In this episode of the Wireless Communications Explained Podcast, you’ll be introduced to Chas Elliott, President of EMCI Wireless, and Mike Humphress, President of Commsult Consulting Solutions — who will both share their thoughts on the state of wireless communications and how the industry is no longer based on your father’s two-way radio.
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Since 2007, Chas has been President of EMCI Wireless (a Motorola channel partner), where he manages day-to-day financial operations and administrative functions of running a Motorola Two-Way Radio Dealer, Motorola Service Shop, and Verizon Wireless cellular retailer.
With 30 years of experience in direct sales, sales management, marketing, business development, and distribution management, Mike Humphress is a recognized innovator in the wireless industry. His employment with Motorola included the positions of Sales Representative, Regional Sales Manager, and Area Business Manager. In addition, he has spent six years in two Motorola dealerships in the capacity of Vice President and General Manager.
Listen to the full episode of the Wireless Communications Explained Podcast to learn more about:
- Their career journeys that led Chas Elliott and Mike Humphress to their current leadership roles in the wireless communications industry
- How two-way radios have changed and evolved over the past few years
- The driving forces of innovation in two-way radios
- The biggest misconception people have about two-way radios
- What the future of two-way radios looks like
Chas Elliott shared insight on how two-way radios are evolving:
“…We’re continuing to see more data-centric devices and being able to pass a lot more bandwidth from a video perspective…analytics…(and) a push to private LTE. There’s a lot of users that for years used a radio voice system, they put a repeater in on-premise to be able to talk on that two-way radio system.”
“It’s evolved quite a bit. Now data video analytics triggers being able to put applications on your radios, all of these different things have converged all the technologies. The digital capability allowed users to get more out of their device than just push-to-talk and release to listen.”
“What we do in a lot of cases is mission-critical. It is operations-critical. We need to ensure that the devices we’re giving our customers provide them with value.”
“The market drives innovation and having a business case for something even if it’s different. We serve multiple vertical markets. We have a whole range of products, suites of products, everything from hardware to software. And you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what the customer is looking for to help drive the value to them.”
Mike Humphress explained the impact of digital and different technologies converging with wireless communications:
“When the two-way radio finally caught up with much of the rest of the world from a digital perspective, it changed the scope of everything because not only do you still have that integration of all those different technologies that can now come together, but you still have the most core and important part of this whole thing — which is instantaneous communication with an individual by the push of a button, which is still probably the hallmark of land mobile radio or two-way radio.”
“I think our industry is being wildly affected by cloud-based technology, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI). All of those things are coming to bear on everything from simple voice communications to all the other components of what we have available in our industry today. So whether it’s video, data, or pure voice, all of those are impacted and affected by these technological advances in a great way.”
“I think it conjures an image of buggy whips when they think of two-way radios, that it is an archaic, outdated technology that we used to use back in the nineties. But now that we have all of the cool features and gadgets that go along with smart technology and smartphones in general, they have been replaced, including a belief that push-to-talk over cellular has replaced two-way radio. This is a massive misconception, unfortunately. And it’s been permeated by people that invest in carrier communications and have a vested interest in making sure that people continue to subscribe to those services. And to some extent, it’s this industry’s own fault for not doing a better job of communicating the, what I call, solution-relevance of the land mobile radio piece of the story.”
Lightly Edited Transcript
Joshua Feinberg:
Welcome to Wireless Communications Explained. In this episode, you’ll be hearing from Chas Elliott, who’s the president of EMCI Wireless and a Motorola Solutions Manufacturer’s rep, and Mike Humphress. He is president of Commsult Communications and a long-time veteran of the wireless communications industry. Chas and Mike, welcome to the podcast.
Mike Humphress:
Thanks for having us.
Joshua Feinberg:
That’s terrific. The first place that I like to start is to get your perspective on how each of you ended up in your current roles. We’ll start with you, Chas, how you ended up at EMCI Wireless and what your career journey has been to arrive at this place?
Chas Elliott:
Sure. For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been with EMCI Wireless and kind of started in… I have a background in, basically, IT technical services. I came into the business as there was this transition from analog to digital and just kind of fell into my wheelhouse and went from many ethernet-centric and data-centric type applications. It kind of made sense. It’s a logical transition for me, coming with an IT background into the two-way radio business. I kind of started, if you will, from a technical role, and as my business sense grew a little bit, I grew into the role that I have now. Eventually, I was afforded the opportunity to buy in as an owner of the company.
