Welcome to episode 154 of the G two on five G. It's the latest onsite scoop on everything, five G. We cover six topics in about 20 minutes, and it's brought to you by more insights and strategy. I'm Will Townsend, and joining me again this week as fellow analyst anal sag. So let's get started with my first topic and it's earnings time and both at t and Verizon have reported their two Q earnings.

So at a very high level. At t posted about 30 billion in revenue. Also reported 14 straight quarters of 200,000 plus at t fiber net ads and 12 straight quarters with 300,000 plus postpaid phone net ads. And they're reporting that it's their best two CU mobility operating income ever. They also took the opportunity to talk about their demonstration with a s t space mobile.

We've talked about that on numerous podcasts as well. So overall fairly decent performance from at and t. Verizon, on the other hand, a work in progress. So they've been struggling in particular with postpaid phone net ads. And so last quarter they were negative, so this quarter they were positive to the tune of just 8,000.

But what's interesting is I dug into that. That represented 144,000 from its business group, but 136,000 net loss from its consumer group. Verizon still has some room to move. Both stocks were affected by that Wall Street Journal article on lead telecom cabling. Which I did post some of my insights after speaking with US Telecom, that's an in industry consortium as well as at and t leadership.

Their stocks have bounced back since then. And there have been some interesting develop developments on that Wall Street Journal article. In particular an environmental group that apparently funded their research. And and so a story broke yesterday. I did share some insights on Twitter there.

I don't wanna make the earnings recap, about that, but all in all I'm not surprised, with either operator. What about you? 

In the time that we chose our topics, T-Mobile also announced their earnings. Late 

breaking. Why don't you cover that? I might as 

well 

add that in so we bundle it all together nicely.

I'll just add that T-Mobile beat on earnings per share by 16 cents per share. Reporting that they got 180 6 while they were expected to get 1 71, but but they missed their revenue which was almost. 200 million short of expectations. So they posted 19.2 billion when the expectation was 19.34.

The stock dipped ever so slightly and then came back and then went back down and is now clawing its way back up. It's only a per difference of about a percent. So not really hugely impacted by stock, but they did change their guidance upward. So it's like a mixed bag where they missed their revenue, they beat on earnings, and they're guiding up.

So I think investors might not know what to do, but I was pre briefed on T-Mobile's earnings. And the interesting thing is they're Talking about how they're once again leading in growth in customers and profitability and that they raise their guidance again for this year.

And that they are, leading in churn and delivering the highest Q two postpaid phone net ads in eight years. Their postpaid net account additions was 300,000 and their postpaid net customer additions. Of 1.6 million was the best in the industry and raised their guidance. And then they had a phone net customer edition of 760,000 and their churn was 0.77%.

Wow. They also added an additional 500,000 homes, high speed internet customers. They're, they're just moving on. Yeah. I obviously, there's some operational things that are affecting how their revenue and. Profitability is, but they're obviously, operationally they're very sound because they're beating expectations on profit.

This might just be that, maybe they didn't get as many net home ads as they were expecting or whatever it is, but T-Mobile continues to move down the path of growth and profitability. And I know that at t and Verizon are trying to get to that point, but it seems like maybe at t's a little bit more further along.

Yeah. So it's interesting. So you mentioned, so they added, what, half a million F W A subscribers, so that, that's gotta push their overall number close to 4 million, right? I forget what it 

was. I just looked at the number. That might be true. I have to go back and look again '

cause it's, I thought it was sitting at like 3.2 or 3.3 million.

So if that's the case could be close to four so mean clearly. They're executing well against their their F w A business and, and I, I expect, once Verizon gets its C-band built out, They'll have a much more competitive product. And and I expect a, I'm actually gonna be pre-brief by at t executive management next week on what they're doing around fixed wireless access.

So I don't know how much of that I can share publicly after that conversation with Jen Robinson. But it'll be interesting to glean some knowledge because, F W A has been something that at and t has held in their back pocket for their business customers and they really haven't.

Been aggressive with a consumer offering, but it would make sense as a copper catch to, to move people off of legacy. But, 

I just had one more thing to add is that Verizon is gonna be raising their fixed wireless prices by $10 a month. Oh. That's new news. That's not something we didn't necessarily include as a topic.

