Welcome to episode 200 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 again this week is fellow analyst Anshel Sag. Let's get started with my first topic and I want to talk about AWS. And so Newsbroke, this was actually a light reading article from our friend Ian Morris, who is famous for his sensational subject lines, but he writes about AWS and their lawsuit that they have filed against Nokia over telco cloud intellectual property. And so this is really interesting. So last year, Nokia got out of the cloud platform business. In lieu of focusing on network virtualized services and that sort of thing, I'm going to talk a little bit more about what they're doing around their network as a code is my third topic, but at a high level it's really awkward because now that Nokia has gotten out of just delivering the platform level stuff, they've actually partnered with AWS in Germany to deliver a lot of this. But what AWS is claiming is that Nokia has infringed. On a lot of its intellectual property with respect to when Nokia was taking basically a telco cloud platform to market and again, this is very interesting. He said, she said is fired filed in Delaware court, which tends to be favorable for companies that are incorporated in the United States. And Again, the platform that Nokia had been previously taken to market was something they called CBS, which was Nokia container services. And so it's extremely interesting what's going on here and Nokia has. Not really commented other than it's reviewing the the accusations by AWS and it will be, following up in court. It, since then, since Nokia got out of the cloud platform business, they have divested a lot of those assets to Red Hat. And so it's interesting because, I think if. Nokia was still operating its cloud platform. There'd be a lot more meat on the bone here for AWS to go after. But, they transitioned a lot of this technology. And so anyway, I don't know if you caught the news, but it's quite interesting and it will be, it will be very interesting to see how this all turns out. So AWS is the leader, with respect to what they're doing with telco cloud and, what they do with 5g, but what do you think? I did not catch this news, actually. I find it interesting because I feel like AWS is a little bit newer to telco than Nokia is. So I'm curious about how this IP ended up in AWS's hands and wasn't something that Nokia had already created. So I am curious to see, who really is, the originator of this IP and whether or not there is any overlap. I can't say I know enough details to say yes or no but I have a feeling that, most of these things like they usually do will settle out of court. But it could go to court and then, more details will come out. But most likely both companies don't want that to happen. So we'll probably see a settlement. But yeah, the truth is that, for telco cloud, there, there is a lot of competition. I can see why, AWS would try to protect that. Yeah, it's interesting. Ian is quite funny. He's based in the UK. So he's got that dry humor on that side of the pond. And at 1 point in the, in his article, he talks about, hey, how AWS believes that they invented the Internet 20 years ago, or whatever, as actually the Internet was, it's probably, 25 plus years ago, but yeah it'll be super interesting to see what happens. I tend to agree with you that this deal will probably get settled out of court. And and both companies will move on because their partner, for example, in Germany. So interesting. Hey, let's go to your first topic. And there are a slew of earnings that have that have come out. And so you want to cover some of the top ones, including ARM, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, and T Mobile. Yeah. This has been a very earnings heavy week arm reported good earnings, but a outlook that was just in line with projections. So people weren't happy and their stock was down Qualcomm beat raised. So their stock like went through the roof. They were just, they showed that their automotive business Was up like 81%. Wow. And, but they guided that one's that, that record quarter is gonna be flat for the next quarter, but that's still like huge record for, year on year. And then on top of that they showed double digit growth in smartphones, which is crazy 'cause like it's pretty much been a solid single digit business for a while. . So having double digit growth is huge. And then they're, they were also guided up on their iot business because that incorporates their PC business. But also IOT is rebounding from its doldrums. So they, they look pretty good, even though Apple says that they're going to potentially drop them as a modus. Apple's not saying the rumors are saying Apple will drop. Yeah. We talked about that last week. What do you think is driving the double digit growth for Qualcomm on the smartphone? China has been weak for them for a while. And rebounding in China, I think will be a factor. I didn't listen to the call yesterday because I was busy all day. Okay. Going to the game and doing some reporting for game time tech. So I didn't have a chance to the call, but I'm like fairly confident that it's China because all the other markets have been doing well for them except for China. China is a big market for Qualcomm and when things go well in China, things go well for Qualcomm. AMD reported earnings as well. They showed huge data center growth. Huge AMD Instinct GPU sales for data center client is now profitable. And their gaming business took a hit cause the console cycle is old now, but they're still profitable there as well. It's a pretty low margin business. But it's a, but it's a big revenue driver for them, right? It was because they do custom, it's not anymore. It went from 0. 