3075: NetLync's EaaS and the Shift to eSIM-Only Phones

[00:00:04] Are you curious about how telecom operators around the world are rapidly transforming to meet the demands of new technologies like eSIMs and RCS messaging?

[00:00:15] Or have you ever wondered what goes on behind that network that provides you if that service that you take for granted?

[00:00:22] But it's something that we all do. We just expect that constant connection to the internet from our phone wherever we are.

[00:00:28] Well, today I'm going to be joined by the CEO of NetLink. We're going to dive into the innovative world of entitlements as a service.

[00:00:38] Might not mean anything to you, but believe me, you will be impacted by it and probably use it.

[00:00:43] So NetLink has pioneered a service that drastically shortens deployment times for operators from several months to just a few weeks.

[00:00:52] This is something that blew my mind and one of the reasons I was excited to get him on the podcast today.

[00:00:57] And I want to learn more about that and also how they are democratizing access to advanced mobile service technologies.

[00:01:04] My guests will discuss how their work with leading industries such as Apple, Google and Samsung has culminated in a revolutionary approach that not only enhances customer experience,

[00:01:16] but also sets the stage for future technological integrations across various device categories.

[00:01:23] So I'm going to invite you to join me today as we uncover the critical role of entitlements in today's telecom landscape,

[00:01:30] what this means for our future of connectivity.

[00:01:34] But enough from me. Let's get my guest on now.

[00:01:37] So a massive warm welcome to the show.

[00:01:40] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:44] Yeah, thanks, Neil. Who I am is Amir Abelhosen. I am CEO for NetLink.

[00:01:49] I have an interesting history, but I think it's getting to be a bit long history in the telecom business.

[00:01:55] I am known to do, people call me a serial entrepreneur.

[00:01:59] I own my fourth startup now, something I really enjoy.

[00:02:02] And I've had really great experiences with the ones I've had in the past as well.

[00:02:06] I am a highly passionate individual about the telecom industry and work with carriers and the device manufacturers around the world to solve particular challenges,

[00:02:15] especially the next wave of challenges that are coming forward right now.

[00:02:18] And you have had a fantastic career in tech.

[00:02:22] And I suspect you've seen so many big changes along the way.

[00:02:25] And one of the things I was excited about getting you on here today was to discuss or demystify entitlements as a service,

[00:02:33] which is an exciting innovation that seems to be transforming the telecom industry right now.

[00:02:39] And I suspect that you've seen this evolve.

[00:02:41] So can you tell me a little bit more about the journey that led to its creation and also how it might differ from the traditional entitlement solutions?

[00:02:50] Yeah. So it's entitlements technology has been around for north of a decade so far.

[00:02:57] And was it basically a technology and a service designed by Apple, particularly around device authentication.

[00:03:03] Its primary role at the beginning was to quickly authenticate or create and create a persistent level of authentication for iOS users,

[00:03:13] particularly when they're using FaceTime and iMessage.

[00:03:15] The very few pieces in the network that captures the status of a device between the OEM, the user and the carrier themselves.

[00:03:23] So it's kind of holding onto that status in terms of improving who it is or ensuring that the user is who they are. Right.

[00:03:30] So for example, when your device is registered for the first time, anytime it goes into roaming, airplane mode, reboots, updates, anything along that basis.

[00:03:42] What will happen is the will send out a notice to the carrier and it will say, OK, prove to me this is the OEM.

[00:03:50] And the way it does it, it basically does a phone number lookup. So it will send a request to the carrier to validate that this is an actual phone number.

[00:03:57] And then it will also show that it's registered on the carrier network and then it will send a message back saying, yes, this is a legitimate number.

[00:04:07] And it's communicating effectively with the home network as well, too.

[00:04:09] So once that's established, then it goes back in and it says, OK, now you're authenticated and your iMessages when you're communicating with somebody else will be blue.

[00:04:18] Any other iCloud based services will be authenticated as well, too.

[00:04:22] That was its primary use case. That's what started over a decade ago.

[00:04:26] And then from there, once they had this really elegant protocol for authenticating devices, they started to use it for permissions.

[00:04:34] So voiceover Wi-Fi, voiceover LTE, is the device allowed to use this? Does it have permission to do it?

[00:04:40] And it would basically check in with the carrier and authenticate that.

[00:04:43] And then it was used for Apple Watch, right? It became a requirement for Apple Watch when you're putting companion devices.

[00:04:49] Again, you're authenticating the devices, making sure that they're both who they are and you're pairing them together.

[00:04:54] Same thing with the iPad. Now it's gone a little bit further as well, too, because where it's going now is it's being used for eSIM transfer.

