Welcome to episode 182 of the G two 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 is fellow analyst anal sag. Let's get started with our annual Mobile World Congress Barcelona Show, wrap up, and I was on the ground in Spain.

Ancho was remote.  Man, there were a lot of announcements. I know I saw that you posted a Forbes article, right? I think it was about Qualcomm, I believe. The first of 

many. Yeah. So get ready. I've got that one. I got that one out. That was a long one. Then I've got one for Intel, Lenovo and Dell and all the AIPC stuff.

Becoming a business thing, which I'll cover and I've got another couple coming down the pipe. It's got to get those things out. But, yeah, it's been a busy few 

days. Yeah, I know it's been, I think it's been a busy few weeks for both of us all the pre briefs a couple of weeks before and then I was on the ground. 

I behaved, try to get to bed early because I was just Forbes article as well. It'll be early next week, and it's going to be a big 1 as well. I probably want to have. I probably will not have multiple ones, but it'll be a pretty big 1. I'm going to cover several topics and I'm going to talk about a few of those on the podcast.

So let's jump into my 1st topic. And this was something that I wasn't necessarily tracking. But boy as I got there and I started getting into meetings became quite evident and it's APIs. And so you and I have talked about Ericsson's acquisition of Vonage over 6 billion. We've also talked about the Goodwill write down  that occurred last year.

And I think everyone in the market and the mobile market was scratching their head. Was this a smart move by Ericsson?  But you know what? I would say one of the highlights of the event for me and many meetings that I attended, there was a lot of discussion around API and how API and API approach can bring high degrees of programmability  and the opportunity for monetization to these next generation mobile networks that operators are spending billions of euros and billions of dollars to develop one big Bye.

You Kind of development is with the Vonage management team in general. So Nicholas he was president of Ericsson North America. He is actually now moved over to become  CEO of Vonage. I missed this news somehow but I know Patrick Moorhead, our firm's chief analyst did spend time with him this week.

I also had a chance in line getting back on the plane to head home to meet Joy Corso,  and Joy is Vonage's CMO. And so we were talking about the opportunity that APIs  bring. And we were joking about, when the news initially broke with Ericsson's acquisition of Vonage, it's hey, they're the IP phone company, but.

What's interesting as I attended meetings with AWS their telco team and other briefings, even with some of Ericsson's competitors, there's, there was a lot of discussion around API and can it drive monetization. The big question is Vonage positioned to capitalize? I think with with Nicholas at the helm, Nicholas is a very charismatic leader.

He's very smart. He did quite a bit while he was president of North America Erickson to really promote the need for programmability. Because that just speeds the developer process and that speeds innovation and actual applications and use cases.  So I don't know. And you're, and you're spending time remotely if you caught any of this, but it didn't it wasn't evident to me during my pre briefings, but boy, once I was on the ground in Barcelona, it was pretty evident. 

Yeah, 

I think I did see some of it ahead leading up to the show, just a little bit of like a trickling. Obviously it wasn't there, so I didn't see it in person, but I definitely noticed a lot of talk of APIs. So a lot of coverage of APIs. Truthfully, these APIs are really just pointing to what the network can do, right?

Ultimately, it's what you need. An API is fine, but you need an SDK to take advantage of the APIs. So I feel like that's maybe a missing talking point, is we have to build a system of an actual developer kit to use these APIs. Because you can talk about APIs all you want, but if you don't have a good way for people to use them, They're useless.

It's just like a network slice is useless unless you have an API to take advantage of it. This is like a multi layered thing, but I feel like this is something people should have been talking about sooner. And maybe even talking about in advance of network slicing because network slicing is one of the ways that you can use this.

But yeah, I just I feel like this it might be a little bit. I feel like we're a little late talking about this. There should have been a discussion we had last year. But maybe now is the time. I don't know. But  that's my feeling is I feel like this is maybe a little bit, of a late discussion.

Yeah, I touched on it and, that was a big acquisition on Erickson's part, and you make a very good point. APIs are used to integrate different salute software solutions together. So you have API integration when it comes to networking. You have API integration when it comes to security, you have API integration.

It comes in lots of different forms. As you mentioned, it's an application program interface and as you rightly mentioned, an SDK or software development kit is required to do that. And Vonage is, providing those assets, those those capabilities for this to happen, traditionally mobile network infrastructure was closed.

And so we're seeing momentum around more open standards, through the use of software defined networking tools, as well as. In general,  just additional resources that are provided to developers so that they can develop those next generation mobility applications much more, quickly in the past, I spent time with with AT& T and Verizon and T Mobile and at their lab, their lab locations, and they would bring developers and provide them with, before, 5G began,  became deployed provide, these developers with test beds to give them early access to understand sort of the power and the capabilities that 5G new radio could could deliver within the overall. 

