 For the three o'clock show, this is Think Tech. As a matter of fact, this is Community Matters. And we're talking with Ed Sun today. He's one of the founders and current leader of the Sun Global Broadband, SGV. Hi Ed, nice to see you smiling face. Loha. So today is how SGV is going to help us in a time of COVID. Help us deal with COVID, help us reopen our economy as and when we can. This is very exciting. Can you give us a little praisey about you and SGV and how it got started and what it is and what you had to do to make it happen? Sure. Thank you for having me today. In fact, it's always a pleasure to see you again. Same here. Sun Global Broadband was the brainchild, believe it or not, of Dr. Fujio Matsuda and a group of us in Hawaii who tried, wanted to build Smart City. We started off by developing relationships with the Japan companies, including the Tokyo Olympics, NTT, KVDI, Japan Homeland. And what we started to do was build out the Waikiki first, because that's where the Japanese love to go. And what we developed was a system, it's a Wi-Fi system that behaves like 4G cellular. And it's totally developed in Hawaii. The team that developed it was more homegrown talent, people from Verifone, some of my friends who work at HP Labs with me, as well as some of the people from Hawaiian Telephone. So it's a local homegrown product. And it's the first in the world for a Wi-Fi system that has mobility up to 40 miles per hour. And we're able to aggregate or connect in with other Wi-Fi networks automatically, seamlessly, using a cloud-based system. So- Can I stop you there for a minute? What do you mean move at 40 miles an hour? I mean, you could have it off a truck broadcasting, off a truck, it moves at 40 miles an hour. Is that what we're talking about? It's a think-of-it-all cellular, except it's all Wi-Fi. And we developed that technology here. It's the first in the world, some of the technology came from NASA, the Mars Lander, and we re-adapted it for Wi-Fi. Wow, that's great. It sounds like you have significant connections with UH, am I right? Yes, we're at the Mono Innovation Center, working with UH Innovation. We're also tied in with the Hawaii High-Tech Development Corporation and DBED. So we're proud to be a local Hawaii company. That's great, that's great. So you alluded to the idea that you've been developing broadband wireless, what have you in pioneering steps in wireless and broadband. And that is important now in the time of COVID. I was mentioning before the show that, I mean, anyone can realize that we're all, we're all doing broadband these days. We're all on computers, we're doing Zoom like you and I are doing right now, where connectivity is the word of the day. And as time goes by, we'll need more of it, more people will get more sophisticated, demand will be greater, demand for speed will be greater, and hopefully the price will come down. And Hawaii will be in good shape to deal with all the people who wanna do virtual conferencing and the like, which is the new paradigm really, and it's gonna stay with us for a long time. So you're well positioned for that, but it sounds like it's more, okay? Can you talk about the more? Yes, yes, absolutely. In fact, we have a short presentation now maybe I can put up the first screen. And what we did was in March, we had to pivot is our business was primarily the Asian and Japanese traveler. So the pivot was, how do we help Hawaii come out of the pandemic so we can restore our normal business? So we had a selfish motivation to save Hawaii. Well, we appreciate that. All of us speaking for the whole state. So I don't know if we're able to put up the slide, but what I wanted to show was what a bubble looks like in Waikiki. And that slide there, okay, is basically what the bubble looks like in Waikiki. So if you can imagine this, Jay, it's a Wi-Fi technology, but we have less than 100 antennas that covers that whole area of Waikiki. If we use normal Wi-Fi technology, it would have been over 2,000 antennas. Yeah. You know, actually, we've been waiting a long time for that. I remember in the early ought years, there was such talk about trying to make Waikiki wireless. Obviously going to cost a lot of money with thousands of nodes all over. But it sounds like you've licked that problem and you can do it on far fewer nodes, yeah. Right, and we're partnered with several hotels because we don't intrude on the hotel. We're only doing outdoor Wi-Fi. Okay, so we work with the hotels and with the industry to marry indoor to outdoor. So where do you hang them? Typically our antennas, well, we're at some of the ABC stores. So Paul Kosasa and ABC have been very supportive. We're also on some of the hotels like the Alohi Lani Hotel, Nualtani Hotel, Waailana Ambassador Hotel, Bank of Hawaii. So our macro access points, Wi-Fi access points can actually get this now. We actually tested it. We connected a cell phone that was at the Hilton Lagoon and the antenna was at the Nualtani Hotel at Kapilani Park, 1.7 miles away. Now, of course there are no tourists right now in