YouSaid · the spoken record

Chet Kanojia

lines on the record: 72
first: 2016-02-04
most recent: 2016-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sure you've game this out. What do you imagine the complaint is you're going to get from the incumbents, whether it's Comcast or Charter or Time Warner cable?”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this case, you're not digging rogues. We're not attaching to utility poles. We're not doing it. It's a private transaction between a cellular operates very differently than cable. And so the question by extension, you can ask, right? If a phone's giving you an LTE signal, that's giving you quote-unquote internet, and there's none of the franchising things come into this.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's no, because what I was thinking about when you were doing your presentation this morning was, I remember when Verizon started to do its rollout and it had to go to every town it wanted to supply cable and broadband service and go through this lengthy process involving multiple sort of city bodies and time Warner cable or cable vision, whoever the incumbent was there would try to slow it down when various means, you're not going to encounter that problem.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's Brooklyn and start selling us. You see As long as the equipment is certified by the FCC and you're not causing interference and various other things like that, as long as you're buying access from your fiber provider, Sidera or level three or whatever, of course. There's about over 2 million customers in the country today that use what is called Wisps, which are wireless internet service providers.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This array of micro anten But you can't just set up internet, right? Someone generally write the FCC has something to say about that. No, you can just go into Brooklyn and start selling us, you see without any governmental sign-off.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is not part of the point. I think the challenges here are going to be much more execution oriented just because this is not easy, obviously, right? And in building things out. And we did a lot of this the hardware area where we were doing city-based city systems. It was a much bigger scale in terms of, so just to put it in context, a single area system was 20 feet by 10 feet by 8 feet, right? This is array of micro antennas. Exactly. It was a giant thing and it weighed like six tons and we had to have a crane and all this other stuff. These things we learned a lot from that and we realized that success will be required that we have a deployment model built in day one that is efficient, compact, small, low power, low zero or very limited zoning requirements and focused on where this equipment is already pre-zoned for, right? So rollout is built into the technology. We learned a lot from that.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you started area, you knew from the get go and you said as much, you said, we are going to be in court. We're going to spend a bunch of time fighting the networks in the programming. They're going to claim we don't have the right to do what we're doing, which you were taking programming off the airways and saying everyone has the rights to this. We're going to distribute this stuff over the internet. The network said you didn't. They won in court. But you knew from the get-go you were going to be in court there. You knew that in addition to whatever technical problem you had to solve, you were going to have a legal battle and we're probably going to be binary. In this case, you've got the technical issue to solve. What are the regulatory and or legal issues you're going to solve?”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So the thinking was, even in those days, you were like, okay, we don't know how and when this is going to get solved, but the access network piece has to get worked on at some point just because whether we succeed at AO or not or somebody else, that's long term, you're going to have a problem where the guy who controls the pipe is effectively going to set the policy for what you get, where and how.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And was this something you were thinking of while you were doing Ario? Because it seems, and we'll talk a bunch about Ario, but it seems like this would have occurred to you while you're doing Ario, that while we were fighting the TV guys, you also had an issue with the broadband guys. Exactly.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's stipulate that all this is going to work the way you say it's going to work. We've been running technical tests in Boston. I have many questions. First of all, was this the thing you thought I want to do as soon as Ario was done or on its way out? Or were you playing with other ideas?”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now, if you take that beam and you think of it as a laser, a really coherent source, right? For the same amount of power, you can shoot the beam a much, much greater distance. The problem is it's a narrower beam. So now you have to build a system that can effectively paint an entire picture, if you will, in space and direct the energy wherever it needs to based on kind of which packet is going where, but it's doing it in very, very narrow things. The net result of that is you get a lot more effective power distribution-wise.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to completely be on me. Condense this. So the easiest way to think about it is you've got, let's say you've got a small battery, right? And you're powering a light bulb with it. Now as you go further away, because it's distributing energy everywhere, it drops off relatively.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or more importantly, dealing with landlords who effectively become the road gatekeeper in there, right? So you had to have a self-installed strategy for apartments, and then you have to have an easy to install by a commercial installer like a direct TV or dish network type of guy for more suburban or higher structures like that, right? So that's relatively easy to solve for once you've kind of figured that out. And third, where we spent a lot of energy in terms of solving the problem was, so going back to this question that you asked, the historical view is point to point works, point to multi-point attenuations too hard, and you really can't make it work. So we sort of step back and said, we know point to point works, how about we create a highly dense sector switch system so that it looks like to the airwaves, essentially it's a point-to-point system, but from a deployment characteristics, it's a point to multipoint. And that's where this active phase ray that we built comes in. And the easiest way to think of it.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was one. So that was like a huge check mark for us saying. So that was a technical thing that we had to prove to ourselves. Could we actually take Wi-Fi off the child and run it and up convert, down convert in high frequency bands without distorting the thing? So that was one so that we proved that. So that got us off the, I got to spend $100 million in developing radio technology off the thing. Second then became primarily about A, making sure that any consumer device we build was self-installable, right? So you got out of the landlord problem and you'll have to come up with various iterations.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Radius around it. So you can sort of drop these things into kilometer radius and they will serve all the households in that area. And so again, without getting in the weeds, because it's not going to help me and maybe it probably won't help Westerners either, what is the thing that you guys figured out? You did this basically in a year, right? Because Ario stopped in a year and a half. Yeah, a year and a half ago. And you guys started working on this, I guess, sometime soon after. So within a year and a half, how did you solve this problem that's bedeviled many people? So if you go back to the list of three that I was making, right? So number one was we said, look, there is a lot of innovation that's already happened in things like Wi-Fi, for example, right? So what we are really doing is we're not creating our own radios. It's off the shelf base man. So you basically, we take a modern Wi-Fi systems and in particular Mu Mimo based, which is basically means multiple streams can be combined at the same time and propagated.