Welcome to episode 174 of the G2 O 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 as fellow analyst Anshel Sag, and we're gonna get started with our special end of 2023 review.

So we're gonna be taking a stab at some of the broader trends in 2023 and what he and I expect in 2024. But before we get started. How's your holiday been my friend?  

I'm pretty chill. I celebrated Hanukkah earlier in the month. So I got that stuff out of the way. Ironically, I didn't really  get much other than like a jacket, but I did just  get myself a Dyson yesterday.

I saw that. That was my big purchase for the year other than, getting the car ready  for the baby coming next month. So yeah.  That's really the big thing is just getting ready for the baby. And I don't know what will happen with the podcast for the first few weeks, but I'm hoping that it won't be too long of a gap between episodes. 

Yeah, for our viewers and listeners that may not be familiar with this news,  Anshul and his wife are expecting their first child. Super excited for the 2 of you.  I have 2 daughters. They are grown up and they are out of the house and I had a great time with them as well. I had to do separate celebrations with them.

Because they live literally at an opposite, parts of the world. My youngest is a chemical engineer first year with Halliburton. Very proud of her living in West Texas. And my oldest daughter works for a solar power company as a project manager. She was in East Texas in Longview, but she recently moved to Springdale, Arkansas.

And just coordinating with them has been challenging. I fit in a Spurs game, drove from Austin to San Antonio with a good friend of mine and my wife. We had a great time. And, I'm just worn out. It's been great, but I am looking forward to a very quiet New Year's Eve at home. But without further ado, let's jump into it.

I want to hit my 1st theme for the year, and I want to talk about the satcom space race heating up and you and I think, during the course of the year on chill, we talked about a bunch of different mobile network operators and companies. We've talked about Verizon and space.  They were the first to announce their partnership with not a lot of detail.

We certainly talked about at and t and a ST space mobile. I'm actually wearing, if you can see an at t shirt that says Dallas. We have a connection and you can see the satellite image right there. So I've spent, obviously considerable time with AT& T. We've talked about, that relationship with AST.

Just recently, you and I talked about Rogers and Link. We've also talked about Amazon project Coupier  Coupier. Yeah. 

The 

one with Amazon and Verizon. Yeah, exactly. Satellite or satellite  and many call it satellite, whatever. I'm so tired right now  and I can't blame jet lag for that.

But man, it is a space race. There are tons of competing solutions out there. Some are based on 3GPP standards like we've spoken about before. Others are not. Some are designed to deliver more than just the middleware solution that a space mobile is aiming to do, for example, with space X and Amazon.

But, it's a crowded market and, at the end of the day, the question I can come up with is, can we call a winner and. I don't think we can. I do believe at Mobile World Congress Barcelona in February of next year there's going to be a lot of attention paid to low earth orbit and the use of terrestrial spectrum and how that can bridge the digital divide.

And, all these companies that we've spoken about this year have different strategies and architectures to go about it. If I were to just call, a company that I believe is in the pole position I would have to lean towards AST SpaceMobile just because what they're doing and again, they are further behind in their commercial deployment than, say, SpaceX is, but their overall strategy and architecture to not necessarily monetize the service, but service the middleware, I think that's a winner.

But Again, I really believe next year we're going to see a lot of activity around Mobile World Congress Barcelona. I'm going to meet with many of these companies. I've already began to set up those those meetings with them. And so I think it's exciting. I think this is great. We've talked about lower orbit well before this year, but really this year was, it's was, it's coming out and I expect big things in 2024, but would love to get your insight here. 

Yeah, I agree that there is no clear winner here. I do think there was a clear loser. I think that's one that we can call out is definitely Qualcomm's Snapdragon Space. Yeah,  Snapchat and satellite. Sorry. Yeah. 'cause they basically gave up on it. Yeah. So I think we can call Clear Loser. I do think there are some interesting things happening in the market, but I think having a conversation with media tech that we had.

It's quite clear that we're still a few years away from being even able to call a winner. And I do like your call that, AST SpaceMobile may be in the pole position. Especially when you consider that Verizon and Project Creeper still are like, doing initial test satellites, T Mobile and SpaceX.

