Welcome to episode 167 of the G2 on 5G. It's the latest inside scoop on everything 5G. We cover six topics in about 20 minutes, and it's brought to you by Moore Insights and Strategy. I'm Will Townsend, and joining me again this week is federal analyst Anshul Sag. Man, you been really busy, and we have been remiss.

We've we've skipped a week or two here. Like, where have you been, man? 

Lots of places. I was in Hawaii. I was in Phoenix. I don't actually, I think I was at New York at some point. I usually am in New York at some point. I think I was in Dallas for 5G Americas. So that's right. It's been a crazy few weeks.

Yeah it has been for me to, it's been a crazy September, October heading into November for me. I was in London. Then I was in Riga, Latvia for 5G, and I posted a Forbes article about that and. I just spent time with Dell here in Austin. There was a technology analyst summit.

It was NDA information. But I'll be publishing a Forbes article related to what they're doing with, aI broadly, but more or less telecom. I spoke with Dennis Hoffman, the general manager of their telecom business unit back in August. So that'll be posting later today, but. Let's jump into this week's podcast, but it's good.

It's good to be back and be talking with you. Buddy T Mobile and Deutsche Telekom have launched an AI challenge. And, from my perspective, I'm coming fresh off of this Dell event again. I can't talk a lot about it, but, there's so much excitement around generative AI and, the applications for telecommunications in general are, are.

Potentially going to be super disruptive, but the details of the competition and this is something that T Mobile does quite frequently. So I give them credit for gamifying the whole innovation process, but what they want to focus on, both DTN and T Mobile are in 3 kind of key areas for AI application and telecom.

So network management being 1, customer service and experience being number 2, and then. Thank you. Something that's, it's a pretty general category applied AI in general. And John saw was quoted in a press release this week, speaking about it, but, I think this is super innovative then, if you want to learn more, we'll include a link when we post the podcast, but what do you 

think?

I did not see this challenge was announced, but it sounds a lot like their 5g XR challenge that they did. So the interesting thing is there are some companies that do come out of this. That end up becoming customers but also it helps them identify leading use cases for their network with whatever technology is being applied.

So this is AI but that previously was XR. So you could definitely see a scenario where, T Mobile starts finding ways to integrate AI into its 5G network. Take advantage of that. I think this is a good thing. I don't necessarily think it will, revolutionize the way the industry approaches AI, but I do think that it's a necessary effort and a good exploratory exercise for T Mobile, but also a way for them to build relationships with developers.

And to engage with the community overall. 

Yeah, I agree. Developers are key to innovation and to monetization and, geez past a lot of that innovation was done over the top. And so the mobile network operators like T Mobile spent billions of dollars and deploying infrastructure and purchase license spectrum and then.

They basically monetize things with unlimited data plans. And so that's just not going to work, moving forward. So I think it's great. There are already some examples here. 18 and video have announced a partnership where 18 is leaning into videos, AI capabilities to do intelligent truck roles.

And I think we may have spoken about that on a prior podcast, but. From my perspective, I think what I can do is improve customer service number 1. And number 2, make networks more resilient potentially in the future, from a self healing perspective. But, yeah, it'll be interesting to follow this.

But I think it's a great effort and I think more mobile network operators will be embracing just, the power of AI just given a lot of the hype around generative AI in general. But. Thanks. Let's go to your first topic, and you mentioned you're in Hawaii. I always have fear of missing out.

You and Patrick Moorhead, our chief analyst, spend time with with Qualcomm, and obviously it's Snapdragon, so it's very device centric. You want to provide a recap of and you also wrote a Forbes article, right? I 

did I wrote that Forbes article about a week ago, maybe a little bit it was last week.

And part of the reason why we didn't record last week, cause there was no good time or place for me to record. I did a Snapdragon summit immediately back into a wedding in Phoenix. So I had no time to to settle in and record something. But basically the interesting thing is there are two focuses.

There was one main focus and our listeners are going to love to hear this. AI was at the center of everything. Nobody can let themselves. Do an event without talking about AI, but I will say Qualcomm has been investing in AI for quite some time. It hasn't really been like a, a phenomenon for this year.

In fact, last year's summit was all about AI as well. They've been investing in AI hardware for years, and that's why they have a lead. And they are 100 percent leaning into it. And with their new platforms they really focus on the PC platform actually that led the discussion with the Snapdragon X elite, which they claim has better performance.

Then Apple, Intel, and AMD. That product will not be available until mid time next year. So there's still some time to figure out whether or not these claims are valid. And then there will, obviously be real performance measurements in, in operating systems to verify those.