Waikiki. So we made a pivot in in late April, okay? And what we did was we contacted all our international partners, Sony, British Telecom, NTT, KDDI, Australia, South Shore. And what we came up with was a world-class way to detect, track and trace people with COVID-19. And it's... Before you go there, I just wanna walk down memory lane for a minute about Tarik Hock. Tarik Hock was also at the Mineral Innovation Center years ago, right here now, but he established a company that was at the front end on something called Mesh Technology. That's right. Each node talked to the node nearby. And so what you had to do was hopscotch the nodes and you could cover an enormous amount of territory. The far ends didn't have to talk to each other. They talked to the mesh. Is that what you're using? No, actually always looks like a cellular network because we invented a macro cell that can reach over a mile away. The issue with mesh, and Tarik was one of the leaders in that area at the time, right? He was with Ned Weldon and others. Yes. So what Tarik built was a mesh network. The issue with mesh is that as you make hops from one at AP to another, number one that in the hop, you would have greater what I would call latency, okay? Which is delay. And you would have greater jitter which is unstableness of the network. So when you use a voice over IP call, jitter is the limiting factor. After two hops, you couldn't make a voice call and have good quality. Streaming, after a hundred millisecond latency, it doesn't work. After the third hop in a mesh network, it wouldn't work. Interesting. And that was a limiting factor of mesh network. Serious. Yeah. And of course, today we're using our phones for over the top, video streaming. I've been watching movies on my phones. We're doing Zoom, right? Which is very jitter sensitive, okay? So all these things that we developed back then was strictly for we're looking up the internet. And that's where the big difference was. Yeah. Okay, I interrupted you. I'm sorry. I want to get back to testing and tracing in COVID which is of course, the order of the day. Yeah. So if we can put up the next slide. I just want to, maybe the next one after that. Yeah. So this is a contagion suite that we adopted from Australia that they use in Singapore. What it does, it has a unique flavor because it actually hides everyone's face. So you cannot see anyone's face which is a rule in what they call FBA hip hop compliance or private health information, right? Okay, you can't reveal anyone when you're doing a health check. So what happened was this system here you can do a fever check. Okay, totally redacted. If someone has a fever, then we'll only unredact that person. And that's a patented feature from this company in Australia. I don't know if you remember way back there was a company called DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation. Oh sure, we had a computer paid by them way back in around 19, oh gee, I want to say 1980 or so believe it or not. So DEC way back when I was a head of HP here, DEC has some of the best scientists in the world working for Ken Olson. And the AI team that worked for DEC developed this technology some 20 years ago. And it was a technology looking for a home. And I think they found it with COVID-19. Well, indeed, a match. And that's the way tech is sometimes. So what happened was they implemented this facial recognition system, but it really doesn't store any images. Our face is stored only as a mosaic, digital. And that ensures privacy. Yeah, and then what they added is behavior analytics. Like the system can actually smell and hear and can detect whether I'm wearing a face mask. It can go forward and backwards so it can see if I touched the surface, if someone comes by and touches that same surface. So it can actually check for social distancing for six feet. It does all this with standard CCTV cameras. So are the cameras in the same place as the nodes, the wireless nodes? Or is it a different structure altogether? And here's the genius. If I have a node that can cover one mile, all of a sudden I can light up all the cameras. Ah, through the node. That's right. So we're not having to try to build out fiber infrastructure like we did for Chinatown, right? Now I can light up all of Chinatown with a few nodes and we can turn on all the IPTV cameras and we can do sensing almost on immediately. Okay, so we're in a time period now where we need automated systems because if I have a contagion disease, you know, if someone can actually make someone else sick, maybe a hundred other people sick, you can't possibly manual track or trace something that grows exponentially. No, and we certainly haven't been able to do that here. Right. The other thing is that most people are confusing some of the terms in the Fusion Lab for Homeland Security. The term tracing and tracking are two distinct things. So tracing means if someone has a contagious disease, we can trace who they might have contaminated or what they might have contaminated, okay? Tracking means tracking that person. A lot