Welcome to episode 177 of the G2 on 5G. It's the latest inside 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 and very tired Anshul Sag as a new dad, and I'm Will Townsend. Hey buddy, before we jump into it, like, how are things going at home? Better? If you can tell by my bags, I'm still not getting enough sleep. But it's going more smoothly. We're leaving the house regularly, not just staying holed up in the house. She sleeps really well during the day not so well during the night. But yeah, it's getting better and I'll start going to industry events. Next month I'll go to one. I'll be going to the Intel IFS. Inaugural event and that's the one that I'll be going to next month. And then March is just, back to normal. So yeah, I'm not really on paternity leave as I'm doing this podcast, but I'm also not really working at a hundred percent capacity. No, I hear you. And it's hard as analysts for us to take a day off. I am in the Florida Keys at my place in Isla Morada. I needed this. I drove through a snowstorm. Visiting my wife's parents last week. And so I'm going to work remotely, down here. I'm doing a dry January still continuing that have been good on that. So it will be tough not to go to some of my favorite places here in Isla Morada, but I'll. I'll hit the water and get some snorkeling in and whatnot. But let's jump into it. We've got a lot to talk about this week. And you and I are both going to talk about earnings. I'm going to take AT& T to start and you're going to talk about T Mobile here in a moment. But AT& T did post its fiscal 4th quarter 2023 and year end results. The stock was down and you're going to start to talk about T Mobile and how the market reacted to their earnings as well. They had modest. Growth and progress and mobility services, but fiber continues to be a real standout for AT& T. They, they ended the year adding another 1, 000, 000 subscribers and so that kind of equates to over a 25 percent in growth. And that is quite impressive. AT& T continues to invest in its fiber build out. But let me also mention from a mobility standpoint, there was some growth in post paid both in net sub ads as well as net phone ads. And I think a lot of it has to do with AT& T executing on building out its mid band spectrum and we've talked about that on numerous podcasts as well. But all in all, even though the market didn't rack, tremendously favorably to the earnings, Hey given the circumstances. Broadband is a very bright point for AT& T, and I do think that there are some additional headroom as we've discussed on prior podcasts. AT& T launched its consumer 5G fixed wireless access service last year Internet Air, and I believe that's, it's in limited markets now, but as they build that offering out I believe that's going to provide some additional incremental revenue for them. But what are your thoughts before we jump into T Mobile? I think AT& T is showing that when you execute on your core business and focus on it, you can do well. They've pretty much divested from or at least, pulled out from all their media stuff and just focusing on fiber, focusing on 5G wireless and, what the experience has gotten better, customers are happy. You know that they're seeing growth and profitability and as somebody who uses AT& T wireless and AT& T fiber they're solid products. I don't see why they wouldn't be doing well. And T Mobile obviously has their own competitive edge against AT& T. But You know, AT& T, I think, really their fiber product is incredible. As somebody who uses it every day, this podcast is done over AT& T fiber. They've done a really good job with it. And, fiber should be the future. I think it is. And I think they have an edge on their competitors on the broadband side that are still doing copper and trying to push. More and more through the same copper every year. And I just think the future is fiber. And and a lot of that fiber strategy is pushing their 5G network capabilities as well. I think AT& T has done a really good job of being conscious about how they roll out infrastructure and to maximize its utilization, not only rolling out mid band when they had both blocks of spectrum that they bought weight and also when they do that, we're also rolling out fiber simultaneously and helping to improve their, your unit economics quite a bit. I just think they're really smart with how they've used their capital expenditures. And yeah, I just, I think it's showing what this year's results. Yeah, I know you alluded to it. I call it a tale of two broadbands, like a tale of two cities. And certainly AT& T's focus, primary focus is on fiber secondary FWA. T Mobile's on the other hand has been decidedly fixed wireless access because that's what they have in their wheelhouse. And I don't want to steal all your thunder, one of the big things that I drew from T Mobile's earnings. Was a subscriber number that's approaching 5 million, but I'll let you take it from there. Yeah, so I, I followed T Mobile's earnings. I watched the call because they broadcast it live all over the place, YouTube and Twitter and LinkedIn. And yeah I think when you look at T Mobile's earnings. They gave a really good summary of, they got 300 K net account additions for postpaid 1. 