#195 - Straight Out Of NASA: What Irrigation Can Learn From Cellular IoT

[00:00:00] Before we get into today's episode, I had the chance to visit OpConnect's corporate office and spend time with their team in person. The people were wonderful. Open, generous, willing to show me how things really work behind the scenes. Pretty much exactly what you think a tech facility might be like. And in a weird way, they have this command center that's like straight out of NASA. Maybe I'll show you that here. In irrigation, we talk a lot about connected controllers, cellular devices.

[00:00:30] Particularly Wi-Fi. And OpConnect has a lot to offer in this space, but it's because what they implement in irrigation comes from other industries like connecting ATMs and solar arrays and inverters and EV chargers. And I think that what makes this conversation relevant and hopefully valuable is just that. That we're bringing technology,

[00:01:00] from other industries into the landscape industry that's already been proven. So instead of using irrigation as a testing ground, this stuff already works in other industries. And all you have to do is get a device, plug it in, turn it on, and you'll be up and running. All right, let's get into the episode.

[00:01:24] If you're an irrigation professional, old or new, who designs, installs, or maintains high-end residential, commercial, or municipal properties, and you want to use technology to improve your business, to get a leg up on your competition, even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic systems, this show is for you. Justin, thank you for welcoming me to your corporate headquarters today.

[00:01:52] I'd love to start for those that are not familiar with OpConnect in general. Can you just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do here at OpConnect, and what OpConnect is known for? Justin Nichols, Director of Sales here at OpConnect. And really, from a high level, OpConnect, we're a cellular IoT company. And so our mission is really to go out there and connect the world one device at a time and to simplify that process.

[00:02:17] For our customers to make it as easy as possible, for them to connect whatever widget they have to the internet, and for those that are looking to monetize it, be able to make money on that experience. And when you say connect devices, I heard you say to the internet, add a little bit more clarity on what it means to connect something to the internet.

[00:02:35] Yeah, absolutely. So in our world today, everything is connected to the internet. I mean, if we go around our house, I think we talked about this on one of the podcasts, like, you looked at how many devices are on your Amazon or Google speaker, and it's like 50 connected devices.

[00:02:50] The same thing now exists in the commercial world. And so what we're doing is connecting different customer hardware to the internet for them to be able to monitor for proactive maintenance, or to manage the device where they can actually change the way that device interacts, to be able to connect or collect different data from different endpoints and to be able to use those insights to make better decisions in their business process.

[00:03:17] And just to be specific, we're not talking about connecting home televisions and those types of devices to the internet, right? What types of devices are we really talking about here?

[00:03:27] So, I mean, we're in basically every market that you can think of, but this could be our traditional retail environments where OpConnect started. So this could be an ATM, a Bitcoin ATM, it could be a kiosk, it could be a vending machine, a car wash, it could be gaming systems in a casino into more industrial applications where it's wastewater treatment plants, boilers, coolers inside an office building for commercial water treatment.

[00:03:56] Say in New York City, say, in New York City, irrigation controls, ag controls, in the renewable energy space. You're talking EV charging, solar inverters, grid monitoring. And now one of our new verticals that we're really accelerating in is connected security. So cameras, mobile surveillance trailers, access controls for doors and gates, all of that stuff requires a connection to the internet for either operations or monitoring.

[00:04:25] So I'd love to get into some of those markets more just to educate those folks that are strictly really in irrigation and landscape about some other markets that you guys are involved with. But let's talk a little bit about connecting irrigation and landscape equipment. What types of equipment get connected and how are they primarily being connected today?

[00:04:45] So for us, it's primarily two markets. It's a commercial market and then kind of a residential or light commercial market. And so we are connecting the irrigation controller. You know, that is the brains behind the system. That's where all the data from the irrigation system is collected. And that allows a landscape management company or whoever is servicing that system to be able to change things, monitor it, conserve water, conserve energy, things of that nature.

