Welcome to episode 240 of the GTO on 5G. It's
the latest Insight Scoop on everything 5G and
6G. 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 Anshul,
I want to talk about T -Mobile. I spent some
time with them last week at, of all places, a
Gartner symposium. That is where we held the
fourth annual awards. It was called the unconventional
awards, but it's been changed to innovate. And
we moved it from mobile world Congress where
we had held it for three years prior. So it was
a great event. We were celebrating customer successes,
utilizing T -Mobile's infrastructure. And that
is a great segue to my first topic. At the event,
T -Mobile used it as an opportunity to launch
what they call their edge control solution. And
what edge control does, it combines the company's
5G advanced network with local breakout. And
what that does is it delivers almost a private
-like cellular experience. But what I love about
it is that it doesn't require any infrastructure
on -premises. So there are other solutions that
are light. that use routers with a degree of
intelligence and then use cloudified core infrastructure
to make that all work. But again, what I really
like about this solution is that it requires
zero on -premise infrastructure. And it's very
interesting. It's very forward thinking from
my perspective. And it has the potential to really
reduce the complexity of taking advantage of
a cellular private network. T -Mobile has done
some pretty innovative things with their advanced
network solutions, basically combining their
public network with private infrastructure to
deliver a hybrid approach and meet customers
where they're at from a deployment perspective,
from a CapEx perspective. But I really like this.
And I know you caught the news. Any thoughts
here? Is this a game changer? Because you and
I have talked about the fact that it took a few
years for private cellular. to really get its
footing because there were so many different
ways to get there and i thought it really confused
enterprises but what are your thoughts yeah i
think that this is an interesting solution especially
for someone like t -mobile who doesn't have as
much of an edge play as say verizon or att do
so i think that this will expand their capabilities
for edge compute um and satisfy a lot of the
needs that that people might have that they didn't
previously have as an offering And I think it
strategically improves their competitiveness
against Verizon and AT &T, considering that they
do have a pretty good 5G network. I feel like
edge control is something that they probably
needed. And I think it really rounds out all
the other offerings that they have. I agree.
And you and I, I think we spoke about this. We
may have referenced it, but we couldn't go into
a lot of detail because it was under NDA. But
you and I spent time several weeks ago with T
-Mobile and Bellevue. And we were briefed on
the roadmap. And so this is one of the things
that's coming from the T -Mobile for Business
enterprise roadmap. And all I can tell our viewers
and listeners is that there's a lot of other
pretty compelling stuff that's behind edge control.
And from my perspective, it really legitimately
places T -Mobile right there in the thick of
things with Verizon and AT &T that have traditionally
had very strong cellular enterprise offerings
just beyond access. So it's great to have a third
player in the mix here in the U .S. that's providing
customers with a lot of flexibility and a lot
of choice. So it's fun to watch. But hey, let's
go to your first topic. And we're actually going
to make this a two -part topic. There was a big
event, NVIDIA held its GTC. D .C. event. Our
fearless leader, Patrick Moorhead, was there.
There was a very interesting sort of pregame
session where Patrick spent time with a number
of different folks. There was someone from the
media. I don't recall her name. I think there
was a very well -known venture capitalist. Yeah,
CNBC. And there was a very well -known venture
capitalist. And so the three of them anchored.
this this pregame event before the actual conference
started and then they had a bunch of different
ai companies perplexity you name it filter through
there so it was like three and a half hours i
think you can catch the replay online but that's
a long preamble but i'm going to let you take
it away because you want to talk about a big
partnership between nokia and nvidia yeah so
this is like a Kind of an extension of what we
heard during the Capital Markets Day with NVIDIA
building this ARC computer for 6G. Obviously,
Nokia was already kind of part of that announcement
back, I think it was May in San Francisco. And
that was when OpenAI and NVIDIA and T -Mobile
all had these big announcements. And Nokia and
Ericsson were part of that as well. This announcement
is an extension of that in the sense that they're
still going to be doing. the arc aerial ran computer
for 6g and there's still ai ran but the the explicit
call out of t -mobile was there i read the linkedin
post of the ceo of nokia and he also mentioned
dell which i thought was really interesting yeah
for sure yeah So there's clearly a more strong
US focus on all of this. And then the big deal
was that NVIDIA is investing a billion dollars
into Nokia, which is what they did with Intel.