Still haven't really given much of an update. Rogers and Link just did a test call. I think, everyone's still pretty much at the starting blocks, to be honest. And I do think this is going to be more of a marathon than a sprint. So we're going to see a lot of handing of the baton over from one company to the next.

I do think we'll see some consolidation. We might even see some companies move, maybe move from 1 partner to the next. Yeah, but I like that. There's a lot of choice out there. There's a lot of opportunity. And, the geo guys are still trying to find a way to get involved seems to be more for emergency satellite.

Communications like for what Apple's doing  with global star. But I think long term, I think the 1 thing that maybe is missed on people is I truly believe there will be a point where it becomes mandated for emergency 911 services to have satellite connectivity. And once that mandate goes through, it cements satellite as no longer being a fad.

But we're actually becoming something that becomes necessary and required, and I think that will happen with time, maybe the next few years as these things start to mature a bit, but I just think that it's one of those scenarios, like, how many times can you think about it where you're in the middle of nowhere, and you need to be able to make that phone call, and there's a service that's got to be a bare minimum for everybody.

Yeah, I agree and I'm hoping that we'll see that happen down the road. 

Yeah, I'm confident will to your point, we're, we're early in here, but I do think. 2023 was the year of, Leah's coming out. And I think there's much more in store next year. So it's exciting.

Let's move to your first theme of the year. And you want to talk about fixed wireless. I'm glad you picked this one because it is truly the first killer app for 5G.  

Yeah. So the question is one or the statement is his first true killer app for 5G, but also how much runway is there left?  One of the things I think is really interesting is, we have seen this year really be the year for fixed wireless growth, even late last year.

And, normally something like this doesn't really have a lot of runway. The spectrum runs out or speeds start to decline, but there was a really interesting report that came out from Ookla. Not a week ago or so, and they were basically saying that, first of all, T Mobile and Verizon's fixed wireless service are not only gaining customers solidly but they are also keeping speeds at an equal level, which means they're increasing the spectrum and availability of bandwidth for fixed wireless.

So combined in Q3, so We don't actually know Q4 numbers yet, but combined in Q3 alone, Verizon and AT or Verizon and T Mobile accounted for nearly 7 million fixed wireless customers.  T Mobile had 4. 2 million and Verizon had 2. 6 million. So almost 7 million customers, which is incredible. And when you think about that 7 million customers, almost all of those are coming out of Spectrum and Comcast.

Which mean and honestly, I don't know if you've seen this. I have seen this here in San Diego, the amount of TV ads, billboards, online ads, tick tocks, I'm seeing of Cox and spectrum, poo pooing 5g internet. It's okay if there, if it wasn't a real threat, they wouldn't be spending millions of dollars on ads, trying to, poo 5g internet.

But the reality is. The Comcasts and the spectrums of the world really aren't providing a good service. Yeah. And and T-Mobile and Verizon are there to offer potentially the only other option in a lot of these markets where these cable operators have effective monopoly. Now I'll add to the validation of what Ula said.

They said, in Q4 of last year.  The the actual download speed for T Mobile was 119 megabits per second. And now it's 122. So it's actually gone up three megabits for Verizon. It started at 94 and now it's up to  one 20, about one 22 as well. So both companies are really seeing a huge improvement in, or at least, a continuous improvement of speeds as they add customers, which is, you can't really say that of almost any other technology out there for connectivity. 

And yeah, I just think that when you look at how big Xfinity and Spectrum really are and how dissatisfied people are with that service there's a real big opportunity for what, what's going to happen for competitiveness and user experience. And, it's a very simple application, but I do think it's going to continue to grow, especially as both Verizon and T Mobile add more of that CBAN Spectrum that they, they bid for on the B and C blocks. 

Yeah. 

And you almost mentioned at and t we did talk about them this year. They launched their their air consumer service. And they're, it's in limited markets. They're being very surgical about that given their their investment in fiber.  And so I think, we'll see these numbers continue to increase, AT& T will pick up consumer subscribers as well.

