Welcome to episode 196 of the GT nine 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 Wil Townsend, and joining me again this week is Fellow Analyst Anshel Sag. But hey, Anshel, before we get started I know you and I have been on the road for quite a bit.

And you went to a Padres game to rest and relax. How did that go? How are the Padres doing this year? 

They are doing okay. They're not doing great. They should be doing way better. But last night they hit their third walk off homer in three home games in a row. So nice.  They've never done that before.

And if they do it tonight against the Brewers again, it will have been the first time in baseball history. So it's unlikely to happen, but if it does, it will be an interesting record. I did drive home from LA yesterday. I was in Long Beach for the good old augmented world expo conference. Which I will briefly talk about later in the podcast.

I don't have as an official topic, but there are some 5G things that I wanted to mention.  Cool. 

Awesome. Yeah, I haven't been in Astro's game this year. My, my daughters are coming in July after the 4th, and we're going to go do a Round Rock Express game. That's always fun at the Dell Diamond. Going to get my little bit of my baseball fix there, but hey, man, let's jump into it.

And I want to lead with my 1st topic. I've heard the rumors for quite a while, but there's a big change with Microsoft with respect to how they're approaching telecom and basically they, in essence, pulled the 5G ripcord on Azure for operators. And I remember I wrote an article about this on Forbes.

It was like 4 years ago. After Microsoft acquired affirmed and meta switch, the combination of those 2 acquisitions well, over a 1Billion dollars, but 4 years later Microsoft's decided to get out of the kind of the virtual service application space. And and just focus on infrastructure, similar to what AWS is doing with talco.

But the sparks a pretty big change for the company. And again, it demonstrates, Microsoft, they make these mega mergers remember when they acquired Nokia, and they thought they were going to do handsets and, look where that went. But. This is interesting, and it's it validates that there's a pretty strong ecosystem out there for companies that are focused on the application layer.

And then certainly lately we've heard a lot of news around.  Api focus, and Erickson is really leading that charge, and that's all about bringing higher degrees of programmability to the networks and certainly. AT& T is demonstrating that with what they're doing with Nokia with oven ran and that sort of thing.

But I don't know. From your perspective, was this a surprise for you? Because it wasn't for me.  

I guess my only question is, what does it mean for someone like AT& T?  

Yeah, so if you look at what AT& T is doing with their core it doesn't affect that.

So again, the focus is really on infrastructure and in moving away from applications. And that's what these acquisitions entailed. They entail, some 5G core, but it's really the application layer. So I don't really think it affects anything that AT& T is going to do.

Certainly they made the announcement that they were moving their core to Azure, but this is really focused on Azure for operators and the application layer. And I, I'm not surprised because. It's a pretty competitive space. And in many regards, what Microsoft was trying to do was competitive with the ecosystem.

So it's probably, long term, a better strategy for them. But my goodness, man, the billion plus dollars they spent on those acquisitions. There's probably going to be a fire sale of those assets and they'll recover some of that money. But but yeah, it's just, it's an interesting sort of change of direction there,  but hey, let's go to your first topic.

You want to talk about orange and what they're doing to support the Olympics with a private 5G network?  

Yes, so  they, they are just the large, I think they're the largest carrier in France.  I use them when I'm in France. And basically they are standing up a private 5G network so that different broadcasters and  device OEMs will be able to do like these new use cases for 5G.

So for example Samsung will be deploying 200 Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphones on 85 vessels. To be able to show the different perspectives of different athletes and be able to cut in and out of different boats that are going down the River Seine. They will also use those smartphones to capture HDR footage of the ceremony, which will then be streamed over Oranje's 5G network.

And that they will, it will be a private network that's entirely separate from the commercial network. And that the contract that orange has with the Olympics will cover 120 venues including the athlete training grounds. It's quite clear that orange is the lead partner for a lot of this, but they're also pitching their network for broadcasters to use it while they're, filming in the field during the Olympics.

