Welcome to episode 181 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. I'm Will Townsend joining you from Barcelona or Barthelona, Spain. And and my fellow analyst Anshul Sag is joining me as well.

Unfortunately, buddy, you didn't get to make it this year, right? 

It's all good. I had other important things to tend to  

you. Do you're a new dad? And I think our viewers and listeners know that very well. So I will try to, do double duty while I'm here and and make up for that.

But let's get started. We're going to kick off the podcast and talk about AT& T. I'm going to 1st talk about a launch around their dynamic defense. And this news broke, I was actually previewed by executives on this and what dynamic defenses is basically AT& T embedding cybersecurity capabilities on the wire.

Over fiber and in within the mobile network as well  to deliver some core cybersecurity functionality. Now, the company is initially targeting this towards small to medium sized businesses. And I think that's pretty smart.  Because that size organization tends to be under protected. Those organizations don't have typically the security operations resources that larger enterprises have.

But I also do believe that dynamic defense could be advantageous for larger enterprise customers in that it could. Potentially filter a lot of the inbound, potential hazardous payloads and go pretty far in reducing alert fatigue and improve fidelity. Now, I don't see dynamic defense necessarily, replacing, the various point solutions that very large enterprises deploy, but it could be another layer.

And, this is the 1st iteration, the 1st launch of it. Certainly at& t has been injecting security into its it's connectivity services, but they're just from my perspective, taking this to the next level. And I think if they engage in future partnerships for example, with the cloud  solution providers, Because a lot of security is being delivered via the cloud.

I think it could really augment and enhance what they're doing. So there's no news around that yet, but I would expect that in the future, because so much of cyber security is a partnership. 1 size does not fit all and 1 solution does not fit all. So I don't know if you caught the news here. I like it.

1 of 5G superpowers is improved encryption over LTE. So this sort of takes it another level. But this is also this is available via wireline as well as mobility. But did you catch the news? 

I did not. So this was me finding out as you tell our audience. I do think it's pretty interesting.

It does definitely sound like more of a a way to ensure that, Endpoints are secure and that, the secure network doesn't just end at the transport level. And that there's a lot more security implemented at the end point.  Yeah, 

no, I think it's a good thing.

Having additional layers protections.  Is always very good, but hey, let's keep with the  theme and I want to go to your 1st topic and this was pretty big news and we're going to talk about the nationwide outage that experience, by the way. T Mobile and Verizon were also affected, but not to the extent that AT& T customers were but I'm gonna let you take it from here.

I've got some thoughts, but this is your topic. So I'll let you start with it. Yeah, so this was an outage that occurred. I want to say 2 days ago now. On Thursday. I think it, I think from what I recall was late Wednesday night, early Thursday morning was when the outage occurred. And basically at first everybody thought it was a nationwide outage.

Because people were trusting down detectors to tell them when their cellular network is out. But for the most part it seemed like it was AT& T that was affected. And  if some people are roaming they could be roaming on AT& T's network, which would explain why some people are experiencing outages.

But for the most part, Verizon and T Mobile both said that they never experienced a nationwide outage or even really acknowledged any customers who lost service and said that their networks are fully operational. And then by the time I got a response from AT& T they told me they had already recovered three quarters of their network.

And they said that an application, the application execution of an incorrect process was used as they were expanding their network. So this sounds like a software configuration issue. I first heard that it wasn't nationwide and then it was mostly isolated to AT& T. I felt like it was going to be a network configuration issue rather than a cyber attack, just because the way people were experiencing the outage felt very much on like the RAM level.

Or it was going to be a layer below that at the, the network level, but I didn't really feel like it was a, a complete attack. So once they said it was a software update, it made more sense. And yeah, it was, I would say, not the best experience for AT& T customers. I didn't really use my AT& T phone that day, so I didn't really experience anything.

But I was on T Mobile and Verizon, and both of them were working when I checked. And yeah I think this is one of those things where nationwide outages really suck because they become, national news. And also first responders are dependent on AT& T's network For 1st net so that's something to consider as well that, there's some 1st responders who didn't have connectivity.