And and at the end of the day, I'm so in Bastrop, Texas where I live now I'm on T Mobile's FWA service, and I've actually seen an improvement from, I, I'm seeing download speeds as high as 140 and 150 now. I do believe over time as they build out their standalone and the mid band that's going to improve as well, but to your point to be adding so many subscribers and to see the performance increasing is pretty phenomenal.

And I believe on one of our podcasts, I spoke to the fact that initially T Mobile at the beginning of this year was very aggressive on some of their projections, and then they pull those projections back. Yeah wisely because of that very, thing, you're putting more up to VA subscribers on the network.

They tend to the profile of that customer tends to consume more bandwidth. And so that, that puts pressure on things there, but but yeah, I'm 

expecting to add some more data. This first of all, this ukla reports really good. I think you should read it if you get a chance. Yeah, there's so much detail that I can't really cover.

But one really interesting thing is OOCL is actually able to look at user data and see what, where the users are going to and from. And they said that the vast majority of Verizon and T Mobile's customers are coming from cable and DSL providers. And if you look at the fixed access new recruits for distribution of 5G FWA gross additions by ISP. 

A huge chunk of them are coming from spectrum and Xfinity as well as the Internet. So  it's really exciting to see. And the other thing I was going to add that I thought that was really interesting is there is a gap between urban and rural FWA. There's actually a lot of people in urban areas that are using FWA, which is really interesting.

But even in rural areas, the median download speeds for T Mobile are 91 megabits, and for Verizon they're 51, so people are getting access to way faster internet out in rural areas that they otherwise would, literally could not even buy if they wanted to, because a lot of these DSL plans are like 5, 10, 15, maybe 20, so it's it's really an amazing product, and I think we're going to continue to see that grow throughout the year.

Yeah, 

no, I agree. Let's jump to my 2nd topic. We may go longer than 20 minutes with our here and here. But so my 2nd, theme of the year is I want to talk about open round and is it a boom or a bust? And as we started the year, we saw rocket 10 stumble with symphony. We saw executives exit.

We saw reorganization.  qUite frankly they were, sipping their own champagne and eating their own dog food and wanting to market that to the mobile network operators and that wasn't a success. And then, consequently we've seen a lot of, trials and proof of concepts, but not a lot of production deployment until recently.

And you and I spoke about the big watershed announcement between and T and Erickson. Where AT& T wants to drive, 70 plus percent of its network traffic over open standard infrastructure and I forget the year 2025, 2026. it's a very aggressive goal. But that really validates things and then, we've also spoken about and the Oryx platform.

When I spent time with with entity. At their R and D forum in Tokyo in November, I learned more about that and was briefed on that. And  they're taking a similar approach to rocket 10, but is a much larger organization. Very broad, very deep I'm going to actually be invited to their upgrade of that in San Francisco in the spring.

And I'm looking forward to that and spending time with the team that's based in California there. But. At the end of the day, I don't think we can call it a boom or a bust. The the adoption curves has not been aggressive. But I do believe with this late breaking announcement between 18 and Erickson, I think there'll be a lot of lessons learned from.

Putting Open RAN in a brownfield network environment, which is inherently much more difficult than it is in a net new greenfield,  such as Rakuten, such as DISH. We've seen DISH's stumbles as well. I don't want to beat the DISH horse on this podcast, but there are lots of challenges and when it comes right down to it, it's integration. 

And that's the key there. And so it's going to be really interesting. It'll be great to see the progress of AT& T and Ericsson make as we move into next year. But I do think there's light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not going to, I'm not going to call Open RAN a loser. There are a lot of benefits and disaggregating the infrastructure and using open standards.

Especially in domesticating the supply chain, which is what the US government has wanted to do to wean itself off of not only Chinese infrastructure, but infrastructure from the European providers and Ericsson and Nokia and others. I'll let you weigh in on this, but are you going to call up and run a boom or a bust this year? 