Process. Yeah. And the limitations and the guardrails. This just this whole notion of API and programmability is designed to short circuit that and bring things, to developers and access to developers more quickly. And I agree with you. This is something that should have, taken more than a year to really catch hold.

But I, I think it's promising. And so it'll be interesting to see. I'll be spending more time with Vonage. And be following up with their CMO joy to understand their capabilities there. But everyone's talking about it. It's hot stuff. So we'll see if that actually leads to to actual monetization.

But let's go to your 1st topic. And you want to talk about AI is everywhere in the wild. And I certainly saw a lot of this. You saw a lot of this at CES, but I saw a lot of this at Mobile World Congress as well.  

Yeah, MWC  is really just a. Rolling on of the trend that started with CES which really was a culmination of all of last year's AI announcements.

This year, MWC, the big AI announcements were really from Intel on the client side talking about bringing their AI PC vision to the business. So Dell and Lenovo both announced a lot of AI commercial PCs that have the new Intel Core Ultra processor in it. Which has its own NPU. And then also, Qualcomm announced their AI hub, which is actually a, like a development platform for developers to find pre trained AI models that are optimized for its hardware and its chipsets.

So you can quickly deploy efficient AI models on their devices. So developers can go to GitHub or Hugging Face, which is two most popular places to get those things. And develop quickly on AI because they want people to use their powerful MPUs more quickly. They also had a fairly cool AI demo.

Where they were doing a multimodal  AI where you could talk to it and it could recognize both images and text and give you recipes based on what the image it was looking at. And because that way, it's not only identifying the object, but also deceptualizing what they can do together. So that was a really cool demo.

Also MediaTek had a really cool AI demo. I think the best AI demo I've seen to date for generative AI where you could type in.  And as you were typing the prompt, it would change. So like you said, like dogs and beat dogs and like in hats and they would add hats running and they'd show them running.

And like every word you add, it just keeps iterating the the generative image to a new. More refined version of what you were prompting it to do, but it also shows you how instantaneous and responsive the AI really is, which I think is a really great demo. And then on top of that, Qualcomm announced a new 5G modem, Snapdragon 8X. 

X80. The big takeaway is a six carrier aggregation even faster AI capabilities. And it's not really actually more throughput. It's probably more power efficient. It's probably on a lower process node. I forget which process node it's on and it's probably going to be the next generation of phones.

More fragmented 5g networks will be able to take in more carriers and more efficiently. And then the last.  Announcement in this segment. Is the FastConnect 7900, which is Sequelcom's second generation Wi Fi 7 chipset, which also claims to have AI capabilities both on board and taking advantage of the  SoC.

And what, so it's like a dual modal AI capability. I didn't get that much detail on that, even though I kept pressing them for it. And then  I didn't put this in my topics, but they also announced an automotive Wi Fi 7 solution which is actually the first Wi Fi 7 solution for automotive grade use. 

In market at all. So that'll be really cool because personal automakers tend to be slow. Even if they would get a design when today, it might not be in a car for another 3 to 4 years. So anybody utilizing this now will probably have it in cars in the future, which will make sense because everybody's phones will be Wi Fi 7 by that.

Yeah, it'll take 2 or 3 years to get there. 

So I think that's a good thing just for everybody to have. All cars default Wi Fi 7 in my point, obviously it would be mostly a a premium device or premium car capability initially and everybody else do Wi Fi 6, but that's like the quick of it. 

Yeah, no, that's quite a bit. My friend. Let me jump into my 2nd topic and I'm going to talk about low Earth orbit satellite service. And I did write a Forbes article  a few weeks ago. I believe it was a Forbes article or was it a research net? I don't know. I am very jet lagged right now.

I woke up at 4 30 am Texas time. So I don't even know where I'm at. I think I'm in Austin. I'm headed to Bastrop at some point to my home. But but I did get to spend time with two CEOs. I got to finally meet Abel. He's the CEO of AST Space Mobile.  There was an AT& T reception on Monday.  He and I got to meet for the first time.

And then I met with Satellite OT. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I should have probably asked, Jamie the CEO, if I'm pronouncing it, I feel like it's Centellia, but we'll see, I don't know. It's crazy. Anyway I got to meet with him as well. And, there are a lot of players in Leon that continues to be a space race.

It is super hot, just. From at a high level with ASD SpaceMobile and AT& T, both Abel and Chris Sambar, who runs networks for AT& T they were both very vocal about the opportunity for the 2 companies to work together as ASD SpaceMobile moves closer to its production launch sometime in the 2nd quarter of this year. 