[00:05:03] So it is a really great feature inside iOS that, you know, one of the best things they ever did was you could put the two devices next to each other when you're buying a new one and it moves all your settings and everything over.

[00:05:13] Well, now it'll actually convert your physical SIM into an eSIM or if you have an eSIM, it will just simply transfer it over for you.

[00:05:21] And that's done through device entitlements.

[00:05:22] And then lastly, the latest one is RCS, rich communication services.

[00:05:26] So we know that this is kind of a big deal between Apple and Google in terms of allowing people to send messages and files over what would have been their native messaging services without degradation in the video and audio quality of the files that are coming through.

[00:05:42] And also with receipts and group messaging and everything else with it.

[00:05:46] So now that's operational.

[00:05:47] Entitlements is a requirement by the carrier that they have to have device entitlements in order to enable that functionality with their Android users.

[00:05:54] The iOS users can now communicate seamlessly over their native messaging apps.

[00:05:58] Some things I can speculate on, but it has a fairly rich future ahead of it.

[00:06:02] And it's becoming essentially a critical requirement.

[00:06:04] I talk about iOS, but Android many years ago brought to the industry a protocol called the TS43, which was done through the GSMA to standardize it as entitlement standards.

[00:06:15] They run their own separate setup on it.

[00:06:18] So iOS has its own proprietary approach.

[00:06:21] Android has its approach.

[00:06:22] They're very similar to each other.

[00:06:23] We handle both of them.

[00:06:24] The technology was quite successful that Google quickly adopted it for Android technologies and has embraced it on the same scale as Apple as well, too.

[00:06:33] Fantastic.

[00:06:33] And you've worked with so many industry giants, everyone from Apple to Google and Samsung, to develop this service.

[00:06:41] So I'm curious, what role did these collaborations play in shaping entitlements as a service?

[00:06:46] And how do they continue to influence its evolution?

[00:06:50] Because I would imagine there's so many great conversations going here.

[00:06:52] But what are you seeing here?

[00:06:54] That's a really good question.

[00:06:55] So there was one thing that we were very fortunate with.

[00:06:58] And one thing that I've learned in my experience in building companies is that you're there to solve a problem, right?

[00:07:03] There's a few times where somebody comes up with an incredible idea, brings it to market, and people didn't realize they needed it, and it becomes widely successful.

[00:07:11] But most of the time, your ability to succeed is what problem are you solving?

[00:07:15] Who are you solving a problem?

[00:07:16] And what's the urgency behind it, right?

[00:07:17] Which helps with the timing and making money from it.

[00:07:20] So that being said, when I was looking at, I finished my last startup, it had gone through an exit, and I worked with IDEMI over three years as part of the acquisition.

[00:07:30] When I was looking to get back into it again, obviously, the relationships with the device manufacturers of the OEMs was there.

[00:07:36] And one of the things that was very clear is that besides the fact that they had been promoting E-SIM for a while, there was a move towards digitalization for the carrier experience.

[00:07:45] And that's happening on two fronts.

[00:07:48] So a lot of carriers, well, one of the things they do is they try to, okay, we're going to make our website signup process better and try to make it self-serve.

[00:07:55] It's still challenging, and there's still quite a bit of work to do.

[00:07:58] The second part is they build an app.

[00:07:59] It's not much more the extension of a website in terms of making that work.

[00:08:03] But what's happened is that the device manufacturers themselves have built these experiences themselves directly into their operating systems to make device migration, device setup, device registration, all of this stuff much more elegant.

[00:08:16] They really are, I would say, hyper-passionate about delivering the best customer experience because that's what they're realizing is one of the sticking points towards keeping somebody inside their ecosystem, right?

[00:08:27] Is the elegance of how that device came out of the box when you powered it on, how you set it up, everything else behind it.

[00:08:34] And so they've built these features in there that takes a lot of the heavy lifting away from the carriers, particularly with new device setup.

[00:08:42] So in that case, the problem is that they need certain technologies to be widely adopted, right?

[00:08:47] So for example, we've been talking about 5G for, I mean, I think a decade now, and it's still not available all over the world.

[00:08:54] But there are very much experiences tied around a carrier having 5G and how that affects iOS or Android devices going forward.

[00:09:03] So one of the things we were able to do as a group is that we were working with device manufacturers.

[00:09:08] We know they wanted 100% adoption of entitlements around the world.

[00:09:12] And the problem is that the penetration of it was still quite low in terms of how many carriers were using it.

[00:09:19] Now, every major carrier in the world does use it.

[00:09:22] I would say you would classify as a tier one and a good number of tier twos.

[00:09:26] So carriers with north of 10 million customers, some of them north of 5 million, will have adopted entitlements as well too.

