We are live and we want to welcome all of our viewers and listeners to episode 214 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 thorough analyst Anshel Sag. Let's get started with my first topic, and this is an interesting development, if I can say that clearly. Nokia and AT& T recently announced a partnership for evolving not only automation in that mobile network operators environment, but also for voice core functionality. And this is great news for Nokia, because everyone knows that AT& T aligned with Ericsson. On a lot of issue, initiatives that were tied to, just making the overall AT& T network more programmable and more flexible and that sort of thing. So this is great news for Nokia. Like I mentioned it involves automation. And in kind of the vision here, and this isn't a Mobile World Live article that posted is ensuring customer focused network and automation to drive new services. And what's going to be used is the Nokia cloud platform and what NCP does, it streamlines network activities, enhances automation and minimizes manual intervention. And this fits very well with what AT& T and my friend, Igal Elbaz AT& T is wanting to do is to make the, make their network more programmable and that's going to drive monetization and a better customer experience from my perspective. I think this is great news. And then there, there's also some enhancements to leveraging Voner voice over a new radio to provide more flexibility within the voice core functionality. I don't know if you caught this news, my friend, but what are your initial thoughts? I did not catch this news but I do think it's interesting, especially for Nokia. Just because, to your point, AT& T seemed like they were going all in with Ericsson. Yeah. I know they didn't say they were going all in, because I think they said something like 45 percent of the network. But even then it is interesting the voice core functionality seems to be a big part of that. Yeah. And. From some of the headlines I saw, it seemed like there might have been some friction in the past that prevented this from happening. Yeah. I'm not really sure what that was, but it seems like it worked out for both parties. Yeah. And I've spoken with Yigali Bez on several occasions and I don't think, obviously in, in aligning with Erickson, there's some, some cost synergies that go along with that. And then there's also the ability to focus engineering efforts with one particular partner. But this clearly demonstrates that Nokia brings a lot of value to the table. And I've been writing about Nokia quite frequently. I published a research paper on their autonomous networks platform. I've published. At least one analyst inside and there's a second one that's gonna be coming next week as well. But this really positions, Nokia well and its core service provider market, but what they're doing here is also translatable into enterprise. And if you remember, it was a couple of mobile world congresses ago when Nokia. Changed its logo and really doubled down and stated that it was going to make a concerted focus and investment on growing its enterprise business that is finally coming to fruition. This is a service provider announcement that we're talking about, but I think there's a lot of applicability to what they're going to do in enterprise as well. So I think it's all very positive. And and it just demonstrates that AT& T is leveraging best of breed when it comes to working with both Ericsson and Nokia. So all good stuff, but with that, let's go to your first topic. And you've been doing a ton of writing. You continue to do a ton of writing. And you've recently published a state of 5G report for last year, looking back at developments that occurred last year and some predictions for this year. So without further ado, why don't you provide an overview of all that good stuff? Absolutely. This was a very long piece. I would say 50 percent of it was backward looking 50 percent forward looking publishes on Forbes this week wrote it a few weeks ago. And I think the time is pretty good kind of sets the tone of where things are at for this year, especially ahead of MWC. I'll probably write some kind of an update after MWC as well. Just to level set. But I think my predictions are pretty good. And I'll say, one, we're, 2014, we saw release 18 starting to take shape. We saw 2024, right? Yeah, so sorry, 2024. So last year we saw a lot of progress. In developing, release 18 and having these 5G advanced networks, then we saw, 5G's rollout continue to be slower than expected. We saw a strong focus on enterprise and industrial applications for private 5G networks. We also saw monetization, still struggling for the operators, which is why we saw, the Ericsson joint venture announcement for 5G APIs. guys. We also saw 5G fixed wireless continue to grow and challenge cable. And we saw that 5G devices are continuing to mature and we're getting more specialized, interesting, compelling devices, like the TCL stick that I've been using, and I will be writing a review about because that TCL stick uses RedCap, which requires a standalone network which means you, to