The good news is I may have an opportunity to go back to Midland and and be there for what I believe is referred to as the chip in.  So that should be interesting. I don't have a lot of information to share beyond the fact that both AST, SpaceMobile and AT& T remain very bullish on the opportunity.

Mr. Sanbar basically stated he feels like there's no other competing technology. As compared to what is T is doing  is also historically worked with Nokia as well. So there's a lot of technology that's coming together there. And certainly when 1 of the largest mobile network operators in the world gets behind something that's pretty positive.

And just, a personal basis a bell, and I had a chance, to talk about the digital divide. He is very passionate about that. He's actually, he told me he's on a UN, a United Nations council, but that's focused on connectivity and bridging the digital divide. I think that's fantastic.

I told him about my book. That's a work in progress. It can it's been a work in progress for several years, but a lot of it was stymied during the pandemic. Yeah, but I'm picking that up and I'm even thinking about broadening the focus and including some technology areas, like lower orbit and that sort of thing to I 

think you'd be 

foolish not to.

I know to round out the narrative but that's exciting, and, I think Satellite OT or Satellite they're an interesting company, if you don't know who they are based in Barcelona. At Mobile World Congress, we have all of these companies come from around the world and, many of them are not local.

They're not Spanish based and they are based in Barcelona and Catalonia.  Yeah, they are very focused on narrow band IOT. And what what Jamie shared with me is that as they move towards production and the 2nd half of this year they already have MOUs lined up so that they'll be able to hit the ground running very quickly.

They're not focused on, launching a ton of satellites initially, and that's AST SpaceMobile's plan as well. AST SpaceMobile, talks to, the fact that physically their their satellites are larger and they're not, there's not a requirement to launch. 

10s, 10s of thousands of satellites like Starlink, but there are concerns about its size, but, hey, it's, give and take from that perspective, but just to round out the thought process with satellite OT or Satellite what's really interesting is that Jamie shared with me, the, there's an opportunity for them to work with NGOs to do some things that are very philanthropic In bridging the digital divide  where and these are sustainability use cases, and I will go into more depth and my Forbes article, but there may actually be an opportunity for me to spend time with that team as well as they engage in some of the,  these these philanthropic efforts.

Where the company will provide, access, they're not going to provide the sensors but work with organizations that are leveraging narrow band sensors. To do things like monitor deforestation illegal poaching in very remote parts of the world. As you can imagine deforestation and places like the Amazon region, Amazonian region.

And wildlife conservation and in places like the continent of Africa, where there's a little to no  connectivity and remote areas. So it's super exciting. So I, we were talking about, the opportunity of my helping them tell their story. And so I'll probably be doing that in the future as well.

But again, and CNN satellite continues to be hot. So what are your thoughts before we move to your 2nd topic? 

I don't feel like there was really anything new in terms of news for that segment, so I don't really have much to add other than we're going to continue to follow this and talk about the next developments as, things continue to occur.

I saw some news about, t Mobile and SpaceX may be getting a little bit too much wiggle room FCC in terms of approvals and some competitors not being happy about that. So we'll see, but ultimately I want there to be competition because I think this is a, this will be a function of smartphones where I still believe that 911 services will be done over satellite. 

Yeah, no, and the, the opportunity to augment like what. AT& T is doing with 1st, that I think is huge. But with that, let's go to your 2nd topic and it would not be a mobile world. Congress Barcelona wrap up. If we didn't talk about mobile devices and there are a bunch that were launched. 

Yes. 

Some of them were launches. Some of them were prototypes. Some of them were teasers. So I'm going to just roll through these real fast. I don't waste anybody's time. Honor announced the Magic 6 Pro, which is their flagship phone. Xiaomi announced their 14, but their flagship was the Ultra. That might be the new hotness in terms of capable smartphone camera capabilities.

Both of those have the latest Snapdragon HN3. Motorola showed off a bendable phone. Which wraps around your wrist. I saw that. Crazy. It's a new generation of something that they showed off in 2016. 8 years ago. And it doesn't honestly look any more commercially ready to be honest with you.

That's why, that's how I feel about it. And then we've got Techno which is like more of a mainstream, like a more budget brand very popular in Africa has showed off a rollable phone concept. Lenovo showed off a clear screened laptop, which literally has no back. You can see through it and everybody had to pose with photos with their face behind it.

I 

saw that. It was wild looking, man. 

Yes,  that's very much a prototype. And then Xiaomi showed off their car. Because every Chinese manufacturer of anything now has a car including, Xiaomi. And then Samsung showed off more of their Galaxy Ring. They let people take pictures of it, which they didn't do before.

