AI-Powered Connectivity on Racing Yacht – Bart Giordano, CommScope

This is techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong tv. I, I got a really cool story, you know, look, what we do here with is kind of geeky, nerdy.

I love it. My wife or my kids would not necessarily say it's cool, but every once in a while we get to do a story that is really cool that my, you know, the kids would love, my boys would love. And I think there's, I'm hoping there's gonna be one of them.

Let me introduce you to Bart Giordano. Bart is president for Networking and Intelligence, cellular and Security at CommScope. For those who don't know, well, I'm gonna let Bart tell you all about CommScope.

Hey, Bart, welcome to techstrong tv. Thanks very much, Alan. Uh, I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk about what is a pretty cool project.

All righty. So before we get into it, let, let's get some of the, you know, table stakes set aside, set up right away. Bart, tell us a little bit about you, your role at CommScope, and a little bit about CommScope for companies who aren't, or for audience who is not familiar.

Yeah, so CommScope, uh, the way to think about CommScope is we're a connectivity company. Uh, all forms of connectivity from fiber and cable that, you know, connects up infrastructure to the set top box or the, uh, CP device in your home to enterprise networks, to cellular infrastructure, to base station antennas. Pretty much every time you're connected to the internet, you're using some form of, of CommScope's products and, and solutions to enable that.

And we're organized across five business segments. And I have the pleasure of leading, as you called, the networking intelligence, cellular and security business, which comprises of our new, uh, CommScope century platform security and, and IOT solutions, as well as our cellular business, our ADAS platform, as well as our one cell small cell portfolio. And of course, ruckus Networks, an enterprise networking business, which we're gonna talk a little bit about today.

Love it. I can't wait to hear about it. So Ruckus is, ruckus is something I'm somewhat familiar with.

Sure. And I, you know, I would imagine our audience is too, but for those who maybe aren't familiar when we talk about Ruckus, give us a little ruckus history if you can. You bet.

Ruckus has been, you know, operating, uh, for about 20 years now. And it started with a value proposition around world class wifi and operating wifi in really difficult conditions where you're struggling with capacity constraints, uh, very dynamic environment. And the solution itself has to be adaptive to that environment to maintain really resilient connections.

Uh, over, you know, the last couple of decades we've dramatically expanded the, the portfolio, uh, to include not only wifi, but also switching and a whole suite of services over the top for network management, network intelligence, security, et cetera. So, uh, it's a full fledged enterprise networking business that serves hotels and schools and high density residential environments, and certainly the very challenging outdoor environments like we find with, uh, our relationship through Luna Rosa Prada Perelli. So, and that's a great lead into what we want to talk about today.

I mean, I, I've always thought of Ruckus is kind of rugged wifi, right? Uh, you know, here in our office it's not that rugged. I mean, in all honesty, right?

But, you know, you are, you're doing things where you're in challenging environments, whether they're be because they're outdoors, you know, subject to nature or, or even the inside ament is such that you, you know, it kind of chews up and spits out kinda regular, you know, run of the mill wifi solutions. Ruckus was the, was the choice for those kinda ruggedized environments where you need, you need it. I think the best way to think about it is Ruckus has really made a name for ourselves serving public access networks.

In a private network, you know that an IT organization is controlling. You can make some assumptions about the sophistication of the users. The devices coming into the environment are controlled and you real, and you oftentimes have very regular symmetrical spaces that are somewhat static, but Ruckus serves public access networks where you can't make assumptions about the users and their devices that they're coming into.

And oftentimes, um, you are dealing with a very dynamic environment. The environment itself may be changing in terms of the users and the number of users in a capacity and load on, on the network. The environment itself may be changing, you know, if you're in a factory or, uh, a smart city and you have people and things moving around.

And the trick to that is to have an infrastructure that adapts, uh, to that dynamic environment in a way that the users and the devices on the network don't experience any degradation of reliability or performance. That's what we've built Ruckus for. Got it.

All right. I think we've done enough setting the table as we say. Bart, let, let's dive in here.

So first of all, you know, I think people know Pelli when it comes to racing. They know Prada when it comes to fashion. Of course, lunar rosa is, is part of that.

