Welcome to episode 194, 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 more insights and strategy. I'm Will Townsend, and joining me again this week as fellow analyst Anshel sag.  But before we get started anal and I were, we're hanging out together at Dell Tech World and then buddy you did double duty.

You were at build earlier in the week, right? 

Yeah, build, and then over, overnighted myself to Dell Tech in Vegas. Thankfully, it's all in the same time zone.  

Yeah, for sure. And, I know 1 of your topics is going to center on some of the stuff that you learned with Microsoft as well. And some of the new copilot and PCs and with 5G integration.

But  let me get started with my 1st topic. And I want to talk about Erickson. And they're investing another 50 million and it's open, ran ready 5G factory. This is in Dallas. It's in a suburb called Louisville. It's the Louisville fighting farmers. That's the high school mascot there. And I know it well, because I lived in Dallas for several years, but.

Erickson opened this facility just right before the pandemic at a cost of over 100 million.  It covers over 300, 000 square feet, and they recently invited analysts and media to tour the facility. Unfortunately, I could not make that. I was included on that invite list, but  the FIERCE team, the light reading team, I think Mike Dana was there as well, They had a cadre of journalists and media folks and analysts that toured it.

And and what, from my perspective is interesting about this is that the company is manufacturing it's products there and it's doing a lot around MIMO antenna infrastructure construction. And I didn't know this as I read this fierce article the ASIC designs are actually done in Austin, my hometown.

And then in Louisville, they're putting this all together. And what I really like about what Erickson is doing is that they're eating their own dog food. They're sipping their own champagne, whatever analogy you want to use, but they're using private cellular networking to facilitate all of this.  There's some pretty amazing statistics that that they were able to speak about.

And from an efficiency standpoint, the company points to reducing energy consumption by 25 percent and water usage by 75%. So there's, yeah, it's pretty compelling. There's a lot of sustainability advantages in deploying cellular. Obviously, cellular is much more deterministic than Wi Fi, given, Wi Fi handoffs and that sort of thing.

And it's clearly a great demonstration of using private cellular networking within a manufacturing environment. And what they're also saying from an Open RAN ready perspective is that the majority of the products that they're building are Open RAN capable. And so this really benefits Ericsson in a number of different ways.

Number 1, it's domestic production,  and I'm going to also talk about Nokia later in the podcast and what they're doing around federal, but but it domesticates the supply chain.  There are certainly advantages with continuity of supply since the antennas that they're building there are actually produced in the U.

S. and I don't know, I'm I'm envious now of Mike and the Fierce team and others that got the tour. I'm hoping to get a tour scheduled here in the not too distant future, but don't know if you caught the news, but this is a pretty significant increase in its investment. Certainly, it's tied to its 14 billion collaboration.

With at and t and my buddy I Bez, was actually there for the tour and spoke to how the companies are working together and the advantages of basically delivering an open network to facilitate programmability and agility and that sort of thing. So I'm sure you caught the news. Any further comments or insights?

Yeah, I was also invited to this, but I also couldn't attend. I didn't know the dollar value but it definitely would have been cool to attend just because of Erickson's role in the U. S. market and helping to bring Open RAN, to a more prominent position in the U.

S. market. But other than that, it's obvious to see AT& T involved, makes sense.  And yeah, it seems like, Texas continues to be the center of a lot of America's, 5g  domestic production capabilities. 

Yeah, for sure. And let's not forget about A. S. T. Space mobile. They're based in Midland, and I'll have some news to share in the coming weeks as I continue to have conversations with the bell and his team there.

But let's jump into your 1st topic and you want to talk about  T mobile and there was a price increase, but there's a little bit of context that you want to add to that. 

Yes, so some customers with older plans are getting price increases.  I'm apparently getting a price increase and I don't even know how because I'm on a magenta plan.

But I guess it's too old. Then there are newer plans now. But I think I got a notification. I'm getting an, a 4 per line or something. It's pretty significant. But  the one thing that, that's interesting is one, this is something that like, a lot of customers are upset about because A lot of them were told that their prices were going to increase.

But it seems like they are now and then on top of that T Mobile I feel is following the lead Of AT& T and Verizon who both raised their prices this year. So I think that T Mobile is under pressure potentially from its own investors To raise prices because if  you look at T Mobile stock, it's been pretty steadily growing.

And I have a feeling that if they're raising prices it's because they believe that they are most likely the best carrier and they want to be able to pay, pay for the upgrades and also charge for being  the best 5G carrier. I will say that most people are not thrilled about this.

I really can't imagine anyone's really thrilled about this.  But it is a reality. And I feel like a lot of people are upset because they thought that T Mobile wasn't going to raise prices on them. I didn't really have, see any good explanations or hear any good explanations, but price increases generally suck for everyone.

This probably sounds like a, it might be a necessity for all of the investments. That T Mobile has made in the last few years. And I think this is their first price increase in 10 years. I think this is also how they're justifying the fact that it's happening now. But yeah it's a reality.

And I think it will be interesting to see how that shakes out over time.  

I'm not surprised to see this because they're following their competitors and there's no need to leave our poo on the table from my perspective. And also T Mobile is an entirely different position now than it was. 

Before it's 5G journey, they they're offering one of the most robust 5G networks. They've been the fastest to deploy. And we've talked about that on numerous podcasts. So there's no longer a need for them to be the value player. And I think you can define value in a lot of different ways.

They do a lot with what I call entitlements with the magenta plan that you're on where, you get things like streaming services included and that sort of thing. They've been a leader as far as offering, higher, throttle caps and that sort of thing.

So I'm not surprised to see that happen. No one likes price increases, right? But the fact that this is the first major increase in a decade speaks volumes to what they're delivering subscribers from a balance, value perspective when, because it's just not all about price.

It's about. Network reliability. It's about dependability. It's about resilience and, and so all the other kind of intrinsic softer things that T Mobile has continued to do in the consumer space to be very disruptive there. I'm not surprised to see it, but I think if people look, that.

The holistic, value that T Mobile delivers and also, Verizon and AT& T I think, it is what it is. And I still think there's value there, but that's just my, my, my take on it, but hey, let me talk about my 2nd topic and it's Deutsche Telekom, and they continue to focus on private companies networking solutions, and I caught the news on RCR wireless that they have deployed a massive private 5G campus network for a very large paper mill in Germany.

And it's large from the standpoint that it's the equivalent to 50 football fields. Now, in Europe, football is soccer, so it's not, us football, so soccer field, but still. It's quite massive. It covers 350, 000 square meters. And this is the company is hamburger container board. 

And what I find really interesting about what the company has to say about its 5g network is that they believe that it's going to help optimize information flow, logistics, and production processes at the site. And they produce an incredible amount of paper product nearly a 1M tons annually.

Much some of the things that I was talking about with with Erickson's 5G factory, and what they're seeing from a power efficiency and water efficiency. With paper mills, and I know this because in college, I had a college roommate who in the summers, he lived in Wisconsin.

He'd work at a paper mill and talk about use of water and paper mills. It's huge because they have to basically produce the pulp that gets, basically transformed into paper. And I would assume that in employing, a cellular network, they're going to see some of the same efficiencies that I was just talking about with with Erickson, but.

I don't know if you caught this. There was a lot of news this week, but I think it's pretty compelling. What do you think?  

Yeah, I did not see this news. I did look into it afterwards. I do think it's interesting, but I also think it continues to prove that, like. Private 5G applications are relevant for manufacturing, especially.

And at Dell tech, I actually did check out the 5G AI demo area. And they had. Some demos for, basically 5G private networks in a box, which it was part of Dell's partnership with Nokia and showing how they could, deploy this in a brewery to monitor bottling and things like that.

Yeah, it makes sense. Private 5G is going to be. A lot of manufacturing facilities transition to a more modern manufacturing, industry for that. Oh,  

yeah, no, absolutely. And I've often went when I'm asked by journalists, what I think the, 1 of the biggest sort of applications for private cellular my, my answer is manufacturing automation and by my estimate, it could be, upwards of 50 percent of the total addressable market.

For that application, and we continue to see examples of that with as an example with Deutsche Telekom and with Ericsson but, hey, let's move to your 2nd topic. And you want to talk about a 5G use case. And this has to do with with drone deployment in Scotland.  

Yeah, so this story, I originally found it on the BBC, but if you go look far back enough.

Light reading also posted about it. And basically what it is they are already using drones for, search and recovery of people a thermal, thermal devices and things like that. But now they want to use drones for 5G as 5G base stations to transmit video footage during search and rescue operations.

So they're also using drones as infrastructure.  And this is the company's called Jet Connectivity. Now they pop up 5G base stations that can be put on a drone to  create a self deploying 5G network. So that way, search and rescue people can actually communicate back and forth when they're looking for someone.

And yeah, this is happening up in Scotland. I think, they're basically trying to find ways to improve connectivity and this is more of like a trial. This isn't like something they're deploying now. But it's cool to see that there, more places are starting to use drones for networking.