offer that, you have to have a robust standalone network, which T Mobile does. And then looking into 2025, it was, More 5G advanced deployments, AI and machine learning becoming even more prominent in the 5G networks operations and its capabilities continued more continued focus on enterprise and industrial applications, especially something like T priority where it's specifically for first responders. And then more synergies between edge compute and 5G, especially when you're looking at someone like horizon, but also T Mobile and their partnership with NVIDIA on that, I actually see that this AI brand that we're going to talk about later, some of those compute capabilities will enable other use cases. Other than the 5G network, like XR, where I think that XRs, if you want to have those super light and thin glasses, you can't have that much compute on them because you're going to need to drive the displays with the battery and you don't want to use compute for that. So you also the compute where well to the edge. So that's not possible unless we have enough GPUs at the edge. And that's actually been a big. Theory of mind for the XR market we need to have more GPU compute at the edge and AI might actually get us there. Also huge satellite that's here. We're going to, we're going to see satellite talked a lot about, And I'm going to talk about my next topic. But there's also going to be a continued focus on monetization and taking. More out of the 5G network by using standalone, by using network slicing and all of these advanced 5G network capabilities And that we'll probably continue to talk about 6G, but it's still too early. Yeah. You really like that TCL device, don't you? Yeah, it's just a, the reason why I love it is because first of all, we did that podcast completely on that stick, and it was super stable. But on top of that, it doesn't have a battery, so it can, as long as it has a USB port with power, it works. Yeah. Now you've talked about it several times. Obviously, you're a tech geek, and These episodes are not sponsored by TCL just to, to provide that copy out to our users and listeners, but I might have to try to get a demo, as well and play with it. But that's great stuff, man. You went really deep on that. I remember when you and I and Patrick Moore had our chief analyst. We, it was like, I think it was like 2019 or 2020. We did this like multi part series. I think it was on Forbes around the state of 5g. And we went into Silicon, MNOs, just, just a plethora of information, but you've done a really good job here to revive what the three of us did, many years ago. And it's for our viewers and listeners. It's a great read. If you really want to get up to speed, obviously actual, highlighted, several of the things that he focused on, but it's a very deep read. So highly recommend that you go check that out. But you already teed this up, but my second topic and thanks for the suggestion on this one. But I want to talk a little bit about, where we're at with ran and it's no surprise, ran market is way down when you look at, the market share numbers and that sort of thing. A lot of folks have been suffering. I think, there was an article on light reading that kind of went into this a little bit deeper. But, right now, all the attention is on AI and, purposed. Silicon to drive it, not just GPUs, but there are a lot of companies like Marvell and AMD and Intel and others that are focused on. Both general purpose and, and custom silicon, but I think what this light reading article highlights is that there's been a sort of a decided movement away from VRAN and the whole notion of running those types of workloads on, on, basically standard silicon, right? CPU silicon. And if you look at. Intel's telecommunications business it's not grown, it's been, treading water here. And, and so from my perspective, AIRAM is getting a lot of attention right now. We've talked about the fact that NVIDIA is very focused here as well. You mentioned 6G. A lot of folks are speculating that the future of 6G could, could involve AI infused radio access network infrastructure and equipment, but what do you think? And then also, let me punctuate all of this by saying that if you look at Samsung networks. They were really leading the charge in VRAN and they've had some short term revenue challenges as well. All of that sort of indicates that, the shiny object in the room is AI and what AI potentially can do for RAN. And I guess the question I've got for you is, do you feel like all the focus on AI RAN is responsible for killing the traditional notion of a VRAM. And then you could even take that a step further and say, Oh, the way I look at it is to me, AI RAN is still a form of VRAM. It's a software defined RAN. And to me, it's on purpose built, but it's based on purpose built silicon, whether it's GPU or an NPU. But the thing is, the GPU is not purpose built silicon, right? It's actually jerking general purpose. Silicon that happens to be running a wireless network. The truth is. The appliance NVIDIA has for AI RAN is very much similar to the appliance that it does for data center. It's the same GPU. It's running very different software and architecturally. Yeah. It's a different software stack. Yeah. Good point. But fundamentally it's still, I come from the GPU world. And when gpus became general purpose computing devices to my, in my mind, it's no different than running it on a CPU. It's still a general purpose accelerator. It just happens to be massively parallel. So I see AI ran. As a component of VRAN, I think it's competitive with it in a certain way for especially for attention. I don't think the market share is there yet, but no, it's super. It's super nascent, right? AI RAN right now is in sort of proof of concept. So absolutely. Yeah. Yeah So the way I look at it is, I ran is a new shiny thing, but I also think in some ways, a Iran validates V ran in terms of validating the virtualization of the network. It's a little bit more flexible, in my opinion, but I think there are going to be places where you want CPU. Versus GPU and vice versa. And I think it's probably better to have a mix of the two, to be honest. And I think that there's right now, you're absolutely right. That, AI is the exciting thing to talk about, but I also think if Intel CPUs had a lot more AI performance to compete with GPUs, I don't think we would really be talking about this as a if or it would be more of an and, but I think we're in a place where the market is maturing. We have a new entrant and a new idea and a new concept, and I think they're just going to live in harmony, but I do think that there will be a time when AI ran incorporates what VRAN did and takes away market share. But I also think that they're going to. Work in lockstep in some ways, just because I think GPU is not really that far of a concept from a CPU. Yeah, here. Yeah, from a performance standpoint, certainly, the whole notion of AI and, being able to do things more intelligently and, adjust the infrastructure, to, to more efficiently spectrum and that sort of thing is pretty exciting. But cool, man. Let's go to your second topic. And I'm about to like sneeze. So I'm gonna have to mute my line here. But you want to talk about 5G and Super Bowl. Yes. There's another Super Bowl happening this Sunday. It is Super Bowl L I X. Which I forget what the Roman numeral that is what that boils down to. But it's in the fifties, I think mid fifties or something. But by the way, the Kansas City Chiefs are going to repeat. So Honestly, I could not care less. I know I'm not. I'm not from Philly. And having a rematch of the Super Bowl we had two years ago doesn't really excite me that much. But what does excite me is that. Verizon, at and T-Mobile are once again upgrading the Superdome, which now is no longer the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. It is now the Caesars Superdome because betting has not ruined sports enough. . And what's your opinion? Sunday , don't get me started. I don't know if you saw Hoburg got fired from MLB for sharing a betting account. He was literally, he was the only umpire to ever call a perfect game during the World Series. Oh, my God. When does Pete Rez get reinstalled reinstated in the whole thing, right? There's a lot of things going on. Verizon says that they upgraded the Superdome, but they hid all of their antennas. So that way it's a lot less intrusive, but also improves the coverage. And I believe they doubled their 5G radio deployment in the Superdome. Yeah. So there's a lot more physical, A lot more physical wires and antennas running through the building. And then they also Comcast says that they're going to have an enhanced 4k format with super low latency for the Superbowl which is really interesting because they're building on what they had done with the Paris games. And I think that's only going to be available to Comcast customers with their, latest set top boxes. And it's cool because, it'll take it. It'll be a 30 megabit stream doing 4 K. And then I saw some other things. Cox is gearing up. Charter is going to have a, an ad, Super Bowl ad to take a shot at T Mobile Home Internet, which tells you they're feeling the threat. Verizon, I don't know if you saw, they're going to have a satellite ad that they have already started pushing with. With Buzz Aldrin, it's actually a pretty cool commercial. I thought it's a great, it's a great ad. I agree. I think we're going to see more ads from other carriers as well. In fact, we can't talk about it, but we were pre briefed by a mobile network operator and just wait and see. Yeah. So you're going to see a lot of ads from at this point. Yeah. Everyone's going to be talking about satellite, but it's crazy, like the Super Bowl is like a really big opportunity for everybody to show off their capabilities and really promote what their network can do at the best possible, venue. But in general, I think there's a lot of opportunity for. Infrastructure upgrades at these stadiums and, they spent, the Saints spent like 500, 600 million upgrading the stadium before the Super Bowl to get, I think, to get the Super Bowl because the Superdome is actually not that new. No, it's been around for quite some time. Yeah, so yeah