We have yet to find out what that will look like. In the end result but it will be interesting to see how that final product will be delivered when we only see it during the Olympics, but know that if you have a weird camera angle, you've never seen this probably from a smartphone from Samsung. 

That's being broadcast. To the world. But yeah, it's an exciting time. I think we're going to only see more and more of these things starting to manifest themselves as we get closer to the Olympics. And yeah, it will be exciting to see what new technologies are announced. Camera companies are running around announcing new cameras for the Olympics.

And it seems like we're going to see more 5G technology announcements as well.  

I think it's a great showcase for, what 5G can do. And, you and I have talked about lots of other sort of sports venue related use cases on our podcast. And, most recently, what T Mobile has been doing with the professional golfers association, supporting some of the tournaments there.

And I'm just curious because I didn't catch the details on this, but you mentioned, orange, providing access to this private network for broadcast. Are they, and, and obviously what you described. In the vessels and that sort of thing, really it's a great kind of promotion for what orange what their capabilities are.

But are they monetizing access for broadcasters to the, to use the network 

or 

do, 

There, it seems like it's more that they are enabling athletes and para athletes with.  free service and devices from Samsung. So it's I think it's going to be much more like user generated content as opposed to broadcasters.

But I have a feeling that broadcasters are also being offered some private packages, but I don't think we have any visibility to what those look like and what their costs. But I have a feeling that there are some broadcasters that are interested in  taking advantage of this network because it's  a foreign country and, they're not necessarily equipped  to work in those 

networks  for sure.

Yeah, the whole notion of crowdsource journalism, that was 1 of the, early. Identified use cases for 5G. So that's coming into play here when you talk about enabling the athletes to have these devices operate on the network and capture interesting, like you said video and camera angles and that sort of thing.

So that's super cool. Hey, let's go to my second topic, and I want to talk about the formation of the Global Telco AI Alliance, and it's a joint venture that's composed of SingTel, Deutsche Telekom,  SK Telecom, and SoftBank. And so what the initiative is to tailor generative AI applications for mobile operators.

And this is an area that I plan to write about, likely on Forbes in the coming weeks and months. But What's really interesting is that they are focused on developing multilingual, large language models that are specifically focused. On telco workloads, and it could be quite interesting, initially the applications that I've seen for generative AI within telco has been around call center support and that sort of thing.

This is pretty new stuff. And so it's too early to estimate what's going to flow out of it. But I think it's great. They're pulling together mobile operators that are leaders. With respect to, to use case, especially SK Telecom and South Korea we've talked a lot about how innovative they've been in focusing on these cases with 5G for both business.

And it's been a lot of consumer, but I think this is great. And I think we're going to start to see more alliances. Obviously this is very focused on. With Singtel in Singapore and into Wichita telecom and others and the European, part of the world, but I would expect that we're going to see other collaborations come together within North America and other parts of the world.

But don't know if you caught this news and if you have any thoughts before we go to your 2nd topic,  

I think this is going to be a long thing long term thing. Like you said. I also think it's going to enable operators to maybe work together to coalesce around specific models and coalesce around, certain expectations so that they can help vendors to better provide  services and equipment that match their needs.

Obviously all operators are going to be the same, but maybe they can hone in a little better and maybe offer telco specific offerings for GenAI. That they can actually address multiple customers with, because I think one of the challenges is if you try to specialize across verticals too much, then it becomes too much of a challenge.

But if telco, operators and other vendors in the space coalesce around specific needs, then I think it can better address. So I think that's the net positive of this being. Created 

yeah, I totally agree with you. It's going to be focused on outcome and the other challenge and I'm just reading in between the lines here.

But 1 of the other really big challenges I see with applying generative AI and to telco workloads. Is around security when you think about the number of devices that are going to be involved. It's a massive attack surface and and and there's a lot of focus right now on securing a, I'm actually working with Intel on a paper.