[00:09:34] Now, they have been using this technology and it hasn't drastically changed in 10 years, which was part of the problem.

[00:09:40] The original version was literally called an entitlement server.

[00:09:43] It would sit, you'd build the box, you'd put it inside the carrier's data center, you'd wire it up and away it goes.

[00:09:48] When I was at Idemia, we deployed entitlements in the cloud, which was great.

[00:09:52] But all it did was just basically move the location of that box into AWS or Azure or anybody else that provides cloud services.

[00:10:00] But the problem is that the heavy lifting was still around the integration.

[00:10:04] The commercial model was still a barrier and particularly the maintenance of it as well.

[00:10:10] Because I mentioned earlier, they've got all these use cases that the OEMs are putting behind it.

[00:10:14] I know, for example, like Android is working on a satellite.

[00:10:17] It has a satellite use case that they're looking to add in there as well to add support for Leo's satellite-based services as well for your Android devices.

[00:10:24] And there's many more that are going to keep coming.

[00:10:27] So we were very fortunate that we were able to identify the problem for the OEMs.

[00:10:31] Then we were able to start with a blank piece of paper and build something completely from scratch.

[00:10:36] To say, okay, if you could build entitlements with a completely blank piece of paper, how would you do it?

[00:10:42] And so we looked at it and said, okay, what's the biggest problem behind it?

[00:10:45] Number one is deployment.

[00:10:47] Number two is maintenance.

[00:10:48] And number three is cost model.

[00:10:50] And along the way, that's the beauty of, again, when you get to start with a blank piece of paper, you have no legacy, is we could take a completely fresh approach.

[00:10:59] We started looking at things like Stripe.

[00:11:00] We started looking at things like Twilio, Atlassian.

[00:11:02] And the list goes on and on, all these developer-centric services that allows you to self-onboard yourself.

[00:11:08] We knew that technically, in my experience especially, that when I would go out and sell something to a carrier, nine times out of ten, they actually had the internal talent there.

[00:11:18] The problem is it was either resourcing or cost or timing, right?

[00:11:22] And so if you could put the onboarding back into the hands of the carrier and build something that's for developers by developers, so meaning that everything is nice and clean, perfect documentation, APIs are easy to understand, it's got all the test benches built inside of it going forward.

[00:11:39] And they'd love to get their hands on this kind of stuff.

[00:11:41] Then you could probably solve the adoption issue.

[00:11:43] And so far, I think our approach has shown that it's actually doing that today.

[00:11:48] So from there, we had to work with them very closely to look at, okay, what are the problems we're solving for you?

[00:11:54] And what are the problems we're solving for the carriers?

[00:11:56] And our job is to become that service in the middle of it that addresses the problems for both parties.

[00:12:03] And yeah, we're really quite happy with the first results of it so far.

[00:12:06] And we're even more excited about what's coming down the pipeline.

[00:12:09] One of the things that put Netlink's solution on my radar was when I was reading about how it can dramatically shorten the time it takes for operators to deploy mobile services, bringing it down to something like three to four weeks.

[00:12:21] So can you tell me a little bit more about some of the technological advancements behind that quick turnaround and why this is a game changer for operators around the world?

[00:12:29] Yeah.

[00:12:30] And that was the first thing, by the way, that when we were starting to put this thing out there, people said that's not possible because a normal and timeless deployment took anywhere from six to 12 months, sometimes even longer going forward.

[00:12:40] But it wasn't the actual development work that was the bottleneck.

[00:12:43] It was the fact that you're using an external party.

[00:12:46] It's the planning.

[00:12:46] It's putting together the teams.

[00:12:48] It's the contracting.

[00:12:49] It's everything else in the middle.

[00:12:51] To get these things up and running.

[00:12:53] So we really just wanted to make it completely accessible.

[00:12:57] And part of that too, by the way, is that the commercial process had to be designed inside of the product as well.

[00:13:02] So it wasn't an afterthought.

[00:13:04] So when we went out to the market and we said you could do it that fast, the first reaction was, yeah, that's not possible.

[00:13:09] We've never seen that before.

[00:13:10] We've never heard of that before.

[00:13:11] But then when we would show that we walk the technical teams or the carrier walking through it, it's like, oh, wait a minute.

[00:13:16] This is not very difficult.

[00:13:18] This is actually quite easy.

[00:13:19] Why?

[00:13:20] Because we put ourselves in their position and they're in their shoes and said, okay, what would it take to get to three to four weeks?

[00:13:25] We actually had that number in mind when we were building this thing.

[00:13:28] So the reason it's a particular game changer is that there's three things that it accomplishes.

[00:13:33] Number one is that it allows you to utilize your internal resources inside of an organization to do the deployment.