6 billion to 600 million. Oh shit. Yeah. Okay. Like crater. So it was not a bright spot for sure. And then Intel just reported earnings, which were not great for them. They just announced another layoff, 15%. The weird part is their core business, which is consumer is actually just fine. I wouldn't say it's like doing great, but it's not doing horribly. It's just data center and networking are not doing great. Like high margin businesses for them are supposed to be, and they're not. That's that. And then T Mobile also reported earnings. And they said that they're now over 100 million postpades. It's 777 K net postpaid ads, which is huge. And they're basically just trucking along growing at a rate that's, unexpected, they're continuing to grow at 4%, even though they're colossal now. And their total sales were up 3% to 19. 8 billion. And adjusted earnings were 9 percent or 8. 1 billion. And then 50, their free cashflow rocketed 54 percent to 4. 4 billion. And they are, they're machine. And it really comes down to their, they have a solid 5g network. And people are recognizing that. And this is the, their formula for the merger that they had with Sprint. And this is proving out that they their strategy was right. We also know that they're looking into fiber stuff now. So yeah, they're looking for growth opportunities, but also like we said in the last podcast, also an infrastructure opportunity, a copycat of what AT& T has done with their 5G network, but AT& T's network and Spectrum hasn't really been as. Strong as T-Mobile's. And if you look at the data T-Mobile's network is still much faster than at t's and Verizon's. . Hey, those are all great insights. I think the only thing that I would add to that is when you look at what the company has also done on the enterprise and government side with T-Mobile for business. They have really over the last couple of years and Cali field who runs tfb had posted some things on linkedin today. And I provided some insights as well, but they've really done a masterful job of. Moving, away from just focusing on connectivity and Sam's. And really build some compelling enterprise and government solutions with SASE and SD WAN with security, TIOT, and then leaning into their FWA footprint and a lot of the FWA stuff and business is access, but. They've really built over the last two years, some very meaningful enterprise services to allow them to better compete with the likes of AT& T and Verizon. And to your point, the investment that they've made in their 5g deployment and Hey, let's you and I take another victory lap, again, for probably the 10th or 12th time, a lot of yeah, there were a lot of folks in the industry many years ago when that deal was going through. Regulatory approval that didn't think it was going to come together. They didn't think it was going to be accretive. And you and I were out there because we do spend time with the company and we understand fundamentally the nature of what they had in that 2. 5 gigahertz spectrum with Sprint, but then they've taken that and they built compelling services on top of that. It's no surprise to see, this banner. Quarterly performance from the company but, hey, that's a great segue to my 2nd topic and I want to talk about T Mobile, but a little bit. Different. It's it's really related to what they've been doing with rural, and we've talked about this on numerous podcasts. T Mobile has really doubled down and focused on rural connectivity, and that makes a lot of sense. Given there isn't consistent fiber availability in many rural towns, it's chicken and egg. We still struggle with that east of Austin and Bastrop where I've been living now for the past year. We still don't have the ability to get fiber from AT& T or anyone. But but what they're doing now, and this sort of to accentuate their 5G for all campaign, and I love this because I'm Texan. I live in Texas. I'm native to the Austin area, but they're doing something around high school football and they're calling it the Friday night 5G lights. And so they're sponsoring a contest. The grand prize is 2Million dollars for a complete high school football field makeover and this includes. A digital scoreboard the latest 5G kind of activity to support all the activations and that sort of thing that goes along with watching football. But in addition to the 2Million dollar top prize, they're awarding 25, 000 dollars to 16 finalists and then they're also giving 5, 000 dollars to 300 high schools throughout the competition here and it's great. 