Welcome to episode  185 of the G2 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 Moor Insights and Strategy. I'm Will Townsend and joining me again this week is fellow analyst, Anshul Sagg, 5G Let's get started with my first topic.

And this was an article that Mike Dana posted recently around Ericsson and Nokia establishing new business units to focus on 5g US government deployment. So this also includes military. And it's it's not surprising because spending has been somewhat soft especially on RAN. Over the last year or so, and so this gives both companies a focus to go after private networking deployments within the federal government and for military applications.

You and I have talked about the military applications with 5G for quite some time,  but it's interesting. So Ericsson is calling its new division, the Ericsson Federal Technologies Group, EFTG and the Nokia is is the Federal Solutions or NFS unit.  And from my perspective, as I read through Mike's article there aren't a lot of surprises here.

This is something that I think a lot of people were expecting, but What's interesting is, I think we've talked about this as well, but defense contractors are jumping into the mix as well. So Lockheed, Raytheon, others. Are focusing, and obviously they have long established relationships with the federal government.

There are a lot of, infrastructure providers that are focusing on these opportunities. I do recall last year, you and I talked about.  The Marine Corps and how they're using 5G to manage their logistics and warehousing applications. Again, this isn't surprising news, but what's also an element here. 

Is the consideration of using open round and certainly the U. S. government. Started the whole notion around Open RAN and an attempt to domesticate the 5G supply chain. And certainly Nokia has embraced private networking for quite some time and open technologies. And, as we know, Ericsson, they came kicking and screaming.

And then obviously the big announcement with AT& T last year, they're fully focused on it now as well.  I don't know necessarily if Open RAN will be a requirement but I believe with the federal government, it could be. So I don't know if you caught the news, but any thoughts?  

I think that there is a lot of demand to satisfy the U.

S. government, and I think the U. S. government has made it clear that they want to have 5G  for military applications. So I think it's really just a an acknowledgement that the Department of Defense has  increased needs for networking. And God knows how ancient a lot of the stuff that they're working on with is today. 

Obviously, there's going to be parts of the Department of Defense that are advanced and, but those are by far and away the minority. And I think that they just want to modernize everything and bring connectivity to places where it hasn't existed, but also do it in a secure way that doesn't sacrifice the integrity of the mission.



And the other advantage and using cellular is, it's a single network. So you don't get into these overlays with respect to a lot of enterprises that already have brownfield, enterprise networks that are Ethernet based or Wi Fi base. And then  a lot of these companies will layer in private networking. 

Especially for the non carpeted  areas of their operations, operational technology environments, whether it's warehousing or manufacturing and that sort of thing. So it gives the federal government, a single network. It's easier to manage because, once you start overlaying different networks, it becomes very complicated into your point.

I would also assume. That what's been existing from a connectivity standpoint within the federal government is probably pretty antiquated. And so 5G provides a lot of flexibility with propagation and performance and latency and that sort of thing. I think it's wise for Erickson and Nokia to establish business units so that they can focus discreetly on the opportunity.

And then again, be more competitive with those established military.  Contractors that have been selling to the federal government for many years. But, hey, let's move to your 1st topic this week. And, big news around the Department of justice. And I think it's 15 states, right? That are suing apple for anti competitive smartphone tactics.

And you want to talk about that. 

Yes, so I've spent a considerable amount of time dealing with this today,  but basically the Department of Justice is accusing Apple of deploying anti competitive tactics. Against its competitors and it has five core arguments against Apple, which are really what I'm going to cover because it's an 88 page document.

But basically what it's saying is that, Apple is using its App Store to be anti competitive. It's block, it's making more difficult for super apps to be cross platform and one of those things that it's doing is with iMessage. And it's making, iMessage too much of a difficult thing to overcome which includes SMS.

And they also talked about cloud streaming apps, which was really interesting. And what's really interesting about this is that the two of the five points have already been addressed by Apple recently, which makes me think they knew this was coming. And that they are trying to head off as much as they can so they can appear as though they're making changes is.

Already, but truthfully as we've seen, Apple doesn't really make changes unless regulators force them to they don't really believe in in, market power or free market unless it helps them. For example, the iPhone 15 pro max.  Or any of the iphone 15s would never have had type c if it weren't for the european regulators, right?

Yeah, I just you know, I don't really have that much sympathy for apple here I do think what's interesting is that they the so far i'm about halfway through the document I haven't read it fully through yet, but i've used all of my ai tools to summarize things And the thing is that one of the things to talk about is that they're using Apple's using privacy and security as a pretext to not justify or to justify it's anti competitive.

Behaviors because it says, we can't do this because of security or we can't do this because of privacy and then they also talk about how apple is also making it difficult for smartwatch makers to build cross platform smartwatches They're also they also talk about apple not allowing, Banking to be very like cross platform either and that they're treating themselves as a preferred partner in terms of finance Like with the apple cart  So there's it is coming at 'em from all directions.

