Welcome to episode 134 of the GT on 5g. It's the latest inside 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 Ancho. Let's get started with my first topic and I wanna talk about a startup called Irvine.

And I actually recently spoke with the company to talk about their technology, but they've they've made their big splash announcement. They're focused on a wireless back haul solution for indoor deployments. And so I'd like to spend some time on why I think it's unique. So in talking to the company, They're leveraging the 60 gigahertz millimeter wave unlicensed spectrum to basically create a back haul solution for indoors.

And what's really cool, they have beam steering technology and it basically employs two different radios. One n and one out. And what they can do is they can actually use beam forming to shoot around corners. That's one of the contentions within indoor environments. And where I think this is really gonna be impactful is in private wireless deployments.

Because if you think about, Back haul, it's typically fiber or CAT six. And so this solution utilizes millimeter wave for back haul. And I think that is gonna be really compelling. It's gonna untether things and I think it's really gonna help with the, with the private, wireless deployments.

And I'm not sure if you've seen this or if you heard the news, but they are a startup. They're gonna be at Mobile World Congress. I do plan to meet with them, but would love to get your. . 

Yeah. So it sounds like the product itself is called Air Tunnel or Wave Tunnel. Yeah. And I do think it's really interesting cuz it is indoor wireless backbone.

I think it could work really well in places where maybe the structure maybe a little bit older.  And you're looking for a way that may be. , and you might be looking for a way to get infrastructure into a building and, work it through the building without it necessarily requiring you to drill through concrete.

. So I think there are definitely some applications for this. I didn't see what the max throughput would be. , it sounds like they say it goes through walls and around corners. Yeah. And it's non-line of sight, so it's definitely, a little bit more interesting than what I've heard before, but it sounds like it's a hardware and software solution.

It is, and, I think it's again, it's gonna be pretty impactful for private wireless deployments. And, I asked executives, we had a call last week and I asked 'em, I go, is anyone else doing this? And their answer was no. We believe we're the first that was actually stated in a, in an article that was published this week, I believe it was from Fierce Wireless or Telecom as well.

To your point. Not a lot of, specifics on, throughput and performance and that sort of thing. But obviously if it's millimeter wave, if it's back haul it's gonna support a pretty beefy wireless pipe. Yeah. So I'll be learning more. In fact, I think you and I, at the end of this podcast, we'll be talking about what we plan to do at Mobile World Congress, but let's move to your first topic.

Earlier this week you talked about Qualcomm and X 35 and you were briefed under embargo as, as well I, around their X 75 and you wanna talk a little bit about that? 

Yes, I have a visual aid. So we've got a snap Dragon logo here, and on the other side is the Snap dragon.  X 75 modem with a diagram of the converged millimeter wave sub sticks and millimeter wave millimeter and sub SubT sticks transceiver.

And what's supposed to be the RF front end? I'll move it a little closer to the camera so you can see. But yeah it's a modem. It's a discreet modem. It will be the flagship mode.  that Qualcomm has. It will be announced, technically announced now. But there'll be demonstrations of it at mwc.

And it's a thin modem, so this is gonna be probably in the next iPhone as well. If Apple so chooses to go with the latest Snapchat, which lately they have been and it'll probably end up in the latest smartphones as well. But the real details here,  in my Forbes article. I wrote an article that actually published today, the announcement was yesterday.

And we record this on Thursdays usually. So if this publishes on Friday, know that. But basically the X 75 is top of the line for Qualcomm. The big deal here is they've increased their AI performance by two and a half X inside the modem. That's not on the phone. That's not an s o c inside the 5G modem.

, they now do 10 component carrier millimeter wave instead of. , they now do five component carrier in mid band instead of four. So they've increased the throughput. They also added uplink mimo, which means you get uplink carrier aggregation and you get about 50% uplift on uplink.

And if you improve up uplink performance, that means you reduce battery consumption and you improve coverage. And then on top of all, It's a release 17 modem that's release 18 ready, which means that Qualcomm believes that its capabilities will align with where the release 18 standard will finalize.

