Welcome to episode 217 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 strategy.
I'm Will Townsend and joining me again this week is fellow analyst Anshul Sag.
Let's get started with my first topic.
And I want to talk about telecom AI.
And I recently published a Forbes article examining several global
mobile network operators that are effectively leaning into modern AI,
generative and agentic to delight subscribers and improve operational efficiency.
So in this piece, I focus on AT&T, NTT, Docomo, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone.
And I wanted to get this published before Mobile World Congress.
We're going to talk a lot about Mobile World Congress towards the end.
But from my perspective, these operators are leaning into next generation
modern AI architectures, and they're doing a lot of very innovative things.
I have plans to meet with SK Telecom.
They are actually included as well.
So I failed to mention that.
But at the end of the day, what's beginning to happen now, initially
it started with doing things like intelligent truck roles and improving
customer support, but it's taking things to the next level, not necessarily
eliminating head count and staffing, but really making customer service,
field service professionals much more effective in what they do.
And at the end of the day, churn is a big measurement that all MNOs use.
And from my perspective, artificial intelligence can delight subscribers
in reduce the likelihood of churn.
So I know you've been a publishing fiend on Forbes.
I don't know if you got a chance, my friend, to read my article, but
what do you think about this?
Is it hype or is it reality?
I have an opinion.
I think I made my opinion, but what do you think?
So the only thing I'll add is that I mostly agree with this piece, especially
when you consider what we've been seeing over the last few months from
different operators, I think this is just be a continued trend towards
more operational efficiency.
I will also say agentic and generative AI were the theme of the event I
attended yesterday with Amazon and Alexa plus, I didn't include it in my
topics because it's not a 5G topic.
It's very much a smart home kind of story, but it's quite clear that all
forms of generative AI and agentic AI are starting to permeate throughout
the IT sector and telecom is no different.
Yep.
Good point, my friend.
Let's go to your first topic.
You want to talk about AT&T and AST Space Mobile and a video call.
It's a big milestone, right?
Yeah.
So when I forget, this happened like a few days ago, I want to say three days
ago now, so it happened this week and basically it was a successful video
call using the Bluebird satellites that launched last September.
And this happened with a, I think it was a Samsung device.
If I remember correctly, I was looking at the video and it looked like an
S24, S25 Ultra, and it was done initiating a call from Midland, Texas,
AT&T in Dallas, utilizing an AST Space Mobile satellite network.
And they did it using BlueWalker 3 specifically.
And yeah, it's, this is another milestone in the partnership
between both companies.
I think the biggest hurdle, I think, was their official commercial
engagement, which happened last year.
This is a continuation of that relationship to a point where I think this will be
something that becomes a fundamental part of AT&T's network.
And even they talk about how it's going to be useful for first responders
in rural areas and that they say nearly half of AT&T customers already have
access to peer messaging and emergency satellite services.
It's really interesting and exciting.
And video calling is not easy.
Being able to show that I think is a demonstration of not only the
stability of the connection, but also its throughput and latency.
It's exciting.
And I hope to see more developments between these two companies down the road.
Yes.
You know, what's interesting about this, I was driving back from Kansas City
to Bastrop last Friday, and I actually was invited to come to AT&T's headquarters
to witness all of this.
Unfortunately, the timing didn't work.
And, and I understand that it actually occurred on, on Saturday.
I don't think I'm disclosing any confidential information there,
but it is very exciting.
It shows the power, shows the promise of low earth orbit satellite connectivity
and how it can augment and supply gap coverage.
And so it's just going to take AST Space Mobile a little bit longer
to get more birds in the air.
Certainly there's been a lot of news around what Starlink is doing.
They have a significant greater number of satellites in the air right now.
And, you know, I think we've weighed in on, on social media and that commercial
that ran during the Super Bowl and between T-Mobile and Starlink,
but it's all exciting from my perspective.
It's just going to raise the innovation bar.
I'm, I'm really looking forward to spending time in Barcelona next week
and digging deeper into not only LEO, but some other topics that we'll talk
about later in the podcast.
But let's go to my second topic and I'll be pretty brief with this.
NTT and Palo Alto Networks announced a partnership for improving the security
of NTT's private 5G platform.
And it's, it's no mystery.
It's no secret that 5G provides a lot of encryption enhancements over LTE,
but more is needed.
And so what the two companies are doing together is Palo Alto is providing
its next generation firewall solution.
And then NTT is integrating that into their private 5G network fabric,
if you want to call it that, to improve security posture and just provide
an additional layer of defense.
And I do expect to hear more news on this topic from Palo Alto Networks
when I spend time with them in Barcelona next week, but it's powerful.
