Welcome to episode 186 of the G two 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. Joining me again this week is Fellow Analyst Anshel Sag. Let's get started with my first topic and I had a very interesting conversation.

My friend a PR agency had reached out to me about a week ago. They were representing Booz Allen.  Booz Allen is obviously a huge integrator, and they shared some news around what they were doing with Ericsson and Nokia to partner on modernizing the U. S. Navy their communications with 5G Lab and proof of concept efforts.

And so I took the call because it was really interesting having Ericsson and Nokia. Ha. On the call with Booz Allen there was not a representative from the U. S. Navy, but it was a pretty fascinating conversation, and the timing was pretty cool because you and I had spoken just last week on our podcast about Nokia and Ericsson's federal government business units and how they are discreetly focusing on that opportunity with sales and marketing and all of that, were the two connected? Yeah, what do you mean the 

two connecting? After we spoke about it, did that cause them to outreach to you? It may 

have it may have I'm not certain, but but in any event, it was an interesting conversation. I asked a lot of questions that they basically said they could not answer because it was a government clearance level. 

Stuff. But when I asked 'em about spectrum and that sort of thing and asked 'em about SATCOM and, direct to sell and all that, but the one big thing that came outta the conversation was definitely there's a focus on open ran.  And certainly Nokia has been bull, very bullish on that.

Ericsson's finally joined the game, obviously as evidenced by again the big announcement with at t last year. But that's about all I want to say other than I am going to be writing a Forbes article that's going to go deeper and I will be speaking with someone with the U. S.

Navy to get their perspective as well. I'm sure this will have to go through multiple reviews before it's posted. But I just think it's interesting that Erickson and Nokia are both working together with Booz Allen. Booz Allen obviously is driving the integration effort of all of this.

But I think it's great. I think it's going to provide the Navy with some very interesting  avenues to pursue. I will also mention, okay, I talked about Open RAN. It's definitely going to be a part of what's happening there. We did talk about network slicing and how the Navy is very interested in that and being able to tailor latency and throughput discreetly to different types of use cases.

And certainly we talked about boner. Thank you very much. And we also, and that's about the extent that we discussed, but again I'll be spending time with the U. S. Navy and and publishing an article, hopefully the next couple of weeks. But what do you think? It's pretty cool, huh? 

Yeah I think, this is definitely something that I feel like a lot of. Organizations, especially the U. S. military. Want to maybe talk about, but also not in too much detail. It is a challenge to fully appreciate what they're doing. And I think that's probably the biggest challenge here, but I do think it's like a clear indication that they're serious about modernizing the communications infrastructure and getting things up to par, which I think will be really important.

And I'm sure our adversaries are already doing.  

I'm sure they are as well. And, what I also like about 5G in this particular application is that it becomes a single network construct. And so you eliminate the complexity of having network overlays. If you have Ethernet and Wi Fi, and that sort of thing together, and the need to manage all of that. 

And just the deterministic capabilities of cellular connectivity, like I highlighted and my most recent Forbes contribution when I visited John Deere and spoke about their private 5G deployment for manufacturing automation and that sort of thing.  Yeah, I don't know how much deeper I'll be able to go, obviously, because this is very sensitive because it's tied to the military defense of the United States.

But I think it's going to make for a great read. So viewers and listeners stay tuned to that. But hey, man, let's go to your first topic. And you want to talk about Tesla and their desire to deploy private 5g.  Yeah. So a 

lot of publications latched onto this article or this announcement. It's not an announcement, really, it was a  job posting.

That got pulled and it was for a cellular systems integration engineer that understands current and future connectivity requirements of Tesla vehicles and optimists for on premise use cases like manufacturing, shop floors, outdoor areas, and R& D labs. And and it goes into detail about Tesla's private 5G protocol stack ultra reliability and high data rates. 

using private cellular infrastructure, vendor and deployment model globally. And it also mentions eSIM, LTE, CVRS and standalone 5G. Tesla didn't respond for comment to the light reading article, but the truth is Tesla doesn't have a PR department, so they're never going to respond. Elon decides to respond.

Other than Elon 

Musk, right? Yeah. But basically  what's interesting is this is a really good, automotive manufacturing is a great application for this because it allows so much flexibility and especially with a car like a Tesla, that's already pretty connected.

Yeah, those cars and being able to stage them, in the yard and update them remotely, outdoors without using too much. Actual cellular bandwidth and using a private network instead that's already a huge application, but then also think about the factory floor. God knows what they're going to do with the robot.