And yeah,  but do we know that on show? Because there wasn't any sort of delineation between kind of the broader public mobile network and 1st, not authority. Yeah, 

all I'm saying is that I saw reports of it, but there wasn't. I haven't seen any statements from FirstNet and I didn't have time to reach out to them because this happened on Thursday, and I just sent out a bunch of emails to all the 3 carriers.

But yeah, it's an unfortunate situation and these things do happen,  and it was interesting to see how the FCC and other agencies got involved with. Reporting on what the situation is and whether it's a real concern but yeah it's definitely a challenging situation.

And oddly enough 1stNet didn't put anything out on Twitter. I don't think they released any statements. So we don't actually know what the condition was of their network.  

Yeah, I, I think this was really the broader, public mobile network, not necessarily 1st, not authority, and, your 1st thought is, could this be a cyber attack?

It appears that it was not. And certainly there are rules and regulations that, if telecom infrastructure is compromised that. They have to fess up. We saw that with T Mobile when they experienced their their cyber attack. And then I was, I was digging into this, I contacted AT& T.

They really couldn't provide a lot of details you they, they told me that they were able to get 3 quarters of the service, restored and pretty short order. There were some that were speculating around could this have been a peering issue with handoffs with being certain cell towers, but, hey, it just proves that that, networks are vulnerable and that, that was my thought, that, there must have been some sort of software update or something that happened. Bear in mind, AT& T is being very aggressive about leveraging open telecom infrastructure and a lot of that is software defined and there are huge advantages to having programmability in the network from.

An agility perspective, and the ability to roll out services more quickly and that sort of thing. Shit happens. But it really demonstrates just, how important cellular connectivity is on our daily lives. I'll just share just a very brief little antidote.

I finally was able to get the painter back over to the house to do some final things. And he kept asking me about this. And, and that's when all the news broke, about the outage. We do depend on cellular connectivity. It is critical infrastructure. It does support 1st responders.

Now, to your point and I'm sure AT& T will be doing a lot of examination into this and determining root cause.  I am an AT& T customer. I did get a text yesterday when I was flying from the States. Over here to Spain just apologizing for the outage and valuing me as a customer committed to doing better.

Not a lot of specifics there, but we wish 

first net did confirm that they had outages in multiple cities. Light reading. But yeah, it was definitely a shocker for a lot of people and. Yeah, it was definitely a major.

Yeah. Hey, let's go to my 2nd topic. I want to talk about mobile Congress.

I am here for the week  boy. It's going to be hectic. I've got meetings on those back to back. It even starts on Sunday for me, it started on Sunday for me last year as well, but I'll be spending time with Samsung and got a couple of dinners and, be a lot of receptions here. But so I get started Sunday, but, what's that 

get food 

poisoning.

Yeah, I'm not going to get food poisoning. So I have a new rule of thumb. I do not eat buffet sushi. I learned my lesson last year. But but, hey, I'm super excited about this year. A lot of people are, are equally excited. From my perspective, generative AI, I believe is going to be front and center and, how that gets applied to telco workloads will be really interesting.

Certainly. There are customer support aspects to that field service aspects to that. But I do expect to learn a lot about generative and how it's going to be applied within the mobility space. I also believe satellite communication, something that, I have been talking about on this podcast many times.

I believe that's going to be front and center this year and how satellite is going to come together with terrestrial cellular networks to bridge the digital divide. I have meetings set up with a number of different solution providers there. And I'm hoping to be able to provide some additional perspective this week, as well as in a Forbes wrap up of the event. 

And I think finally, I'm expecting to hear more about where we're at with open. This is something that got started quite a while ago very focused in the US on domesticating the 5g supply chain and weaning. Certain parts of the United States off of Chinese infrastructure and rip and replace, and we've seen rip and replace, occurring all around the world. 

