How EdgeBeam Wireless Uses ATSC 3.0 for One to Many Data Delivery

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[00:00:26] How many TV towers have you driven past without giving them a second thought? Those familiar structures that were built to send one signal across an entire region. Which could also be exactly what modern networks need when thousands or millions of devices all require the same data.

[00:00:47] Well, today on IT Infrastructure as a Conversation, I'm going to be joined by Conrad Clemson. He's the CEO of EdgeBeam Wireless. And Conrad will explain how the company is using ATSC 3.0 broadcast infrastructure as a one-to-many data delivery layer alongside cellular, fibre and satellite networks.

[00:01:13] So, we will discuss vehicle software updates, live sports, public safety, edge computing, even digital signage. And how a one-gigabyte update sent separately to a thousand-plus screens can create one terabyte of traffic. But broadcast distribution can send that shared payload once across an incredible wide area.

[00:01:37] So, if you do manage network capacity, connected devices or rising data costs, today's conversation might change what you see the next time a TV tower appears beside the highway. Sometimes the newest network idea is already standing there right in front of you. But enough for me. Let me introduce you to Conrad right now.

[00:02:02] So, thank you for joining me on the show today, Conrad. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Sure. So, hey, I'm Conrad Clemson. I'm the CEO of EdgeBeam Wireless. I'm coming to you here from our headquarters in Boston. I've been a Boston guy my entire career. I'm pretty much a startup guy my whole career. This is my sixth venture. It's my fourth, basically, blank sheet of paper ground up.

[00:02:27] And most of that space has been spent in service provider, mobility, media and entertainment. And while almost everything I've done has been pretty small, you know, if you do a small company and you get bought, you end up inside a big company. So, I've had the opportunity to do tours of duty in places like Lucent and Motorola and Cisco. So, a little bit of big company stuff. You know, one of the things that I've found really exciting about EdgeBeam is it's not your classic venture-funded startup.

[00:02:56] EdgeBeam is a joint venture and it's funded by the four largest broadcasters in the U.S. And that's Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray and Scripps. And these broadcasters came together with the idea that there must be something more interesting that they could do with their spectrum and be able to monetize that in some new ways. And I'd known particularly the Sinclair and Nexstar guys from previous lives.

[00:03:23] And we started talking about the idea of, well, how do we use their infrastructure, particularly their next-gen infrastructure, as a wireless data player? And that's the basis of EdgeBeam.

[00:03:34] So, what we're trying to do here at EdgeBeam is to take advantage of all of these broadcast towers that really cover the entire United States of America and go, hey, given all of that infrastructure that's out there, what kind of wireless data services can best align to this infrastructure to create some interesting new businesses and some interesting revenue sources? And that's the journey that we've been on. For me, it's 13 months now. I joined here last June.

[00:04:03] And we really jumped into revenue in the second quarter. So, we're just at that. You know, it's a pretty exciting time. We've got these exciting new products and they're meeting the market for the first time. And we're finding out what works and what doesn't work and what customers like and don't like. So, it's a great journey and it's an exciting time to be a part of EdgeBeam. It's an exciting time, quite frankly, to be just in technology. There's things are always changing. Gosh, they're changing now at least as much as they have for the last 20 years, maybe even more.

[00:04:34] Yeah, it's that pace of change which makes things incredibly exciting. And we need a new mindset for almost every new trend that hits us here. And I think most network architects have traditionally spent their time thinking about fiber, 5G, Wi-Fi and satellites. And one of the things that made you set off my tech spidey sensors was you believe a broadcaster infrastructure has largely been overlooked in modern network design.

[00:05:01] So, tell me more about that and why you think that's beginning to change. Sure, sure. I mean, look, you just said it, right? And I think everybody who's out there in the industry would say that. They'd go, oh, tell me how you get data. And you go, well, it's fiber or coax or this or that. I would be shocked if we asked 10 people how they think they might get internet over the next five years. And any of them would say the broadcast infrastructure. That, I think, is one of the things that makes this so interesting.

[00:05:27] Because if you think about it, like, let's back up 20 years ago. And this is more for the U.S. audience probably than over in the U.K. But, you know, back in the late 90s, a group of people actually only about 10 miles from here got together. They said, you know, maybe we could use the cable infrastructure to deliver broadband and not just cable TV, right? And we could compete with DSL.

