Welcome to episode 180 of the G2 on 5G. It's the latest Insights 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 Anshul Sag. Let's get started with my first topic.

And news broke this week around Talos partnering with Samsung Networks.  For both LTE and 5G open and virtualized RAN, and I've spoken about Samsung networks in the past, they are really building a significant beachhead  with respect to  VRAN, and the company four or five years ago was not even a factor in the RAN market.

And so they've really been competing with the likes of Nokia and Ericsson and others. And this is significant. Tell us is a fairly large operator in the Canadian market. They have been going through a rip and replace of Chinese infrastructure. So they've had a lot of Huawei in their network. So they've been removing that and it's interesting.

I read this article is light reading.  It's a pretty aggressive plan. They want to convert 40 to 50 percent of all their mobile sites to virtual and technology by the end of 2027. So that's a super aggressive timeline. Certainly there are advantages in doing that from just, a domesticated supply chain perspective.

So continuing to move away from Chinese infrastructure, but this really, from my perspective, demonstrates Samsung's continued momentum and progress when it comes to the Iran. So don't know if you caught the news, but any thoughts did not catch the news,  but it does seem like a natural progression for tell us.

And yeah, if there's a ripper replace going on I think Samsung is definitely part of the discussion and it seems like they. I want the deal, also mentioned to tell us hasn't deployed massive MIMO. As they embark on their 5G build out, and their spectrum profile is in 3. 5 gigahertz range.

Samsung can be able to bring them, capabilities with massive MIMO, which. Basically, for our viewers and listeners that are not familiar with massive MIMO, that's an antenna structure that puts density of antennas into a smaller footprint. It's more power efficient, and you get much better propagation performance.

So they're going to lean on Samsung for that as well. I think it's great for TELUS. They're competing with Rogers and others in that market. And again, kudos to Samsung. I think that's a great win for them. Let's move to your first topic. And you want to talk about Verizon and they have basically entered in an agreement with the NHL for private 5G. 

Yeah, so this is actually a renewal of an agreement that they already had in place with the NHL. But what it does is it adds. They're the official wireless service provider partner and the official mobile edge computing partner, which I don't think I've ever seen any sports league ever have.

That's a new 1 for me. I don't know. Yeah, that's a new 1 too. Yeah, they will use Verizon to deploy private 5G wireless across. NHL arenas, which some of which are already in pilot and they don't say which ones. And they say it will help with game day operations and roll out new and transformative solutions to advance the sport and improve overall fan experience.

Basically, it's going to be an improved backhaul for a lot of things and they're going to make sure that Verizon will continue to try to deploy and expand 5G Ultra Wideband across the arenas. And there's a lot of talk about MEC computing here. They keep talking about the power of 5G and Mac to change how fans consume live sports, and that the 5G network is enabling cashless checkout and that they're, They'll be able to manage, they'll be able to watch live streams, manage fantasy teams and check scores with virtually no lag.

This is similar to what they're doing in the, with the NFL. They're really leaning into the sports experience and enhancing that for their customers. And it looks like they also will have some activations. At MetLife Stadium as part of the 2024 Navy Federal Credit Union NHL Stadium Series, that's a mouthful.

And that will be one of their activations to kick off this re up of their partnership with NHL,  the fan activation component is exciting. I've. Visited several venues, including where the Seattle Seahawks play, and that's actually an extreme networks deployment  and it's it's interesting.

You can do a lot with, 1 of your favorite things AR and VR, but. You mentioned the concession connectivity and that's huge. And I spent time with Circuit of the Americans because they're in my backyard and right outside of Austin between Austin and Bastrop, where I'm living now, and they're investing in private networking because it's going to improve coverage.

And it's going to improve the capabilities of operating concessions, and that's huge. I think for, sporting events, and if you don't have a resilient network, there's a real opportunity cost to these venues to not take advantage of the mobility aspects of.  The point of sale and ordering and that sort of thing.

So I think that it's a great example of what Verizon is focused on from a, enabling sports venues with connectivity.  But Hey, man, let's go move to my 2nd topic. And I want to talk about T Mobile and they're leaning into a new technology called uplink transmit switching. To drive some pretty significant improvements and uplink speed on their 5G standalone network.

So this is an article that I caught in Fierce Wireless  and what T Mobile is speaking to is using again, this new feature called uplink transmit switching or ULTX.  And they're seeing uplink speeds of up to 345 megabits per second on again, their 5G standalone network and T Mobile is claiming that this is the fastest uplink ever recorded in North America.

It is utilizing sub 6 gigahertz spectrum. To no surprise Qualcomm was involved in this demonstration as well. This is a partnership with Nokia. I think there's a, there are a lot of pundits out there that are, celebrating. I'm not going to celebrate, but their demise given, 18 T's recent partnership with Erickson, but this demonstrates Nokia's capabilities from a ran perspective.