Very similar kind of partnership slash investment.
And I think it also catapulted the stock like
25%, which is crazy. But what it does, it's like
a vote of confidence from NVIDIA that Nokia is
on the right path and investors are going to
pour in. It's really interesting because the
way I see what NVIDIA is doing here is leveraging
its strength in the market to give itself an
opportunity to get undervalued companies really
cheaply, have a significant share of the company's
stock, and also be able to profit off of the
success that they are enabling with their technology.
It's really interesting. There's not that many
details. Not that many more details on what's
actually going to roll out, but this is very
much an America -focused announcement, even though
Nokia is a Finnish company and Ericsson actually
has a U .S. factory. But nonetheless, this is
still a very interesting announcement and a continuation
of what's already been talked about. I think
the Dell component is relatively new. I don't
seem to recall that having been brought up before,
but there's still a long way to go. We still
need to get a lot more detail on what this is
actually going to do and how it's going to look.
But T -Mobile seems to be the lead here. And
I'll say the whole GTCDC event was very focused
on the US. And in my write -up that I think you
and I will do together, I think that the focus
is going to be that this is really about addressing
the needs and concerns of the US government.
So there was a lot of HPC stuff. There was some
auto, tons of AI. and then also 6g i think this
was very a very catered event to satisfy dc's
concerns and you can say this is the trump administration
specifically but really if you look at it all
these concerns have been in place for quite some
time and it's really about addressing what the
dc audience wants to hear Yeah, no, I agree.
Those are spot on insights. The Dell relationship
is not new. So a few years ago, NVIDIA retired
its compute infrastructure and they moved over
to Dell Technologies. There's some NEB certification.
So this isn't just common off the shelf. type
server solutions. And obviously with the disaggregation
with Open RAN and that sort of thing, Dell's
been playing there. But this just provides another
opportunity for Dell to strengthen its partnership
with Nokia and sell more compute infrastructure.
I think from my perspective, NVIDIA choosing
Nokia was somewhat strategic just based on some
of the recent work that I've done with Nokia
around their autonomous networks platform. and
so our viewers and listeners if you're interested
you can hit the more insights and strategy website
i've published a few formal papers and i've done
some contributed writing what we call our analyst
insights so go hit our website if you want to
learn more about that but that kind of is a nice
segue to my part two on gtc dc where i want to
talk about what was announced as an all -American
AI -ran stack. That sounds like apple pie and
football and whatnot, but obviously the federal
government has been very focused on the need
to domesticate the supply chain to a certain
extent. That happened with Open RAN and 5G, but
there's a real opportunity with 6G to get ahead
of this. And again, it's been a very strategic
focus for the federal government when you look
at the rip and replace that started with Chinese
infrastructure and then Open RAN. And I've published
something on LinkedIn a few months ago around
Open RAN, its successes, its failures. It'll
be interesting to see how that sort of all winds
up. But let me get to the crux of what this all
American AI native wireless stack is. It's obviously
involving the aerial platform that you talk about,
which, by the way, at GTCDC this week, NVIDIA
also announced the fact that they are open sourcing
that. So that's pretty exciting. So that's going
to really remove the barriers for adoption and
certainly NVIDIA will benefit. You need the hardware
acceleration and networking and all of that to
make this all work. But I think their move to
move it to open source, I think is great. It's
just going to accelerate all the development
behind it. But when you look at the partners,
this is a full stack solution. You've got Cisco
providing user plane function and 5G core software.
And you've also got some specific 6G -like applications
from MITRE and from Booz Allen as well. Specifically
going into the applications, there's a lot of
camera vision, computer vision with spectrum
censoring. And the whole notion of AI RAN is
to more effectively utilize spectrum, right?