And some people were able to try it out. I was not. I will hopefully eventually, if they ever send me one I might have to just go buy myself one. And then, last but certainly not least. OnePlus launched their watch and I stupidly today decided not to wear it. But it's somewhere in my apartment here.

I've actually been using it since before it launched. The crazy thing about that watch, and this is how I'll wrap up my segment. Yeah, it's a dual OS, dual chipset watch. So when the phone is doing smartwatch things, it's on one chipset. And when it's doing like basic tasks just telling time and reading your heart rate, it does it on a different phone, on a different chipset.

With different battery life. With an always on screen, I'm getting three days, which is three times more than I get on a normal watch with always on and with always on with the screen, not always on people are claiming somewhere in the ballpark of a hundred hours of battery life which is four or five days.

In my experience, when I had this, when I didn't have always on display turned on, I was getting at least four days based on my math. So really this thing is, it  might be the revolution in how we get smart watches that have full capabilities to a week, which I think is like the sweet spot.

Because  charging your watch every night, it's not horrible because you're just doing it when you do your own phone, but not having to always charge it and being able to charge it when you feel like it or when it's convenient is just so much better. And that's why I think a lot of people wear these smart rings because you only have to charge them about once a day.

But yeah, that's like the smartphone and device. Round up. That said, I mind that my last topic will be the XR stuff, which I'll say for after your third time. 

Yeah, actually, I saw the 1 plus at the event, I'm Spencer blank who you and I know, but, very well, he he showed me the 1 plus watch.

And that's interesting. I didn't realize the dual chip set thing with the battery life. And I have an Apple watch I'm wearing it right now. I wear it when I travel and. Okay. It's the ultra or whatever they call the,  yeah, the ultra. And yeah, you've got to, you got to chart, you got to recharge the sucker at least every other day.

Because, it's got the always on display and that sort of thing. And it's a bigger screen and whatnot. I'll also mention, I served as a global award judge and we we honored the honor. And that, and also I think the Google Pixel, but if you go hit my Twitter feed, you can learn more about that.

But saw 

the pixel won best, like smartphone camera or something like that. 

Yeah, it did. And there was an kind of an honorable mention for the honor, and there was like, there was a Porsche design version of that as well. Yes, 

PORs design looks great and yeah, an honorable mention. 

Yeah, honorable mention, but but, yeah, there are just lots of gadgets, lots of devices out there.

You would have been a kid in the candy store, but you'll likely be back next year. So you can, see it in the 

flesh. So I will probably be. Be I'll probably go next year with little 1 in tow. Obviously, yeah, 

that would be cool. Yeah, there you go. You can get a little path is, you walk around the show floor with with your daughter there.

But, hey, I know we're running along. So I'm going to be very quick on my 3rd topic. And I want to talk about. And I had learned about this before the actual event, but I think it's worth sharing. Nokia is finding some renewed enterprise focus with Dell Technologies when it comes to a couple of different things.

1, private 5G networking. So Dell did announce that, that Nokia will be its preferred partner when it comes to private cellular networking opportunities.  And Bedell will still maintain a flexible approach to that sort of, it sounds like a best of breed, but they will lead with Nokia and I think that is important especially when you take into consideration the the Ericsson AT& T tied up for open and how that's affected, Nokia in the very short term, which also resulted in some reduction in workforce and that sort of thing.

So I think the timing's great. Nokia and Dell have long been partners. Nokia has been leaning very heavily into Dell, especially for common off the shelf server technologies in the Dell PowerEdge. And so that leads me to the second point I want to make here. Nokia is sun setting its compute platform.

I forget the name. Matt Kimball on our team is the compute expert. He would probably know if he was on the podcast with us today, but Nokia will be sunsetting its compute platform, and they will be  consolidating that and moving 100 percent in a  direction with Dell and the PowerEdge server platform.

So I think that's great. Nokia needed some momentum, needed some wind. Given, the news with Ericsson and AT& T. And I think, the other opportunity here is that Dell provides a very robust channel yeah. And a trusted channel as well. And if you look at Dell's recent earnings, they just killed it again.

That, that path to enterprise is huge for Nokia because. They've been challenged in the past when you look at what they've tried to do with like new eyes networks. Yeah, it's a service provider selling motion. Yeah, I don't want to cut you off. You wanted to say, 

I'll just give a little quick insight.

I would say I'm not the most knowledgeable in the sector. However, it's quite obvious that. Nokia needed some  credibility in terms of compute and working with a reliable partner that has a good reputation. And I think Dell is still looking for, telecom recognition. And I think this is a good partnership for both companies because I think they both gained something out of this.