1 of the executives and reading the press release grew up in West Texas. And if you're not familiar with the TV show, Friday Night Lights, it it follows a fictional high school football coach in West Texas. There was a movie Friday Night Lights with Billy Bob Thornton. I will say the TV show was filmed in Mostly around Austin, Texas. So while they were filming, it was fun to see that. But I just love it. Here's another innovative way that T Mobile is leaning in to rural connectivity and focusing on something. In many small towns in Texas, Friday night football. That is the big deal of the week. Everyone looks forward to it. It brings everyone together. People, they treat it like some people treat professional and college sports. They tailgate, they get together, they pot luck. And just another brilliant example of the T Mobile magenta marketing engine really focusing on something that can be very impactful in rural America. And then, and in Texas it's very appropriate, but they they talk about this is nationwide. It's just not Texas. And they provide some examples of schools that they've worked with currently and in the past. And I just, again, I just think it's a brilliant idea. And as you and I spend time with with other analysts on our team. With game time tech, and I did something with that with Mel and with Robert last week around the Olympics. It's super compelling and it's super relevant. So what do you think about all this? I know that you're a big baseball fan, but are you a big football fan too? I like football, but I think the NFL was a very poorly run organization. Oh dude, don't even get me started about Gouda. I also think college football is equally dysfunctional, but Oh dude, no, I love college football. Yeah, sorry. I'm actually a huge hater of Most collegiate sports, especially football because resource suck from everything else and too many universities pour way too much money into football programs that either lose money or pull money away from literally everything else. Not my Texas. Yeah, not my college has become way too much of a. Entertainment venue rather than a educational institution and funded, funneled into research and other things like, for example, at UCSD, where, you know they pull in more money through their research and development on biotech and in, and in actual software engineering and hardware engineering that. And their sports ever could, or any sport ever could, so I'm a huge proponent of. Of sports, and I think they're good for people, but, I think the scholarships and the whole NIL thing, it's just a little out of hand. It's become, it's becoming, it's becoming what it really already was just it's less, hidden, all of those universities that, are paying, they're students under the table until now. Yeah, so I, I just, I hate it. I hate all of that. At least the NFL is paying people. Out in the open and now the NIL money is more open than that. Yeah you opened a can of worms there. But in general, this is good for, promoting high school football. I just think that there's way too many people who, go into these sports thinking that they're going to make it. And if you look at the number of people who have made it into professional sports, that's so small that it's like a really bad, false dream that, that, that might, pull people's attention away from. And education, yeah, hey, listen, we're on a tangent here, but, I agree. I think swung the to the opposite end of the spectrum. Oh, it's a huge overcorrection. Yeah, it's a huge overcorrection, and student athlete should be able to be rewarded on their likeness and autographs and that sort of thing. But I agree. I think. I think at some point, there'll be universities treat them as cash cows, right? It's a, ultimately, it's a lot about the money and I hate that because it should be about education. But nevertheless it's a good charitable thing that they're doing. And, it's not called collegiate level. So it's definitely more, students are held a little bit more stringently at high school level for education. I know I have a lot of friends who played football in high school that never get one anywhere beyond that, but some did, some went to college, some almost made it down and fell. Yeah, it's just interesting. Man I've known you, my friend for almost eight years and I had no idea. But our viewers and listeners they discovered. You opened the wrong can. With that, let's get back on the 5G topic track and you want to talk about Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 4S Gen 2 and what it could do for the value smartphone space. Yeah, so this is actually Qualcomm's big push. Into getting five G to a much broader audience. Potentially, they say up to 2. 8 billion smartphone users in select regions. Out of that 2. 8 billion, probably a billion come from Africa. A significant chunk is Africa being behind on 5G. But really what this comes down to is it's a platform that has 5G connectivity. It has support for 90 FPS displays, quick charge for and it has one gigabit per second download speeds and wifi five. So this is a real true 5g diploma, platform Xiaomi and other brands are already talking about using this in their devices, and they're expecting to get seven times faster than LTE in the same price tier. So this is about a hundred dollar price tier or lower. And that's just a huge accessibility thing. And you think about India, Africa, Latin, a lot of these places, either Don't have 5g or they have way more 4g than they have 5g And getting these more affordable devices in people's hands, ultimately drive people to move towards standalone. And once you get more standalone users in the billions, you start, having much better economies of scale to deploy that 5g standalone network, which then creates a new applications with them, create another refresh cycle for users