everything RF recently interviewed Jim Roche, the President and CEO at thinkRF. Jim thrives on leading and contributing to breakthrough organization successes. With a background as an entrepreneur and leader of multiple high-growth enterprises, Jim is a successful executive with over 30 years of relevant experience. He is a founding member of two unicorns (Newbridge Networks and Tundra Semiconductor), has extensive experience as CEO of private and public high-growth companies, and has served on the boards of many other successful companies
Q. RF Spectrum is a public resource which has a tremendous value for society. Globally operators have invested over a trillion dollars in spectrum licenses and also more in the infrastructure to monetize the spectrum. However, we also see that it's a critical and scarce public resource. So, the wireless spectrum impacts the way we live, both in terms of our work and also the way we communicate. So, in this interview we will discuss if we think mobile operators are fully utilizing their spectrum. Also, if the public receives a good service throughout the day as they move across varying locations. But firstly, I wonder if I can start by asking you about thinkRF and in particular if you can share with us what you do and who your customers are.
Jim Roche: Sure, my pleasure. So, thinkRF is dedicated to exactly this the problem or the situation that you just described. It's our mission is to analyze what's happening to the RF spectrum and provide the data that we're able to generate from that to users of the spectrum and to those people that benefit from the use of the spectrum.
Q. So, what do you think the major challenges are in this space for network operators and what are they facing?
Jim Roche: So, as you pointed out, over the last few years mobile network operators, the companies that run the wireless networks, have spent over a trillion dollars in gaining license to spectrum through these typically, it differs country to country, but typically it's a spectrum auction process. So, after they spent all this money the next thing they do is they go and invest capital to build the base stations and light up the spectrum. So, that our cell phones can communicate with the spectrum or the IoT devices can communicate with the base stations using the spectrum.
The thing that we don't have generally is a really good sense of how the spectrum is being used ubiquitously. And what I mean by that is the wireless operators will have pretty good sense of what's happening around the base station of course, but they don't have a really good sense of what's happening up away from the base station. So, you might have experienced like me at times where you're maybe driving on a call and the call drops or you get a really bad quality signal it's like noisy or very quiet or problems with the signal of some sort. Why does that happen? Often it's because there's maybe some interference with the spectrum or perhaps the signal isn't reaching well enough where we happen to be in the moment. It could be due to a geographic anomaly. Could be that a building is creating a shadow to the transmission of a signal.
The mobile spectrum operators like BT, Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, Bell Canada, we're in Canada, don't have knowledge at an intimate level about what's happening. What they do when they run into a problem area often is they conduct what's called a drive test. So, they send out a little van with sometimes one sometimes two people in it and a bunch of equipment. They go to this troubled area, and they monitor what's happening in the spectrum and they get a snapshot of what's happening in that moment. We thought that was problematic and that there would be value in the market if we could ubiquitously and continuously monitor the spectrum and provide that data to the mobile service operators as well as to the government organizations and regulators that license the spectrum, so that both the operators and the regulators have a really good sense of how the spectrum is being used.
Q. Great. So, can you tell me how you see this compared to RF Drive testing or perhaps crowdsourcing?
Jim Roche: Crowdsourcing, that's a good one. So, there are some services out there very clever approach. What they've done is embedded a little bit of software into various applications on our phones and with that software they monitor the signal that the phone is picking up in the moment and provide that information in a crowd-sourced manner to the operators. It's really valuable information. The downside of it is, it's not real time and it only provides a slice of information about what's happening, a small portion of the information about what's happening with the spectrum. So that it's valuable, but it has significant negatives from an operator's perspective. RF drive testing; going out with a vehicle with expensive equipment and measuring what's happening in the spectrum in a given location fills the gap, but only does it in that point in time and in that location. It's very expensive as well.
RF Multi-band Analysis Drive Testing Illustration
So, what we are doing is continuously monitoring the spectrum ubiquitously, 24/7. We're back hauling the data from that monitoring into the cloud, analyzing the data and providing the insights to the operators. This is highly complementary to the information operators currently have from their own gear, from drive test and from the crowdsourced information. And its much richer data than you would get from crowdsourced information. Allows them to make changes to their networks in order to provide better service, to maximize their retention, reduce churn and to acquire new customers into their networks.
Q. So, Jim could you describe SXM and give some details about how it works?
Jim Roche: Sure, I'd be happy to. So, SXM stands for Spectrum eXperience Management and what we do is we deploy SXM IoT nodes that monitor the spectrum in a geographic area such that they're continuously monitoring, 24/7, what's happening in the wireless spectrum across the entire frequency range. The data that the SXM IoT nodes collect is then uploaded to the cloud where it's integrated across all the IoT nodes. We then analyze the data to produce insights and provide those insights to mobile service operators or other customers that might be interested in how the spectrum is being used.