But it's something that that I think our listeners should know about is that they're gonna raise from 25 a month to 35 a month, which. Is not to be surprising 'cause 25 bucks a month, I can't see them making money on that. No, because T-Mobile I think is charging more like 50. They are So I think t, I think Verizon will eventually come up to 50 over time.

I think once they improve the performance Verizon does then yeah, they can meet competition there and and raise it. So I think it's just been a market penetration strategy for Verizon to this point. But hey, that's a great segue to your first topic and you wanna talk about T-Mobile lat up for x carrier aggregation.

Yeah, so 

I have been doing a lot of digging, trying to get answers. Out of companies on what they're doing to compete with this. And there really isn't any competition. Basically T-Mobile is aggregating two of their five, 2.5 gigahertz fans with a 1900 megahertz and 600 megahertz. So those four carrier aggregation, I'm showing five fingers, but four carrier aggregation.

And I don't think they're gonna stop, to be honest with you. Yeah. Because they've got that, they've got that additional band of C-band that they've got in their back pocket and they also have some 3.5, 3.45 gigahertz zig as well. So I think they're gonna have quite ample spectrum and I, I don't know how many carriers they're going to aggregate, but I have a feeling that they're going to start aggregating carriers.

Based on, the topology and network strength of your area and where the spectrum's most needed or how it's deployed. But four K integration's huge. They're claiming up to 3.33 gigabits per second. Yeah, without millimeter wave. And for Verizon, As good as I've seen it is at four gigs and that's basically just millimeter wave it's incredible what they're able to achieve with this, and I don't think they're done. And I think it's gonna be really interesting to see how this evolves over time, but t-Mobile has the best coverage, they have the best speeds and this is just gonna keep letting, keep continuing them down this path.

Yeah. 

Clearly T-Mobile's taking full advantage of its very Spectrum footprint, and aggregating, the lower band spectrum improves propagation as well. But that is some phenomenal performance when you consider that this is low in mid band. There's no millimeter wave there, right?

No. Yeah, it's crazy. But good. We'll keep our eyes open and continue to see what T-Mobile does. From my perspective they're really fine tuning what they've done with their standalone deployment and I think as the, their press release stated, putting the pedal to the metal.

But let's move to my second topic this weekend. I know you wanna weigh in on this as well, but Intel and Ericson. Announced a partnership that's going to involve a number of different things, but in particular five G SOCs. There wasn't a lot of detail. Both you and I did ask Intel in particular for more color on this, and there isn't a lot available, but basically the press release states that the two are gonna team up to drive innovation and disruption with new five G systems on a chip.

And What's interesting is that I have spoken with Edge Q and they hope to do the same with their S O C that integrates Risk and arm to provide a base station on a chip, both four G and five G functionality. Now they're a startup. They're a well established startup. They've been around for a few years now.

I think it's five. And I did publish a Forbes article. If you go hit my Twitter feed at Will Town Tech, you could probably find it there. But what are your thoughts? 

I think the interesting part of this is that they will be using Intel 18 A. So that's a detail that, that they did give us.

Which this is like an advanced intel process node that they are going to enable Ericsson to be using. I believe this is a 2025 timeframe. So it is, yeah. Even next year, this is probably the following year. Yeah. If Intel Foundry Services is able to deliver this on time and if they do, this will offer, Ericsson a pretty good advantage on power and performance in a way that maybe they never have had before.

Yeah, this could be a game changer for Ericsson in terms of delivering new applications and new form factors for their customers. 

And I've spent a lot of time with Ericsson and they had an imagined possible series of events last year and their their president of North America, Nicholas was talking about how they really want to.

Supercharge the developer community, make their infrastructure programmable and easier to develop on and really accelerate innovation. And this could be a part of that. It's also worth noting that I don't believe Ericsson has done a lot of custom silicon. In the past, relative to, say Nokia that has their reef shark set of SOCs and Nokia, they did that big on F P G A and it didn't work out well for them, so they had to retool what they were doing from a silicon perspective.

But I think this is a smart move on, on Ericsson's part, to partner with Intel and, hey, Intel's had its ups and downs, right? There's no denying that, but. This seems to me to be a great match made in heaven, and I think we'll see some significant innovation come out of it.

To your point, this is a 2025 expected tape out, and so it's interesting that they would've announced something so far in advance, but I have a feeling that there'll be more information coming as they move towards that 2025 date. But let's move to your second topic and, our fearless leader, Patrick Moorhead, is in Korea for Samsung unpacked.

