TOM RAYNER: Thanks, Nikolai
And good afternoon, everyone.
As Nikolai said, my
name is Tom Rayner.
And I work for a
company called Myriota.
It's a company that specialises
in satellite communications
for small amounts of data from
any location on the planet
at ultra low cost.
And I'm thrilled to be here this
afternoon talking about some
of the observations that
we are making around
emerging internet of
things, or IoT applications
in the agricultural sector.
From the outset,
can I acknowledge
that my identical twin
brother is in the room.
He works for Rural
Bank, Will Rayner.
And he will be presenting
at the dairy session
later on this afternoon.
So I'm going ask a
favour of you all.
If you've got colleagues
or friends who are not
in this session to go
to the dairy session
and subsequently go
to who they think
is Will for a very smart
comment about the dairy industry
tonight, and they get a
bit of a blank expression,
please apologise on
my behalf because I've
got nothing to add about the
dairy industry whatsoever.
Look, I've got
about 15 minutes so
we'll quickly talk
about what IoT is
and what we identify as the
internet of things at Myriota.
And that neatly
runs into who we are
and the technology
that we have developed.
And then I'm going to run
through a very simple IoT case
study around a connected
water tank monitor that's
out there at the moment.
And then finish with
some observations
around some of the
IoT applications
that we see coming up
and being deployed now
in Australian agriculture.
So what is IoT.
IoT is a buzzword that stands
for the Internet of Things.
What does that mean?
Well, you can go online and
get all sorts of definitions
for the Internet of Things.
But essentially, it's
just connecting things,
whether it's connecting to the
internet or to one another.
It could be anything from a
car to a water tank monitor
to a watch.
This is my Fitbit, or my Fatbit
as my wife kindly refers to it.
And I'm not going to
be here telling you
what the ideal definition
of IoT is other
than to say that there's
one common thread--
and it's particularly
important when
you talk about Australian
agriculture-- is that they all
rely on connectivity.
So obviously, Internet of
Things without connectivity
just becomes things.
And we've been
there for decades.
And of course, in
Australian agriculture
that can be a bit of a
problem, because we've
got some clients who
are in places like this.
And IoT connectivity,
particularly
when you're talking about
small amounts of data that
has to be at really low
cost to make it viable
can be a bit of a challenge.
We've talked about
the lack of coverage.
About 70% of
Australia's land mass
does not have any 3G
coverage whatsoever.
And that takes up
a huge proportion
of Australia's
agricultural land.
And of course, you
can get connectivity
out there using
existing satellite
services or some sort of
terrestrial infrastructure,
but it's expensive.
And it often negates the
benefit that you can get
from connecting IoT devices.
And often, the
transmitters themselves
have to be quite complex
and heavy and expensive
and have large
power consumption.
And then you've got the whole
issue around scalability.
I'm sure many of you
have seen the literature,
but we're talking about
hundreds of millions,
if not billions of individual
connected devices out there.
And you need communications
infrastructure
that can handle those huge
numbers of connections.
So that leads nicely when
we understand the remote IoT
connectivity challenge
into our company Myriota.
So what do we do?
Well, in a nutshell, Myriota
has solved the remote IoT
connectivity problem.
So we were formed in late
2015 to commercialise
technology developed at the
University of South Australia.
There was a $12 million research
programme looking into this
exact problem-- how to get
small amounts of data back using
these new class of nano
satellites as cheaply
as possible, while maintaining
the attributes of being low
cost, being very small,
low power, and importantly,
enabling the huge populations
of individual connections to be
out there.
And so how have we done it?
So that is a picture of one
of our satellite transmitters.
I've got one here in my hand.
It's a 22 millimetre by
30 millimetre little bit
of electronics,
all off the shelf
electronics, that anyone can
integrate into their device
no matter what it would be.
So instead of say integrating
a Sim card and a data plan
into your device, you can take
one of these and a data plan
to your device and
get connectivity
anywhere on the planet.
These little guys send
small packets of data.
So we're talking 24
bytes worth of payload
per individual message.
So think of it like a short
message service, SMS service,
at ultra-low power
to a constellation
of low Earth orbit satellites.
Now, people get excited
about the satellites.
This is a video of
the three satellites
that we have access
to now through one
of our shareholders, a
company called Exact Earth.
There are three that
we have access to.
The movie's not working
very well there,
but they're actually
in polar orbit.