But, maybe the robots are going to require, a constant Internet connection. In order to be smart enough to actually be an effective. robot on the factory floor. It's going to be interesting. Also I didn't know this, but Tesla also was in recent litigation with interdigital for a pool of 5g patents.

And they said that they they violated the friend the rates and that there's, there are some issues with that. That's a separate issue, but. I do think it's really interesting that they're looking at this and I'm wondering if other automotive manufacturers might fall in their place.

I think there are already some auto manufacturers in Europe that are using private 5G. I think BMW is one of them. They are. I think this might actually accelerate the growth of use of private 5G  in automotive manufacturing. Even though Tesla might not be the. The 1st to do it, but they might be the 1st to popularize it.



Yeah, definitely BMW has deployed private 5G. I believe Mercedes as well.  And I'm actually, I'm hoping when I'm in Europe through a new connection that I've made I may have an opportunity to tour. BMW facility, they prior to the pandemic, they were actually conducting these 3 to 4 hour tours that showed all of the automation and what they were dealing with private cellular.

I think it's really clever that light reading found a job post and they were able to piece that together and write the article. I did not see it. I also find that it's interesting. I need to dig into that because you mentioned Tesla  specifying some sort of special 5G tech stack. And that's not surprising because it seems like everything that Elon does tied to Tesla is very grounds up and unique.

And I'm just wondering what's involved in their 5G tech stack? Are they combining? I'm wondering, edge compute with, because it's going to be, 3GPP standard stuff. It's likely got to be CBRS, which has been very focused on LTE for the most part. Now we're beginning to start to see.

Some private 5G deployments that are leveraging CBRS, but what do you think their 5G tech stack is all about? 

I think it's a proprietary combination of off the shelf technologies. Okay. I think that they want to have something that fits their specific needs, like you said but is also not going to require them to spend too much resources, creating it just.

I think they want to, build a solution, not create. I think that's probably what it's going to be. It's probably going to be, open RAM based.  And it's probably going to, take some of the vendors that already have solutions for private 5G. It's probably going to be a Nokia or an Ericsson solution in some way.

There's going to be some integrators involved. So I think this is probably more about. Configuring and deploying it, then it is really about creating 

it. Creating or building it. Yeah. Interesting. Cool. I'm going to dig into that because that's, I think that's pretty clever on light readings part.

Was that Mike Dana that wrote that? Yeah, it 

was. And they deleted the post. I went to the link on his website and it's gone. So clearly you got too much attention. Oh man. Because now obviously the cat's out of the bag and that makes a huge difference. 

Yeah, okay. Sorry, Mike. If you're trying to deflect that, but hey, let's move to my second topic.

And I want to talk about AT& T and they had 2 announcements this week. The 1st was around their launch of internet air for business. So they're taking their, obviously their 5G fixed wireless access.  solution that they've launched for consumers, and they're broadening that for businesses. And didn't dig too deeply into the particulars, but I'm sure, they're higher data limits and that sort of thing.

They're probably doing some integration work for businesses. I like it. AT& T has been very fiber first. They lead with fiber, but I like the fact that they're recognizing and by the way, AT& T has had an FWA solution with LTE for quite some time. And, I assume it was probably a fallback, and in areas that maybe are underserved by fiber.

But what I like about this is that they are, they're focusing on small to medium business because of the ease of provisioning and that sort of thing. You don't have to roll a truck. Okay. And I think it's also going to be an ideal solution for  larger organizations that have a branch location. So if you think Jiffy Lube or, like a national footprint coffee shop chain, like Starbucks, although Starbucks is focused on Wi Fi, at least with Cisco these days, but.

I do like it. And in a lot of these instances in these branch locations, they're already familiar with cellular because it's a backup. It's been a redundant fallback. But, the power of, again, getting back to that single network overlay and ease and provisioning and deployment and ongoing management.

When you don't have. IT staffs that these type of branch locations, I think is pretty powerful and then enterprise connect this week. So Mel brew 1 of our principal analyst was there. So go ahead her Twitter feed. If you want to learn more about enterprise connect, but AT& T used the event to launch an initiative with Microsoft Teams for a 5G and AI infused unified communication solution.

AT& T is claiming they are the 1st to work with Microsoft to deliver this, and it's basically, it's taking unified communications mobile, leveraging the power of 5G from a latency throughput device. Support standpoint, and then using a I because, hey, you know what, man? Any launch that doesn't mention a eyes is probably light.

So they talk about a I and some of the things that Microsoft is doing there to make things, easier to manage and, and self heal and that sort of thing. So I don't know if you caught either of these announcements, but but it was a big week for AT& T.  I 

definitely found heard and saw and paid attention to the first announcement.