And just hot off the presses, I, I just published a second Forbes article
this week that goes into a little more depth about what NTT is doing to
really drive the accelerated adoption of private 5G, because as you and I have
talked about on prior podcasts, it's been very long tail.
There are a number of reasons why I'm not going to mention them because I've
probably mentioned them way too often.
Don't want to repeat myself there, but I think this is a really positive move.
Security is actually a very important point and aspect to private 5G because
so many of these networks are deployed in operational technology environments
where you have a mix of different solutions, you have a lot of IOT and,
and there just needs to be higher levels of security to, to make all of that,
again, very secure and functional.
I don't know if you have any thoughts here.
It's pretty straightforward stuff, but what do you think?
I do not have any thoughts here.
I will just keep it brief.
Okay.
All right, man.
Let's go to your second topic and boy, Qualcomm is the marketing
machine, I caught this as well.
They've launched a new brand and it's super cool.
And if you're a game of Thrones fan, you'll probably like it even more,
but why don't you share the details?
Yeah.
Basically Qualcomm is working on their branding and so far most people know
Qualcomm, a lot of people know Snapdragon, but there's some things that don't really
fit into Snapdragon because Snapdragon is a consumer brand.
So what they've done is they've created a new brand called Dragonwing.
I can't necessarily share the look of the logo here, even though we just
recently got the ability to add images to our live streams.
I don't know how to use it yet, but basically it's a really good logo.
First and foremost, it's cool because it looks like a big Dragonwing like this
and you can see like the dragon head and it fits really nicely into the Snapdragon
and all of the dragon branded stuff.
And what's cool is it incorporates cellular infrastructure.
So this is very relevant to WC and the podcast, networking infrastructure
and industrial and embedded IoT products.
It's quite a big part of Qualcomm's business will fall under Dragonwing.
However, some things are also losing the Snapdragon designation,
like Qualcomm's modems.
They are now Qualcomm modem.
And then all of the CPU products, all the graphics products, all the
wifi chipsets, specifically wifi chipsets, those are all under Qualcomm branding.
And those are because they are horizontal across both consumer and enterprise.
And that's why they keep the Qualcomm branding.
So you now have this interesting situation where you have three
different brands, you have Qualcomm, Dragonwing and Snapdragon.
But right now they're still attaching the Qualcomm brand to
Dragonwing. They're not just calling it Dragonwing, it's Qualcomm Dragonwing.
And I think once that brand gets enough strength over time, I think they'll
drop the Qualcomm name from it.
But I think it's good.
I think they always struggled with a brand for what they're doing in
infrastructure.
And it also means, I think that they expect to see more growth from that
segment and that they will have more opportunities down the road for more
products to and potential product lines to fall within Dragonwing.
So they're trying to grow their enterprise side.
And yeah, other than that, it seems pretty straightforward and I like it.
It looks good.
It's purple, but I think you'll probably see a lot of that at MWC.
And that's a slight preview for our next topic.
And I would love to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, no, I think this is brilliant on their part.
They needed to separate how they presented the brands in the market.
Consumer versus enterprise and to your point, Qualcomm continues to push
further and further into my boring area of coverage infrastructure.
And you get to cover all the cool devices and stuff like that and AR, VR.
But I think it's wise.
It makes sense because Qualcomm has been really focusing, especially on its IoT
platform.
We've talked about MediaTek.
They've got a very robust platform.
I think one of MediaTek's challenges is they've been really focused on
their products, challenges is they've almost over rotated a little bit on the
branding and they've had this kind of proliferation of different sub brands.
And I like what Qualcomm is doing here, focusing Snapdragon on consumer,
Dragon Wing on the enterprise stuff.
And there'll probably be some additional kind of branding
adjustments as they move forward.
I agree with you.
Mobile World Congress will be probably their big coming out party, just like
Nokia two years ago when they unveiled their new brand mark with an emphasis on
focusing on enterprise and expanding their share of wallet beyond service providers.
I think at a very high level, it's brilliant.
You do find Snapdragon in a lot of enterprise infrastructure like smart
cameras.
So it'll be interesting to see how the branding changes on that.
Cisco has been one of, or Meraki actually has been one of the initial leaders in
that category.
And there are a host of other companies that do smart cameras that leverage
computer vision for a host of consumer enterprise applications as well.
But I like it.
I was, I was just going to add one more thing.
Yeah.
Verizon has already launched something with a Qualcomm Dragon Wing product.
Oh, it's the Qualcomm RAN intelligent controller and Verizon's using that in
combination with Samsung's AI powered energy saving manager, manager.
