Welcome to episode 195 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 More Insights and Strategy. I'm Will Townsend and joining me again this week is fellow analyst Anshul Sag.  Boy, you and I have been on the road. You're in Taiwan for Computex.

How was that? 

It was good. I was actually there for two weeks. Week one was with Intel as a Pre briefing of Computex for their announcements coming at Computex, and then week two was actual Computex. And I got back on Friday, so that's why we didn't record last week either. But we're now we're going to make up for today and hopefully we'll do another 1 later this week and we'll be caught up.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I've been on the road. I'll be in Vegas. 4 out of the current 5 weeks, and so I'm back with Zscaler, but let's get started this week. But let's get started with my 1st topic. And while you were on the other side of the world, big announcement, ASD space mobile expanded its network operator collaboration with Verizon and big news on this front. 

The coverage is going to be quite extensive across Verizon's network footprint, and it just really validates what AST SpaceMobile is doing. They are still aiming for their first production satellite launch this summer, and I may have more information to share if we record later this week or, possibly next week around  some additional insights there, but suffice it to say, from my perspective, this really validates what AST SpaceMobile is doing.

Certainly SpaceX and Starlink continue to focus on what they are doing from a test perspective with T Mobile. I don't have any inside baseball on this one, but I would bet Vodafone might be the third operator to, to drop with AST because they happen to have an investment in AST SpaceMobile.

But I'm sure you caught the news when you were over in Taiwan. Any additional thoughts? 

Yeah, what this didn't make me think when I first saw it was What's going on with Amazon and Project Creeper? Is that going to be the enterprise only play? And then this becomes the consumer play? I'm just wondering, what's going on with what Verizon already had?

In the burner. So that's the only thing I was curious about. We'll see what happens.

Yeah, certainly AWS they're focused on this segment. They're also doing a lot around, private 5G and that sort of thing as is, Azure for operators, but you're right. I didn't really think about that.

It's interesting that we really haven't heard, any recent updates around what Amazon is doing with blue origin and all that. But yeah it's heating up. It's going to be quite interesting,  but hey, let's, 

yeah, I was going to say, we did have that 1 update during. Reinvent  your member.

Oh, that's right.  It wasn't much, but it was something.  

Yeah, but certainly, reinvent was what in December, right? Yeah, so it's been we're already I cannot believe man time is flying by it's already June and we're pushing into the middle part of the month. But yeah, it'll be interesting. I made you some digging there on Amazon to get an update.

But let's go hit your 1st topic and it's worldwide developer conference for apple. It's that time of year and you want to talk about some pertinent updates that has flown out of that. 

Yeah, that literally happened three hours ago. It's fresh, very fresh. The big updates are all across all of Apple's operating systems.

Vision Pro, not relevant here. But I will say the relevant updates were they talked about RCS. So that's still coming. It will still be a green bubble. They talked about satellite messaging. So now Apple's emergency messaging is not the only feature that they have for satellite communications. They now will have two way messaging. 

And if you're an Apple user, to Apple user, use iMessage. They will also be SMS communications as well. And then another interesting feature was that macOS is adding iPhone mirroring. So you can now see and communicate and interact with your phone. wirelessly, stays locked but you can communicate with it from your laptop.

So that way you can unify all of your notifications and your applications. And, some apps don't work great on Mac iOS and that's fine. You can just use them in iOS on this little pane on your screen. So those are like the big mobile 5g kind of updates coming to WWDC to iOS messaging and to Mac iOS.

They also talked about Apple intelligence a little bit which is their branding of AI and A lot of it's just on device AI,  but they did talk about cloud AI and having a, this kind of private like experience running on Apple silicon in the cloud, which means that will probably require some kind of 5G connectivity.

But they will probably optimize for between on device and cloud AI. And they're saying it's going to be very secure and it's going to be running on their own app, silicon. And now our colleague, Matt, we'll have to start tracking. Apple is a server vendor as well. So  to him on that. There are basically no details so far on that side, but it is really interesting to see that Apple's gotten into the AI race with its own branded Apple intelligence.

It's a lot of pretty low hanging fruit. Like image retouching  and, natural language processing and, video and photo library, search. So it's a lot of the same things you've seen from other people. Cool. They did talk about OpenAI in a partnership there and they didn't really talk about the kind of integration or what's really driving all this stuff.

So we're really light on details, but I think over the next few days, WWDC will give more details and we'll finally figure out like what's powering a lot of these experiences. 

Hey, on the iPhone mirroring, I own an iPad, right? I have an iPhone as my primary phone and obviously you can do sync between those devices.

So is there anything that new with this? This iPhone mirroring announcement? You mentioned it mirrors with your Mac, right? It's 

literally 



You'll whatever's on your iPhone screen will show up on your Mac.  I see as like a 2d  representation. Of your iPhone screen at the time. So let's say you have the Uber app on your phone and you want to order food, but you don't want to grab your phone.

You can just poke around on your Mac and do that from your phone, from your Mac. Oh, I got it. Okay. Or if you're like using, there are certain, there can be tons of apps that aren't on your PC, that are on your phone. And that's just like an easy way for you to actually just use your phone without having to touch it, because that way you can just stay focused in one place. 

Yeah, sounds super super convenient for sure. Hey, man, let's go hit my 2nd topic. And this is when you and I take our victory lap. We've taken victory laps in the past, but while you were traveling, T Mobile announced its intention to acquire the majority of US Cellular's assets and subscribers.

And this is something that we had spoken about on a prior podcast Verizon, potentially what was going to do the same but it appears that T Mobile is going to acquire sort of the lion's share of all of this. And, I think there was mixed reaction online. Some pointed to the potential anti competitiveness of this deal, but honestly, and we've talked about cellular for quite some time.

They just haven't had it's been chicken and egg with them. They haven't had the resources to really invest properly in their network.  Their footprint is also rural. And this fits very well. Certainly you can make the argument that both AT& T and T Mobile are very focused on rural when you look at, For example, what AT& T is doing with digital learning centers and digital divide and overinvesting in certain markets with fiber that supports the backhaul for 5G and for 5G to help bridge the connectivity gap and and certainly, T Mobile has been very focused on rural as well, as you look at their footprint and their build out.

But I've got a question for you. What's your opinion on this? Do you think this is. Is it going to require a lot of scrutiny by the federal government, or is it going to be a slam dunk for T Mo?  I think it will 

probably come with a lot of scrutiny, most likely because if you combine T Mobile's assets with U.

S. Cellular's in a lot of rural areas, their market share becomes, almost intractable. Yeah. So I think they may be forced to divest  in some areas where their market share is too high. But really, it's also a,  an unfortunate reality that, the economics of rural connectivity do not match  capitalism and  the fact that the market will, solve the problem itself,  we've clearly seen that it doesn't.

Yeah, so what that means is that the government has to get involved and that's why we have stuff like bead. That's why we have all these different rural development funds, and I think that maybe, hopefully, the FCC can talk to the FTC and be like, Hey,  we could actually save some money here by not having, by allowing this to occur, there already is no competition.

Coverage is already quite poor. So how about we allow this to happen as a merger, but we put some stipulations on  what needs to be delivered and what kind of services and what kind of pricing maybe they negotiated that way as opposed to forcing divestiture.  And having, certain customers be underserved while others are not.

I don't know. , maybe that's the right approach. The world's in imperfect place. And I'm the first one to acknowledge that. While I would love to see, perfect competition occur in these rural markets I think it's been quite clear that there's very little to no competition in these markets.

Yeah. And as a result people are not getting coverage and they're getting pretty bad coverage if they do.  

Yeah, you bring up a good point. And again, it's another chicken and egg scenario. Investments are prioritized and made in mobile infrastructure and fiber. Based on subscriber density, right in the economics for payback of those investments and then the ARPU.

They get generated on that, and it's unfortunate for people that live in highly remote areas and rural areas because  that payback can be 234 times longer than saying a denser urban population. And so it's not done by design. It's to your point. It's capitalism. It's done by economics and mobile network operators are in the business of making money.

And programs like bead can level, or adjust the playing field to provide incentives to, to build out these less dense subscriber areas. But I think you're right. I don't really think about that. Allowing this deal to happen, putting sort of the necessary guardrails, around it but then not having to the federal government, not having to subsidize that build out.

And, as you and I have spoken on many podcasts, the underlying infrastructure, to deploy next generation mobile network is in the billions of dollars. I think I've spoken to the stat AT& T and Verizon  have both been on record that, north of 2025 billion U.

S. dollars  to build out these networks. So it's not a trivial undertaking. And that's just been the challenge with U. S. cellular. They just, They haven't been able to, to get, to that next level to be able to fund that and dish as well. And we've talked about dish quite a bit, but Hey, man, let's go to your 2nd topic.

You want to talk about NVIDIA? They're melting the world. 10 for 1 stock split we've talked about what they're doing around 16 and you want to talk about they're testing open ran in a private 5g network scenario. 

Yes, so they are actually already planning to build a standalone 5G network.

And part of this 5G standalone deployment is that they want to test their own O RAN compliant solutions that use it's their 5G capabilities. They have their, I forget what it's branded. It's something air. And it's basically they're trying to power the air interface and I think they also want to do or but right now they're trying to, get clearance to test and do interoperability testing of their 5G solutions with other OAN compliant vendors radio units.

And the system, they say, will include a 5G core network, 5G Geno B 5G radio units and 5G SA capable devices. They want to really have a complete 5G solution running on C band. So they want to run licensed spectrum to declare which carrier they'll be working with. They might work on all 3.

It's just interesting to see that NVIDIA is getting more involved in the 5G space. They've always been like a toe dippy kind of company. They've never really gotten that aggressive. But I think after talking to them and seeing what they were doing at GTC earlier this year, it seems quite clear that they're interested in pursuing 5G and 6G quite aggressively.

So it'll be interesting to see how this private 5G deployment at their campus in in San Jose. Sorry, Santa Clara, technically would, what that would look like and how they would use it as a test bed because they do a pretty big campus and they've got lots of compute. So there's probably a lot of opportunities and new applications that they could try and deploy. 

And I have a feeling this will probably translate to 6G testing as well.  

I bet it will, and this is interesting. Initially with open round, there were concerns that it was, and I've stated this probably a dozen times over the years on our podcast cost optimize, not performance, optimize and then in stepped companies like like Marvell and Intel. 

And Qualcomm to provide accelerator solutions to address the performance concern.  So now, obviously NVIDIA is the the AI, beast. And a lot of what I've been reading about what they're doing with radio is using AI  to do a better job of sort of fine tuning. Attenuation and that sort of thing.

There's obviously a I involved in what they're doing. And if they can prove to the carriers that they've developed something that will enhance those existing, for example, my mo. In 10 infrastructure investments, it could be quite compelling. Yeah, I'm not surprised to see see this topic on our podcast and what's happening there.

Boy, is there anything that Nvidia can't do? What's your opinion on that?  

Consumer devices. 

Yeah, okay. 

I've been working on Nvidia for 15 years. Boy, do they screw that up. They have had some incredible things that they've completely mucked up for no good reason. So  we'll save that for another podcast.

Yeah, for sure. Let me get my 3rd and final and I want to talk, it's the ministry of disinformation in China. This was pretty interesting. So our friends at RCR wireless news published a report  around China, weighing in on what it's seen with it's 5G deployment over the last 5 years.

They're claiming a massive economic impact of nearly 800 billion US dollars. And again, what's really interesting, man, is that they point to the 3. 75Million 5G base stations that they have put into deployment since the end of April and and they talk about, where they want to get with coverage.

They're claiming that they expect to reach 90 percent of the population covering 5G by the end of 2023. Now, it's hard to audit where they're at, on, on that curve, but it's 1 thing to deploy it. It's another thing to adopt it. And so another metric.  And this may, I think this came from the GSMA is around.

It's expected that the 5G adoption rate  should hit 2023. so it's 1 thing to deploy the infrastructure, right? It's another thing to applying use cases and that sort of thing and where it can really shine from my perspective is in private networking deployments and. And I think in the same article, the source that RCR Wireless spoke to talked about, manufacturing, automation and ports and, transportation, warehousing, logistics, use cases, all similar use cases to the ones that we're seeing  benefit from the power of a 5G and private 5G networks in the U.

S. But, and I probably know the answer to this question, but I'm gonna ask you anyway, it's just more chest thumping. On China's part to claim that they have a lead in the world.  

Absolutely. 

I knew 

that was the answer. The truth is. When you have such a big bureaucracy. Like the Chinese government everything is based on metrics.

And numbers, and, they need to have 3. 7M base stations. They need to have a 100Billion dollars of economic impact. They need to have 90%. Of adoption rate. The truth is, all those numbers are probably grossly inflated to satisfy somebody's, bureaucratic KPIs for their job.

I believe the real numbers are probably much lower. Unfortunately, when it comes to China, most data is. Is questionable. , I think we can look at these numbers and say cool. I, I would love to see an independent third party actually do an assessment. I just think we're so early.

I don't feel like I see enough, commercial 5G applications for enterprise and for iot and for industry right now to say that $800 billion, 800 billion.  Sounds like a, yeah, real number. I could say if you blocked off a zero, maybe, but 800 billion just feels.  

It feels really big to me too.

It's close to a trillion if you want to round it up and yeah, we've been on this journey for. You could argue we've been on the 5G journey for longer than 5 years. It's, it's probably going on 6 or 7, but I agree with you. I don't believe we've seen the critical mass  point, the inflection point that's really going to drive it.

We're seeing pockets like, at least in the United States, we're seeing pockets like. My time with John Deere and what they're doing with 5G in their factory and their warehousing operations and that sort of thing. And honestly, the adoption of private networking, it hasn't hit the hockey stick yet, just because there've been lots of different ways to get there.

And we've been in this sort of, standalone, non standalone quagmire. So yeah, I call, I call bullshit on On some of those numbers, but, it's definitely going to have an impact. I just don't know if it's a trillion in China at this point, but with that said, let's get your 3rd and final topic.

And I want to think that you've talked about this before. But you want to talk about link 5 G, and they're in their tower infrastructure and how it's dividing New Yorkers in New York City. 

Yeah. So it's really this is what we talked about before. It rolled out in 2022. They've rolled 150 of these 32 foot towers since then.

They're saying they say there's gonna be another 2000 on the way.  And if you consider that connectivity is super important today's age. It's really important to have these devices because they're going to actually enable a lot of people to have connectivity that otherwise wouldn't have it. But a lot of people really think they're ugly.

And I call them monstrosities and, a lot of people are just, still using 5G fear mongering,  try and get these things not to be installed. But the reality is, I think there could be a much more elegant solution. Maybe someone figures out a way to create unique designs that match that.

The aesthetic of the neighborhood,  they don't really stick out like a sore thumbs. And I think that's really what the big issue is here,  but it is a significant. Rollout with thousands of end points  that will likely build out coverage for the city of New York in terms of 5G with some free spectrum and some license spectrum.

But. Overall, it's just funny because it's made it to the New York Times and, if it's in the New York Times, and it matters to New Yorkers,  it's just been interesting to read people's opinions and, some people admire them. Some people don't but, in New York, people like to complain about a lot of things. 

And especially if it's something that's, an eyesore. But yeah, I just wanted to bring this one up cause they're still very much in the throes of deploying it and they even made some references to to telegram polls or telegraph polls. Maybe sometimes, infrastructure is necessary, even if it's ugly.

But yeah that's it's not really a super serious topic. But it's an update to the. 5G situation. 

We had the same challenge in Austin very early on, the city council and their infinite wisdom had similar concerns about the aesthetics. I spent time with AT& T, I think it was a year ago.

I toured New Orleans, and they were doing some, pretty in it, and this wasn't a tower company, but obviously it's AT& T, and what they were doing with small cells they basically created.  It was it looked like a gas lamp. And it really match the aesthetic, especially in the French quarter, which I thought was interesting.

And then I've actually, as I spent time in Colorado, I've actually seen antenna arrays that look like trees. Now, they look like maybe your artificial Christmas tree. If you celebrate Christmas but but there is a way to to make these. Things look more aesthetically pleasing.

So I just, I think it's super, super interesting there, but Hey, buddy. I'm glad we got this in. It'd been, it's been a couple of weeks. We'll try to do a double shot later in the week, but it was a great conversation. I'm going to, I'm going to let you get some sleep, but before I let you do that, 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. Willow is at Wail Tah Tak and Ana is at Ah Chah Sahd. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again later this week.

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