Welcome to episode 176 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. Joining me again this week is fellow analyst Ancho sag. But before we get started, ancho, you've got some great news. So why don't you share that with our viewers and our listeners.



Yes my wife recently gave birth about a week ago. And that's why we skipped last week because I was in the 

hospital.  So Shauna, she's beautiful. Anshul's a first time dad.  I've been around the block a few times he's not getting a lot of sleep these days, but that'll improve over time.

So we're going to be extremely efficient and succinct with the podcast this week. I'm going to start with my 1st topic and news broke around John Deere partnering with Starlink for satellite connectivity, and I'm assuming this came out of CES, but this was an article that I caught through Fierce Wireless and. 

At a high level, what the partnership entails and if you're not familiar with how John Deere has done a lot of autonomy, it's really been with GPS. If you can believe it. And I remember it was a that was well before the pandemic. And I was able to go out in the middle of a parking lot there. Near the convention center and and saw this demo, but they are moving no surprise to LTE and eventually 5G connectivity.

But basically, the way the solution works is that, if  someone is operating a piece of John Deere equipment that is equipped with a Starlink CPE, and there's  no connectivity to a traditional radio tower, then this solution can develop the satellite connectivity to do a lot of the autonomy. And a lot of the different functions that are available through  John Deere's application, which is the Deere Operations Center app.

Hey, here's another fairly compelling use case for satellite connectivity. So what do you think, my friend?  I think it's great. If 

you think about a lot of the rural areas where there are farms and just the sheer size of a lot of these farms, it makes a lot of sense that you would want something that.

It takes advantage of the clear sky and delivers pretty good bandwidth. If a farmer needs to get a firmware update or, push new data into the, the combine or whatever it is it's a lot easier to do with Starlink than pretty much anything else they have access to. 

Yeah, I agree. And so today again it's mainly LTE connectivity with the satellite failover, but I'm sure,  with 5G, that'll bring some applications, some capabilities. 1 of the challenges, obviously, in rural is just, 5G is still being deployed. And as you and I have spoken on prior podcasts.

There is stand alone. That's still a well underway from a deployment perspective in the United States and other parts of the world. But I think this is another compelling demonstration of how satellite can bridge connectivity. With that, let's go to your 1st topic and you attended Samsung unpacked.

I'm assuming virtually right? Yes, virtually. 

I I was pre briefed. I wasn't able to attend in person. I was invited to go, but. Obviously I couldn't go just like CES but yeah, Unpacked was interesting. Most of the information was just, new phones the regular, the S24 line, updated with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the U.

S. The Ultra is Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 across the board everywhere in the world, but in other geographies they are shipping with Exynos 2400 chip. So they've gone backwards and  trying to save some money and because they make the chips themselves. So they're definitely getting better margins there. And they're also leveraging AMD GPU IP for ray tracing and graphics in that X and S chip.

The big takeaways are Galaxy AI, which is their branding of a suite of AI features for photography. For translation for a bunch of different applications, but the big controversy was that they are going to start charging for this. AI capability after 2025? I'm not sure that's going to stick.

I think they're gonna backpedal on that one. Yeah. Because they got a lot of pushback. But the 24 Ultra is a really nice phone. They did away with the curved screen. They're using the latest gorilla glass armor, which is what, the toughest that they make. And I think one of the cool AI features that is part of Galaxy ai.

It's something that they worked with Google on, which is also going to be available on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro at the same time as the S24. Which is called circle to search. So you can basically pause any video take any image and just circle part of that image or that video, and it will automatically search it for you on the Internet.

So it's like a really interesting and compelling way to start looking for things. And, if you let's say you're watching somebody's tick tock, you can just circle their their video. I think they're experimenting with shorts right now, but I think it's going to expand everything. 

It's just really an interesting way to use ai that's unique but maybe not exclusive. And yeah the other thing was that they teased a smart ring. But they, that's not a 5G device. It's a wearable health device. Yeah. But no details there. But yeah, the entire, S 24 line is 5G.

And it's the default choice in the US when it comes to, Android devices.  

I saw the the announcement around the the smart ring. I wear an Oro ring and it's pretty incredible. I'm not a big smartwatch person. I do have a, an Apple watch that I like to wear when I travel, so I'm not surprised to see that Samsung's announcing something along those lines that market is becoming crowded.

Aura tends to be the leader, but there weren't a lot of details right.  

No, no pricing, no availability, just later this year. Okay, interesting. And to be fair I'm excited about it because I've been considering getting an Oura ring. I even bought the sizing kit and I just feel like it's a little too chunky for me.