Joshua Feinberg:
That’s great. Did you know at some point in going to school that you wanted to move into some aspect of IT or wireless? Was that something that excited you when you were younger or did that just kind of fall into place with one step leading to another?
Chas Elliott:
Yeah. If you would’ve told me 20-something years ago that I would be in the two-way radio business here in 2021, I would think you’re crazy, right? It certainly wasn’t at the top of my list of career adventures that I was looking to pursue, but you’re right. As I went through schooling and everything else with the IT background, I knew that I didn’t want to fix computers every day. I knew that I didn’t want to work on printers and all of that stuff, so it’s kind of a logical transition. I did networks and things of that nature in a previous life. I knew I wanted to be involved in technology, but I wasn’t exactly sure where my fit would be. It took some time to fall into place there.
Getting Started in Wireless Communications
Joshua Feinberg:
That’s great. How about you, Mike? Did you always know that you wanted to be in wireless? What led you to your current role in working as an advisor at Commsult?
Mike Humphress:
Yeah, that’s funny. I’ve been in this industry for four decades. So, it looked a little bit different when I first came in right out of college. The guy that recruited me into this industry said, “Would you be interested in going to work for Motorola Cell and FM two-way radios?” I couldn’t spell two-way radio at that particular point in time. I had no concept, no idea of what it was outside of CB radios back then. It just wasn’t something that the general population knew that much about. So, I was so intelligent about it. I even asked him the question, “Once I’ve sold everybody one of these, what do I do then?” That’s exactly how much I knew about it. So, no thought whatsoever about going into this field or this industry at all, and I’ve been in it my entire adult life now.
Joshua Feinberg:
It’s interesting. So, there was nothing that happened with running around the backyard as a kid with walkie-talkies or anything like that or pretending to be the dispatcher chasing down bad guys as law enforcement or anything like that?
Mike Humphress:
No, you’ve got to remember, in my case, Marconi had just invented the radio. So, there wasn’t that much out there to think about other than — you saw police use them and that kind of stuff. But no, not in my case. I wasn’t looking toward that kind of career.
Joshua Feinberg:
Chas, when you first started out working in wireless communications, what was people’s general perception of
?
Chas Elliott:
Yeah, it was something that, for a lot of people… Especially friends, right? I’m of a younger generation here, so a lot of my friends would immediately go, “People still use those things?” That was kind of the sentiment that we would typically hear. When you remind them that they see it everywhere in law enforcement, and they see it in hospitality and everywhere else, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I guess that does make sense.” You wouldn’t be doing that, but many people thought that technology was obsolete, coming out of the ’80s and ’90s. People remember pagers and things like that, but once cellular took over, there was this kind of perception that two-way radios were no longer around.
Joshua Feinberg:
All right. Mike, what did people think of two-way radios when you were first getting started in the business?
Mike Humphress:
They thought they were just for police and taxi cab companies. Those are the only places that you saw that many. Many businesses did have two-way radios, but they had basic simplex systems covering a small footprint or a small area. They didn’t have mobile to mobile, portable to portable communications that were long distance and effective, because they were just coming into the world of repeaters back then, where they were just becoming very prevalent and had the opportunity for people to use them.
They just thought CB radios were how people communicated, or if you were a police officer, maybe then you had a different kind of system. It was a wildly different time back then. It was a lot more exciting from the standpoint that as you brought the technology to them back then, they had no concept. They didn’t realize that they could talk 40 or 50 miles from one handheld radio to another through a repeater. So, once they saw that, they got fired up, and that was exciting stuff.
As we progressed beyond that into the world that Chas was talking about, people did come to believe that, “Okay, now, two-way radios are passe. They’re dead. They’re over. Now, we’ll just do everything on a cell phone.” And I think that thought process is still prevalent today, right?