We're seeing open RAM being embraced outside of the United States as well. Vodafone  has been a very big proponent. They, from my perspective, have been leading the charge as a European operator, Deutsche Telekom to a lesser extent as well. It'll be interesting to see the evolution of where we're at.

I think we're finally, you and I have talked about up and around. I feel like we're finally at critical mass. We're moving from point of proof of concept into deployment, both in brownfield and greenfield. Hey, those are the 3 things that I'm going to be focused on. I got, man, I was on 20 or 30 prebreeds the last, week and a half, 2 weeks.

I know you were as well. I know you're not on the ground this year, but do you have a couple of additional expectations that you're looking forward to?  Yeah, I 

think it really depends. I could launch into my topic, which I think falls into that. But I think. When you look at what's already been announced, which is what I want to talk about.

I'm already talked about their R& D demos and then they also talk about all their pre MWC announcements. There will be another announcement coming literally tomorrow after we publish this. I've been on the fence about whether or not to include those. But then, half this podcast would just be Qualcomm announcements, so I'm going to sell them out.

I think it's better that way. But we'll talk about Qualcomm again after the fact. As opposed to ahead of time. I do have a chip here in Lucite. You can imagine what it might be considering we're talking about Qualcomm, but I'm not gonna flip it and show you. Don't 

break that embargo.

Yeah don't break that embargo. I'm right at, the reason why I had to stay really high level on kind of my three, expectations is that. 90 percent of the stuff that I was pre briefed on doesn't start breaking until Monday. 

Some of it's Monday. Some of it's Monday, but I'm going to, I'm going to fire these so we can get through them fast.

1st  came out with. Announcements on infrastructure, they talked about their infrastructure processors. Those are for applications and for small cells. And then they talked about, using their infrastructure processors with other chips, including their AI accelerators to run 5G networks.

Then they did a whole thing about 5G advanced demos and 6G. I, they've actually invited us over to their headquarters and their demo warehouse in San Diego. And because I'm local, I was able to do that. Ironically enough, most people are going to hear about these demos, but never experienced them in person because They're not really transportable.

And most of that we saw were giga MIMO. So we actually saw them testing giga MIMO. In,  in their warehouse where they're turning in watching the reflections and stuff and giga MIMO is going to be basically what we have with massive MIMO, but higher antenna counts, higher bands. And essentially their claim is it's going to operate the same in terms of footprint as mid band does today with.

Massive MIMO. We'll see what happens, but there's definitely already some hope there that, these higher frequency bands will be what we use for 6G except for China, who will be using 6 gigahertz, which is what everybody else is using for Wi Fi 7. So that's a different discussion to have.

Yeah. In addition to that, there was a a satellite demo, which was pretty cool where they had a full anechoic chamber  and they were using a robotic arm to simulate a satellite passing over at the exact speed that a satellite would, and then using that to, to show how their 5g NTN  solution works.

And they are now using in the standard within release 17, as opposed to a proprietary one that they had previously, which was called Snapdragon space. I think it's trick and sound on top of that, they also showed us a demo of their. Basically digital twin and how they're using that to simulate coverage indoors and how to, improve that simulation so that they can fully simulate these kinds of things without having to have somebody regularly run tests and just honing in that data so they can help industrial companies and application teams to implement it.

Figure out how to quickly change their configuration or optimize their configuration for the best coverage for a private network date. And then there was also a demo that I got that was a 5G AR demo which basically allowed me to see Barcelona in AR, but both using local and cloud compute and seamlessly transitioning between the two. 

The based on the conditions of the network and the congestion in it. There was even 5g red cap stuff. It's, it was a very busy 

a smorgasbord of demos, huh? Yeah, 

absolutely. Tons of stuff. On top of all that, they announced their Wi Fi 7 automotive grade access point solution. I saw that.

Yeah. Then they also announced their third generation of their 5G fixed wireless.  Ultra platform which is, based on the modem, that's not announced yet. I'm pretty sure they talk about this platform, but they don't say what's in it. Oh, actually I'm wrong. It's an X 75. So last generation modem is in there.

