The mission at ECSite is to empower the workforce, break data silos, and embrace the future of technology in telecom. In this episode, we sit down with the visionary Subbu Meiyappan, the CEO and Founder of ECSite, to explore the world of digitizing the telecommunications industry. Subbu shares his incredible story of reinventing himself several times, all in pursuit of the next big challenge. He shares how he launched ECSite, a game-changing automation software company whose mission is to automate every aspect of fieldwork, from design to data collection. Subbu is passionate about making sure the industry is prepared for the future. As he puts it, “Automating the mundane elevates the human,” and it’s a philosophy that is transforming the way we work in the telecom world. Join us in exploring the possibilities of digitizing the telecom industry.
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Digitizing Telecom and Elevating People With Subbu Meiyappan of ECSite
I have a wonderful guest with us. It is Subbu Meiyappan. He is the CEO and Founder of ECSite. Subbu, thanks for joining me. I’m so excited to talk to you. I can’t wait.
Thank you, Carrie. I’m super excited to be here with you. Thank you for the opportunity. I’m honored that you invited me to this talk. I’m looking forward to chatting with you.
We spent some time together and I could have talked to you for hours, but I was impressed with your story of how you got here. Can you share that with us?
I studied my undergraduate in Electronics in India and then I was working at an oil refinery as a trainee technician doing control valves and things like that. I was thinking, “What am I doing?” I applied to come to the US. I got admitted into a Master’s in Electrical Engineering at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. Nobody in my family has ever set foot outside the country, let alone outside the state. Here I am on a plane to America. I came here to Tennessee. I did my Master’s. I enjoyed being in a small university town.
I learned a lot and I got a job at a company called VLSI Technology doing microchips for a lot of gaming-related applications and things like that. It was in the mid-’90s. I was working at a chip company and I ended up going to some standards committees and whatnot. At that time, I met people who were writing those standards. We’re also teaching at the Arizona State University and they said, “You seem to know what you’re talking about. Can you come and teach a graduate course in VLSI design?”
I did that for a couple of semesters and I started liking teaching. I said, “How do I become a full professor here?” They said that I need to get a PhD. I applied to Stanford and I got into Stanford to do a PhD program. I progressively moved West and I came to Stanford. I was still in my visa situation, so I was doing all of this part-time.
I switched to Cisco, still doing a lot of chip design. While I was studying for it, some light bulbs went off saying, “I understand how to do chip design but the thing that I don’t understand is the single-crossing in communications.” I wouldn’t say I learned everything. Becoming an instrumentation engineer to VLSI engineer, I wanted to study communication. I started from literally Communications 101. I picked up all of that.
Out of Stanford, there was a startup that came out building my MIMO chips. Now, we use my MIMO everywhere. How you build it into a consumer-grade chip was a big challenge at the time, both from the size, power consumption, and whatnot. This company had an innovation to do that and they called me to work with them on building that ship. It was the best of both worlds for me. It was communications, signal processing, and VLSI chip design.
I jumped ship and went there. I worked there for a few years. We got acquired by Qualcomm. I was at Qualcomm for a couple of years. Again, you get these moments saying, “I’m doing well. I’m enjoying this, but you don’t like the status quo. I want to do something else to up the game and do different things. The Bay Area is full of entrepreneurs thinking about wanting to do a lot of things.
A couple of my social friends, I don’t drink beer. We’re drinking something. They said, “Let’s go and figure it out to do something.” By then, I had gotten another Master’s out of Stanford. My friends were also in the tech field, but one of them was a business major and they said, “Let’s form a company. Let’s go solve some problem that’s meaningful.” We decided to form a company called NextNav. It used to be called ComLabsWhat NextNav did was very important. The problem is to solve indoor locations for different use cases, but the product is primarily for public safety.
When you are in a building and you call 911, it’s very difficult to locate you because cell phones don’t give you an accurate location. We wanted to solve that problem and long story short, after years of working at NextNav Technology, it is now used in all the phones in in the US with all the carriers for all public safety applications. There are a lot of commercial use cases and whatnot. That was my story coming up to the NextNav.
While at NextNav, I’ve always been on the technology side and saw that we were deploying all these GPS-related beacons on cell towers. I found out that the whole deployment process was painful, broken, and with a lot of error-prone manual stuff. I was thinking, “What is this? We are living in the 5G or 6G world, but people are still doing stuff manually.”
