Welcome to episode 243 of the 6G podcast. It's
the inside scoop on everything 6G, and we cover
six topics in about 30 minutes. And it's brought
to you by More Insights and Strategy. I'm Anshul
Sog, and joining me again this week is Foul Analyst
Mike Dano from Ookla. This week, we're doing
a special host MWC 2026 edition. Both of us attended
the show last week. How did things go for you,
Mike? So busy. This is my first show where I
attended as an analyst, not a journalist. Much
different for me. I'm with Ookla now, different
companies. And we were just talking about the
time change hit me especially hard at this show.
So it was just a lot. This is the first time
I stayed through Thursday. So I actually spent
the weekend recovering. This is just a lot. I
almost had the exact same experience, although
this has probably been my fifth or sixth as an
analyst. Jet lag still kicked my ass. and there's
proof of it. I won't post where there's proof
of it, but there's proof. And yeah, I stayed
till Wednesday, but I probably would have stayed
till Thursday if I didn't have my family with
me. Ah, yeah, yeah. And Barcelona's great for
bringing a family with you, not with an MWC schedule.
Were you able to go out and go see stuff with
your family? Yeah, a little bit on Sunday before
the show, and then sporadically, mostly for dinner
after the show, because to your point. My meetings
are basically 8 a .m. till 5 to 6 p .m. every
day, and then clawing my way back from the convention
to my hotel, which was nowhere near the show,
which is actually ideal, but not for the end
of the day. Exactly, yeah. The travel in and
out of there is just challenging, no matter which
route you take. I was stuck in traffic in a taxi.
I got crammed into the tightest subway in the
history of the world, and both times it took
me an hour to get to the show, so it just...
There's no way to win. Only lose. Yes. So with
that, I'll kick things off. I think I'll start
with Qualcomm. And normally I wouldn't just pick
one company for an entire topic, but they had
a very busy MWC. They had the new Snapdragon
Wear Elite, which is a wearable chip specifically
for AI purposes. It will be used in a next generation
Galaxy Watch, which is the first time they're
in a Galaxy Watch. and pre -announcing such a
product announcement on its own. So that's a
big one for them. All of the new AI wearables
will most likely use this chip in some way or
shape. They also announced the FastConnect 8800,
which is a Wi -Fi 8 chip. This is the company's
first Wi -Fi 8 chip. It's also the first chip
from the company to have four different radios
on it. So Wi -Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, and Matter,
and then UWV. So it's quad. radio technology.
It's ultimately 4x4 Wi -Fi. So it's the first
client Wi -Fi to have 4x4 physical antennas,
which doubles the throughput from the theoretical
of 5 .8 in 2x2 up to 10 .6. If your router supports
it, it doesn't have to be a Wi -Fi 8 router,
it could be a Wi -Fi 7 router as long as it supports
those four spatial streams. And then in addition
to that, they also had a data center announcement
with the AI200, which is a rack scale AI solution.
I'm sure everybody who went to their booth saw
that rack goes then center there. And then last
but not least, the Snapdragon x 105 modem, they
skipped 95. And this is their 5g advanced chipset
that will allow them to also test some 6g capabilities,
but it's not explicitly being called a 6g modem.
And it will come to phones at the end of this
year. and potentially other devices next year
that they'll probably use for trials for 6G.
And yeah, that's just Qualcomm. Yeah, tons of
stuff out of Qualcomm. And they talked about
their concept of physical AI, which I know they're
not the first one to talk about that. But I know
they talked a lot about their wearables play.
And I saw Meta had a booth at the show. They
were showing off their glasses. There's several
other companies that have smart glasses. Did
you feel like, are we turning a corner in terms
of wearables? Are we starting to get to the point
where these are going to be a little less sideshow
and a little more main stage type things? Because
that certainly I thought was the message that
Qualcomm was giving. Yeah, I think they're the
one company that's positioned to make that mainstream.
All of Netta's products run their chipsets. I
would say I also saw Google's AI classes with
a display in it. And I actually posted that on
Twitter. comparing the two with the MetaRay bands.
And the truth is they have a very mature product
and they have a very mature model. So I think
really it comes down to are the models ready
to take advantage of this form factor? Because
the truth is we're going to get all kinds of
hearable AI or that's clipped to your ears or
something you wear around your neck or something
you wear on your face. But in my experience,
I find that glasses are like the ultimate form
factor for AI. whether so AI can perceive the
world that you see it. And I think that's important.