[00:05:51] Okay, you fast forward to today and, hey, over half of residential customers get their broadband over cable networks. Boy, why does that have to be any different for us? And, you know, it's interesting because the broadcasters have sort of a, in the U.S., have kind of a unique relationship with both the public at large and the government. And their contract goes something like this. The broadcasters get access to this spectrum.

[00:06:19] And in exchange for that, they agreed to provide the highest quality broadcast for free that includes local news and sports. Well, about 10 years ago, the broadcasters went back to the government. They said, we have a problem. We can't live up to our contract anymore. We're going to need a new spec.

[00:06:38] There are things like high definition and 4K and Dolby Atmos and HD and all these new great things coming for us as an industry to live up to what the government and the public expects for us. We need a new spec. And the government goes, great, write a new spec. Well, these guys were pretty clever about that because they went, you know, as long as we're going to define these new pipes, in addition to defining some video pipes, we should define a data pipe. And they did a nice job of that.

[00:07:06] And so even 10 years ago, the broadcasters came up with this concept of transmitting data just like they transmit video. Now, the catch comes in as you go, that's necessary but not sufficient, right? So we have this pipe kind of hanging up in space that we could put data through. What we've done at EdgeBeam is to finish that out and say, gee, now that there's a data pipe, we can put the other things around it, the control, the signaling, the billing, the delivery mechanisms to now create an end-to-end service.

[00:07:35] And nobody had ever thought of that before. And what's interesting is, you know, as soon as we go out and talk to people, they go, gosh, well, this makes a lot of sense. If you were in the United States, if you were in Boston, for example, if you're driving in on the main highway into the city, you know, about every two or three miles, you see those cell towers sitting along the edge of the road. Well, just as you get to the edge of the city, there are these two hills that have a half a dozen TV towers on it.

[00:08:02] Okay, those six TV towers provide all of the coverage for all of Boston. So what's really cool about that is I look and I go, I don't have to build a network. I don't have to invest in towers. I don't have to hang new things up there. All of that infrastructure sitting out there, all I have to do is turn it on. And that, compared to somebody else, that gives us a huge capital advantage because we're just taking advantage of what's in the ground.

[00:08:28] And then the trick for us is to look and go, well, the thing that's interesting, though, is our transmission is different than what you get on a cell tower. A cell tower gives you a very short range, very high performance point-to-point connection. We look and we go, look, we got a pretty fast big pipe that covers everything. And it's really, really good at taking one thing and getting it to a whole bunch of people.

[00:08:53] And so now what we've tried to do is to look and go, how do we apply that? And how do we use these things that are special about us to really try to seek out examples where you've got a piece of content that you want to get to a lot of places? As it turns out, there are a lot of those, and that creates the big market opportunity for us. And today's networks are incredibly good at one-to-one communications.

[00:09:18] But many emerging use cases involve sending identical data to millions of devices all simultaneously. So where does that traditional Unicast model start to break down, both technically and economically now? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that. And let's talk about a couple of real-world use cases. So if you are a car manufacturer, and let's say you were a value car producer, and you're making cars for $20,000 or $30,000.

[00:09:47] You know, when we've talked to some of those car companies, they look and they go, you know, we need to download a lot of data to our cars. We need to upgrade their software. Maybe even monthly or quarterly, we need to put new high-definition maps on those cars. In a lot of instances today, people are now talking about downloading LLMs and other AI models into those cars.

[00:10:10] And what we've heard from a couple of car companies is, hey, if we use traditional cellular technology to do that, over the life of the car, the communication charges are roughly equivalent to the cost of the car. And that doesn't work for us. You know, let's just imagine there are 100,000 of those cars driving around Boston. Well, if you wanted to deliver that over a cellular network, you'd take that one gig of data and you'd deliver it 100,000 times. That's a lot of data.

[00:10:39] That's very expensive. If you put that on our network, we deliver it once, and it goes to everybody. The savings that you get on that and the flatline expansion that we have, that creates the differentiation and the value to us. So if we then go, well, gee, that's interesting. What are some other examples of that?