[00:13:39] It is really quite straightforward to do it.

[00:13:42] We've added a new component called a diameter security gateway, which makes the integration even easier.

[00:13:48] Believe it or not, it's actually reduced by 50%.

[00:13:50] We can talk about that a little bit later.

[00:13:52] And then the third part is the commercial model had to be completely clean and simple in every single way.

[00:13:58] Meaning that it's what you see is what you get.

[00:14:00] There's no surprises in the middle of it going forward.

[00:14:02] So we had to give them confidence to jump into this.

[00:14:05] And then from there, when you do the key pieces, it's almost like what I like to say to the teams is paint by numbers.

[00:14:10] Right?

[00:14:11] We really tried to simplify and we continue to simplify it as much as we can.

[00:14:14] But for the developer, that's kind of the process.

[00:14:17] We lead you through, okay, step one, step two, here's what you need to do.

[00:14:20] Here's what you need to organize.

[00:14:22] And then from there, once you understand exactly what you're doing, what you're working with, it does become quite straightforward.

[00:14:29] I mean, the technology itself and the integration, and we're not reusing anything new.

[00:14:33] There is no revolutionary infrastructure that we're accessing within the carrier.

[00:14:37] The carrier has to have these particular components.

[00:14:39] What it does do, though, is it does take what has normally been outsourced and been a bit of a mystery and demystified it and simplified it and made it even enjoyable to work on for a developer because it's something that is quite straightforward and has a nice, clean result at the end of it when you get these services up and running.

[00:14:58] And entitlements as a service is set to future-proof use cases and also streamline onboarding without requiring third party or OEM partner agreements.

[00:15:08] So I'm curious.

[00:15:09] Yeah.

[00:15:10] How does that approach empower maybe smaller operators and allow them to compete with some of these larger telecom providers?

[00:15:17] Well, I said earlier, I mean, part of the goal with the device manufacturers was to build a service that they would have a partner which would help them get to 100% deployment of entitlements around the world.

[00:15:26] And when we said 100% deployment, we're not talking about large carriers or particular classic carriers.

[00:15:30] We're talking about every carrier because what they don't want, the device manufacturers, they don't want a really great experience in the United States and they want a mediocre to poor experience in Nigeria, for example.

[00:15:46] They want all the customers around the world to have the exact same experience and the exact same tools.

[00:15:51] So when you're building this service, you're building it in mind for the smallest operator all the way to the very largest operator.

[00:15:59] But we had a particular focus on the tier two, tier three because this was a market that had no access to the service.

[00:16:05] So two things happened.

[00:16:08] Apple supported us and built the ability to create what we call universal entitlements.

[00:16:12] So for the first time, a small carrier can actually use entitlements technology without having an agreement with the device manufacturer.

[00:16:20] And there's particular commercial and technical considerations that allows them to use entitlements in the past.

[00:16:27] Now they've opened it up to essentially everybody to have the same experience.

[00:16:31] That was number one.

[00:16:32] Number two is, okay, how do you make it accessible for every type of operator, right?

[00:16:36] I mean, the resources in BTE or Vodafone or Orange is completely different than some small rural carrier in the United States or a small operator in the Caribbean, for example, or somewhere in Africa.

[00:16:50] So we had to take all of those into consideration in terms of, okay, how do we level the playing field?

[00:16:55] Because the deployment process is identical.

[00:16:57] And we were successful because I can tell you right now, my smallest customer has 500 subscribers.

[00:17:03] They're in a real remote rural area of the United States and they've got 500 subscribers and they've got access to the same services that T-Mobile or Verizon or AT&T do from a device entitlements or device experience standpoint for iOS.

[00:17:18] And we also have very large customers, well north of 10 million that are also using the service as well.

[00:17:24] And they're accessing it in the exact same manner as well, because ultimately entitlements has a very particular function and a set of features.

[00:17:32] And it's really about the onboarding and the accessibility of it.

[00:17:36] So this is the thing that we had a theory or a theorem that we approached and we were able to prove it from that level.

[00:17:43] And we have it with actual customers that are on board.

[00:17:46] But now when you have to have new features that come out with entitlements, well, the traditional process is you have to go to the device OEM or they give you a notification.

[00:17:53] They send you the documentation.

[00:17:55] You've got to digest the documentation and figure out how you're going to deploy this stuff.

[00:17:59] With us, you log in the portal.

[00:18:01] The new use case is there.

[00:18:02] You click on the box, access the APIs, access the documents, and away you go.

[00:18:06] It's designed to be, again, a very seamless experience.

[00:18:10] But it also saves effort for the OEM in terms of distributing that information and making sure that they're all up to date and up to speed.