It affected us at NextNav significantly because we would collect all of this data manually and then go to the field and find out that things were wrong, which meant that we had to do another truck roll and tower climb. Sometimes, even cranes and that took time. I wanted to automate that and we tried a few things at NextNav, which worked well.
That is when I saw the business opportunity to build and digitally transform what happens in the telecom field, and that was the birth of ECSite. That’s where my journey was starting from India and going through all these gyrations of reinventing myself seven times over to figure out what next can challenge me and here I am.
I love that you said, “What is the next big problem to solve?” You kept thinking that over and over. I think that is the brilliant mind of an entrepreneur. What problems does ECSite solve?
In problem-solving, you don’t have to think long and deep to solve or to find problems because the problems are around you every day. You walk up to Starbucks and say, “Why can’t this be automated,” for example. There are so many things that could be automated. That’s how I think about it. The mission of ECSite is to automate everything that happens in the field.
In problem-solving, you don’t have to think long and deep to solve problems or to find problems because the problems are around you every day.
If you look at it, the factories are pretty well automated. There are a lot of robots. If you look at Amazon warehouse, everything is automated, but when it goes to the field and there are technicians involved having to do the work and things like that, automation is not as prevalent. I saw this for the first time while building out the NextNav beacons on cell towers that are collecting and a lot of this is mission-critical data. How does a radio on a cell tower or how does an antenna work?
They’re using that to provision and commission the site, but the data is still collected manually. There are lots of fudging delays and all kinds of things. In order to automate what I would call mission-critical data collection, ECSite built a software platform to be able to automate the data collection in the field. We try to leave no stone unturned and the most difficult part is this mission-critical data collection with test equipment.
I know you deal a lot with the workforce, Carrie. The talent pool is becoming scarce. The knowledge required to operate these things is getting more and more complex. How do you abstract that with an app in the field that you can automate and still have all the test equipment? We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but we still have software to help automation in the field and in factories. That’s what we’re after.
If you look at it, the opportunity is pretty large from a wireless and wireline space where all the fiber deployments are happening and data centers. There’s a lot of opportunity. ECSite builds automation software with a field-first approach that helps collect this data, push it into the cloud, and generate all kinds of reports.
I want to dig into the product, but you know you started in wireless. What are the verticals do you serve now?
We still primarily serve wireless, but because we’re doing test automation with test equipment, one of our customers was doing wireless deployments. They also had a manufacturing line. They pulled us into manufacturing. They were like, “Can you automate this manufacturing line for us where there’s a lot of test automation?” That then ballooned into other opportunities within the manufacturing line. We serve the wireless field services business and also the manufacturing line as well. There are a lot more opportunities in data centers and whatnot that we’ve not even touched, but the platform can serve all of those needs.
You mentioned automation quite a bit. Can everything be automated? How in the world is this possible?
It’s a philosophical question and I look at it now. Sometimes, it’s just goosebumps to think that they can take off a rocket and land it exactly where they want it now. That’s automation. I couldn’t imagine that happening in our lifetime. Automation of anything is possible. It is a mindset and the tools are available. You were talking about AI to do a lot of things. In my opinion, there’s nothing that cannot be automated. As I said, it’s a mindset. You have to think about it as, “Why should I repeat this?” You do it once and then you shouldn’t have to repeat it. There are tools, capabilities, and talent pool to make any automation work.
How is automation going to affect the workforce the way you see it? I know there’s a lot of fear out there, uncertainty, AI, and all this conversation. How do you see this?
There’s always this fear, Carrie. Without automation, we wouldn’t be enjoying the lifestyle that we have now. A very simple, relatable example is the ATM machines. Originally, there was a teller in the bank who was giving you money. Nobody wants to go into the bank to draw money. They just want to go to the ATM, withdraw the money, and come out.
Similar to that, certain mundane things have to be automated. I always think about it as automating the mundane elevates the human. We can do much better things. Now, you only go to the bank when you need to see a human to do certain things, solve issues, and things like that. You want them to be the communication force, the people that deal with customers, challenges, and stuff like that. Other than that, all the mundane stuff should be automated.
