Welcome to episode  187 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 Morin Sites and Strategy. I'm Will Townsend dialing in from Las Vegas, Nevada, and joining me again this week as fellow analyst, Anshel Sag. Let's get started with my first topic.

And I've got a theme this week, my friend, I'm going to be talking about companies that are reorganizing their businesses. So I first want to talk about Casa Systems and our friend, Diana Guvertz posted this on Silver Linings around Casa Systems chapter 11, reorganization. If you're not familiar with KASA systems, they focus on 5g core, RAN and cable assets. 

The company, I believe last year was speaking to how they were focused on riding the ship.  But this sort of comes as a surprise they are selling assets to various companies  and it's it's not a liquidation. It's not chapter 7, but I believe the company is doing this in a measured way to mitigate the impact to not only customers, but.

Employees and whatnot, and it's no surprise. This has become a very competitive space.  There are, there's been a lot of consolidation going on. Certainly you look at things like  Athenet's sale to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  And so some of these smaller companies are just finding it more difficult to compete.

And you and I have also talked about on prior podcasts about how brand spending has slowed considerably. No surprise as networks focus on standalone deployments and updating the core, but Casa had both core and ran. And so in cable, and you could argue that  cable is probably not a deep profit pool in any circumstance, but, here's another company.

That's that's not weathered the storm. So I don't know if you caught the news. Any thoughts. 

I did I do think it's unfortunate. It sounds like they may be ran out of funding. Yeah, they probably needed more. It's not a surprise that this is happening. I think a lot of companies are holding when they, their business models aren't really sustainable at the point. 

Where they are but I do think that they did have some interesting technology and it seems like they might be selling off some of their assets to, pay off their debts,  but I'm not sure that cost of systems will really be the same. After 

this, no, and I think what Diana reported in her article was that their liabilities almost equal their assets.

When this thing is set and done, I don't see how the company can continue. And again, there's just so many other market pressures. And, we've talked about other companies in this space, like Mavenir.  That have stumbled and I'm going to talk about airspan here in a moment. That's, they're a bright spot, but as they come out of their bankruptcy, but, yeah it's interesting.

I, it's, there's a lot of consolidation going on here. And certainly the emphasis is moved from random core. But again, Casa systems had both core and ran assets. So it's it's interesting, but let's move to your first topic. And I did catch this week the department of defense is preparing to release a new spectrum swath.

And it could be really advantageous for 5g and potentially 6g applications. Yeah. 

So this is a it's actually like a consequence of a DOD report. I think it's a  232 page report. I remember correctly, and it basically goes into first of all, like how this 3 gigahertz spectrum would be used.

How it would be shared. It's it's like 1 of those things where this is more of a thought exercise at this point. Yeah,  it seems like there's a lot of talk about, again, dynamic spectrum sharing and also that the, the government would still be the incumbent if necessary.

And I believe it would free up. A couple 100 megahertz of spectrum at the low end of the 3 gigahertz band. And no real talk about an auction. But because this is like a it's like a. Government. DOD research document. There's a lot of redacted information. So it's not like a fully public document, but it is about, freeing up the three gigahertz band.

It's from 3. 1 to 3. 45 which is, 300 megahertz of spectrum which is nothing to laugh at. Yeah, they say that the defense industrial base retains band access for testing and experimentation and that they should maintain a national emergency. The action policy and that current and future federal systems must be accommodated equally.

The government is not viable for damages to commercial systems. Establish interference safeguards, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, this is a more of a dynamic spectrum sharing conversation. It seems but more potentially a more advanced one. And yeah, that's how I see it today. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Yeah, so from my perspective, this seems to, if it does become released that it would fit well into ongo and CBS, right? Because when you look at those spectrum assets. That was reallocated military spectrum, right? My assumption would be, if this, if it ever does get released, it sounds like right now they're putting some guardrails on it.

And so maybe it's going to be limited to, defense contractors that are working on, next generation 5G and 60 applications for the government and military defense. But if it were ever to become. Quote, unquote, publicly available. It's feels it feels to me like this would fit well within and on go.

Would you agree with that or disagree?  

I think this would probably require an added level of complexity to that. I think it would probably be a little bit more weighted towards the defense department. It seems but it seems like they want to make sure that people follow coordination conditions at all times.

Yeah. So I think they want to have more control than already exists. But it might be more of like a CBRS kind of situation. 

Yeah, that's my viewpoint, but they're, like you said, it's, a lot of the information's been redacted and it's  we're just trying to read, the tea leaves right now, but but it is interesting and yeah, it's it plays into the conversation I had recently that I spoke about on our last podcast with Booz Allen and how they're working with Ericsson and Nokia.