[00:18:17] Wow.

[00:18:17] I love the contrast there at both ends of the scale.

[00:18:20] And with the anticipated global shift to only smartphones in the next few years, I'm curious, how is Netlink preparing operators to transition smoothly to that new technology?

[00:18:31] Are there any challenges you see there and how are you helping address them at Netlink?

[00:18:36] So, yeah.

[00:18:37] So, that was part of the motivation for the device manufacturers.

[00:18:41] As we know that the U.S. is eSIM only for iPhone.

[00:18:44] We know that there is more and more eSIM only devices that are out there.

[00:18:47] You can only predict that model is going to simply expand into more and more markets.

[00:18:51] But we also know that the eSIM adoption, even for devices that are running eSIM and physical SIM, a lot of carriers are taking customers down the route of eSIM as well.

[00:19:01] And we've seen the impact of it in the travel roaming industry as well, which has made accessing services around the world incredibly easy.

[00:19:07] The idea there was making sure that every carrier in the world can access device entitlements, particularly with any type of region, any type of class of carrier, including NVNOs as well.

[00:19:19] And I was talking earlier about making sure that the device experience is the same anywhere in the world, what the OEMs are after.

[00:19:25] But entitlements opens up quite a few things in terms of how that eSIM experience is going to look.

[00:19:31] First and foremost, the download and setup of an eSIM device.

[00:19:36] Entitlements actually has functionalities in there that makes that completely seamless and easy to manage.

[00:19:40] The second one is device transfer.

[00:19:42] So if the customer already has an eSIM or has a physical SIM and they're migrating into, for example, an eSIM-only device in the US or potentially somewhere else in the world in the future, they don't even have to call the carrier anymore.

[00:19:54] They don't have to go to the local store and get a physical SIM card.

[00:19:57] They don't have to put one on order.

[00:19:58] They don't have to go to a website to register.

[00:20:01] Everything is handled directly in the device setup experience.

[00:20:04] And all of a sudden you've got connectivity with not only when your device moves all the files and all the photos and all the apps over, but also moves over the instructions for connectivity, right?

[00:20:14] Via the eSIM as well too, or converts it into an eSIM as well.

[00:20:17] And then you look at other devices that are coming down that are already out there.

[00:20:22] Apple Watch, you've got iPad, you've got additional Android devices as well too.

[00:20:26] All of these things are now going to be able to interact and set up much quicker when you have device entitlements versus not having it.

[00:20:34] In fact, like I mentioned earlier, if you want to have Apple Watch, currently today, it is carrier partners for the OEMs.

[00:20:41] And there's quite a big number of them.

[00:20:43] But the fact now that they can make entitlements so affordable and so easy to access, they can bring Apple Watch devices to their users much faster.

[00:20:53] Same thing applies with Android, I think called Android Wear devices, right?

[00:20:59] So the same thing applies with them as well.

[00:21:01] So all of these interactions, all of these relationships with these devices and the device management and the device setup all becomes completely seamless when you have entitlements.

[00:21:12] Now, just let me finish.

[00:21:13] When you have all of those pieces all working together completely elegantly and the carrier and the OEM has managed to take that heavy lifting or that intelligence that you have to build on your network in the past and move it into device entitlements, which makes it completely automatic and seamless.

[00:21:28] All of a sudden, your customer care calls go down, right?

[00:21:32] Your customer complaints go down significantly.

[00:21:35] And also, your customer retention goes up.

[00:21:38] Why?

[00:21:38] Because when they're moving to new devices, everything is so seamless and so elegant, they're not frustrated by the process where they may think of switching to another carrier.

[00:21:46] And now it becomes a customer service tool in the same process as well.

[00:21:50] Now, if you build all these digital services in the background, this is great, but you're not going to get all the way until you have entitlements in place to kind of complete that journey with what the OEMs have designed inside the operating system, because that's where the customer interacts 99% of the time.

[00:22:06] And I would imagine that customer experience is also another huge focus for telecom operators now, especially with the growing complexity of so many different devices.

[00:22:16] So how do you see entitlements as a service enhancing customer experiences, not just for operators, but equally for end users too?

[00:22:25] And how does all this align with the emerging device categories like wearables?

[00:22:29] I mean, you mentioned Apple Watch there as well.

[00:22:32] How do you see all this evolving?

[00:22:34] Yeah.

[00:22:34] I mean, so I kind of covered off some of that in the previous question, but it kind of goes back to it again, is that carriers are talking about going digital or the digitalization processor journey.

[00:22:42] And they're doing it under the driver of two factors.

[00:22:44] Number one is it does a significant labor of customer experience, right?

[00:22:48] The idea of going on hold for hours, right?

