Welcome to episode 207 of the GT 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 Tradogy.
I'm Will Townsend,
and joining me again this week is fellow analyst Anshul Sag.
Hey buddy, you're pretty happy, right?
The Padres crushed it last night.
Yeah, not complaining, but job's not done yet.
They come home tomorrow, play two games,
and if they win both, the series is over.
The Dodgers are a good team,
and they just gotta win out.
They do, and unfortunately,
my Astros got swept out of it by the Tigers.
Ah!
Oh, we gotta give some other players and teams a chance.
It's the first time in a very long time
that neither of the World Series teams
have made it through that round of the playoffs.
Crazy.
Let's jump into it.
I wanna hit my first topic,
and boy, this came as quite a surprise last week
when you and I saw the news break,
but it's official.
Chris Sambar, that has been the network president for AT&T,
is departing the company,
and that's after over 20 years with AT&T,
and this came as quite a surprise.
In fact, Chris was on my podcast with Abel,
as we talked about AT&T and AST Space Mobile's collaboration.
What do you say?
There haven't been a lot of details.
There's not really been anything officially stated by the company.
Folks like Sean Kinney at RCR Wireless and Mike Dana at Light Reading
were quick to break the news.
There was apparently a leaked memo that spoke to this,
but it is interesting.
Now, running a network as expansive as AT&T's
doesn't come without challenges.
There have been network outages,
but I'm gonna talk about one that affected Verizon recently as well,
and there've been some security issues as well,
but I don't think those were the reasons why Chris is leaving.
Again, it's a challenging position.
There are a lot of moving parts there,
but if you were to speculate, what do you think?
I've heard some inside baseball,
but I don't know if I'm going to serially give it credibility,
but I have a feeling it might have just been
a good old-fashioned management disagreement.
Yeah, Chris had a very long run T.
It's gonna be really interesting to see where he lands.
There is a lot of speculation.
Could he land at AST Space Mobile?
I will say that I've been around both Chris and Abel.
They have mutual respect for one another.
Both companies have accomplished quite a lot
just to get to this point with AST Space Mobile
launching its first five commercial low-Earth orbit satellites,
but I don't think we're gonna see Chris go off into the sunset.
I think he's gonna land into something pretty amazing.
He's a smart guy. I've gotten to know him personally.
I've enjoyed working with him while he spent AT&T,
and I think the next chapter will be written there.
But with that, let's go to your first topic,
and I caught this news as well that SpaceX and T-Mobile
have gotten emergency authorization to use direct-to-sale
in North Carolina to support all of the disaster recovery efforts.
Yes, so this is the temporary emergency authorization,
and basically it's the direct-to-sale technology
that they've been working on for quite some time.
This is specific to T-Mobile customers in North Carolina,
so this is not available to just anybody and not just anywhere.
This is very much about enabling basic SMS
in places where there's no cell coverage.
So it's really just about being able to communicate with people
and send messages back and forth. This is not some kind of
new novel capability that hasn't existed before.
It's just enabling something that was in development
and is still in development, but to help save lives.
Yeah, it's not even in production.
Yeah.
The link is still going through its test phase.
But the FCC was the one who made this authorization.
This is like a test in flight, is the way I would call it,
and it's not even in production.
This is the way I would call it, and I think that right now,
there's a lot of opposition to what T-Mobile and Starlink are doing.
Supposedly, there's a lot of interference, but...
Yeah, yeah.
We don't know the details of that yet,
and hopefully the FCC will take care of that.
But for right now, being able to save lives is most important,
and helping recover connectivity for people who don't have it
and might not have it for a while.
So I have a feeling this will be very temporary,
but there's also a chance that it can, down the road,
be approved for more use.
This was approved less than 12 hours, or less than 24 hours ago.
This is still very new, and it will be interesting to see
what that looks like down the road,
and whether this will eventually just be transitioned to a real license,
or if they'll have to get a full license for the whole country, etc., etc.