Joshua Feinberg:
Yeah. When I think of even just the applications, we talk from time to time about hospitality entertainment; I can’t imagine a scenario where you go to get seated at a large restaurant, how they logistically would handle knowing whether a table is open and where to move someone if they complain about not liking the first table. Or an angry customer, trying to track down a manager because the meal is late, or going to a big sporting event. How would dozens or hundreds of security personnel be able to communicate in real-time if there was an emergency or just someone misbehaving that needed some kind of attention? So, yeah, those situations seem to be very much out there.
And then, I think back to… I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. I don’t recall a time when you would see police, emergency, fire, and first aid squad personnel doing their jobs without that. I guess there must have been a time going back probably 20, 30, 40 years before that, but it seemed like it was always there, and people, even back then, were buying CBs just like a hobby, right? Back when bag phones were outrageously expensive, and it was an enormous status symbol just to pull up in front of someone’s house or office and call them from the car.
Mike Humphress:
It was awesome. Yeah. Absolutely.
The Evolution of Two-Way Radios
Joshua Feinberg:
How have you seen the two-way radios evolve over the course of your career, Chas?
Chas Elliott:
When I was first coming in, as I said before, there was this kind of transition from analog to digital technology. When that started to happen, everything became a little more data-centric. So, when I first started, there were analog, voice-only, two-way radios. You picked up a radio, you keyed up and pushed the push-to-talk button, and you talked, and the other person listened on the other side. But aside from that, there wasn’t much to it, more than just voice. Since then, it’s evolved quite a bit into now data, video, analytics, triggers, being able to put applications now on your radios. All of these different things that have made it — kind of converged all the technologies. The digital capability allowed users to get more out of their device than just push-to-talk and release-to-listen.
Joshua Feinberg:
How about you, Mike? What have you observed happened as you’ve seen two-way radios evolve over the past decade or two?
Mike Humphress:
Well, yeah. Yeah. Going back a little bit before the analog to digital conversion, when you think back to when I first started selling two-way radios, it was a party-line environment. People not only could monitor, but you also had to monitor before you could use a frequency before you could key up because it was FCC regulation that mandated that so you didn’t interfere with somebody or walk on them. So, anything that you communicated could and was heard by other people. And as you progressed technologically and moved from the community repeater environment into trunking, then things began to start getting better from the standpoint of capability, feature sets, privacy, and all those other things. So, now, you could use a concept that the telephone company came up with when they used trunk lines to get telephone service to everybody that was now private phone lines.
And then from there, you moved into the world of… really, Nextel came into existence, and then you had an all-in-one device that was a pager, a cell phone type of device, and a two-way radio. That expanded the marketplace even more. Oddly enough, before it went away, many businesses were asking for the “beep beep,” which they called the dispatch side of a Nextel unit rather than the telephony side of it because they realized the fact that instantaneous push-to-talk communications were still more valuable to them than being able to make a phone call, even on that same device.
Then, of course, it went away, and that left people with what they thought was only one choice: to go with smartphones or cell phones as a method for communicating in a particularly wide area. But then, with the advent of what Chas was talking about when two-way radio finally caught up with much of the rest of the world, it went digital. It changed the scope of everything because not only do you still have that integration of all those different technologies now that can come together, you still have the most core and essential part of this whole thing, which is instantaneous communication with the individual you want to communicate with by the push of a button, which is still probably the hallmark of land mobile radio or two-way radio. But now, it’s got all this other cool stuff with it too, so it’s been an incredible, amazing journey to watch the evolution of these technologies and what it brings to the market.
Joshua Feinberg:
Do you see it as a moment in time, or a particular year, where the switch was flipped from analog to digital, where most of the devices, most of the market share, most of the interests seem to move? Was there a particular year or a range of years?
Chas Elliott:
I mean, for me, it was the late 2000s, just before 2010 or so, that we started to see a lot of adoption into the digital market. Specifically, some FCC regulations came out around 2011 that drove many users to transition from really old analog voices to newer digital technologies. But, as a whole, that’s really where I started to see that. It was probably that 2007 to 2011 type of timeframe.
Joshua Feinberg:
Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting about that three or four-year window is that in 2007, the original iPhone came out. I think in 2010 or 2011 was the first iPad. The US was going through a massive housing market-induced recession in 2008, 2009. So, people were looking to cut expenses and get more creative about getting more done with less. And then, the backdrop of all of this, accelerating the change over in wireless from analog to digital.
