Welcome to episode 157 of the G two on five G. It's the latest insight 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 join me again this week as Federal analyst ancho sag. Let's get started with my first topic.

This was pretty dramatic news. So very suddenly this week Tarik Emin at Rakuten announced his resignation for personal reasons or family reasons, and this was pretty abrupt. He's been An industry icon in driving disaggregated infrastructure. In particular, O Ran, he was leading Rakuten Symphony as well.

And so it got me thinking, is there trouble in paradise? And from my perspective, I did dig into this a little bit further. And it's clear that symphony's revenues have been flat to declining, which indicates that they're not adding any new business. And I pointed this out as a concern, a mobile network operator taking its learnings from OAN and then spinning a business unit out of that to help other operators.

This is a very highly competitive market and environment. Clearly, I'm just gonna read between the lines here, but, symphony their financial performance was probably not meeting expectation. And when you look at the broader Rakuten mobility business, it's off also a TA off.

And from my perspective, this was likely, Rakuten's attempt approach to reset things with with Tarek's departure. But I spent a lot of time with Tarek. He's he's an innovator. He had some very unconventional ideas with Symphony providing. Rip functionality at no charge.

But at the end of the day, you and I have talked about this. Open RAN was really gonna be a greenfield consideration for five G because all of the mobile network operators really locked their their ran plans many years ago, all dating all the way back to 2017 and 2018. But what's your take on all this?

I agree. It was fairly sudden. I personally don't love the the typical corporate family excuse reasons or personal reasons thing. Like I, I get people having those things, but I feel like that's overused in a lot of scenarios. But I, if there is some family issue, I really hope that it is resolved.

Yeah, everything's okay, but it's been used so many times for non-family issues that I just don't really trust it as a reason anymore. And I'm more inclined to agree with most of what you've said. I really think that O Ran does have a lot of potential. And I think a lot of that potential lies in private networks.

And I think the problem is that private networks are taking longer to deploy and I think anyone would've liked to see. And I think that's really just a consequence of the fact that these are larger enterprises that are deploying O Ran and these things will take time to integrate. And they have to go through a P O C phase.

We're coming out of that p o C phase, but to get those things from p o C to actual deployment is still fairly difficult. And, they're fairly small deployments if they're out of the p o C phase. So I just think this is a slow roll thing. And, when it comes to companies that are publicly listed and have quarterly earnings that just doesn't bode well.

I think, I'm a huge proponent of running companies privately especially when you're in a new industry. And the burden of public shareholders not understanding how long these things will take to actually make a meaningful impact. Somehow Amazon managed to convince their investors of that fact, but most companies are unable to let investors.

Be patient 'cause they're not. And that's really what I think this is a component of is, this might be a temporary plateau, but they may still not realize the full potential for another three to five years, so because of that, I think he he may have been prematurely removed, but yeah, that's just the way things are.



Yeah. You're right. The scrutiny on corporate America, especially for public companies and to. On earnings and profitability and that sort of thing is very intense. You've seen Dell over the years go public, private, public, and one of the big concerns Michael Dell stated all along was guidance, providing that guidance to Wall Street because, we're not financial analysts for tech analysts, but, some of these financial, buy-side analysts can be pretty brutal.

And some of them have a lot of influence and, can affect. Stock valuations, but hey, I wish Tarek, all the best. I do hope if there, there are family issues there that he works through those. And this isn't the last that we've heard from him. He's a, he's an icon in the industry.

Guy just oozes personality and charisma and he's a visionary. And so this isn't the last I think that we've heard from, but.

It's talking about behind the scenes, dish and EchoStar are finally coming together in an all stock deal and you want to talk about that And I've got some, some perspective here too, but I'll let you take 

it away. Yeah, I'm gonna keep it brief 'cause I wanna make sure the podcast doesn't run too long.

But yeah. We talked about this a month ago. We were right. It looks like this is a $6 billion company together, which is sad because their revenues are much higher than that. Yeah. So the company's definitely valuations has come down quite a bit. The thing is EchoStar does have $1.7 billion in cash, which I think Dish wants to get access to.

And this will be a reunification of the two arms of Charlie ER's empire. This is just one of those things that like, was probably gonna be inevitable because the Charlie Ergon own 60% of our EchoStar already. And echo Star's market value was only 2 billion while dishes was 4 billion. There is some value being lost there, but I think, really what this is about.

Potentially making more resources available to Dish and also potentially more spectrum. I also think to a certain degree there will be some unification of satellite and cellular down the road. So this might be a little bit of a visionary thing, but I think a lot of people are very, suspicious of whether or not this will be successful considering how hard dish has fallen in trying to deploy its five G network and.

How it's struggling to main customers. I think I saw they lost another a hundred thousand customers recently. Yeah. I didn't put that as a news item, but I can wind that into here. I've been hearing lots of grumblings that things are really not good. We have been reporting constantly that lots of executive departures and they will lose.

