Welcome to episode 171 of the G two 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 more insights and strategy. I'm Will Townsend, and joining me again this week is Fellow analyst Ancho Sag.  Dialing in from Veeva Las Vegas for reinvent.

Yeah, I actually have a sticker, you can see it, a sticker from the AWS telecom group booth at the expo. And I also got a cool pin as well. That's the only swag I got from the show. I don't really do swag anymore. I've accumulated too much direct.  

It piles up for sure.

Yeah, unfortunately, I couldn't join you this week. I've had 2 international trips almost back to back. So I tuned in from home and  I'm sure our viewers and listeners saw a lot of live tweeting or X scene activity from you and I, but let's jump into our topics this week. And I want to get started with dish. 

They're claiming the world's largest 5G loaner, not to be confused with other terms, voiceover and honor deployment with adding Denver as a market recently. And, we've talked about dish and, their trials and tribulations, Denver is their home market. They're based in Colorado.

And basically they are claiming that they have the largest.  Voice over in our deployment in the world across 89 markets that covers over 140, 000, 000 people. And so the latest edition of Denver  includes not only, their core 5G mobile deployment, but voice over in our as well. And so I'm wondering how relevant is this?

And I'd love to get your take on, like, where do you see the applicability for 

voiceover in our.  Yeah, I think it's possible that they could actually have the largest donor network. Not to be confused with the other word. I think the reality is that,  um, I just think they missed the mark on the actual network itself.

I think that Voner has a lot of opportunity to enhance the user experience and potentially deliver a superior, user experience for a lot of things and enable new capabilities, but. If the network itself ain't great and people are running from it and, the company's struggling to keep management in place and funding available to grow the network.

I just feel like this might have been a good thing. It was a good idea if other things had been executed properly. And I think that's really the rub here is I don't think it's bad that they have owner and I think it's going to be something that everybody deploys eventually, but.  The other operators haven't prioritized it like they have, and maybe they were right to but I also think that they're deploying Voner because  they are essentially a greenfield network and, they were able to just go we'll just plan for Voner from the beginning and it'll be a very light touch upgrade for us compared to literally everybody else.

Yeah, they can claim this. As a superiority thing, but I just think they're struggling in every other imaginable way. And, maybe it's a glint of hope, but  they're in some real tough, dire straits here.  

They are, this is an article. I believe it was light reading that I caught and, from my perspective, just needs to do things differently.

They need to find new ways to monetize things and, voiceover and are, it's going to provide, some enhancements from a subscriber experience perspective, but I struggle to understand, potentially how they can monetize that. Thinking about, IOT, that could have been, a more discreet focus for them that they could they can monetize. Although IOT has been very difficult to monetize in the past. But I think, just given.  Just the reshoring of manufacturing and, semiconductor production and the need to highly automate things.

IOT is going to be a big part of that. And 1 of 5G superpowers is massive device support, like a factor of 50  X over that of LTE, but yeah, And, it's interesting and they continue to beat their chest around how they're leaning into, cloud native and open random, that sort of thing.

But I know, and, that they've had a lot of challenges getting there. It's not as easy as they assumed it would be. And there's been a lot of management shuffle in the process. Hey, listen, I don't want to be negative. Hey, this is a great accomplishment for them. They're climbing to have the largest voiceover in our network on the planet.

It'll just be interesting to see how that really equates to revenue down the road. But let's go to your 1st topic. And, I saw you commenting on this and, we may be taking a victory lap here. But I guess the big question is Apple going to kill its 5G modem efforts?  Yeah, 

so this is a,  this is something that's been developing  since pre 2019.

I've written a lot about it over the years. And really I, at this point, I feel like we're beating a dead horse. It's not dead yet, but it might be a dead horse soon. But the reality is this was a. A rumor. Nobody has really confirmed it in any meaningful manner.

The reason why I say that is because the usual suspects who would leak this kind of a rumor haven't confirmed it or leaked it. So I think right now we're still very much in the rumor territory, Apple rumors tend to spread very quickly.  And Mark Gurman, I don't think has said anything about it in terms of confirming it.