I am of the camp that if we were talking about it mid year, I would have said a bust but I feel like we like hit rock bottom and have since shot back up. So I think really the AT& T Ericsson announcement has reinvigorated the market.  I think it has validated a lot of the things that people have tried to claim for a long time, but we were just waiting for a, a tier 1 operator to implement.

And I think with AT& T going as hard with Ericsson as they are and claiming that they're going to go, I think you said 70%, right? Yeah. So doing that in such a short period of time, I think, implies that AT& T is serious about this. And so is Ericsson. And, this helps Ericsson because, we've talked about this before.

They were struggling with competing with The market on Open RAN and having something, that was considered to be leading class, but we know that AT& T would in no way, go for anything that wasn't the best in class. I think we're going to see some things change a lot and I think next year will be a big year for Open RAN and I think we'll probably see a lot of.

Excitement at MWCE and probably it'll feel the life has been breathed back into open 

ran. Yeah.  Yeah. I think  N Tt Doomo is gonna pick up the torch where Rakuten Symphony left off. I'm not riding Rakuten off at all, but I think they'll carry the momentum forward.

I think, again, there'll be a lot of lessons learned, from the at and t and Ericsson relationship. Vodafone in Europe has been very aggressive with Open RAN. They have been deploying it and in production in small pockets, and I think we'll continue to see that expand, and we'll probably learn more about their progress at Mobile World Congress Barcelona as well. 

Let's move to your 2nd topic, and this is tied to a slowdown and ran spending. You and I have spoken about this on a couple of our podcasts and, but, Erickson Nokia they're struggling right now in certain ways. And you want to talk about that as, as.

Networks now have, has a ran deployed and they're moving to the core and the stand alone. 

Yeah, so  this is more of like a talk about the transition of spending away from ran towards core. But also the way that Erickson and Nokia's investors have interpreted this transition, because if you look at their last year or so both companies, stocks have not done well.

Both of them have struggled since 2021. And they've both missed multiple quarters of earnings. Both of these companies have 20Billion dollar market caps. While they have 26Billion dollars in revenue that's a staggering thing. But that's, share price is a concept of future profits and future revenues, not current.

And I think. The real thing that has turned the tide for Ericsson at least is the AT& T deal. If you look at their share price, It went through the roof. After the announcement wasn't in a good place. So it's not really in a great place right now, but it's in a much better place than it was a month ago.

But I think when you look at what these companies do you're seeing Ericsson stay with his core business, even though it did write off that big Vonage acquisition. And Nokia is selling off business units again, right? I struggle with what the future of Nokia will be, and, we saw them do a big rebrand earlier this year.

They really tried to reintroduce themselves as a services company and that might enterprise 

enterprise company as 

well. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that may be their opportunity down the road. Because maybe they don't see RAN as a big opportunity anymore but I do believe that, Open RAN is a big opportunity still maybe longer term.

But I think we're going to see Ericsson maybe become the last remaining big infrastructure provider. And everybody else becomes these smaller Open RAN providers where, you have more space. More, specialized infrastructure for different types of applications.

And maybe it's, or maybe it's just all, programmable with Open RAN, right? I think that might be the direction we move in, especially if Ericsson moves, more towards Open RAN. And maybe Open RAN ends up being the solution to a lot of these problems. But ultimately, I think we still have to focus on the core.

And I think there's going to be a lot of focus on the core in 2024. And I think, that's going to be because standalone is the only way that I believe that these 5g networks will be able to monetize their investments and actually satisfy users discontent with the state of 5g. And I think, focusing on core standalone might actually even increase demand for infrastructure.

Especially when you look at let's say millimeter wave. That was a bust for a lot of reasons, but as, people start using 5G more regularly maybe there's actually a need for more RAN, maybe it's all millimeter wave, small cells, but to fill in the gaps in terms of  Capacity where it's needed most as 5G applications grow.

I think is as more demand grows, there might be an opportunity for these infrastructure companies to start to, build out more infrastructure. But right now, I think it's more about the core than it is about the rain. I think that's hurt both Ericsson and Nokia. In the last year or so.