Yeah. And I have no idea about the second announcement yeah. Yeah. I think the first one's a big deal. Yeah. Mostly because there's so many underserved small, medium businesses. Like I, I used to actually do it when I was like a teenager and I used to help, deploy networks and configure.

It, and the amount of times I was shocked. How bad the internet connections were at small to medium businesses. I'm like, I don't understand how you run your business with this kind of internet. Yeah, I think it's a, I think it's a big deal. And more FWA is better, I think cause it drives more competition between the different FWA operators so that small to medium businesses get the best deals possible.

I did look at the plans. I believe there's two tiers of plans.  Top tier plan seems to give you Unrestricted access for the first 250 gigs.  And then beyond that, they start to throttle you if the network is congested. But other than that, it seems like there's a lot of interest in making sure that.

There's ample connectivity for small media businesses with this kind of solution. 

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see the market footprint for this, because with their consumer solution. That it was a limited set of  major metropolitan areas and so  it will be interesting to see if the business version follows suit, but time will tell, because it's hot off the presses. 

Hey, man, let's go to your second topic and you want to talk about China mobile and their plans to roll out 5G advanced to 300 cities across China this year.  Yeah, so 

this is an interesting announcement because I went to China mobile's website  and it's nowhere to be seen. In fact, China mobile does not use their own website for PR,  which I find really interesting.

What does, who does do a lot of PR releases for China? Mobile are the global times, which is a Official Chinese state paper. So it seems that China mobile, maybe a little bit more closely tied to the Chinese government than even I realized and, and basically they're talking about five G a which is five G advanced, which they interestingly did not call 5.

5 G, but some other publications did. And effectively what it is it's that half step. On the way to 6g it's releasing and they're talking about rolling out to a hundred cities which would eventually reach 300 cities by the end of this year. And they're trying to build the world's largest 5g advanced commercial network.

And they're talking about the transition from 5g to 6g and talking about how 5g advanced has higher speeds, large, larger connectivity. I don't know what that means.  Lower latency. I assume it means better coverage, but I'm not really aware of anything in 5G advanced that improves coverage over other  5G.

So let's take that with a little grain of salt.  And the interesting thing is that the Global Times that reported on this said that China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom are all actively deploying 5G advanced. But if you go and look around on publications around this announcement, none of the other operators are actually announcing anything yet.

So they're also taking a little bit of a too optimistic perspective on the deployment of 5g advance. That said I do think 5g advance will eventually have rollouts. I think it will come later possibly next year because we're still figuring out standalone this year with release 17. So I think 5g advanced Will likely be a 2025 story, not a 2024 story,  like many things about, China, they tend to embellish the the actual reality of what the network looks like and what the deployment is like.

I think we'll probably see some rollouts with 5G advanced this year in China, but I don't think we're actually going to see nationwide coverage until next year. And I don't think there's going to be that much, verification of this, but I would be happy to see if they did it, by the end of this year.

And then they also said that China mobile created a, an alliance for 5g advanced innovation, which will push numerous achievements in content applications. Technology platforms and ecosystem capabilities. So all these things are very nebulous concepts with almost no detail. So when I hear things like this.

I tend to be a little bit more conservative with my interpretation. But it is, really interesting when I see stuff like China mobile has said is accelerate the innovation of 5g advanced technology, leading the completion of 60 international 5g advanced standards ranking first among global operators.

There's a very clear propaganda. Takes here on almost every paragraph. So I would take this with a grain of salt and say that it's good to hear that, that China mobile is talking about 5g advanced and I believe that they will have it. I just feel like we're getting a little bit of a a little bit rose colored lens,  how this is going to be.

And yeah I think this is good, but realistically, I think we need to see more 5G standalone applications like what we're seeing in India with Geo. I trust and believe Geo way more than I trust China Mobile through the Chinese state, papers.  

Yeah, in the hometown hero Huawei here they've been really pushing, 5.

5 or 5G advanced and, you're right, I think it's more practical to focus on standalone, look at network slicing, and let that settle out and get developers, behind that and really that's going to unlock the true promise of 5G. That's a phrase that I've used probably 1000 times on this podcast. 

But, yeah, everything, it seems that comes out of China has got pop and circumstance and, rose tinted glasses tied to it. But, hey, man, let me get on my 3rd and final topic. And your 3rd and final top is going to be funner than mine. But I'm going to talk about key site and via the, they've been battling to acquire spirant. 