But, . The other thing was they're really leading on AI and they have ANPU with 45 tops, which is way faster than anything anybody has. on the smartphone or the PC. And I think they're going to really lean into that with Microsoft next year with the expectation that Microsoft is really going to push AI on the, on Windows harder than they ever have.

And then the other thing is that the smartphone that they announced smartphone chip is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It's got all the latest and greatest 5G capabilities. It's got the X75 modem in it. So it's the, the top of the. Top of the line 5G modem from Qualcomm and it's going to be in all the latest Android flagship phones.

In fact, they announced at Snapdragon Summit last week that the first OEMs would be Xiaomi and Honor, and both of them basically launched last week. The time from announcement to launch has now gone to near zero for Qualcomm. So they're actually launching chips way earlier than everybody else. Anticipated.

There used to be a few weeks, a few months, it's gone down to hours. So they're really launching these things in rapid succession. It's got all the latest process nodes from TSMC and supporting insane, highly memory speeds and all that. But the real big takeaway, in my opinion, is they're coming after the P.

C. There is going to be 5G capability on that as well. And they want to reshape the P. C. market with their new Orion based associates, which came from their acquisition of Nuvia, which is a bunch of former Apple associate engineers. Yeah, 

Boy, I continue to be impressed. Qualcomm keeps pushing into adjacent categories now squarely and enabling personal computers.

And I think we will see a lot of design wins from a client perspective. Next year. I'll say that at this step dealt analyst summit. I'll just say that I saw some very interesting prototypes and I'll just leave it at that. But, yeah, it's it's amazing, and. I've read, analysts are divided.

Some are guessing that, these this new Qualcomm solution will be in low end to mid range PCs, but. Hey, I wouldn't be surprised because if you think about what Qualcomm delivers from a power perspective, very low power. There's some really interesting things that can be done within a PC form factor, right?

And obviously that's an area that you cover for the firm, but it's exciting. So we'll definitely have to, keep watch on this and, probably have followups on future podcasts, but let me go to my second topic. And I want to talk about Korea and the news broke this week that they're investing even more in 6g research.

And, just begs the question, is this too soon? Because you and I have spoken about South Korea and how they've been a leader and how, from an operator perspective, they've really focused discreetly on 5G applications, both consumer and enterprise, and they've really led the charge with respect to deployment and that sort of thing.

But they want to take that momentum and they want to be very ambitious with 6G because they want to lead that. And and they've continued to invest in 60 research, but the latest round is the equivalent of 325M and it's being driven through the Ministry of Science and ICT and it's all about developing pre 6G technology by 2026.

To ensure that Korea, has a very strong position with respect to getting out in front of 3GPP and the standards that are going to be flying through. I'd love to get your perspective on this, because we don't have a 3GPP 6G standard defined yet. From your perspective, what do you think the timeline is on that?

On 6G 

standard? Yeah. My understanding is sometime in 2028. Is expected, which is 5 years away. I don't actually think it's too early to invest in 6g research. Just because. These G's tend to take a decade to develop. They're ready and we're in the middle of that development cycle. I would actually expect the bulk of spending to be done in the middle, right?

Where we're not as exploratory, but we're trying to develop what might end up in the standard and what might not. I don't really think it's a bad thing. I think it's actually a pretty good thing. It means that there's real development happening, but I would say that we are still probably 6 to 7 years before even realizing it.

I wish there were better ways to talk about future technologies, but I do think that they actually nailed. 5G pretty well. I think the biggest mistake the industry made was really actually deploying 5G non standalone. Because I think it's really hampered the development of standalone as a whole, which is actually part of a lot of what I'm talking about for my other two topics.

And I think you and I have actually talked about this a while, 2023 2024 are going to be the years of standalone, because if they aren't, then 5G is sunk. And I'll save my rants and analyses for my next two topics. 

Okay, yeah we've talked about this quite a bit. In fact, I spent time with Dell telecom executives this week and, we were having the same discussion around, miss expectations with 5G and I go if we're going to point the finger at someone, it's 3GPP and, this whole non standalone versus standalone, tweener, kind of thing that, that we've gone through and hopefully, Thank You know, it's recognized that, Hey, it was an effort to provide, mobile network operators, the time needed to get things deployed.

But in the, at the end of the day, it really slowed the progression of it all. And and I do believe, and I think we've talked about this before that we should see most regions. Get to a deployed standalone 5g core 5g ran hopefully by the middle to latter part of next year. But then the, we're five years into the 10 year, typical decade, that you pointed to. So it's interesting, but it is what it is, but, so that's a good segue to your second topic. And you want to talk about Ericsson and they have a new 5g standalone toolkit. 