And you and I have talked about there are many
different schemes to go do that. But that is
going to be important. And from my perspective,
you know, and then you've been playing with the
DGX Spark as well. So a lot of the focus at the
event as I tuned in over the last couple of days
was around the developer. And you might want
to share some of your initial experiences because
you've got one of those units, right? You've
been playing around with it. Yes, it's a cool
little device. It does get a little warm while
you're using it. because it doesn't really have
very active cooling but you'll appreciate one
of the coolest parts of it which is this port
right here that's for the 200 gigabit link using
connect x7 and then you can scale two of them
together and double the memory capacity that
you have it's just a cool little box to have
for ai development because It gives you that
big model support with that 120 gigs of unified
memory, CPU and GPU. And it's got a 20 -core
CPU. It's pretty powerful. And then a pretty
powerful GPU as well. And it can do a decent
amount of AI inference that doesn't really bog
down your machine, especially if you have a laptop
or something where that's your primary development
environment. And yeah, you can also just have
it as a server for other things as well. So it's
a Linux box. Really what it is, NVIDIA has just
made the entire software stack on that device
really easy to use. And all you need to do is
just find the different samples and different
playbooks that NVIDIA has built for replication
you're looking for. And you might not even have
to know how to code to deploy some of these things,
which is really cool because this ease of use
is really one of the biggest challenges for coding
and deploying AI. So yeah, I think it's really
cool. And they announced a bunch of... networking
stuff as well, or at least rehashed it. It's
been like a lot of things were also rehashed,
like the T -Mobile and Nokia announcement. I
think this is a very America rah -rah kind of
thing. It was in DC, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
So I think it's important to understand the context
of it and why it was done. But ultimately, I
think NVIDIA is kind of the center of the AI
universe right now. And I think it's smart for
the U .S. government to mostly let them do what
they need to do to be successful. And yeah, I
think the U .S. government doesn't want to enable
someone else that's not a U .S. company to be
successful because ultimately they want that
orbit to be around U .S. companies and for the
U .S. to be able to deploy things. But I will
say, I do think this administration is a little
bit short -sighted on power and they need to
be accelerating power deployment and not canceling
multi gigawatt projects just because they're
green. So I think power is going to be the biggest
challenge. And I think NVIDIA knows it. Everybody
else knows it. And even the Chinese government
knows it. And the Chinese government's building
so much capacity that if they don't use it for
AI, they will not know what else to do with it.
Last thing I'll mention, I want to circle back
to the Nokia NVIDIA announcement. The interesting
thing, and I shared some insights as I was taking
off from Austin because I'm in the Bay Area for
another event this week, but the space mob jumped
on my one post and they probably jumped on your
X post as well. Airscale, a souped up version
of Nokia Airscale is used within AST Space Mobile's
low Earth orbit satellite deployment. And there's
some speculation by the space mob out there that
that can position AST Space Mobile quite well.
Because again, The 6G standards have not been
defined. There's a lot of pre -definition. Qualcomm
has done this. Even T -Mobile has predefined
5G advanced. But suffice it to say, we know that
some form of AI is going to be a part of that.
And most likely, we're going to see low Earth
orbit satellite become a big component of that.
I wanted to mention that as well before we move
to your second topic. But let's do that. So you
want to talk about Samsung Networks and SoftBank
signing an MOU. Yeah. So I originally thought
this was an MOU with Samsung Networks. And then
I looked at the actual release and it says Samsung
Electronics, which is interesting because it
says it's an MOU for joint research into next
generation communication technologies, including
6G and AI based RAM, which sounds like Samsung
Networks, right? Yes. Yeah. And it even goes
into more detail. It says. The two companies
will categorize next -generation communications
technologies into four candidate areas, 6G AI
for RAN, AI and RAN, and large telecom models.
So all of this sounds like Samsung Networks.
But for some reason, this is being called Samsung
Electronics. Maybe it's because Samsung Electronics
is technically the bigger parent company. But
I thought it was really weird. That's very much
a networks announcement. But nonetheless. What
this means is that a Korean company is going
to be building a Japanese company's network or
at least helping build it, which is very interesting
because there's some cultural challenges there.