[00:05:12] So let's even get more detailed. For an irrigation controller, how are they connected to the internet? And then what type of device do they use OpConnect to connect it?

[00:05:22] So for commercial irrigation systems, typically we're hardwiring that through an ethernet cable. And so we are going to connect the device, which is a cellular router. That could be an OpConnect router. That could be from one of our partners in our ecosystem when we're hardwiring that in. So all the communication that is done from a workstation, a laptop, a smartphone app, all goes through the cellular internet so that you can be anywhere in the world and remotely connect to that controller.

[00:05:49] And how many, let's say controllers, how many controllers can be connected to one OpConnect device? Gotcha. Yeah. So in the irrigation world, controllers are pretty low data. So you can connect a lot of controllers. Some of our devices have four ports, meaning we can connect four hard lines of ethernet into that device without needing a network switch. But in theory, you could get an eight, a 16 port switch and connect eight to 16 irrigation controllers.

[00:06:17] It's rare that you'd have 16 controllers on the wall, but just from a fundamental conceptual perspective, you could wire it all up. Absolutely. The devices are powerful enough that you're going to have enough throughput, enough bandwidth. And of course, on the cellular side, there's going to be no limitations from what we can do through cellular channels to enable that.

[00:06:38] And most of the time with the irrigation market, it's one to one because most buildings have one controller. Some have two, some office parks might have more, but they're going to be further away from each other.

[00:06:48] Yes. Typically it's one to one. That's still the most robust strategy too, because let's say you had four controllers inside a building, which we see. If something happens to the device, you lose all four. So it's not as resilient. So we always advocate more of a one to one, but I get it. There's budget constraints. There's things of that nature. But yeah, typically four is about the most we would see from an irrigation standpoint. Are there certain brands that you know you've already integrated with, or shouldn't even use the word integrated because you don't really integrate.

[00:07:18] You're kind of just a pass through, but are there certain brands or models of the controllers that you see a lot of? Yeah. So we've, at this point, we've been in the irrigation space for a little over five years. I think we've worked with everyone, but common ones are going to be the household names that you and I know. You're Rainbirds, Hunter, Toro, Hydrawise, things of that nature. Baseline. Baseline, correct.

[00:07:40] Hey, it's Andy. A quick little aside here, my friends. If you're enjoying this episode, one of the best ways you can support the show is by helping it find the right people. Subscribe, share it with a friend, or send it to one person in the industry who might find it useful. It's kind of like buying me a beer or a coffee without actually having to buy me anything. And one more thing. Thank you for being curious. That's really what keeps this whole thing going. All right, back to the episode.

[00:08:11] If you're willing to share, what's the volume of connected devices that OpConnect has in the wild? U.S., global? Like how many devices are out there? So through the acquisitions that we've had over the last couple of years, it's several million that are in our ecosystem now. Wow. All throughout the globe, not just in the United States. Wow. And that's why we saw earlier on the tour, the command center. I don't know what you refer to it as. Yeah.

[00:08:39] I would call it the command center because you're watching over all those devices. So our backend systems is called Midway. And our customer-facing portal is called Summit on our fully managed. And yes, that is our gateway to be able to look at all those devices no matter where they're deployed. And I doubt that there are millions of irrigation controllers. So could you tell us what percent of, let's just say in the USA, what percent of total connected devices are irrigation?

[00:09:06] Irrigation, below percent. If I was to guess today, I'd say we probably have somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 units. Okay. So if there's millions and there's 5,000 or 10,000 in the irrigation industry, what are all those other devices connected to? Like what are your other big verticals? Yeah. So we cut our teeth in the ATM world. That's where OpConnect grew. We were a line item.

[00:09:30] So we're probably known mostly in that connected retail financial market. So different kiosks, payment systems, ATMs, really anything that requires payment for a form of business. So any type of machine that has payment attached to it, high level of uptime. Let's say you have a vending machine and your big hours are during lunch break and that vending machine was to go offline.