And that, that's, that's just going to be faster, more power efficient. It's going to be great. And what was interesting was they were showing how this solution has a a new motorized reflector with 360 degree field of view. So it's basically going to find the millimeter wave signal where it's best and stick to it, which I thought was cool.

That definitely sounds like something that would be really useful for somebody who wants to have millimeter wave, or that's like their solution. Other than that, I think that was the barrage. I'll add that there was also approval of the FCC when it comes to AFC and allowing Qualcomm to manage access on the 6 gigahertz spectrum.

So that's maybe not as relevant because it's a little bit wifi ish, but yeah, they just had a barrage of announcements. That was about 2 or 3 days ago and I went visit them last week. So I haven't written any of that up yet, but there's so much to talk about. It's. Exhausting and that's why I'm not even talking about all the other stuff that's getting announced. 

Yeah, I know it's, I, call it a, a smorgasbord, a charcuterie board a lot of tapas, a lot of stuff from Qualcomm. They're always, they're always, it just seems like the payload. On their launches is just a super intense and there'll be more breaking this week.

And you and I might want to collaborate on a show wrap up here. But, hey, let me go hit my 3rd and final topic. And I found this in RCR wireless and it's pretty cool. And I think I think you'll agree with me. But seem to they're a Singaporean mobile network operator. They tend, we've talked about them on prior podcasts.

They tend to be pretty cutting edge, but. They're claiming the 1st app based network slicing demo or technology proof of concept. And they're stating that this was implemented in partnership with Ericsson and Samsung and what they're claiming is the ability to enable app owners to activate a custom slice.

Of same tells 5G network to boost the performance of that particular app and enhance the user experience. Now, this is different because traditionally network slicing technologies  provide a differentiated experience, whether it's, tailored to latency whatever to a subscriber line more broadly and not tailored to an application.

This is pretty cool. I'd never heard of it. And it's using  an advanced slicing technology known as user equipment route selection policy, or you're  with application detection, control, and this particular demonstration was tested using same tells cast application during a live stream of the recent Australian.

Open this is pretty cool, man. If you think about it being able to direct it down to the application at the application level. This could be really cool. There could be some really  significant  applications that are realized from that. We're even aware of this technology, because you and I talk about network slicing quite a bit on this podcast.

Yes I have been available. I've known about U. R. S. P. but I didn't know about A. D. C. But the good thing is I what this sounds is it seems like it's just an extension of network slicing to the application layer. Some kind of, S. T. K. I'm thinking that this will probably be something that they offer as a service.

Two application developers to get a bit more granular control of the network and how the devices operate. But I do wonder since this is a network slice is this like a generic network slice that they would already have set up and then let the developer shape it a little bit on the application side?

I think that's probably the more reasonable application than, having a application, configure the network itself. Or at least, do its own version of that. I'm sure that was easier because they're the operator and it was their app. Once you start getting third party apps, I think it gets a little more challenging.

And I think that's probably where it gets a little more complicated and where we'll probably see a little bit more general Configurations of network slicing.

Yeah, just, a little further detail on Samsung's involvement. So Samsung this is an article on our CR wireless.

That Samsung stated that they've already configured U. R. S. P.  For its galaxy is 24 ultra and plans to extend the rollout to other devices. Yeah, it's interesting. I agree with you. I think the kind of the DevOps, or, the developer angle of it would be pretty cool like this whole notion around, APIs and, using APIs to make mobile networks more programmable to 1 of the reasons why Ericsson spent so much money on bondage.

But, yeah, no, it's super cool. I wasn't aware of, this application kind of layer, slice capability. Pretty cool. I'll have to, keep keep my eyes and ears tuned into that. But, hey, let's wrap things up. I'm getting through this with with minimal jet lag,  but you want to talk about Sony's new portable 5G transmitter and.