[00:22:50] Which is still the case today, or having to get in your car and go down to the shop just to simply go get a SIM card or change your plan is something becoming completely difficult for customers to deal with today.

[00:23:02] Especially the fact that if you think about a post-COVID world that we're dealing with, they like everything to be online and in some cases almost automatic.

[00:23:11] So with the device entitlements in terms of enhancing the customer experience, is that really what you're doing now as a carrier is if they're buying a new device, you're just ensuring that they get the new iPhone or the new Google Pixel or the new Samsung device delivered to their doorstep.

[00:23:28] And they open the box and they simply put the two devices together next to each other and they transfer everything over seamlessly, right?

[00:23:36] So all of a sudden now it's a 24 by 7 experience.

[00:23:39] You're not waiting for customer care hours or going down when the shop is open or closed.

[00:23:44] The customer is now empowered or has control of when they want to set up the device, when they want to activate it, when they want to migrate it, everything else going forward.

[00:23:53] And so they're not thinking about the bad carrier experience that we used to go through in the past, which are incredibly frustrating processes overall, right?

[00:24:05] I went through it recently with a carrier in Canada where I was switching carriers, had to activate four devices in my household.

[00:24:13] This only happened about 18 months ago.

[00:24:16] Carrier did not have eSIM transfer or even eSIM set up for the particular type of program that I was on.

[00:24:23] So I had to sit there, spent two hours plus with a customer care representative.

[00:24:29] Then I had to wait for my SIM cards to arrive by mail.

[00:24:32] Then I had to go into the website to register all those SIM cards.

[00:24:35] I mean, it was maybe a four hour process altogether.

[00:24:38] And looking at my time and other people's time is just as valuable as mine.

[00:24:42] Can you imagine here I am talking to you about the story saying how I spent four plus hours of my time setting up four devices in my household.

[00:24:50] That's a negative experience that sticks with me.

[00:24:52] Whereas I would have told you, you know what?

[00:24:54] I just got these four new devices, set them up at home, and it was completely seamless and it was done within 10 minutes.

[00:25:01] And that's something I would say to the carriers.

[00:25:03] Well done.

[00:25:04] You now have a full digital proper experience versus reminding me why I don't look forward to upgrading devices.

[00:25:10] Yeah, I think so much of your story there will resonate with people listening from a lazier standpoint for myself.

[00:25:16] I know when traveling and if you haven't got roaming for that particular country, you have to hunt down the local cigarette stall and buy a SIM.

[00:25:24] And then you've not got the thing to open the SIM tray on your phone.

[00:25:27] It's not needed anymore, is it?

[00:25:29] Like those kind of experiences.

[00:25:31] No.

[00:25:32] Yeah, it's just crazy.

[00:25:34] And keep in mind, eSIM technology has been around for quite a while.

[00:25:37] I mean, I was there towards the beginning of the commercial applications when Apple launched the Apple SIM, right?

[00:25:41] It was a physical SIM, but it functioned like an eSIM at the time.

[00:25:44] And that was really, but that was almost 10 years ago.

[00:25:47] Yeah.

[00:25:48] So it's been quite a while to get to the adoption where the adoption kind of needs to be to get momentum.

[00:25:55] So when I say, I'm saying that the adoption is getting there, but it's now getting to the point where now there's momentum and then you're going to see it moving at a more accelerated pace, I think, in the very near future.

[00:26:04] And that will change the relationship with the customer and the carrier overall, because now you're calling the carrier to make sure you're getting the best price, the best value, the best plan suited for you versus calling them to get your device set up, which is completely time consuming.

[00:26:21] And it's not a fun experience in the traditional means.

[00:26:24] In the new world, it's completely seamless and easy, but your carrier must have device entitlements in order to support that.

[00:26:31] And you mentioned adoption rates there, and I think we should highlight, you've seen some pretty impressive adoption rates of your own now with something like around 100 operators around the world signing up for entitlements as a service.

[00:26:43] So I've got to ask, I mean, what kind of feedback are you receiving from your clients?

[00:26:48] And what does this say about that growing demand and thirst for this solution?

[00:26:53] Well, I mean, there's two camps.

[00:26:54] I mean, there's obviously there's the carriers that have been had access to entitlements for many years and decided not to do it, particularly for financial reasons, right?

[00:27:03] I mean, the cost barriers of it were really quite high in the time and the resources required were quite high.

[00:27:09] So we obviously we address those from that class of carrier.

[00:27:12] And these are what you would see as an authorized reseller for iPhones and Android devices and Samsung devices as well, too.

[00:27:18] So they have different paths to take.

[00:27:20] But the ultimate path for them is also deploy entitlements.