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of physical elements that rain fade means rain when rain happens signals attenuate right so so nobody has had really focused on solving those now those work in more point to point link so for example today if you go out and you know you look around you know there are 60 gigahertz links or 80 gigahertz links running and they're providing core functions like backhaul very very reliably so it's not that the technology doesn't work it's the issue has been how do you solve for the direct to consumer question in that thing so your plan is going to be we're going to go market by market and then sort of i was talking to one of your investors who said this is the google fiber strategy sort of we're going to go into not only just market by market but neighborhood by neighborhood and we essentially put down i don't know what the right term would be is it a speaker a transceiver a transceiver that's going to serve what 300 homes at a time 300 clients at a time the starry beams which are these machines can serve about a two kilometer range”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we not get left in the dust? How do we part of invasion cycle that is everybody's together in it? So that was number one. Second, the biggest other big problem in fixed wireless has been that historically it's been a point-to-point strategy in which a landlord is involved in some way, shape, or form, right? So that was companies like Intelligent and others did that for enterprise solutions where they would go install like a large dish on top of your roof and then point in the dish. And that dish feeds a bunch of different. Then there would be either a fiber or a coax going inside those things. And what ended up happening was really the amount of debt these guys took on. And by the time they could roll the market out, fiber guys came into it. And enterprise was the easiest attack point for fiber because it was large, you know, people willing to pay $5,000 a month or whatever the connection fee happened to be. And the third has been much more of like a propagation technical challenge, which is you've got things like foliage, rain fade, all those various.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a certain degree of confidence say, you know, we had solved for those things. So the first thing is really a technological roadmap question. So clear is a great example of it. Intel sort of got behind this whole thing. They created WiMAX, which is a totally orthogonal to what the conventional strategy in the marketplace, which was either 3G at that point or going to LTE or Wi-Fi on the other side. They came up with a completely new radio technology. And the problem in radio technologies or anything in baseband, it's just bloody expensive, right? You spend $100 million to develop this thing, and then you're the only guy who's making it. And it just costs an arm and a leg. And the innovation cycle leaves you in a dust. So by the time it all got said and done, Clear could deliver 2.2 and half a megabit a second, whereas LTE was pumping 10, 15, depending on the coverage set. And you're saying, by the way, we're going to be able to deliver gigabit speed. So therein lies sort of the first question in our mind was, you know,”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“90s there was an effort put in collectively by a number of companies to sort of do fixed broadband. Trevor Burrus And fixed broadband means in the most basic terms means fixed wireless. So if you think about wireless in two categories mobile wireless which is typical mobile phone cellular things like that or fixed wireless in which the client is not moving is static in a location and typically for a building or a house or things along those lines. Meaning you're beaming it to me at my home at a router that's not moving. Correct. I think the conventional wisdom that fixed wireless is difficult and has been tried before and hasn't worked is absolutely right, right? And one of the largest examples of that was ClearWire that Sprint ultimately acquired or Olin or whatever you want to call it. And when we were starting this, we said, this has been tried before and hasn't worked. And there's a bunch of reasons. And we really started cataloging those reasons why it didn't work. And we said we would do this if we could make sure we...”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over those things, we should have choice over internet. You're saying we can deliver it. To me, that seems like a much bigger deal than even a really good and impressive router. Yeah, that's the big sort of, let's try to change the world again, kind of a business. So I'm at a severe disadvantage here since I barely know how to turn on my MacBook. So I can't engage you in the technical discussion, but I do know that what you're saying is, look, we're doing this through fixed wireless broadband, and there are many smart people who say, no, no, no, this has been tried before. It doesn't work. There are technical reasons for that. So what is the thing that you guys have figured out that's going to allow you to make it work this time? So fixed wireless isn't a new thing, right? It's been around for a fairly long time. I mean, you could sort of argue that, you know, microwave communication sort of really started in the 50s and 60s and fixed wireless has been around since then. And you really sort of have to take a step back and say, there's two parts or three parts to sort of this whole story. In the mid-90s, latent...”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Videos buffering or this or that, and we would say, Well, your speed seems to be okay. And we realized that in-home propagation was a real problem for most of these people. And that's kind of where the in-home propagation is. The broadband has got to your house. It's getting stuck somewhere there in the router. And we can talk about this because you're saying, look, there's two parts of this business. There's the broadband and there's this router or you've got a different term for, but we're thinking of it as a router. But to me, the really big deal is, and you pointed this out at the beginning of your presentation, is, and this has annoyed me and gone on about it a bit, there is effectively no competition for broadband in the US, I think 70-some percent of the country has one option. Give or take, yep. And then maybe there's a small chunk that has a choice between two. Where I live in Brooklyn, you would think I would have more options. I have one. And broadband is you can argue the most, it's incredibly important, right? It's as important as water, any other utility we get. We don't have any choice.”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kara, I'm here with Check Kenozha, who many of you know is the guy behind Ario, and he's now the guy behind a new company called Starry. He just introduced it a couple hours ago. I want to thank him for coming up here. Chad, we can talk about Ario, and we will, but why don't you explain what Stari is, first of all? Sastari is a pretty big effort that spans. We kind of looked at the market and said, you know, there's an interesting opportunity in providing an end-to-end experience for the consumer for both broadband access and in-home how you experience that access that you get. I'm going to just stop you there because the main thing you're doing, right, is you want to create a new broadband service that you're going to sell that's going to compete with the existing basically monopoly and duopoly of cable and telco providers. And we believe that sort of the Internet of Things and the entire experience and stitching all that together is a really interesting opportunity. And I think both kind of go together. We would get calls from people that said, hey, my...”
2016-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chet Kanojia, Starry CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT