Welcome to episode 169 of the GTO on 5G. It's the latest scoop on everything 5G. We cover six topics in about 20 minutes and it's brought to you by More Insights and Strategy. I'm Will Townsend, joined again from Tokyo this week and I'm also welcoming my fellow analyst Anshul Sag.  Let's get started with my first topic and I want to talk about Kendral and Nokia. 

And I think I've spoken about Kendra in the past. They're a systems integrator and they've been working with Nokia on private networking deployments. And, integration is pretty key. Obviously, in very large public mobile networks Nokia provides all of that, but it's a little bit different when you look at enterprises, but the partnership between the 2 companies has resulted in 18, very large installations, most notably chemical company. 

But they announced this week that they're expanding that to Chevron Phillips chemical. So it seems to me that. They have a solution that's ideally suited for the petrochemical industry. And what's interesting about this, it's based in Houston, Texas. It's based in my home state. There's a lot of energy production in Texas. 

My daughter works for Halliburton. She's in West Texas, but for Dow Chemical prior to initially an LTE deployment, this will be these will be 8 LTE networks leveraging CBRS spectrum. But prior to that, they had relied on outdoor Wi Fi.  And no surprise the company basically stated that they were having challenges with Wi Fi coverage and performance.

And, Wi Fi just requires a lot of densification. And you get to a point, and I get this question often,  when, when should,  a company consider, private cellular over wifi? It gets to the point where the cost of densifying wifi exceeds, the benefits that you get, and it actually exceeds the cost of deploying a private cellular network.

This should be really interesting.  They basically state that they have over 3000 various applications that they're running. And obviously, this is an operational technology environment. There's a lot of manufacturing. There's a lot of production,  and there's a lot of sensors that are involved here. And so they stated for this 1st phase that LTE should get the job done just fine.

And that's the case with a lot of these cases, but, from my perspective,  as they start looking at things like autonomous guided vehicles and autonomy in general for a lot of the more dangerous operations that's where 5g is really going to shine, from  not only a massive device support.

Because 1 of 5G superpowers is that it can support a significantly higher number of devices in LTE, but it really comes down to the latency. That's sub 5 millisecond latency. I think it's a great showcase. It continues to demonstrate the momentum that Nokia has established early  in the private 5G space, but wondering if you have any comments here, or if you caught the 

news. 

I don't have any comments. I did not catch the news. But I do think that there is some value in, more  industrial applications of private, 4G. I do wonder why they went with LTE  instead of. Yeah I don't know if you know anything about that, but maybe it feels like maybe it's one of those things where they spec that out so long ago that's just what it is, and that's how it's going to be.

And maybe we'll get 5G in 5, 10 years from now.  

Yeah, I don't have the context on that. I do spend a lot of time with Nikki. So I do plan to follow up with them when I'm back in the States, but I would assume it's, it's possibly to your point that, the planning phase, started, quite a bit, time ago.

There, there may also be some challenges. It's just a spectrum and, CBR spectrum is very mature with respect to LTE support.  And just recently CBS is beginning to support 5G deployment use cases. So it's probably a combination of all of that. I would also think if they went straight to a private 5G standalone network, that would future.

Proof what they're doing. Hey, there may be some sort of modular, progression that gets them to 5G. But yeah, we can only speculate, but let's go to your 1st topic. And you want to talk about apple. And I love this headline. It's are pigs flying at at apple.  

Yeah, you could say hell froze over, you could say pigs are flying, but basically Apple was responding to a request from nine to five Mac who got the scoop that Apple said that later next year, there'll be adding support for RCS universal profile, which is the standard is currently published by the GSMA.

And they believe that RCS universal profile will offer better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS and this will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users. But  why this is likely happening is because the European Digital Markets Act is in place and companies have, I believe, until the end of this week to state.

You know what they plan to do or how they plan to, adhere to it. So this is clearly how Apple plans to adhere. And yeah, I think it's a huge win for a lot of reasons and I think the industry will be better for it. Much like the type C situation with the iPhone 15. 