It's not like one, very focused thing. The one thing I'll say that's really weak in this argument is that they tried to claim the apple's market share is 70% of the, I want to say that they were calling it like the performance smartphone or like a, I think they call it performance smartphone.

There's no such thing as a performance smartphone. No. It is one smartphone market. Whether it's a hundred dollars smartphone or  as they claim 1, 600 cell phone smartphone, because that's as expensive as the iPhone gets. But the truth is they still have majority market share in the US and they were the number one smartphone OEM in Q4 of last year in terms of shipping.

So those two alone to me scream already over overwhelming market power. Now is that monopoly power? That is a discussion that needs to be made. But even if they don't have monopoly power, they may have  Enough market power to be performing monopolistic behaviors, which is what these antitrust laws were in place for the Sherman antitrust act and others.

And truthfully, I, I've written actually quite a little, quite a bit about these specific tactics.  These are all on our website. I can link for these later, but I've actually gone into detail and researched what the challenges are. But one of the biggest things is I messaged the green and blue bubbles, right?

And, my sister recently, I tried to get her to switch to Android because she had an old iPhone and I had, I've got lots of phones I'm going to obviously toss a phone for my sister.  She had the worst time switching to android and the biggest thing was iMessage In fact after she switched back to iphone because of all the problems she had with iMessage She found out that she actually didn't get invited to some events because she never got the messages So that is still happening in 2023 So  whatever apple said about they fixed, all these issues with people, Not getting messages.

It's not true. There are definitely still problems with I message. And the truth is, there are a lot of social implications that we've all heard about in the last few months, if not last few years. And I just think that this lawsuit definitely feels like they've been planning to sue Apple for quite some time.

It feels like Apple has already seen some of these arguments against them because they've, it seems like they've tried to address some of them. Like the cloud thing where they've changed their tune. They also talked quite a bit about the app store and how I like, they make it very expensive and they take a big cut.

And then if you have an app that, that already is getting a cut, then you also have to give a cut of all the internet and get in app payments. So  I feel like they're coming at Apple from a lot of different angles. I do think this will be a very interesting case. I don't think it will be an easy case. Apple's lawyers are going to make a lot of money and build a lot of hours for this.

But I really didn't think that the U. S. government was going to go after Apple, considering how many times they've been on Apple's side. But clearly this administration is a lot more neutral when it comes to big tech. Which I think is a good thing because, some people think that this administration is more biased towards big tech.

But it's clearly that they're more about making sure that there's a fair amount of regulation and that companies are held accountable regardless of their size, which in Apple's case, they are,  if not the largest tech company, one of the top three. 

For sure. And I'm wondering, are you going to write an article about this on Forbes or on our website?

I'm 

probably going to have to, but the truth is I've written so much about all of these different things already. Okay.  That would probably be pretty succinct, and I will just link back to a lot of the things I've already written. But yeah, I actually want to finish reading this complaint first, because it's, eighty one, eighty eight pages, and my five paragraph copilot summary is not going to cut it for me.

So I'm going to have to go through and finish reading this today. So I think I'll probably have something written up over the next few days and have that published 

on Forbes. Yeah. And I think it's a great idea and this is big news, right? And  yeah, it affects it affects a lot of things here.

There are a lot of moving parts to it. And at the end of the day it, to me on the surface, it feels that Apple is engaging in anti competitive practices. And we. We've talked about, numerous, examples of that on prior podcasts, but interesting. It's great.

It's great to get your take on that. Let's go to my 2nd topic. I want to talk about 3 UK and they booked their 1st earnings before income and tax loss in nearly 15 years and guess what they blamed.  Take a guess the cost of deploying 5G. And I've got a response for that in a minute, but just to share kind of the high level details.

This was actually something that was posted to mobile world live this week. They talked about a number of different things. The market structure in the United Kingdom, the number of players, the fact that the United Kingdom has some of the slowest data download speeds of all G7 countries.

It ranks the United Kingdom ranks 22nd out of 25 European countries in terms of 5G availability and download speed. The kind of at a kind of a very high level 3 booked in revenue in 2023 2. 6 billion pounds. That's about 3. 3 billion U. S. dollars with a loss of 117, 000, 000 pounds which compares to a profit of 147, 000, 000 pounds in 2022.

So  I think it's a cop out that they're blaming the cost of, 5G deployment, because clearly. The United Kingdom, the residents in the United Kingdom are not getting what others are getting. And we've talked about, the whole non stand alone and stand alone. And, we're still in that transition to stand alone, which will unlock the true promise of 5G.

