Welcome to episode 153 of the GT on 5g. It's the latest insights scoop on everything 5g. We covered six topics in about 20 minutes, and it's brought to you by more insights and strategy. I'm will Townsend, and join me again. For the second time this week as fellow analyst ancho sag. Let's get started with my first topic, and I wanna talk about N T And News broke this week that they completed a successful demo towards 6g, and so the details are.

That N t and researchers with the Tokyo Institute of Technology announced a successful demonstration of a phased array transmitter module to enable instantaneous ultrahigh capacity data transmission to mobile receivers. And this is actually involved beam forming in the 300 gigahertz band. Which many expect will be utilized for future 6G systems as well as terahertz.

Again, you know this is the G2 on 5g, but we often, bring 6G into the, to the discussion and hey, I don't, I used to think that, we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because we're still, we're not even halfway through 5G deployments and standalone and that sort of thing.

But hey, I think anything that can be done, as long as it doesn't distract from, the challenge at hand getting, getting 5G fully deployed is probably a good thing. And in fact, on that note you've either published or you're about to publish, A very interesting article with an interesting title.

Why are you calling it? Why does 5G suck today? Or something like that. 

It's going to be a paper with an article that, that kind of summarizes it. Okay. But it's gonna be, I think the article probably be called Why You probably Think 5G Sucks right now. 

Okay. I love it. I love that headline, man.

But yeah, I didn't know where you were at on it. I know. It's, it looked, I've, I, you shared it with me and I think it's gonna be, It's gonna be very compelling because you go very deep into the tech and, there are, there, there are more explanations for that, versus just the fact that we haven't, fully achieved standalone ubiquitously around the world.

But do you wanna share a little preview or do you wanna wait and not steal the thunder? I'm, 

it's too long to Summarize in any form on this podcast and keep it under 30 minutes okay. I'll say that title should be enough of a teaser, but I go through all the reasons why the state of 5G is what it is today and why people are disappointed and have the right to be.

Yeah. Cool. Let's move to your first topic and you want to talk about Huawei and are they getting back into the 5G game? 

Yeah, so this was Kickstarted by Reuters about a week ago. And it's slowly filtered through the industry. And this has been one of those things where some people, with knowledge have said that they believe that Huawei will go back to using their own high silicon chips.

That will be manufactured by S M I C or ic which is the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer. And it's unclear exactly what chips those will be and what products will run them. But this would actually get Huawei back into the 5G space because for the last few years now, they've been running 4G chip sets by Qualcomm.

And they are, not using the latest and greatest. And that has, I believe, affected their sales globally as well as their competitiveness at home against the other Chinese vendors that do not have restrictions like Z t e, like Xiaomi like one plus opo, like Vivo, so literally everybody else.

Yeah, this might give them an opportunity to be more competitive at home and even maybe abroad. But it's unclear whether those chips will actually be competitive and whether this rumor actually will even come to fruition. It's just an interesting thing because Huawei has, in the past, been a pretty big player in the space and I'm seeing them gearing up again in terms of their rhetoric and spending and trying to get back into the market in a way that they can.

Yeah, the entity listing or listing, whatever you wanna call it, has certainly throttled, not only their 5G device. Product productization, but also their infrastructure as well. And for our viewers and listeners that are not familiar with high silicon, that is Huawei's design arm.

So Huawei does not manufacture, any of its its own chips. But it has design capabilities and it's used outside sources in the past, like T S M C to produce that. But obviously now on the entity listing, they've been able, unable, to engage, with anyone other than, someone internally to, to China.

And there's, there've always been rumors that, could or would Huawei. Basically vertical vertically integrate and, but the investment required and the cap and the, just the knowledge to produce semiconductors, it it's a very high bar. And unlikely that, that would ever happen.

But, they, they have in the past Huawei with its design capabilities, have done some pretty interesting things with their Karen chip set, which is an AI chip set. And those were integrated into some of their flagship devices and did some really interesting things like can't, could, over time learn.

Sort of the usage, behavior, if your client, client email intensive or if you're browser intensive. And then shift the performance to optimize around, the actual usage. And so it'll be interesting, to see if, these rumors come to fruition and what comes of it.

And if it allows Huawei, to your point to have access to 5G chip sets. To make it more competitive, because I think you've talked about that on prior podcasts, having, 4G devices just isn't competitive given the market is moving, obviously towards 5g. But with that said let's move to my second topic and I wanna talk about 5G Americas.

And they released a recent update on 5G non-terrestrial networks. And this is a subject that, we've talked about low earth orbit satellite and that sort of thing. And so 5G Americas they're a consortium that's focused on promoting the deployment of 5G in the Americas just based on their name.

And this report, I'd encourage, our viewers and listeners to go hit 5G americas.org. You can download the paper. There's also a blog that's attached to it, but it's discussing that, given, you know where we're at, we're seeing lots of momentum, which is no surprise around an ntn.

You and I have talked about Media tech and Qualcomm, supporting connectivity with the chips that, that they're providing for end devices as well. And so I took a chance, or took an opportunity to run through this and, 5G Americas has done a pretty good job and sort of summarizing where things are at and where things are moving.