Since release 18 has not actually been standardized yet. There isn't a freeze, a complete freeze of the spec yet. , like with 17 we got last year, but it will be fairly soon. But realistically, I don't think you're gonna see release 18. Be a thing until 2025 or 2026. . So this is very much a long tail modem.

Yeah. That I think is actually a good thing if it really does land as a release 18 modem because,  that will enable, a lot of companies that are looking long term for 5G to build something today with that modem and be able to continue to use that modem for a very long time. Yeah. I'm not saying that you can't use other modems and continue to build, some of the people who built with the X 50, for example, which was Qualcomm's first, 5G mode.

They're not gonna have standalone and they were only gonna do millimeter waves. I think having a modem that's gonna do release 18 is very interesting because Release 18 is also known as 5G advanced, which is technically five point 5g. So it's already like that midpoint between 5G and 6g.

And I think it will help companies take advantage of a lot of the future.  opportunities that 5G will pro provide. Other than that they didn't really talk about process node, which I thought was a little interesting, but we could assume it's a four nanometer again. Yeah. And they didn't really talk about throughput.

I didn't see any throughput numbers anywhere. But I'm gonna assume the throughput is probably still capped at probably around 10 gigabits per second. , however, I have a strong feeling that real world performance is probably gonna increase quite a bit just because you have more access to more spectrum.

and, some qualm numbers have gone up and Yeah. And you have uplink mimo. So I think overall this will still be a net positive for smartphone users. And, I think this could also find its way into other devices that set. I don't think the X 75 will necessarily be in as broad of categories as X 35.

We talked about last. And my article on Forbes kind of covers the X 35 and X 75 together because I think together it creates a much more coherent vision for what Qualcomm's trying to do on the modem side and how they're trying to address the market. . 

Yeah. No, I love the investment protection aspect of it.

I'm wondering if it's, if it's gonna be firmware upgradeable or if they're just getting ahead of the specs, like with the additional capabilities that you spoke 

to. 

But I think it will be firmware upgradeable. Yeah. But you did remind me one thing, the converge transceiver is very interesting.

They didn't include it here. You can see it's actually just printed out on the thing. It's not an actual chip. But what's interesting about the conver. Converged transceiver is that it now reduces the need to have two transceivers, one for sub six, and one for millimeter wave, and it does one for both.

And that is an interesting thing because it will make millimeter wave easier to deploy because one takes up less pc B space on the board. They say 25% reduction. And it also helps save power because you're no longer have to light up two transceiver simultaneously. You can just light up one transceiver.

And obviously there's also a new millimeter wave module, a fifth gen millimeter wave mo module for. Whole system. So we can probably expect higher performance, millimeter wave, smaller size modules, maybe even lower power. That's the trend that Qualcomm has been going towards with these millimeter wave modules.

I forget the name of it. It's a Qtm five something, but yeah, that's the X 75 announcement. Good 

stuff man. And for our viewers and listeners if you wanna read that article that ans just posted to Forbes, go ahead. As Twitter feed at anchos, let's go to my second topic this week and I want to talk about a company, coherent Technologies and they've been signing up partnerships left and right.

There was an announcement with Mair this week. They had signed and an agreement with Vodafone last year. So what's special about these guys? I've spent time with their senior vice president, Ronnie. He's a, he heads up marketing and sales. They have a really interesting technology. They call it their universal spectrum multiplier or U S M.

And what it basically does, it claims to be able to double the 4G and 5G spectrum performance. And that is huge. When you look at, how expensive spectrum is, you've got carrier aggregation going on you've got multiple ways to try to squeeze as much coverage and performance out of that, that spectrum.

That's that very valuable asset that. Is spent, billions of euros and billions of dollars on. So I think Coha Technologies is a company to keep a close watch on. And I will also be spending time with cohere at Mobile World Congress, and I'll probably have more to share after the event.

But what are your thoughts about the spectrum multiplier technology? . 