Series I'm glad you mentioned that.

Really Europe drove that right? And it was a lot of my friends, on the last iPhone announcement, there was, a lot of discussion around usb. C. support the iPad and seeing that we hadn't seen that on the iPhone until the most recent iPhone and really that's Europe driving that. And, from apples perspective, I think they, they enjoyed monetizing lightning and all the licensing.

Yeah. That they receive from cable manufacturers and whatnot. And yeah, in order to, to not overly complicate, what they're doing from a design perspective there, they just migrated everything to U. S. B. C. But it's just funny because a lot of my buddies go, Ooh, look at apples innovation.

They're bringing U. S. B. C. To something that androids had for years.  

Yeah, they wouldn't have done either of these if it weren't forced on them by the European regulators. Yeah, European regulators, yeah. Have made a huge difference and obviously Google probably feels very vindicated with their whole, blue bubble green bubble campaign yeah, and it's it is genuinely an issue when my sister has run into it recently but the good thing is that when I was speaking to wired I said that you know I really think there's an opportunity here to kill sms and mms which are woefully insecure 

And they're long in the tooth 

and they're inadequate for so many things that like It may actually be the end of sms for the most part which is good because it's just it'll be better for everything and having rcs compatibility across android and ios will be  huge, I think for a lot of reasons and security is an added benefit honestly, but in addition to this good news  There's also bad news in the Apple world.

It looks like Apple might not actually be able to hit its 20, its recently delayed 2025 target of delivering its own 5G modem. This was, came from Mark Herman at Bloomberg, who is pretty much... Everything he says, it ends up being true. So I don't really question the validity of this rumor, even though it is true rumor.

But what that does mean is that Apple gets less and less wiggle room in their already newly extended licensing agreement with Qualcomm. And  this. It's funny because I don't think Intel actually had as many delays when they were supplying Apple as Apple has delays by itself. That said, they are using the same IP from Infineon, which is where Intel's business started from as an acquisition as well.

So  I also think this is something I believe that Apple is also having problems because they aren't really doing enough development.  And participating in the 3GPP in a way that would allow them to cross license patents so that they would spend less time trying to create novel approaches to things that have already been solved and easily be solved through patents.

And I have a strong feeling they're going to end up licensing patents anyways, even though they don't want to. anD yeah, I think it's going to be one of those things where It might get to the point where Apple goes, we're just going to kill it because we can't make this work. At some point, 

you start throwing good money.

Yeah.  

Every time they delay, it just makes it harder for them to keep it alive.  

Yeah. Sorry. I didn't mean to talk over you. Yeah. Why throw good money after bad, right? I know this has really got to stick in their crawl because, Apple has this attitude, only designed here, right?

And yeah, but this is difficult stuff. And I think what Apple's figuring out is that, hey, this isn't a walk in the park, but and Qualcomm's had, considerable amount of time to perfect what they're doing. And MediaTek has made, great inroads as well. I know you're going to talk about MediaTek pretty soon here, but let me jump to my second talk. 

And about Juniper Networks and I've talked on prior podcast about the city of Las Vegas and what they're doing to deploy, private cellular for a number of different use cases, we talked about F1  on the last podcast where I was very badly jet lagged and pretty mumbly. So I want to apologize to our viewers and listeners.

Not my best performance there, but. But here comes juniper network. They're joining the city of Las Vegas private 5G party and juniper does have a pretty interesting platform. They call it cloud Metro and what they're aiming to do is compliment what, what the city of Las Vegas has already been embarking on from supporting um, city government and public schools, but also tourism as well.

And  there are two particular cloud metro routers that are gonna be deployed. The 70 24 and the 4,300, actually the 4,300 is a switch. And basically this is gonna form the backbone of the network.  And obviously you've got backhaul that's. Supplies that, but they're also going to be integrating myths, wired assurance.