I don't think everybody's going to want to wear
glasses. So there's going to be different solutions
for different people. But ultimately, to your
point, we're going to see a lot of AI wearables
in the next year or two. And I feel like a lot
of the ones that came out last year were too
early for a lot of reasons. And I think that
this Snapdragon Wear Elite product is optimized
specifically for that kind of use case, especially
when you consider that they're saying it can
run a 2 billion parameter model on device, which
I think people care about because it's going
to affect battery relations. It's always connecting
to the internet and privacy because you're going
to have to have these things on pretty often,
pretty frequently. And that's going to be, I
think, the biggest challenge, that privacy factor,
which is going to be a challenge for companies
like Meta, especially considering the latest
news. Yeah, we had the Google Glasses when it
was at least five years. 10 years ago when you
had the glass holes for just that problem. So
I'm not sure that's been addressed, but it really
feels like this time around, I'm interested to
hear you say that because I'm wondering if this
time around, if it's going to get real and it
really feels like there's a lot more pieces of
the puzzle in place to make those wearables actually
happen this time and maybe not suffer from the
glass hole that those initial ones fell into.
Yeah, definitely. I think that. might lead us
into your topic. Oh, yeah. Yeah. For my topic,
my first topic that I chose, my big takeaway
from Mobile World Congress this year is all about
satellites. I can't help it. I'm just interested
in satellites personally. And I also think that
we got a lot of interesting satellite news last
week and the week before. And so I think just
to summarize the satellite news, I think Starlink
obviously had a huge announcement at the show
about the second generation. direct -to -device
satellites. And they had a whole keynote about
it. Lots of articles written about that. So that
isn't really a surprise. They're going to have
basically 1 ,200 satellites that they're going
to launch over the next year or two that will
basically be able to do transmissions direct
to smartphones. And they said speeds up to 120
megabits. We'll see how that actually plays out
in real life and whether that's for one. customer
in one area, or if it's for multiple customers
in one area, we don't know the details yet, but
we're certainly watching it very carefully. But
what I thought was my takeaway was that was not
the only announcement on the satellite internet
front. We had announcements from SES. We had
a rumor that SES is selling their ground infrastructure
in order to raise money. So that is. One development
that I'm watching, we had Viasat talk about its
joint venture with Space 42. I think it's called
Equities, I think is how you pronounce that.
But that was pretty prominent at their booth
at Mobile World Congress. They had a big drone
that they talked about potentially connecting
to that network. We had Utilsat, just in the
last few days, got financing to refresh its OneWeb
satellite constellation and participate with
Europe's IRIS constellation effort. We had AST
Space Mobile announce earnings last week, and
they also had a big deal with TELUS. And TELUS
also invested into AST Space Mobile in order
to create some ground infrastructure there in
Canada. We had Amazon Leo had an announcement
with Vodafone for backhaul for cell sites. Samsung,
of course, had their big Galaxy announcement.
And their new Galaxy phone supports three different
types of satellite connections. It's LTE, NB
-IoT, and... 5G NR, and then Qualcomm had an
interesting demo with their booth, which was
satellite connectivity using millimeter wave
spectrum. So I think my takeaway from all of
those things, and each one of those things has
interesting things to say about it. But when
you step back from all these individual announcements,
I think what you get to see is that there's just,
this is a really new emerging market. And the
fact that there are that many players, that many
demos, that many funding announcements. All in
just the span of a week, it really tells you
that there's just a lot going on in the satellite
marketplace today. And I fully expect that we'll
continue to see that pace continue this year.
I think this is just a market that is really,
it's really on the upswing and the sky's the
limit, really, in terms of where this thing is
going to go. I think 2026 is going to be a pivotal
year for just the development of the satellite
internet market. fixed as well as direct -to
-device mobile. I think this is the area that
I'm going to be watching this year. It makes
a lot of sense, especially when you consider
that I remember talking to MediaTek about this
two years ago, and they were saying 2027 will
likely be the year when it's actually available.
It doesn't seem that far off, actually. It seems
like we might actually get commercial viability
from a lot of these companies by 2027. Just considering
all the activity we're expecting this year. Yeah.