I think I need to look more into it, but it sounds very compelling. Yeah. Just because spectrum is always a constraint. And I think obviously there are certain countries that are more str spectrum constrained than others.

And I think Europe is probably one of those markets where they could be very successful. . But yeah, I definitely would like to learn more about the technology itself, and I might even join your mwc. Checking out what they've got to have. 

You bet. So a little shut out to Ronnie there, Ronnie.

We'll see you here in a week or so, but hey my friend. Let's go to your second topic. You wanna talk about the iPhone and it's getting 5G standalone support, right? Yeah. 

In one of the developer betas of iOS 16.4 there is going to be an option to enable 5G standalone. What's interesting is that this is hidden in the setting.

and it's in the cellular settings and it, the toggle is only going to be available for T-Mobile users. Okay. Which makes sense because T-Mobile is the only network today that has 5G standalone enabled across its network. , they currently have it in the low band and they're literally in, in the process of deploying it in the mid band.

And I have a strong feeling that my network outage upgrade that happened yesterday was probably one of those. Yeah. . And what's interesting is T-Mobile is talking about how this new standalone network on iPhones could, deliver up to three gigabits per second across all the spectrum that they have.

And if you had told me that two years ago, I would say you're crazy. Yeah. But as somebody who actively runs speed tests on all three carriers on a regular basis without standalone, I was already getting one point. Gigabits per second on T-Mobile. Yeah. And that was without C-band and without some of the other spectrum that they deployed.

So I actually think three gigabits per second is actually within reach without millimeter wave, which is astounding. Yeah. When I first read this article, I didn't really understand why they were saying Three gigabits per second could be coming as soon as possible on iOS. 16.4. And then I realized they were talking just on T-Mobile because I have an iPhone 14 on Verizon and it does four gigabits per second on millimeter wave.

But it's really interesting cuz they're talking about, aggregating, 2 5, 2 0.5 gigahertz bands, plus 1900 meher.  and they're not even talking about 3.7. So yeah. It's really interesting and standalone is not really about speeds honestly. But it's gonna enable fire speeds just because, there's a lot more to, to put together in terms of spectrum.

Yeah. And the device will be able to enable it. I think there's a little bit of a confusion here from this nine to five Mac  reading cause they seem to be. Conflating standalone with higher speeds, even though those speeds could totally be accomplished on NSA as well. Sure. But, SA will have better coverage and I'm really hoping to see, how this translates to on network slicing.

And because Apple is a, adopting this I think that really bodes well for our standalone applications because IO.  and iPhones are just a really huge user base. Yeah. And if operators are able to say that Samsung and Apple both have standalone enabled on their network, that's probably, the majority of their users a across those two OEMs.

I think that's actually the big story here. But it's very exciting. This is 16.4 beta, so it's not a commercial release yet, but these betas usually release in the next few weeks after they, after their beta. So we could see this in the next month or two after mwc. 

It's exciting to see the devices now catch up with what T-Mobile has, done from a leadership position in deploying sa and yeah,  you and I have talked about this many times.

Standalones gonna unlock the true promise of 5g. It's not necessarily, equating to faster speeds, but to be able to do things like network slicing that are gonna. Open up a host of new use cases and modernization opportunities for the mobile network operator. But with that, let's go to my third and final topic and I wanna talk about 6G and hopefully we can wait several years for we, before we have to rename or rebrand our podcast, , but I was just thinking about that.

Yeah. But I wanna talk about Nokia and t and they've both achieved two technical advances on the path to six G. And as I read this article, and it was a light reading article, it made me wonder. Will the future of mobile networking become aware? And it reminds me of Skynet and Terminator.

I'm a total science fiction geek, but let me share the details. This broke, this news broke just earlier this week and the two milestones that they announced, one. Was the first implementation of AI and machine learning into the radio air interface, which effectively gives six G radio's ability to learn.