But  essentially what it is Apple has spent billions and billions of dollars, both in acquiring Intel's modem division, hiring thousands of engineers, opening a multi billion dollar R& D  research development facility in Germany, hiring thousands of engineers here in San Diego. Not here in San Diego to poach people from MediaTek and from Qualcomm.

So I think this is one of those things where  I think Apple needs to be successful here to be able to move into the 5G era and the 6G era, because I actually think long term, if you look at Apple's growth their best growth is in services.  And if they really want to enhance the user experience down the road, having connectivity on all devices is how you sell more services because connectivity services literally don't exist.

The way I look at it is, they're gonna want to build the modem. First, as a discrete modem to save money, but then down the road, integrate that modem into the SOC to save on space and power. And that way they can optimize the user experience and see how data is consumed and, have always on PCs, which I'm Literally Max can't have today because they don't have a modem and have, the Apple watch with the LTE modem in it now enhanced even further with a 5g modem that's super low power, which by the way, I believe they are using Qualcomm in the watch.

Yeah, I just think that  If you look at what the implications of having a 5G modem will be they would benefit greatly from it being successful, but they have continually failed and they keep pushing it back. And there will be a point where investors start asking,  is this worth it? Qualcomm has been a reliable partner. Qualcomm has delivered them, good product. And they don't have A real competitor to switch to, even though I think they could go to MediaTek. And honestly, I'm surprised they haven't. But we'll see. I think this rumor isn't, fully  verified.

I think the way, easiest way to verify this rumor would be like we were talking earlier with the Qualcomm Apple relationship where, suddenly Qualcomm says they signed an extended agreement. Again, that might be more of a confirmation of this than anything. And that's only because Qualcomm has to be transparent with their investors.

So I think we'll find out but right now it sounds pretty bleak. And this was originally supposed to be a a 2023 launch. And now, earliest we're going to get is probably 2025.  

Yeah, for sure. And our chief analyst, Patrick more had I saw that he weighed in over social media on this as well.

And he made some pretty good points. Modem development is not easy. Qualcomm's been doing this for 2 decades and certainly. Yeah, 4 decades.  Yeah, really for decades. Okay. He mentioned 20 years, so he may have been referencing, particular, but, the media tech, they've really been, coming, coming up, on, full speed and moving out of the value, into the performance category as well.

So this, it's not rocket science. Science, but it's a pretty high bar to do 5G modems and, and, Intel, basically, they gave up and they divested their, the IP that they own to Apple. Hey, it's not easy, but it'll be interesting, to keep our ears to the ground on if this rumor, continues to catch catch steam, but I agree with you I don't think they're going to be anywhere, close to delivering something on their own until 2025.

Expect to see more Qualcomm and Apple products as we move forward over the next year or so, but let's go to my 2nd topic. I want to talk about Ericsson and they publish a mobility report every year. And I this year I actually today I joined a a call to learn more about it, but just a very high level.

I'll share some stats. A couple of things to know 1, based on Erickson's research, they believe nearly 1 in 5 mobile subscriptions will be 5G by the end of this year. That sounds pretty realistic to me,  but it's a forward looking statement is around 5G accounting for 25 percent of global mobile traffic by the end of the year as well.

But they expect that by the end of 2029, which. I can't even imagine 20. 9 at this point. That's that's so far out in the future, but they do believe 85 percent of the world's population will have access to 5G. Now that there's going to be a lot dependent on that, right? Because there are a lot of parts of the world. 

That are still unconnected but we'll share a link to to the report. It's actually, it's pretty lengthy and it goes into quite a bit of detail.  But what are your thoughts?  

I actually haven't had time  to go through their report which I usually do, but because I've been hearing, back to back for the last few days, I haven't had a chance to look at it.

But based on what the numbers you threw out, I do think it's interesting that they said access, but not connectivity. For example, T Mobile, I think they now cover almost the full population of the United States, but they definitely don't have them all as customers. Or connected. It is interesting.

And with satellite, that could be potentially considered 5g. And that would also offer the opportunity to have that claim of access, but I also think access is not just, the end of it. We also have to make sure it's like actually affordable for people which a lot of satellite services are not.