And this is an acquisition. I'm sure many people are familiar with that brought a lot of AI capabilities to to Juniper's portfolio and really has been pretty instrumental in accelerating Juniper's footprint within within enterprise, having traditionally been very service provider focus. These are pretty compelling solutions. I've actually spoken to the team here and I think, much what we see with some of the greenfield 5G deployments, there are lots of, infrastructure providers that are involved. And so I think. Juniper brings  some unique capabilities here.

And also, leveraging their knowledge base from their traditional, service provider business that really up until, the next acquisition, that was, their sole focus and they weren't really a factor in the enterprise. But certainly that's changed now, but I think this is great.

I know that you continue to. Thank you. Monitor what's going on there because F1 is heating up, but do you have any thoughts here before we move to your second topic?  

I was going to ask you what kind of network is this exactly that it's being used in?  And I was going to say  today at this MediaTek event that I'm at, they actually said that MediaTek is the The house of record, I don't know what you want to call it, but basically they're the ones manufacturing chips for Juniper networks. They held up a pretty big it looked like a server chip almost with some memory dies on it.  That, that was a purpose built chip for Juniper.  

Yeah yeah, so they're, so Jennifer, they leverage merchant and they do some of their own custom silicon.

My understanding is, and these routers and switches, it's leveraging some of  their their own custom silicon  to answer your question. There it's part of a broader, private 5G network and it's, as I read through the news here it's actually  designed to cover what they're doing from what they're calling the city's innovation district. 

Okay, and yeah, I don't have a lot of additional details on what the city's innovation district is, but I'm assuming that's probably a combination of, government, service, stuff as well as supporting tourism industry, because obviously, Las Vegas is a huge tourist draw.

 Yeah,  but let's move to your 2nd topic. And that's a great segue into media tech. And you want to talk about a red cap mode. Red cap is something that we've discussed on prior podcasts.  

Yeah, so this new modem is the M 60. Like Qualcomm's X 35, it is a reduced capacity modem built on a much, different architecture to optimize for power.

I will have an article out when this. Podcast is published on Forbes kind of detailing the M 60 and you know what its applications are. But truthfully, they're not any different than what we've talked about with red cap modems from Qualcomm. And I'm not really aware of any other red cap homes at this time.

 This is a, capable of upwards of 200 megabits downlink and 100 megabits uplink, which is ample for most industrial applications or IOT or, even some wearables. So this is the real focus on this is, delivering lower power than. What was possible on 4G LTE, but also delivering higher, throughput and lower latency and I think if I remember correctly, I'm spitballing here, but I think when I was  working on my article it was something like 70 percent reduction in power consumption versus the, Good  Last generation of 4G LTE IoT products,  and it was something like a 60 percent reduction compared to 5G products.

It's still considerable, power consumption reductions in both scenarios. And. For MediaTek commercialized this, they're putting it inside of their T300 RFSOC platform, so that's similar to what they have with their other T series products, which are like a, there's an application processor, there's some networking,  and it's basically like a complete system on a chip for this connectivity, so that way when someone wants to deploy it, it's going to be a very small footprint. 

And it will actually, be a lot easier to deploy. Speaking of the footprint, I think they said something like it will be a reduction of 60 percent on PCB space compared to 4G IoT solutions as well. So you're getting power and spatial reductions. And that's huge for someone who's trying to build connectivity into a product that either Already has it or hasn't been able to accommodate it because of the limitations of power and space. 

aNd I don't know if you've got the detail on this, but I would also assume that there are some costs take out consideration as well, because red cap is.  Position, for, integration into a number of different form factors, including clothing. 

Yeah. So there's absolutely going to be a case where this is a lower cost solution compared to let's say, MediaTek's M80  top of the line modem, but I would also say neither Qualcomm nor MediaTek have communicated that these modems are cheaper.

And I think that's partially because they're more likely to be integrated more. More deeply into the device  than some other modems might be, but even I just think they're not really talking about price because it's probably a different business model. They're probably integrating more to your 1,  and other integrators to get these, enterprise.