Absolutely. And then. Again, this test was involved with Qualcomm Snapdragon modem RF system,  and they're also using carrier aggregation and they're using MIMO to get to these speeds. I know you're a gear head and you jam on this stuff. What do you think? Is this significant from your perspective?

Yeah, it's a pretty big improvement from their previous record too. It's about 20 percent faster. Which is huge. I think the one thing to impress upon people is with uplink improvement comes better coverage and better battery life. The uplink is the weakest link in your phone, and when you have bad signal, your uplink is the one that has to be boosted and that usually ends up costing you battery and radiation the better your uplink signal, the better your overall signal will be, and your better battery life, and it should work.

You'll want a better uplink, and this is a great thing to hear, and it will probably result in a lot better uploads for, apps, streaming, all those kinds of applications, so it's a really good thing, and I was excited to see this happen. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with this technology.

T Mobile is stating that it's fairly new, so I'm going to dig into it a little bit further and learn more about it, but hey let's move to your second topic, and this was big news, I was actually pre briefed on this, but you want to talk about AT& T and FirstNet, and they're expanding Their relationship. 

Yeah, so I saw this as well, which is why I had as a topic.  I was surprised you didn't choose it as 1 of your topics. I almost did.  Yeah, the 1st net is pretty big because. 1st of all, AT& T 1st, that are tied at the hip. 1st, that's built on AT& T's network. But it is still a quasi government agency and it's mostly, for people who don't know, it's for public service and first responders, and they plan to spend somewhere around 8 billion to enhance the FirstNet network, which includes 1, 000 new cell sites. 

and  transferring the network from stand from, non standalone to standalone and converting LTE spectrum to 5G. So modernizing network enhancing its capabilities of standalone and increasing coverage as well. So it's a pretty big investment. It is 8 billion over 10 years. So it's about 800 million a year, but that's still a considerable amount of money for a network that has one purpose.

And I, I think when you consider that they already have 5. 5M connections and support 27, 000 public safety agencies. That's a pretty significant network. And the good thing is that the 4G network will remain fully operational for people to use as needed, but it does sound like the 5G is going to be where they really focus all their energy. 

Yeah, in addition to the files in these sites there's also a new converge core that's being delivered as well. And it's not clear to me in the press release and the news that kind of rolled out of this. Whether they're, and I'm assuming they're leaning into what they're doing with Azure, because we've talked about that in the past, there was a transference of intellectual property as well as man and woman power to from AT& T and Azure, as they moved out of their sort of open,  And this was like, this was 3 or 4 years before the announcement with Ericsson sort of their open networking initiative.

So I'm assuming Azure is involved in this just because a core  cloud delivered core gives you significant scalability. But there's also a new core to make this happen as well. This is super significant. And if you think about the cost of the average cost of deploying 5G from just, the traditional public service perspective, Verizon and AT& T have both spent, north of 25 billion just on the infrastructure and not the spectrum to make this happen.

So for another phase of FirstNet to roll out here over the next decade. At 8 billion, this is pretty significant, and it's going to do a lot to improve connectivity and resiliency and performance for 1st responders that relied on a Motorola network for almost 100 years. It's exciting, and I did share some thoughts on this and some insights on my Twitter handle at will town tech.

If you want to hit that and dive a little bit deeper. But, hey, let me go to my 3rd and final topic. And I want to talk about Nokia and Dell.  Teaming up for private cellular networking, both companies have had a long partnership and Nokia basically has leveraged Dell power edge servers for a lot of their infrastructure.

And so they formalize that agreement and actually Nokia will be transitioning. It's airframe server customers. To Dell power edge server. So this is an all in scenario for them. And but what's more significant is that, finally, Dell has put a stake in the ground and Nokia will be Dell's preferred enterprise private networking provider.

There have been a lot of rumors, was going to do something on their own. Dell is very good at building ecosystems, and I'll be spending time with Dennis Hoffman and his team that mobile world Congress in the coming week. And and I'll be learning more about this recent announcement, but I think this is great.

Nokia is certainly a leader when it comes to private networking and given the relationship between Dell and Nokia that's existed for quite some time, this is just a natural evolution of that partnership. I think this is great for Dell. I think it's great for Nokia and it's interesting because. 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise they're building their own private networking capability. They acquired Alphanet last year, which provides the core infrastructure. And it's, you would ask the question, Hey, why would Nokia consider HPE servers ProLiant servers? And it's because there's that conflict there.