I did not trip over that word, but yeah, that's something that
they just announced as part of their open RAN strategies.
We're already seeing Dragon Wing being used.
Cool.
Maybe I can get you a t-shirt while I'm in Barcelona next week, but Hey, that's
a great way for us to wind up the podcast.
We want to talk about Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2025 and provide our
thoughts on what we expect to see at the event.
I've been on the road for three weeks.
I'm in Florida this week.
Did a little DIY, did my annual DIY project and got some new counters
installed and then I head back tonight to Texas and then on Saturday I'm back
on a plane and head over with Patrick Morehead to attend the event.
But from my perspective, this isn't going to be super shocking.
We're going to see a lot more low earth orbit, satellite discussions.
I'm going to meet with a number of different companies.
I get to meet with Abel at AST Space Mobile at the end of the week.
I'm really looking forward to catching up with him.
It's been a while since he and I have spoken.
So tell you, I'm going to meet with Jaime, the CEO there, and I've got several other
low earth orbit, satellite related discussions scheduled.
So I expect to hear a lot about that.
Number one, and then I guess the second point that I'm expecting to hear a lot
about is this whole notion of AI ran.
And Nvidia has really been leading the charge.
You and I have talked about Nvidia on prior podcasts.
So they started out last year with the 6G cloud and it's basically
designed to be a testbed and now Nvidia is maturing that even further.
In fact, I was able to be pre-grieved on the latest AI ran announcements that are
coming at Mobile World Congress.
Can't talk about that right now.
It's still under embargo.
I'll be sharing more shortly, but from my perspective, AI and the ran,
could do an amazing number of things to just supercharge the capabilities of
spectrum usage and antenna intuition, if I'm pronouncing that correctly,
continuation, and it's my Texas accent coming out and just a host of other things.
And it's interesting.
So Nvidia just announced earnings above expectations.
I haven't looked at the stock recently.
It's interesting.
They're going to be moving from MWC directly into GTC.
Yeah.
And I'll be attending GTC virtually this year, but yeah, at a high level
lower earth orbit satellite, I expect to hear a lot about that at MWC.
I expect to hear more about AI ran and I expect to see more players beyond
Nvidia that jump into that, that AI ran category, but what are you expecting?
And I know that you're not going to be able to go this year, but what are you
expecting from the next year?
Honestly, I would say it's a lot of the same stuff in terms of new modems,
new wifi, chipsets, a lot of the same kind of fundamental wireless stuff that we're
used to, but also to your point, a lot more AI ran stuff and the next phase of AI
in the network, but also AI on devices, more details and more information.
I expect we'll see more demos of AI running at the edge.
So I think we're seeing this year where AI feels a lot more tangible as opposed
to something that's aspirational.
So I think that's the theme that I'm getting from it.
I also think that we move from the
AI to the multi-year effort, but nevertheless, I think it will be something
that will grow with time and because AI is moving so fast, I think maybe the
hope is that if AI growth continues to accelerate, then that's going to be
something that we're going to see in the future, but I think that's going to be
something that we're going to see in the future as well.
And I think that's going to be something that we're going to see in the future.
So I think maybe the hope is that if AI growth continues to accelerate,
then that will take 5G with it.
Yeah.
And we've talked about that on prior podcasts, how FWA has been the killer
app, killer use case so far for 5G, but as modern AI becomes decidedly hybrid,
moving from cloud to network edges, mobility is going to play an important
role in facilitating that inference and that training on the edge.
So it's exciting.
It's an exciting time to be in the technology industry and to see the
sea change happening and cloud was really big, but I really do believe that
as we entered the second half of this year, a lot more enterprise applications
are going to surface.
Initially, gen AI has been fun for creating a song or creating an
interesting image and that sort of thing.
And my prediction is we're going to really see it move into the mainstream.
We're going to really see it unlock a lot of enterprise in these cases.
We're already seeing that with security and co-pilots and reducing friction
from sock analysts onboarding and that sort of thing, internal situation
report generation and whatnot, but its ability to really take AI ops within
the network to the next level is pretty amazing.
I've been weighing in.
I've been spending time with Nokia recently.
I've been publishing a ton of stuff, formal papers and formal papers.
I'm in the process of doing some video work with them and we'll be spending
time with both Nokia and Ericsson next week at Mobile World Congress as well.
But Hey, my friend, we were speedy this week, but why don't you take us home?
Absolutely.
We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting.
If anyone would like to provide insights on a future 5G topic for a future
podcast, please reach out to us on social media, Will is at WillTownTech
and I'm at Anshul Saag.
We hope you guys have a great weekend and please tune in again next week.
And don't forget to rate us and subscribe.