Industrial applications going. We'll see what happens. But, this could end up in our glasses. It could end up in a gateway. There's  virtually anything could potentially take advantage of a red cap modem. If it doesn't need 

a lot of throughput.  Yeah. Yeah. And, obviously the power  profile is the killer, aspect of red cops of cool, man.

Hey let's go to my 3rd and final topic. And I want to talk about telecom and,  you and I have talked about South Korean, mobile network operators, how innovative they are, how they were some of the 1st. Yeah. To really lean into very innovative 5G services initially in consumer and then eventually in an enterprise to really distance themselves.

And in fact, dude, I remember you and I and Patrick are our principal and founder of more insights and strategy. We did a 6 part series on who is leading in 5G and this was like, I think, in 2018, 2019, we need to refresh that by the way, but part of it was carrier and you and I contributed to that and.

We were really struck and impressed with their leadership while news is coming, from SK Telecom tied to recent earnings that they are very squarely focused on leveraging AI and infusing AI in the next generation 5G services. And this is no surprise, right?  You can't swing a dead cat and not hit a company that's talking about generative AI.

I think that's a terrible analogy. My wife would probably hate me for saying that since she has a cat, but yeah, but I'm in Tokyo. So it's acceptable, at least this week, but, it's interesting S. K. telecom they've actually developed an internal app. It's for call center management and obviously that's more of an enterprise service, but they expect to drive.

I think the number I read was 9 to 10 percent of total sort of service revenue. By 2028 with AI and in the process, they've, they're also backing several AI startups and there's one that they've put 100 million investment, which is anthropic.  You might know them, but it's a competitor to open a I right?

I know. Anthropic. Yep. Yeah. 

And so what they're hoping to do is develop specific telco large language models. And this isn't a surprise. I spent time with Dell. I wrote an. Article I couldn't talk a lot about the India stuff, but it was a, their take on and, these large, the processing of models is going to occur, not only in the data center and in the cloud, but it's going to eventually occur locally as well.

But from a perspective, I think there, there's more to learn and there's more to. Leverage with AI than just  making networks more reliable and predictable. I think there's some true monetization opportunities here. And specifically there was discussion around, metaverse applications.

And this is where I'd like to really get your input, because you are our mixed reality expert at the farm. What do you see a doing within telecom and metaverse to really drive some innovative kind of applications. 

So  first and foremost, I think every version of AI that we know today.

At some point needs to call back to the cloud, the more you call back to the cloud, the more you would depend on a good connection and a fast 1. and that's already an easy 1 for 5G. I do think that 5G or AI will be more hybrid in the sense that. You'll have some things that won't run locally because that's what they can do.

And that's efficient. And that makes sense. But then there will be times when you have to call back to the cloud and send data to the cloud and then receive it back when it's done. And that's a 5G connection right there. Now, on the Metaverse side or on the XR side,  I think we're still figuring out  what's happening with,  how 5g connectivity affects  XR.

I think it's less of a factor in VR than it is with AR. The problem with AR is we're just so early on that. I just don't think we're at a point of scale where 5g makes sense. I do think a 5g network with good edge compute could offload some of the compute on glasses to make them thinner and lighter. 

But we're not really there, even if they were thin and light, the optics are not there yet. We need both edge compute and devices to get thinner and lighter. But that's how I see it.  

Okay, that's fair. No, it's good stuff, man. That's great. Let's move to your third and final topic. And we talked about T Mobile earlier and F1, but this is really, I think, from my perspective, a watershed moment with connected PC and I shared something on Twitter, but I'm going to let you take it.

And then I've got some thoughts here as 

well. Yeah, this was something that I think has been a long time coming. I'm actually surprised that it's taken this long in the year of our Lord 2023, but basically this is T Mobile is leading the charge here. In my opinion they are offering to any user.

With a  Snapdragon based Surface Pro 9 5G they can get 30 day, actually it's 90 days and 30 gigs of free service.  I'm already a T Mobile customer, so I'm still able to take advantage of that. But it took me like, five seconds to do, cause I already have a T Mobile account. You do have to set up an account and pay, have a set up, some kind of payment.