Yeah.  On next generation naval U. S. Naval communications and I'm assuming this spectrum slot is probably a part of that because when I asked the question about spectrum frequencies I was told that's classified,  but the good news I will use this as an opportunity to share an update.

I have set up some time with the U. S. Navy. This week. To talk more about  this particular  collaboration, and that'll serve as the basis for an upcoming Forbes article in the next week or 2. so stay tuned there, but let's go to my 2nd topic. And I want to keep bankruptcy as a theme. It sounds a little more of it, but.

But this is a, this is some positive news. So I want to talk about airspan and, airspan has been it was a high flyer, they were  basically a part of every sort of open ran 5G as a service, offering and then they. They went Hollywood. I think we've talked about this.

They did a SPAC and it just, it didn't end well. And so they went into chapter 11, but  news now is that they're re, emerging  from chapter 11 as a private company  and they're still very focused on the opportunity with open round, tied to private networking and small cells. 

As a result of what they've been able to do, they've been able to cut the debt down significantly. And basically they've been able to secure 95Million dollars of new equity financing. And so Airspan is going to, basically rise from the ashes here and take another run of things. Their technology was solid.

I just felt like they got ahead of themselves and they got caught in this whole, back, hysteria and they just let it get ahead of themselves. And so they took their eye off, what they needed to focus on. So I think this is good. It brings diversity back into the supply chain.

There are proven entity. They've been around for a long time. And I'll tell you what, I like an air span to the Energizer bunny. And I don't know if you recall this, but they were involved with WiMAX.  Way back in the day,  and and obviously we know what happened  with Y max. And so they, they pivoted and they, they emerged from that and became, a considerable player, within the small cell space.

And then they've hit this other, inflection point. I don't know. How many lives does airspan have? What do you think?  

I wonder if maybe their reorganization is partially due to, maybe carrying the burden of the YMAX days. Maybe carrying some debt that they never paid off.

Who knows? I do think that there's going to be a future for them, but I think, I also feel like they're, they've always been trying to latch on to the next best thing or the next,  And I think sometimes it's more important to just focus on one thing and to be good at that. So we'll see what happens, but yeah I did see this news.

And yeah, it's just unfortunate. To see in they had a lot of opportunities and, I feel like they've also acquired a lot of. Yeah. Different  teams and I think they're even part of, they're not really fully independent. I think they've spun out of.

Or from Alcatel Lucent at some point. 

Yeah, and they've to your point, they've acquired companies like they acquired Mimosa in their phase 2 now Mimosa has been sold and Mimosa provided a lot of private networking infrastructure and so it'll be interesting.

To see, if they get refocused and to your point, all of these sort of start stops or are not good. Certainly it's not good for talent retention. It's not good from a credibility standpoint. As, as an enterprise, if you're considering their solutions, are they the most stable company out there?

Are they going to be around? And so they need to really write that ship and they need to prove to the market that they can be. They can be stable and they have long term viability, but, time will definitely tell. But speaking of viability and energizer bunnies, I know you want to talk about Huawei and I caught this news as well.

They're with their recent earnings they're not quite back at the high point. Of their, financial success prior to the the D listings and that sort of thing. But they're approaching 100Billion in revenue, top line revenue. And that presents probably a challenge for folks like Qualcomm and you want to talk about that. 

Yeah, so there's a lot of talk about Huawei. I think  one China loves to talk about Huawei because it's, the darling of the Chinese government, 

The hometown hero. 

Yeah. Yeah. And the truth is that they are increasing their shipments quite a bit on the smartphone side. They increased their smartphone shipments by almost 50 percent from a year ago which would put them in fourth place by market share ahead of Xiaomi.

And they did a hundred billion dollars in revenue last year. Which is nothing to shake at. And their profit grew at, I think, 12 billion. Which is up 150 percent year on year. So they're profitable and they're increasing their revenue. One other thing is they've also really pushed heavily into autos now.

So they're trying to compete with Xiaomi, which is also a phone manufacturer that makes cars. And I think when you look at what's going on. What the Chinese smartphone market it was pretty flat. So it makes sense that they would go into the auto automotive solutions and automotive business.

They said that their auto business grew 120 percent from a year ago. Which 

was probably a very small base, right? 

Yeah. So I think there's definitely like a lot of good. Science for huawei here, but I also feel like some of this is being overblown for either  Chinese, propaganda purposes or the alternate which is you know, huawei is a big scary big scary evil company and they're making too much money and they have to be held down even more the truth is, I think there is some impact here that if Huawei continues to be successful in China and take share from other Chinese OEMs, most of whom use Snapdragon processors, there's a chance that Huawei could eat into Qualcomm's future.