Yeah, I do think, Okay. 5g is moving at a pretty rapid pace. I actually do think if you look at the growth numbers It's doing better than 4g did even though the sentiment is not the greatest  , 

right? Yeah, no, that, I think we've mentioned that in the past as well as far as we're seeing, an acceleration relative to where LT was in.

Its its nascency. But let's go to your second topic and, you've been in Vegas with AWS all week, so you'd be remiss if you didn't include something around AWS, so you wanna talk about project copier and support for their private connectivity platform.  

Yes, I also now know it's pronounced creeper.

Okay. 

I always pronounce to 

be fair. It's 1 of the words. I think a lot of people don't know how to pronounce until they hear somebody else say it. But basically,  this is Amazon's satellite low Earth orbit. Network and they announced that they will actually offer a business solution in addition to the consumer solution where they will directly connect  Kuiper to a  I don't know how to say it, but basically their own AWS private network.

So that way, if you're an enterprise, you never actually have to hit the public internet. And you can trust your data to go over that network securely. So you can run, enterprise workloads, without necessarily worrying about, data leakage. And then on top of that, They also announced deals with NTT in Japan to provide a service to them which was really interesting because that wasn't part of the announcement but NTT group has, a lot of  Different business units.

So they said that entity DoCoMo, EntityCommon, and SkyPerfect would collaborate with Project Creeper to get that satellite connectivity, and I think it's a, it shows that Verizon's not the only game in town for them. And that they're going to have international coverage, and they're going to be able to take advantage of both the consumer and the enterprise connectivity to make, satellite more robust, and I use it as a additional component carrier where necessary. 

And just to clarify, 'cause I don't think you pointed this out. This is Doomo, this is the mobile network operation division of MTT. So very similar to deals that, we've seen between T-Mobile and starlink and at and t and a ST space mobile. Yeah, so this is good. It just seems Leo is getting really crowded, man is there enough.

Is there enough room for, for all of these players to take a bite? 

What do you know? They've only thrown up two satellites which isn't anywhere near what SpaceX has. It isn't within AST space mobile, but AST space satellite is also much larger. They're going to need a lot fewer of them.

So we'll see. Yeah, obviously I'm sure everybody's. Hopefully cooperating with the appropriate agencies to ensure get space collisions. But I do think that the night sky will get increasingly crowded.  

Yeah, and brighter for sure. Let's go to my 3rd and final topic. I want to talk about Verizon.

We don't talk about Verizon often on our podcast, but I caught the story on mobile world live and Verizon is actually trialing a network slice  for 1st responders and  I found it interesting because they're talking about their standalone 5G core and, what they're doing there. And, Verizon, in my opinion, I think you would agree, they been, it's been interesting.

They've been in 3rd place chasing T Mobile and AT& T with respect to getting their 5G network deployed that they were the ones that were they had the widest gap. In mid band spectrum, and but, it's interesting that, this news broke. It was just, this week around, what they're doing with slicing and, basically, slicing the network to be able to provide a very high level quality of service.

And prioritization for 1st responders, and, today in mobile networks, there's prioritization that goes on that doesn't necessarily leverage networks licensing. But if you start thinking about 1st responders. And communication from ambulance to hospitals, when, you know, to, to prepare hospitals for incoming patients with life threatening issues and injuries and, and the use of video to do a lot of this and, telematics and that sort of thing.

And, telemedicine.  iT could be quite compelling. When I've thought about network slicing, I haven't necessarily thought about first responders, AT& T, obviously they've got first net and, that's being adopted pretty broadly in the United States. But I thought this was an interesting use case.

What 

do you think?  Yeah, I do.  So I looked into this. And basically. They did. They did a test where they tested  the commercial network with slicing and their commercial network without slicing. They were live video feeds,  but also live mapping. So when there's something really critical happening, you can know exactly where everybody is and see what they're seeing, which I think is really powerful and useful.

They said that they saw a 53 percent improvement in the 95th percentile of time to first frame. So how quickly they were able to get the video feed up. They got a 5 percent improvement in start percent, a 68 percent improvement in latency, and an 83 percent improvement in jitter. So those are huge improvements in where it matters.