Yeah. So this toolkit is an interesting development. Because it really focuses on enabling standalone.

So it's really not just it's software which means that a lot of it's things that, that's already capable, the hardware has, but just to be unlocked in software. And there are four key like toolkit targets, which are enhanced massive MIMO software for improving multi user MIMO. An optimal beamforming selection based on user velocity.

So like really just honing in on performance ran slicing advancements with intent based automation for things like automated radio resource partitioning and rate and delay control scheduling. So lots of granular things to allow for one millisecond target delivery and then improved SLA capabilities.

Improved low latency capabilities for time critical communications with uplink configured grant and L4S superior quality experience. So this is all about just amping up the capabilities of 5G SA. Yeah. They even talk about data boost upsell and L4S support in 5G core. So these are all things that I think are necessary to make SA valuable and improve the user experience.

And they already have quotes to basically support their toolkits, capabilities working with Deutsche Telekom as a customer and yeah, I just think that this is a clear indication that there is a demand and a need to improve standalone experience and performance.

And truthfully, I think this is should be the focus of the entire industry is just focusing on the standalone because it blows my mind that we still are not, running standalone everywhere all the time, and people are still complaining about 5G networks like if we want, if we really want to improve the user experience and get users and.

And developers on board, we need to push standalone harder. And I just, I know it's being pushed. I know there's a lot of activity around it. We've been talking about it for months. if not years now, but I just feel like there's a disconnect between what the operators are communicating to users. What does, network state is and how it's all being marketed.

And when we were at 5G Americas, the whole talk of the town was standalone, so I'm not even sure we talked about it because it's been so long since we did a podcast, but I do think that 5G America summit really made it clear that everyone's on board for standalone.

But it doesn't fully feel like everybody's on the same page. 

Yeah, and, there have been other complications to like, poor farming of spectrum, and that's a statement in the United States, and, just a lack of mid band before the C band auction, concluded with Verizon filling in much needed gaps and it's, it's coverage.

And an AT& T to a lesser extent. There have been some complications, in Europe, it's very complicated. Each individual country has specific roaming and spectrum auctions and regulations that make the the EU. Very complex and then, we've seen, regions like Korea, where they didn't have that encumberment and they were able to get, things rolled out pretty quickly, including China.

But we've got to get to stand alone. I'm glad to see that Ericsson is publishing this particular toolkit to help drive the momentum there. But we've beaten that 1 enough. Let's go to my third and final topic, and I wanna talk about at and t and they are extending their five G fixed wireless access service, which is called at and t Internet Air to 13 additional markets now.

And so initially, and we covered this on a prior podcast when they announced their consumer FWA solution it was somewhat limited and that's because at t has a fiber first strategy. And they believe that, fiber will provide, the best, balance of performance and value and that sort of thing.

But they also recognize that there are markets that that FDA is a very good fit for when I heard the news, I was expecting these 13 markets to be quite small, but there's some pretty large markets that are included in its expansion. And it includes Houston, Texas, where I lived for several years.

Thank you. Miami Kansas City, which, Kansas City is not a huge metro, but it's a pretty good size metro St. Louis and Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, California, and, some parts of upstate New York. I'm not going to read them all, but we can include a link of if our viewers and listeners are interested in learning more, but.

I think this is a a validation of a, at t recognizing that it behooves them to offer, flexibility and choice to consumers with respect to fiber and fixed wireless access. Now, when you look at the pricing and what you can, what you can pay for one gig symmetrical up and down from a fiber perspective in FWA, that the delta is quite narrow and for most tech savvy consumers, fiber is going to be the natural, option to consider. But again, in some of these smaller markets the fiber footprint may not exist there. So I think it's a great move. I think we'll continue to see expansion from AT& T. Certainly, T Mobile continues to add to its subscribership with its 5G home Internet.

I think there are over 4 million subs now. And, Verizon is, now that Verizon finally is building out its mid band spectrum, the performance on its 5G FWA servers should improve as well. Don't know if you caught the news any thoughts here before we go to your 3rd and final topic. I 

did catch the news.

I thought that Kansas City was a little funny because that's Sprint's old headquarters. Yeah, it is. T Mobile is basically T Mobile's 2nd headquarters. But yeah, you're right. Those are pretty big markets. So that definitely feels like a bigger launch than the initial one, in my opinion.

And yeah, I think everybody should be offering fixed wireless. As an option for people, because they're going to be spotty places where coverage is not great. And then there's some places where it's awesome. And there's gonna be places where there's no, no service at all, whether it's wired or wireless.