But I'm not sure if they realized what the lunar Rosa Prada, Pelli team, you know, especially when it comes to, you know, boating and racing and boat racing and so forth. Can you, you know, for all, for some of our audience who just sit behind a keyboard all day, right? And they don't get to experience a lot of this cool stuff, right?

Tell us what, tell us about them. So Lno Rosa is a racing team that is pursuing the 37th America's Cup championship that will be held in Barcelona next year. Um, obviously it's a highly competitive sport.

It is world renowned, and, uh, it's a very sophisticated sport that, you know, goes back many, many decades. But as you might imagine, um, you know, more recently it's not just athletic ability of these teams that matters, but also their technical capability. And so, um, there's a, you know, fairly sophisticated network of, of sensors and equipment onboard these sailing crafts that enable those teams to really, uh, tune their operations and, and excel.

And so, uh, through our partnership with Luna Rosa, we're able to provide the network infrastructure that enables that world class type of connectivity. Excellent. And, you know, look, it, it's, um, I mean, there are some people out here who say, ah, it's, they're just sailing.

But when you're, when you're competitive sailing, like in an America's Cup environment, I mean, it's, it's, it's competitive and it, it's not leisurely necess. It's not leisurely for sure. Now, there are other people in our audience bar who say, what the heck?

Do you need wifi in that environment for? Right? Is it mission critical?

Well, It's absolutely mission critical. So, you know, we, um, have the opportunity to host Gilberto Nobili, who's the operations manager at, at, at lunar Rosa at our partner conference in, in GUE last week. And he spoke about the complexity of their operation, and of course, the competitiveness.

You know, these boats have hundreds of sensors that are streaming telemetry, uh, over the, you know, while on the water. And, you know, these sensors are measuring everything about the boat, everything about the environment. There's even wearables on, on the sailors themselves, right?

And all of that information needs to be streamed live to the support boat. And that support boat can be in sometimes up to two miles away, over open water. So we collect that data locally on the boats, uh, on the sailing craft over wifi, and then it is transmitted over water to a support boat and, uh, then can be uploaded, you know, back at the dock once the, uh, event or, or practice round has completed.

And as you might imagine, this telemetry and the information coming off the boats, uh, is really how these teams optimize, you know, their operation in order to be more competitive. And so it really is critical that you have reliable infrastructure that can work even under these extremely demanding conditions. I mean, you think of a sailing craft kind of undulating across the water, and if you've, if you've watched these races, um, there's a lot of activity and a lot of creativity, um, that that goes on on the boat during a race.

And being able to have real time insight and, and visibility to everything going on from, uh, the wind speed, the weather to the pitch of the craft, um, you know, to the forces on the, the, the sailors themselves is, is absolutely critical. And we're really proud that we can enable a flexible and adaptable, uh, wifi infrastructure, uh, to, uh, to drive all of that. Absolutely.

You know, I'm sure there are people out here who are saying, wow, that's really cool, but I'm not in the America's boat program. I don't even have a boat. What is this?

How does this apply to me? And I'm, I'm kind of reminded, I'm, I'm old, I'm kind of reminded, right in the Apollo missions to the moon, right? NASA had to develop, NASA had to develop so many just brand new technologies Yeah.

For new environments, for challenging environments that though they were developed specifically, you know, for, for the program, found their way into everyday commercial and, you know, requirements and, and became indispensable, and things you don't even realize today that really came outta that program. I would imagine it's the same kind of thing here, right? Things you learn here make their way into, you know, every day ruckus environments.

It's, it's not just for the America's Cup team. Yeah. This is, this is certainly a, a special case, but, um, you know, you can apply the lessons learned here to a classroom environment, right?

Sure. Where you have students bringing lots of different devices into a classroom and sort of digital learning has become the norm today. And if you don't have a reliable and adaptable network, then you know, the, the student outcome, uh, will suffer Similarly, uh, we deploy a lot, uh, of community wifi.

Um, so you imagine wifi out on a, a city street, in fact, um, you know, lower Manhattan has a lot of, uh, ruckus gear in the, uh, lake New York City kiosks that are used to provide connectivity locally to, you know, residents and, and, and patrons on the street. And, you know, if you, you've been in Manhattan before, you realize that's a very harsh dynamic environment with a lot going on. Uh, but you're in New York City, so you have an expectation of a world-class experience.