6 postpaid net customers. Total they got 900 K postpaid net customer additions. And they had 16 billion in revenue, which was a 3 percent increase over year. They had 2 billion in income, which was a 36 percent increase. And there it beats out was 7. 2 billion. They had 5 billion in net cash, 4. 3 billion net cash flow. And the 500 K high speed internet net customer additions, as you said, almost got them to 5 million. I think they're like 4. 9 or something like that. Super close. And then they also touted their, their 5G footprint now covers 98 percent of Americans which is thanks to their low band approach. I think there was somewhere where they quoted that they have more coverage nationwide of 5G than their competitors combined in terms of square miles. And then they also talked about their Ultra Capacity Network, which is the mid band, which is what everybody cares about. They now have, they now cover over 300 million people with it, which is far and away, way well ahead of where Verizon and AT& T are. They also touted their network performance on Ookla and OpenSignal. Basically they're unstoppable there. I think the real thing is that they continue to execute on growing their customer bases everywhere. They even said TFB, which is their business segment, also had a record quarter and a record year. Yeah, I think T Mobile is doing really well. And it's just one of those things where they're about to hit 100, 000, 000 postpaid customers in addition to the 21, 000, 000 prepaid customers. So they're just, they're a behemoth now. They call themselves young carrier, but I think at this point they are very much a carrier, but yeah, I think what will be interesting to see is. How their leadership and, standalone and network slicing will manifest itself at this year. In new applications, we know they're doing the beta test with a lot of the video providers. And it'll be really interesting to see how that manifests itself down the road. And whether that, creates new services and new opportunities for T Mobile and its customers. But, yeah I think this was just a really good solid year for them across the board and very similar to AT& T. I think when you focus on your core business, you can be really successful. And I have, I've been trying to find this data and I, briefly saw it, but I believe they're now in the top 5 in terms of service providers because they have 5 million subscribers. So they're really growing. I think they might still be top 10, but they're taking a lot of business from their competitors. And even though, the industry isn't growing at the rate that it used to be, they are still growing fast from the industry, which means they're taking share. And, that's been T Mobile's story since they, they completed the merger with Sprint. Yeah, I'm going to cover this in my third topic. I'm going to talk about a partnership that T Mobile is entering into to improve the overall performance because As they put more subscribers on that service, they're going to have to focus on capacity and performance. And there are already I've read some articles around, originally T Mobile was positioning its consumer services, unthrottled, unlimited, but there are about 10 percent of their users that surpass like a terabyte in a given month. But anyway I'll address that in a second topic, but I agree with you. They're firing on all cylinders. I don't think the market reacted very, positively to their news as well. I just, I think, all in all Wall Street is just down on telecommunications, especially when you look at some of the challenges that the infrastructure providers are also having. So we're not going to go into Nokia's or Ericsson's earnings, but there's some softness there for obvious reasons. And We talked about the whole build up and ran and you know that's occurred. So it was definitely going to fall off there. I think the reason why investors were unhappy was because I think they missed on EPS. Honestly, as somebody who's been following stocks since I was like 5 years old I think the way stocks are priced are ridiculous. Because if you hit on earnings. You hit on your bottom line and your top line, but you don't have a good guidance. You fall. If you have a great guidance and you didn't hit on one of those two, you fall. So there's always a reason for a stock to fall. And then when a stock shoots through the roof, it's like, there's sometimes no explanation. Yeah, markets aren't always rational. I'm an economics major and so we could do a whole podcast on a rational exuberance and market dynamics and that sort of thing. But, yeah, I agree. The fundamentals are there, for both AT& T and T Mobile and yeah, it's exciting to see them battle it out, AT& T on the fiber front and now getting into consumer FWA and then obviously T Mobile on the consumer front. And to your point, I'm glad you brought it up. T Mobile for business is growing as well. That's been an area. It's just complete upside for T Mobile as they build out their portfolio of services that we've talked about on prior podcasts. But let me get to my 2nd topic, and this is my big 1 for the week. A lot of my Twitter followers and others were clamoring for you and I to lean in on this news around AST and SpaceMobile's funding. For reasons that we won't share we were hesitant to jump