And the Samsung one looks a lot thinner and smaller. Yeah. 

Cool. And certainly if you're an Android person, it fits well within the ecosystem as well. But hey, let's go to my second topic. I wanna talk about NCT Doomo and I covered NCT Doomo on a prior podcast, and this was after a trip that I made to Tokyo and spent time with the company and also other divisions of NTT at their r and d forum.

They held what they call their open house 24 event this year this past week.  And there was a lot of talk around terahertz and 6G and sort of the evolution of 5G. And from my perspective, as I read through the various announcements, they're going to lean, they want to lean very heavily into terahertz, which is interesting.

You and I have talked about that. Could terahertz be the future of 6G? There's certainly some challenges. I think you, you stated those challenges as well, but to no surprise, also a lot of discussion around AI and how that's all going to come together. And they also talked about their sensing platform.

And that's something that I wrote about in that Forbes article after I spent time in Tokyo in December or November of last year. But I continue to be impressed with NTT DoCoMo for the longest time, it seemed to be that SK Telecom and Korea was the real innovator from a use case perspective and forward looking technologies.

But NTT DoCoMo is really, coming into its own I'll be at.  An event in San Francisco that's hosted by NTT Americas and that'll occur in April. And so I hope to learn more there, but I don't know if you caught any of this news in between feedings with your daughter, but what are your thoughts? 



I did not catch this one. But  I have been noticing that NTT is becoming a lot more aggressive, specifically Docomo and just getting more, more exploratory with when it comes to new technologies, they always has have been, but there were there was a period of time when they weren't as prominent.

And it seems like they're getting back to that spirit.

 Awesome. Hey, so Anshel, let's go to your second topic this week. And you want to talk about T Mobile and some coverage improvement.  Yeah, 

so T Mobile actually invested 200 million.

Into basically building out their coverage in West Virginia. They did this as like a joint announcement with the governor of West Virginia. And  part of this was they were  deploying new sites.  So they basically increased their coverage by 30%.  They added 377  new towers,  upgraded 121 existing towers, which is what cost them 200 million.

Yeah,  their result was 100 percent of interstate highways in West Virginia service with T Mobile 5G, 90 percent of West Virginians now have T Mobile 5G access. Which is that up 30%. They also said 70 percent of West Virginians now have access to ultra capacity 5G,  which now delivers median download speeds of 100 megabits per second statewide, 41 percent faster than 2021.

And they said that they  greatly expanded backup power sources to ensure redundancy. So they are trying to make a play for the entire state. And it might work. And also, West Virginia is 1 of the poorest states in the country. So it's a nice thing for them to improve access because now people will be able to get, much faster Internet at home than they probably ever would have if they even have Internet where they live.

Yeah, West Virginia is very mountainous. It's just not beneficial for a lot of companies to cover it. And, it seems like T Mobile has really gone out of their way to make this possible. And they are, they're talking about home broadband and competitiveness.

And yeah it's a big deal. I think they did something similar in South Dakota when they first launched. There's 600 megahertz band with standalone that basically just cover the whole state. So it's really cool to see them, still continuing to focus on more rural states and enabling more connectivity for 

people. 

And this has been a real focus for T Mobile. They've really invested in rural America. They've done a lot of grants and subsidies to drive connectivity there, and from my perspective, it's needed. And to your point, West Virginia, it's typically from a, from a revenue perspective, there isn't a lot of heavy industry.

There is a lot of mining that occurs there. But to your point there are a lot of rural areas in the Appalachian Mountains and that sort of thing. I applaud T Mobile for investing in an area that likely has lower subscriber density and likely probably lower, average revenue per unit or ARPU.

So that's that's great to see T Mobile making that investment. But let's move to my 3rd and final topic and I want to talk about something that's pretty close to home base. The LCRA or the Lower Colorado River Authority and Central Texas  is actually testing private cellular. In the management of not only hydroelectric operations, but also parks and central Texas area.

So I'm from Austin. I grew up in Austin. I recently moved out to Bastrop, Texas, which is East of Austin  and the Colorado River actually runs through my neighborhood. So this is very close to to my heart, but. LCRA operates a number of different dams, and this, these are all connected through the Highland Lakes chain.

These generate electricity, but also the S-L-C-R-A has responsibility for park management. So what I really like about this is the LCRA is testing 900 megahertz spectrum. Now this is LTE, but this is to manage basically 34 retail utilities within Texas that serve over a million people. And then also it's going to be piloted amongst 30 parks recreational areas and natural resource areas.