Unfortunately, you didn't, or fortunately you didn't make the trip all the way to Seoul. But I think you wanna weigh in on what you found compelling with unpacked in Korea. 

So I obviously wasn't able to attend, but I was pre briefed and I already have an article, which will be going up today, most likely.

Awesome. I've been busy yesterday, so I wasn't able to publish it yesterday, but hopefully it'll go up today. I think I. The big takeaways are we've got new foldables, we've got a new Z flip five, which is the flippable phone. The one that opens like this is not it, this is a competitor device, but it's the flippy, like a flip phone.

And then you've got the fold, which is the fold five. And then you also have the new tab SS nine series, which are they're Android tablets. Those are also new. And then there's also new watches. So they've got the new watch six and the watch six classic. The quick takeaways are the flip five and the full five have a new hinge, which allows it to close, flush, no longer having a slight open when it's a slight gap when it's closed.

And then the flip also has a bigger outside cover screen now but it is not as big as the one on the razor. Plus that I have, so it's maybe not class leading. That said, all of the phones and tablets have the latest Snapdragon eight gen two processor from Qualcomm. So that might be a factor in how they're priced.

The flip five starts at a grand and the fold five starts at $1,800. All of them have five G as you would expect. Yeah, as pen is still not built into the fold. It's still part of a case, so it's unwieldy in my opinion. The Watch six Classic finally brings back the rotating bezel.

Everybody loved. I personally was sad to see it go on the Watch Five Pro. I will be trading my watch five Pro in for a classic six with a 47 millimeter screen. Whoa, gigantic. It's 

400. Is that bigger? Is that bigger than the Apple Ultra on? 

Think it might be depending on, 'cause ultra's not a circle, it's a rectangle.

So yeah, it's a tank watch. I think you technically get more, more square footage out of the circle. Pi r squared. But I do not, I am not opting for the cellular version anymore because I find that cellular watches are pointless. Carry my phone everywhere and. The S five, the S nine, the tab S nine comes in a SS nine 11 inch, SS nine plus 12 point something inch, and then a 14.6 inch ultra.

So there's three sizes, all same processors, hodgepodge of memory capacities and storage capacities. The tablets do come with a memory card slot that's up to a terabyte. I cover that all in the article if you wanna get more details. But my takeaway. The fold does not have much competition, especially in the US and Samsung really hasn't done much to improve it, in my opinion, other than the hinge.

And then the flip has improved. They actually now start at default 256 gigs of storage, which I believe is a consequence of the Razor plus having a standard 2 56 gig storage. So there's gonna be a lot of competition there between the razor and the flip. They're both gonna be a grand.

They're both gonna have very similar specs. The Razor Plus does have an eight plus eight Snapdragon, eight plus gen one, so it's a slightly slower processor. Late last year. As opposed to this year's model. But overall, Samsung is still leading in Android tablets and Android watches. This will, the new watch will come with Wear OSS four, I believe.

They'll beat Google with the Pixel Watch, which I'm wearing right here. This has 3.5, so I think the Samsung will actually beat Google to releasing their own operating system again. And then yeah, that's the wrap up. I think the watch, watch six starts in 300 bucks. If you want to watch six classic, I think it's $400 is the starting price and then the cellular is a little bit extra.

But I think it's a very like iterative year for Samsung Foldables. But they do have a lot more competition globally, foldables, and then in the US they have more competition as well, at least on the flip side. 

Yeah. Good summary my friend. And as I'm, as we mentioned, Patrick Morehead, our chief analyst is in Korea and I'm sure.

He will be publishing some of his insights. He already has. Oh, he already has. Good for Pat. It's I'm sure he's struggling with the time zone over there. It's it's crazy. It's been a while since I've been to that part of the world, but I. Good. Go hit the more insights and strategy Twitter handle Patrick Moorhead as well, and you'll be able to find his article.

But let's move to my third and final topic this week. I wanna talk about reliance in India, and they're hitting their five g rollout ahead of their published schedule. This is an article that broke in R c r wireless news earlier this week. And it had set a rollout of, of December, 2023 to be completed.