Revenues in China. And that's partially because Huawei uses its own chips. And to my understanding, Qualcomm still doesn't actually have a way to charge Huawei for licensing because they're on the entity list. So even though Huawei is most likely using Qualcomm patents they can't actually be charged for it because Qualcomm's not allowed to charge them.

I would, I'm going to look into this more and maybe ask Qualcomm's licensing arm about if Huawei's shipping system or phones with Qualcomm IP, like, how do they get paid or do they get paid? That said, Qualcomm did supply Huawei when they could only use 4G. And that was interesting, but I think people.

are maybe giving Huawei a little bit too much credit here. I do think that they've gained quite a bit and they said their consumer business grew by 17%. So it's not nothing to, Shake, shake at, but I would also say that it's not really like the major return that to the global scale it very much feels like a localized thing right now. 

And yeah, I, it does seem like they really are turning a page, I would say.  And, 2023 was a good year for them. And I think it was evident at MWC this year from what I could tell. And people seemed to to indicate that Huawei really, had a bigger, more dominant presence, which MWC is their big show,  but yeah, I'd love to hear your take on 

this. 

Yeah, the company continues to reinvent itself. I think we've spoken about.  The company's reinvention on a number of different podcasts, they've focused on things like solar energy. So where they got blocked on 5g they pivoted and focused on transformer solutions for green energy, solar energy, which is great.

They're now focused on automotive and don't forget.  Even at the end of the day, if they are shut out of every market outside of China, they still have billions and billions of people that they can sell to. And Chinese enterprises that will continue to buy their infrastructure, they continue to grow their their enterprise networking business unit as well. 

So they've just, they've pivoted  and rightly and I agree. A lot of the Hubble is likely, sort of propaganda oriented, you talk about me. They are an up and comer, I was just reading about them and this, this, their new launch and I'm sure you're familiar with the model.

It looks like, it's a beautiful design. It's designed to land at under 30, 000 and compete. Very aggressively with Tesla. And could they become the new darling Chinese company, because they just seem to be hitting on all cylinders and their stock is way up based on the pre orders on this model.

And I'm sure, the model name it's beautiful. What is it? The SU 

yeah. I'm glad you remember. Cause I think it is SU seven. 

Yeah so it's interesting. Don't count while they out there. They're resilient and they are they do have depth and other areas.

They're not a 1 trick pony. But it'll be interesting to see how things progress here over time. But. Let me go hit my 3rd and final topic, and I want to talk about reliance. It sounds like we've been talking about this Indian network operator for quite some time, but I caught the news that they hit a pretty big milestone.

They've run rung in 100. Million 5G subs. And that's pretty significant because they continue to really dominate the market there. And what's also interesting. This was an article published by RCR wireless. They talked about how, even though India was fairly late in its 5G auctions in 2022 the country has rapidly become 1 of the biggest standalone.

Deployments in the world and as we've talked about on prior podcasts, stand 5g standalone really on lots of true potential of of 5g. And what's also interesting is that there's a new auction  that's going to be coming up in May. And it's going to include low band, 800 megahertz and 900 megahertz as well as 1.

8 gigahertz, 2. 1, 2. 3, 2. 5, 3. 3 and millimeter way that 26 gigahertz. So that's going to be put up for sale. Reliance has been snapping up spectrum left and right. I think to date, they've spent over 11Billion U. S. dollars. It's interesting. And so it just it got me thinking, will the company double down on, on additional spectrum purchases to maintain its lead?

And I know you follow the Indian market and we talk about the Indian market, quite often, but what do you think?  



I think it's  not really that surprising. They are the leading operator in india. Yeah, india has I think over a billion mobile users now, so 100 million is not really a crazy number but I do think it's really impressive when you consider they haven't really even had their 5g network on for a year and I think they will probably end this year with 200 million customers. So I think it's great for india and the faster that they take up 5g the faster the new applications will come and, with that volume and those that kind of scale, it's going to really change the landscape for connectivity 

in India. 

Yeah, and they've been very disruptive in doing it using disaggregated infrastructure and. Open ran and, qualified core and that sort of thing to really accelerate the deployment. So it's. We, I can remember back, and, a couple of years ago, and we were, you and I were both somewhat critical of how slow the the Indian government was to get these 5G spectrum auctions lined out.

But boy, mobile network operators reliance and really stepped up. So it's it's great to see it, especially in, a part of the world that is rapidly developing like India. But, hey, let's go to your 3rd and final topic and, I did weigh in on this.

I think there were a lot of folks that sort of jumped the gun on this but AT& T did experience a PII.  Data leak and you want to talk about those details and, I've got some thoughts here too, but I'll let you take it away. 

Yeah there was a lot of. Fusion about what happened with the sleek. 