And so, um, yeah, I think, you know, the lessons that we learn in these really challenging environments are, are fed back into our r and d teams. And, and certainly we're always trying to improve. And, you know, one of the ways that we're, we're always, uh, improving now is to use data science, right?

Um, I think the world is sort of captured at the moment with artificial intelligence, and that is a core and fundamental element to, uh, the solution where, you know, all the data that comes off a network can be tr uh, fed into training and learning algorithms so that the, what we used to go through to optimize a wifi network can now be automated, um, using data science and using elements of, of AI algorithms in order to, um, you know, figure out how to configure a network in a way that is most optimal and then adapt to those changing conditions, whether you're on the water, whether you're in a classroom or out on a city street. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, it's funny, I was actually in New York City this weekend and I, we walked around a ton, mostly downtown. Yeah, that's right. Beckard soho area.

And I was, I was amazed, you know, at the consistency of wifi signal of, of wifi and cell signal there, actually. Yeah. Um, cuz a lot of times I'd look and I see I'm on wifi and I'm like, I didn't even realize, you know, what wifi I, you know, as a security person that freaks me out, right?

Why am I joining wifi at networks without my permission? And then, but a lot of them were from the cellular carriers as well. Sure.

And they were open and they, they, they rocked, right? And so, you know, and when you walk into the canyon, Well, The artificial canyon, right, because it's buildings, it, it's, it's nice to have that kind of connection. It's A common, it's a common, um, deployment model for operators today in a capacity constrained environment like you experience in, in lower Manhattan.

So, um, it's very expensive and, you know, technically and politically challenging sometimes in order to, um, augment your, you know, macro infrastructure to add new cell towers in a, in a place like Manhattan. So what the operators can do now is through relationships with, um, for example, link New York City is offload cellular data traffic onto the wifi network and sort of balance capacity across these two mediums. And that's, that's the experience you had, right?

You didn't really realize it, but through the relationship with your operator, you have a profile on your device. It detects a network that, um, they have a, a, a roaming relationship with relationship, and you can maintain that strong connection even if the cellular capacity is constrained. I, I've been in lower Manhattan with five bars, right?

So I've got a really strong signal I can't transmit traffic because there's just too many people on the network. And so why wifi office is one way to address that, I agree with you. What, what about 5g bart, what is 5G gonna do to this?

So, you know, again, 5g, um, just like the, the evolution of the, the different wifi standards will bring more capacity onto the network and enable, you know, a variety of new use cases. So I think, um, you know, today we think about data streaming and, you know, live video, like we're doing right now over wifi tomorrow, we think about things like augmented reality and virtual reality. And so the thirst and, and hunger for more bandwidth is, is, um, really paramount.

And so cellular and wifi networks all around the world are consistently being upgraded in order to handle these new use cases. Personally, I gotta get $3,600 for this new Apple, uh, goggles to do all that, but I'll worry about it anyway. Hey Bob, we're about outta time.

For people who wanna get more information on Ruckus and maybe, you know, check out and follow along some of the adventures of the Lunar Rosa product, uh, Pelli team, where can they go? com, um, or check out the, the Lunar Rosa product Pelli website. I think we've built a very flexible infrastructure for them.

I think one of the things, you know, um, people take for granted is we also, you know, have to enable them to move around quite frequently, right? Because, uh, their base of operations is in Kaari on the island of Sardinia. But of course, these races happen all over the world, in this case, in, in Barcelona.

So, uh, we built a cloud management infrastructure that allows them to move around freely. And you can learn more information about that on our website or from the Luna Rosa Prada Pelli team. None of those places sound terrible by the way.

Not at all. Hey Bart, thanks for coming on and joining us today. Keep up the great work, keep us posted.

We'll invite you back soon. I really appreciate your time today, Alan, thanks so much. Thank you.

Bart Giordano from CommScope, the people behind Ruckus. Check it out. Uh, we're gonna take a break here on Techstrong tv.

We'll be back in a minute.