Welcome to episode 138 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 again this week is Fellow Analyst Ancho Sag. Let's get started with my first topic and I wanna share a personal experience with T-Mobile's 5g fixed wireless access product.

And I've recently built a home in Bastrop, Texas and there aren't a lot of broadband options out there. The city is growing quite a bit. It's benefiting from the growth in Austin. Elon Musk has relocated the boring company headquarters out there as well. There is fiber service about 13, 14 miles south of the city in a little farming community called Smithville.

Hopefully that fiber service will come soon, but. I had relatively very few options. So actually Ancho, when you and I were at Mobile World Congress and we met with Neville Ray I mentioned this to Neville and said, Hey, I'd love to get A C P E, I'd love to test out the service. Within a matter of 24 hours, I was getting emails.

And so when I got back from Florida last week, that unit was waiting for. I ran out to to Bastrop this past weekend. And let me tell you the ease of setup is incredible. I unboxed it, I plugged it in, it went through some updates. I downloaded an app and I had the service connected within about 10 minutes.

And actually my wife was with me and she was blown away as well. The way that I've built the house, I've got these really huge windows in the front of the home, so I was able to put that right near the window.  and I'm getting five bars. And so I am, I'm super impressed with just the ease of setup.  That's one of the things that T-Mobile has talked about is about how easy it is to set up.

Now from a performance standpoint, I didn't have a chance really to test it out. I will be back this week. I'll be doing some speed tests and that sort of thing. I'll actually probably be recording a podcast with you and I'm also doing some video sessions as well. And so I'll report back on that.

But so far so good. Again, ease of use and I've got a fairly strong signal. Not a fairly strong signal, a really strong signal. I'm assuming this is likely low band for now. But I just wanted to share that with our viewers and listeners, and I wanted to get your take. . 

Yeah, I was gonna say we should definitely try to record a podcast over it to see, how robust it is.

Yeah. But I would also say, do at home streaming of TV and movies try and download some big files. Really put it through its paces because. . Not all CPEs are the same, nor are all services and, every cell is different. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see what your experience is like.

I had a moderately good experience in terms of setup. The experience was great, but the speeds were mediocre. But that's also when I lived in suburbia where they didn't really. Mid band yet. Yeah. Now they have mid band everywhere, so I probably even get good signal here, although I live on a, in a double wall apartment complex.

So yeah, I'm on the inner wall of the complex, so I don't actually have much cellular reception inside here, but even then, I still get some mid band. But nevertheless, I hope you haven mid.  Because I think your experience will be considerably better than just using low band. But they have a lot of low band spectrum now as they're freeing some of that up from 3g.

And hopefully your experience will only get better at time. 

Yeah, no, I believe so too.  My assumption it's gonna be low band just given the city and just, where it's at in its maturity with other broadband services. But like I mentioned I'll be recording out there this week and, I'll definitely report back, but that's a nice segue to your first topic, and I have lots of insights to share here, but big news, so T-Mobile acquiring Mint Mobile.

it was like for 1.4 billion, and rumors have been going around, for some time here. But it's your topic. I want you to lead off with it, but I definitely have some thoughts here. Yeah. 

, obviously MIT Mobile is a very well known operator. They're an M V N O, so they don't really have their own network.

In fact, they're using T-Mobile's network. Yep. Yeah. So this is actually a very good fit for T-Mobile because they are no longer going to have a customer in that.  For wholesale. So they actually could see wholesale revenues dip as a result of this. , however, they will gain those customers as direct customers.

Yeah. So they'll still be making sale those sales. And my understanding is that MIT Mobile will be still operating somewhat independently of T-Mobile. , but I expect that they will eventually be wound in and they will probably keep the brand just because it's a strong brand. Yeah. And I think, they really like having Ron Reynolds as a spokesperson.

Yeah.  As well as a, former major shareholder. I think they, the understanding was that he was somewhere in the ballpark of 25%. 

Yep. Yeah. A quarter of the company.  