You and I are obviously very close to Chris Pearson and the team there, and again, I, I don't know if you caught this, but I would encourage our viewers and listeners to, to give that a read. 

I did glance over it but I didn't really see anything that particularly changed my views on ntn.

And I think maybe just one of those pieces that gets. More education out there for the markets. Yeah. So people understand, what the horizons are like and what the reality is in terms of performance and coverage. And I think maybe reiterating that this is not something that will replace cellular networks.

No. Cause a lot of people, that's like the first question they ask and I think it's important to address that upfront. 

No, you're absolutely right. And I attempted to educate the market when I did a Forbes article several weeks ago just around the space race, and, Talked about, some discussions I had with a s t space mobile, and then, just the publicly, available information with starlink and how each of those companies are working with with different carriers, T-Mobile with starlink and a S t Space Mobile with at and t.

And by the way, I've had a lot of follow up to that article and, lots of folks asking me when. I'll be writing a follow up and I'm hoping that the timing will be sometime next month to be determined. But just stay tuned there to all of my newly found friends in the Twitterverse.

But let's move to your second topic and you wanna talk about the C I S A and N S A issuing guidance around strengthening 5G network, slicing against threats. Yeah, so 

this is actually a second industry paper that they're releasing. And it's specifically centered around network slicing. Network slicing is a feature that's only possible when you have a standalone network.

So this is something that clearly is focused on future applications using standalone. And I also believe that this is important because, Private networks are gonna use standalone and have these network slices deployed for different applications. So I think network slicing is gonna become a much more popular topic than just you and I talking about it.

But I think this is important because they talk about, threats, network slicing security guidance for 5G cloud infrastructure threats to 5G infrastructure and open radio access network security. So they're talking about open ran, they're talking about, 5G cloud.

Yeah. But ultimately all these components help you build a network slice. And I think that they just want, defense contractors and the government. To understand the different types of things that they need to consider. There's the parts that I see here are the, they talk about potential threats of 5G network slicing.

And then they have a three, actually they have a four parter when it comes to security cloud, security guidance on 5G cloud infrastructure. They do prevent and detect. Secure and isolate data protection and ensure integrity of cloud infrastructure. So this is very much like a deep yeah, infrastructure kind of talk.

But it's just interesting to see that they. Are explaining what a network slice is and what the use cases are, and then explaining, if you're using this is, these are the security cons, constraints you might want to consider. And yeah, I just think this is one of those things that we're probably gonna see more happening in the near future.

But I do think that network sizes are going to be a really critical place for security and making sure that, a connection is secure. And that people understand what the risks are when they're deploying a network slice, which I believe is actually gonna be more secure than what we have today, but it's also important how it's set up and how it's managed.

Yeah. Yeah. And those are the things I think they're talking about mostly. 

And when you were speaking to some of the pillars, it reminded me of some of some commonality with NIST frameworks as well, and undoubtedly with the high degree of disaggregation that we're seeing with things like open ran and virtualized ran and cloudification anytime you disaggregate infrastructure, you broaden the attack surface.

And so there needs to be more scrutiny placed there. And I also completely agree with you as private networking, cellular networking catches momentum, those deployments will be, there'll be standalone and from a 5G perspective. And yeah, when you start, basically creating virtual slices of physical infrastructure.

That opens up, concerns about security as well. I totally agree with you. There needs to be more scrutiny placed on the security of this. Certainly private networks, to your point. Slicing is gonna be a big part of what's delivered to ensure, that, basically connectivity is tuned to the workload and we're right.

Yeah. And match to service level agreements and quality of service commitments and that sort of thing. And you're already starting to see this in the form of early form of segmentation with solutions like cel. And and cradle point. And yeah. So this is, I think this is all good. And to your point, I like the fact that also it is basically providing awareness for what network slicing is and its capability.

So I think it's it's all good from that perspective. But let's move to my third and final topic for this week. And I wanna talk about Nokia. And they announced earnings this week and they like much their competitor Erickson they reported not so stellar earnings.

They cut, their annual forecast reported a 3% year on year drop in net sales. Any a 37% falling at profit. But c e o PECA Lendmark is still bullish. And despite the macro economic challenges that he basically points to, with respect to its recent earnings, he still feels really bullish on future 5G gains and.

I think you and I talked about this earlier this week. I talked about in an article that I wrote around the R market, in a market sizing report on Rand, which by the way I. It's, it was Del Oro group and they actually have revised it. And they've actually taken it, even further, down from a growth perspective over the next five years, there still needs to be investment in core infrastructure, right?

To move these 5g NSA networks, standalone networks. I'm reading between the lines there and he didn't really, come out and say it, but I believe he feels there's still some growth and some steam with 5G with respect to, these core infrastructure, upgrades and certainly Nokia has been traditionally strong in Rand, but they have a pretty solid core offering, but, I will mention now there are lots of alternatives to core infrastructure.