So Dell is pretty uniquely positioned itself to continue to take some opportunity and market share with servers with Nokia and then lean on Nokia to provide that private networking platform. Don't know if you have anything else to add to that before we move to your last topic, but. What are your thoughts? 

I  don't really have much to add here other than I think Dell is increasing their relevance in telecom. I think, this deal helps them get more credibility in the space because they're still a relatively new player. And, I think Nokia probably wants to work with a partner who is well regarded, but maybe needs a little bit of  credibility help in the telecom space.

So I think this is a good partnership. But I would expect that Dell might be partnering with others as well in the telecom space for similar applications. Yeah, it's, Dallas, definitely they're building an ecosystem approach to doing all of this. Dollars. Very also heavily invested in edge.

And so I, I expect to see edge come into the picture as well as Nokia and Dell move forward. But I think this is a win, but for Dell, Dell is going to, they're going to transition some of this Nokia server opportunity to Dell and Dell is going to lean heavily into Nokia for private network.

And so I think. On the surface, it's a solid partnership, but with that, let's go to your 3rd and final topic and you want to talk about Vodafone's hyper reality hub and that. That screen's mixed reality in one of your big lives.  So this was announced today. Actually I lied. It was not announced today.

It was announced two days ago. This is definitely like a, we're already in the pre MWC era with we're two weeks out, basically, and we're already getting MWC announcements. And to our audience, we're probably going to be talking about MWC next week and the following week, and maybe even the week after that.

There's going to be lots of announcements, lots going on. Just get ready, fans. Hyperreality Hub is a product. It is a standalone solution powered by Snapdragon technology that utilizes Vodafone's fast, secure connectivity computing. To be shared between the Hub, XR Glasses, and across the cloud.

I was not pre briefed on this. I don't know anything beyond this press release. I should have reached out to Qualcomm. I was there yesterday. They probably would have been able to explain to me what the heck this is. But I'm looking at it from the photos and the description. There are two products.

There's Hyperreality Hub and Hyperreality Hub Plus.  It seems that the Plus variant of this  They both, I believe, are like a set top box kind of situation. Where all the computing is in the set top box. And then that's connected to the Vodafone network and it uses wifi seven or wifi six depending on the version to connect to these AR glasses that are based on Snapdragon ar two gen one, which is a pretty powerful pair of glasses.

Actually wore a pair yesterday. That'll be part of a an article I write about the MWC coverage but nevertheless they, it looks like it's a  AR experience powered by a remote computing box that you don't have to wear on your face or on your body at all. And then. If that's not enough compute, then it pulls from the cloud and gets even more render capability in.

So you get these tiers of performance and tiers of experience based on what's needed and what connectivity is available. They also have this thing called a virtual agent named VEDA that's part of this experience. But they don't actually explain what VEDA stands for. But the Wi Fi 7 is a component of this as well as  5G.

And that the Hyper Reality  Hub Plus sounds like you can have multiple pairs of glasses paired to one a box. And it uses Wi Fi 7 and 5G to connect those users together. It's very nebulous. It talks about Snapdragon spaces. It gives no specifications for anything. But it does sound like an AR glass.

What's weird is they use the word mixed reality somewhere here. Like it's not mixed reality. It's very much augmented reality.  And they said some weird stuff like they're all connected by Vodafone's fast, secure, and highly responsive networks and interact intellectual property architecture. What is an intellectual property architecture is intellectual property is, intellectual property goes into building and architecture.

Yeah, that's interesting. I should probably meet with that if I when I'm in bar. To your point, they will have this. for the first time at Vodafone's booth and Qualcomm's booth at the MWC expo. Now, I regret not having looked this up earlier because I literally could have asked Qualcomm  what's going on here.

Because I don't know what compute is inside the hub, but I'm going to assume it's some kind of Snapdragon 800 chip.  That's driving this as opposed to a smartphone. But yeah, it's really cool. This is the kind of stuff we're going to see a lot more of. There will be a digital health. 

Telehealth Digital twin showcase called Yumi which is powered by Veda and ai. It's it feels like this was not really a very well written out press release, but no. It does seem like some of these things are very, prototype y, and that's my thoughts on this.

It feels like the glasses they're using look like the reference design, so this doesn't really feel like a product. This definitely feels more like a concept for showing people how they might be able to use it, and then if a customer gets interested, maybe then they ship an actual product. Yeah, no, it sounds to me like a squishy proof of concept to your point, but hey, now I'm intrigued.

I am going to spend some time with Vodafone and so I'm going to dig into this big time, but hey, my friend, it's been another great podcast. Why don't you take us home?  Totally. I hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like my insights for a specific 5G topic for future podcasts, please reach out to us on social media.

Will is at Willtown Tech and I'm at On Shell Saw. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week.