[00:10:57] You know, if you think about things like high-value sports, boy, if a million people are watching a World Cup game on their phone or on a connected TV, that's a lot of bandwidth. And that bandwidth tends to go on the last mile of the network. Now, if you think about it, gee, I've always been a networking guy. Well, we're pretty smart about that. And so we know things like we know how to efficiently put fiber out there.

[00:11:22] In some cases, we'll even run multicast protocols in that fiber, or we'll use a CDN to cache data near the edge of the network. And that stuff all works great. And then we get to the last mile, the most expensive part of the network. And we go, oh, game's over. Boom. And now we retransmit that data a million times. We lost all that efficiency that we built into there. What we're doing at Edge Beam was we're going, you know what?

[00:11:51] We're going to carry that efficiency over that last mile of wireless infrastructure and create that same efficiency that we have at the Metro and the core today. So it's really, it's a logical extension. And it goes to another principle. And hopefully there's some techies out there. And we all know this. Engineers by nature, we're lazy. We'll always take the easiest thing that works. Good enough? Good enough. Let's go.

[00:12:16] Now we're at the point where there's so much pressure on the spectrum out there. Because let's be honest. We can't create more last mile spectrum. The spectrum is what the spectrum is. Now we can just decide how we use it. And we're bringing a new level of efficiency that's never been available before. And ATSC3 is often associated with the next generation television. But you're using it as a data distribution platform.

[00:12:43] So tell me more about how broadcast infrastructure can actually function as a one-to-many networking layer and where it fits alongside cellular fiber and satellite networks, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of people don't realize it. But these broadcast networks, these are big internet-scale networks that exist out there today. You've got big fiber pipes that are running out to the last mile.

[00:13:07] Now, when they hit there, they hit a whole bunch of things like packagers and encoders and transcoders. They go into exciters and they get transmitted over a radio network. Gosh, that just described every different sort of network that we have out there, be that Wi-Fi or cellular satellite. Now, the difference is that historically that's all been tuned just to transmit television signals. Well, guess what?

[00:13:36] In this day and age, television signals are ones and zeros, just like every other data transmission. So it's really just a small step forward where we look and we go, instead of sticking a TV signal in there, we're going to stick a data signal in there. And then it's just a small matter of building all the software around it to turn that into an internet protocol. And the good news is we finished that work. Now it's time to go deploy it and roll it out.

[00:14:01] And if we did have those glasses, we'd also be looking at connected vehicles, IoT deployments, public safety systems, digital signage and software updates, all sharing a common challenge, which is distributing that same data at a massive scale. And I'm curious from your vantage point here, which of these are or which of these use cases are creating the greatest pressure on today's networks? And where do you see the strongest demand for alternative delivery models? Yeah.

[00:14:30] Look, so the short answer is all of them. But really now the catch becomes how do you prioritize and how do you go and attack these markets first? And, you know, for us, Neil, what I'll tell you is there's really a two-pronged strategy. Our biggest markets are the B2C markets, right? Going to consumers. If you just think about it for a second, we go, wow, there are a lot of cars out there. Wow, there are a lot of people who are streaming video and streaming high-value sporting events or downloading software to their Xboxes.

[00:15:00] The tricky part is we got to go and get receivers out to all of those places, and that takes time. So while those are really big markets for us, they're markets that we kind of crawl our way into, and they build over time. But as those two markets build, they build to really, really big numbers. Really, really exciting. Not going to pay my employees paychecks for probably the next year or two. So that leads us to these B2B markets, these business-to-business markets.

[00:15:27] And the great thing about going to a business-to-business customer, and that's our digital signage or our public safety or enhanced positioning markets, is go to the customer and you go, hey, you've got a card. Take that card out. Take my EdgeBeam card. Plug that in. Now you're on my network. It's a much lower barrier to entry. So the thing we're finding is we can go and make an enhanced GPS sale in three weeks.

[00:15:53] We can go and do a digital signage deal in a month or two. Those are much more actionable and still very, very big markets. And that lets us get out, prove the technology, and start to show to the world and show those bigger markets, hey, there's something here that matters. And if you look and you go, who does it matter to? Look, it matters to the end customer because what the end customer sees is, quite frankly, a lower communications bill. Right? But you know what?