I mean, we're really, we're seeing it being playing
out right now. We've got obviously iPhone has
been doing this with the global star satellites
for a while, but Starlink is turning on generation
one service in multiple countries and with a
lot of different providers and it's at the pace
is accelerating. They're talking about their
second generation satellites and there's a lot
of additional players that look like they're
going to play in or yeah, just very interesting
to watch. But. To pass it back to you, I think
you've got another couple of takeaways from Mobile
World Congress, right? Yes. So I'm going to focus
on the NVIDIA push at MWC. A lot of that push
was in concert with Nokia. They actually had
an analyst roundtable at Nokia's booth. Interestingly
enough, they did not have a booth at the show,
which I think a lot of people paid attention
to. Considering that they're still relatively
new to the space compared to everybody else.
It's not a total shock. And I expect that next
year they'll most likely have a booth. But anyways,
they were all over the show. They actually showed
me a map of all the different booths that they
were at. And there were definitely some halls
where they weren't present, but that's normal.
But they were very present in numerous halls,
especially hall six, hall two and three. So they're
all over the place and they're. trying to make
sure that they have their vision understood by
the market. Because I think a lot of people anticipate
that Nvidia's whole play here is to sell AI compute
at the end. And that's actually their tertiary
goal. Their primary goal is actually to explicitly
just run the RAN more efficiently and to do it
at higher performance than the existing incumbents.
which I think is fundamentally an important thing
to establish, but also that they will enable
AI features within the RAN and power features
like integrated sensing, ISAC, and then other
AI enhanced capabilities, which they're working
with companies that all come on, which is literally
deploying AI at the modem and network level and
allowing those models to talk to each other and
understand network state. in a faster, more efficient
way. And then the third goal is to take that
excess capacity and enable it to be used for
edge computes. It was an illuminating discussion
with them. It was interesting because I got that
from one of my one -on -ones with NVIDIA. They
didn't fully express that three -pillar vision,
I think, in every place that they should have.
But to me, that makes a lot more sense than just
talking about AI at the edge, which is editing.
how a lot of people have captured Nvidia's strategy.
And they're not just working with Nokia, they're
also working with Ericsson and Samsung. And each
of the vendors has a slightly different approach
to how they're leveraging Nvidia's GPUs. Also,
in our conversation with Nokia and NVIDIA, I
started to get a better understanding of how
they're going to deploy GPUs at the edge and
in the infrastructure. And they're actually going
to have add -in cards. It's not going to be a
full rip and replace, which what some people
were expecting would be. So there's a lot more
nuance to this, of course, but overall, I think
I left MWC being more confident in what they're
trying to do and having more detail in what they're
trying to accomplish. And they gave timelines
and they gave specific feature readiness dates
that they want to have for capabilities. People
were asking about which Nokia products are going
to get updated and when. This is, I think Nokia
is the right partner to look at. for what Nvidia
is trying to do just because there's some tightly
integrated. But also T -Mobile is also pretty
bought in as we've talked about in the past.
But in general, I think that this looks a lot
more measured and I think more professional than
I was led to believe in the beginning. To be
fair, we didn't have that many details. I think
them coming out with more details of being more
measured in their answers, I think has made me
feel a little more confident that This is mostly
a 5G infrastructure upgrade and that there will
be software 6G implementations down the road.
Those are a little bit more murky, but fundamentally
they just want to be able to run the network
more efficiently and to do it in a way that enables
more software -defined features down the road.
I know you have a lot of opinions. Oh, that's
super interesting, actually. I'm very interested
to hear that because, yeah, I obviously... NVIDIA
is all over the show. My hot take was that it's
not MWC, it's NWC. It's NVIDIA World Congress
because, yeah, just NVIDIA was everywhere. And
during the show, they announced massive investments
into Momentum. and coherent some optical players
in order to help design the networks in and around
data centers to make sure that those networks
are able to handle the massive capacity for the
data that's being transmitted in and out of data
centers and that follows on obviously you mentioned
the the investment that nvidia has into nokia
but yeah very interesting to hear that because
It's hard to understand the scope of what NVIDIA
wants to do in telecom, whether it's all hardware
related, all software related, a mix of the two.
Yeah, that's interesting to hear that they're
taking one step at a time. And the idea that
you may upgrade some components at the base station
as necessary rather than a wholesale upgrade.