of people are saying, well, we're gonna have an app that does tracing, but there's no way to do tracing with an app on someone's personal cell phone. Is it the phone doesn't know, you know, who I came into contact with and what proximity and whether I touched something that they might touch and might touch later, okay? So tracing has to be automated, okay? And it's only done by, you know, you have to use sound, smell, and sight. There is no way to trace it versus that we're using a device. Tracking, however, you can possibly track people, okay? If they're willing to use the COVID-19 setting on their phone. But even then- So it's an opt-in. It's an opt-in. And by law, you can't force someone to use it, okay? Because essentially, once you turn it on, you have to ensure that the database that's collecting the information is HIPAA compliant. Actually, you know, to me, I'm an old-fashioned guy, but I think saving people from getting infected is actually more important than HIPAA in some ways. Yeah, well, I agree with you. But the thing is, if you can do both, that's the ideal. Yeah, that's the ideal. So how does this work together? You want to test and trace. And you want to do it on the same, essentially the same integrated system. That's right. How does that work? How do you integrate those two approaches? So we can integrate in tracking systems with our video, facial, analytic system. And the database would then be seamlessly integrated in with FBI, okay? Or with Interpol. And the reason I throw that out is, I like to use the example of banking. If I want to send large sum of money to another state, I have to go through an exchange. So I want to send a large amount of money to another country and not go to jail. I have to go through a different kind of exchange. Classified and secured information is no different. I'm going to send information on someone's health to track in another state, okay? You have to have it go through a federal database. In our case, it's the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System and the FBI. If I want to send that data to Japan, okay? Japan screens it through NCIC and Interpol. The systems that the company I was with before, Advanced Technology Systems, what we built for DHS was the exchange system for federal, state, and inter-country links for the exchange of information. And I think if we're going to do tracking, we want to track people coming in and people going out. Can we put up the next slide? There's another slide there. And I think it shows this one here. And I love to show the red and the orange here because I think there's a misconception of people in Hawaii saying, we want the Japanese to come back. But whether this slide is by NTT working with San Global Banda. But the way we need to consider this is there is a one-way trip in the red from the Japanese coming here. There is a one-way trip for the Japanese going back, which is in the orange. It's not a round trip. One of the greatest inhibitors I've heard yesterday as I was listening to U.H. Shardless School talk about reopening for travel. You said the inhibitor is not people coming here with a 32-day or 72-hour test. The issue is when they go back to Japan, they're still quarantined for 14 days. Because we don't have a policy here, okay, on tracking, tracing, and detection that allows the Japanese to feel safe when their people come home. We could test them here before they get on the plane. I mean, leaving a departure test. We're not doing that now, yeah. We should do that. And then information should be forwarded to Japan via Nlets, FBI, and Interpol for the land. Okay, so it's not only the test, but how we share the information. Well, you say forwarded. You know, I'm wondering, ThinkTek is studying Dropbox lately as a potential. And all this data lives online, but you have little icons on your local machine that tell you that it is online. So you know it's there and you can call it up if you want. Wouldn't it be better to put this data online so that you put it online here. It's an international server somewhere. And the Japanese can pick it up in the same way that Dropbox picks it up. And they'll be able to check on every passenger that way. Yeah, so the Fusion Data Center or the Homeland Security Data Center is the Dropbox, so to speak, for all of that, for Interpol. The one thing that's interesting about classified data or secured data is there's different rules like when I did work for Asian Development Bank, there's different security measurements for financial. When I did work for MedStar, the Homeland, there's different rules for HIPAA. When I did work with, you know, federally stuff, okay? There's different secret laws for FBI and CIA. You cannot just merge data together. There are rules and policies about what data can be mixed with other data, who can view it, and how long you can keep it there, and how it's used, okay? The HLS, if you made me king of the universe, or potentially, you know, you and I would both be sort of joint kings of the universe. We wouldn't have this kind of disparity. We'd