[00:16:22] It also matters to the people who are providing those networks because what we're doing is we're taking a very congested part of the network and we're scraping off a whole bunch of data that makes use, that makes room in that very crowded last mile of the network for other services that are best served unicast. And now we can go and take all that multicast traffic and deliver more efficiently. So you roll that all back and I go, look, you're going to see us in these business-to-business segments first, but make no mistake about it.

[00:16:52] In the background, we're building up our fixed wireless to access play. We're building up those connected car plays. We're building up the plays into the autonomous vehicles. All of it is really freaking exciting, too. I mean, it's a great time to be out there and be building a company right now, and we're going to take full advantage of that. It really is. And if we look at the network economics for a moment, let's say, for example, an organization needs to distribute a 1 gig update to 1,000 endpoints.

[00:17:21] The traditional model effectively creates a 1 terabyte of network traffic. So how should infrastructure leaders be rethinking the cost, capacity, and scalability implications of the model as endpoint counts are inevitably going to continue to grow? Then we're going to throw AI and AI agents into the mix as well. But what should they be thinking? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, look, network bandwidth is just like computer memory, right? The end user requirement is always about twice what's available.

[00:17:52] And, you know, so when we think about that, we look and we go, look, we're not out to be the next Verizon Wireless or Comcast. We're not going to solve all problems for all people. We live in a very, very specific part of the world. And for us, we think of the network as being very, very tightly tied to the verticals that we're going out and trying to serve. And I think a really good analogy is we're sort of an extension of the CDNs, be that Fastly or Akamai, out across that last layer that's out there.

[00:18:22] So in kind of in consumer or small business networking, that's where we start to think about the fixed wireless access space and how we can make a real difference in those spaces. And what we're really doing is we're going to go and extend that caching efficiency out across that wireless network and bring that advantage of bandwidth savings and economic scale out to those end users.

[00:18:48] And, you know, given the billions of dollars that's being spent on Spectrum now, we look at them and go, look, being able to not make that next purchase of Spectrum, gosh, that's a huge win for everybody who's out and playing in that space. So I think that's a real breakthrough for us. And I suspect many people listening will be investing heavily in edge computing strategies right now. So how do you see the one-to-many data delivery complementing edge architectures?

[00:19:17] And what kind of role could broadcast-based distribution play in reducing latency, congestion and backhaul costs? How do you see that playing out? Yeah, look, congestion and efficiency is a big deal for us. And it's very easy for us to describe the power that our architecture brings. We're going to transmit something that today is being transmitted a million times. We're going to transmit it one time. Now, you know, if you think about the history of the internet, two things have always been true.

[00:19:46] It's a very download-intensive environment. You know, 90-plus percent of internet traffic is down. The other thing is it's been historically very much of a pull-centric environment. I'm going to go pull what I need down into my environment. What we do is now create the opening or the capability for that chunk of traffic to be used for what it was intended.

[00:20:13] Making podcasts or doing video conferencing or FaceTiming with my kids. Well, now what we're going to do is we're going to leverage the power of networking and leverage the power of networking principles to drive efficiency and cache capabilities all the way out to the edge of the network.

[00:20:29] So, as people are thinking about how they're moving these edge caches further and further out in the network, when they start to move that across the wireless network, boy, all of a sudden now the real key is how do I get all that data out to those edge caches and edge computing? And we go, hey, we're the perfect answer for that. Because if you're doing a big edge computing job, in all likelihood you're not doing it in just one location.

[00:20:55] But you're looking and going, hey, I need to push something out to the edge of all of London or the edge of all of Boston. That's a lot of devices that you're going to want to go and hit. And generally speaking, it's the same code and it's probably even a lot of the same data. Gosh, what if you could do that 100 or 1,000 times more efficiently? Nobody is going to say no to that.

[00:21:17] And another interesting example is digital signage because many people think of it as a display problem rather than a network problem. So, how is the economics of content delivery changing for large signage networks? And what do you think or why do you believe connectivity is becoming as important as the screen itself? Because this is something we don't talk about enough, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:42] You know, digital signage has been a market that's really exploded in the last five to seven years. People are recognizing that it's really not cost prohibitive to put a screen out into an environment versus, hey, once a month sending a guy out there to put a new poster up. But now that you look and you go, geez, I actually have a computing platform out that I can put in front of a customer, it becomes very valuable.