We're about to kick that off. But  when you take it to a mobile network, it becomes infinitely.  More challenging. You still have the same challenges with traditional, cloud scale out and that sort of thing. But it'll be interesting to see what gets focused on from a security standpoint here.

But. Let's go to your second topic. You want to talk about T Mobile and I did catch this news. I didn't dig into it. So I'm looking forward to getting your take on it, but they've won a pretty large contract, the Spiral 4 contract, and this is about, 5G, private 5G support for  CellGP that I think you've spoken about in New York and also the Women's PGA Championship. 

Yeah, so these are three different things. The Spyro 4 thing is actually I looked into it. It was already announced months ago. And a bunch of different operators won contracts, including Verizon and AT& T. So this was T Mobile kind of just confirming that they won their portion of the contract. And my understanding, when I looked into it, is The first year of the contract is guaranteed and then it's nine years of renewals.

So it's a 10 year contract. And basically if they get to, if they deliver in a satisfactory manner, they win the rest of the contract. So I have a feeling that we won't see all of them continue to hold this contract over 10 years. But they've all won the contract and now it's their job to keep it.

So that's Spiral 4. It's really just about delivering connectivity. To the Department of Defense, specifically, I think it's Army, Navy, and a couple other branches but it's like very much about just like giving people cellular connectivity on their devices. And then the sale GP thing in New York I looked into that basically it's a private 5G network that will allow them to stream video from the catamarans themselves.

underneath so you can get live video coming from the catamaran.  And that's something that has already been a thing in SailGP but this will probably be much higher quality video and it will be real time as opposed to maybe slightly delayed. And then the women's PGA championship is also happening.

And that's going to be, I think that's up in the Seattle area. And that's right in T Mobile's backyard. I think they're based in Bellevue. And I believe this will be very similar to what the, what they did with the PGA men's tournament and basically helping them, build infrastructure, do broadcast, get rid of cables.

And just to enable a smoother, better experience for everyone involved. And yeah, this is T Mobile is getting their their enterprise, business  spinning up. Because this is all enterprise and commercial and not consumer at all. And it's helping them grow as a provider of services and technology.

That are 5g based. And yeah it's really cool to see that they're, expanding outward and, working on  the media side and helping with, different sports leagues and Salem GP championship. So it's really exciting. And I hope to see more of this.  

Yeah, they are. You're absolutely right.

Boy, just in the last, I would say, 18 months, we've seen a bevy of announcements from T Mobile for business and they are really finally catching up with AT& T and Verizon from a business service perspective. And then certainly, it seems we talk about them quite often attached to not only the PGA men's and women's championship and, in different tournaments, but also a number of, other sporting, support, venue support like a major league baseball and that sort of thing.

So it seems to me that they're really making a name for themselves and sports. And Verizon has done that for quite some time, especially initially with the fact that they were, focused on building out their 5G millimeter wave, which is very appropriate for sports venues. But, yeah, they T Mobile for businesses definitely come a long way and it's fun to see all the focus here, especially in sports because you and I are big sports fanatics, but.

Let me let me hit my 3rd and final topic. And I thought this was a pretty interesting use case. It was published on RCR wireless or a friend, Sean Kenny and his team, but this is around Telia and in Sweden, they're using drones for 5G enabled remote forestry machine control. And so basically, we've talked about this before they're able to.

Basically, bring a portable mobile base station into a very rural area. And this is in the middle of Sweden, where they're engaged in forestry operations and. Establishing that base station in a drone, they're able to do remote control of machinery trucks and that sort of thing. 5G has been a poster child use case for, for mining.

And so it's very dangerous operation and forestry is equally dangerous as well. When you think about these massive trees that they're harvesting and loading on, trucks and that sort of thing. I just thought it was a cool use case, really points to the power of 5G with respect to.

That ultra low latency that you need for that tactile control. Since this is a remote control operation, it's not autonomous. It's remotely controlled and you can't have any lag time or any jitter and that sort of thing. And, I'm reading between the lines on this 1 as well, but I would assume.