have a uniform rules. That's right. Yeah. So, interesting enough, the system exists. So, there's a few of us, a few people like me running around that. So, we remember back to 2002, when we developed all of this in the Delta way. And we're now trying to make it more public so that we can refresh people's minds about what is available, okay? Believe it or not, when we went to SARS, H1N1, and anthrax, back in 2003 and 2004, the systems exist that can do these things. Testing and tracking. All these systems were developed back then. You know, it's just a matter of, a lot of it was kind of muckballed, right? That's very tragic, actually. And that, you know, that you could not make the assumption back then. There would never be another, what is it, H1N1 or H1N5, whatever it was back then. You could not make that assumption. We know that as a matter of the planet and the biochemistry of the planet, there are always going to be viruses and pandemics will occur from time to time, sorry. So, we need to have systems in place and we can't let them, you know, we can't let them go on the back shelf and become obsolete. This is a big problem, even in the last 20 years that we've done that, we have had our head in the sand, yeah. So, interesting enough, okay. Everything I'm saying, before you said, well, Ed, that's brilliant. I didn't invent all these things. I just have a good memory. That means you're getting older, Ed. You know, I just qualified for Medicare, Jay. Got it. The secret is out. I still have black hair, but I do remember the test, okay? And I still love the technology. So, one of the things we wanted to do today was just make people aware that these things exist, okay? Well, Dr. Matsuda and I has a vision for creating smart city. We've pivoted it now to allow it to be, you know, a way to get us pretty much out of hiding, okay, into a controlled environment that we can deal with a pandemic and we can have a sustainable tourist industry, okay? And it's all about building systems that people trust, okay? No matter what we say, if we look like the systems can't be trusted, no one's gonna rely on it. Yeah, so we not only have to build it, but we have to build excellent versions of it. We not only have to build and, you know, excellent versions, but we have to deploy them and we have to show the world they work and then we have to publicize the fact that we have them. And then everybody who's potentially a tourist to come to Hawaii will say, hmm, Hawaii, safe place. They really care about keeping people safe. You know, right now we're not in bad shape. I mean, they're coming, but you know what? We're never gonna get to, you know, whatever we used to have 10,000 a day, 10 million a year, I don't know the number, but the point is we have a long way to go before we build that kind of confidence in the world of travelers. And this is part of it. What you're talking about is definitely center of building that kind of credibility. Can we put up the next slide and kind of a slide that I think kind of wraps it up. Everything that's there, we can do today. Okay. The good thing is I've adopted these technologies from all over the world and it's available now. You just have to get implement, okay? And we have to get, of course, government support. Yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, let's assume that this is an excellent system that has both testing and tracking. And that, you know, it has a high level of accuracy and it's easy to operate and it would do what it is designed to do. And so the question then is, how do you deploy it? Especially, you know, now when we have no money. How do you deploy it? I mean, if I made you King of the Universe again, there's something about you, I don't know what it is. You know, how would you deploy this so that you get the maximum benefit out of it over a time long enough to show the world that we can do this sort of technology? The good thing is we looked at it from the platform up. So we have the platform in Waikiki and we can easily extend that platform to the airport. So I've already invested over $2 million to build Waikiki. Okay, that's our group. And we can extend it to the airport for nominal amount. Then we would have a complete tracking bubble from the AMA lounge or JAL lounge all the way to Waikiki. 100% tracking and tracing. Then we can implement this 50 CCTV cameras in Waikiki. Okay, that's used by HPD and it was put in there by the Waikiki ambassadors. We can re-utilize that. And then all of the hotels have CCTV cameras. So we're re-utilizing assets. Okay, then we have to implement the facial recognition software and the servers. And software of course, we can work out licensing agreements and it's easy to turn on. So it's just the servers for the facial analysis. So actually, interesting enough, almost all of it is in place. It just has to be re-utilized. So what would that take? I mean, I guess everybody always assumes that you can't do a project like this unless you get government involved, which I think sometimes is an overstatement. Sometimes you