[00:22:06] And in fact, if you think about it in a retail environment, as an example, you know, one of the things that was always magic about Google is you could go and you could say to an advertiser, how would you like to advertise to somebody at the magic moment when they're getting ready to make a purchase? And he goes, I want that. And go, great. Google's going to deliver that to you. Okay. Now let's take that out into the real world and go, well, what if you could place an advertisement at somebody who's getting ready to make a purchase? What is that worth to you?

[00:22:35] Or what if you could go to somebody who's, I don't know, standing in line in the DMV and you could show them an ad for a new car? All of a sudden you can get real, real time capabilities and reach those out to customers at that magic moment when they're making a purchase decision or you have them in an environment where maybe if they're not even making a purchase decision, they're thinking about you as the advertiser.

[00:23:01] That's what creates, I think, one of the really interesting opportunities in digital signage. But the question now becomes, well, how do I get the right advertising sitting right on that billboard or kiosk or whatever it is so I can present it at the magic moment? You'd go, well, I'd like to know who's standing in front of my digital sign. Oh, well, your digital sign knows that, right?

[00:23:23] You could imagine, for example, a digital sign sitting in a mall and you can go, hey, I see six guys standing out in front of this digital sign that's in a mall right in front of, I don't know, Ann Taylor. Okay, we can go, oh, well, let's not advertise Ann Taylor. I got six guys standing here. Let's put up a Levi's ad. Being able to collect that context becomes really important. But now all of a sudden you look and you go, hey, what I'd like is I'd like a portfolio of all of those ads already sitting down here.

[00:23:50] And in fact, look, I'm in a mall, so I got 100 signs sitting out here. I'd like that entire portfolio of ads sitting right there. And then I can make a decision at the moment based on local intelligence about what I'm going to do with that. Wow. Guess what? That just became a one-to-many problem. That feeds now right back into the kind of value that EdgeBeam can bring to bear. Now, a Rye guy, look, I used to work at Cisco.

[00:24:17] A Cisco guy would go, oh, the network will take care of all that. We don't care about that. Look, here's the other reality. These are low-margin businesses. So going to somebody and saying, oh, it's no problem. You know what? Send 10 gigs. Send 20 gigs. Send all that data down there. We'll just bill you at the end of the month. Look, all of a sudden the thing that we get to bring to bear in this kind of an environment is we give them certainty of cost. We don't care how much you're spending. We don't care how much data you're sending. We're going to charge you X.

[00:24:46] It's a flat rate, and that's all that's in there. That becomes very powerful. Now, there's one other thing I'll mention in the digital signage front that I think is really interesting, and quite frankly, it's something that we discovered on our way to market. There's a second place where we really strengthen our value proposition, which is it turns out my investors have something other to offer than just the core bandwidth itself. It turns out they're in the local advertising business to begin with.

[00:25:13] They already have highly trained sales forces that, among other things, are very, very successful in selling and positioning local advertising. When you go into the digital marketing, digital signage space, one of the big gaps in that space right now is how do you get good access to local advertising? And that's hard. You know, and in fact, one of our customers happens to run a chain of grocery stores.

[00:25:38] And one of the things they said to us is they said, look, we're really excited to have you guys in here because of who your investors are, because all we could ever get until now was advertising for outdoor patio. And we don't really want to advertise patio furniture in our supermarket. Can you help us bridge that gap? And, you know, it's just another example of how we can come together and bring all of our assets to bear to solve important problems for our customers.

[00:26:02] If I was to give you a virtual crystal ball and look into a future where AI, autonomous systems, connected vehicles, industrial IT and real-time services continue to expand. How do you see the future wireless architecture looking like? And will success come from building more network infrastructure or from building smarter about how we distribute data across infrastructure that we already have? How do you see that evolving? Yeah.

[00:26:31] I mean, I think any of us who lives in technology right now would have to make the observation, gosh, stuff just continues to evolve incredibly quickly. And, you know, one level we can go, oh, AI, it's the next frontier. And I think that's right. But because I look and I go, look, cloud computing didn't stop evolving. Networks didn't stop evolving. Right.