And Dell's reliability and their supply chain are unmatched. And I think that they're, they're a very trusted partner in the U. S., so Nokia knows that they can work with them. And, yeah, I just think Dell, to your point,  they killed it on earnings, and it seems like they're probably, they're just one of those companies that's very hard to stop.

They are just ruthlessly efficient in accomplishing their goals, and they get rewarded for it. But, yeah, that's my thoughts. 

Yeah, I'll just close it out. I did have an opportunity to meet with the Dell telecom team. I ran into Dennis Hoffman. He's the general manager on the flight over and we just chatted just real briefly, but I didn't meet with Dennis, but I met with Sandra on his team and a couple of other  folks and they continue to build momentum with their telecom.

Business and they had, they had several announcements. I mentioned the ones with Nokia, but there were some other announcement there that's really furthering their momentum there. And what I like about Dell strategy and it plays to their DNA is that it's a very ecosystem based approach.

So they don't profess to be all things to all people, but, where they have capabilities within compute they're looking at shoring up partnerships. They're doing reference designs they're doing blueprinting, and they're doing that sort of thing, all the right things, but bringing in the right set of partners like Nokia to be successful in telecom.

So they're really raising the bar. They're competing with Hewlett Packard enterprise in that regard and Lenovo as well. I met with both the HPE Athenet teams and Charles Freeland that manages the telco and edge business for Lenovo. And I'm seeing a lot of promising things there. So I love how the traditional  PC and compute companies.

Are stepping up and they're really providing value add within the telecommunications space. So with that, we're going to roll to your 3rd and final topic. And Hey, it's all about mixed reality. And that's 1 of your big love. So I'll let you close this out.  

Obviously, there's a lot of attention being paid to mixed reality and spatial computing thanks to Apple's version pro launch.

But at the show. It was just more of the usual suspects doing their their regular things at MWC. There's usually a good amount of mobile related XR stuff. Welcome announced the XR hub. Which is a reference platform that Vodafone actually picked up that we talked about last week in the reality hyper reality hub.

But the update was they changed the optics or the glasses. So it's no longer the Qualcomm reference AR2Gen1 headset. It's now a more sleek digilens based up a waveguide solution.  And then  I was at Qualcomm ahead of MWC and they gave me their boundless AR 5G demo, which was really cool because it was a enterprise focused demo that showed how you could use AR glasses paired with a smartphone connected to a 5G network powered by Ericsson with a hollow light rendering solution to render a really high resolution 3D model of a car or a city in a digital twin environment and show you how they can manage the user experience.

So it doesn't ever drop below a certain frame rate or a certain level of quality by turning on and off the graphics based on your connection and constantly pulling the experience to make sure that it's good enough and switching between the smartphone and the cloud and back and forth seamlessly by dialing down the graphics a little bit.

And yeah, I think. In addition to that, Opo showed their next generation of their air glass every year. I've been at MWC for the last few years. They've had a new version of their air glass. They had the 1, they had the 2, and now they have the 3. The 1 was a single single eye solution. So was the 2.

But the three is a dual eye 50 mil, 50 gram lightweight solution. So it's super lightweight. They're claiming they developed these optics in house. I think they're actually probably licensing someone's tech because nobody just, pulls wave guides out of nowhere. It's a very complicated tech.

So I'm really excited to eventually try that out and WC would have been my chance, but fortunately I wasn't able to, so that's a big bummer. And then there are some companies that are coming out with. AR contact glass or AR contact lenses.  They say that they're going to have them in 2026. This company is called Xpanseo.

I don't know how to pronounce it, but I'm a little hesitant just because. There was a company called MojoVision that had hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to this exact problem, and they failed. Yeah. Due to a lack of funding, which was like a moment where the market ran out of funds for XR right before Apple came to market.

So they shut down in January of 23, I think. But they still have a display business so they're not fully shut down, but they shut down their AR. Contact business. So we'll see what happens, but I'm very hesitant about AR contact lenses at this point. And, yeah, that's the roundup of XR stuff at 

MWC. 

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to put anything that had any sort of electronic connection to it, in my eyeball, but I also have astigmatism and I tried contacts twice and both times I had to go to the ER. To have had them removed. So I have a very sensitive eye issue there, but hey, man, we went a lot longer than 20 minutes, but we had a lot to talk about.

I think it was a great podcast. Why don't you take us home?  

Oh, we hope our viewers and listeners had enjoyed this week's topics. If anyone out there, I'd like to provide insights for a future topic. For a future podcast please reach out to us on social media. Will's at Wheel Town Tech and I'm at On Shell SOG.

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