But I was shocked, to to understand just how. Badly the united kingdom ranks relative to other parts of the world. So what do you think about all this? Is it legitimate to for three to blame their 5g deployment cost On their financial shortfall, 

I Did not look into this enough to give you a clear answer what I do think is interesting is Their margins seem to have grown.

So it's weird that their revenue was up, their margins were up, but they somehow managed to lose money. Yeah. 

Their revenue was 3 percent gross. It's pretty much flat, but yes, 

Inflation but it doesn't really make sense why they would be. Posting a loss of  117 million pounds.

Yeah, 

and that was the math. The math doesn't add up for me either, but I just think it's a cop out that they're blaming, the deployment cost. I think, 

I think it might be 1 of those things where it's look over here, but actually, this is what's going on.  Yeah, because they had a.

Earnings before into interest taxes, depreciation amortization of 402M pounds. Yeah, which is down 34%, but. I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking that, they're not really in a great position it seems, and I, I just don't think they want to acknowledge that they're not really scaling enough because if they were, they would be able to, take advantage of this deployment. 

Rather than claiming it as a weakness, I think if you can get customers on your network fast enough, you're not going to lose money on a deployment.  

And I think, investing and standalone and then driving the monetization behind that addresses, whatever the deployment costs are and historically, these mobile network operators haven't done a fantastic job and monetizing things beyond access.

But that can be the case with. That cannot be the case with 5G. And so I think it's an excuse. And to your point, it doesn't quite add up, but it'll be interesting to see how things roll from there. But Hey, let's go to your second topic. And this week was big in the AI world.

NVIDIA held GTC and many were billing it as the woodstock of artificial intelligence. And you had an opportunity to spend a couple of days there. I covered the event remotely. I will be working on an article and maybe a research note to our website. It might be a Forbes article. I'm not sure yet, but I am going to address some of the announcements that came about from both an enterprise networking with and all of that as well as telco.

But you want to capture or summarize. Some of the announcements around telco with with 5g and 6g aspirations. And I did catch one of them around some sort of research, some sort of research cloud to drive the next evolution of ran with 6g. But I don't want to steal your thunder. So I'll let you take it.

So that's the crux of what I want to talk about. Actually really interesting because. During the Q& A that I had with Jensen he actually brought it up, which I thought was really interesting because he clearly thinks it's very important to the company. I wasn't in any telecom briefings. I just didn't have time, but I caught the news after he brought it up and I was like, Oh, okay.

So NVIDIA wants to do basically what they're doing is they're taking advantage of what their Omniverse cloud can already do. And which is it's basically their virtual simulation platform. Or one of the ways to do virtual simulation, but essentially would allow one, the simulation of both 5g and 6g signals.

But also how those will behave with real material responses with, concrete, steel, glass, like true simulations, and you can, swap out radios. And they also want to accelerate RAN as well. So they want to one ramp up their acceleration of RAN with 6G. I think. They're open to being a 5G thing, but they realize that most 5G has already been deployed.

So they're, I think that's part of the reason why this is very much a 6G story. But they don't want to rule out somebody who might want to deploy in 5G first early. And yeah I think, It's really a combination of they seem have renewed interests with Open RAN and they also want to power some of the research tools when it comes to 6G and understanding how let's say the 13 gigahertz band will operate with a with the Whatever Qualcomm technology, the Giga MIMO, right?

So that would be definitely something that you would use. And ironically enough, Qualcomm was already talking about using digital twins for private networking. So I think we're very close to using something like an NVIDIA,  Omniverse for simulating how one, you would want to deploy network, but two, how you also train those models, because we've heard a lot of talk about using models and AI.

And it was interesting when Jensen was talking about it, it seemed like his perspective was that 6G is mostly going to be 5G with a very heavy dose of AI.

Yeah, interesting. A couple other takeaways for me, 1, it's impressive how the company is really moving from  providing silicon.

And obviously, they're very famous for GPUs. And by the way, Blackwell, their latest GPU. 40 to 50, 000 to paint on the configuration or they 

want that statement back a little bit. They don't want  pricing, but you're right. That was the quoted amount until they were like, yeah, 

based on 200 or GB 

1 or GB 200.

Yeah. Based on an NRE of 10 billion, R and D investment, and which is crazy. So that's interesting. I'm sure they'll sell them like hotcakes. But the other thing that I'm impressed with is that the company is really moving towards a platform model where, they're providing software,  silicon, and, and all of these capabilities, with their cloud capability and with just, providing a truly a platform. Now. I anticipate there's a holy war that's beginning to materialize with networking. Yeah. On with networking with when you look at companies like Intel and Marvell, right? And, and within video, pushing infinite band or, that was a, an acquisition of Mellanox.

It's interesting. I think we both agree. It was a really good acquisition. Yeah, 

it is, but it's interesting. And, you've got Nvidia, pushing antenna band and you've got everyone else on the Ethernet bandwagon. It's been around since long before I was born. I'm actually going to write an article about this, so I'll share that on the podcast, because I think it's.

