Welcome to episode 168 of the G2 on 5G. It's the latest Insight 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. But before we get started, we are a little bit late. I'm actually in Tokyo, and I'll be talking about my first topic will be around the R and D forum that NTT is hosting here. But how was your week, buddy? Good, just busy. I'm home this week. I'm out of town next week. I'll be at the media tech executive summit talking to a lot of media tech executives and. Connecting with press and talking about all the new things coming out of MediaTek. Yeah, I know. I know you want to talk about that this week as well. We'll just, we'll jump right into it. I've got some, a lot of travel, as I push forward towards the end of the year as well. This is my last international trip of the year, but I am looking forward to spending time here in Tokyo, and that's a nice segue to my first topic. And so I want to talk about NTT, and they host an R& D forum here in Tokyo every year. Now, the online access is available to the general public, but to attend in person is by invitation only. So I feel quite privileged that extended that invitation. It is Sunday. My time and I'll be here all next week and it's a full 5 days and the topics are, they're excellent. And so we've talked about in TT in the past. They are a partner of Cisco's. In fact, I learned at partner summit Cisco's partner summit that I attended last week in Miami. That they've been partners with Cisco for over 30 years. And so NTT is a huge integrator, but they also have a mobile network operation division, NTT DoCoMo. And so what I'm really looking forward to is spending time with the infrastructure folks, understanding what they're doing to enable things like private 5G and their partnership with Cisco. But also I'll be touring a few different DoCoMo Exhibitions 1 is about just something around transportation and logistics and the other involves basically their operation in a sort of, real world, smart city scenario. There'll also be exhibits that I'm going to be attending as well, and they're going to range from satellite, which is something that you're going to talk about here in a few minutes, but also optical networking. And a pretty interesting use case around improving 5G throughput using spatial information. So I'm looking forward to it. I do plan to publish an article. It might be on Forbes. It might be on the more insights and strategy website to be determined, but that'll be coming out in the next week after I spend time here. But I don't know. Were you even aware of the R and D form here? No, but I do think it's interesting because NTT is a very broad company in terms of what they do. And I like to think of them as like a, they're a data management company. And obviously they own an operator as well in Japan. But, it's always interesting to hear about what NTT is doing and... They're the leading of the sphere in a lot of ways for digital transformation in Japan, which is super important for that country. Because as far as I understand, they're only recently started to eliminate the use of rubber or wax seals on official government documents. Okay, NTT is. aT the head of that kind of making sure that those efforts are done safely and securely, but also in a reliable manner. So that's, that's what I know about NTT. I would say that the areas that I cover, they're not really that active. But I will say that I see them everywhere that I go, and it's quite clear that they have a global presence, even though they are very much a Japan, focus company. They are, yeah, they are definitely their footprint is global. Recently, they've gone through a a consolidation. They were operated under many different entities. And so they're trying to unify that to simplify and streamline things much like they do with their customers as well. Over 330, 000 employees. So they're definitely huge. I am definitely looking forward to spending time with them this coming week, and again, I'll be including those insights and in a writeup, but I mentioned satellites. So let's let's talk about, I know you want to talk about Qualcomm and they're ending their partnership with Iridium. And so that, that's pretty big news, man. It is. It's actually really interesting because you and I have actually talked quite a bit about satellite over the last year or so, we even had some people from MediaTek on to talk about it. And the interesting thing is that what it seems like, first of all, the actual news is that Qualcomm is terminating its relationship and agreement with Iridium at effective December 3rd. And what that means is that None of Qualcomm's OEMs really wanted to work with Qualcomm and Iridium to make this possible. I was actually at CES this year and they drove us out to the desert and showed us the demo and I have a, a whole recording of it. And basically it seems like there's no interest in this non standard approach. It seems like we're gonna move in the right direction of standards based. solutions, whether that's from a a link mobile or from a a media tech or anybody really. But it's interesting because Qualcomm has a lot of experience in cellular, but also satellite. And it's really interesting because Iridium's stock tanked pretty hard from this. And I've had people reaching out to me to talk to me about it and, it really just seems the statement I got from Qualcomm was that the OEMs prefer standard phase solution which means, adhering to NTN which MediaTek already does and I think it's just better for the industry if everybody adheres to the 5GNR NTN standard whether that's the IOT or the the actual, database solution that's more capable and has better throughput because the the NR solution for. This satellite communications can actually do a lot more. And I think that just we're going to see a little bit more. We're going to see continued consolidation. The 1 thing