[00:09:56] You're losing thousands of dollars in revenue if that machine is offline for say 60 minutes. And so we pride ourselves in maintaining the highest level of uptime so that our users who are deploying this experience don't see any downturn in the way that they're using the machines or how they're using it to monetize their business.

[00:10:17] And I think irrigation falls more closely into, let's say, industrial, commercial industrial, IoT kind of, but more industrial. So what are the verticals that are sort of like parallel to or similar to irrigation? So I would say really there's strong parallels in the renewable energy space. So if you kind of strip away all the technical details of an EV charger or a solar inverter on a solar system to an irrigation system,

[00:10:47] it's very similar. You have one control panel or one unit that's kind of the main intelligence that's gathering all the data from all the endpoints that it's connected to. It's fairly low data in the irrigation world and say in the solar world, you have a handful of manufacturers that kind of own and operate that space that go to market with connected devices, connected controllers, connected solar inverters, and they're all sold through kind of a similar wholesale distributions.

[00:11:15] And you were talking to me earlier about the solar, you said inverter, similar to a controller. Are those again one-to-one or do you connect multiple inverters through one OpConnect device? Yeah, so that's where it's a little bit different because typically these are going to be in commercial sites similar to irrigation. The difference here is you're going to have multiple solar inverters on a commercial site where you might only have one or two commercial irrigation controllers.

[00:11:42] And so they use a process that's called daisy chaining where they might take 50 inverters on a single site, wire them all together, and then they have a central communication hub that all that data from all those inverters pass through, and then we connect a device to that one communications hub. But it is basically powering the data for all 50 inverters. Got it. So let's talk data for a second.

[00:12:05] How much, what is the volume of data that an irrigation controller uses just average across the different brands? Do you work with month? Yeah, I mean, you're never going to see, or I shouldn't say never, but very rarely you would see an irrigation controller go over 50 to 100 megabytes in a given month. Per month. Per month. So oftentimes it's even lower than that. And when we're talking about streaming in our homes and streaming to our computers,

[00:12:31] we're talking about like 150 to 100 megabytes per second sometimes. Yes. And here we're talking about using that much data in a month. Correct. And we have, say, with the security trailers that you've all seen in the parking lots and job sites, those could be using terabytes of data in a month because they're live streaming multiple cameras, high def video. Gotcha. So what other is, well, let me step back. Is that the highest bandwidth streaming cameras?

[00:13:00] Right now, yes. For the most part, cameras, the throughput that's needed for that for live streaming, that is going to be the highest data consumption that we see where it could be terabytes in a given month. And as it relates to somebody using, well, I guess we could go all the way back and say 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, 5G, what have you, CAT M1, etc. Yeah. What are the types of networks that irrigation controllers benefit the most from being on? Yeah. So 4G is probably the standard.

[00:13:29] We've seen when there was a 3G to 4G kind of conversion, when they shut down 3G a few years back, that was right around the entrance of what's called CAT M1. And so we do see a lot of irrigation controllers use CAT M1 technology. It's going to be slower, lower bandwidth, perfect for these low data applications. The thing with CAT M1, it's incredibly slow. So I can't put a CAT M1 device on a security trailer. It wouldn't give you one second of streaming.

[00:13:57] So it's matching the right cellular hardware data plan to the right application. And speaking of data plans, are the data plans that you, well, let's say that OpConnect offers, are they different and how are they different than a consumer data plan that you might obtain just walking into an AT&T store? Yeah. So these are IoT plans. We're not going to have a lot of limitations in the world of 4G and 5G if we're not talking, you know, unlimited data options that we would in the security world.

[00:14:25] And so basically because of our position with the carriers, you know, being a very large partner and reseller, say in the U.S. of Verizon and AT&T, we tend to have higher priority than what you would get, you know, just walking into a store. You're not going to have any limitations in terms of bandwidth or if it gets throttled. What does that mean, Larry? What does being throttled mean? Throttled means you lose speed for your application.