it's cool to see, obviously AT& T has done stuff as well. I don't know if you've got pre briefed on any of that, but it's exciting to see every year the networks get, buffed up and improved so that they can handle the obnoxious load Of people's streaming and posting and uploading stuff. Every year and all the mobile network operators love to publish these statistics, on Monday morning, every year the data usage continues just to go through the roof. And it's just, it's crazy and. I've written a lot about venue connectivity. I've spent time at Circuit of the Americas in Austin. I've spent time with at the Golden State Warrior arena as well. I've spent time at where the Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Sounders play, whatever. There's probably, I know it was T Mobile Field. It may be called something else now. But but at the end of the day, it really behooves venues to work with MNOs. To improve the overall connectivity for smartphones, but, and then, their wifi investments that go into this as well. But, fans that go to these games, the average Super Bowl ticket, it's a little bit less this year than it was last year. I think it's the average is 4, 000 per ticket. But if you attend an event like that and you're going to spend, 8, 000 just to to see the game, you want to be able to share those, those memories and those pictures and that experience. With friends and family and so on and so forth. It's an important investment. It brings fans back. It supports other things like concerts and that sort of thing. And at the end of the day, and then when you talk about a point of sale, a lot of point of sale now is powered on. I'm on private cellular networks. It just, it's a moneymaker, for these venues. Yeah, I looked up the AT and T details just to make sure we have that they're going to have 91. DASA zones with 5G plus C band as well as 4G and 5G millimeter wave with 34 high power radios and 255 low power in the back of house and concourse areas. They also added 4 new nodes and 5G plus C band overlay on 69 small cells. And then they also added 5G plus C band to the sites around the downtown area, including exhibit halls at the convention center like you were talking about. They also are deploying their first net. R. O. G. response operations group on standby for emergency operation centers. They're going to have satellite unlike trucks and cows. They're going to be 11 cows on site as well. And they're also going to be deploying band 14 for public. Lots going on. This is normal for all the operators to just, deploy as many assets as they possibly can for the Super Bowl. I don't know what T Mobile was talking about for their deployment, but it looks like everybody's trying to do a Super Bowl ad. But it looks like the Super Bowl ad that we might get this year. Might or might not have celebrities. They've been doing a lot of those. Yeah. But yeah, it'll be interesting what all the Super Bowl ads are for all the different companies. Yeah, no, it's amazing. The infrastructure that gets invested for these things and, just, it's on the world stage. I think the Super Bowl is watched by over 200 million people every year. You want to make sure you pull it off. In the right way. But hey, man, let's hit my third and final topic. I want to talk about Bolden Networks. They're a company that I've been following for some time. They're focused on private cellular networking. News broke this it was actually in late January. around their ability to secure like over a billion dollar basically line of credit facility to support their expansion in North America. And so the company is very focused on vertical use cases. Including neutral host at venue, but more broadly speaking, they're focused on the enterprise market. There's a lot of opportunity and I've spoken about it multiple times around manufacturing automation and that sort of thing. But I think the timing is good for Bolden because I'm beginning to see that, it's been, we've talked about private cellular for quite some time. It's been very long tail in the adoption and I've provided my insights in the past and why I think that's the case. So I don't want to go there, but I do believe. And I did not do a predictions article like you did this year, but I do believe one and I'll just throw it out there right now. My prediction is in 2025 that we're going to begin to see an acceleration of adoption around this because now there's some really interesting use cases. There are, for example, public utilities. That are investing in building almost telecom grade networks that have capacity to be able to resell that and repurpose that you're seeing some very compelling these cases with respect to modernizing agriculture and that sort of thing. And, and so I think this is a positive move. I think, the timing is not, coincidental. I think, they've time describing. That's a massive credit facility. 1. 