Chill on that for a minute. And then the second is utilization of subter Hertz spectrum to boost network capacity. It's 60 g is all on speculation. You and I have speculated that it's gonna be Tara Hart Spectrum, but here the second sort of p ooc was around utilizing Subter her.

to boost network capacity. And that makes sense theoretically at a high level. But I don't know if you caught the news, but what do you think about all this? I think, 

Some of the things that I've seen some of those demos that I've got pre-brief for M W C I'm trying to dance around my embargo NDAs, but be careful.

All I'm gonna say is that AI accelerated networks and AI accelerated devices working with ai, accelerated networks are going to be a thing. Yeah. Whether that's in 5G or in 6g. And I think that we are going to see, a lot more intelligence built in on both ends to maximize performance and battery life.

Yeah. To enable. , some of these terror Hertz and subter hertz applications. I will say that, I think if you think millimeter waves propagation is bad, wait till you see terror hertz. Yeah. . So that's gonna be an interesting conversation to have. Yeah. I think there's many years of research that need to occur both trial and error to make terror hertz a viable.

Band of Spectrum. Yeah. And that introduces a whole different type of antenna that you would need to include on the smartphone, which would then, you know, in introduce an entirely new bomb problem. So think we're very much I believe that six G will probably be more. In the seven to 12 gigahertz range.

Yeah. Then we will see maybe in the subter Hertz range or even terra Hertz range. Yeah. But it'll be really interesting to see how six G pans out. That said to your point, I've also been thinking about when we need to rename this podcast . And hopefully it won't be anytime soon. But Yeah, I think it's really interesting and I don't think it hurts to talk about 6G and think about it.

Yeah. We're probably seven years away from it actually launching. And we probably shouldn't really be talking about it in a meaningful manner for another four or five years because, most of it will be just pain in the sky like it is right now. Yeah. But yeah, there's lots of research going on.

And you know what, I think six G is probably gonna be the. , battleground for a lot of different industries. 5G was a very heated one, right? We saw Apple, and Intel trying to challenge Qualcomm. And media tech, I think made a lot more ground up on the 5G space they did in 4g.

Six G is a new opportunity for a new entrant and maybe even old ones. Reinvigorate their strategies and we'll see what happens. 

Yeah. I try to be selective on the six G topic on, with our podcast, but I do think that there's some there's some learnings that can occur from this forward kind of thinking.

Investigation mentality that could benefit things like 5G advanced and that sort of thing. So I just, I thought it was an interesting, angle on the AI machine learning and the awareness and learning capability of potentially future networks. But with that, let's go to your third and final topic.

And it's been a big weekend, super Bowl last weekend. I'm in Kansas City still here. Still rooting rooting the chief's win. But you wanna talk going crazy? Yeah. It's been crazy. The parade was this week. We didn't go down to it, but we watched it in the comfort of our home. Over a hundred thousand people were downtown for the Chief's kingdom.

But but you wanna talk about two activations and at and t activations, right? One's tied to the Super Bowl and another's tied to, 

Yeah, another one. , I want to talk about the Super Bowl first, even though I listed it second. Yeah. And then talk about the b I'll start weekend. Super Bowl, lots of data has come out about that now.

Verizon claims that their customers made up 60% of the Super Bowl's attendees, which is an interesting demographic because super Bowl tickets are not cheap. And then I'm jumping between articles cause I've got a Verizon published here. I've got a light reading article. I've got an RCR article, so I'm gonna be over the place a little bit here, but I'm gonna try to be quick and efficient with my use of time.

Okay. It says, Verizon users use 47.8 terabytes of data while at and t users use 21 terabytes. And if you extrapolate that data, you can do some math about how many at and t people there were, how many Verizon people there were, and how many T-Mobile people there were in the stadium. I'm not gonna do.

Now at and t says its customers used 21 terabytes of data compared to 13 terabytes last year and tw 10 terabytes during the 2020 game. Yeah. Which is, and nearly half of that usage, nine terabytes occurred during pre-game activities, which I find very interesting cuz people are just probably bored and trying to consume their time in doing stuff.