And if you think about the applications for private cellular, from an operation standpoint.  It's tremendous when you think about, the operation of dams and that sort of thing, you have a lot of sensors, there are, you've got to open floodgates and that sort of thing.

Very similar to a port operation. Maybe not as many moving parts, but very ideally suited for that. And if you think about parks and recreation there are a lot of applications, not only for gas Wi Fi, but but also just for.  Management of parks using computer vision there are poaching, issues, it is deer season right now deer hunting season in Texas.

You're not allowed to hunt in recreational areas and parks. And so I think there'll be a lot of applications for this. And again, it's a test and it's.  But I think if it's successful, there could be opportunities to expand use cases and and eventually employee 5g down the road. So I don't know if you have any comments here, but what do you think just from an application perspective? 

Yeah. 

There's, there's a lot of opportunities for a lot of these IOT applications to benefit from private networks. Yeah. I think, deploying the right type of private network based on the IOT application. Is a key component of success. And I just think, having more connectivity and more places and leveraging, maybe smaller swaths of spectrum but still using standard spectrum instead of using, like a lower land or something that's a proprietary tech  will ultimately be better for everybody because the costs come down and then that enables more volume, which then increases the uptake and Then you just got that flywheel moment.

I hope that we see more of these kinds of things happen more and more developments.  

I agree. Hey, let's move to your third and final topic. And Verizon has been in the news this week. There was news recently around a pretty big write down of like 6 million relative to their  their wireline business and what they're doing there, but they've also been talking about 5G standalone slicing and small cell deployments.

And you want to share that with our viewers and listeners.  

Yeah, it's interesting because there's this whole article in Fierce Heart Wireless about Verizon's approach to network slicing and standalone. And what's interesting is that it, very much talks about how they tied their rollout of standalone with, Their C band rollout which we expected exactly what there was going to be, what they were going to do.

Makes 

sense. Yeah. And, their network has matured. I've actually been on Verizon for the last year. I went out and bought a iPhone 15 pro max and slapped it on the Verizon network to get a good idea of what the coverage is like. I will tell you that their C band network is quite good, but it's reach is not that great.

There's a lot of places where I get signal. And the performance is just not there. Same could be said of T Mobile's network, but they're in way more places and I get much faster speeds in general. Yeah,  but they are talking about slicing. They did some demos. They did 1 with axon for law enforcement applications.

I think we even talked about that a few podcasts ago. We do, and then there also did 1 during formula 1 with Lando Norris.  Where he carried around a device and they gave him a network size for streaming that video on his device.  So it sounds like they're getting a lot more aggressive on enabling network slicing and taking advantage of  SA, which is great because we've been talking about this for years.

Yeah. The more operators, start using 5G  SA and network slicing the more developers will take advantage of it. And then that grows the 5G ecosystem and demand for that kind of connectivity. And then they also talked about small cells, which they're going to start using C band small cells and they're going to start, plugging in holes in their network with these small cells.

But, they're not saying exactly how many they've deployed. But, it's really interesting because there's just so many opportunities with small cells to plug gaps, which I think they're going to have to do. Like this is the densification you and I were talking about that they were going to 

have to do. 

I was going to say we've been talking about that for years, given the profile CBAN. It's almost 

like a victory lap. I would say because we were right. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see Verizon is going down the right path and the path that we expected they would maybe a little bit slower than we had hoped, but.

They did also accelerate their ramp of their network, just like AT& T did. They've both done pretty good in terms of rolling out their networks. They still need to roll out their standalone stuff. AT& T might be a little bit ahead of them there. But what's interesting is, we are finally in, in the, actual era of standalone.

And  I'm excited about it because I know what that means for factory growth. 

Yeah, and I think as we exited last year and we did our predictions, I think both you and I pointed to 2024 as being the year for standalone and I agree, we've. We've beaten Verizon up over the last year to 18 months.

And we did point out some things like the need for densification to improve coverage and performance. But, I've been paying more attention. You tend to do this, for the two of us, but I've been paying more attention to Oakland and that sort of thing.

And they are dramatically improving their performance. In the LTE world, they were the king of the heap, when it came to coverage and, reliability and performance, and they fell back and 5g, just based on having that lack of mid band spectrum, but C band has helped them shore that up and they're definitely moving forward, but Hey, my friend, it's been another good podcast this week.

I know you haven't gotten a lot of sleep, but I'm glad we could do this since we didn't get one in last week, but why don't you take us home?  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 Anshel Sag. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate and subscribe.

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