[00:27:23] I mentioned earlier, every large carrier generally has entitlements.

[00:27:26] Not all of them deploy all the use cases, by the way, right?

[00:27:29] That's the other barrier.

[00:27:31] Deploying use cases is a bit of a challenge for them.

[00:27:33] We managed to solve that by splitting entitlements or use cases, but that's a different story.

[00:27:37] But on the other side of it, there's literally thousands of carriers are out there, big and small.

[00:27:42] Like I told you, my smallest customer is 500 subscribers in the United States.

[00:27:47] They didn't have access to entitlements in the past, even though it would solve major problems.

[00:27:51] And the reason why is because it used to normally require a carrier agreement.

[00:27:54] Now, the OEMs have made a very wise move by opening the market up and making entitlements accessible to everybody.

[00:28:01] The approach that we took kept that in mind.

[00:28:04] You can imagine the market is thousands of carriers.

[00:28:07] Very quickly, we had over 100 of them registering and signing up to get the process going.

[00:28:12] And they've been deploying in various stages or windows going out the door.

[00:28:15] The feedback has been consistent and we're happy to hear it.

[00:28:18] It's doing what we designed it to do.

[00:28:20] Now, we saw some of them having technical challenges, particularly on the device authentication component, which is the most critical component.

[00:28:27] So what did we do?

[00:28:29] We built a service called Diameter Security Gateway, which basically acts as a proxy and pre-wires, does half the pre-wiring for entitlements.

[00:28:39] They install them into their network and they just simply only have to do 50% of the connection versus 100% of the connections before.

[00:28:45] And even the testing is reduced because, again, it comes pre-wired.

[00:28:48] So it reduces the chances for errors.

[00:28:50] And that's reduced the deployment time even further.

[00:28:52] And it's helped with the adoption rate going forward.

[00:28:54] So we'll see another, I think, another major push in 2025 of carrier adoption around it.

[00:29:00] And as we see more and more eSIM-only devices come to market, they're going to be kind of forced into using it because if they don't, the customer will have a degraded experience going forward.

[00:29:09] So we're very fortunate to be in this position right now.

[00:29:13] And with so many big changes coming and so many big adoption, I've got to ask you, it's one right in the heart of this space.

[00:29:20] How do you stay up to speed with the latest technology trends and the latest movements in the industry?

[00:29:25] Because it is incredibly fast moving.

[00:29:27] And I think everybody listening in any industry feels that pressure of having to be in a state of continuous learning.

[00:29:34] So where or how do you self-educate?

[00:29:36] How do you keep up to speed with this?

[00:29:39] Myself personally?

[00:29:40] Yeah.

[00:29:40] So myself personally, I think there's a couple of things I think that's important in terms of doing this.

[00:29:45] And I've been doing this now for a while in terms of doing startups and building business plans and getting funding and execute or building a team and then executing.

[00:29:52] There's a process.

[00:29:53] Surprising the process is almost identical every single time.

[00:29:56] There's a few tweaks to it.

[00:29:58] But, you know, and the reason you get good at it is not because you learn lessons.

[00:30:02] You learn from your mistakes primarily.

[00:30:04] But you also learn from others' mistakes as well too.

[00:30:07] Now, there's two processes in terms of self-educating.

[00:30:10] The way that we run that link is I run it in a very hyper-focused model, right?

[00:30:14] We have a very clear ambition or goal or vision that we have ahead of us.

[00:30:19] We hired, I would say, people probably more senior than a lot of startups would do out of the gate simply because we needed speed and experience on our side.

[00:30:27] And then from there, we rolled out.

[00:30:30] Going back to that point about being hyper-focused, it also comes back to how do I keep up?

[00:30:34] I really try to, obviously, I'm self-taught in a lot of ways in terms of particularly around engineering.

[00:30:41] But I try to stay also hyper-focused about trying to find something that I can be a subject matter expert at.

[00:30:47] And so, I kind of find a branch of technology.

[00:30:51] I really focus on that.

[00:30:53] Try to get myself to what I would call a near expert level or as much as I possibly can be.

[00:30:58] And then from there, obviously, there's branches that are sitting next to it.

[00:31:02] And I kind of let that go in terms of where the natural course takes me in terms of educating myself and becoming highly curious.

[00:31:08] And then, obviously, I'm just very aware of the trends in the industry.

[00:31:12] All my news feeds that are set up and everything that I have from Reddit to even LinkedIn to even surprisingly on that basis as well too, I find it can be also very effective.

[00:31:22] So, some of the areas that I'm really keen on right now is AI.

[00:31:26] Obviously, we're working on it.

[00:31:28] We haven't made any announcements.

[00:31:30] But we also haven't simply labeled anything with AI.