to want to get newer, better devices to take advantage of those new applications, but we don't have those yet because we've never had that. Standalone, and that's gonna be my next topic. We'll ping pong back to that after you, your third topic. But it's a very simple launch. It could go under the radar for a lot of people. But I actually think it's a lot bigger and more relevant than people realize. Hey, let me ask you this question. Hey, it's great. It's, it represents an addressable market for Qualcomm. But is this also a response to what MediaTek's been doing in the value space? Oh, absolutely. I think when you look at what MediaTek does like with their 7300 series they have really good products there. MediaTek has a very broad portfolio. And the truth is that this is much more of MediaTek's You know, area in terms of expertise with platforms. If you look at like their Dimensity 5g family it goes all the way down to the 9, 000 series, the 8, 000 series, 7, 000 series. And 6, 000 series. So you could, you can have a 60, 20, that's still 5g. I don't know what the price tier is for that, but. It's pretty low. But the reality is a lot of their chips end up when people go really low on a media tech, they drop 5g. I think right now, if you look at what they offer, the demensity 60, 20, I think is what it is. That's like the lowest that you probably would find in terms of price tier that would be more competitive with this, but But even then, it's an older chip. So I think it would be interesting to see how they compete with one another and what devices end up picking it up. But yeah, I think that, it will be good. It's a net positive for the world when 5G devices become more affordable. But like the devices I'm seeing with this MediaTek 6020 they're still over a hundred bucks. This might be the platform that does it but I have a feeling MediaTek will probably have a response to this. Yeah, no, I agree with you, especially, in developing parts of the world affordability on the handset side is crucial, right? It's chicken and egg. Infrastructure goes hand in hand with within devices. So I think this is a good thing. I totally agree with you on that. Hey, let me hit my 3rd topic and I want to talk about Nokia and they recently Had a new announcement tied to its network as a code platform. So if you're not familiar with network as a code from Nokia, it is. Yeah, it is the equivalent of what Erickson is trying to do with Vonage and you and I have talked about Vonage and, the impairment write downs that have basically zeroed out, that 6 billion plus investment. I speculated that I think one of, one of the reasons for that is that, Ericsson was probably a little further out in front than the market was with this, this involves programmability and publishing SDKs and APIs to provide. Access to the network layer so that developers can speed applications that take advantage of things like 5G's ultra low latency and throughput and device support and that sort of thing. So Nokia obviously has their same platform and what they announced was a deal with a digital services company called and I'm going to, I'm going to butcher it. Acolyte and where this company is focused initially is on healthcare use cases with expansion to the utility sector. This is really and so Nokia has been at this for quite some time. They've developed an API ecosystem. They have their platform deployed with 17 operators and ecosystem partners across Europe, North and South America and Asia. The timing on this announcement is interesting because I've spoken to Nokia recently about its network as a code platform. And I'll actually be writing a research note on the subject and really My, my focus will be to talk about what's the value and I've already addressed that with programmability and certainly, Look at the work that Ericsson is doing with AT& T, because AT& T wants to make its network more programmable, not only to drive, kind of new services, but also to do things like with self healing and, higher levels of resilience and insurance and that sort of thing. But but I, this is something that I haven't really written about. And and so stay tuned. My plan is to publish this in the next couple of weeks. But it's really going to focus on, the value why an open approach is important. Why competition, even though we've seen some stumbles from Ericsson why competition could actually revitalize this whole notion of programmable networking and APIs. And then obviously I'm going to, I'm going to spend a little bit of time and highlight what Nokia is doing and double click into that. But but I'd share that with you that this was something that was written up on mobile world live. Any thoughts there before we go hit your 3rd and final? Nope. I don't have anything to add. All right, cool. I guess I did a good job covering that. We didn't get into the dissertation about football on that 1. did we? Let's let you do your 3rd and, you like to talk about it. I think it's a great benchmark, but they published a global standalone 5G report and you want to talk about some of the findings from that. Yes, so there were some really interesting findings. They really highlighted. T Mobile and SK Telecom as the first 5G standalone networks that, Chinese operators in Jio and India also lead in terms of active 5G SA users that Europe is lagging. They also said that the