that I think may have also her Qualcomm was, if you look at the way things are rolling out today, most of the operators. Are the ones really taking this by the horns and working with a satellite provider and then integrating the OEMs into the solution. I just don't think the OEMs have a way to charge customers for this in a way that, successful as a business. And that's part of the problem I think Qualcomm had as well. The OEMs just, I don't think want to have to manage all that complexity and offer additional services. And operators already have the spectrum and, Verizon's aligned with Creeper T Mobile's aligned with SpaceX AT& T is aligned. With AST space mobile. So there's already these alignments in place. So I think it's really difficult for Qualcomm to get OEMs to ignore what's already happening in the market. And I think this is just a natural progression of consolidation. And I don't think it's over. I think we're going to see more companies drop off more or partnerships end. But at the same time, I think we'll see, we'll hear new partnerships be created as a result of this. Thanks. And I don't know if Iridium will be one of those companies to do that, but it's really interesting because Iridium is based in McLean, Virginia, and so is Satellite IoT or Satellite will invite me out to their event that they're having. Unfortunately, I be with Amazon at AWS, but it's quite clear that Virginia is a very central place for a lot of these satellite technologies companies. Yeah, and I actually, I think on a prior podcast, I mentioned the fact that satellite OT or suddenly and however you pronounce it I did meet with their CEO and it was very interesting conversation. I plan to follow up and have some further discussions with him at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. But I think, from my perspective, this looked like a really heavy lift for the OEMs and it's better not to have a diverged path. And, to stay on the standard, and focus on, what 3GPP has done with NTN. And really, I don't want to, I don't want to be negative about Iridium, but I really felt like that they were, following, other leaders in this space. It is what it is, but it'll be interesting to see how things wind out here. But let's move to my 2nd topic. I know you want to weigh in on this as well. We've talked about DISH. Man, there seems to be a lot of trouble in paradise and recently there was an announcement made that it's a dish network CEO. Eric Carlson is resigning November 12th ahead of the the merger with Echo star. And it just gets me wondering, is the wrong executive exiting, Charlie, I think he, he's has a lot to blame here with respect to, what the company's done, how it's, squatted on spectrum and, just all the back and forth that you and I have discussed on many podcasts and, the earnings were abysmal. In the, if the stock could take, it, even further than it has did basically revenues for the 3rd quarter of 2023 fell 10 percent year on year to 3Billion. Yeah. That's a net loss of 139 million compared with a 412 million net income number earned just a year before. This appears to be a train wreck of epic proportion. So what are your thoughts? I was going to ask you, when did they report earnings? Earnings were reported looks like late. Was it late September? No, that can't be right. I guess I don't have the right figure here, but yeah, within the last, several weeks. Yeah, because I think what's interesting if you look at their share 550. And then it went to 350 last week. So clearly they had pretty disappointing earnings. And, there's the CEO resigned. sO November 6, I'm looking at my notes. So earnings were announced in November 6, but basically this is their fiscal quarter that ended at the end of September. November 6 was when they reported earnings. Yeah, and their stock basically tanked a couple days before that. So I just think Bish networks. Is not getting better. Things are getting worse. And yeah this week they reported they made off 500 people in Colorado. I was going to say when you said trouble in paradise. I don't know if I consider Colorado paradise. I know. I know you have some property there, but I do. I would say that it's hard. I would also say that maybe dish HQ is really not a thing in paradise either at this level. But, um, I just think it's a train wreck at this point. And I just don't really know what's going on in the sense that like what they're thinking, because they're still like negotiating with T Mobile about this 800 megahertz spectrum. Yeah. It's 3. 6 billion. There's no way they're going to find the money for this. No. No. With their current share price, I don't even think they're like worth anything as bucks a share. Their market cap is less than 2 billion dollars. Yeah, their market cap is less than what they're trying to pay for the spectrum. Yeah, I can't sink in. But, yeah, there's no way they can get credit facilities based on that. No, actually, I need, I knew someone that was part of the dish team in Colorado and I won't mention her name, but she is back in Austin, someone that I've known for many years. But, you're not the only 1. Yeah. Yeah, things look so promising for so long that this management shuffle continues. It's reshuffling, folks on the Titanic, you're going to say reshuffle cares on the Titanic. I knew it. Yeah, we're going. Their stock was, in 2014, their stock was 61. See, that's unbelievable. And they are now 3. 