I think that's very telling of the current situation
in telecom, right? There's not a lot of demand
for a wholesale. rip and replace update to equipment,
right? They're just the operators just don't
have that financial capacity. But a more targeted
upgrade approach that actually does make sense
for the locations where it would work. Actually,
that leads. So I'm going to pivot real quick
to my next topic, because I think that leads
into it perfectly, which is the obviously we're
here talking at the 6G podcast. So what was my
6G takeaway at Mobile World Congress? My 6G takeaway
from Mobile World Congress is that I think you've
got to pay attention to LA Olympics 2028. I talked
to a number of people and basically everyone
said, if you're going to put a 6G date on your
calendar, it is Summer Olympics 2028 for Los
Angeles Olympics. So I fully expect to see some
kind of 6G something at that Olympics. And I
would not be surprised that NVIDIA plays either
a very serious supporting role. or a starring
role in that, in that 6g demo, whether it's a
demo full -fledged network, hard to say the parameters
of it, what spectrum bands, what capabilities
it might have unclear as of yet. But I think
it is, I'd give it very good chances that we're
going to hear a lot about 6g at the Olympics
in 2028 for sure. Yeah. And if you remember back
in Hawaii, Qualcomm already pre -announced they
were going to be. Part of the LA 28 Olympics.
I think we're just getting more and more confirmations.
That's going to be the case. Interesting fun
fact, the surfing component of LA 28 will not
be occurring in Los Angeles County. In fact,
it will be taking place on the border of San
Diego and Orange County because I know the beach
where they're going to be playing. It's actually
a competitive beach for competitive surfing.
It makes total sense. Yeah. Oh, that's super
interesting. Yeah, exactly. I think I have to
say it. The only thing I'm interested in from
the Olympics is the rock climbing stuff. That's
my jam right there. So now that the Olympics
is, or the, now that rock climbing is part of
the Olympics, that's the one I'm going to be
watching. So I assume that'll be in, they'll
have it, they'll have it in LA. So if I get to
go, that's where I'm headed. Yeah. I haven't
really thought about attending yet, even though
it's so close to me. Yes. Yes. Theoretically
I am, but. It's still a two to three hour drive
or two to three hour train ride, which honestly,
I'll take the train run anytime. Yeah, exactly.
Plus, it'll be just swarming with people anyway.
So double that for whatever it is. Yes. And they
still might not have the train line from the
airport finished in time. So that'll be a fun
one. But I'll transition to my third and final
topic, which was a device roundup from MWC. Shocker,
there were no 6G devices. But there were a lot
of smartphones and other personal computing devices.
We had Moto not actually announce any new phones,
but give a lot more details and do a final dump
on all the details from the new Moto Razr Fold,
which is going to be, has a World Cup edition.
We'll also have a Graphene OS option, which is
really interesting. And we'll have the best rated,
according to TXOMark, camera on a foldable, which
addresses one of my biggest pet peeves of most
foldables today. And there will be a bigger battery
and faster charging. So it's going to be like
a really flagship phone in a lot of ways. Dude,
those razors are so awesome. I just like, of
any foldables, I'm very drawn to that one. I
think that one looks really nice. So to hear
it is upgraded. That's a good news. Oh, there
we go. And this is the ultra off the wind back.
Yeah, I love it. It's just, those are just, that's
a good one. And the main reason why I don't use
it, camera's good, but it's not as good as my
S26 Ultra. That's been one of my biggest pet
peeves. And then there was also the Honor Magic
V6, which is another foldable. The thinnest one
with, I believe, the largest battery in the market,
600 milliamp hours. And then they productized
the robot phone, which is like an AI play. It
was a prototype for a long time, and now they
say they're going to ship one. I did see that
with the, it has the camera that comes out. That's
so weird. It could work for some people. If you
wanted to show off a crazy phone, if you wanted
to show that off and get some attention from
your friends, like that is the thing to get.
Yes. And then Xiaomi had their Xiaomi 7T Ultra
do its global launch. So they did the launch
in China and then a global launch at MWC. And
they did a special edition Leica lights phone,
which has a turnable dial for the camera. It's
one of the best cameras on a phone, period. But
then they went with an extra Leica special edition.
I think that's two grand or something like that.