Oh, yes, there are, my friend, because I've spent
time in both Seoul and many... Yeah, so you know
that this is actually a very big deal. And yeah,
it's just very interesting because most of this
is about AI RAN, but also AI RAN orchestration
and using... 6G and AI together. So this is very
interesting because SoftBank is one of the foundational
carriers in Japan. And Samsung Networks is one
of the bigger infrastructure providers in the
world. They're not necessarily like an Ericsson
or Nokia, but they're constantly catching up.
And this is just another demonstration of them
really building partnerships in places you wouldn't
expect them to. And SoftBank is a... pretty big
carrier. It'll be really interesting to see how
this actually manifests itself in the 6G network.
We obviously are not going to know the reality
of that for probably a few more years at the
very minimum because we're talking about research,
but it's still an MOU. So there's definitely
some real meat to it, but it'll be interesting
to see how they actually manifest as partners
and whether Samsung networks ends up being a
bigger part of the Japanese market. Yeah, clearly
from my perspective, because I have spent a lot
of time with the Samsung Networks team, they
clearly established a leadership position in
VRAN and Open RAN. The challenge, and they traditionally
weren't strong in RAN, if you think back to even
4G and 3G, right? But because that's been their
core focus when... When, you know, the RAN, when
the RAN infrastructure got all built out and
then carriers were focused on core deployment,
their business, I won't say tank, but then they
saw a significant dip because the lion's share
of what they were driving out of their networks,
BU, was RAN infrastructure and in particular
DRAN and to a lesser extent Open RAN. So yeah,
it'll, it'll be super interesting to see how,
how this MOU sort of moves forward, but they
certainly have some very solid strengths. when
it comes to introducing virtualization. And there
is AI that's infused in that infrastructure as
well. And in fact, I can't really share the details,
but I'm hoping that we'll get to the point where
we can publish more insights and strategy research
paper that goes into a little more depth around
what Samsung Networks is doing in that regard.
But with that, I'm going to go to my third and
final topic. I'm going to be really succinct
on this one. But I recently got back from the
Baltics. It was my sixth or seventh year to go
to this event. It was called 5G Techratory. This
year they dropped the 5G because the event is
becoming more than 5G, right? It's cloud, it's
AI and that sort of thing. So they wanted to
recast it. But I had the opportunity to host
two panels and the one in particular that I want
to highlight was titled The Defense of 5G. And
it's funny, even some of the panel members thought
that title was misleading. It's like, are we
going to talk about defense use cases for 5G?
Because obviously in that part of the world,
you know, you're very close to Russia. And a
lot of the operators like Latvia Mobile Telephone,
LMT, are focused on defense applications with
5G, whether they're backpacks or they're drones
or whatnot. But at a high level, like my take
on it, spending time, and it was obviously I'm
the American and the panel members were from
Europe and they were from 6G consortiums, research
institutions. We had Dean Buble, who is the 5G
doubter. We had another doubter on the panel
as well. And I'm the optimist about all this.
But the reality is, I think in Europe, they've
experienced the same. challenges that we've seen
in the U .S. and other parts of the world with
respect to GSMA, please never, ever do another
split with NA and NSA. And it complicates things
in the European Union because each individual
country manages the regulation and spectrum auctions
and that sort of thing. So it makes it even far
more complex. We've had a delayed rollout with
standalone. Finally, AT &T announced just a few
weeks ago that they've achieved nationwide SA.
I expect, and you and I have been talking about
this, you and I have been predicting for years
that eventually AT &T and Verizon would close
the gap sometime in the second half of this year
so we can take our victory lap on that. But it's
been even more complicated in Europe. And when
the subject of 6G comes up, there were a couple
of panel members who said, hey, you know what?
Hold on. We got to get through 5G. We're not
even at 5G advanced yet. And I'm also hearing
what are the applications? What are the use cases?
They've been very focused on access. I brought
up sort of the killer use case that we've seen
in the U .S. around FWA and they agreed. T -Mobile's
done a great job with that. Now you've got AT
&T with its internet air product delivering that
both to consumers and enterprises when fiber
is not available. But suffice it to say the...
The viewpoint on the success of 5G is I think
it's pretty similar to the U .S. as well. And
so I think we've learned a lot going through
this process and this journey and you and I doing
this podcast for the last five plus years. And
so I just hope that we don't make the same mistakes.