Yeah. What is that all about, man? It's really 

cool. Basically it's actually a, it's two things in one. It's actually really a smartphone. But it's not a smartphone. And the way I say that is it has a snapdragon eight gen two. It has cellular connectivity. It has a screen, has a camera, but it is not really a smartphone at all.

Its purpose is actually to connect 4k. Broadcast cameras or  smart or  just a regular photo camera to the cellular network so that they can upload their files  to. Whoever's FTP they're working for. So this is definitely more of a work application. This is not really for consumers.

And they're showing millimeter wave support. So  this does do millimeter wave, which I think is necessary for this kind of application. But it depends on the, where you're actually located because it seems like some places don't support me. I'm going to wait. So they won't actually even offer it.

It's actively cooled with a heat sink. It has an HDMI port, 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port. So you can connect it to your camera directly over HDMI. Or you can connect it to something else using ethernet or you can use usb c so you have options for connectivity It also has expandable storage, which most phones don't have today Which is 250 gig fixed gigs of internal and then an additional one terabyte with an sd card So it can also store footage as well it also has a quarter inch tripod screw hole so you can mount it  If you need to so it doesn't have to be attached to your camera.

And then on top of that it says that they already have it pre qualify with some of their devices and services and that they have a network visualizer. So you can see how the data is being transferred. And it looks like, a lot of this is like having it attached to different parts of the camera that you have for your rig.

But you could also have this attached to a tripod.  Interestingly enough it does have an OLED screen. It does have dual SIM connectivity. It has nano SIM and e SIM support. And it has all the bands you would expect. It says maximum uplink is 1. 1 gigabits per second and a maximum downlink is 8.

1 gigabits per second, which I would assume is a millimeter wave.  Configuration and then on top of that it's basically just, a modem that's really a phone. That's really also not a phone. And in the photos, they have it shown with both video and photo cameras and a lot of the video camera figurations, it's just mounted to the top of the camera instead of a viewfinder.

But it's cool because it's actively cooled. It has a heat sink it has a camera on the back. I don't really know what it's for yet, but it definitely, having 2 networks sounds like you would want to have that, as a fallback in case there's an outage or the speeds aren't good.

With a lot of these new capabilities of the networks  and added frequency to their spectrum holdings, we're hearing about networks like T Mobile offering 300 megabits per second upload. Yeah, you're doing 4K footage. You're going to take every single megabit you can get, especially when there's any suggestion.

Yeah, I just think it's a really interesting configuration and, didn't really talk that much about the antennas, but they have an illustration of what it looks like. But, yeah, I would consider this if I were in the field, wanting to upload my footage, whether it's video or photos, in real time, because if you watch a lot of these professional photographers and on sporting events, they usually have a laptop sitting right next to them for uploading it in real time and.

This would be an alternative to using a laptop where you could just, set up the FTP  and just have those files rip. And then, and they still use, SD card runners. Maybe they don't aren't necessary. If this is able to upload 

fast enough,  yeah, no it's a super cool demonstration of the power of, 5g from a, from a speed and, latency perspective.

It's it reminds me of these these Wi Fi enabled SD cards that would allow you to on your home network Wi Fi. But this is like. Leveraging 5G and, with 4K video, these files are massive, right? And the ability to be able to not have that redundant step of a laptop and be able to upload it, wherever, and then there's also 5G broadcast as well, right?

Could that could be a part of it. Yeah, it supports up to 4K 60 video. So that could actually be a good opportunity for. Yeah. Us as consumers to get higher quality video because most platforms today only really support 10, 1080p and very few broadcasts are actually done in 4k. So we could actually see more 4k broadcasts as a result of this. 

Yeah, I agree. My friend. Hey what a great demonstration of 5G's power, but another great podcast. Why don't you take us home? Absolutely. We 

hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights on a future 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media.

Will's at WhaleTownTech and I'm at On Shell SOG. We hope you have a great week and please tune in again next week. And don't forget to like and subscribe. We'll have tons of content for you guys  and we'll hopefully, maybe even make it shorter.