2 billion. If you think about it and they're in Bolton's really emerging as a very big player in the space. And there are others in the space as well. But I believe the whole notion of acquiring, licensed spectrum has been. Address through CBRS. And so it's been democratized and I've talked about that for years as well. So it's just taken a lot of things to line up to get us to this inflection point where I expect to see private cellular networking, take off further and I know like I'm the infrastructure guy. You're the device guy. Maybe a question for you would be around what sort of do you see any sort of opportunity for like new classes of devices that can leverage private cellular networking, whether it's in the future? The field or it's, I think I think red cap is going to be a driver of that. Yeah. Specifically red cap modems. Because, that TCL device, Okay, yeah, we're talking about TCL. This episode is brought to you by TCL. But the reason why I'm bringing it up, because that RedCap modem inside of it, it doesn't need a battery, right? Theoretically, just plug it into a USB port and whatever device you plug it into, sees it as like a network connection. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing you want to be able to have, obviously building it into the device is the long term strategy, but in the short term, you have to be able to connect these devices to the Internet to make them more useful to add edge AI capabilities to pull down the data that they're doing. I think it'll probably be cameras and security and those kinds of low hanging AI. Fruit that are doing object recognition and object detection, but I think in the long term, you'll see more robotics, more automation and maybe even factories taking advantage of this because I know that there's a lot of really big companies out there right now that are looking and exploring 5G private networks to modernize their. Factory floor. We've seen some big companies like BMW do it, but I think that's going to be a big opportunity down the road. Hey, I totally agree with you. And I totally agree with you on the smart camera, the computer vision stuff. The applications are limitless, like across multiple verticals. But hey, let's wrap things up with your 3rd topic. You want to talk about Elon and the carriers and the battle for CBAN. Yeah, so there's a heating up battle right now. Specifically for the upper C band, I had this article open but I lost it now. So that's on me. But basically there's a auction of 200 megahertz of C band. I saw this article on multiple websites, fierce wireless had it light reading had it. And obviously there's, elon is very close to the administration. Yeah. And you, you really like leading the Dute. Yeah. . Yeah. I have a lot of opinions on those things, but I'm gonna keep it straight here. Yeah. . But the fccs, chairman Brendan Carr I would consider a part of the administration at this point. And he has been talking about making, the upper C band available and the operators want to take advantage of this because it is 200 megahertz, but Elon has also talked about using the same spectrum for satellite and it is 220 megahertz. That's a lot of spectrum that could be used for a lot of different things. And the truth is, Starlink will need more spectrum as it adds more users and more satellites. So he, I don't think he will just let this go. And I don't think it's going to just quickly go away either. I think this will be a long standing situation. And sharing that spectrum will be interesting, but I'm not sure that's how the operators really want to use it. So it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out long term, especially considering that, I don't think there's really an amount of lobbying that these operators can do to counteract Elon having office in the White House. And this will also be an interesting. Situation regarding conflict of interest and whether or not people actually acknowledge such a thing in this administration. But that's a different issue that I think people should still address. I'm just not going to go any deeper than talking about Elon and this topic. No, I agree, and I'm not going to belabor it either. Other than saying that I completely agree with you there. There needs to be a separation of charge and state here because he is in a government role now. And he has received significant government cheese to basically start and operate both Tesla and Starlink and, and he's got 400 birds in the sky now and and this battle continues, and there are concerns around, spectrum contention and that sort of thing. And to your point, he's also got a competing. Starling fixed wireless access service as well. In addition to helping companies like T Mobile and others. The, build, direct to device connectivity. Yeah it's very interesting. Let's not get go there. It's like a too political, but it'll be interesting to see how that all winds out. But with that said, it's been another great podcast. I'm excited about this Super Bowl, buddy. Why don't you take us home? Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners on this week's topic is interesting. And 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 WillTownTech and I'm at Anshel Sag. We hope you have a great weekend. Enjoy the Super Bowl and please tune in again next week. And don't forget to rate us and subscribe