Of the company's value which would give him approximately a 350 million pay. . Although some of this transaction is being done in cash and the other half is being done in stock, but he's getting a significant payday. And I think that they're gonna continue to go the path of what whatever mid mobile does. And I know you have some thoughts on this but I just wanted to add that I think MIT mobile is a good mvno. And most people that I know habit are happy.

So I think at this point this is a good thing for T-Mobile and for Mint. I do believe Mint could have probably grown to be even bigger. Yeah. But these MVNOs are always at risk of being acquired. Yeah. Because they, they have pretty sticky customer bases and they tend to be a lot more heavy on customer service and creating unique value propositions that the bigger carriers don't offer.

Yeah. So a couple of thoughts. So number one, I think there's great culture alignment because, mint mobile's go to market strategy was very similar. To to T-Mobile's, like you mentioned. They're an mvno. They've been leveraging the T-Mobile network. Ryan Reynolds, the guy is just hilarious.

You just look at 'em and you laugh. And the video with Mike, the c e o of T-Mobile and Ryan, what was hysterical and I think at the end of the video Ryan says, I have a new dad now, I think culture is well aligned.  Men has really built its prepaid business with a very aggressive subscription plan at $15 a month.

It starts at 15 a month, and but again, very similar to T-Mobile. Have found ways to provide entitlements and that sort of thing, above and beyond, the service. Very similar to t Magenta as well. I think on the surface, again, good culture alignment. And from my perspective, this brings an install base that T-Mobile can very easily cross sell.

Its fixed wireless access.  that I was just talking about earlier. And so it, it's potentially an acquisition engine and none of that. I'm reading the tea leaves and that none of that was really stated within any of the press releases or the news or the commentary from my Orion or from Mike.

But I think it's a wi it's a wise move again, great culture alignment and I think it fits very well with T-mobile's, disruptive consumer, offering. So that's my take on it. But let's move to my second topic this week and I wanna talk about Roger's communication.

They've launched a challenge to develop 5G applications for the mining industry. And so I immediately thought, is mining the new poster child use case for 5G on a prior podcast during our Mobile World Congress wrap up. I talked about Huawei. And their focused on mining and what they're doing to improve safety and that sort of thing.

So what Rogers is doing is they're actually using their private networking test bed to launch this. And so it's a competition. It's for startups.  and it's actually at their facility in Ontario. And they're asking interested startups to submit their ideas and proof of concepts by April 4th.

And then on April 21st, there'll be finalists that are announced and the winners potentially receive up to 72,000 in US dollars worth of support, which also includes 25,000 Canadian to develop their proof of concept within the Roger. Technology Center of Excellence at the Norcat Underground Center.

What I also find interesting, there are other be besides Norcat, there are other companies involved including Dell Technologies, and Dell is offering its edge platform access to its edge platforms. And so this is pretty clever from my perspective because at Mobile World Congress, one of the big things that Dell talked about.

Was edge. And you and I have talked numerous times about mobile edge computing and how that can supercharge 5G use cases. So this is a great, opportunity for Dell. To get in there and continue to develop their momentum with their telecom group, which, by the way, Dell has always been a very broad, horizontal focused company.

They're all about selling tons of servers and storage and, and whatnot. And telecom represents the company's really only vertical. Now, you can argue that they do sell.  and to higher education K through 12, the federal government. But as far as a tele, a vertical focus, telecom truly is Dell's only vertical.

So I think this is a great opportunity for Dell to to demonstrate what it's doing with Edge technologies. I think they're a little behind Lenovo and HPE in that regard. So this could potentially help catapult them. But I'd love to get your input on, what you think about mining.

Because that has been one of the poster child use cases. It's been talked about since we started this 5G journey back in 20 17, 20 18. 

I think mining has always been one of the,  leading applications of almost every new technology that I've encountered. Yeah. Mining was one of the first applications for autonomous vehicles.

, mining was one of the first applications for 5g as we've talked about. Mining has also been, one of the applications for, computer generated modeling. All kinds of ai and I think the main reason why is.  That a lot of mining is very cost intensive. Yeah. It's generally very risky behavior.