Any of this automation, whether we are flying cars or self-driving cars or warehouses when you start doing things at scale through automation, it opens up a lot of job opportunities. It opens people’s minds up to do certain things. I would say I am a good example to say if I am inspired by the rockets landing at the same place, whatever I’m doing should be child’s play and we should be able to automate this.
This is creating more jobs and efficiencies. A lot of things that we’re doing are the jobs that people don’t want to do. They don’t want to sit and fill out a spreadsheet with 10,000 rows and columns to get paid. We are saying that you collect the data, everything goes to the cloud, the report is scheduled automaticallynd get paid immediately. There’s no need for human reviews. As I said, it’s automating the mundane and making people more efficient. That’s how I look at it and people generally have embraced automation at scale.
Automate the mundane and make people more efficient.
It would only make sense now. As you said, there are more jobs, but there’s reskilling and upskilling. Someone my age thinking, “I need to learn this. I need to up-level my skills in order to take advantage of these new jobs and opportunities. We need to not be afraid of it but have an open mind. Go back to school and get enrolled in classes. I’m learning a ton about technology and AI and up-leveling it right now. Would you say that’s what we need to do as humans? We need to elevate ourselves.
It’s continuous learning. You have to keep reading and tell yourself, “I’ll read one article a day.” That’s all you need to do. For one article, you spend 7 or 8 reading it, absorb the material, and automatically learn more. As you correctly said, it is a mindset. I want to be able to do better things with my time and that’s what it is.
Let’s go back to ECSite. Can you describe the details? How does it work? How does it benefit a company or field workers? I know this is a lot of questions at once but how is it going to revolutionize the industry?
I get into the product a little bit. It’ll be technologically inclined, so I will get into the weeds a little bit to explain some of this as well. I‘ll stick to the wireless industry since this is 5G tech talk. Now, when you build a cell tower, there is a design document and a statement of work. All of this gets shared in PDF documents or some electronic form. The statement of work is a world document.
People try to understand and interpret. The background of all of this is that there is a test plan. There’s a procedure. All of this is in different documents. How many people read through in enough detail to read these documents and that has to get pushed all the way to the field worker for them to do a good job. If it goes to a field worker, otherwise, you have a foreman and supervisor. You also have an engineer who’s reviewing all of this as well.
We start from there. We take all of these input documents and digitize them. I’ll digitally digest and put everything into the cloud. In a way, it becomes an executable document. If I say, “Here is an antenna in the alpha sector.” I know there is a JMA antenna, for example. I know what the manufacturer is, what ports there are, and what frequencies they are compliant with. The technicians should know to some extent, but at the same time, they don’t need to know all the boring details.
What is the specific characteristic of a port of an antenna? They don’t need to know that. From the materials, from the design documents, and from the statement of work, we pull all that information. We digitally digest it, ingest it into the cloud, and create workflows that are customized for that specific site. What happens is it’s not a genetic procedure anymore. All the intelligence is in the software to be able to create these workflows.
When a technician goes to the job site, he uses a mobile phone to pull all this information from the cloud. They just log into ECSite as themselves. They’ll have the sites assigned to them. They pick the site. It tells them exactly what the statement of work is from a workflow perspective for the field. They click through the buttons on the app to do all the tasks. It doesn’t feel like you’re clicking through the buttons for the sake of filling out certain forms and things like that.
It becomes part of your workflow because I do need to test the Samsung port. What happens with the software on the mobile phone is that we talk to test equipment. The app then sets the parameters for the test equipment and says, “You’re now testing F1 on this antenna in the Alpha sector. These are the frequencies that it needs to be compliant with.”
It’ll set those frequencies. Otherwise, people are punching numbers on the Android equipment, for example. You’re in the sunlight on a crane or on a tower. A lot of mistakes could be made and the app abstracts all of this out and it tells them what to do. They will connect the cable. The app will run the test and collect all the scientific information from the test equipment.
It will also say from a close-out perspective, “I need a front and back picture,” and show the weatherproofing. They take those pictures for proof of work and then everything goes back to the cloud. Once you sync back to the cloud, you can populate dashboards, trackers, and whatnot so they can see exactly what’s going on in the field without having to go over the job site. We support all kinds of 360 cameras and whatnot to be able to visualize as much as they can remotely and we can generate what is called close-out packages that automatically get generated.
