Welcome to episode 133 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 more insights and strategy. I'm Will Townsend, and joining me this week is fellow analyst Ancho Sag. Let's get started. I'm actually in Kansas City this week visiting family and still celebrating that big Super Bowl win.

So I'm just gonna say go chief. Chief Kingdom, I'm I've been indoctrinated into into that kingdom via my wife who's grown up here. But let's get started with my first topic and I wanna talk about Erickson and it's expanding, its 5G indoor portfolio. And so the question is, what's the big deal there?

Typically indoors are very challenging environments with lots of metal, lots of interference, basically fairday cages and in venues. As an example, DAAs systems have been the platform Azure to make this all happen. And but what Erickson is doing is it's expanding its indoor mobile connectivity portfolio with three new solutions.

And again, , these are aimed at technology platforms like distributed antenna systems or daes and small cells. And what I really like about this,  they announced a couple different sets of hardware that are sized for obviously, square footage and the configuration of venues and that sort of thing.

But what I really like is a new software feature that they're releasing called Erickson 5g Precise Positioning. And what this does, it provides location services for a wide range of use cases that communication service providers and enterprises can use, like asset tracking, tool positioning for things like environments and factories and mines and hospitals and warehouses.

This is part of the radio system portfolio at Ericsson. And again, I, Ericsson has always been a leader with respect to this type of technology. So from my perspective, this really extends their footprint. And you know why I think it's important, obviously you and I have been talking a lot about private wireless and the applications that can be applied there.

Especially in things like manufacturing automation and asset tracking and that sort of thing. So I'm not sure if you caught the news. It broke about a week ago. We are a week late because I was in Europe and so the news is a little stale. But wondering if you have any insights or if you caught that news.

I didn't catch the news, but I did. I mean I saw it but I didn't really read into it that much. Yeah. I do think it's interesting cuz , I think 5G indoor is going to become more relevant over time. Yeah. But I think that one of the challenges that's happening, and I think I saw an article about this today, is that, like big industrial downtowns and corporate business centers are struggling to get employees to come back.

Yeah. And, return to the office isn't working like they had planned. And some places are, losing 30. Of their revenue, which I assume is probably a 30% reduction in people. Sure. So I think it's gonna be a challenge for a lot of companies that are pushing for infrastructure upgrades to convince Building owners and corporations to invest in infrastructure upgrades when you know their headcounts are down and people are no longer coming into the office as often.

So it's really interesting, but I also think there are gonna be some headwinds for this kind of a business. I hear you and there's no question that there's a lot of downsizing going on. It just seems every other day we hear about a reduction in force, whether it was the 5% across the board, layoffs at Dell Technologies or what.

But I do think that some companies are very focused on finding ways to make office spaces a magnet. And I spent time with Cisco last week at the Ramia live event. By the way, I shared an article today on my insights, so hit at Will Town Tech, if you wanna learn more about what I experienced in Amsterdam last week.

But, one of the things that one of the Cisco team members was telling me was, . In the past they had separate campuses for their Meraki business, which it's a beautiful building.  right there near the Embarcadero. It's got a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge. Cisco had separate offices, but what they've done now with hybrid work is they've they've blended these office environments together.

So now the Meraki building is no longer just for Meraki employees. Both Cisco and Meraki employees can go there and it's becoming a magnet because of the amenities, the beauty, the fact that it's, it's in downtown San Francisco. . And I think even for businesses that don't have, beautiful campuses with billion dollar views out of the windows, providing rock solid connectivity is gonna be an attractive element for people to come back into the office.

So I think your insights are done on, but I think that, something like indoor, improving indoor connectivity. Can serve as a magnet to bring people back in the office, but time will tell. But with that, let's move to your first topic, and I know you and Patrick Moorehead, our chief analyst were at Samsung and Pact I think it was right before I was about to fly out to Amsterdam, and you wanna share your insights on a Galaxy launch and some other things.

Yeah, so it was a pretty jam-packed launch. I wouldn't necessarily say anything there was really ne necessarily announced. Was unexpected. They announced a new Galaxy Has 23 series of phones all shipping with Qualcomm Snap Dragon s Qualcomm Snap Dragon. Series eight, gen two say that fast three times.