Cisco offers a converged cloud core. HPE e recently acquired athe net. They've been around for quite some time with core infrastructure. They're smaller players. I spoke with Druid recently, HPE that provide core infrastructure. Yeah, core is becoming, I won't say it's becoming as clout, as crowded as ran, there's a lot of competition there.

So I don't know if you, I'm sure you saw the announcement on Nokia's earnings, but any, anything else to add before we move to your third and final? 

I was gonna say, I think there's more competition on core. Yeah. And I think there's more diversity across core. And I think that there's.

More room for, different solutions to solve different problems than I think we see with R. Now that said, there's no shortage of rand, especially when you start talking about open ran. But I, I think when I look at this one, I saw Crown Castle also warned that they're gonna have a lot less tower deployments.

And their tower growth is gonna slow. Yeah, I feel like the, the Rand component of the network is going to, is slowing. We're seeing it right now. Yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense cuz you know, the US is coming. To, to fruition in terms of its network deployments. And I think by the end of this year we'll have most of the networks deployed and there'll be some spectrum available, but that's, I think, already anticipated and will just be lit up by existing hardware.

I see it as just the next step. I think this probably should have happened sooner, to be honest with you. Yeah. That depends on the auction. And the auction probably should have happened sooner as well. So that's part of what I talked about in the article. And in general I talked about how we're, moving into the next phase of 5G network deployments and we really gotta hit hard on, on the core side.

Yeah. I think it just comes down to more edge compute and core. And I think that's really, we're gonna see a lot of the activity now, and yeah I do think 5G has a lot more legs and there will be a lot more investment to be made, but Yeah. I don't think those investments will be made until demand starts to occur.

And you start to see, the actual applications driving more demand for more 

infrastructure. Yeah. And I think you know, another potential upside when you look at the radio access network is densification with small and macro cells. And that sort of leads us to your third and final topic around Verizon.

And Verizon, indisputably has been a leader in the US with respect to millimeter wave, their ultra wideband service because those are the spectrum assets they had at the ready when they started their 5G build journey. And you want to talk and of course millimeter wave based on its propagation characteristics require densification.

But you wanna talk about a new multi-point network design that they're employing. And I'm, I didn't catch this, so I'm curious to hear more from you on it. This 

is a fairly fresh article. So it's hot off the presses. Catherine posted this from R c r. Basically what it is, it's actually about delivering millimeter wave to multi-user, in this case, multi-dwelling units in a way that.

Allows them to have a single centralized rooftop radio site. And then the the radio located on top of the multi-point building would then take that spectrum, which would be 37 to 39 gigahertz and allow more users to access that same cell site. And instead of using Verizon's 4G and 5G wireless course, it's actually using their broadband network gateway to direct traffic over Verizon's public IP network.

So it's like a different path to achieving this. But it's, they're saying it's less expensive to deploy and faster and still gets good latency and capacity. This would obviously be more in urban areas. But this would enable them to offer, their fixed broadband service or fixed wireless broadband service.

Yeah. To more users in more dense areas and, wouldn't require any additional fiber drops. And I think, would be an interesting way to have these multi endpoint buildings serviced. And then what they do is they basically drop the signal via coax throughout the building.

So you don't have to have gateways in each user. It's what Webpass was doing where they were using millimeter wave, on the tops of buildings and then dropping in cat five into each household and delivering 500 Megs service for 50 bucks a month.

And then Google went and bought them. Yeah, this, I think this is more of like a combination of wireless innovation combined with utilizing existing spectrum and network assets to. Potentially offer more competition because, a lot of these places where Verizon and T-Mobile are going with these broadband services they are the second carrier of availability and they are offering a considerably better service at lower cost.

You know what's also interesting and I'm gonna provide a preview on an article that I'm working on. But Nokia and Charter announced a partnership back in June where Nokia is providing charter mobile offload capability. The big cable companies obviously are mv, n o, they're, they've launched MVNOs to extend, their ARPU and into wireless.

And all of them have purchased power licenses through C B R S. They have to pay an egress fee right. To per, and for, by the way, Verizon is providing that, that mobility. An activity for all three MVNOs. And and so I'll be publishing an article on this but what's interesting it's a little bit different because this is, What you've described is, Verizon becoming more efficient with how it distributes millimeter wave sort of fwa service.

But what's interesting is that, the cable operators that, that also work with Verizon are looking to leverage cellular infrastructure because they have C v CVS spectrum to be able to reduce the amount of money that they spend to service their mobility customers. And it and what they're doing is they're leveraging existing their existing footprint.

Where, they've had, traditional, docsis, broadband cable and fiber, and they're able to, basically hot plug. The no key infrastructure. So I'm probably sharing way too many details, so I don't want our viewers and listeners to not read my article, but it's another, it's another path, but it's, it's different.

It's supporting mobility, but it's interesting to see how things come to together and how infras, common infrastructure can be leveraged. But hey, my friend, it's been another great podcast. It's our second this week since we were remiss last week. But why don't you take us home?

We hope our 

viewers and listeners found this week's topic interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide us insights on a specific 5G topic for future podcast, please reach out to us on social media, will is at Will and Amma. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in next week. Don't forget to rate us and subscribe.