[00:14:51] So let's say I'm using my mobile phone to stream YouTube and I hit my threshold on that. It will actually cut down the speed that I can watch. So I might not be able to watch 4K or HD. It's going to impact how I'm able to view that content. Are commercial devices also throttled?

[00:15:14] So the type of data plans that we provide from the IoT world and then if we added a new acronym, FWA, fixed wireless access, that's for the high speed. Those are not throttled. And so with our SIM cards through OpConnect and our devices, you would not have those limitations for your application. Okay. And you said OpConnect is multi-carrier. Yes. A customer user has one of your devices. They set it up. How do they choose which network that they want to set it up on? Yeah. So that's kind of the beauty of it.

[00:15:43] If you're deploying at scale, you don't want to be locked into your computer screen having to select which carrier you want. So on our fully managed devices, we have our own baked in software. It's, you know, our secret sauce that lives under the hood. That's going to go through and connect to the right network and be able to switch that network kind of instantaneously so that you don't see any dip in performance. Outside of that, we can also throw a new acronym out, ESIM. You probably have heard that. Your listeners have probably heard that.

[00:16:12] The way the ESIM works is kind of like your iPhone now. There is no physical SIM card. It's digital. But really what it is, it's a multi-carrier SIM. So it's going to give you access to profiles that would allow you, say, in the United States to connect to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. So now what we're seeing, kind of the next big leap in innovation is putting multi-carrier SIMs on a physical SIM card.

[00:16:37] So once again, I want to deploy at scale, but I want to not have to have two or three SIM cards that I have to choose from every time I deploy. We can now use an eSIM, give you access to all three carriers, but once again, not putting you in front of a screen having to pitch which one you want. Let the technology work for you and let it run in the background and connect to the best network possible.

[00:17:00] It sounds like the user doesn't need to care if they're on AT&T or Verizon because they actually should care that they're using and they're connected with OpConnect. And then you guys are doing the work under the hood. So they might have a site that they activate a device and it's on AT&T, but it doesn't really matter to them. Another site, they turn it on and it's on Verizon, but it doesn't matter to them because you guys are making the decision which network is the strongest, which network is up, which network to connect to. Exactly.

[00:17:27] You know, and so every year we add new technology to our tool belt, whether it's in the irrigation world or in the connectivity world. We don't want to do things manually anymore. Let it be automated. Let the technology do what it's there to do. And let's say a device is when it's set up for the first time, it connects to AT&T. Will it, if AT&T goes down, will the device auto switch to Verizon? Yes, exactly. So it will go and it will auto switch and it will keep working through its progressions until it connects. Okay.

[00:17:56] Let's talk for a second about having to roll a truck to your, to the site, to the hardware. When and why would a customer need to roll a truck to check on an OpConnect device? Yeah, hopefully they never do, right? Hopefully they never do. The way we've built the system from, you know, our automation and provisioning to make sure we get the right profiles and network configuration before the device even ships down to our 24-7, you know, customer care team, network team.

[00:18:23] Um, you're able to call in, email in 24-7. That team's going to have tools that they're going to be able to diagnose what's going on. So at minimum, we want to try to either eliminate the truck roll or maybe make it a single roll. And I think historically a technician goes to a site because it's not working. The first truck is to diagnose what the problem is. Okay. Now I need to go somewhere back to my warehouse, get the product, bring it back out and hook it up and hope it works.

[00:18:52] And maybe it didn't work that time. Oh, I realized now I need actually something else. So you might be looking at three truck rolls. Hopefully there's stuff that we can do over the air to reset things and reconfigure it so that you don't need to roll the truck. But at minimum, we're going to tell you what you need to have on that truck. So when you get there, it's just a simple fix and you're out. So one truck and we're probably making that first call from 60 minutes. Yep.

[00:19:18] And people that have spent time, users that have spent time in the irrigation industry are probably pretty sensitive to rolling trucks because it seems to historically been somewhat of a pattern. Controllers time out, they lose connection. And then there's the old, I need you to restart the controller. And certainly you are not, OpConnect is not in charge of that third party device.