SXM IoT Node
It operates ubiquitously and continuously and maintains a history of information, so we know what's happening to the spectrum over time as well as at a point in time.
Q. So, you've mentioned a little bit about SXM and about it monitoring the spectrum on a continuous basis. So, is it keeping a record of this or are you keeping historical data? How is it working?
Jim Roche: That's a really good question. It does keep historical data. So, drive test as an example you get a snapshot in that moment. So, if there was a problem on Wednesday and you send a vehicle out on Thursday you can see what was happening on Thursday, but you have no idea what was happening on Wednesday. SXM keeps information throughout time, so we have that historical information.
So, if there's a problem on the network, the operator can access the historical records and see oh look there was a problem from 10 AM to 11 AM on Wednesday and it recurs every week what might be happening. Well, we can go and investigate that and more often than not, we will have an insight as to what might be causing that interference or that network outage due to the historical data that we've collected for that network and we can compare it to what we're seeing on other networks as well to provide some insight into the spectrum.
Q. How do you think SXM is helping mobile operators, especially in terms of deploying their base stations?
Jim Roche: So, one of the things that especially as we move into 5G at the higher frequencies in the millimeter wave, the location of the towers is particularly important to the quality of the service. So, operators spend a lot of time and money mapping out the locations for their towers. We provide a baseline of information which helps the operators determine where to put their towers and if they're about to enhance their coverage where and how to enhance their coverage.
Q. How are you doing this Jim and how are you trying to collect or how do you go about collecting this real-time continuous data?
Jim Roche: thinkRF has been around for about 15 years and during that time, we've invested in core technology which is world leading spectrum analysis technology. About two years ago, we realized that if we package this up in highly low-cost, highly independent nodes that we deployed around an urban area or around a country then those nodes could continuously monitor the spectrum as I said a minute ago backhaul the data into the cloud and then we could then analyze it and provide that information to mobile service operators.
So, we reached out to a handful of operators around the world and asked them if they would be interested in a service like this and the response, we got was enthusiastically positive. These are companies that we'd worked with in the past and so, we partnered with them, developed the solution and have trialed it principally in Canada, although we also have networks in Europe and in South America. And, the results have been phenomenal, like really, really good. Beyond our expectations!
Q. Great, so if a mobile operator would like to get this up and running, what's required to get SXM working for them?
Jim Roche: We operate this on a subscription basis. So, an operator needs to indicate an interest in the data. If they're interested in the data, we'll deploy a network with them. That network then is continuously operating providing the data to the operator. So, they need to give us a call and we'll work with them to get that network deployed.
Q. Can I ask you where are you in terms of deploying this worldwide with the SXM?
Jim Roche: So, we have just launched SXM as a generally available service. As I said, we have networks in place in North America, South America, and Europe. And those networks are operating continuously and very reliable. Our objective now is to broaden the deployment to other geographic areas. So, we're at the early stages, but we expect over the next few years to have broad coverage in North America, South America Europe and then shortly in Asia as well.
Q. Do you see this SXM solution being relevant for any other industries?
Jim Roche: That's a good question. The first market that we're addressing is the mobile service operators. Companies like BT, Verizon, Rogers, Bell, Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, TIM, SFR, and one of our key partners here in Canada TELUS, among others. However, when the SXM IoT nodes are deployed in a city or in a country, it's able to monitor all spectrum activity right across the frequency range. That includes of course, the frequencies used by our phones and the base stations. But it also includes the frequencies used by police services, by fire departments, by ambulances, by ships communicating ship to shore, trains, airplanes, IoT devices, autonomous vehicles that are communicating with infrastructure, for example traffic lights or each other.
So, we are continuously monitoring the spectrum and can provide that information not only to the mobile service operators but to cities, to fire departments, to shipping organizations, to autonomous vehicle companies, etc. So, we do see this as having huge value in our society beyond the mobile service operators in time.
Click here to learn more about SMX.
thinkRF is the leading provider of software-defined spectrum analyzers for monitoring, detecting, and analyzing complex waveforms for the ever-changing wireless landscape. ThinkRF solutions are built on patented technology and quality engineering to provide higher performance and versatile capabilities for 5G, signals intelligence (SIGINT), spectrum monitoring, technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM), and test and measurement applications. For more information click here to view the thinkRF profile on everything RF.