Yeah, no, I agree. 20, I think 2024 will be the year of standalone and that's an investment in the core part of the network. I'm not going to, I'm not going to call Nokia out here. I think, they've got some assets in their portfolio and they've got some capabilities. And some strengths that they can lean into.

They built a pretty compelling private networking portfolio. They've had a considerable lead on others in that regard. And yeah, but, no, he has had his challenges, the up and down, over the last several years. But there's new management in place, like you mentioned. 

It was actually at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona this year, where they launched their new brand mark, their focus on, as you mentioned, services and enterprise they have new eyes, which is an SD Wan solution. So they have all the right components to to make a run at enterprise.

They're divesting some businesses that they need to divest, but. I still think, the ecosystem is healthier with Ericsson and Nokia, and we haven't even spoken about Samsung networks. They've really emerged as a leader when it comes to to the Iran in particular, and hey, two years ago, three years ago Samsung didn't even come up in the conversation when it came up.

When the conversation was about, radio access network infrastructure. I think competition is a good thing. I always like to say competition breeds innovation, but but yeah, I think 2024 will be the year of the core, but let's move my 3rd and final theme of the year. And, hey, man, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about AI, right?

Oh, my gosh, you could basically state that 2023 was the year for gen AI.  But, my thought process is did I move the needle within telecom and and 5G deployments? And earlier in the year, there was an announcement when when NVIDIA did their big event.  Around what they're doing with AT& T, leveraging AI for intelligent truck roles to support network deployments and field service and that sort of thing. 

There's been lots of, broad, broader conversations around how I can improve security within the network fabric resilience and self healing. Although. From my perspective, when I look back at this year, other than the 18 and video announcement, and hey, if I'm missing something, let me know, but.

It was really more sort of general conversations about the opportunity with AI and again, is only about a year old and and, there's some tremendous opportunities with when it comes to call center personnel and, and supporting customers and providing a better customer experience and that sort of thing with faster resolution of issues and that sort of thing.

I do think, and, AI is not new, right? So this whole notion of AI Ops has been around for quite some time within the enterprise and certainly within public mobile networks. But I do believe that, another big theme, and I'm using our end of year podcast as a preview for MWC Barcelona.

In addition to low Earth orbit, I do believe there'll be a lot of, focus and discussion around artificial intelligence and what that can do for telecom operators and 5G network. But what do you think? What sort of your assessment on AI within telecom this year?  

I think there's a lot of  thought around how AI will be used.

And I do think to your point, AT& T was a really good application of that, at least for NVIDIA. But I think there's still a lot more AI to be used. I think what you did miss was how AI has made its way into the modem and how much, on the Qualcomm side, there's so much AI already built into the modem and there's dedicated AI hardware in the modem.

It's not even using AI hardware elsewhere on the chip. So that's a big deal. And then also they were showing some research and I think this is going to be stuff that we'll probably see at MWC and moving onward, which is pre training models that run in the 5G network that work in concert with the AI in the modem to maximize signal, reduce power consumption, and maximize throughput.

And I think that's going to be how we see AI used first. I think there's gonna be so many other AI applications for 5G. But I think that's like the beginning of it and we'll probably see a lot more evolving at MWC. CES I think will be pretty light, but MWC will see a lot of AI because everyone's gonna want to talk about it.

The AI hype was a little too early last year for MWC to really take hold of it in a meaningful manner. But now that we've had almost a full year of AI hype. With chat, GPT and all the other Gen ai, I think yeah. See a much bigger growth of a focus on AI and 5G and a lot more people actually showing how they're gonna implement it or how they've already implemented it, like some companies.

Yeah. But yeah, I think you're right. This, it's gonna be this is like a second gear of AI hype. In 2024. First gear was last year, this year. Second gear, there's gonna be talk about ai. On the PC side this year you're going to see a lot of that. That'll probably be very heavily during CDS, but I have some, talk about how, 5G is the connectivity for AI because not all AI workloads are going to work.