So it's a lot more expensive than the base model,
but it's a special edition. And then Xiaomi also
had that cool prototype car at their booth, which
is a, they call it the Vision GT. So it's a Gran
Turismo kind of style prototype, which will never
ship as a real car, but it's an idea of what
they're planning on doing for their high -end
product. And then Lenovo launched a bunch of
laptops and then showed off a bunch of prototypes,
including a... convertible tablet. That's a gaming
tablet that can be used as a gaming handheld
or as a as a laptop, like a tablet, with a keyboard,
all that all those doodads. And then they also
had a highly convertible PC with screens and
keyboards that can move around inside and out
the device. And you customize it based on what
you want from the laptop. So you can like have
one screen on the front and one screen on the
back. Or you can have the keyboard on the outside
and the screen on the inside. If it was just
like a configurable laptop. I'm less sold on
that concept, but I think overall Lenovo has
been very good at showing off their prototypes
and then trying to productize them if there's
demand for them. They showed off a bunch of CES
stuff as well, but none of that's new. But they
did have iFixit at their booth, which I loved.
They were shot off, I think the T14S, which now
has a 10 out of 10 repairability score because
you can basically repair yourself, the entire
laptop based on, all the guides and parts that
are available and the QR codes. So you can like
basically maintain it yourself if you want. But
that also enables the laptop in general to be
reused and repaired more often. So it doesn't,
all the components are recycled. It's just they
fix what's broken and then sell it to the next
person for a slight discount. It's really interesting
how that might help with all the environmental
things companies are trying to deploy and make
sure that they adhere to whatever standards are
required for the missions. I really thought at
this show, like we talked about the robot phone,
like I saw foldable phones, glasses. I know devices
are not nearly as much of a focus on the show
as they have been in the past, but I felt like
this year the device sort of game was at least
a little bit better than previous years. Like
I just felt like there was just more stuff to
look at in terms of phones. Totally. Somebody
who's been going for a while. It definitely felt
it was like waning. A lot of companies were just
doing their own events and not doing anything
at MWC. So I agree. It was nice to have that.
I also left off that I did go to the Google Avenue.
I got my fair share of Android pins, which I
don't have on me right now. But I also tried
out the AR glasses or AI glasses from Google
with the single display, which I think I mentioned
earlier. That's also a prototype, but will very
likely be close to the production model. Lots
of devices. I'm the device guy at the firm, so
I felt obligated to give a report from MWC. Good.
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting stuff. It
was good to see that. Yeah. So I have, I guess
it's a little bit related to devices. My last
topic is, yeah, I'm still wondering about the
idea of edge processing for these devices, because
a lot of the applications, Or some of the applications
that people have been talking about may require
edge processing. And especially if you're talking
about augmented reality on these glasses, that
computer processing is extremely intensive and
probably cannot be done on device and probably
will need to be done somewhere nearby to that
user in order to get the timing right. Like if
you turn your head when your augmented reality
vision... that you're looking through in your
glasses needs to react to how you're turning
your head and it displays different information
in different information as you turn your head.
Presumably all that has to be done with an edge
computing setup. But my question is, so I get
that. NVIDIA is obviously a part of that whole
story. So if NVIDIA is able to supercharge a
base station with its GPUs and now the base station
is near to you, that's doing the edge processing.
It's powered by an NVIDIA GPU. That all makes
sense to me. My question. Now is, does it make
sense to have all these edge computing nodes
unmanned and unprotected, particularly in an
era when there's tons of discussion about sovereign
AI and sovereign data processing? Does it make
sense to have all of this edge computing conducted
on a base station that is unmanned and presumably
unprotected? I don't know. That's just a question
I'm raising. I feel like there's a lot of questions
in this industry that we haven't yet thought
all the way through. Can you afford to upgrade
a base station to support edge computing? Does
that financially make sense? Does it make sense
from a data sovereignty perspective? Does it
make sense from a literal enterprise security?
So if enterprises are buying the computing capacity
at that base station, can they do that with the
base station is unmanned? There's just no one
there to protect. A lot of the enterprise applications
for AI assume that the data is going to be extremely
well protected, maybe by being on -premises.
And if it's not on -premises, would they trust
the computing to be done in a data center or
an edge computing data center at the base of
a cell tower that is unmanned? I don't know.