Mike Humphress:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Innovation in Wireless Communications
Joshua Feinberg:
So, that makes a lot of sense. Are there any other factors that you see driving innovation in wireless communications in the last ten years, in the last one year, five years? When people ask you, what they should be thinking about, what are the macro trends behind all of this, what do you impart most of that to?
Chas Elliott:
For me, I don’t look at it from a… The technology, as a whole, is evolving so fast, not just in the wireless communications industry, but with everything. It’s certainly driving a lot of this innovation and need from folks to… It used to be that way back when you could communicate on-premise at one office and be happy with that. And then, maybe you had ten offices around the country, but there wasn’t much need for all ten of those offices around the country to talk to each other. As economies scale up and with everything else involved, there are many businesses, even public safety users, that we work with now that have centralized, maybe their dispatch operations, for example. So, they may have ten facilities around the country, but they want to dispatch them out of one call center. Lots of different things have needs that have driven the need for innovation, and with IP ethernet-type technology, that’s really… Having networks available all across the country and the world has allowed the wireless communication industry to expand and ultimately fulfill the needs of these various users.
Joshua Feinberg:
Do you figure the centralization of resources is a big part of that?
Chas Elliott:
Yeah, absolutely.
Joshua Feinberg:
It’s remarkable because, at the same time in that same 10-year period, you have a massive shift in how IT was being purchased, where all of a sudden, the consumerization of IT, SaaS, and cloud computing was allowing lines of business managers, marketing, finance, and engineering to have their own IT budgets. All this arm-wrestling going on about centralized and decentralized, and yet, the momentum was going in the other direction on wireless.
Mike Humphress:
Well, I think our industry is being wildly affected by cloud-based technology. It’s wildly affected by the internet of things and artificial intelligence. All of those things are coming to bear on everything from simple voice communications through to all the other components of what we have now that are available in our industry today, whether it’s video, whether it’s data, whether it’s pure voice. All of those things are impacted and affected by these technological advances in a significant way. In this day and age, you have to be aware of all of those solutions and technologies to deliver the right kind of solution to your customer.
Joshua Feinberg:
With that in mind, for keeping tabs on what’s driving innovation, what kind of listening posts do you see yourself paying attention to? What kind of listening posts, sources of ideas do you think product managers at Motorola Solutions sit around and listen to stay a few steps ahead of where their demand will be, 1, 3, 5 years out from now?
Chas Elliott:
I think one of the biggest things we do is Voice of the Customer sessions. I mean, just sitting down with the customers and trying to understand, “What operational challenges do you have today, and how can we help improve upon those?” and “If you could solve any issue that would help you with your business or your response time or whatever the question is, even if you don’t think it’s related to a two-way radio device, what are those issues? Do you have any recommendations on how those potentially could be solved?”
Ultimately, for Motorola, their chief technology officer, that’s a big part of it. We work hand in hand with them to ensure that we’re getting that field-level feedback, that it’s not just designed from somebody in a cubicle somewhere who has never seen the real-world operation. What we do, in a lot of cases, is mission-critical. It’s operations-critical. We need to ensure that the devices we’re giving our customers provide value to them.
Joshua Feinberg:
With a lot of the technology entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with over the years, especially on smaller companies, a lot of times you’re training the sales team to listen for cues of, “What’s the missing feature?” that’s preventing them from being comfortable, moving forward with a significant initiative, and a lot of times the thought processes to be able to loop that back into the product or the executive team and say, “Hey, we have this customer that’s a large deal. They said they have three or four buddies and similar companies that would also be in.” Do you see any of that happening in your sales processes?
Chas Elliott:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the market drives innovation, right? And having a business case for something even… It’s different. We serve multiple vertical markets. We have a whole range of suites of products, everything from hardware to software.
You have to have your finger on the pulse of what the customer is looking for to help drive the value to them, which ultimately makes their decision-making process a lot smoother.
Mike Humphress:
We’ve all learned many lessons from Motorola’s mistakes that they made in the cellular world by not doing just that. They didn’t listen. They didn’t keep their finger on the pulse, and it cost them dearly in that part of the world, and I think that we all learned some lessons from that. The customer is a huge listening post, but I think you also have to remain very engaged technologically in things that… You can’t stay in your little voice cocoon and focus only on that particular piece of it. You have to be aware of advances taking place and other technologies because they will merge and converge at some point. So, we just have to stay on top of it regularly.