Locally, and not all workloads are going to work on the cloud, and you're going to need to have that connectivity regularly and pretty consistently to be able to send those, models or workloads back and forth. So that's something to AI and 5G. Yeah, 

for sure. I'll just end with I've often talked about like AI. 

In edge computing, and its ability to supercharge use cases and so as developers, have had their hands on a lot of generative, and. There are so many models that public models that are being provided now and produce that people can play with. I think we're going to start seeing a lot of innovative applications with respect to I think.

In telecom networks, security is a big opportunity because we've talked about some mobile network operators that have had breaches and, I can be used as a tool to counteract, these bad actors, they're certainly going to leverage. It's call it a double edged sword there.

But I do expect that we're going to hear a lot more about it next year, but 

I was just going to ask was the other 1 that had a big announcement with NVIDIA on 5G. Oh. 

Awesome. Yeah, I that's right. I do. I do recall that 1. so thanks for reminding me and thanks for reminding me about all of the AI that's being integrated into devices.

That's definitely your coverage area. So you reminded me about that. But let's wrap the podcast and hey, it wouldn't be a year in podcast unless we talked about 6G, right? 

Yeah, there's been a lot of hype around 6g. I don't want to really spend too much time on it. To be honest with you.

I think the 1 thing is, 1 should be, would we, should we start thinking about 6g now or should we wait for 5g to shake out? And I think the answer to that is we should  really start thinking about 6g because the research for it has already begun. Basically once the 5g was done, 6g research began and I have a feeling some of it even started before 5g was finalized.

I do think when you look at the research cycle is at 10 years about. So we'll probably see around 2030. And that's still seven years away. The way I look at it is right now we should be figuring out what, where we think there are deficiencies in 5G. Release 18 is going to be finished next year.

Release 19 is going to be like a transitionary between 5G and 6G, and that'll probably be a 2025 or 2026 thing. And then we'll probably get release 20 with 6G. And release 20 will most likely come in 2026 or 2027, which will then be available and used in 2028, 2029. I think that's a normal cadence.

I don't think terahertz is going to be a thing. There was talk about using, even higher frequencies. I think we're already struggling enough with millimeter wave as it is. For sure. We have enough things that we need to figure out with millimeter wave. That unless we figure those out, terahertz is a waste of time and literal energy.

And I just think that we should really be focusing on  one, how do we get the most out of the network, which I think is going to be an AI accelerated thing. And also, how can we accelerate the different industries that 5G opened up to us?  With its, broader applications. Maybe there are going to be more specific improvements to XR, which we're seeing in release 18 or maybe to agriculture or transportation.

I think the 5G standard 3GPP is really good. I just think that there are, not everything ends up getting used, and I think they're going to be some things that maybe just. End up slipping to 6G or to later releases and  things were already kind of part of the standard. This kind of happens with every generation.

There's talk about 5G broadcast. We had broadcast in 4G. Didn't do that well. Maybe it'll happen in 5G. Maybe it'll happen in 6G. Who knows? But I just think that I think 6G is slightly premature. But I also think we shouldn't ignore it.  And I think we're still, 6 or 7 years away from that.

So that is a long time in the mobile industry. So I think you and I will happily rename this podcast when it's appropriate. But for now, I think we're still going to stick to 5G. 

Yeah, I agree with you. I think, hey, it's. It's prudent to be, doing initial investigations and in academia, and we've spoken about that as well.

But focus on, I think, you and I have talked about the mobile network operator community, needing to focus on getting standalone deployed that's going to unlock the true promise of 5G from a latency throughput device support security standpoint, et cetera. But yeah, just be measured, be balanced with that.

I may in 2024 decide to attend some of these 6G forum events. We'll we'll see. I'm not going to jump completely into the deep end of the pool on that. But yeah, I think, we will be hearing more and more about 6G and, next year as well, but it's been a great podcast. We went a little bit long, but we had a lot to talk about, 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. Will is at Willtown Tech, and I'm at Onshore SOG. We hope you have a great weekend, and please tune in next week.

And don't forget to rate and subscribe, and have a Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

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