But there, there are a few months early and what's reported is, Over 115 thousand sites with more than 690,005 G cells across India have been deployed as of to date. And reliance is stating that that is enabling the company to provide five G coverage in over 90% of India's towns and cities.

And that's pretty amazing when you consider there's some pretty remote parts of that country as well. So we've talked about Reliance as as a disruptor. They're leaning very heavily into disaggregated infrastructure. Open, ran these sorts of things to speed deployment lower CapEx and opex. And certainly that's important in that market because there's price sensitivity just based on the economics of India.

But but India continues to be a powerhouse economically. I think they're one of the better performing economies as we begin to exit, these inflationary times. But does any of that surprise you, ancho? No, 

not really. I think India's really trying to with obviously geo being the leader there expand access, improve speeds, and I really believe that Geo is taking it upon themselves to be the leader for five G deployment in India because I think they realize that if they can really push the envelope of access, Performance and capabilities.

Every comp company in the world is gonna want to come to Geo to deploy their app, five G applications on Geo's network. And I think that's, I think that's just gonna be a position that others will not be able to compete with. And they will become, one of the top five if they aren't already top five operators in the world.

It's interesting insight and certainly. From my perspective they as an operator are delivering tremendous value when you look at, price, performance and capability and that sort of thing. And a lot of that is just, their time to market. And I agree with you.

Given the population of Indian, given how disruptive they have demonstrated themselves, with not only their L T D E deployment, but now with their five G deployment. I'd be, I'd have to agree with you. They could become one of the largest, mobile network operators on the planet, in short order.

But with that, let's move to your third and final topic. You wanna talk about the F C and this is a subject that, that I've scrutinized in the past, but where they have set, kind of minimum broadband speeds. And from my perspective, They've been quite low. And so now you wanna share some news, some very late breaking news on what they want to do to reset that bar.

Yeah, so this is something that came out a couple days ago actually, but has filtered through. The ether of press and journalism and stuff like that. And, obviously I'm not following the F C every single F C statement, so this is something that kind of came over the last couple days.

But F C, chairwoman Re, Jessica Rosen morsel shared with her colleagues and updated notice of inquiry, which is required by the section 7 0 6 of the Health Communications Act. She has proposed that the commission considers several crucial characteristic characteristics of broadband deployment, including affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to all Americans.

And this is a statement from her press media relations people media contact. It says that in today's, I'm just quoting her. Yeah. In today's world, needs to have access, affordable, high-speed internet, no exceptions. It's time to connect everyone everywhere. Anything short of that is just 100.

Anything short of a hundred percent is just not good enough. So her goal is to Increase the national fixed broadband standard to 100 megabits per second for download, and 20 megabits per second for upload. And is discussing a range of evidence supporting the standard including requirements for new networks funded by bipartisan infrastructure law.

And then she also said that the F C previously set the standard at 25. Megabits down in three, up in 2015 and has not updated it since. Yeah. Which is actually fair. Eight years is quite a long time to not update that. How much more, when we look at like the Ericsson reports for internet connectivity, it's like doubling every two or three years.

I think she's very right in that sense. And I think, yeah, this might be an indictment of the era of not doing anything to change that. But, increasing it to 100 megabits down and 30 up, I think is fairly reasonable. I think that should be the minimum nowadays. Yeah. And then she's also talking about how she wants to set a goal, a national goal of having one gig down and 500 up for the future.

That, that'll be quite a lift. But but yeah, I, I think, resetting the minimum standard after eight years is definitely the right thing to do. Because I know in my own experience, abusing T-Mobile's, f FBA service, and Bastrop anything short of.

100 down, and 50 up is just it's not usable. It's not functional. So yeah, I think this is all positive. It's one thing to set, a policy in place. Certainly it seems like the Biden administration. Is very focused on closing the digital divide.

When you look at all the money that's being, earmarked for telecommunications and infrastructure improvement and for tribal nations and that sort of thing they're certainly trying to hang their hat on that and it's the right thing to do. Digital divide is real and we need to close the gap because it can drive inclusion economic prosperity and a host of other, positive things for society.

So it's, inter the internet, and having connectivity to the internet is almost becoming as important as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink and the food that we eat. I think it's all a good thing. But with that, my friend, it's been another great podcast. Why don't you take us home?

Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topic's interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights for a future topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will is at Whale Contact and I'm at, we hope you have a great weekend and please tune again next week.

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