But it is a good development, and it's a net positive for this emergency.
I think so as well.
And the concerns around contention are not unwarranted.
But given that it's focused on North Carolina,
I would think that it would be manageable.
And this should be a great test of what Starlink is trying to support,
given it's still in that test phase.
But it'll be interesting to hear back from you a week from now
to see if this played a factor in helping first responders.
But I agree with you. I think, Matt, it's a positive thing for sure.
Hey, let me get to my second topic, and I want to talk about Nokia and NTT.
They have NTT data in particular, and they have formally partnered on private 5G.
This is new because the companies have worked together somewhat loosely in the past,
but this represents a formal solidification of a partnership.
NTT data has traditionally used Cisco as an example for the city of Las Vegas
and a lot of the smart city deployment activity and Solona.
So NTT is an investor in Lodes, a soup to nuts, private cellular solution in a box.
We've spoken about Solona on previous podcasts as well.
But I also had an opportunity to recently speak to the city of Brownsville and that CIO CTO.
Last week, ahead of this announcement, so I was pre-wired on this,
and he talked about how they are working with NTT on initially new access use cases
in parts of the city that have been unconnected.
And if you're not familiar with Brownsville, it is very close to the Texas Mexico border,
so it presents some very unique challenges.
They've also been deploying computer vision in public safety type E security,
public safety type E cases as well.
But those are just the beachheads and there are plans for the city of Brownsville to expand
what they're doing with NTT and Nokia.
And I think it's a great partnership.
We've talked about Nokia many times.
They have a very strong private LTE and 5G business and NTT data.
They are experts in integration.
So I think this is a great partnership.
I don't think it's necessarily going to replace what NTT continues to do with the likes of
Solona and Cisco.
I think having multiple partners is a good thing.
It provides flexibility to fit a myriad of different use cases.
So I don't know if you caught the news, but any thoughts?
I did not catch this news, but I would say that I really thought that there were
a lot of partnerships that Nokia has when it comes to private 5G.
And I feel like they're just picking the right companies to work with based on their expertise.
I think NTT data is definitely one of them.
I know you've worked really close with NTT data.
I don't really know them as well as you do, but I just think that there's a lot of companies
out there that are doing a lot of these private 5G consulting engagements.
And some companies are figuring out that private 5G is a better fit for them than just using
Wi-Fi.
So I think this is going to be a slow evolution.
I think it's a slower evolution than I think a lot of people would have liked.
And we've talked about that before, but I just think that because this is such a pivotal
part of running so many different companies, businesses, they can't just switch everything
over overnight.
And I think it's just going to be a slow roll, almost a freight train.
And I just think eventually it will be an unstoppable force.
And private 5G will probably take on a different name, but it will probably still be, if not
the primary connectivity technology, it will be the backup for many companies.
Yeah.
It's just so deterministic.
And when you look at smart city use cases where you have large expanses, the city of
Brownsville was telling me about what they're doing to use computer vision to ensure safety
along a lot of trails and parks that border the Mexico border.
And again, it provides the propagation and the latency profile and throughput profile
that's required over larger expanses and distances outdoors, where densifying with access
points can be difficult.
It can be problematic.
Where do you put them?
It's easy to put devices on traffic lights and that sort of thing.
And that's another thing the city of Brownsville talked to me about smart traffic signaling
of private 5G as well, but I think there are a myriad of use cases.
And again, this demonstrates that there are multiple different parties and multiple different
routes to market to get to private.
You're also seeing companies like Extinet that are basically managed service providers
that are taking over venue deployments like at Circuit of the Americas, which is another
use case that I've talked about and written about on prior podcasts and on Forbes as well.
But I think it's all good. It's been long tail.
We've talked about that for quite some time, but I think this is a step.
This is definitely a step in the right direction.
But with that, let's go to your second topic.
And I did catch this news.
So KT and KT Sat are claiming that they're the world's first with NTN technology.