Obviously we've had them in the U S for some time. But those were primarily 4g applications. And a lot of them are still, they never really made it to 5g. But do we do have some, drones for surveillance purposes? It's great to hear that this is something that. Can improve how search and rescue teams operate and improve, time to finding them and then time to recovering them.

So I think this is a net positive for, a lot of people and other companies like Telenor also testing and these kinds of things out, which light reading referred to, but the BBC was originally what actually caught my eye. On this story I looked into a little more and yeah, it's really cool because Jet Connectivity was really the company who created this 5G base station.

That's light enough and low power enough to be carried by a drone. And that's the real innovation here. And yeah, it's, this was partially funded by the Scottish government. And there's a lot of companies involved, including Advertising University in Scotland's 5G center. Um, it's a lot of collaborative public private partnerships. 

I think it's a killer use case. I saw this for the 1st time a couple of years ago when I was in Riga. And I spend every year in October, typically October, November in Riga at an event called 5G techatory and LMT Latvia mobile telephone demonstrated this capability basically, And it's not what from a pop up perspective at venues and that sort of thing to bring additional connectivity, like a cold or a cow or that sort of thing.

And I've actually seen, this, this sort of scenario deployed with balloons as well. But using a drone is super, super innovative from my perspective. And, from, for search and rescue, it could be huge. Natural disasters when you think about hurricanes, that might hit, my home in the Florida Keys, or even on the Texas coast, it can, it could play a real role in and to your point.

In improving the outcome of finding people that are in distress and certainly, we've seen a lot of drone applications with 5g use for power line inspection and within ports and that sort of thing. And so I really love this use case, and there are companies like HQ that are trying to shrink. 

The base station down to silicon and, there are advantages there from a power and operational perspective that could even enhance this business case and outcome even further. So I love it. I think it's a great  showcase for what can be done with with drone technology.

But,  3rd and final topic. We're being really efficient today. Hey. Because you and I are way behind based on all of our worldly travels, but I want to talk about Nokia  and they've acquired a company called Phoenix group to strengthen its federal solutions business unit. And we've talked about this on a prior podcast, how both Erickson and Nokia are very smartly.

Pivoting into defense and federal government type solutions so that they can expand their footprint in their sales. And what's really interesting about Phoenix is that they're already a well established DOD supplier. And they've been providing very portable solutions that can be taken into war theaters.

Like a backpack type sized all in one, solution so that you can set up critical communications. And so I, I really think this is a smart acquisition on Nokia's part. Nokia had a prior solution an LTE solution, but I think this does 2 things for Nokia. Number 1, it probably brings them some differentiated technology into play.

And it strengthens their position because.  Dealing or selling to the federal government is not a trivial undertaking and you have to be on things like the GSA schedule and that sort of thing. And so this, just from my perspective, strengthens Nokia's capability to focus on LTE and 5G connectivity solutions that are targeted towards battlefield type application.

So I don't know if you caught this news, but any thoughts before we hit your 3rd topic.  

Yeah, I don't really have any thoughts, but I do agree with you that it's easier to acquire your way into the federal government than it is to slowly, gradually  your way through all the red tape.  

Absolutely, man.

Hey, last, but not least, and, you're our device  guru expert in the firm. And so you spent some time, like we were saying earlier at Microsoft build. Yeah, absolutely. And it's pretty exciting this week. These new copilot plus a I. P. C. S. Have been unveiled. We did see some at Dell tech world.

What's amazing about Dell, and Dell's a former employer. And so I'm not going to hurt on Dell in the least, but typically Dell's been a sort of a fastest. Follower if you want to call it that and typically with any platform Dell usually dips its toe And might have one or two offerings, but I think dell had five or six different, versions and it's ensperon and it's It's xps line, but I don't want to steal any more thunder from you.

But what did you learn at build?  

Yeah, so build was microsoft's opportunity to unleash the copilot plus pc on the world Which means that  It's a completely re-architected operating system for Windows 11 with AI in mind. . And one of the things that came out from that were two new surface laptops.

The Surface Laptop and the Surface Pro. And one of the Surface pros will come with 5G later in the year. So at launch it will be wifi, but down the road there will be a 5G variant, which I'm very excited about. My understanding is it'll be sometime in the fall, but.  Nevertheless they had the entire, ecosystem behind them.