And there's a lot of costs associated with insurance and safety. And if you can accelerate.  Any of the components of that process and make them safer by using any technology. I think it's quite clear that this industry is very willing to absorb the new technologies to improve one of those aspects of the mining industry.

However they're also very strict about ensuring that whatever technology they're utilizing is robust and cap. . Yeah, I think it's really one of those things where I do think mining is an application for 5g, but I also think that mining is an application for e almost every new leading technology just because, yeah.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year on mining. Yeah. And trillions of dollars are extracted as a result of mining. And we're not even talking about mining outside of Earth. We're just talking about mining on earth. . I was at MWC and we didn't really talk about this much, but Nokia was doing a lot of talk about, deploying 5G on the moon, and if you're deploying a cellular network on the moon it's gonna probably be for some form of mining, whether it's for research Yeah. Or it's for actual mineral extraction. They have to do. Prospecting first and discover where the resources are on the moon, if they want to extract them.

And that might be a Nokia 5G network or somebody else's. But yeah, it just made me think about, how even on the moon 5G is being utilized or will be utilized. 

Yeah. And the obvious benefits for mining use cases are things like enhancing safety, productivity, and just overall operational improvements.

And that is one of the things that 5G can bring, relative to L T E or other wireless solutions like, Unlicensed spectrum, tied to wifi and that sort of thing, given the latency and you bring up a very good point autonomy. And, one of the ways to improve safety within mining, whether it's strip mining or it's under earth mining or I guess what they call pit mining is to use automated vehicles, remove humans out of us, especially when you go under, under the surface.

And . Yeah, because and then it depends on the mining too. If it's, if it's gas or, oil or coal, that, that creates very dangerous, situations where you want to pull humans out of the mine facilities themselves and have them in a bunker,  basically piloting, the, these types of vehicles. Yeah. So I'll answer my own question. I think it is a poster child use case, but to your, you make a very good point. I think it demonstrates other applications that can go across even more verticals than just mining.

But let's get to your second topic. And this is another one that I have a lot of feedback and input on, cuz I was tweeting about it a couple of weeks ago. But you wanna talk about Comcast and their 10 g. Marketing campaign, which by the way, I've heard on radio and I've seen it online and I've actually seen it as I've streamed content.

But I'm gonna let you take it and then I'll jump in with my insights. 

Yes. Comcast has brought it upon themselves to announce the Existence of a 10 G technology . What's interesting is when this first came out I saw articles like Comcast mis mislead, sorry, Comcast Markets and Internet Service designed to mislead customers.

Yeah. The Xfinity Company now sells an internet network with a name that greatly overstates what you're getting. Yeah. And that came from the street and then literally today,  PC World came out with an article that says, don't be fooled. Comcast's 10 G doesn't mean what you think it does. It's not two times as fast as 5G and has nothing to do with phones.

So  almost everyone who understands the technology, knows that they're lying to us. And I'm gonna say that they're lying, not misled. I'm not going to play political. Oh, you're 

going to? You're gonna take the high, you're gonna take the high road there? Yeah. No, I'm gonna take the low 

road, whatever road it is,

But the reality is this technology is a docsis technology, right? This is using copper.  To deliver internet service to a customer for a fixed broadband connection. This is a technology that has the potential of reaching 10 gigabits per second eventually in some places where that bandwidth is available.

Yeah. But in reality, the likelihood that any US will ever see anything near 10 G is close to zero. And I think that's really the misleading part of this, or the lie, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. . The reality is that in order to actually get 10 gigabits, you need fiber. And even 10 gigabits.

There's very few operators very few broadband companies that will actually be able to deliver that. I think Sonic is one of the few that actually does deliver it. Yeah. At t only delivers up to five.  that's like their fastest right now that they'll deliver to consumers. And I guarantee you that five is going to be considerably faster than anything 10 G will ever deliver to almost anyone.

Yeah. And it's Dosis four, which is a controversial technology on its own because a lot of people don't even really know, what it will be able to deliver and how expensive that equipment will. . And I've gotta be honest with you, my experience on copper has been considerably worse than it was over fiber.