actually don't need to get government involved and you don't want to even ask them. But what kind of support would you have to have? Some government funding on this? Would you have to have permissions and permits and the like? What would you need in order to deploy the system? Well, we would need some funding to design and link everything together. The good thing is a lot of the hard costs are already in place. The other good thing is to get this Wi-Fi is unlicensed. And all the hotels already have Wi-Fi. We put in all the outdoor Wi-Fi. We just have to link them together and then we'll re-utilize existing CCTV cameras. We have to, of course, buy some additional ones in case their aged equipment need to be updated. But all of this is within the capability of the government, okay, working with the private sector. It would be a private, public partnership. Yeah, and as well as it should be. And it would be far better than what they've been doing because my understanding is what they've been doing is making telephone calls and writing it on a yellow pad. And you really need a better database system, a better hardware software and all to do this right. But let me ask you, we only have a minute left and I do want to ask so we can sort of tie this knot here. Let's assume that it's in place. Let's assume that it does what you want and everybody is on board, so to speak. Query exactly how would testing tracing at this level of sophistication reduce the number of cases, reduce the risk of contagion? The idea is there's only one way to really contain a contagion is to have a vaccination, okay? But beyond that, the ability to detect okay is key because, and it has to be automated. The key thing is if we can properly track and trace, then we can predict where the hotspots will be. We'll never totally be able to contain 100%, okay? But we at least can predict the hotspots and that is a controllable environment. So now that you know where a given hotspot is, according to the software and hardware that we're talking about and I suppose there's predictive analysis involved in there and GPS kind of maps and identify the thing geographically. What then do you do? I know this is not part of the system but it is part of the follow up on the system. What do you do in order to limit the contagion? So what happens is, believe it or not, there was a system called HLS RAM, Homeland Security, Response Action Model. Between 2002, 2008, all of us conducted actually training and input sessions in every state. There's 40 fusion centers today that have this and all of the predictive analysis and all of the responses are already pre-programmed into the fusion centers. So every community has their own response action, okay? Now we can advise based on me, I actually did about 10 of these across the US and in Asia with US embassies. But the government can decide the best response model for their community and that's a command and control issue. So give me an example of something that would be in that command and control. Recognizing that would be different from community to community. Right, okay, so say there's a group of people that have COVID-19, our goal would then be to determine, trace backwards and find out where the origin was, okay? From that origin, we can then determine whether it was created internally, whether it's a resident, whether it was a traveler from another state or another country. And then we can then put in regulations and policies of how to deal with it per state or per country or per community, okay? The other thing too is it also helps us determine where to put our resources. We have only so many critical care people, where would we put them, okay? And all those things allow us to basically determine that from jumping backwards in time and then jumping forwards in time. And you need an analytic system to do that. It's almost a gaming engine. Yeah. And that's what we built for the gaming engine. But we have the technology, we have the gaming technology, we have the wireless technology, we have the sensors, the cameras technology, we have all of this and we have the software and we should learn by what you guys did before. We should take that forward and apply it now. And this problem hasn't gone away. It's not likely to go away. In fact, even if it does go away, it's likely to come back at some point in the future. So this kind of technology could be very valuable for the state, at least the state, maybe beyond the state, maybe into other areas, Asia and the mainland and so forth. Hey, Jay, if we can pull this off, my kids who are in their 30s, they'll be able to say, hey, dad, you actually knew something from way back. Well, I hope if you pull this off, Ed, that you'll still talk to me. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to your help, actually. Well, keep working on it, man. Yeah. And good luck with it. Ed's son of SGB, that's son global broadband with great plans and great technology. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to seeing you develop it here. Thanks so much, Ed. Very good. Aloha.