It's , it needs to be shortened. But I'll say what was a big deal at this announcement was that Samsung is shipping Qualcomm, Snapchat globally across all geographies, which they haven't done in a very long time. Yeah. So no more XOs on phones. , with the S3 series at least. And they also.

That they would be upgrading their book three line to all Intel processors, which they actually have, I think the book two was also all intel, but the first gen, they did a blend of Qualcom and intel. Yeah. They don't have any 5G PCs yet which is interesting. Yeah. But I do think they will eventually bring back 5g cs.

I still have one of the earlier Samsung books with 5G built. On a Qualcomm platform. And then they also announced a partnership with Google and Qualcomm on xr. And that was the extent of the announcement. But I do think the announcement was designed to give the market a signal that Samsung is in the XR business.

So when Apple announces their product, people will know that Samsung has already. Something. But I wouldn't necessarily say that Samsung has announced anything because they've essentially announced partnerships. They previously did already announce a partnership with Qualcomm to do an XR headset.

But they didn't actually say what.  that will be  what form it will take or when it will be available. But adding Google to this I think gives a little bit more credibility. And I think it also gives Google an opportunity to reenter the XR market. Which they have not really, in my opinion, participated in since.

They, I don't know, Google Glass basically. They've, they're still doing Google Glass as an enterprise only product. And that's, They killed all their VR stuff years ago. They burned a lot of bridges. So I think this is them trying to find a way to mend bridges and potentially get back into xr, right?

But other than that, the S 23 Ultra is the top end model. Also of note, all of the S 23 series will also ship with Qualcomm wifi. So Qualcomm gets a double win on those, actually, technically a triple win cause they get the s o c, the modem and the wifi chip. . I don't know about RF front end, but I have a feeling they probably also got that win as well if they're already doing mode in the wifi.

Qualcomm is so pervasive and, in, in that area, in rf, right? Yep. And I think S 23 Ultras getting lots of good attention and from reviewers I'm still waiting for mine, but you, I, I got the S 23 plus and it's quite an impressive device. Yeah. I hope I hop can get my hands on the Ultra as well.

And then, yeah, I think, there's lots of competitors in the market. While that was happening OnePlus also announced, launched the one plus 11. And I actually have my review live on Forbes any day from now. Cool. And yeah, that's  my thoughts from unpacked.

Awesome. Yeah, I know T-Mobile got you and I both in S 23 plus. And I haven't been home long enough to unbox it, but I'm looking forward to playing with it and I'm looking forward to reading your review on, on your experience there as well as the ultra when you get your hands on an ultra too.

. But let's move to my second topic this week, and I wanna talk about the United States Postal Service and can they deliver more than just the mail in the form of 5G coverage maps? So you and I have talked about Okla and, these other companies that, that focus on, measuring, propagation and performance and that sort of thing.

But one, one of the big discussion points with the FCC has been around, establishing. 5G coverage maps and our friend Mike Dano at Light Reading wrote an article last week about how the u the United States Postal Service can be actually a solution here in helping stitch this all together.

There's an Australian company, it's called Rand Lytics. I've never heard of them. Have you heard of them? Not to put you on the. I have not. Okay. We'll do a little bit of research on them, but what they've done with the U S P S in Seattle is they're actually leveraging the mail carrier vehicles with equipment to basically stitch together 5G coverage maps.

And I think it's pretty innovative because, I always like to tease the postal service. You might get the mail some of the time. Usually not all the time. But I think this is a pretty interesting leverage of the postal service that has quite a large footprint that still delivers physical mail, all over the United States.

And, we've even talked about postal service post offices serving as basically towers for fwa, right? And rural America, that sort of thing. So I think it's pretty innovative. When you look at.  What the FCC is looking to spend, they signed a 45 million agreement last year with cost Quest to help them de develop these maps.

But if this company ran ly.  can help leverage,  the United States Postal Service means, certainly Seattle is just a proof of concept. They'd have to blow it out nationwide to do it. I think it might be pretty innovative. And I know that, typically on our podcast, you talk a lot about, performance testing and nuclear, that sort of thing.

But what are your thoughts? Can the postal service really step up here? I think they could. The U S P S is the only mail service that delivers.  every postal address. But I will say, there's a lot of places in rural America where they don't deliver directly to the door.