That there are other applications like, using computer vision and that sort of thing. So just a really cool 5G's case. I wanted to throw out there. Don't know if you caught it or not, but what do you think? 

Cool. I did not catch it, but I agree. It's cool. I think the other thing that would be cool is if they if they used robotic arms, come prepared with robotic gloves. 

To do the forestry, so you can just have a robot go  and drop it. Yeah, the reason why I bring that up actually is because when I was at augmented world expo this week, I tried out the latest gloves from haptics and they said that their new newest application. for the gloves is not training of humans with these gloves, which is their main business.

But now they're using those gloves to train robots with human inputs. So they can train robot models, AI models to grab things based on the input of the gloves that they were wearing. I don't have the gloves on me, but I'm acting like I do. And there's pictures of social media and some videos I posted of me using those gloves.

But yeah, AWE was really cool. And there were some 5g use cases as well. There's a company called.  Sightful who has a laptop called the space top, which is a laptop key deck with a pair of glasses as your display. And that comes standard with 5G connectivity because they believe that 5G is a necessary. 

Connectivity choice for making this a useful portable ar pc. So that was the one 5G connecting. Also, there was a really cool panel for, with the guys from Digi Lens and Booz Allen. Talking about XR and 5G and they went actually into the 5G standard and talked about certain things that they're using to make some of their their case studies possible.

I will be writing about that on Forbes in more detail. But that's my thoughts. I weaseled my way in with the 

No, I'm glad you shared that gratuitous opportunity for you to. To share your experience there and wow, those are some really practical mixed reality, applications and use cases.

I think we're going to see more and, the power of 5G, I think, is going to be instrumental in powering a lot of that, especially in remote scenarios, but let's set your 3rd and final topic and you want to talk about Samsung and media tech and testing red cap on V ran I did catch this news as well, but I'm looking forward to hearing your insights.

Yes, so this was a really cool one because Samsung obviously has the infrastructure side, MediaTek has the device side. They both have, they want to test these red cap features, and this was using Samsung's VRAM 3. 0 software. on O RAN compliant radios and MediaTek's REDCap modem on its M60. The two features that they were testing on the V RAN network over O RAN or Open RAN were paging early indication and extended discontinuous reception.

And they're both about power saving features. So it's really about maximizing the efficiency of REDCap. Which is its number one, I think capability. And it actually is considered a milestone by Samsung along their 5g red cap journey as energy saving features that will help get them to commercial viability availability which is planned for the second half of 2024.

Which means that we will likely have commercial deployments. Of 5G Red Cap coming very soon which is exciting because, the modems are already out there. And it seems like from the conversations I've had, and you were present at this too, at the Media Tech Summit it's most likely going to be, the end of 24, early 25, when we'll really start seeing Red Cap, especially in IoT applications, start to take off. 

I think this is, pretty awesome stuff. It demonstrates Samsung's leadership with the ran number 1 and the applications are going to be quite interesting as they roll out. But. What's also going to be really interesting is that, given the power envelope and given. The cost of these red cap sensors.

You're going to start seeing this appear in tennis shoes and in clothing and, the applications, I think, are going to be really interesting. Don't you think? 

Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure. Tennis shoes is I would go that far.  That soccer 

balls and baseballs and yeah, 

I think those will happen with time.

I think the most interesting thing will most likely be logistics. And I think also just connecting a lot of devices that, couldn't, for power reasons, couldn't do it. Or, just it wasn't the right time or maybe even upgrading existing 4G infrastructure. I'm excited just to see where we start to see.

Connectivity and where we didn't have it before. 

Yeah, for sure. Just given the form factor, like you said, the low power requirement. So maybe not 10 issues, but I think we're going to see some pretty cool applications of it. Hey, my friend, it was another great week. Another great podcast.

You and I are both off the road for a while. 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 for a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, Please reach out to us on social media. Will is at Willtown Tech and I'm at Armshell SOG.

We hope you have a great weekend, and please tune in again next week, and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.