So they're actually
going over the North Pole
and under the South Pole
and orbiting the earth
about every 90 minutes.
And then underneath
that, the earth
is rotating underneath
those orbital planes.
So we actually get
global spatial coverage,
not real-time coverage,
but global special coverage
with just one satellite.
So these things are moving about
seven 1/2 kilometres a second.
And you can see the next
generation satellite
that we'll be launching
in the next few months.
That's a 3U cube set, so three
ten centimetre box cube sets.
And we'll be putting that
up in the next few months.
So very small.
They're dedicated space craft
in an altitude of between about
500 and 800 kilometres.
So we've got these
little guys that
send a small amount of data
to one of those satellites.
That's all very clever
and all very good.
But it's actually not
the very hard bit.
So this is all off
the shelf electronics.
You can get anyone to do this.
Even the satellites
these days are
pretty much off the shelf
satellite buses, off the shelf
power management systems, and
off the shelf software defined
radio systems.
The real challenge is that
when one of our satellites
is over Alice
Springs, our satellite
can see all of Australia.
Now, if you've got
hundreds of millions
of these things talking
to the satellite at once,
it becomes a very complicated
communications challenge.
I'm sure everyone here has
been to the MCG or Adelaide
Oval or something and been
at a footy game at half time
and decided to
ring up your friend
and give them a score update.
And the mobile system goes
down because everyone's
trying to make a phone
call at the same time.
Fundamentally, that is exactly
the same communications problem
that we have solved, but
not for mobile phones,
but for millions of
IoT transmissions
direct to satellite.
So the satellites send the
message back down to Earth.
We decode the message with some
advanced receiver software,
which hosts most of the IP.
And we send the decoded
message back to the end user,
whoever the end user may be.
And that gives you a
solution, which is global.
So we can provide IoT
connectivity anywhere
on the planet.
It's ultra low cost, so we're
talking about this device
being about $100 now, $50 very
soon by the end of the year
or so.
And most ongoing data
subscription costs
will be about $5 a month
or less and much less
in some large deployments.
We can support
hundreds of millions
of individual connections
reporting directly
to the satellite.
And a big important distinction
is it is direct to satellite.
So this guy doesn't have
to talk to a repeater
or another antennae or a
base station or an amplifier.
If you connect a water
tank, the water tank
is connected directly
to the satellite.
And we have a battery
life for these things
that we are measuring in years.
So the example that I'll
give a bit later on,
we've got four off the
shelf AA batteries,
and we're expecting north
of two years' battery life.
You pull that all together,
and you've got a satellite IoT
connectivity platform.
So to give you an example about
how this technology is being
used in a real world example--
because it's all sexy talking
about satellites and the like,
but all we are doing is
getting a little bit of data
from one location to the next--
is to talk about a water
tank monitoring trial
that we've done.
Now, we could have used all
sorts of use cases to show you
what we've been doing in
utilities, defence, maritime,
obviously in
agriculture as well.
So we'll concentrate on a
water tank monitoring trial,
and a big shout out to the
CRC for Spatial Innovation,
the Australian Livestock
Spatial Innovation
Programme and the University
of New England among others who
have helped us with this trial.
But it was a very
simple application,
a very successful
application around how
this technology is opening up
IoT in Australian agriculture.
So what we did was we took one
of these little guys that's
being held by our co-founder
and CEO Dr. Alex Grant,
and we put it in
an off the shelf
enclosure with an off the
shelf antenna, off the shelf
pressure transducer.
And that is all you need
to connect your water tank,
no matter where you
are in the world.
This one is one
that's being mounted
on a water tank in [? Amado. ?]
Very simple installation
exercise.
If you can use zip
ties and pliers,
then you can install them.
And then we created a very
simple user interface.
In this case, it's
a phone app so
that a farmer even
with their dumb farms
can actually look at the screen.
If it's orange, go
and have a look.
If it's red, get out
of there quickly.
You know, very,
very simple stuff.
But a beautiful
application about where
a small amount of data, if it's
provided at the right cost,
can be very, very valuable.
Because, obviously, when we're
deploying these things out
in outback Australia, the
alternative to having this data
is that someone has to manually
drive out there and check it.
And some of these organisations,
I'm sure there are many
in the room here today,
spend hundreds of thousands
of dollars on that very,
very boring menial tasks just
to make sure that their
cattle have got some water.
So the only problem
with this trial
is that the trial has
finished, and I'm now
ringing those farmers
wanting my devices back.