Yeah. All the, all of the many hours of pre-game stuff and activations that occur at the game. And then, , they said that at and t had also shared that 5G data usage was up 81% compared to last game. Verizon said that their game, that yesterday's game represents a 57% increase from last year's Super Bowl.

And that peak download speeds hit 4.2 gigabits per second and uploads 300 megabits per second. Verizon says that they invested a hundred million in network upgrades and enhancements around the State Farms Stadium. Yeah. In the greater Phoenix area. 

wrote that's pretty significant. Yeah.

And that's just not like cults and cows and that sort of thing, right? Yes. 

Probably at and t did deploy a lot of cols and cows. But they said that they also deployed more than 2000 wireless network antennas inside the stadium.  and 12 miles of fiber and power cables, as well as more than 60 small cells outside of the stadium supported by 15 miles of fiber.

And then they also did some deployments of Band 14 for public safety. Let's see, what else do I have here? C B R S and Millimeter Wave were also deployed. T-Mobile deployed 140 megahertz of 2.5 gigahertz Spectrum at the stadium. And they, their story was actually that they're not doing any kind of special deployments, but rather that they're just upgrading the whole Phoenix area as a whole, as a component of what their strategy was.

Cisco also did a lot of upgrades to their DA systems and upgraded things to wifi six which is a big deal because that adds security and capacity. And then, , there's just all kinds of stuff. And then on top of that, so in addition to the Super Bowl there was another at t activation that's occurring, I believe later in the month, which is the N B A All-Star game.

And at t seems like they're like the official partner here. So they're doing a slam dunk contest. They're doing a concert. They're gonna deploy 1600 wireless network, improve. Across the area of Salt Lake City increasing C-Band, millimeter Wave and Band 14 Spectrum. It starts on the 17th, which is actually tomorrow, which was probably when a lot of people are gonna listen to this.

And there will be some I think where I found it was there was a the slam dunk contest, which is Shaquille O'Neal. I'm probably gonna watch that. I'm not And then there's also the concert lens. So you can watch the kid Ro Laroy perform live, and then there will be a remix later on that you can also watch.

There's all kinds of stuff going on that's at and t related. Seems like there are a very big sponsor here. Yeah. And there's an above the rim cam presented by at t 5g, which they already had in previous years, which I have actually seen. And what else? Yeah that's kind of it. But yeah, lots of stuff going on.

Big sports. 5G is a big component of that and I don't think that's gonna stop, content and video are always easy low hanging fruit for these carriers. 

I would say it's a layup, right? . 

But I gotta give it to you. I gotta give it to you. 

But I'll tell you, at and t is really front and center, really driving the whole 5G mantra home.

Like they sponsor the Red River Shootout between Texas and ou, Texas Alma Mater. Last year when I attended the Final Four, at and t was a sponsor there, 5G all over the place. And I really think, and you really focus on this, you focus on mixed reality, ar, vr and that sort of thing.

These are really cool activations with video and 5g and it really, it  drives home, the power. Of 5G and what it can do, especially in those video intensive applications. But it's been another great podcast. We got two in this week. Before we sign off though, we just wanna tell our listeners and viewers next week will be a preview of Mobile World Congress.

So an Angela and I will be coming with sort of our expectations, what we think's gonna be going on. And we're also, while we are there the following week, we are gonna try to do some video at the. And we may even try to pull in our chief analyst, Patrick Moorehead, to join us for some of that. But with that, why don't you take 

us home?

Absolutely. I'm very excited about M W C. It's usually one of our biggest shows of the year and it's a big deal for 5G in general, so I'm very excited about that and hopefully we'll talk about it more next week and the week after, just because there's just so much news that comes out during that week.

One podcast wouldn't do it justice, so for sure. For sure. We hope our viewers and listeners from this week's topic's interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights for a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media, will is at Will Town Tech and I'm at Ancho sog.

We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in next week and don't forget to rate and subscribe.