And I think I still think that there's a big. Opportunity here for on the business side. And I think it's actually a missed opportunity for most of these carriers. I've been talking to some business owners about, what's their thoughts on these services? And a lot of them are looking at it because the options on the business side are so bad.

And they're so expensive, and they just don't meet what their needs are. So I do think there's still an opportunity for small and medium businesses to use these services to improve connectivity or even offer as a backup, just in case. They have an unreliable provider, but yeah, it's a great announcement and.

I'm hoping that this helps, AT& T buoy their subscribers even more and maybe offer more competitiveness in the market to push down prices and enable more access. 

Yeah, he has offered to its business customers, but that's probably more of a kind of a mid size, a larger kind of not an S and B you're mentioning a family owned retail location or, something or a gas station or something like that.

And and a lot of this, and these they buy like consumers. They, they want the latest and, they are price averse. And so yeah, it's interesting. And obviously this is going to improve. The monetization opportunity for at and t with FWA in general by, expanding, the, their FWA footprint to consumers.

But let's move to your third and final topic, and you wanna talk about the GSMA and they've been talking about five G advanced, right? But what's the deal? Like where's standalone in that conversation? 

Yeah I agree with that sentiment. There's. There's a lot of talk about 5G advanced when you talk to companies like Qualcomm and even Huawei, they're calling it 5.

5G which they have a track record of doing, which I do not love. The way I look at it is... 5G advance is a natural progression of the 5G standard. We're gonna get it fairly soon. We're already done with release 17. 5G advance begins with release 18. We're maybe a year or two out, which I understand the conversation around it and talking about it.

But I, once again, you can't have 5G advance unless you have standalone. So I feel like we need to address You know, we shouldn't be looking at the third step when we still haven't taken the first 

step. It's almost like we're jumping. Yeah, we're jumping the gun, right? Jumping 

ahead of ourselves. And, I'm all about talking about 5G advanced and how I'm even okay with calling, standalone 5G advanced if that makes consumers more Understand where we are as an industry.

We just need to deploy standalone because without standalone 5G advanced doesn't exist. I love the idea of talking about all these different applications of 5G advanced and there's a lot of talk about AI and XR and there's a lot of cool applications that I think will improve the 5G user experience and enable new applications.

But I, I just feel like it. The standalone is the only way to achieve those things. And I'm so frustrated with the state of standalone that I just don't understand how you can talk about 5g advanced as if standalone is already deployed. 

Yeah. Yeah. So the theme of this week's podcast is standalone.

It's been the theme of our podcast for the last year, right? And we even teed it up. We teed it up quite a bit last year, right? Around this time. And I think we've been pretty good on projecting that operators would start talking about it this year. And, Verizon and AT& T have been, weirdly making interesting claims around standalone here we have standalone here.

We're doing standalone. Yeah, we're not. We're doing more standalone than we're talking about, but not actually just saying we have standalone nationwide and everywhere all the time. It's so what, why are we doing this? T Mobile has clearly stated they have standalone everywhere. And yeah, you can think they're not really saying, oh, we have voner everywhere, but if you have standalone everywhere, you should be able to deploy voner.

Yeah, what's interesting to what was lost and when AT& T did announce its consumer fixed wireless access service. Internet error it is standalone. And, and there wasn't really a lot of reference and, in the press release when it came out, and I actually provide that feedback back to the AT& T team.

Hey, listen, this has been a long, arduous journey and but it's time to, to move forward. And the good news is there are no more excuses, man. Most operators globally have mid band spectrum, which is critical to achieving the throughput and the low latency that we expect from the true promise of 5G Europe has moved, through the hurdles with, spectrum options and regulatory.

The India market has done that as well. China and Asia have been full tilt, so there are no more excuses. So really, I think 2024 is the year of standalone. We'll continue to see, I think, progress, it's November. I can't believe it's already November through the end of this year, but but, I'm going to, I'm going to call 2024 not, not the year of the panda or the year of the goat or whatever.

I'm going to call it the year of standalone. But Hey, it's been a great podcast, man. It's tough. I actually when we skip a week or two, I feel guilty, man, and I really enjoy our conversation. So we'll try to get back at it. Hopefully our travel will calm down a little bit, but we do appreciate our viewers and listeners being patient with us, but with that said, why don't you take us home, Anshul?

Absolutely. And I will say, I think the next travel that we both have together will be AWS reInvent. So maybe we'll be able to record something there. We'll see. Maybe. We'll see. But yeah we hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights for a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media.

I'm at Anshel Sag. Will is at Willtown Tech. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.