[00:26:55] To me, it's more like a whip, you know, where you look and you go, what's happening at the end point of all this is just continued acceleration. And it's continued acceleration because we keep building more and more of these amazing technologies on top of each other. And the whole is worth way more than the sum of the parts. You know, if I look and I go, so what's going to happen next? Look, it's going to go faster. It's going to go bigger. And as that happens, some things are going to be true.

[00:27:22] Many of the companies who were the stalwarts of yesterday and the stalwarts of today, they're going to fade away. And more and more new people are going to come on the scene. And quite frankly, look, whatever happened to Netscape, right? You know, whatever happened to AOL, right? Like there's so many of these big companies that came and went. And the real key for us as technologists is to always look and going, how do we build on this and how do we drive this forward? The AI generation is going to continue to drive us forward.

[00:27:49] Now, if you look and you go, if we look down inside of AI, right, you go, what's the number one thing it's driving? Look at how many data centers we're building and how much infrastructure we're building, right? And we're doing that because AI is the most data intensive thing that we've ever thought of as a human race. You know, five or seven years ago, we go, oh, there's nothing like oil exploration. It's the most complicated thing in the world. Guess what? AI is way more complicated than that.

[00:28:17] And coming with that comes big data, comes the necessity to be able to both reach out and reach back in. And all of those things drive huge requirements all the way across the network. Now, if I look and I go, gee, what does that mean for a company like EdgeBeam? I'll tell you a couple of things it means. As we build this company, we build everything with the question of, well, what can AI do to make this easier and more efficient for us? You know, most of our code written by AI.

[00:28:45] All of our network operations and network infrastructure all run and operated by AI. Our sales reach out, AI-led. Our marketing campaigns start and nurture through AI. My entire FP&A team, it has a name. Its name is Claude. So all of those things are building across us. And as we look and as we think about how that's going to be driving us forward, as we move down the stacks of the computing environment, look, we're going to build more computers. We're going to build more data centers.

[00:29:14] But the thing I care about is we're going to connect them. And as we connect them, a lot of that's going to be connected through fiber. But an awful lot of that is going to reach its last mile through a wireless network. And we're going to carry a lot of that data, particularly the data that follows the premises of one to many. Well, that's a thought-provoking moment to end on.

[00:29:36] And for anyone listening wanting to carry on and learn more about EdgeBeam Wireless, what you're working on here and how they can work with you or keep up to speed with the big announcements coming out throughout the year. Where would you like me to point everyone listening? Find us at edgebeam.com. Find us on LinkedIn. Hey, if you have any questions, just drop us an email at info at edgebeam wireless.com and keep an eye on us. You know, we'll continue to be out there. We're starting to make some really interesting noise on the marketplace. And stay tuned.

[00:30:05] Everybody out there who's sitting there going, gee, I wonder what I'm going to do next. Check out our careers page because we're hiring too. Awesome. And I suspect many people listening would have previously driven past those TV towers every day without even thinking about them. But I suspect when they drive past them now, they will be thinking about that existing infrastructure, how it was built for something today's network increasingly need. Sending the same information so many places at once is a big story behind those towers there.

[00:30:35] So thank you so much for sharing your story today. Really appreciate you, Tom. Thank you, Neil. Yeah. Enjoyed the time together. I think Conrad has given us a very different way to view wireless capacity. A network doesn't always need another tower, another individual connection. Sometimes it just needs a better method for distributing identical data.

[00:30:58] And when we're talking about vehicles, edge systems, digital designs, AI models and live video all competing for limited last mile capacity, edge beam wireless is betting that ATSC 3.0 broadcast infrastructure can carry shared payloads once across a region and leaving cellular networks to handle personalized and interactive traffic.

[00:31:22] And I also love Conrad's reminder there that as engineers, they're naturally drawn to the easiest option that works. And rising traffic eventually forces us to reconsider what just good enough is actually costing us. But over to you. What data is your network still paying to deliver thousands of times when just once might be enough? TechTalksNetwork.com is where you will find me.

[00:31:50] 4,000 episodes over there and also where you can meet me on the road at tech conferences in the final six months of this year. Hopefully I'll see a few of you out there. Speak to you soon. Bye for now.