John Deere – POTs and PANs

In a recent press release, John Deere announced an agreement with Starlink to provide broadband for smart farm equipment in areas where cellular coverage is not strong enough. Anybody familiar with rural America understands that there are gigantic holes in cellular coverage, so this arrangement puts Starlink in a strong position with farmers.

The decision means that John Deer will include a Starlink receiver in smart farm equipment along with a 4G LTE receiver. This technology will be available for both new and older Deere machines. They expect the satellite connectivity to be effective in the second half of 2024.

John Deere says that smart machines will first try to connect to LTE and then automatically roll over to Starlink as needed. This means that a farmer with a large property might be connected to LTE on one end of the property and to Starlink on the other. Today, the lack of 4G coverage makes it hard for this farmer to take full advantage of precision agriculture.

The press release doesn’t explain how farmers pay for the wireless broadband. My guess is that farmers must subscribe to the local cellular carrier and connect in the John Deere app. I envision that John Deere is paying for the satellite broadband and will bill farmers for the usage. A farmer doesn’t need connectivity all year long, just in those months when they are working in the fields.

The John Deere press release cites a lot of advantages to this new arrangement. They say that this finally enables full connectivity for all smart machines made by the company. Deere says that the broadband connection will enable technologies like autonomy, real-time data sharing, remote diagnostics, and machine-to-machine communications.

John Deere was recently recognized for its innovations with smart agriculture when it was awarded an honoree designation at the CES Innovation Awards this year. Smart farming equipment already contains a lot of technology. Machines are equipped with cameras and sensors that transmit information to John Deere through the AWS cloud. Critical data is processed in real time and sent back to farmers. Deere also provides mountains of analytical data on issues like the need for watering and fertilizing fields in specific locations.

Having guaranteed bandwidth will enable another big goal for John Deere. The company already has a few applications where smart machines can do tasks like plow and till field with no human driver. Deere has the goal to fully automate all steps of smart farming like tillage, planting, fertilizing and harvesting by 2030.

This arrangement does not solve the broadband needs for the farm operations outside of the smart machines. In my experience, farmers engaged in smart farming want as much broadband as they can get for their homes and farm offices. Many farmers already subscribe to Starlink, but they are the first in line to move to FWA cellular broadband or fiber when it becomes available at their location.

My consulting firm interviews a lot of farmers every year. One of the most interesting things we hear repeatedly is that farmers today often feel like they are IT guys as much as they are farmers. They utilize a lot of software to manage many aspects of the modern farming business.

There is an interesting fight currently at the US Patent Office that involves all of us in the telecom industry. The argument is over the right of ownership of the software that comes along these days with almost any type of electronics. The particular fight is between John Deere and tractor owners, but the fight is a precedent for similar software anywhere.

John Deere is arguing that, while a farmer may buy one of their expensive tractors, John Deere still owns the software that operates the tractor. When a farmer buys a tractor they must agree to the terms of the software license, just like we all agree with similar licenses and terms of service all of the time. The John Deere software license isn’t unusual, but what irks farmers is that it requires them to use John Deere authorized maintenance and parts for the term of the software license (which is seemingly forever).

The fight came to a head when some farmers experienced problems with tractors during harvest season and were unable to get authorized repair in a timely manner. Being resourceful they found alternatives and there is now a small black market for software that can replace or patch the John Deere software. But John Deere is attacking farmers that use alternate software saying they are violating the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which prohibits the bypassing of copyrighted locks on content. They argue that farmers have no right to open or modify the software on the tractors which remains the property of John Deere. The Patent Office is siding with John Deere.

This is not a unique fight for farmers and the owners of many electronics companies are taking the same approach. For example all of the major car manufacturers except Tesla have taken the same position. Apple has long taken this position with its iPhone.

So how does this impact the telecom industry? First, it seems like most sophisticated electronics we buy these days come with a separate software license agreement that must be executed as part of a purchase. So manufacturers of most of the gear you buy still think they own the proprietary software that runs your equipment. And many of them charge you yearly after buying electronics to ‘maintain’ that software. In our industry this is a huge high margin business for the manufacturers because telcos and ISPs get almost nothing in return for these annual software license fees.

I don’t think I have a client who isn’t still operating some older electronics. This may be older Cisco routers that keep chugging along, an old voice switch, or even something major like the electronics operating an entire FTTH network. It’s normal in the telecom industry for manufacturers to stop supporting most electronics within 7 to 10 years of its initial release. But unlike twenty years ago when a lot of electronics didn’t last more then the same 7 – 10 years, the use of integrated chips means that electronics are working a lot longer.

And therein lies the dilemma. Once a vendor stops supporting a technology they literally wash their hands of it – they no longer issue software updates, they stop stocking spare parts. They do everything in their power to get you to upgrade to something newer, even though the older gear might still be working reliably.

But if a telco or ISP makes any tweaks to this older equipment to keep it working – something many ISPs are notorious for – then theoretically anybody doing that has broken the law under the DMCA and could be subject to a fine up to $500,000 and a year in jail, for a first offense.

Of course, we all face this same dilemma at home. Almost everything electronic these days comes with proprietary software and the manufacturers of your PCs, tablets, smartphones, personal assistants, security systems, IoT gear and almost all new appliances probably think that they own the software in your device. And that raises the huge question of what it means these days to buy something, if you don’t really fully own it.

I know many farmers and I think John Deere is making a huge mistake. If another tractor company like Kubota or Massey Ferguson declares that they don’t maintain rights to the software then John Deere could see its market dry up quickly. There is also now a booming market in refurbished farm equipment that pre-dates proprietary software. But this might be a losing battle when almost everything we buy includes software. It’s going to be interesting to see how both the courts and the court of public opinion handle this.

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