat view. Well, that ends. If if we try to conquer this very large opportunity and problem and challenge, device by device, It we will we will be in Basecamp for a very long time. Right? So I think that's where when you when you speak of SmartConnect, which I'm I'm very familiar with, I think there's a there's there's a bit of a secret sauce there that needs to be explored in how can you use software to push intelligence into a device that allows for those capabilities versus trying to do firmware. Right? Firmware, which is not scalable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's the next challenge, Nick, that that, that we need to figure out. But in order to do that successfully, you still require that collaboration amongst the carriers Yes. And the and the radio access technology providers. Right? So whether it's satellites or wireline, you know, Wi Fi and LoRaWAN, whatever it is. Yeah. I and and that's where we were were, you know, about ten minutes ago is the if you look at what's coming, and we just had a good conversation about what's coming and and, is it lots of things we don't know coming that we will. In a year from now, we say, well, we didn't see that coming. So there'll be more stuff. You mentioned about trust. I've done podcasts based on, you know, trust and, carbon credits, auditability of, data, public private key encryption of data. I mean, there's a lot of things coming, which we're gonna have to deal with, but all of them seem to point in, I mean, the you know, climbing the mountain, the the you might not know which way you're going, but the general directions are up. Right? And I think in this case, we might not know what's coming at us, but and how it's because the standards in many cases aren't defined, and the standards of five g is still not still not defined. Agreed. The standards for, you know, satellite release seventeen that you talked about are still not defined. But what we generally know is that it's coming, and it will get defined. But every one of these, market developments, including areas we haven't talked about, like, you know, the use cases, which today we have business use cases and we have consumer. But they're gonna blend. Right? They're gonna be be in the home. You're gonna want your home security system to be a combination of consumer devices and a a business monitoring service in energy management in the home. Things that's gonna the consumer devices is gonna blend very much into with new technologies like Halo. So is it so, you know, where Wi Fi gets extended and goes through bricks much easier than the current standard. So all these massive amounts of change is gonna come to us. And in every single one of them, whichever way we look at them, they seem to be reinforcing your point that the only way of doing this is collaboration between and I like the point you made, not just the operators, but the operators and all the players. Right. I agree. Like, I think that that it's it's important, in order for us to, I think, in order for us to tackle this momentous opportunity and problem And like you said, the the the strategy is to go to the top of the mountain, but we might have to go around it a couple times, before we before we get there and figure it out. But I think the opportunity is is ripe. And and and I and we're seeing every day new use cases that come forward that just amplify the need for for collaboration, across across the different players in the market. And the general awareness, I I would say from an SI perspective well, you and I you and I, talk all the time, but we we tend to meet face to face at Mobile World Congress every year. Yes. Such a fun show, isn't it? But, anyway, that aside, the but, certainly, the difference each year is that the conversations this conversation is reflective certainly, of of this year's MWC. But we had a lot of conversations with a lot of operators who previously wouldn't even entertain the conversation about the need for a collaborative model. And, of course, the reason is is that the users, the end users are defining it. This is where the money is. And back to the beginning, you did TGC because I talked about the deals that nobody was doing. The the you know, we may have predicted fifty billion things connected by twenty twenty, and we got to about ten or eleven billion. We missed eighty percent of it. Those were deals that nobody got because you couldn't do a single SKU. You couldn't you you had to ship open devices. You had you had you you had installation issues. You had all this complexity. It all comes down to scalability. Scale. And the moment you can have a single product SKU, then, that's when customers start saying, oh, I'll I'll actually do the project for the first time. And and that's what you're seeing now with TGC, isn't it? Because you're scaling way outside of Canada. I mean, you're not you know, you're yes. You're a Canadian operator, but TGC is a truly global offering. Mhmm. It is. Absolutely. And it's it's it's really exciting what we're seeing. And, you know, like I said, lots of tuition value, but what we're seeing now is is really exciting. And I am validating, I think to the original strategy that we spoke about four and a half years ago when we first started, you know, building out this this plan. So Validated your MBA thesis, Jody. Yeah. Because in my just to just to stop to end off with that, my thesis was around, should we build a platform, Nick, or should we acquire or partner? And this was not to build because, network operators, building platforms for end customers is likely gonna be a very long like, we'd still be trying to build it. Right? But there are players in the market, and so that's what actually culminated us to go out and look for who are the players in the market that could that could support the need. So Well, that is a great point to finish, and I will, not so certainly point out that a lot of the conversation is certainly that we have with operators, and I know you're aware of a few of them. The default option is we're an operator. We can build this. And, so, yeah, there's a lot of education still. No one's saying that anyone's got the perfect solution, but the I think the key thing I'm taking away from this, is all of the trends in the industry, of which there are many in this trillion dollar industry called telecom, all of the trends do point towards the need for increased collaboration, which is fundamentally different to the model that the way telecom was built proprietary. It's arguably one of the the the last and the biggest segments of of, industry where it's still essentially run on a proprietary stovepipe model. Mhmm. And in most areas of the world, in most areas of tech, interoperability, and and standards have already happened at every layer of the ISO stack or whichever way you look at it. And telecom has has held out, but I think we can, as we said, we can get some cracks. Yeah. We're seeing some cracks in that. And, honestly, well, some of my favorite conversations are with carriers across the globe just listening to the same problems. Right? So I think that collaboration opportunity is is is really starting to unfold. Well, Jody, thanks so much. Thank you for being a visionary. Thank you for taking your MBA course. What a smart move that was. And, I know, from our statistics on the IoT Leaders podcast that, that a lot of operators listen to this. So I think that I think this this would have got a lot of, airtime, shall we say, with a lot of operators. So thank you very much for that. Thank you for being my guest, on the podcast. Thanks for the collaboration, and it's good to know that we've just got a few little last details to hammer out, and then we'd have solved all the problems in telecom. Yeah? That's right. We'll we'll get that next week. It was always a pleasure. It's always a pleasure, Nick. I really thank you. Thank thanks a lot, and, thank you to our listeners. And, thank you to Jody, who's the VP, as I said, of five g in industry solutions at TELUS and, is bringing her MBA to life, whilst climbing Everest. That's my summary. Thank you. K. Thanks, Jody, and I'll talk to you soon.