Latency and jitter are huge. So we can actually get real time video. And yeah, that, they are working with axon, which is like the leading provider of body cams for police officers. They also do drones and tasers and stuff like that. But I think it's really interesting because they're already working with a pretty well established provider of these, what these cameras, these body cameras.

I think it's a net positive because I think there's a lot of hesitance around policing and, how police are treated and how civilians are treated by police. And I think having, live video feeds or at least having real time data. We'll make everything better for, I think, most people both the police and people who they, are interacting with because that really makes sure that we hold people accountable, whether they're responsible or not.

And yeah, I just think this is a really interesting application of. Standalone with video, which we obviously knew was going to be a great application. They're able to do this perfect slice. That really fits into what kind of applications 

we're going to be seeing.  Yeah, I think it's super compelling and it really it highlights the power of 5G standalone from especially from a latency perspective and what you can do with.

Smart cameras and that sort of thing. And to your point, just think about that real time video  and what that can do to improve public safety. It's mind blind. Kudos to Verizon on that trial and it'll be interesting to see how that rolls out. But let's go to your 3rd and final topic.

And you want to talk about and see go and they have a new enterprise fixed wireless access router. And they're partnered with T Mobile, right? I know T Mobile partners with a lot of different FWA suppliers, I think they've partnered with Nokia in the past as well on the home CPE, but you want to talk about Inseego's enterprise.

Yeah. 

So this is a partnership between Inseego and T Mobile. One thing to note when I looked into this they already actually did launch this router on US  wireless.  U. S. Cellular. So they already launched this on with U. S. Cellular in May, but U. S. Cellular does not have the footprint that T Mobile does.

So this is a quite a big launch for Inseego because T Mobile is so big on and they are, really pushing on the business side. And let's be honest with ourselves. There's gonna be a lot more potential customers that can take advantage of this on the T Mobile network and can on U. S.

Cellular. And you. There's, full support for mid band. And, they're really looking forward to enabling, 64 potential devices  



Per hotspot. And it's got, two LAN ports. It has a Snapdragon X62 modem in it. It has, FIPS 142 certification.

So it's secure. It's going to be well connected. I, what I didn't see was whether or not it has like a external Connectivity I looked into that but it's really like one of those things where I would rather see an Inseego product than some kind of like a Netgear because Inseego is like actually a, their business is doing enterprise router.

I think that there's a lot of opportunity here for both companies and. Yeah, it's it uses, all of the connectivity you would expect, and it has, a WiFi 6 connectivity to get USB ports. And yeah, I think this is the right kind of device. I don't see any antenna connectivity, but.

Oh, yeah, there is an external antenna. There we go. So it has an external antenna, which I think is super important for small businesses.  And yeah, I just think that there's a lot of opportunity here. I've been talking to some of my friends who are small business owners that cannot get good connectivity.

So I'm definitely going to be sending them this way because they're going to want to be able to use this as their, primary internet connection because everything else that they've been offered just sucks.  

Yeah, you make a good point and Sigo is very focused on the enterprise.

And if for our viewers and listeners that don't know this, and Sigo is a rebranding. It's Sierra Wireless, right? It's, it's the MiFi is and Sigo's, DNA and history and roots. And Over the years, they've acquired different businesses, and they have a telematics capability that supports use cases for supply chain, logistics, transportation, that sort of thing. I think, they've had some challenges, financially, they've been a roller coaster, but things seem to be settling down for them. I know personally, their CEO, and he's a great visionary. And so I think.

Expect, more things from Segoe as they move forward into the 5G world. But hey, man, I appreciate you taking the time. I know you've been in Vegas. You probably got to be exhausted.  You haven't been staying out too late and hitting the casino tables.  No, 

I'm not a big gambler. What I have been hitting is the Fiji waters.

I'm on auto number four. You gotta hydrate while you're out here. Otherwise you die.  

Yeah, you forget you're in the middle of the desert. But hey, man it's good to connect. Another great podcast. 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 topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will is at Willtown Tech. I'm at Anshal Saag. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.