GSMA doesn't make the same mistake, and I don't
think they will, in that we see a much more successful
and accelerated role to 6G when the time is right.
Any additional commentary there before we close
it out with your final? I think there's going
to be a lot of cool use cases for 6G. I'm happy
that there isn't going to be an NSA -SA battle
again. It really screwed a lot of things over.
It's okay. Just wait to deploy the G when you're
ready and no weird stuff. Even if it means 5G
comes later, or if it means 6G comes later, it'll
be what people expect, right? We still don't
have... nationwide in a lot of places. So yeah,
there's so much to talk about. It would be its
own podcast. We might have to do another podcast
on that topic alone. Hey, let's close it out.
And boy, it seems like Verizon's new CEO is already
on the job, right? So you want to talk about
some late breaking news at Verizon. Yeah, so
Verizon has inked a deal. It's a wholesale deal.
with Eaton Fiber. And basically what it is that
Eaton will build out the network for Verizon,
and Verizon will be able to serve and market
those customers and be able to basically expand
its fiber footprint beyond where Verizon is today,
or in addition to where Frontier is also today.
So it's going to be even bigger than the combined
assets of what Verizon will have with the Frontier.
I will say that I haven't really heard that much
about Eaton before. But it seems that Tillman,
which is a parent company of Eaton, has some
capacity in Florida. And it's unclear if there's
other locations where they will be able to expand
capacity. But it seems like Verizon is looking
for ways to... build out fiber with partners.
I believe Tillman slash Eaton will fund a lot
of this development. Verizon won't technically
own the networks, but they will be serving them
and basically marketing those networks and buying
that wholesale from Eaton. And the Tillman fiber
company in Florida has T -Mobile as a tenant.
This company is very clearly like a wholesaler
that builds out networks for. companies that
want to have capacity, but don't want to spend
the capital to build them out. And yeah, it would
be really interesting to see what other deals
they sign. But very clearly, this is a continuation
of Verizon's expansion into fiber, which is a
very clear fast follow after AT &T's fiber build
out. And so is T -Mobile. T -Mobile is also following.
AT &T is definitely leading here. And it'll be
interesting to see Verizon also acquired Starry,
which is also like a FWA, which we talked about
before. So there's a lot of really interesting
things that Verizon is trying to do to expand
their broadband business. And it's funny because
a lot of people don't remember this, but Verizon
sold their fiber business to Frontier and bought
it back, which is very funny by just buying the
whole company. But I will say I'm happy for a
company to admit its mistakes. And that mistake
happened under the old CEO and was corrected
under the old CEO as well. Yeah, I think this
is good for Verizon. I think more competition
is better. If people have more choice on any
kind of internet connection, it would be great,
let alone fiber. I know some people who lived
in Austin and other areas where Google Fiber
was the only option, and the prices were okay,
but once another fiber option became available,
prices fell through the floor. Fiber is great,
but competition in fiber is better. Yeah, no,
I totally agree. You know what's really interesting?
This has been AT &T's mantra, right? With fiber
and they're over -investing in areas, even in
areas that have lower population density. And
for the longest time, and this was before T -Mobile
launched its FWA product, but T -Mobile had the
attitude that, hey, it's not strategic, right?
If you need fiber for backhaul, but it wasn't
until they really got serious about using their
spectrum at T -Mobile. to launch their consumer
and enterprise fwa that they really started doubling
down on fiber and like verizon's been in and
out they had their fio service and to your point
i'm glad you brought it up it's this pac -man
thing with frontier but clearly when you look
at recent earnings they crushed it they're ahead
of their very aggressive plan on fiber ARPU is
super healthy, super high. Mobility was fairly
strong for them as well. Fiber is foundational.
It's driving broadband. It's the best broadband
experience. And you've got to have fiber for
backhaul for mobility. TNT doubled and tripled
down. They've got quite a large checkbook. But
yeah, we're seeing T -Mobile and seeing Verizon
follow suit as well. Hey, my friend, it was 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 would like
to provide insights for our future podcasts on
our future 5G topic, please reach out to us on
social media. Will is at WillTownTech and I'm
at Anshul Saag. We hope you have a great rest
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