[00:19:42] And it could be true that that third party device needs to be, you know, power cycled, reconnected, unplugged, plugged in. But it sounds like from the OpConnect standpoint, as long as there's power running to it, we're trying to go to a 99.9% uptime. And, you know, it's the easy fix, unplug it and plug it back in. I have to do it with my Wi-Fi router, what, once a month, right? Oftentimes that's what needs to happen too with the cellular router.

[00:20:08] But we can do that over there and we can actually power cycle it so you don't even have to go and unplug the cord. Are there any projects that you have experience with that the user thought there is no way that cellular connectivity is going to work in this location? And, in fact, you send them a device and it powers up and you've got great signal. We were seeing that all the time, actually, in the irrigation world when we made the switch from 3G to 4G.

[00:20:37] So if we just kind of do a little cellular 101 here, all we did when we went from 3G to 4G to 5G is we're increasing speed. So it's a faster speed to 4G, now even faster at 5G. But there's always going to be a trade-off and that's signal strength and penetration strength. So the faster the device is, the tighter that band is. And the tighter the band is, the less penetration strength it has through vegetation or buildings.

[00:21:05] And so a common complaint we would hear all the time is, when I had my 3G device on this irrigation controller, I had no problem getting it to work in this basement. I upgraded it to 4G, now it doesn't work. Well, simply, it doesn't have the building penetration strength. So that's if we go back to CAT-M1. I was going to ask you, is that part of the reason that CAT-M1 is better for IoT? Very slow, so very long wave, better building penetration strength. So once again, it's picking the right technology for the job.

[00:21:33] So let's say there is a contractor out there or a specifier and they know that this irrigation controller is going down in the mechanical room of a building. How do they know that they can specify or order a device that's going to be CAT-M1 versus a device that's going to be 5G or 4G? So if they talk to OpConnect, we're going to advise them on that. So if they were to call in our team's trade, are trained to know, you know, kind of our verticals and use case and best product mix from a carrier standpoint and hardware standpoint to be able to walk them through that.

[00:22:02] So, you know, that's part of the benefit of having a partner and not trying to do this yourself and guessing. We want to be an extension of your business so that you have the expertise needed to be able to properly deploy and scale a connected solution. Oftentimes, the other thing that we can do. So if we're in a, you know, a higher data, higher bandwidth type of scenario, let's say it's a security camera. It's moving the router and the antenna to a better location.

[00:22:30] So very inexpensive to run Ethernet cable. You don't lose much signal quality, but you do when you start running longer antenna cables or you have to make them super thick to where it's just going to be very, very expensive. So if somebody wants to, if they know they want to use a Cat M1 because the signal is going to have to go through walls or it's down in the basement, do they have to purchase a different piece of hardware or is it just a different SIM? What is the difference in equipment? SIM wouldn't matter. So the hardware would be different for, say, a Cat M1 device.

[00:22:58] Our Milo device is our Cat M1. Our different partners in the cellular world have different Cat M1 products. And then also maybe looking at antennas, higher gain antennas, and then also looking at placement of where that antenna is, how far they're running it, things of that nature. Once again, that's where we kind of come in as a consultant. You tell us the problem and we'll help troubleshoot how to get it right the first time.

[00:23:23] Now, across these different industries that we've talked about, irrigation, ATMs, solar, EV chargers, are there any particular patterns that you see that maybe from an IoT connectivity standpoint make them all similar? Yeah, so I can tell you one of the weak points that we commonly see in that treatment train of technology, and that's antennas. It's oftentimes not thought about.

[00:23:53] I'm thinking about my SIM card, which carrier I want, my data plan and what device I want, and we're not thinking antennas. And sometimes that's the weakest link in the chain. And so that's why we're partnered with companies like TowelGlass that give us literally 5,000 SKUs that we can pick from to match the right antenna for the application. Most antennas you purchase, they come with those little paddle antennas that you screw on the back. That's really meant for benchmarking at your desk.