The, dish will lose its c e o. There's a potential, there was rumors that maybe Tarek might come in and help run the company, but I'm not sure he has the the energy to try and run two new five G networks. One after another. But I would love to hear what your take is.

So I'll be really brief. Charlie and I believe the the EchoStar executive were on C N B C recently, and it was a little awkward. They were really getting grilled and, the big question was where, are they gonna find the CapEx to. Invest in, in making this a reality.

You're spot on. One, one of the points that Charlie pointed to was in combining with EchoStar, it gives them a very unique footprint combining satellite as well. And he spoke to the fact that, they're the only, operator that has, both, terrestrial and satellite coming together, but, time will tell with execution and Dish's execution has been less than stellar.

And I think to the point that you made too, there's been a reshuffling of management, just like we've seen recently with Rakuten. And so there, there is some concern there and there's concern that, Charlie's had the spectrum. He's had, been sitting on spectrum for years.

He's been accused of spectrum squatting and, subject to potential fines if he doesn't deploy that spectrum. So they need to focus on the fundamentals. They need to deploy the spectrum that they have and and maybe not focus on the satellite part of it, but man, it will be interesting to see how this all winds out.

But let's move to my second topic this week and I wanna talk about Intel and Samsung. And they announced a recent vRAN collaboration. Now both companies have been working together for quite some time in the vRAN space. Samsung is arguably a leader. With respect to vRAN really leaning into it.

And so the nature of the collaboration is that Samsung's gonna integrate its vRAN 3.0 software with fourth generation Intel Zion, scalable processors. And what this is designed to do is improve capacity. So basically with this with the same number of servers, you'll be able to support more cell sites.

And so that, that's a great thing. VRAN is the, the advantage of vRAN is being able to virtualize, that radio access network infrastructure get more out of the physical. Layer of hardware and equipment out there. So this is all great and it was a learning for me.

I didn't realize that Samsung and in had been working with each other getting all the way back to 2017. So I think this is a good thing. We talked just real briefly about Open ran with Terra. Virtual ran is, it's not to be confused with open ran, but it's another, arrow in the quiver for operators that are wanting to mitigate, their CapEx and improve their opex position.

But what do you think? Yeah, Samsung and Intel ju go way back. I believe Intel is also key in Samsung's core deployments. So there's obviously a relationship that already exists there. And obviously we know Samsung has their own semiconductor business as well. I really think it's just mixing and matching where Samsung has strengths and weaknesses and where they think Intel is a good application.

And also, a lot of people forget, but. Sometimes the operators have influence on what these network vendors use in their equipment because ultimately, a lot of what these operators are gonna use is dependent on the software that they have in their network. There's a lot of influence that occurs all the way up and down the chain. And I'm not surprised to hear this announcement, but it's really interesting that Intel has done a very good job. Of, having these continued announcements down the road saying we're working with Ericsson more closely, we're working with Samsung more closely.

So they're very, they're doing a good job of communicating what they're doing on five G and working with the leaders in the industry to, to make it clear that, Intel is a big player in the space and continues to be. 

Yeah, I'm impressed with, their support for telco workloads, intel.

And also I'm very impressed with what Intel is doing around confidential computing and silicon root of trust. And there are a lot of activities with with extensions to support AI workloads, both models and underlying data. We're gonna see more and more of generative AI come into the mix within the telecommunications industry.

And so I really like what I'm seeing, with, fourth generation Xon, scalable processors and the support for these different, verticals and use cases and applications. But let's move to your second topic. You wanna talk about Qualcomm and they've hit a new 

speed record?

Yes. So this is one of those things that will continue to happen. I think in perpetuity. But I'll say we have a new record. I believe the previous record was seven gigabits per second on four carriers, and I think that might've even been a media tech record. But this is a Qualcomm record.

They're doing 7.5 gigabits per second in sub six, only on a standalone network with four channels of carrier aggregation on the latest Snapdragon X 75 chip set. Using 10 24 qualm which is not a surprise, but pretty interesting. Obviously 10 24 qualm. You've gotta be pretty close to the cell site to achieve.

Yeah. So you're probably gonna be looking at the cell site, maybe within a hundred to 200 feet of it. But this would be a 300 megahertz of T d spectrum. So this is probably gonna be 2.5 gigahertz. If you can get it, I don't think, I don't actually think that T-Mobile has 300 megahertz but you could probably combine 2.5 some with some 3.5.

Yeah. But I don't think 3.5 is T d, but nevertheless they're able to pull off as much as possible. This is their modem, their latest modem, which is, five G advanced ready. And yeah, there's nothing really other than this was, this modem was announced in March at M W C, so it's been about five months and the modem's already breaking records.

But we'll see what happens what, down the road. Because this modem also has 10 carrier millimeter rave. Ion and I have a feeling that we might get some millimeter wave records, probably closer to maybe M W C Americas in Vegas. 