44. Yeah. That's just not good. I just don't, I really think at this point, they just have to be parted off and sold. Honestly, their spectrum is worth more than the company is. Yeah, it definitely is. It's it would be a hostile takeover and honestly, it would probably be better used in someone else's hands Yeah, no, I totally agree better used than someone's hands that has the resources to deploy it and to deploy it in an effective Manner where they're the entire company doesn't get hacked and is hobbling for three to four months I don't even know if that's like Really public knowledge, but the company has been struggling and it's just one thing after another. And this just really doesn't look good and I have a hard time being positive. I think we tried. I really do think we tried to be positive about this. We did, hey, listen, having the 4th operator. Competition, breeds innovation, but they just didn't have the wherewithal to pull it off. No, I don't think so. Let's not continue to beat a dead horse. Let's move to your second topic. And you did mention the Media Tech Executive Summit, and you want to talk about Dimensity 9300. Yeah. So they actually did this. Last year where they pre announced their flagship chip, in advance of the summit I don't personally love it because it makes it hard for me to like properly connect everything together but basically the Mediatek Dimensity 9300 is their new flagship chip this will be the chip that lands in all the flagship phones that they win. And hopefully the wins that they get are better than last year. Getting more flagship chips outside of China. That's the only place where MediaTek was able to get design wins for the 93, 9200. bUt I actually have the chip here with me. They sent me one in Lucite. I'll even put it closer to the camera so you can see. That is right there. And yeah, it's a chip. It's a smartphone chip. It's got the latest CPU cores from ARM. The one thing that's really cool about this chip is it's the first chip from MediaTek. To have no efficiency cores. So they've ditched the efficiency core for a very efficient big core paired with even more high performance, big core. So it's a a four big core for bigger core configuration. I call it all big core CPU. which results in eight cores and some real crazy performance. They're claiming a 15 percent increase in single core performance and a 40 percent increase in multi core performance, which is pretty big. And they're also, talking about AI, of course using their seventh gen AI processor. And they're saying that one's 45 percent more efficient. And of course there's adding support for even faster memory, which is necessary. To support a lot of these AI workloads, and then, they've got a 12 core GPU, which is, an Immortalis G720, which is an Arm's GPUs which obviously positions them well to compete against Apple, and yeah, it's it's just one of those things where this is a very iterative approach it does have all those same things that, previous generation modems have had and yeah it's. It's their best, latest and greatest. And it'll be really interesting to see how it competes against the snap dragon, eight gen three, which came out a few weeks ago and he's already shipping in devices. Yeah that's a summary there and I'll be at the summit to to ask more questions and get more details on it. Cool. So from your perspective, Dimensity, Squarely is their performance solution, with, dropping those ancillary cores and going to the four big cores, like you mentioned, is this sort of a cost optimization exercise, or is it more of a preparing it for next generation local sort of AI, capabilities or both? I think it's both, but I also think when you look at the configuration, it's very much focused on high performance. And there's already going to be phones out there like the Vivo X100 that will have the Dimensity 9300 and it will be, maybe enough to compete, but I'm not sure it will beat Apple. And yeah, I think there's just, there's always going to be an OEM that launches with Dimensity. And they've actually expanded Man City into their auto business as well, but, which I don't necessarily agree with, I think you should have a separate brand for auto, but yeah, I think they're really trying to stay up on the flagship category with the Man City 9300 and, efficiency cores are, I think they're going by the wayside because if you look at what Qualcomm is doing with their Snapdragon X Elite, Which is their PC processor. It also doesn't have efficiency course, but it has 12 of the same course with a couple of cores that can clock even higher, but they're all effectively the same course. It just seems like we're moving away from that efficiency core design, which is really funny because. There was a time when efficiency cores were a new thing and everybody implemented them because they couldn't find a way to make a big core very efficient. And now it's big cores are so efficient that we might not actually even need efficiency cores anymore. Oh, yeah. So the improvements and efficiency have dealt away with the efficiency course. That's interesting. Cool. You're much deeper on the silicon level stuff. So I trust your judgment there, but. I like what MediaTek is doing, how they're moving up market and Domensity is really providing, solutions that fit into that premium category. So it's good stuff. Competition is always great, but let's hit my 3rd and final topic. And I want to talk about SumX, their tower operator. They acquired some private 4G and 5G service capabilities from Edscom. And now they're dumping that and they're basically selling it to Bolden Networks, which was previously branded BAI Communications. And so You know, this isn't like a huge surprise for me. This was outside of some X's core competency. You could argue that private networking was adjacent to what they were doing with towers, but in their press release, some X did state that they want to refocus on their core business and adjacencies within, operating towers. And but also the, there's no surprise that private, private network adoption has been slow. And we've talked about that on many other podcasts. I think that will change over time. I think a lot of it has to do with, the delay that we've seen with standalone deployment and big public mobile networks, but most private