I just feel like there's so many questions about
this AI future that I think are not yet fully
baked. Not yet fully baked. That's my, but I
don't know. I don't know if you've got a... I
do have an opinion. I think that there's a lot
of challenges with hybrid AI. And I think this
is definitely one of the ones that has to be
resolved. I think there will have to be some
level of security that proves like a chain of
custody. And there will probably be all kinds
of security layer on top of that. And I think
because of that, that might even... reduce some
of the compute capacity that's available at the
edge just to to do decrypt and encrypt and that
might be part of the equation of how nvidia deploys
this and how others do it and maybe that might
be a big component of different companies approaches
to this hybrid ai but i think ultimately for
ai to be successful on device it also has to
be pretty good at the edge because to your point
there's gonna be tons of applications that are
way too big to run on device, but maybe not computationally
marked to run all the way in the cloud in terms
of cost. So we have to think about the security
aspect of things, but also the costs, and what's
going to work locally, what's going to work at
the edge of what's going to work in the cloud.
And I will also require models of varying sizes
and complexities. So I think I had some of these
discussions at MWC, which was like, what's going
to end up, what's going to run on the edge? How
big is it going to be? And how relevant will
it be to the user or the application developer?
Because is it going to be a 7 billion parameter
model? If it is, maybe you can actually just
crunch it down to something you can run on device.
Or is it going to be like a 70 billion parameter
model? That's maybe actually should end up in
the cloud. Or maybe we don't actually. end up
running it on the RAN. And we run totally different
workloads on the RAN. So I think if there's one
way that I look at it, it's maybe the RAN ends
up being something that the operators use to
run their own services that they offer down the
road. I think that the live translation feature
that T -Mobile deploy in my mind for those things
that make sense, there might be more of those
types of workloads that make sense that don't
touch. super sensitive data. But then again,
translating a live call could actually be sensitive
data. Yeah, I think you raise a very valid point
in that we do have concerns about data security.
I will tell you, really sensitive data, even
to this day, doesn't really even go to a cloud.
It might not even be a discussion because it's
already not part of the discussion already. And
your only option is basically on -prem or on
-device. You and I did sit in that T -Mobile
press conference at Mobile World Congress, and
they talked about their cloud that Deutsche Telekom
is building in Europe. And already at 10 ,000
GPUs, and they only announced it a few months
ago, and it's already at 30 % utilization. And
then they're going to build more locations throughout
Europe for Sovereign. data center play and seemingly
very successful already. It definitely seems
like there is demand and operator. And not only
is there demand, but there are operators out
there that are investing in this successfully,
which is a big change even from, I think, just
last year. And I would also add that I think
carriers outside the U .S. have more opportunities.
Right. Because there's a lot more appetite to
not be dependent on American cloud companies.
Right. For this capability and the next natural
tenant. is the operators. So I think non -US
based operators do have opportunities here. I
think we mentioned this a little bit in our last
podcast. I think that's still true. Non -US operators
are going to be the natural successors to US
cloud companies if that separation were to occur
or is already occurring because some countries
don't necessarily trust the US government. There's
a possibility the US government could just decide
to cut. anthropic off from some other country,
right? ByteDance. Yeah. We could, it's anybody's
world now. Yeah. I'm not really sure where we're
going with it, but I think the Europeans aren't
willing to take too many risks. And fair position
too. I know. And we'll see what the next week,
everything will change next week. We'll see.
We'll see how it goes. A war broke out while
we were traveling, attending a trade show in
another country. Who knows what will happen next?
especially considering what's going on with everything.
The war with Iran has proven out the ISAC use
case is very valuable and will likely be at the
forefront of many countries' 6G deployments,
especially in the Gulf states. I think that will
be a very big chip in the negotiations for Spectrum
and other things with governments. But that was
just an aside that I had during MWC that I didn't
mention earlier in the podcast. Great point.
Yeah. If the focus wasn't on public safety yet,
it is now. Really? No. I really enjoyed our podcast.
We didn't actually run as long as I thought we
would, which. Not too bad. Covered a lot of ground.
Mixed feelings about that. But overall, I really
enjoy our second podcast together. Another big
one. We hope our viewers and listeners found
this week's topics interesting. And please don't
forget to rate us and subscribe and tune in again
next week. Thanks again, Mike, for joining me.
Thanks.