It was all, these are all snapdragon x elite based pcs.  So this is ARM really coming forward. So this is like a, mobile story, but it's also a PC story, which is something we haven't really been able to talk about in the past. So ARM is really taking over Windows now. And I believe that this will eventually transition to more 5G connected PCs especially with Qualcomm being the lead ARM supplier right now, actually have an exclusivity until the end of the year. 

I agree. So for the next six or seven months, we'll probably only see Snapchat and X Elite as the, copilot plus eco system enabler. . Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how this, transitions into copy text and then what that looks like for back to school and how that transitions into the holidays.

There will be competition from a MD and Intel, but. Right now Qualcomm has the exclusive and it's showing, real compete for Microsoft to be able to compare against Apple's M3, even though they did announce M4 just now, with like last week with the iPad Pro it's still an iPad Pro and it doesn't really compete.

With windows like a Mac OS would so we'll see how it works out. I will probably be getting a few systems, including some of those from Dell. And you did make a good point that Dell generally is not always at the leading edge. Sometimes they do follow, but I will say they have been a really close partner of Intel's and for them to go all in like this.

With Qualcomm after years and years of not even shipping anything with Qualcomm. I think it's actually a really big deal. And I think it's a vote of confidence in Microsoft and in Qualcomm proving that this is possibly the future of the PC and hopefully 5G connectivity on PCs. 

Yeah, I couldn't agree further. And what an opportunity for Qualcomm to grow into an adjacency and really drive a ton of volume. AI is bringing so much attention to the data center, to the cloud, and now to the PC. And, from my perspective, I think as we move forward AI workloads are going to become decidedly hybrid.

So you're going to have larger language models in the cloud and connectivity that supports that. And then smaller language, models at the edge of the network where data is created. And, it's incredible. And, one of the things that I noted that you haven't mentioned is the battery life on this platform.

It's incredible, right? What's the average target? It's like over it's over 24 hours, right? 

No. So I would say right now, from what I've seen from all the OEMs the average is about 20 to 21 hours of battery life, which is still better than what Apple's showing. An actually, our friends over at Signal 65, Ryan Shroud went and benchmarked one of the surface. 

Notebooks that has this chip in it against an M3 MacBook, and it beat it on battery life. So this is a huge improvement for the entire PC ecosystem on battery life, but also an upgrade on performance. So it's it's not a sacrifice. It's a overall upgrade. And that's why, Microsoft, I think, believe that they needed to go with someone like a Qualcomm. 

To shake things up, but we will see chips from. Intel AMD, and potentially others next year, maybe even late this year. 

Yeah, that diversity, I think it's just going to drive further innovation and I'm glad you made the point that this isn't a Chromebook. So there's no sacrifice in performance, which is incredible and they're.

There's some new features like this recall feature, right? That's AI based because there is integrated AI and the and the snapdragon silicon, right? 

Yes, it's an NPU. So 1 of the, 1 of the limitations of the copilot plus platform is you 40 tops. Of AI performance on the NPU, not just in your graphics card or in some other accelerator.

It needs to be an NPU or  NPU like experience. And right now you have to either light up a big GPU to do that, or you just can't achieve it. So like even Apple's M4  does 38 tops. So it's just under what a copilot PC can do, copilot plus PC can do and Intel's right now at 11, but. Lunar Lake, which they're coming out with later this year, will do 45.

And I believe that AMD's next platform will also do 40. So we're going to be there. The PC ecosystem is going to grow pretty fast. Copilot Plus is going to be what I believe is the future of 

PC. I want one right now, so I'm going to work my contact at Ella at he's back at Dell. He was he and I met each other many years ago at Dell.

He was the product manager with with Dell that launched the first Color Notebook, the 325NC, and now he's back in a very senior role. But and it was great to see you, Ed, if you're listening or viewing our podcast today, but hey, buddy, we kept it tight. I love it. We hit the topics. There's a lot of excitement going on.

AI, I think it's going to change the world. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention NVIDIA. And their earnings incredible and video is leading the AI revolution. They just blew it out the door. The stock hit a thousand dollars a share for the first time in its history. And at its earnings, it did announce a 10 for one stock split.

That's going to occur in early June. And there are just so many companies that are going to benefit from this. Dell is very well positioned. Intel and AMD are very well positioned. Certainly Qualcomm is going to capitalize on this as well. And this is great. I'm going to give Ed some credit as well.

We, we were texting the other day. And it's almost the PC industry needed water and AI is becoming the water. It's super exciting to see this. It's definitely an inflection point that we haven't seen since maybe the invention of the cloud. But Hey, my friend, it's been another 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 is at Wildchild 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.