UAE has really good download speed of almost 900 megabits per second. While Korea's at 730. So they're really flying and that's great. But they also said that in the U S there's not that much users actually using standalone. I think there was something like. They said almost a quarter are using standalone today which is not great. And that T Mobile does have the lead amongst U. S. carriers by a significant margin. And they said that Verizon has been slow, which is not a surprise. But that DISH is actually a notable SA operator. And that they expanded their coverage. Over the course of the last year and they even, talk about Brazil having, pretty good download speeds. And yeah, it's just been really interesting. There's, it's a very deep report. I'll definitely make sure to add that to our Twitter feed. But basically what it's showing is that, India is doing a great job so is China and, T Mobile is a bright spot in the U S. Yeah. But in general, there's a lot more improvement that can be made and that Asia Pacific is at the forefront of 5GSA launches. So I think there is room for improvement this year, and I think we will see things improve this year. But the reality is that there needs to be more 5GSA networks, which is what I was trying to lead to in my previous topic. There need to be more users that are supporting it on their devices. And then the operators need to, light it up. Obviously they also talked about how, a lot of essay networks that were already launched have had some of their speeds reduced due to. More users joining their networks and more applications taking advantage of it. But we said that some operators like T Mobile didn't see that because they kept adding spectrum. It's really interesting because. There's a lot of things going on. But the reality is that like they said, only 11 new 5g SA deployments happened in nine countries in 2023, which is really not great. So we need to see more momentum this year for 5g to continue to grow and improve its value to both consumers and operators. And. I don't know what else I have to say to get operators on board, but just it's very much a chicken and egg thing, but it's also like how does anyone expect anything to improve if they're not willing to spend on it for well, and this, The transition from non standalone to standalone has definitely been a long tail and at least in the U. S. I would expect that that 25 percent of American subscribers that the, if not the majority would be T Mobile AT& T continues to roll it out. I think Verizon's been in the 3rd position and it's interesting to hear about dish, but their subscribership is. Minuscule, compared to the big 3. Yeah, and then you got, then you got the Fandango with us cellular and T Mobile and so it just. It just takes that long tail out even longer from my perspective, but I've got 1 more question for you on your topic. So T Mobile saying that they're adding spectrum so that they've got the capacity and it doesn't wreck performance. But, how much of the, how much of that could be addressed with things like carrier aggregation and that sort of thing from your standpoint. I think carrier aggregation is fundamental to making it possible because you can't really add new bands without carrier aggregation. Yeah, I think there's a cap on how many carriers you can aggregate and whether or not a carrier is worth aggregating. If you don't have enough spectrum. There is a slight penalty to do that. But I think carrier aggregation would, these fees wouldn't be possible about carrier aggregation, right? She has a T Mobile. You have to aggregate the low band with the mid band to make them better. Yeah Yeah, I guess I was more or less. Angling out, can, can you double down or triple down? Because it's already happening, but I'm just wondering what's the lift for, for mobile network operators to, to add more aggregation on their networks. It really just comes down to having the spectrum, if you don't have the spectrum, then there's no reason to do the aggregation. And that's why. You see all of these carriers, all of them are saying we don't have enough spectrum, right? They're all saying we want more spectrum. And it's because, I think that rightly believe that as people start using 5G more, there will be more demand. And then in the networks will become more congested and they'll need more spectrum to alleviate that. I get why they are the way they are. But I also think that, maybe we should get 5G core deployed before we try and add more spectrum. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And let's not do this. for 6g so Anyway, but it won't be there won't be a non standalone in 6g. So that's going to solve most of the problem So is that official from the chasm now? All right Thank the lord. They learned I didn't know that so you're our Resident expert that likes to read through all of these release notes. And yeah, there is no non standalone. Beautiful. Hey, my friend, it was fun. I did enjoy the high school college football pro football conversation. So we went a little off topic, but why don't you take us home? Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners enjoyed this week's topics. If anyone would like to provide insights on a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will's at Willtown Tech and I'm at Anshel Sag. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.