[00:24:22] I'm going to use the antenna in the kit that it came with, but those typically are not the antennas you want to use in the field. You want to use a purpose-built antenna for that application. So if we're talking irrigation, we don't want the antenna inside the stainless steel box on the pedestal. And we see that all the time. You're not going to have any strength. We want to get a waterproof direct-mounted antenna that's threaded onto the exterior of that stainless pedestal.

[00:24:49] And we see that in the security industry and trailers, you know, putting the router inside with the paddle antenna. No, let's get a higher-gain antenna and put it on the outside of, you know, high up on that mass on that trailer to just give you the best success possible in the field. So one of the last questions I would love for you to talk a little bit about is the difference between purchasing a device and then paying the service versus either maybe financing the device.

[00:25:15] I know that you have some options out there so that if a contractor doesn't have the budget to add, I don't know the cost, let's just say $500 to $1,000 of cost to a controller. How might they also be able to participate and get started? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the standard way is, you know, CapEx. I buy a router from this place. I buy a SIM card, a data plan from this place. But to your point, let's just say a router is $500 and you need 10 of them.

[00:25:41] All of a sudden, you need $5,000 day one. And the client might not have that in their budget yet. And let's say it's multiple. Let's say it's $50,000 day one. So something unique that we do is we do an OPEX plan. So we'll just take a little bit of the cost of the hardware. We'll throw it into that monthly. And now all of a sudden, you go from paying, let's just say it's $10 a month to $12 a month.

[00:26:07] And your month one cost of getting into, you know, the router and the data plan and getting that site provisioned and configured day one is much less expensive. I think that's a great option because a lot of times when these devices are being implemented, it might not be in the construction cost up front. So I think that we see it all the time. We see it all the time because either they're retrofitting or they did new construction and didn't think about what about my irrigation controller? What about my solar panels?

[00:26:36] What about my EV charger? What about my security system? So nothing is wired in to provide internet to all those things they might need at their office building. And all of a sudden, it's like, well, I don't even know how I'm going to power this stuff. I don't know how I'm going to run all this stuff. I don't have the capital to be able to put in all these devices. Now you can do that all month one and just pay for it monthly. So last question. Is there anything we haven't talked about or something that you would like someone to know about OpConnect?

[00:27:03] So we kind of talked about it earlier, eSIM technology. We now have the ability to provide network coverage to 600 carriers worldwide on a single SIM card. So I didn't even know there was 600 carriers. You mean there's not just two or three? It's not just Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile? No. So every country has their own version of that. And it can be really chopped up to where you might have 5, 10 carriers in a given country.

[00:27:30] We're lucky that we have three large carriers that basically cover the entire United States. Most countries aren't like that. They're regionally split up by carriers. So yeah, on a single SIM card with a single device, you can have a global SKU, deploy anywhere in the world, and have access to 600 different carriers. And that might seem like, well, who needs that, right? Who needs that?

[00:27:50] But you got me thinking because there are architects, irrigation engineers, irrigation consultants that might, they might have offices here in the United States, but they might be actually drawing an engineering project all over the world. So does that mean they could specify an OpConnect device for a project in the Middle East or a project in Europe or a project in the Caribbean? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:28:11] And so we're actually coming out with a global version of our Neo2 that's going to ride on our eSIM to give you access anywhere in the world and give that Neo2 experience that people are used to. But today we just pivot and we use one of our partner's hardware and, you know, spinning everything back to irrigation. We're doing that right now with some of those brand names that we talked about earlier. They have projects in Dubai, in the Middle East, in Australia, in Europe, in South America. We're providing that service today. Fantastic. Fantastic.

[00:28:42] Awesome. Good stuff, Justin. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Always fun. Really appreciate it. To chat with the sprinkler nerd. Keep up the good work. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me, Andy.