into the fray. One of the things that I like to do is I like to wait for the dust to settle as well before I weigh in. I did that when HPE dropped the bombshell a few weeks ago on its intention to acquire Juniper Networks. I'm glad I did, because it gave me an opportunity to speak with executives, get a little more insight on the situation and then provide a balance, set of facts and insights based on that. So I did the same thing with this. This is a pretty much a watershed event for space mobile. They also provided their stock offering later the same day, which is interesting. Let's not get into that. We're not financial analysts. We're technology analysts, but I want to talk about just the merits of this deal. And so at a high level, you've got Google and AT& T as new investors and you have Vodafone that's investing a 2nd round. It's an aggregate of 155M dollars. And here's. Why I think it's compiling by the way, I just published a Forbes article on this. So it's on LinkedIn. It's on Twitter. All the requisite companies have been tagged. So if you're interested, go hit my feed at will town tech on X, Twitter, and you can read more. But at a really high level, why is Google involved in this deal? It's pretty obvious to me, Apple with its latest iteration of the iPhone. 1 of the big announcements was tied to. Google. Satellite connectivity and texting and Apple is doing this. No surprise. In a walled garden fashion, they're doing a lot of that on their own, Google's interest, obviously, is to ensure that Android devices, smartphones, tablets, whatnot are going to be compatible. And so it's a logical investment for them to make an ASD space mobile given, ASD space mobile has really been out in front in my estimation. They've been working with AT& T probably twice as long. As an example, then start link is with has been with T Mobile. The other thing to mention to you in this article is I compare and contrast where both star link and space mobile are today with respect to direct to cell phone capability. As you and I have spoken about Starlink just launched, several satellites that support that discreet functionality just in January of this month. In contrast AST Space Mobile launched Blue Walker 3 in the fall of 2022. I believe that's all in my article. I'm not looking at it right now, but, at a high level. AST space was just had a longer runway and you can argue back and forth about the pluses and minuses with star link and space. Normal. It's a good thing to have both of them involved here, but at a high level, it's pretty compelling. And then. If you look at, okay, what's in it for Vodafone? Vodafone operates in a lot of regions around the world that are highly remote, Australia, although they got 100 percent out of Australia and they're doing a joint venture now in Australia with another company. But. But Africa, these places are very remote and an expensive incremental CPE device to connect to, terrestrial spectrum, to satellites just isn't going to be viable. So I think that's Vodafone's interest in providing some gap coverage with some of their their parts of the world that they serve that are highly remote. And then obviously AT& T gets first mover advantage here and. the opportunity maybe to be one of the first out of the gate to monetize it. But I will mention, since Starlink made their announcement with T Mobile back in 2022, they've since signed on five other mobile network operators. And so they're building that. AST space mobile is up to over 40 now. Numbers and numbers, it all, it all work itself out in the wash, but I'm still giving the edge space mobile when it comes directed to saddle or from satellite to cell phone connectivity. I know you wanted to weigh in on this last week. So what are your thoughts this week, my friend? I think my opinions are still the same. I think that this is a really big announcement for AST Space Mobile, and I think it will put them much more on a lot more people's radar. Because having that investment from AT& T from Google is a validation of their importance to the market and that they are a market leader and not just a small company that, got a very strong following of fans. I think that we probably are still quite a ways away from really seeing commercial deployments. Because that's just the state of things as they are today. But I think we're going to see a lot more trials happening this year. And I think we're going to see potentially more satellites going up, and I'm just hoping to see more competition in the space. And maybe hear more from SpaceX, now that they've launched the satellites. And T Mobile will hopefully, offer more details because I feel like we're very opaque there. And yeah, even talking to different companies like LinkMobile as well, or LinkGlobal. And yeah I'm a big fan of what's going on and seeing these kinds of developments happen. And I think our earlier conversations with MediaTek were very insightful in terms of understanding, where the market's at today and where we can really expect it to grow. But I still think we're very much on that 2025, 2026 horizon for these things to be much more commercial. I might be devil's advocate there. The title of my article basically paraphrases is 2024 the year of, lower orbit satellite services. I