What does that mean?
There's a lot of focus and activity around non-terrestrial networks.
So they're the first ones to actually claim that they have successfully integrated their
commercial 5G network with a commercial satellite and actually connecting a geostationary satellite
with their 5G network using NTN.
So it's not like a simulated.
It's a real functioning connection.
They did work with Roden Schwartz.
I don't know what component of that was Roden Schwartz, because they don't actually say anything
about that.
But what it seems like is they were able to actually connect their ground network with an
actual satellite using NTN, as opposed to having it be a simulated satellite.
Other than that, it's just KT loves to be one of those world first carriers.
At least that's what I found.
And in general, I think that there's going to be a lot more carriers that actually want
to claim this first.
We'll see if anyone else says that first.
But in general, I think it's going to start to usher in the next generation of satellite
with NTN and delivering full capabilities on the satellite side as a component carrier.
To the 5G network.
Roden Schwartz, they're a test and measurement company.
They do a lot of the groundwork and helping operators design and deploy these next generation
networks.
So I wonder if there's some blueprinting goodness that's going to come out of this that can
allow what's been done here to be expanded in other parts of the world.
Was there any?
Yeah.
I didn't read too deeply into the release, but was there any reference to that?
Yeah.
So what they said is it was the Monggunghwa Satellite 6, which is known as Korea Sat-6,
located at an orbital altitude of 35,800 kilometers using a 5G NTN standard.
And they said it was the first time that 5G NTN was used for geostationary Earth orbit.
So maybe there's already been an LEO.
And this is the first time that 5G NTN has been used.
And this is for GEO.
And they also said that Roden Schwartz was a part of helping this happen, as was VIAVI
Solutions Korea.
So it's unclear what their role was, but it's clear that this is a Release 17.
It's a commercial satellite.
It's a commercial network.
And I think that's really what they're trying to talk about.
But truthfully, this isn't going to be like a regular commercial deployment for some time,
I believe.
And it seems like they want to talk about this almost more in a 6G capacity than in
a 5G capacity, probably because 6G is just a sexier word now.
But that's how I look at it.
It doesn't really feel like it has too much meat on it.
Yeah.
And it feels like to me, like the direction that 6G going is around AI enablement, right?
When you consider some of the recent announcements from NVIDIA and some of the partnerships
that they're putting together to do intelligent steering of RAM with artificial intelligence.
But yeah, it's all conjecture at this point and it's conjecture on the spectrum band and
that sort of thing as well.
But yeah, it's interesting stuff.
But hey, man, let me hit my third and final topic and I'm going to talk about Verizon.
There have been some kind of restructuring things going on there.
They have a new CTO that was recently announced.
This is a veteran, a 30 year veteran that's coming from Vodafone over to Verizon.
We've spoken to him before.
Yeah, we have.
And this is also on the heels of a reduction in force recently at Verizon where they've
laid off 5,000 employees.
Seems at a very deep level, the company is restructuring its overall operations.
Any insight into why they're bringing on a new CTO and what the RIP was all about?
My understanding is the layoff was about the company overall, which is, I think it was
the layoff that probably should have happened a while ago.
And then on the CTO side, honestly, I think it's really just, while they are ahead on
edge, I think they're behind on other things, right?
Like they should have been more ahead on standalone.
And I think their edge is useless without standalone.
And I think that's the problem is they invested in Edge early, but they're not
in Edge early.
I think we all agree on that, but they just can't utilize the edge without standalone
applications.
That's what I think.
That's a part of it.
Also, I just think their strategy was a little bit mistaken.
I don't know if that's the CTO's job, to be honest with you.
They pushed millimeter wave way too hard.
And I know that was what everybody had to work with initially, but I think it's...
That's the spectrum they had initially.
Sure, but everybody had that spectrum initially.
They didn't have to lean into millimeter wave.
They chose to lean into millimeter wave.
And when it was clear that strategy was not the right one, they doubled down.
