Welcome to episode 191 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 in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, is Anshul Sag. We're here for the MediaTek Analyst event.

It's been a great event so far. What do you think, buddy? 

It has, and, we're almost wrapped up now, and I think we've heard a lot from MediaTek. And we had a lot of questions answered as well, but there's still a lot more to talk about.  

I agree, and that's going to be one of my topics, but I want to jump into my first one, and I want to talk about Samsung and O2 Telefonica. 

This is a huge milestone, my friend. They've announced the first commercial deployment of virtualized RAN and open RAN in the German market. And I'm going to pull up the article here. It's actually in Landsberg. And it's providing high performance, reliable 4G and 5G services to customers. O RAN and V RAN continues its momentum.

What do you think about all that? 

I think it's a big deal. I think that it clearly shows the momentum is growing. And that, Samsung needed a win there. Yeah. And I think it's a good one for them because it's a V RAN and an O RAN deployment. So I think it's net positive for customers.

For both them and O2 Telefonica. 

Yep, I agree, and it continues to solidify Samsung's leadership position. And VRAN, hey, three, four plus years ago, when the whole 5G train started rolling out, Samsung really wasn't considered a leader in RAN, and they've really changed their their trajectory with VRAN.

But, let's jump to your first topic, and it's interesting that we're spending time with MediaTek, but we're going to talk about Qualcomm, and you want to talk about their Q1 earnings. 

Yeah, so they reported Q1 earnings this week, and they were able to actually surprise, the market a little bit because there have been a lot of expectations that they wouldn't do so well because the smartphone market's, in a state of flux, but they were able to report 9.

4 billion in revenue 2 of GAP EPS and 2. 44 of non GAP EPS. Really the big deals here were that they were able to report,  1 percent increase in revenue and that they had EPS increased 13%. And then they also reported 35 percent in growth in automotive. So automotive continues to be a strong segment for them.

IOT shrunk 11%. That will, I think, change once they launch their PC. They're PC chips because they actually classify PC as IOT. I, we'll see what happens, how they break that out in the future, but right now that's where it falls. And then, handsets were up 1%. And they really talked about auto quite a bit.

They said that 45 billion design win pipeline, which is huge. And then they also had they said that a third of that is ADAS on the call. They're definitely indexing heavily on the automotive and we'll see how they move forward throughout the year, but they've got a lot of flagship wins and they also have challenges from MediaTek.

We're getting a little bit of the band here as we're recording. We're just going to keep rolling here, but I had a question for you. So it sounds like in several categories Qualcomm was relatively flat. Did they meet expectations with Wall Street? 

They did not only meet, they beat expectations.

Okay. And they guided upwards. So their stock is act, went up actually about 4 percent after hours. 

Yeah, the market has been nuts like with Tesla and all the news that was coming out. And then I noticed the markets were generally up today. We're not financial analysts, but we like to play them on TV sometimes.

But that's good. That's good news. And we are going to talk about MediaTek here in a minute. But. I want to hit my second topic and I want to talk about AT& T  and they launched a new service called Turbo. Now on the surface, you might read through the press release and assume that this is network slicing.

It's not I was pre briefed by the company. What they're positioning Turbo to be is an enhancement to your data plan. And it boosts performance in that regard. So it's based on open internet principles. This is super smart because you and I have talked about net neutrality  and the fact that there, there's been a new ruling that reverses the Trump administration's decision. 

That was ratified all the way back in 2017. And we've talked about this as well. There are going to be a lot of concerns around M and O's with traditional network slicing. Is that going to violate net neutrality? And at the end of the day, if it's focused on, Providing an even playing field regardless of application.

Yes. That's where it's gonna it's gonna meet the criteria there. But AT& T is pricing this incrementally for subscribers. So it's a 7 adder if you want it. And what they're pointing to is for mobility users that want to take advantage of improved latency and and, more consistent throughput for things like mobile gaming and that sort of thing.

For for video conferencing, things that are very video intensive their turbo services is suited for that. I think you caught the announcement as well. I did. Any further thoughts? 

No, I think it'll be interesting to see what that uptake is like and what people are willing to pay. And if they're able to demonstrate that 7 value is worth the extra spend.

I think it's priced right. I think 5  would have been a slam dunk. 7, 

it's not here nor there. It's not 

here nor there. I think if it was 10 or over, I think from a consumer standpoint. 

I think they should have tried it at 5 and seen how it went. 

It's easier to lower prices than raise prices, so it'll be interesting to see what happens, but let's go to your second topic before the band starts back up, and you want to talk about the FCC, and there were some fines that were levied against some operators.

So they actually fined all operators, the major ones in the U. S. Yeah. They fined T Mobile, Verizon,  AT& T. So T Mobile gets to pay the Sprint fee and the T Mobile fee. It accumulates as a total of 200 million across all four carriers. T Mobile pays 80 million AT& T pays 50 million, 57 million, and Verizon pays 47 million.

It's a It's basically a lawsuit that doesn't allege,  it claims and validates that the carriers were collecting user location data without their consent or knowledge and selling it to third parties.  They are basically paying a fine for breaking the law, and this was something that happened, I think, somewhere back in 2018 pre merger, so that's why Sprint got fined, and it just seems like they all thought they, they were okay and could get away with it, and The FCC disagreed, so this was a long justice for them.

So was it a battle that was going back and forth? Because I wasn't aware of this, because you mentioned it started all the way back in 2018, right? 

Yeah it didn't seem like it was something that was a priority for the previous administration. Okay. So I think it got stalled until Oh, until there 

was a new administration.

Yeah. 

Okay. 

All right. Hey, listen, the FCC is there to ensure, proper competition and that sort of thing. Safeguarding of customer data. And 

there's a quote in this Verge article that says, An AT& T spokesperson, Alex Byer, said the FCC's action Lacks both legal and factual merit it unfairly holds us responsible for another company's violation Of our contractual requirements to obtain consent ignores the immediate steps.