, they'll deliver to a mailbox and then, the whole neighborhood will pick up from the mailbox. Yeah. So it's not perfect. But I think as far as,  those miles are getting driven anyways. And they probably are the closest.  to delivering, nationwide and reaching nationwide.

, the only other company I can think of that might even come close to that is Google with Google Maps. And Stream View. So like maybe Google Maps is capturing, cellular data while they're capturing images. Yeah. I know they're capturing GPS data yeah.

I think it would be really interesting. I think obviously you'd have to create some kind of, three carrier.  Compatible appliance that can be attached potentially to the top of a mail truck. And maybe run on solar power and enable it to run independent of what the, the the driver is doing and really does create a coherent map.

Cuz honestly, I think our biggest problem is da we lack data.  And I agree that there should be a government agency that monitors this because truthfully, I don't think any of the carriers are being held to accounts to no provide good coverage maps. Yeah. And it should be legislated. But unfortunately, a lot of these carers spend a lot of money on lobbying to avoid.

Yeah. And the other point too there could be some, spoofing of the data. If it's if the FCC just solely relies on the mobile network operators to provide those coverage maps, because that's typically a chess beating exercise. T-Mobile has been the most aggressive, obviously because they've been in front of their other competitors in the US with respect to deploying 5g.

But yeah, I agree. There needs to be, there needs to. Some impartiality there. And I do think it's just, it's an interesting, it's an interesting use case. Like to your point, didn't really think about that. There are a lot of parts of rural America where, yeah, it's not getting delivered to the door.

Also, what I've noticed in rural Texas as a cyclist when I'm outside of Austin there are a lot of, mail delivery cars that are not U S P S vehicles. These are personal vehicles, and these people are contracted. By the US Postal Service to deliver mail into some of these outlying areas. So that would break down that model too.

But it's interesting I think we'll do some more digging on analytics to learn more about them, but I just thought it was an interesting story. But let's talk about your second topic this week. And you were talking about Qualcomm with respect to you with Samsung unpacked. But you wanna talk about it's X 35 5G modem, and it's the first release 17 modem.

Yeah. So Qualcomm announced this modem last week as part of this coverage. And I got pre-brief on it and it's a really interesting modem because. It's designed, it's actually not only their first release 17 modem, but it's also their first red cap modem. . It's designed to deliver 5g not necessarily for the sake of speed, but to deliver the efficiency of 5G and the latency of 5g.

Yeah. But to do it at a fraction of the power. So they're basically saying that this modem does all of what you would expect from a 5G mode.  at half the power. So this is significantly less power. And it's really designed for the vibe I got was all applications. You could theoretically put this in a phone, although it seems like you really wouldn't.

It's seems like it'd be like an iott. It'd be more of an iot application, wouldn't it? It is. It is more of an iot application. However, it also felt like they were saying that maybe you could put this in tablets and PCs.  if peak bandwidth is not a concern. Okay. Because it sounded like they were able to get I wanna say 500 megabits per second is their peak throughput.

. Which isn't crazy as far as 5G goes. Yeah. Would you consider that it's considerably less power? Then it like blows.  You know what they're talking about because they're really comparing this to a 4G LTE modem. Yeah. Because that's, most of the IOTT applications are 4G or 3g.

So they're able to do this at half the power of what they were doing on LTE E. So they're doing this in 5g, half the power of LTE with, I want to say more than double the throughput. Okay. So this is like a, it's a pretty. Announcement for Qualcomm. Yeah. I feel like this is like one of their MWC pre announcements where they announce a modem before MWC and then you can go and see it in person and see all the demos that they have.

But the the thing that, that's interesting is it has released 17 capabilities as well. And the reason why that's interesting is because that means it can do. , NTN and satellite communications natively. . And it can do it based on, the three GPP standard as opposed to doing something proprietary.

Yeah. Which is most of what we seen today. But when I asked Qualcomm about this, they said that they aren't talking specifically about they're not specifically talking about satellite. , but that my assumption would be correct, that it does support ntn. Yeah. Also a slight clarification it was the peak download speed is 220 megabits per second, and the peak upload is 100 megabits per second.

Okay. And it support and it supports both boner and VoLTE for Colin services. . And it supports 20 megahertz of bandwidth and it supports 5G n r. , ft d standalone, t  d sub six, ft d and LTE e cellular technology. So it's pretty, yeah. Across the board capable. But to your point, this is absolutely an iot OT application first.