networks, especially 5G deployments are straight standalone because obviously it's easier to manage the core and the radio access network infrastructure within smaller private network deployment. I just thought this was interesting, another sort of bellwether or indicator around, maybe sell next thought, and acquiring these assets, they could jump on something pretty quickly and build it pretty quickly. But I think what they probably learned is that. This is, private networking is going to be long tail, especially when it comes to 5G. Obviously, LTE private networks have existed for a very long time, but and that should change over time. But it's a, it's a long tail play from my perspective. So I don't know if you have anything to add to that, or if we want to just jump to your 3rd topic. I do not. All right, let's just jump to your 3rd topic. And this is something that you and I have joked about, on the side, but this is tied to the Las Vegas Grand Prix. And, I've been keeping up with all the news around the fact that, ticket prices have been dropping. F1 organizers, this is a funny tweet or an ax or whatever you want to call it that I think I saw you exchange with someone, or maybe it was a LinkedIn post or Facebook but it was like around. Oh the F1 folks didn't know that it actually gets cold in the Nevada desert in November. Are the wheels falling off all of this, but with that said, you do want to talk about T Mobile's 5G experiences that they're going to be promoting. They're going to be promoting various activations at the event. Yeah. So they have they have an immersive 360 degree driving experience. They also have. I think there's like a T Mobile zone at the event. And actually to your point, I do think ticket prices were obscene. They were somewhere in the 1, 600 to 1, 800 range, and that was the cheapest tickets. I think the F1 organization got a little greedy. And people decided, you know what we're not even going to bother. And as a result, hotel prices have tanked, ticket prices have dropped, and yeah they just set themselves up for failure as an organization, but T Mobile also has the T Mobile Zone at the Sphere, which, what I was talking about and they'll have performances there every day. So there's cool there's cool activations that are doing there. And they're also doing a thing where T Mobile customers get to ride shotgun with some vehicles. They didn't really say with whom but I'm hoping that shotgun means like maybe in a a pace car, right? Because there are no second seats in F1 cars. But yeah, there's also a big talk about connectivity. And they actually released a press release a couple days ago when we originally planned to record this. That OpenSignal reported that T Mobile has 66 percent 5G availability in the Las Vegas fan experience area. And that Verizon has 22. 9 percent and AT& T has 11%. They also said that their download speeds... Are 171 megabits per second, while AT& T and Team Verizon are virtually tied at 113 and 112. And then I think the last one's probably, I don't love this one, but it's called consistent quality. That's another open signal test. But if 70s, so as far as I'm concerned, that's a wash. But clearly T Mobile is ready to serve the networks. I would love to be there to test that valid, invalidate that claim. But I do think that, T Mobile is really positioned to be successful for running this race. And that there's more likely going to be, more happy T Mobile customers at the race than Verizon or yeah, T Mobile has invested in the Las Vegas market. We've talked about this, right? So they're supporting the remote piloted car service and I'm so jet lag right now. This is probably not my best performance and I'm struggling to remember the company. I should know it. Hey, hello. There you go and and also T Mobile's involved in the city of Las Vegas with a lot of smart city type use cases. So I think, having, the Las Vegas Grand Prix front and center and this should really highlight, T Mobile's, build out of their 5G assets and They have their advanced network services. There are advanced network solutions. Deployed there as well. So they're actually deploying inside the Grand Prix pit building. And the new Formula One headquarters, which are where the final, finish line is and they're also networking using network slicing on their standalone network to power point of sale terminals at the event. So fans can pick up. Whatever gear they want, it's probably very overpriced. If you've been into an F1 race, how overpriced it is. They can pick up your 50 F1 baseball cap, but that's cheap. That's yeah, you're probably, it's probably 75 or 100, but I will mention because I did recall this, even with my incredible jet lag that when I was at Mobile World Congress, Las Vegas ice, but I said, I spent time with with the T Mobile executive Parvin Mahajan, and we did, we talked about several topics and, T Mobile for business should be sharing this on their social media channels, but there is a fireside chat between Parvin and I. Where we talk about some of these things that you're mentioning at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. And, just saying, so I'll be researching, I Would've been opposed if they asked me to, take a look at what's going on. But unfortunately, I'll, I will be at the media tech executive summit, so I won't be able to attend the race. Oh other times. Yeah, I couldn't attend it either. I had also a conflict, but Hey, buddy, thanks for hanging in there with me, man. I'm struggling here with the jet lag. I've only been here a day, but why don't you take us home? Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like to reach out and provide us insights for a specific 5G topic for a future podcast. Please reach out to us on social media. Will is at WhaleTownTec. I'm at OnshellSod. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate and subscribe.