think we are going to begin to see some this year, but to your point we may not see to the crescendo of all of that activity until 2025, but. As T space mobile, as an example, they're still focused on, deploying their commercial satellites in the 1st calendar quarter this year. Time will tell, but Hey, let's move to your 2nd topic. You want to talk about the the 1 plus 12. It recently launched and you've got some insights based on your experience with it. Yes 1 plus 12 is out now. I have it somewhere I actually. Messed up and didn't bring it with me to my desk. But yeah, it's a great phone. It is another snapdragon 8 gen 3 device. What's really a big deal about it is first of all it's like a really good camera. I would say it's probably one of the best cameras I've used on a smartphone. And the photos just look amazing and I have, a very cute dog and a very cute baby to take photos of. Good measure. And right now, because they're just launching this device, they also have like really aggressive deals. So first of all, this is an 800 phone. So it's already the same price as the base level as 24. But it has. Wi Fi seven standard, and it comes with 12 gigs of Ram and 256 gigs of storage, which is more than what Samsung offers. I think Samsung starts at eight gigs. But also if you pre order if you order the one plus 12 now As a pre order they automatically upgrade you to 16 gigs of ram and 253 or 512 gigs of storage Which is insane for 800 bucks on top of that They do trade in offers where they'll give you 100 no matter what kind of phone you have and no matter what kind Condition it's in, and they're also often up to 700 in trading credit. If you have a really good phone. And yeah, they're even offering 12 months financing zero APR. They're also giving 30 coupon to the buds three, which also launched, which I do have right here. Nice little blue container case, but yeah, the truth is. It's a great phone. I really don't have any bad things to say about it has wireless charging to 50 watt wireless charging, which is crazy. And it also does wired 100 watt charging. If you have a 240 plug and 80 watt if you're in the US, because 120 has a limit on. what it can produce at certain voltages. So yeah, it's a great phone. And it comes, very well equipped. And some of the reviews are, extremely glowing. I haven't finished using it. I can't say for sure that it's my favorite phone, but honestly, 24 ultra, this is probably the phone to get. You're not spending over 1, 000 because S24 Ultra is 1, 300. So if you're not trying to break the bank, but still want flagship, to your phone, honestly, the OnePlus 12 is it. I can't really consciously say that, I would recommend the S24 base model or even the Plus over this one. I'm still waiting for my S24. It'll probably come in the next few days. But I only see the S24 Ultra being better than this thing. And only because the Ultras, similar in specs and it has a lot, of more capabilities. But the one thing that is missing from the OnePlus 12. And that's a downer but that's only really a relevant item if you're on Verizon and the other thing is they have a one plus 12 are, which is like their budget version of this phone that one is 500. That one starts at eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage, but it's 500. And it has last generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so it's still a very fast SoC. It's not as fast as the current gen it has a smaller charging capability. It doesn't do, I don't think it has wireless charging, but it does still have a 5, 500 milliamp hour battery. You're going to have crazy long battery life out of that phone. Also the base model one plus 12, which is the higher end model that one has a 5, 400 milliamp hour battery, which is bigger than the S 24 ultra. They're doing some really incredible things with the one plus 12. And Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential here. And the only problem is it's not really available in, carrier stores. But it seems like they're doing pretty well just selling direct to consumer on the, news and reviews and, the truth is there's a lot of people out there that I've talked to who actually know who one plus is that I was really surprised by when I talked to them about it. Yeah, they've really grown their footprint and their brand. And I know you're a shutterbug and they do some pretty awesome optics right on their phones, Hasselblad or Blad or whatever. Yeah, that's called. Nice stuff, man. Hey, let's go to my 3rd and final for the week. And I want to talk about T Mobile and Nokia teaming up to speed up T Mobile's 5G fixed wireless access service. So I caught this news and basically under this new arrangement, Nokia is going to offer its multi access gateway or what they call their MAG gateway. Solution, which is going to allow T Mobile to improve not only scalability, but time to market. And that's super important because as we were discussing earlier as T Mobile adds more and more subscribers they're going to have to be very careful about how that scales and how the performance plays out for consumers. And for their business internet customers as well. But but this product supports LTE, which. Obviously is important as well as 5G non standalone and standalone. And