Yeah. And that's why, they talked about the power levels being, half of what it was on LTE  and I. , it sounds like this is also maybe even drop in upgradable where if you designed for LTE with this chip set, you could easily transition to 5G and not worry about whether or not you can design for the future.

So I think this is one of those solutions where Qualcomm is trying to create a, five or 10 year roadmap chip set. . And it sounds like there might also be other chip sets in this series.  I think they also announced another one. I'm trying to find that cuz it, it happened like more than a week ago.

And, we've both been quite hammered heavily in the last week with information. I'm vaguely remembering there was another X 30 series, but essentially these are all designed for iot applications. And they're not integrated. These are discrete mode. . Got it. Yeah. And it, there's no secret that Qualcomm,  one of their superpowers is designing very power, efficient chip sets and modems and solutions.

And this really plays into their strengths from my perspective. And yeah, it sounds like it's it's low band. It's about propagation, it's about less about, devices and more about iot. But yeah, it'll be interesting. You mentioned Mobile World Congress. Both you and I and Patrick Moorehead, our chief analyst, will all be attending M W C, and I expect that you and I will probably do a preview podcast before we get on our flights next week.

To head there. Our listeners and viewers stay tuned for that. But let's go to my third and final topic this week and I want to talk about another G S M A event. So this is a Mobile World Congress Asia I've attended in the past. But they did announce last week that they are returning to Shanghai, China.

this year. And so it got me thinking, what does this mean for an embattled, China, there's no secret that, the geopolitics are high with respect to Russia and China these days with, the, all of the drama with that balloon and it getting shot by that fighter jet, and I read it had, The equivalent of three school buses, in size and weight of equipment on it.

But with all that said, I'm wondering like our, our visas probably expired right? During covid. So how many folks does a GSM a think they're gonna be able to get at that event? They're gonna all be, folks that are within China. , but and then you've got Huawei they will be at Mobile World Congress.

It'll be interesting. They've invited me to swing by their booth, so I'm probably gonna do that and see what they're all about. But yeah, they also invited me to swing by their analyst summit that they're having during mwc. This is all really interesting. I'm just trying to read between the tea leaves here but what do you think about that?

I think they're trying to capture. The APAC audience that wasn't able to go to M W C or didn't go and, because of all the surging in Covid I think this is gonna be a difficult event to get rolling. Because Covid is still ravaging China right now. Yeah. They have some of the worst numbers that they've had since the beginning of the pandemic basically.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. , it's a questionable whether or not this event will really be welcome and heavily attended. I think it will be very APAC heavy, like it always was. Yeah. I've never been fully tempted to go enough to actually attend it. M W C is a much easier one to justify, especially when you're Yeah.

In Barcelona travel. So I think if they're gonna have people come, they're probably gonna have to find ways to get people to get sponsored if they're not coming from China. Yeah. And I have a feeling that this will probably be one of those shows where you get a lot more APAC heavy vendors.

Maybe some of the Japanese Iran companies some of the Chinese vendors, maybe Huawei has a bigger presence there. Sure. It's gonna be, I've never been to that show, so I don't really know what the vibe is like. Yeah. But just from what I've seen, it really feels very APAC heavy. So I think that will continue, but I don't think it's gonna be anywhere near the scale of where it used to.

And if you look at where M W C is today, it's even still at a fraction of what it was before. I think that's, that show's gonna struggle and I just think that G S M A is just trying to, get the gears moving again on the events that they were doing to keep their organization role cuz the events are a big component.

are they yearly revenues? Oh it definitely is. It's what they monetize. And just to clarify,  this is Mobile World Congress, Asia. So you've been talking about the big event in Barcelona, which by all practical measures is Mobile World Congress. The Americas event has been growing.

They moved it to Las Vegas last year. It'll be in Las Vegas again this year. I attended last year and will be attending this year as well. But you're right,  these are smaller regional events and they're gonna cater, to the local, the local markets there.

I've only attended M W C Asia once I believe it was in Shanghai. It was several years ago. And it's just a smaller version of what in Barcelona, to your point. But I just thought it was interesting.  They could have picked a number of different places to host it. You've got in Southeast Asia, you have some, developing regions and places like Vietnam and that sort of thing.