Yeah. In the six years that I've had at and t Fiber I think I've had a grand total of two hours of outages. Yeah. While on copper, I had multiple days of outages. So I have a lot of feelings about the way that Comcast is choosing to do this. I think it's very clearly another response to fixed wireless success.

Because everybody associates fixed wireless with 5G right now. And I, we talked about, I, there's a billboard in San Diego where Cox Communications, which is a competitor to Comcast also is fighting back against 5g fixed wireless. Yeah. Because they also is probably seeing that they're losing customers a result of that.

But I think this is, Very intentionally misleading marketing campaign. Yeah. And the expectation is that, we're probably not gonna see any. Real tangible benefits until the end of this year. And then most people probably won't even see it until, 2025, which they claim this full deployment will be capable of delivering 50 million homes in businesses by 2025.

So 50 million is really not that many. I think Comcast has a, has an actual customer base around 30 million. , so it's really not, Some technology that I think should be communicated the way it is. They did something similar. I want to say when 5G first came out, three or four years ago, they announced 6g.

I think that's what it was, right? I think it was six G. Yeah. Actually, you know what, it might have been Broadcom that did it, but someone did the, someone something similar where a new g came out and someone tried to.  another hire G that was completely unrelated. I want to say it was Broadcom and it's just I struggle with it, I think it was, I can almost certainly say it was Broadcom with wifi six.

Yeah. The first wifi six chip set. Yeah. And yeah I think, it's a struggle, but we'll get through it and it's important for press and analyst like us to call things out. Yeah. And make sure that the cus you know, people are aware of what's going on. 

Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with you.

Completely misleading. You know when they talk about, when you read into it and you double click into it, what they're talking about is the transport layer, back haul, having the potential to get to 10 G to your point over time. And then they're marketing the service as 200 megabit 10. And it's and it's obviously it's crossing the streams with 5g.

It's doing a disservice to the market. When this first started breaking a few weeks ago, several weeks ago, I was on Twitter. I was very adamant about it. Several, fellow analysts, colleagues also said, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. And then I've been reading all kinds of articles.

There was someone on LinkedIn that has quite a few followers. I forget that person's name. , he wrote a diatribe and really ripped it all apart and just said, Hey, again, this is a disservice and it's similar to some of the disservice that was being done early in five G's deployment when certain operators, these names I will not mention again because we have whipped those horses many times, but they were promoting.

Doing things like densifying their L T E networks in preparation for 5G and calling it 5G when 5G wasn't deployed. And so this just does it a service to the market. It confuses the market. I've tried to call out Comcast. I've tried to reach out to them. I have a relationship with the Comcast business team because I've spoken to them about what they're doing with private networking deployments with C B R Spectrum in certain venues around the country, and it's just fallen on deaf ears and yeah, so it's up to folks like you and I that are knowledgeable about this to educate the market and I will continue to hammer on them until they, they say something, but I think they, they even, this campaign it's omnichannel.

It is online. It is. I had hours in the truck driving from Florida. To back to Texas on St. Patrick's Day. That was my St. Patty's day, and I must have heard 10 or 15 radio spots for this. And it was just, the traffic was already boiling my blood and this was just sending me to the next level. So we're sending, and we're gonna tag Comcast and Xfinity when we post this podcast, but do the.

The right service and stop this insane marketing campaign because it's basically just confusing the market. But anyway, I'll get off my soapbox and I'll move to my third and final topic this week. So I wanna talk about Vodafone and three, and , there've been a lot of rumors, about, the potential merger of the two.

And o the obvious question is, would this create a competitive situation in the United Kingdom, or could it accelerate 5G innovation? Th those are the things that I think about. And certainly that was the discussion. When when T-Mobile was in the midst of acquiring Sprint, there was lots of concerns.

It was going back and forth. You and I rightly called it, we knew the merger was gonna come together because it had, different aspects to it. Now ha has T-Mobile and Sprint delivered on all of its promises? They didn't create all the jobs they said they would, but hey, They've got a fixed wireless access service that's 2 million plus subs.