It’s surprising, Carrie, that every market and carrier has different requirements for close-out packages. I always joke saying that there are as many close-out package formats as RF engineers in the room. You have to sit there and formulate all of these things. Once we create a template, it’s automatically generated. This comes in a full cycle. We take that data and put it back into wherever the design document came from.
These days, as-built documentation is very sparse. If people have gotten paid, they move on to the next project with the close-out packages and they don’t necessarily have time to do the as-builts and whatnot. We’re trying to make a life cycle off the data collection to make sure it is all there. As a part of this, I’m talking about how we’re automating what happens in the field now, but my thought process is that all of these processes are generally outdated.
We’re complying for the sake of complying. We’re using 2022 technology with AI and everything to generate 1990s spreadsheets. Those get distributed through SharePoint folders and whatnot. I hate it. I don’t like to see all this happening in the industry because this creates data silos and people don’t look at these spreadsheets. Only when there’s a problem that they look at it. By then, the field crews had moved on.
We want all of this to be API-driven. All the systems should talk to each other. You should be able to query the data anytime you want and all of this should be self-alerting. That’s how I see how all of this should evolve, but we have to start from the grassroots to make sure the data is collected correctly, which is what ECSite is trying to do.
Subbu, you’re a visionary. I’m going to call you one right now. I want to know what’s next for you. What do you see that is possible? Again, it could be this industry. It could be something else. You mentioned flying cars. I want to get into your head a little bit more.
First of all, just looking at this industry, I would like to break all these data silos. All these systems should be able to talk to each other. We work with a lot of our partners. We don’t try to boil the ocean ourselves, but the ocean could be boiled if you ask me. How do you boil it? You have to boil it all together. We’re working with partners and integrators to be able to make all of this work.
Breaking the data silos means collecting all of those data correctly. I always encourage people to say, “Don’t use my app. I’m not trying to sell you this, but think about collecting this data in an organized, methodical way.” There are enough opportunities to be had, but overall, the long-term vision is to go back to sites over and over again to fix problems.
If there’s an upgrade, I understand, but if it’s just, “They didn’t do a good job,” or, “Things were missed,” and all of that, those go-backs should be avoided. If I think about it, I would rather build a tower climbing robot that would be useful for periodic maintenance. Robots can do all kinds of fancy things at factories. All they have to do is climb and check the torque on all the ports, for example. Is there a weather seal on all the ports?
Those are simple things that these robots should be able to do and towers are not going to go away anywhere from all the things that we want to do indoors and whatnot. We should be building tower-climbing robots. That is one of the things that I talk about. A related topic for you is again elevating the human. I think we should abstract as much information as possible so that people have developed specific skills to do certain things and can do those.
It also allows them to go deep into certain things with a broad-based skill. I don’t have to say, “Now, I’m coding in Python, so I have to take a course in Python. Tomorrow, I have to code in JavaScript. I have to take a course in JavaScript.” It should not be like that. I should be able to switch from one to the other with the levels of abstraction.
I’m giving an example of where we have to become broad-based and how automation can help us get there. On a related note, I would also say the way we’re doing contracts and things like that all have to evolve to smart contracts with blockchains. You’re in this industry, Carrie. I know how difficult it is to get paid on time, even if you fulfill the contract and whatnot. Whereas, if you did your job and met the metrics, why not get paid immediately?
It can be Net 45. I don’t care, but I want to get paid. Payments get delayed for whatever reason because of some whim of some people who are accepting this. I know crypto is not the best word to talk about in general, but blockchain is here to say. Ledgers and contracts will also evolve and people will transact through smart contracts as well.
Blockchain is here to say. Ledgers and contracts will also evolve and people will transact through smart contracts as well.
When you said robots that climb towers, I pictured the tower tech can now stand on the ground, which is safer for them. They can operate this robot. That’s cool. I absolutely love it.
It’s also sustainable, Carrie. One of the operators mentioned that they drove about eleven times to the moon and back in the Pacific Northwest for tower maintenance. It’s how much driving that they’ve done. Imagine the amount of gas, workforce, and whatnot they’ve spent on the amount of climbing they had to do and driving. All it was was a small inspection. Even on a small scale, I think this will help the planet be much more sustainable and get to net zero as well. We have to think about our children’s future and how we evolve all of this into net zero. That’s another purpose of the automation as well.