That could have been hosts. You've got Singapore which would be a very logical choice. I just thought, the choice of, taking it to Shanghai was interesting. But time. Yeah, time will tell you. And I have been, you and I have been there many times but with that, let's move to your third and final topic for the week.

And you wanna talk about a network slicing demonstration with three really big industry stall wars. And this has to do with with enterprise and consumer solution delivery to an end. Yeah, so this actually happened like almost two weeks ago, admittedly because we're late on the podcast.

Yeah. But this is actually going to be demoed at mwc. And what it is a an actual network slicing demo showing both consumer and enterprise applications on a pc. So Intel, Microsoft, and Erickson worked together to deliver. On Windows 11. So this is, the latest Windows operating system.

Yeah. And they did like an interoperability testing in Sweden to show that they could do this using a cellular connected laptop. This is like the use case you and I have been talking about for 5G PCs since the beginning where you take a pc, you walk off campus and you still have the exact same experience, both in terms of security, in terms of performance and in per, in terms of like your domain and all of that files that you need to access.

Everything is essentially the same, and you can go anywhere with that device and it behaves as if you're on campus, right? And. That I think is a huge opportunity for PC makers and for Microsoft and for the operators all at the same time, to take advantage of five G's capabilities and deliver a truly secure PC experience that is better than what exists today.

Because so many people are logging into VPNs and it bogs down their PCs and they're doing them on unsecure networks. And VPNs are still questionable if you're on an unsecure network. . These are the kinds of things where you no longer need to do A V P N because you are on the actual network of the whatever company decides to provision the network, These are true private networks. And I think the application is really incredible. They're, this was an Erickson release and they said that it will be in the Erickson. For demonstration. They talked about using teams in Office 365 and even using AR and XR capabilities with this kind of network slicing application.

And it used Ericsson's dynamic networking, slicing selection and their dual mode 5G core as well as their rand slicing capabilities to make this possible. So obviously the network side was very Ericsson heavy. Yeah. But Microsoft and Intel both were, a component of this. And I'm gonna assume that.

if this was an Intel based system, it might even technically include media tech as well, since Media Tech makes the modem for this. But Intel does brand the modems in their PCs intel. It'll be really interesting to see this demo. I'm hoping to, take pictures of it, maybe play around with it and see what the experience is but I'm super excited about it just because this feels like a real 5G use case.

Something that you and I have been talking about for almost four years. I agree. And you and I have also been talking about the possibility if we can find the time, because we are very booked at mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but doing some booth videos and that sort of thing and doing a mini podcast from.

Barcelona. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna set that out there. . I think that'll be fun to do. And just one final comment before we wrap up. Cisco's been leading this initiative called Open Romine, and it's a coalition as there are a lot of different companies. Ericson and Intel are likely a part of it, but that's been the first step with what you're describing with being able to.

Rome ubiquitously and have that same policy and that same access. And by the way, VPNs are inherently terrible because they typically authenticate users to a flat network, and that's how bad actors can move laterally through networks. And as I've been building the security practice for our firm over the last two years, zero Trust is really bubbling up and that's more.

Authenticating users to applications based on defined policy. And so what you described in that use case is very compelling cuz it takes open roaming to the next level on a 5G network. And then to your point, it represents a tremendous monetization opportunity for the mobile network operators with all of the billions of euros and dollars they're investing to build out those networks.

But I'm sure we're gonna see a lot of cool stuff at M W C and we'll have a lot to report back over the coming weeks. But with that, it's been another great podcast, a little late this week, but why don't you take us home? Yeah. And I just wanted to add, I think everyone in the enterprise environment hates VPNs.

So Yeah, , I think I did when I went vpn, corporate America. Yeah. Even the people have to run them. They don't like running them either. No. Total performance hogs for sure, man. Yeah. I used, when I worked, I worked in corporate America, I used to just turn mine off, and I'd just, I'd figure out and I'm sure your IT department and Yeah.

And was really happy with you about that. I left Compact many years ago, but , why don't you take us home, bud? Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topic's interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights on a specific strategy topic for our future podcast, please reach out to us on social media.

Will is at Whale Town Tech and I'm at sho. We hope you have a great week and please tune again next week or actually later this week because we have two this week, . Thank.