We took to address the company's failures And perversely punishes us for supporting life saving location services Like emergency medical alerts and roadside assistance that the fcc itself Previously encouraged we expect to appeal the order after conducting a legal review. So they're blaming the third party You  But  I feel like they probably should have safeguarded this data a little better than they did.

It's like blaming Cambridge Analytica when, maybe the safeguards should have been in place. Yeah, 

interesting. Hey, let's go to my third and final topic. And I want to talk about some of my insights from Media Tech's Analyst Day. You and I are, we're invited to this event every year.

I think last year it was in Austin, if I recall correctly. That old, 



Yeah, it was it's a famous hotel, Driscoll, I believe, but anyway we're here in Scottsdale at the Sanctuary resort, beautiful place. And we just concluded a day with MediaTek. We got to hear from all of the business unit leaders in the morning, and then we had breakouts this afternoon.

I tell you what I continue to be impressed with how The company is forging forward with Dimensity at the flagship level. They've got a 30 percent market share in the China market.  That's an area that you're focused on. I'm the infrastructure guy, so I don't want to steal thunder away from you.

But I guess from my perspective, what I'm also impressed with is the investment that the company is making in wifi and how they're very aggressively pushing into enterprise. They couldn't speak to any specific design wins, although they are expecting. To land a major design win with an enterprise, basically an OEM that provides enterprise grade access points, and I think that's going to be tremendous for them.

I think once they establish that foothold, that's going to drive a lot of top line revenue for them. It's a high bar as well. This company has traditionally been very consumer focused. When you look at the enterprise, you've got to support. A heck of a larger number of devices. You've got to provide higher levels of security.

And you've just got to provide better RF and better propagation in general. Because that's what enterprises demand when you think about enterprise grade routers and access points versus what you find in consumers. I think it's super impressive.  They continue to lean on that. What I also found interesting was how they're cleaning up.

A lot of their categories and iot and automotive and wifi with some discreet naming to make it simpler for the outside world to understand where their different products fit. I think before it was a, an alpha numeric, jumble Yeah. On their silicon. But those are some of my thoughts.

What are some of your additional thoughts? 

I think they have become a lot more aggressive on the wifi side. . And they've made some. Significant claims in terms of performance. And I'm really excited to see how those, actually manifest themselves  competitively. But the truth is they have pretty close relationships with AMD.

They had a really strong one with Intel before Intel killed their 5g business. I think that they are really moving forward with their wifi business. They also have some pretty considerable products on the 5g side. And I just, I've been using the Dimensity 9300 for a bit now.  And I was really impressed with it.

The performance was there, the battery life was there. And I just think that MediaTek has really moved themselves into a new tier. And continue to do so by  delivering quality products. That their customers want to bring to market and eventually that will, come out as some kind of brand recognition, but I definitely think that, MediaTek has to spend more on marketing themselves and claiming ownership, they are the leaders in satellite here in terms of they had the right strategy from the very beginning and now they're the ones that are forging forward with  NTN on the satellite side and we'll see what happens long term, but it's, they set us up for a really good understanding long term what, what's going to happen on satellite. 

Yeah, and I'm sure you and I are going to write this up at some point, either short form or longer form on the more insights and strategy website or Forbes, but the final comments on may completely agree with everything that you said.

They have really they've moved from being the value leader to providing silicon, within 5G from flagship down to value. I think that's impressive. And I also agree with your statement around they need to really focus more on, on marketing because, There aren't a lot of people that are familiar with MediaTek.

Lots of people are familiar with Qualcomm for obvious reasons. And Broadcom. And Broadcom as well, right? And they're providing both networking, Enterprise networking silicon for Wi Fi and for broadband and for fiber and as well as, the consumer side of things as well. But let's move to your third and final topic.

And we've actually talked about this before. Nokia putting a 5G network on the moon and you want to provide some updates to our viewers and listeners. 

Yes. So it's not a 5G network. It's actually a 4G LTE network. Okay. It wasn't clear whether or not it was going to be 4G or 5G when they first announced it, but now it's clearly going to be a 4G network.

Okay. How did it miss that?

 It was supposed to, it was supposed to, It was supposed to be 5G? It could have been. It was like a possibility. Okay. But they were supposed to launch in April and they weren't able to. So now they're launching in Q4. Yeah. It'll be in the October timeframe. They're going to be launching with intuitive machines on a, on their lander.

Using SpaceX Falcon 9 this will be on the moon they're going to be doing, building a dual redundant network in a box that will support cell phone like terminals carried by a rover developed by Lunar Outpost. So there's two different companies that are working with a launch partner to get this thing on the moon and they're going to be looking for water on the moon.

And that's The core of what they're enabling is this lander and  being able to transmit data and they need connectivity, obviously they need connectivity because, you can't just run things without the ability to transmit data. It's going to be exciting to see the first lander was on February 22nd and it fell over on its side, which I remember watching but yeah, we'll see what happens.

Hopefully they land it. straight this time. But hopefully that network will continue to operate and they can use it for next tests. And interesting they did say that if you believe in a lunar future with more human presence, more, more robotic assets, resource mining and drilling and all that, then you definitely need more capacity.

That might be the right time to move over to 5g. 

All right. Interesting. Interesting. Boy, you're going to see Nokia technology, not only on the moon, but. It's also something that AST Space Mobile is leveraging the air scale technology that's that Nokia provides to make what they're doing from a sat, com, direct to cell perspective function.

Hey, it's been a little distracting with the band, my friend, and Camelback Mountain behind us, but It's been a great conversation. 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 is at Welltown Tech and I'm at Onshell SOG. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week. 

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