It seems like this was actually a much older leak. Then people anticipated when I 1st saw the news, it sounded like it was a new. But it seems like it's very much an old one that maybe AT& T didn't really acknowledge existed until it became public in some way. But basically this was part of a trove of data that was being resold and shared on the dark web and some hacking forums.

And basically they found that there were leaked data and users pass codes. And that is what triggered AT& T to reset millions of their customers pass codes this week. And they basically acknowledged that there were over 70 million AT& T users, full names, email addresses, physical address, and in some cases, social security numbers and birth dates.

But only 7. 6 are actually current AT& T 

customers. Yeah, the majority, yeah, the majority are older 

subscribers. So 65 million are former account holders. Former, not older than former. Which is the vast majority, so that's something to consider. But, if I was no longer an AT& T customer, I would still be pissed.

And it looks like this is also something that has drawn a lawsuit that's shocking part of the news that, someone filed a lawsuit because they claim that a continue and failed to act.  Yeah, that will be something that we probably will hear about over the next. 12 months or so.

Most likely they'll probably sell it off court, but yeah, this is just, another indication that like Operators continue to struggle with these data leaks. It's not just AT& T. It's not just T Mobile security is just a continued thing that I think Operators as a whole need to continue to invest in and make sure that their customers can trust them To protect their data, which at this point I feel like is a very difficult thing to do You  

It is here's the deal the nature of public mobile networks  is challenging.

It's challenging because you have millions of subscribers. You got, even, more connected devices. What you probably know the stat what's the average number of connected devices that an individual has, when you count the smartphone and the watch and I think it's two and a half.

Yeah, it's like 2. 5, right? You've got millions of subscribers, and then you multiply that by the number of connected devices, and it creates a huge attack surface, right? That, bad actors can infiltrate and that sort of thing. I'm not defending AT& T. You rightly point out that this is a challenge for mobile network operators globally.

We've seen this with T Mobile. We've seen this with Verizon. We've seen this with operators that that operate. In Europe and Asian, that sort of thing. So it's a constant challenge. I did share a tweet on this. I have spent some time with to understand the sort of the depth and the context around this.

I do think that there were a lot of people that jumped to some early conclusions that aren't exactly valid. Did AT& T sit on this for an amount of time? That's to be determined, but I think, a lot of people were pointing the finger AT& T on that point. And we've got to allow AT& T the time to do the investigation, the forensics on this to understand it.

And they will be forthright, they've been, very transparent case in point. With that outage that occurred several weeks ago, they were very transparent. Shit happens. So much of what mobile network operators do is software defined. And and I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that is fortifying it's defense.

From my perspective the company has invested tremendously in cyber security. It's recently launched this dynamic defense capability that embed security within the network layer. It is new and so that will take time for it to to harden and roll out from my perspective, but I do believe the company is doing everything that it can to safeguard.

No company wants to expose PII and. And by the way, I don't know about you, but it just seems every I still get snail mail almost monthly that, some company has exposed my personal identifiable information and has offered me a credit monitoring service to do it.

And so now it's just. It's commonplace and it sucks. And more needs to be done. But I think what people need to understand is that just the massive scale of these networks involving millions and millions of subscribers and a multiple of connected devices just makes it really difficult.

Again, I'm not giving a TNT a pass, but I would just state that I think it's important to allow them to do the forensics. Come back, and then we can make an assessment on how we feel like the 

lawsuit will probably 

force that.  Yeah, and I, it's, I, when I 1st learned about this, I got a journalist troll email into my inbox saying, hey, would you like to weigh in on this?

And it's whoa, hold on. It's did this get leaked, that there was a leak, but, did this get leaked as well? Yeah, this is always the fodder for for class action lawsuits and that sort of thing. But let's give the company an opportunity to prove it out before we jumped to some rash conclusions there, but.

Hey, my friend, it's been another great podcast. I've been on the road this week with Fortinet. I'm going to be spending time with with NTT, and it's upgraded then in San Francisco next week. Where are you headed over the next couple of weeks? I know you spent some time with 

Qualcomm with the new Snapdragon X Elite stuff.

And then next week I'm with Intel in Phoenix for Intel vision. So  it's going to be travel almost every week from here on out till July, probably. 

Yeah, for me to, I get a little bit of break. I'm going to spend some time in my second home at the end of this month. But then I'm back on the road.

It's I'll be back in Vegas for Dell tech world and may. Got another couple of trips plan and then Jan, it's going to be, it's going to be Vegas baby. It's going to be Cisco live. It's going to be discover and Z scale or life. Hey, I think we we're judged and graded on the amount of air travel we log as analyst, right?

It's fun, but someone's got to do it, but Hey, it's been a great podcast, my friend, why don't you take us home? Absolutely. 

I hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights on a specific podcast. Please reach out to us on social media.

Will's at Will. 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.