But I think that could be streamlined, maybe paid through the Microsoft store would be great.  Just because I think, I feel complicating how things are paid for is one of the biggest problems that 5g PCs have  but T Mobile is leading the charge here, however, they are not alone Verizon's an option as well which I thought was pretty cool.

I don't think they have any promotions. I haven't had time to ask my Verizon contacts, but I don't think  then there's a, you, who, which is the KDDI. Operator in Japan and then you have Bell in Canada, Swisscom, we know where they live. Telenor, which is Norway Telia  which I think is  Sweden. Baltics, right?

It's somewhere in Norway, I think. And then Telstra, which is Australia, Vodafone, and then Vodafone Espana. So that's a lot of carriers that they didn't even really announce this. This wasn't like a, a big hurrah. For Microsoft, they just quietly announced this, and then T Mobile made the announcement, and then I accidentally stumbled upon all these other carriers and yeah I went and set it up, took me less than 10 minutes and it actually saved my butt earlier today, because the Wi Fi network here at the conference  obviously shit the bed.

And while it was shooting the bed, I ran a speed test and I got 11 milliseconds ping and 600 megabits down.  So I was hashtag winning. But yeah, like that was a perfect example of why we need 5G and PCs because there's so many scenarios where Wi Fi just doesn't cut it. And I'm really impressed with the experience that I've had so far.

And yeah, like this is I think, this is I think prepping for next year where Microsoft is going to make a really big push  on AI PCs, but also there's going to be a lot more PCs with 5G connectivity. And we're probably going to see this framework that we're seeing getting built out, getting more flushed out and deployed. 

Yeah, no, I think it's a watershed moment. I think to your point  there's been a lot of friction with connected PC. It's, it's difficult to provision. You've got to go through several different hoops. And yeah, I think it would be smart that, with the surface product, you could just activate this through the the Microsoft online store.

And because at the end of the day, you've got to remove friction to make this happen. And I remember many years ago, I was adult. Now, I was in a business development role and 1 of the things we were working on was,  this was in a TG world. We were integrating mobile broadband modems on the latitude business notebooks.

And this was squarely. This was a business play, not consumer.  And I was managing the relationship between Dell and TELUS in Canada and AT& T and it's really how I first got exposed to cellular connectivity many years ago. And obviously, at that time, we didn't have the sophistication that we have today with SAS and software defined and that sort of thing.

But that was 1 of the big challenges. And, the program, it was very early. Probably not a remarkable success,  but it was the Genesis for, what Microsoft's been pushing for years, which is around connected PC. And I think the value for business travelers, road warriors you and I, to be able to not have to worry about finding a Wi Fi hotspot, just, it just, it improves your connectivity tremendously.

And I think. Patrick Moorhead our chief analyst and founder he's kicked the tires on connected PCs. And he says the same thing because, you and I travel a lot that, our fearless leader, I think he's cloned himself and he's on the road all the time. And if you think about it, being able, to just to open your notebook and be instantly connected to a 5G network and to be productive.

There. That's huge. And it's almost it's almost impossible to, to assign value to that because it's so tremendous, right? Yeah.  

Yeah. One thing I will add, and I find this perplexing, is why  at and t is missing? Usually when something like this comes out, I find that at t and T-Mobile are the leaders. 

And then Verizon is lagging or Verizon does it by themselves. And then T Mobile and AT& T catch up. It's very rare to see T Mobile and Verizon being the ones that are starting with this. So  I'm very curious to see how AT& T responds to this. 

Yeah, no, I think I think they'll step it up because obviously AT& T has a very mature enterprise services portfolio, but hey, it's been another great podcast.

I'm glad I was a little more coherent on this one, 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 provide insights on a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media, wills that will contact.

And I'm Anshel Sog. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in next week. Don't forget to rate us and subscribe.