All of these companies do 5G network design, test and measurement.  Keysight is 1 of the largest, if not the largest, they are actually, if my recollection serves me well, they are a spinoff of Hewlett Packard. And and so initially had offered a little over a billion.  Euros which equates to 1. 4 1.

46 billion US dollars. But then Keysight has come in and outbid them  and it totals 1. 5 billion. And I spent a lot of time with Spirant. They do a lot of great work and research. They published a report. I may try to dig that link up so that you can include it when we post the podcast.

But from my perspective this provides key sites and some deeper capabilities within the whole test and measurement realm. And this is super necessary to build out networks. You just don't hang a bunch of radios and. Light up the core and you're done. This, each network requires specific design, especially when you look at private networks and the contention with building materials and space and, the spectrum that you're going to be using and all of that.

I think. This is a real boon for key site. I'm hoping that they allow the spirant team to keep doing what they're doing, because they've done a lot of great stuff. But I think this is great, not only for, for big public mobile network operators, but just for the future of private networking as well.

So don't know if you caught the news, but wondering if you have any insights before we 

move on. I actually saw the battle. And he said he's a pretty big player. And Spirit is Also pretty important. So I get why there's a battle for them. Yeah. Or for it  grammatically correct. But yeah I just think that this is probably the best thing for spirits and investors.

And they'll probably get their, their money's worth, but yeah I don't really have that much of an opinion. I just think that it's it's interesting to see Keysight getting involved, but not really surprising. Yeah, 

and, I think maybe some questions will come up around.

Hey, this is, this is anti competitive. You weighed in on Apple and what's going on with the D. J. and so is Patrick more had our chief analyst and founder, but but I think this deal gets done. It was interesting to see the battle. It really demonstrates. The value that these 2 companies place on Spiron and their capabilities, but let's go to your starting final topic.

Baseball season opened yesterday. You're wearing your Padres hat. I'm in Austin, so I left my Astros hat back home. But my asterisk choked, man, they were up for 0 Yankees came back, beat him 5 for your Padres 1, but with all of that pretext. T Mobile did something pretty clever. They're the, they're just the king of magenta marketing and they sent out secret baseball buttons.

And so you want to talk about that on opening day? 

Yeah. So this little button here came in a tiny little box. I think you got one too, right? I did. So basically why does this button exist? Because when I click on it, it launches a a fake, it's really not a real thing, but it's a fake video call six windows with a fake interface and you click it again, it launches another tab with all of the games that are being played today,  and if you're logged in, I think, just click on a game and watch.

This is really the purpose of this. Is to promote T Mobile's partnership with MLB and that you get free MLB TV  Subscription for a year if you're a T Mobile customer  So this is like a way to promote that, you can watch, baseball at work  Yeah, 

and if the boss walks by you hit the button 

But the truth is that you and I both work from home.

We don't have a boss to be afraid of  Unless our wives are watching but the truth is, that's not really the situation but yeah, like it's a cute little way to promote their partnership with MLB. I actually get a free subscription to MLB TV by being a season ticket holder. But I'll get a second one for free that I usually give away to a friend or family.

It's cool. And yes, I did go to opening day yesterday. If you can tell, I got a little burnt, even though I had sunscreen on, it was a good game. They were down at the beginning, came back and won  four, six to three, something like that. But it was against our old manager, Bob Melvin, who  What was a little bit of sketchy on his departure because it seemed like he actually checked out in the last season, which was one of our most disappointing seasons we've ever had.

And it's not really a shock if he checked out and I was thinking about leaving for an inter division rival. So intra division rival.  So  yeah, we were happy to be him. They're playing again today. I will not be at that game. I will be traveling today. But yeah, it's, it was fun. And the little button thing, I got it to work.

It just install an app on your PC and click the button. But I don't really see myself using it that much because yeah I just keep baseball open if something's going on while I'm working.  

No, it's great. Again, it just demonstrates T Mobile's.  Savviness when it comes to marketing and actually you can go to a website and you can enter, I think they're picking names out of a, an online hat to, to send these baseball secret buttons out.

But yeah, go Astros, go Padres. But hey buddy, it's been a great podcast.  Why don't you take us home? 

Absolutely. And you were correct. I did not state that there until March 31st, if you visit secretbaseballbutton. com You can't win one of these buttons. So yes. Thank you for a reminder. 

Yeah. You heard it here.

Our listeners and viewers heard it here. 

We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics. Interesting. If anyone out to provide insights for a specific 5g topic for future podcasts, please reach out to us on social media. Will's at Wilton Tech and I'm at Onshore SOG. We hope you have a great Easter weekend and please tune in again next weekend.

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