They're, they've deployed 5G faster than anyone else, and. You and I have talked on numerous podcasts about how T-Mobile ventures is partnering and supporting startups and DR. Driving lots of really innovative use cases like Pano AI that we've talked about in the past and that sort of thing. So from my perspective, Europe is a little bit different.

Their 5G deployment has been slower. A lot of that is due on regulation and spectrum auctioning that's managed individually by country and then very complicated roaming agreements between countries as well. And what you've, what we've seen in Europe also is been ran sharing because these operators just don't have the billions of euros to to deploy as quickly.

And so that has really slowed the 5G deployment. And in Europe and in the UK in particular. From my perspective, I think there's enough competition in the UK that a merger of Vodafone and three would not be anti-competitive. In fact, it could accelerate. , the combined entity's deployment of 5g. And also accelerate time to innovation with respect to 5g because again, Europe is a different animal than the US based on all the things that I just said.

And and also I think if this does come together, it has a better likelihood of getting regulatory approval by that regulatory body, which is op. Because of Brexit. So I don't know that, that's a lot. I know I shared a lot, but would love to get your 

input, buddy. Yeah, I think I disagree with you.

Okay. Having been in the uk I see that Vodafone in three are big competitors. Okay. I think the important part is to remember that BT also bought ee, which was another competitor of its own. Okay. So I think four, becoming two is not good. And I.  There should be more competition in the space and I have a feeling that there will be more consolidation, which means more high prices.

So I think if anything, it would be important if this mar merger to occur that there be assurances that prices don't go up on consumers. Yeah. And that obviously shareholders will benefit from. . But ultimately I think I don't really know if I agree with this merger unless there are terms that are agreed upon to ensure prices are kept low.

That point, counterpoint, right? And so you make some very good points and I think I made a few as well, but it'll be interesting to see if it does come together. And if it does and I agree with you as well there would definitely have to be some stipulation around ensuring that subscription prices wouldn't go up.

But I'll also add that on average when you look at the r p on mobile plans in the, in Europe and UK in general, compared to the. Quite significantly lower than the US but anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens. But let's move to your third and final topic and we continue to talk about the space race.

It seems like when Apple announced satellite support for emergency messaging with iPhone, that just started a chain reaction, a domino effect, whatever you wanna call it, with respect to satellite. I ended up spending time with John Stanke last year. We talked about satellite. A gentleman from Bloomberg actually wrote about that  and now the FCC is paving the way for satellite expansion.

And you wanna talk about 

that? Yeah. So basically the FCC is starting to advance rules for satellite terrestrial mobile convergence. Following M W C, there was a lot of talk about satellite, and I think that you look at what's going on with d.  operators and the OEMs. And this is an NPR r m, which is a notice of proposed rulemaking, which kind of talks about not having silos and making sure that people who are going in remote areas are gonna have, Talk, the ability to talk to other networks and have interoperability.

But this is still very early on and it seems at and t is supportive of this. They're calling this s c s, which is satellite supplemental coverage from space. So it's not even really necessarily tied to one technology. But there will be probably more rules. More concretely laid down later on.

Yeah. But, it's, it looks really positive and it seems like they're very supportive of this technology and I think it's a net positive for OEMs operators. The fact that there's gonna be probably some kind of first net association as well. Yeah. For first responders, so that would make sense.

Net positive for. Yeah, 

no, I agree. The first net comment I think is spot on. I think that makes sense. I'm wondering, does this get managed by the newly created or recently created Space Force under the Trump administration, or is it an FCC thing? , who knows. . Yeah. No, but I agree. This is, again it seems like, apple sometimes will wait to enter a category when they do they're a category creator, right?

Yeah. And I think we've talked about that, with you've talked about that with respect to if they ever get really serious about, mixed reality that they're a category creator, right? And so I think. , apple gets a lot of credit with that iPhone announcement and the satellite messaging support for emergency messaging to really start this.

And it's exciting to see all this come together because here's another opportunity, another tool in the toolbox to help bridge the digital divide, right? Beyond just, starlink and those sorts of services and, and 5G deployments. But hey man, I thought we had a really good podcast this week.

So why don't you take us home?