Even if you're standing on a cell tower holding your device and you're getting 7.5 gigabits per second in mid band, even carrier aggregated, that's in, that's incredible.



All I can tell you is I was just at the LA Convention Center. At siggraph, which there's no five G News for that, so I'm not covering it here, but I'll be writing a piece that'll probably go out early next week. I was getting 1.6 gigabits per second on T-Mobile. No millimeter wave inside that convention center with thousands of people.

That's crazy. I was just like mind boggled because I wasn't actually getting that much on Verizon with ultra wideband problem with Verizon is I wasn't able to, I didn't have time to check if I was on millimeter wave or not, but I was actually getting faster speeds on T-Mobile than I was on Verizon.

Crazy. That's crazy. I love what Qualcomm is doing really to drive the performance envelope here and just in general with things like Open ran that sort 

of thing. T-Mobile's network does for carrier aggregation. So yeah. 

Yeah. Impressive. Very impressive. Let's hit my third and final topic, and this is pretty late breaking news.

Cisco continues to be on a buying spree. Boy, they've Chuck Robbins has a big fat checkbook there. But they've purchased a mobile core vendor, W G T for $150 million. And so WG two is working group two. This is Telenor's spin out of a company that a business unit that they started it all the way back in 2017.

And so Cisco obviously is very focused on service provider and it's basically a cloud native mobile core. And what, Cisco plans to do is, Its capabilities to deliver a programmable mobile core as a service to its customers. And this fits really well with Cisco's overall strategy. They already offer converge core and they offer a private five G as a service offering with various RAN vendors.

Pick your flavor. And so I think, $150 million to Cisco is a drop in the bucket, right? And this really strengthens what they're doing. And really the value here from, a network provider standpoint is having that mobile core. That's one of the reasons why H P E acquired ANet so that they could be competitive.

With the likes of the Ciscos and certainly H P E, they continue to lean heavily into GreenLake, their IT consumption services model. And offer, not only networking as a service, eventually they're gonna have a pretty compelling five g as a service solution.

I don't know if you caught this news again, it's late breaking, but any thoughts before we move to your third and final? 

I did see the news I don't really have that much knowledge about WG two. I'm glad you picked it up 'cause it was pretty late breaking. But yeah, I mean I think Cisco has very, made it clear where they're trying to build their strengths.

And this does seem like something that would be very complimentary to what their current businesses are. But to your point, they have been on a acquisition spree. This isn't a necessarily particularly big one right, as far as Cisco goes. But I do think it's a probably a very good one in terms of just product fit.

And I'll just finally mention that Cisco's recently announced a mobility services platform, something that I'm planning to dig into with some upcoming briefings with Cisco. I may I may come back on a future podcast and talk about that, but, so let's move to your third and final topic.

And you wanna talk about the ss e s and their completion of clearing of C-Band 

Spectrum. So SS e s is one of the world's leading satellite communications providers. And they are one of the companies, I think Mrsat was the other one that were utilizing a spectrum in the us that needed to be cleared for C-band.

And there was a early clearing incentive given to them if they were to clear their spectrum by December, 2023. Which is also the time when the B and c blocks of C-band are to be made available to the operators. And the bidders who won. So this is the second phase where the first phase occurred in 2021 when we saw that first deployment of spectrum, and now we're seeing this second phase occurring and they were able to pack their spectrum more tightly and launch some satellites to enable that spectrum use.

So they're repacking, so they launched five new satellites. They repacked all their C-band downlink into 200 to the upper 200 megahertz of the C-band, which is what we were we knew about. And then they, all the necessary equipment changes associated with incumbent earth stations and gateways across the planet into the 3 3700 to four gigahertz band, which are not being used for satellite communications.

And above that is where the the feared f a A. Interference situation was right. And yeah, so it looks like they will get their $3 billion incentive payment. And yeah, it'll be paid probably in the fourth quarter of this year and hopefully T-Mobile at T and Verizon, we will utilize that spectrum very soon thereafter.

I don't know if emer has, Necessarily cleared their spectrum yet, but they say they will be ready by the December deadline as well. It's good news for more spectrum and we will see what maybe those higher bands have more chances of interfering with altimeters and things like that.

But hopefully that situation's been resolved already in, in whatever aircraft or not. Compliant will just not fly until they are. But yeah, it's just an update on the spectrum situation and I think something that will improve the five G experience for users down the road and will hopefully allow for a more robust five G experience in total as we move closer and closer to standalone.

There's always that gold rush or that prize Goldilocks mid band spectrum, the great balance of propagation and performance. But good stuff, buddy. Hey, it's been another great podcast this week. Why don't you take us home? 

Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topic interesting.

If anyone out there would like to provide insights on a specific five G topic for a future podcast. Reach out to us on social media, will is at Will Tech, and I'm, we hope you have a great weekend and please next. And don't forget to  us