I’d like your thoughts on generative AI. How do you think that generative AI will help the telecom industry, specifically?
It’s a very interesting question. Being in the Bay Area right now, it’s super hot. Everybody is talking about generative AI. I also didn’t talk too much about AI in my vision because I think AI will be a part of all the work we do under the hood. It may not be obvious to you what AI is doing, but a lot of it is under the hood.
What I see is that now, generative AI has a lot of different use cases. One is in context. I want to help them. We have to pick up the phone and ask somebody, even for me, how to operate those test equipment. I want to be able to have all the manuals for the test equipment and say, “I’m in this step. What is my next step?” We should be able to answer all of those kinds of things.
The next world problem is an interesting problem from that used case. The other thing is that I was talking to you about data silos. Data silos are there because certain software tools do certain things and they push it into a database. For somebody to take all of this data and create a massive master database, an inquiry is painful. Generative AI is going to help break these data silos.
I can bring 3 or 4 databases and tell the generative AI, “You have access to these four databases. Tell me, how is this design related to failures here? Is there any correlation that you see?” That will be a good way to bring all of them together and say that I can answer questions about my data. I also say that people use dashboards now for a lot of their task tracking and stuff like that.
The days of the dashboards are numbered because, as you see, dashboards are static in some sense. If Carrie likes a certain field over the dashboard, Subbu may not like the same field. He may have different questions, but I want to ask questions about my data. I want it with all my databases. Generative AI will have a role there. As I said, in summary, generative AI will help with all this data analysis and is a big way for tech help and whatnot from understanding manuals, procedures, and steps.
I also think apps will go away eventually and you’ll just have a phone that says, “I want to do this,” and it’ll do it through generative AI. That is how I see that it’ll evolve. Going from a big screen with thousands of icons, I think we will end up with one screen where we can read a lot more with one icon that says, “Do this.” It becomes a true personal digital assistant overnight.
Subbu, you are leading the charge here. I am excited to see what’s next, follow your life, and learn from you.
Likewise, Carrie. You do fantastic work both on the work front and in the nonprofit. I’m inspired when I talk to you and see you.
Thank you so much. Where can we learn more about ECSite?
Our website is www.ECSiteApp.com. I just started blogging, Carrie, on technical topics. This whole C-Band deployment has been a big challenge in the DAS industry and I saw some of these problems. Again, these are repeated problems over and over again. As I said, “Let me write something about it.” Now, I have committed to writing an article at least once every month to put something out there. As I said, a lot of it is about the data that we have and we use the data to sort of help the industry in a way that makes sense. Our website is a great place.
I see a podcast in your future. I think it’s perfect for you. You need to be a podcaster.
I have always been a guest and I’d like to learn from you and see how we can do this.
Let’s do it. Subbu, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is enlightening. I always learn so much from you. Maybe we can do this again next year and see where you are and where the industry is.
Carrie, thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate you having me on the show.
Take care.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you.
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About Subbu Meiyappan
Subbu Meiyappan is a leader in wireless telecom with over 25 years of entrepreneurial and technology development experience. He is a serial entrepreneur, having previously co-founded NextNav, an inventor and an author. As CEO of ECSite, he is responsible for leading the company’s vision to automate everything, everywhere, helping transform the Telecom industry into the all-digital era.
Subbu previously co-founded NextNav in 2007 – an indoor location company. He spearheaded the development of a terrestrial based network of highly-synchronized beacons that emit GPS-like signals on a licensed spectrum. The technology has been adopted by NASA and is finding its way into public-safety, E-911 and myriad of location applications where GPS does not work. NextNav went IPO in 2021, valued at $1.2B.
Prior to NextNav, Subbu was Principal Engineer at Qualcomm and Airgo Networks leading the development of first commercial implementations of MIMO WiFi ICs. He has also worked at Cisco Systems, Philips Semiconductors (NXP) and VLSI Technology.
Subbu has over 30 issued US and international patents and several more pending. He has written several technical publications and spoken at industry and academic conferences. He also taught courses at Arizona State University and been on several industry standards committees.
He has a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Instrumentation from Annamalai University (India) and dual Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and Tennessee Tech.
He also co-founded a non-profit organization Vetrivelfoundation.org that is helping take world-class education to the masses by converting Khan Academy videos into Indian regional languages.
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