It's a really interesting kind of dichotomy to see. 

I'm just going to. I was going to add one thing, and you'll appreciate this. I didn't really talk about it as much on the networking side, because it's not really actually about 5G networking, but it might be a technology that enables 5G, which is they really pushed hard on NVLink and what their new chips can do for interconnecting the different GPUs together because my vision was spot on, which is they just want to connect a bunch of GPUs together with as few CPUs as they can.

Interestingly enough, they are using the their own CPUs, the Hopper CPUs. Actually, Grace is the CPU hopper, is the GPU, but the Grace CPUs are now going to be paired together with their GPUs so that they have a, quote, supercomputer on a, or super GPU on one, one card and then they  throw a bunch of, nodes into a single rack and they call that a GPU now.

But that's all powered by InfiniBand. And they say that the fiber is too power hungry and too expensive. And they don't think that Ethernet is fast enough. So you're right. I do think it's going to be a very interesting debate because, AMD seems very firmly in the Ethernet realm.

But I also believe that Ethernet does have its limits and you can only, stretch the standard so far. I think Nvidia may have bought themselves an advantage with Mellanox and what they've done 

there. Yeah, no, for sure. And it provides differentiation for them as well. Plays to their strengths.

It's very fascinating and it just seems like Nvidia continues to be on this rocket ship trajectory. I like, I have friends.  Ask me constantly, hey, should I jump in and video? It's hey, listen, I cover them. So I can't give you stock advice, but but there's a lot of headroom with within video, obviously.

Yeah, so so our viewers and listeners stay tuned to something that I'll be publishing in the next week or so. But, hey, let me jump to my 3rd and final topic. I want to talk about US cellular and. We've had, good things and not so good things to say about these guys, but they are jumping into the private 5G manufacturing space with rock wall industry in private networking.

The company is really focused on more of the 1st responder stuff. At least that's what this article stated. It was an RCR wireless news article by James Blackman.  But with with Rockwell Automation, they are jumping into the industry 4. 0. There's a new connected enterprise lab that's in Ohio.

That's interesting given, what Intel is investing in manufacturing there, but. Yeah this, but it's interesting because us cellular continues to not effectively execute on its it's mobile. It's public mobile network build out. And now they're focusing on Rockwell automation and Rockwell industry.

And so I'm wondering. Is this company spreading themselves too thin? Should they be focused on what they need to be focused on, which is the, their public network offering first and then go after these incremental opportunities. I don't know. What do you think?

I think they are looking for new opportunities.

Yeah, and if they have the spectrum and they have if they have the technology and they're not using it, why not find applications for it?

Yeah, good point. And we were just talking about the private networking opportunity that Ericsson and Nokia are driving as well. Obviously.

U. S. Cellular is a mobile network operator that is leveraging infrastructure from companies like those. But, yeah, I think, all of the big public network operators are looking for again. Monetization opportunities, and certainly when they can all get to stand alone, they can start slicing their networks that drives some very interesting capabilities within private, but.

That is actually a great segue to your third and final topic and you want to talk about Reliance in India and what they're promoting about their network slicing capabilities. 

Yeah, so they are already running a fully standalone network both with the core and the ran but they're also pushing on new use cases that take advantage of network slicing.

They've not only are they going to have network slicing, they already have implemented it this year. They already have  a slice for gaming, a slice for high security services, a slice for fixed wireless, and then other applications. But they're already looking at additional applications, including private networking.

And they believe that they could actually have more services down the road. So they were looking at how private can enable more services. And they're talking about how they're already delivering services, not  proof of concepts. And they're, like I said I think we both predicted they're going to be ahead of the curve.

And it seems like they're already there. I think they're very aggressive, and unafraid to make mistakes. I don't think they've met any yet. But it seems like they are they understand the importance of having a standalone 5G network and having network slicing deployed and how it's already helping them.

And I guarantee you some of the first killer 5G use cases are going to come out of India.  

Yeah, no, I agree. And they're, they are super innovative. They're leveraging this aggregated infrastructure and harnessing the agility that comes along with that to really, when you look at what they did with their LTE network.

To deploy it in record time and do it and scale it in such a way that they can hit the right RPU levels and subscribe subscription pricing levels for that market. And this is just another example, I think of their leadership, and they recognize the power of network slicing and what they can do with it to monetize it.

We've often talked about SK telecom and Korea. As being very innovative and being very focused on 5G use cases, but our viewers and listeners should definitely continue to watch Reliance and what they're doing in India because. They're truly innovating in a lot of different ways. But hey, my friend, we went a little bit long, but we have lots to talk about.

It's been a 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 specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will's at Whaletown Tech 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 us and subscribe.