[00:31:33] It's very easy to do.

[00:31:34] So, we've been very careful with that.

[00:31:36] But we are looking to make the experience better.

[00:31:38] So, I've been going down the path of, okay, how do we integrate AI?

[00:31:41] And so, that's kind of one of the areas I've become quite passionate about.

[00:31:43] But you have to kind of pick something and really build a real high passion about it and kind of dive into it.

[00:31:49] And you'll find yourself in a pretty good position, ultimately, of being kind of a subject matter expert around it.

[00:31:54] I hope that answered the question.

[00:31:55] It really does.

[00:31:56] Some great insights there.

[00:31:58] And I'm conscious we could talk about this stuff for hours.

[00:32:01] And anyone listening wanting to dig a little bit deeper and explore this world a little more, where would you like to point everyone listening?

[00:32:07] Is there a website anywhere you'd like to talk to or social channels you'd like to point everyone to?

[00:32:12] Well, I mean, obviously, our website, netlink.com.

[00:32:15] So, N-E-T-L-Y-N-C-E.

[00:32:18] Everybody thinks it's L-I-N-K.

[00:32:20] It's not.

[00:32:21] It's N-E-T-L-Y-N-C.

[00:32:23] And you can go there and obviously get our latest announcement.

[00:32:26] We've been pretty consistent about putting some new information out there overall.

[00:32:30] LinkedIn is a good source.

[00:32:31] If anyone wants to reach out as well, too, it's a good way.

[00:32:33] I always daily, I get lots of questions or people reaching out on LinkedIn for various reasons.

[00:32:37] But I really do enjoy these podcasts because I find that people do follow up and ask me some really good questions as well, too.

[00:32:43] And I'm happy to connect on that basis.

[00:32:45] And I think there's several technology and tech websites that are out there that are really useful.

[00:32:51] But device entitlements is interesting.

[00:32:53] There's not a terrible amount of press around it because that was always one of those hidden features within the network that did a lot of things.

[00:32:59] But it wasn't one of the things that you would bring to the surface or you would particularly market.

[00:33:03] Like a carrier wouldn't go out and say, I've got device entitlements and brag about it.

[00:33:07] You would see it through the features that would be enabled going forward.

[00:33:09] Absolutely.

[00:33:10] So I think it's really interesting to see, obviously, what's coming down the pipeline.

[00:33:13] We just finished the latest iPhone release.

[00:33:16] We've got the next one coming up in September.

[00:33:17] We're going to have another wave of, I think, the Samsung devices are next.

[00:33:20] What's the next wave of other Android devices that are out there?

[00:33:23] It'll be, I would say it's going to be very interesting in 2025 to see what comes around the corner and what that impact is going to look like on the carriers.

[00:33:30] So obviously, all the great tech news websites do a pretty good job of that one.

[00:33:34] But for iPhone, I like macrumors.com.

[00:33:36] I think that's a really great one as well, too.

[00:33:38] And Android Authority is another one I like for Android devices.

[00:33:42] Awesome.

[00:33:43] Well, I think it's one of those areas that we don't talk about enough.

[00:33:46] So I kind of thank you enough for taking the time to sit down with me today, shining a light on this topic that impacts each and every one of us without us even realizing it, I suspect in many cases.

[00:33:57] So I would urge anybody listening to connect with you directly if they want to carry on that conversation.

[00:34:02] But more than anything, just thank you for starting it today.

[00:34:05] Really appreciate you, Tom.

[00:34:07] Yeah, no, I appreciate it.

[00:34:09] This is great, Neil, and lots of great questions.

[00:34:11] And thank you for the opportunity.

[00:34:14] Big thank you to my guest today for shedding light on the transformative impact that Netlink's entitlements as a service is having on the telecom industry.

[00:34:23] Whether that be speeding up the deployment of new services to enabling seamless device integrations across platforms, it seems that Netlink is at the forefront of these telecommunications innovation.

[00:34:36] But for everyone listening, how do you see these advancements influencing your digital interactions?

[00:34:42] What did you learn today?

[00:34:43] What were your big takeaways?

[00:34:44] Were there any questions that you would like to ask?

[00:34:47] Well, have you experienced some of the benefits of the technologies we talked about today firsthand?

[00:34:53] Love to hear your thoughts.

[00:34:54] So please email me, techblogwriter at Outlook.com, Instagram, LinkedIn, at Neil CQs.

[00:35:01] Let me know your thoughts on this one.

[00:35:03] Other than that, I've got another guest lined up for you bright and early tomorrow.

[00:35:06] Predictable, I know, but I will be here same time, same place.

[00:35:10] Hopefully you will all join me again.

[00:35:12] Bye for now.