And they're saying, go away.
You're not getting it.
So it's a good problem to have.
So we've had a look at
a very simple use case.
You get an idea of the flavour
of the types of things that we
can do.
Now, I thought it
would be appropriate
that I give you some
of our observations
around the types of
applications that are coming up
in Australian agriculture.
And these are just
our observations.
There's nothing too
academic about this, other
than to say that remote
connectivity is obviously
one of the barriers to entry to
IoT applications in the bush.
And so we're getting
a lot of interest
for people coming our way.
And in the main, we see the
emerging IoT applications
fall in two distinct
buckets, if you will.
First is there are quite
application specific examples
of what we can do.
And there are more complex,
sophisticated enterprise
wide IoT solutions that
are being sought after.
So the application specific
things that I'm talking about
are as simple as a rain gauge.
So a farmer can have a
connected rain gauge.
So without having to
drive out to the far edges
of the property or
their other property,
they can see how much
rain there has been.
Same thing with
weather stations.
Same thing with soil
moisture probes.
We've talked about
tank monitors.
And we talked about flow metres.
And one of the
interesting things
is that we're seeing
some of our clients,
who will be the
OEMs, the people that
take our connectivity
solution and put it
into their solutions, is having
a tank monitor linked to a flow
metre.
So yes, it's all
very good and well
to say that there's
a full tank of water,
but is the water getting out
of the tank and into my trough?
You link it to a flow metre.
You say, yes, the tank is full.
And yes, there's 150 lactating
cows in that water point.
And they're drinking
about 200 litres a day.
Everything is OK.
Asset trackers for all
sorts of different assets.
Water metres, aquifer monitors,
and I think eventually
ear tags.
So we're not that far away from
getting this system on a chip.
And we're talking
about getting very
close to having a discrete
satellite connected
ear tag where they
don't have to be
within range of any other
type of application.
So they're all application
specific, quite
discreet examples.
To Peter's comments
earlier today, I
mean we see the
adoption of this being
quite rapid because
this is not just
the Internet of Things or IoT.
We call these IoPT.
This is Internet of
Profitable Things.
Farmers make money
out of this as soon
as they put it on there.
And it's very easy to articulate
the benefit of doing so.
The other side of the
things that we see
are these enterprise
wide solutions.
And these are a
bit more complex.
To give you an example,
we had a winery
come to us the other day.
And they came to us
because they identified
that low cost comms were
stopping their IoT rollout.
But they wanted to monitor a
grape bin from the vineyard
to work out what grapes
were going into the bin.
Then to track it on the
truck, and let the winery
know when the truck
was going to be there.
Then once the bin
got to the winery,
track it within the
winery to make sure
that the Shiraz was getting
crushed in the Shiraz bin.
Then link the
quality of the fruit
back to the individual vineyard
so that the farm manager
could make some management
decisions about next year's
fertiliser applications,
et cetera, et cetera.
I said, mate, we just
deal with satellites.
That's very complicated.
But you can see that there
is value in doing that,
but you're talking about a whole
range of different sensors,
a whole range of different
connectivity platforms,
a whole range of software that
needs to be interoperable,
et cetera, et cetera.
It will be coming.
And I'm sure that there
will be people that
come up with those solutions.
But they're a far more
complex proposition.
Same thing with
software as a service
file management
platforms, like Agworld.
They want to instal
various different sensors
around the place to make
sure that they are all
interoperable to get some
decent data out of it.
Logistics.
A lot of feedlots of looking
for updates about the feedstocks
that they've got
in their feedlots.
Paddock to plate
tracking, obviously.
And multi-site supply
forecasting, particularly
the large corporate
farmers who want
to get an understanding
of their likely
off-take out into the
future and making sure
that they understand
that they can meet
their future customers' needs.
And again, ear tags.
So there's some really
interesting stuff that's
been doing in that space.
And we look forward to hopefully
our connectivity solution
being on use on a few of them.
So look, in summary,
we think there's
a really exciting path
forward for IoT applications
in Australian ag coming forward.
We are lucky to
be involved in it
because we think we solve
a fairly unique problem
in this space.
And we're not a ag
tech company, per se,
but a lot of our
clients will be.
And they'll be installing
our stuff into their stuff.
Thanks for the opportunity
to present today.
And obviously,
looking forward to any
questions that you might have.
[APPLAUSE]