what else? I'm reading the article here Nokia is stating that it's tough to be a technology of support residential broadband applications, such as high depth video streaming that significantly consumes more bandwidth than mobile applications. Hey, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah I applaud to mobile for staying ahead of this, knowing that as they grow this footprint, they're going to have to start making some important decisions to keep that service quality high, because. The last thing they want to do is, get all of these subscribers signed up and then, they start having to throttle, users and that sort of thing. And that creates churn. And that's an ugly number that everyone in the mobility industry looks at. So what do you think? Makes sense, huh? Yeah, I think, I didn't, I, I briefly caught this after I saw that it was. One of your topics. Yeah, I vaguely remember hearing about this technology. I guess the question is like how does this in terms of infrastructure, what's different with this mag solution compared to what's already in place. No, that's a great. That's a great question. And it has to do with routing. So the routing capability is is much more robust. And so it's I don't want to get too technical for our viewers and listeners, but an NPU assisted user plan architecture. So it's it's just a new badass architecture and it may be something. And I didn't have time to dig into it. I might do that, but it might be taking, routing technology. That's typically been used and enterprise use cases and bringing that down market into consumer. But it's just an improvement and it's running capability. That's the secret. Okay. So it's basically just a a better router for, for pushing more data through more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, man. Let's let's wrap it up with your third topic. And I didn't catch this news, so I'm going to be interested to hear it from you. But it sounds like in India that there may be some penalties for operators that are slow rolling 5G. Yeah, so India's Department of Telecommunications they sent out notices to Vodafone and Adani data networks, asking them to explain why they failed to meet their minimum rollout obligations. That are stipulated in their 5G licenses, if you remember last year India finally released their spectrum for 5G in October, and, it's been very, a very rapid deployment for companies like Jio, who have, met their requirements what I'm hearing is that some of these fines may be as high as 1. 6Million dollars. And there haven't been responses to these requests, but Reliance and Barti Airtel were both pretty quick to launch their launch their services and, we've talked quite a bit about Geo's capabilities and what they're doing. So they're very far ahead. But, yeah they said that they said that in August officials at the Vodafone idea. said that they confirmed that they would not meet their ROA obligations in 15 of the 17 circles of spectrum at purchase last year. So they are in trouble. And they said that this article says that the companies actually faced difficulty for some time and are debt laden and are struggling to pay their dues with vendor partners. And we're safe from the brink of collapse by the government last year. The government actually owns Vodafone IDEA to a tune of 35. 8%. And then Adani has also missed its obligations and they're trying to do some private network deployments, but it seems like they're still not meeting their requirements, it's interesting to see that the Indian regulator is actually holding these operators to account, and it might be because there's other players who want to take advantage of that spectrum, and it's being misused or underutilized. And, in a market like India, where things move quickly, I think there's a, there's an appetite for not. Not hoarding spectrum. And you could also make the argument that India has been a region that was very slow to get spectrum auctions rolling to support 5G. And so now, it's catch up mode and, we've been talking about. The race to 5g, and how could that enable competitive advantage and economic prowess and that sort of thing like the whole China versus us thing. India is definitely behind in that regard. And so this just might be the government. Going to the regulation bodies and saying, Hey, listen, let's, let's get these folks to move. And we've certainly seen that with dish in the U S and the spectrum that they've squatted on, for years and, but let's not beat that horse. Cause we could dedicate a whole another podcast to that, but yeah, I know it's interesting. And, and to your point, India is. It's economic growth is continues to be quite strong. And so 5g can feel that from my perspective, but hey, buddy, I know I rambled a little bit here. It's been a long couple of weeks and that's why I'm in the Florida keys. I plan to relax a little bit more and I hope that you get some, so much need address with Shoshana and your wife. And just congratulations again there on the birth of your daughter. Why don't you take us home, my friend? 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 Wealthontech, and I'm at Onshell SOG. We hope you have a great weekend, and please tune in again next week. And don't forget to rate and subscribe.