Misconceptions About Two-Way Radios
Joshua Feinberg:
Another area that I wanted to ask you both about was misconceptions that people have about two-way radios. Why don’t we start with you on that first, Mike? What do you feel is the biggest misconception that potential customers have about two-way radios that you come across in the field?
Mike Humphress:
I think that it conjures an image of buggy whips when they think of two-way radios, that it is an archaic, outdated technology that… Yeah, we used to use those back in the ’90s, but now that we have all of the cool features and gadgets that go along with smart technology and smartphones in general, they have been replaced, even up to and including a belief that push-to-talk over cellular has replaced two-way radio.
It’s a massive misconception, unfortunately. It’s been permeated by people that invest in carrier communications and have a vested interest in making sure that people continue to subscribe to those services. To some extent, it’s this industry’s fault for not doing a better job of communicating what I call the solution relevance of the land mobile radio piece of the equation.
When you see people using the wrong tool for the job, it bothers me greatly to see that happen because that tells me that we haven’t gotten the message out to the marketplace. We joke about this all the time. This is not your father’s two-way radio, right? It has changed. It has evolved. It is now a very robust and comprehensive device that can do everything. I think that there’s a huge misconception out there around that.
Joshua Feinberg:
I wonder to what extent that consumer media plays a role in fueling that misconception? I think about it like when I’m watching a basketball game or football game or a baseball game; you can’t go more than one or two commercial breaks without seeing an ad from a carrier or Apple’s latest iPhone. Do you think that’s creating part of the challenge because it’s going direct to the consumer with the messaging? Do you focus more on business to business, business to government, or mid-market enterprise?
Mike Humphress:
I’m going to go a step further and talk about Motorola, as a company, as an example, does not have the product placement they used to have. When you see a law enforcement show on television, it’s not unusual to see them talking on a cell phone, from the detective back to another detective, rather than a two-way radio. You’ll see people using smartphones and applications that, historically, when you watch the TV show, they were using two way-radios. So, I think it’s not just the advertisements in between. I think it’s the actual shows themselves that, in many cases, are giving people the impression that that’s the technology you use now.
Joshua Feinberg:
That’s interesting. So, when you think about a TV show or a movie going to great pains, look at something like Grey’s Anatomy. They must just spend a small fortune every year to consult with doctors to make sure that their programming accurately represents what goes on in a hospital, especially what we went through in the last year or so. So on police shows like CSI or something like that, they’re not accurately representing the tools that the detectives would use out in the field?
Mike Humphress:
Correct.
Joshua Feinberg:
Interesting.
Mike Humphress:
What’s your thought on that, Chas? Do you see that?
Chas Elliott:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, when I first started in the business, even in the NFL, you would see the big NFL headsets, and they would have Motorola branded in giant letters over them. Occasionally, you’ll see it, but for the most part, you don’t see that. You see that the user is wearing a headset, but you don’t know what’s on the other end of it, right? Is it a two-way radio on the other end? In almost all cases, it is. It’s just not branded the way that it used to be. From a perception standpoint, many folks probably think there is some form of a cell phone or something else on the other end.
Mike Humphress:
True.
The Future of Two-Way Radios
Joshua Feinberg:
Interesting. Now that we’ve gotten an idea of how two-way radios have evolved over the years and what’s driving most of the innovation and some of the biggest misconceptions, where are we headed next? What’s going on in the industry right now? Thinking ahead over the next, say, two or three years, what does the future of two-way radios look like?
Chas Elliott:
In my opinion, part of what we’re seeing and continuing to see is more data-centric devices and being able to pass a lot more bandwidth from a video perspective, having more analytics, and things of that nature. A big part of what we’re seeing is a push to private LTE. There’s a lot of users that for years would use a two-way radio voice system. They put a repeater in on-premise to be able to talk on that two-way radio system. They also have a Wi-Fi system. Take a hotel, for example. They have a Wi-Fi system that any of the guests can be on as a public system. And they have a private system for maybe their users, like housekeeping, facilities, maintenance, things of that nature.
