| Tuesday, 16 May 2023 |
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Good Morning edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com,
Welcome to the very first edition of Present/Future.
I'm Brady Ng, one of The Ken's deputy editors in Southeast Asia. Every other Tuesday morning, I'll bring you the long view on tech, breaking down the most interesting deep tech ventures in the region. I'll speak to the scientists and engineers who want to change the world on a fundamental level. The ones who are chipping away at the big problems—in labs, in virtual environments, and even in space.
Present/Future is a little different from our usual newsletter lineup. For one thing, it's our very first limited-run newsletter. But perhaps more importantly, it is our only newsletter that isn't behind a paywall right now. That means anyone can read it in full just by signing up with an email address, so please be sure to share it widely.
For this first edition, we'll explore one big idea: what's the best way to communicate over long distances? Because, on the road to developing a system for interplanetary communication, there's a solution that could give billions of people a stable, fast internet connection, no matter where they are.
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The Past: Analogue Songs
My first experience with going online was auditory: the ear-splitting screech of a dial-up modem, loud enough that the whole house would hear when somebody logged on. The concept of streaming was still years away, and loading a page of text could take minutes. But it was exciting. For 11-year-old me, being able to read about nearly anything was my first reason to stay up well after bedtime.
That scream let out by the modem sounded like pain. And in a way it was, like forcing a square peg into a round hole. At the time, telephone networks were built to carry human voices, not 0s and 1s. To fit computer-readable data through a phone line, digital signals had to be modulated into an audio signal and demodulated on the other end, hence the name "modem."
That noise we triggered by clicking the "connect" button was the computer sending digital data through an analogue channel.
Computers were given a voice. Quite literally.
The Present: Seeing Stars
Today, more than five billion people around the world use the internet, and most of us are constantly online through our phones. Telecommunications is a digital business—or is well on the way to becoming one. But another leap forward could already be coming, and it's being developed in Singapore.
Rohit Jha hails from Jamshedpur, the first planned industrial city in India. A place that, in his words, revolved around the Tata group's massive crude steel production plant.
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Rohit eventually went to Singapore in 2006 to pursue a degree in engineering and has been in the city-state since. And from 2016, he and his co-founder Mohammad Danesh have been building Transcelestial, a venture trying to manifest the big idea we began this edition with.
Rohit describes the solution that Transcelestial is building matter-of-factly:
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Transcelestial is creating the technology needed to build the equivalent of an undersea cable, but in space.
That may sound a straightforward goal, but the tech needed to achieve it is anything but. Transcelestial's first version of the CENTAURI system is a device the size of a shoebox and forms part of a network of "wireless fibre optics". The units are installed on top of buildings and transmit data using light beams. If CENTAURI units are deployed at a large scale and within 3,000 metres from each other, cell tower networks can expand quickly.
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While Rohit looked to the stars for inspiration, he and his co-founder aren't losing sight of the immediate things they can accomplish.
CENTAURIs have already been deployed in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India, and the United States. In the Philippines, Transcelestial has teamed up with Globe in Visayas (the country's central part) and Mindanao (in the south) to provide 4G services to villages.
"If it's a technology of the future, then it should be able to solve the problems of today for us," Rohit tells me. However, there are technical hurdles that require invention. It's a problem that has been worked on for at least three decades, particularly in the defence sector.
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Rohit likened the process to building electric vehicles in garages before Tesla became a household name. There's a lot that needs to come together, but they fall in three major buckets:
- How do you inject data into light?
- How do you point and track? Or, how do you stabilise the beam so that it hits the right spot kilometres away?
- How do you compensate for the presence of weather, like rain, haze, fog, and snow that interferes with your signal?
Plus, the resulting unit has to encapsulate software that runs neural networks to process computer vision. It has to utilise beamforming, a processing technique that uses constructive and destructive interference to propel signals. It has to use adaptive power control to cut through the weather. All of this has to be autonomous. And the unit has to be manufacturable without too hefty a price tag.
The results are uncanny.
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If this sounds great, then why haven't you heard more of Transcelestial? Why aren't they forming more partnerships and growing faster? The answer has little to do with the tech itself, and more to do with the business side of things. Some telcos experience the sunk cost fallacy, others adhere to the refrain of if it isn't broken, why fix it?
Even if Rohit and his team believe that a laser-based communications network will be the default in the future, existing telcos need to consider revenues for the next quarter. Experiments that aren't expected to immediately yield huge payoffs just won't happen.
Because of those conditions, the companies that Transcelestial ends up working with are often not the top telecommunications companies, but the second, third, fourth-place players who are willing to try something new to climb upward. Working with telcos of any sort lets Transcelestial tap into a global communications sector currently estimated to be worth US$1.9 trillion. Broadband service alone accounts for US$324.7 billion.
The Future: Over the Moon
Transcelestial's earthly objective is simple: to connect people by deploying the CENTAURI system wherever it's needed. That's important because, to paraphrase William Gibson, the future isn't evenly distributed.
Connectivity in Singapore may be fast and stable, but fly just three hours to Bali and it's an entirely different story. That's a consequence of how undersea cables are deployed, followed by the way that bandwidth is distributed to cities and towns, plus the "last mile" connectivity for end users.
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That last part is precisely what Transcelestial is addressing. CENTAURI runs at 10 Gbps. (For reference, home broadband in Singapore is capped at roughly 1 Gbps, while phone internet is roughly 1/10 that.) Rohit's plan is to break the 10 Gbps ceiling and hit 25 Gbps.
Developing something like that turned out to be a perfect fit for scientists and engineers with professional experience in the space industry. Specialists with that background now form part of Transcelestial's R&D team.
Rohit and his co-founder are already thinking about what their company might be doing decades from now. He referred to a worldbuilding exercise that authors of fiction go through—consider what our civilisation will look like 50 years in the future. A low Earth orbit satellite network could drop several hundred Gbps or even Tbps of connectivity onto a city anywhere on the planet. And by that time, there may be more of a human presence on the moon, even Mars. Those people will need to communicate with Earth too.
Deploying that network could also be fast, with rocket launches planned in quick succession instead of laying undersea and underground for years.
In the best-case scenario, all of that is still years away. But Rohit speaks about it with excitement, even though I'm sure he's repeated the narrative hundreds of times to different ears.
His story is one that starts in an industrial town and points towards human connections that span celestial bodies. And along the way, real and significant problems are being solved.
Keep your head in the sky.
Regards,
Brady Ng
P.S: Be sure to write to brady@the-ken.com with your thoughts and suggestions, and please do share Present/Future with your friends and colleagues.
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