01:33:39 · John Coogan, Brian Manning
[01:33:39] S0: How do you think about network congestion? I was just I was just hearing about how Starlink is an amazing network, but there are some small pockets where if you have a whole bunch of people in one small Alaskan town, they will actually see some network congestion, and the terrestrial Internet providers have done decades of work to make sure that, like, a stadium still has cell cell connection when there's a 100,000 people at a football game. Does that... And is that is that a factor for you where you might see a lot of demand for these... For for for this this service in a particular area and you need to design around that, or is that less of a factor for this particular technology? [01:34:25] S4: It's a really good question. And one of the superpowers about GPS and similarly the way that our system operates is that it's not bidirectional. It's a one directional broadcast. Okay. And what that means is once you have coverage in an area, you can support an infinite number of users in that area. Interesting. So it's almost more like radio than it is like communications. [01:34:43] S0: Yeah. [01:34:44] S4: And so for us, like, once we get, you know, the critical number of satellites up to serve that area, you you can cram 10,000,000,000 people into that area and we can still support every single one of them.
01:34:44 · Brian Manning, Jordi Hays
[01:34:44] S4: And so for us, like, once we get, you know, the critical number of satellites up to serve that area, you you can cram 10,000,000,000 people into that area and we can still support every single one of them. [01:34:54] S1: Mhmm. I remember... Talk about the kind of expanding need for systems like Pulsar on the Basics earnings call. Elon was making the bull case for Starlink as in, like, we're gonna have just way way way... Like, because of the explosion of robotics that I think we can bank on over the next ten plus years, there's just gonna be way more connected devices that that have a bunch of unique needs, some of which align with with, you know, humans just carrying devices, but there's a bunch of other use cases.
01:35:28 · Brian Manning
[01:35:28] S4: Yeah. I I think the company is like... So we came out of the autonomous car world, and it was really built to support the world's transition from, you know, a hands on world to a hands off world. And if you look at, you know, what satellite communications are really doing for devices, they're answering, I would say, kind of the what and the why, but it's really leaving the where and the when. And so that's... Our system really fills the where and the when for things, it does it at an accuracy level that they need and the places that they need, and it's really filling the gaps for GPS struggles. And so GPS, as great of a system as it is, is a half century old architecture operated by the military, built for the military. And most people, like if you ask a random person on the street like, Hey, what is the value of space? A lot of people say, Well, GPS, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Yeah. But similarly, you see the, what I call the nuisances today, where if using a Strava app to go running and you go underneath trees and it's, I didn't run two miles, I actually ran two and a half. Yeah. Or the Uber is down the street and you can't, you know, catch it because it's it's just on the opposite side and you're running through the rain. There's those levels of nuisances, but it also is much bigger than that and what, like, the conflict in Ukraine has highlighted where, you know, GPS jamming is just kinda running wild Mhmm. Because it does disrupt all the military systems that are over there. We're seeing the same in Israel. We saw the same in Iran. Like
01:36:48 · John Coogan, Brian Manning
[01:36:48] S0: Mhmm. [01:36:48] S4: And these are no longer just military problems that, you know, all the countries around there are getting disrupted. I mean, there's even been civilian airliners that have gotten shot down because of this. So it is a unfortunately expanding problem that we are really building a solution to primarily built for commercial, but we are proud of the work that we do with the military as well. [01:37:08] S0: On on military GPS, I I remember maybe, like, fifteen years ago or something when when Google Maps was was was becoming dominant. There was this thing that might have been fake news or rumor, but this idea that the civilian GPS system was less accurate than the military GPS system. And at a certain level of precision, that technology or that protocol was, like, encrypted or classified. I don't know if that's true or not, but are you going to face similar regulation where a certain, certain capability level of your technology will be restricted? Or are we in a new regime where kinda everyone can have centimeter level access to positioning because maybe it's not that big of a deal anymore. I don't know. [01:37:56] S4: Yeah. The answer is a bit of both. Okay. And so in... I think it was the nineteen nineties that they did. The US actually did degrade the accuracy. It was called selective availability. [01:38:08] S0: That's right.
01:38:08 · John Coogan, Brian Manning
[01:38:08] S0: That's right. [01:38:09] S4: Yeah. And they turned it off for a second, I think, during, like, the Gulf War and everyone's like, wow. This is way better than we thought. Oh. But then there was a seven forty seven that wandered into Russian airspace and got shot down and killed everybody on board. Woah. And so that was actually The US made the decision that, like, this is too important. Like, having reliable precision is too important to the world. We can't keep degrading it. And And so they actually made it... I think Clinton made an executive order to... That they won't degrade it anymore. [01:38:39] S0: So when he comes monitor... The seven forty seven got off track because it didn't have the higher level of precision. [01:38:44] S4: Right. Interesting. And it it wandered into, like, [01:38:47] S0: That makes sense. [01:38:48] S4: GPS wasn't really being used and so it wandered into unfriendly airspace. And if you translate into the modern world, like the the same the same thing is happening effectively again, but it's it's not as much even around precision, it's about the protection and, you know, the jam a bit, like, how jammable GPS is. Sure. And, like, unfortunately, it was in... It was, I think, Christmas of twenty four. It was in Azerbaijan I remember. Airlines. Yep. Air... Like, and it it didn't... Like, the GPS was jammed. It couldn't find the runway, and it was doing circles and it wasn't broadcasting where it was because it didn't know where it was. Yep. And so... [01:39:21] S0: Got shut down.
01:39:21 · John Coogan, Brian Manning
[01:39:21] S0: Got shut down. [01:39:22] S4: You know, it got shut down. And so, you know, if that was American Airlines flight, I think it would have caught a lot more news. Definitely. But, unfortunately, these these instances are becoming more real and, you know, aviation cuts a lot of attention, but, you know, it's happening to drones, it's happening to time synchronization, it's happening to buses, to logistics, to all these different things that just need a lot better precision, a lot better power and protection than they're able to get with, you know, the the kind of legacy systems that are out there. [01:39:48] S0: Interesting. I have one last question. Go for it. On the receiver side, what is the distribution model? I mean, I I can go buy a Starlink terminal at Best Buy. I can buy it online. Do you have a direct to consumer or partnership business business development relationships with everything from, a Garmin or an or an Apple or a Google that might make a device that would benefit from this? Or are you focused on, go to market with the military first or airlines? Like, what what is the what is the what is the plan for catching the data?