And that was a mistake, right?
AT&T and T-Mobile both pivoted.
They didn't.
No, good point.
Yeah, very valid point.
And a lot of that makes you wonder, was marketing strategy default for a lot of that?
Hey, they've got a new CTO, not a marketing person, but someone who's going to be very
technical, probably understand what assets are available and what needs to be prioritized
from a deployment standpoint.
But I totally agree with you, not focusing on standalone.
Part of that was chicken and egg.
You've got to get the mid-band, the C-band stuff rolled out, then get things transitioned
to SA and start slicing.
But we've talked about AT&T-Mobile in particular, and they are just large and in charge promoting
what they're doing with slicing, whether it's T-Priority, which was the most recent
slice for first responders.
Or the security one.
The security slice for the SASE or VIDEA.
Yeah, yeah, interesting stuff.
Hey, let's hit your third and final.
And boy, it seems like almost every other podcast we talk about Apple and new 5G modems,
but there's one expected for the iPhone SE.
And is this the current version or is this more forward looking?
This is for next year.
Mark Gurman at Bloomberg came out with an article that kind of updated the status of
all of Apple's products and how they're no longer doing an annual cadence.
They're just going to release things as they're ready.
I read that, yeah.
And so part of that is going to be we're getting new MacBooks later this month, most likely.
But in the next year, we'll be getting new iPhones and they won't be all launched at
once.
And one of those will be the iPhone SE, which will very likely carry the A16 that's in the
current iPhone 16 or A18, sorry, the A18 and iPhone 16.
And I think it will have the cameras from the iPhone 15, if I'm not mistaken, and it
will have Apple's first 5G modem.
And if you think about where they would do this, there was a lot of talk between it being
the iPhone SE or the slim, which is going to be a new thinner iPhone.
But it makes sense to launch it in the SE, I think for a lot of reasons, because it's
a lower volume part than everything else Apple does, even though it's a whole lower price.
Initially, it will be lower volume.
Over its lifespan, it will probably be higher volume than any other iPhone, but it's lower
stakes because it's a cheaper iPhone.
And if there are some performance issues, it's less of an issue.
Or if there's some battery life problems, they can accommodate for them.
I just think, and if there's supply issues also, it's not going to hurt their bottom
lines.
I think this is the right way for them to do it.
It's low expectations, low risk for them.
And that's why I think they have to do it.
Because if they were to launch this with the flagship iPhone and something went wrong,
it would be catastrophic for the company because iPhone pretty much drives profitability for
the whole company.
And that's why SE has to be where they launch it.
I will be very interested to see how that performs.
Most likely it will not have millimeter wave because iPhone SE doesn't have it.
It was the first phone, I believe, on Verizon to not have millimeter wave 5G.
And I expect this next generation will also not have it for the sake of keeping that modem
simple, low power, and reducing the RF front end build materials.
This is something I think we'll see probably in the springtime, maybe early summer, depending
on when Apple decides it's ready.
But very much first half of next year.
And it will be interesting to see how that performs and what people say about it.
So we've been tracking this whole soap opera with Apple and its modem development for years.
If this puppy actually launches in the spring or summer of next year, is that going to be
five years?
That's what I thought.
That's an eternity in the tech world, right?
It is.
But if you go back to my tweets when Apple acquired this division from Intel, I'm not
this division from Intel.
I said four to five years.
You did.
So this is your victory lap, man.
It's just, if it was a brand new from the ground up design, it might have actually taken
them longer, like a decade.
Sure.
But having something to start from, which I've heard was not much.
They had somewhere and they've probably accelerated things and there've been delays.
I think they were hoping for three to four years, but ended up being more like five.
Yeah.
Good things come to those that wait is the way to look at it.
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 for a specific 5G topic for your
future podcast, please reach out to us on social media.
Will is at WellTown Tech and I'm at Onshell Sog.
We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week.
And don't forget to rate us and subscribe.