The push to private LTE brings more bandwidth and more control security as cybersecurity becomes more and more paramount with all these data-centric applications. Now, there’s a big push to put private LTE in facilities so that you can have a device with a SIM card in it, and that’s what controls whether or not it connects. So now I don’t have to worry about Joshua coming on to my internal network. As long as he doesn’t have that SIM card in his device and it’s not authorized, then he wouldn’t be able to get onto my network.
So, there’s almost the convergence of the public cellular carriers with the control and the security of your own private LMR or land mobile radio system. There’s a convergence of those two technologies. People don’t have complete trust in cellular because they can’t control their destiny, but on the other hand, with a traditional LMR system, you need to be able to complement that with data. It used to be that a little bit of data, sending some text messages or a work ticket to a person in the field, was about all you needed to do. Now, we need to pass video, and we need to pass a lot more large files. To do that, we need the bandwidth of LTE. So, there’s this convergence right now of the wireless communications industry.
Joshua Feinberg:
I’m sure there’s a challenge with people’s expectations around that because so many of the carriers have been — gosh, got to be three, four, five years already — talking about robust mobile broadband and how much they allow you to stream with caps and everything. Do you see that the commercial side, the public safety side, of wireless communications has largely been able to keep up with those perceptions of what people are expecting based on what they see on cellular?
Chas Elliott:
I think on the public safety side of the house, there’s still a reason why everybody carries a two-way radio and not necessarily a cell phone, right? When it comes to mission-critical push-to-talk, you have cellular carriers out there trying to build to that standard. Still, it’s just not quite there yet—from the land mobile radio perspective, just being able to control that with county-owned towers and equipment and things of that nature, especially here in Florida. It’s not uncommon to have a hurricane or five come through in the course of 30, 60 days. When that happens, you need to control the response from your public safety and first responders. Right now, the comfort level isn’t there with a cellular carrier. They may have a two-hour battery backup or something like that, but at the end of the day, if you’re without power for 72 hours or more, you still have first responders on the street that need to be responding to incidents. And not having communication in this day and age, it’s a recipe for disaster there.
Joshua Feinberg:
Yeah. I guess it’s a combination of the typical things that the meteorologists look at, how big the storm was, how populated the area was, and the intensity and forward speed. All of that impacts just how much damage it does with power lines and cell towers being down.
Chas Elliott:
Exactly.
Mike Humphress:
On the commercial side of the house, you look at the fact that the carriers aren’t really at a point where they can deliver the same kind of service to public safety. On the commercial side, it’s the other way around. I think the land mobile radio industry is catching up with the carrier-based smartphone types of things. When you look at multifunctional devices now that have all of the — you can go to the Google Play Store and get the same apps on your device, that is also your two-way radio, that you can also watch video on from your different camera devices, there is a barcode scanner; it does everything in one single device now. But it does it with the durability and ruggedness and with all of the things that you come to expect out of a good quality land mobile radio.
So now, when you start putting all that into the equation, I think LMR is catching up with the smartphone world with highly competitive offerings and more functional in a business environment and the ruggedized environment that most businesses operate in. That is probably going to trump a lot of the smartphone applications, in my opinion.
Joshua Feinberg:
Yeah. The durability and ruggedness, if you think about the typical person that has a smashed smartphone screen —
Mike Humphress:
Yeah. A lot of people have smashed smartphone screens.
Joshua Feinberg:
There’s a whole industry of retail stores that just specialize in fixing the glass and a whole industry of third-party protectors, screen protectors, and everything. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Chas, if anyone else is watching this, listening to this, reading about this episode, and they have any questions, what’s the best way for them to reach out to one or both of you?
Chas Elliott:
If you wanted to reach out to our office, the office number is 1-800-226-7470. You can ask for me directly.
Joshua Feinberg:
That’s great. We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes as well. But it’s been great talking with you both today, all about how far wireless communications has come, how wireless communications today is very different than it was a couple of decades ago, how it is not your father’s two-way radio, some of the big misconceptions that people have about two-way radios, and how that shapes the perception of where we’re all headed next. So, you’ve been listening to the Wireless Communications Explained Podcast. Take care now. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Chas.
Mike Humphress:
Thank you, Joshua.
Chas Elliott:
Thank you.
