Welcome to the episode 140 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 Hule is poised to announce earnings, but there was news breaking today.

I caught this on Mobile World Live on Friday. Around some comments that were made by executives and what's happening is no surprise, its profitability has fallen. That's due in large parts to a lot of the sanctions that have been going on with respect to its telecommunications business, what it calls its I c T business.

But I found it interesting that the company is gonna double down on r and d spend. Wally is from a percentage of revenue wise one of the most prolific investors in research and development. It likes to count patents. It likes to state that it's one of the most pro prolific patent filers relative, relative to many companies, both in the US and in Europe as well.

But at the same time, in addition to increasing its spending on research and development, it's also hiring more people and the company feels like it could. The company get ahead and develop new profit pools and new business opportunities for it. Now, I spent some time with Huawei at Mobile World Congress.

I captured that in a Forbes article. And the company is diversifying into things like inverter platforms for solar power and that sort of thing, and. That plays well into the whole sustainability and green notion that a lot of other infrastructure providers  are focused on.

But I'm wondering in the short term, this can't help its financials get any better, but I don't know if you caught the news, but would love to get your insights. 

I did not catch the news. I vaguely saw that, their profits dropped a huge percentage. Yeah. But what I do think is interesting is, there is still a lot.

Movement towards removing Huawei from, different networks. . apologize if you're watching the the video podcast. I'm strobing  and I can't quite discover what the cause is cause you're not in the club. No. I turned off my l e d lights and I'm still strobing and I turned off another light, so apologies.

We'll figure out what happened. But . What's interesting is Windstream just announced that they completed the removal of Huawei network gear. So there's still a lot of movement to removing Huawei equipment. And I think your point is interesting that they might try to just diversify their company to enough areas where they no longer are dependent on.

Countries purchasing Huawei equipment. Yeah. And just broadening Huawei's scope and getting into the sensors and turbines and things that, that, that are adjacent to what they're already doing in 5g. But yeah, it's, it's gonna be an uphill battle for them for sure. And it seems like the more they get restricted, the more closely tied they get to the Chinese government.

So it's like almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. . But I do think that Huawei will be more challenging to work with outside of China in the long term. And I think Huawei has decided that their future is secure in China and that's where they're gonna focus. 

Yeah. And yeah no surprise that the the Chinese government would be supportive of Huawei.

They are the largest enterprise.  in that country and help drive and constitute a lot of the G D P for China as a country as well. But let's move to your first topic and you wanna talk about a merger between s e s and Intelsat? Yeah, so this is 

actually a rumor that was already happening.

There were people expecting that this merger might happen. But what happened is that ses. Actually came out with a statement ver basically validating that there are negotiations occurring. , while Intelsat chose not to say anything. But the interesting part is, first of all, a lot of people are very interested in what this merger might mean because it would make them a 10 billion satellite company.

Yeah. And these are, more legacy networks for, backhaul and satellite communications. . And what's also interesting is these companies very likely do need to merge to survive the landscape of constant consolidation within the industry. Yeah. But what I do think is that, , there are a lot of hurdles that could prevent this merger.

SES is actually majority owned by the b I believe, the Luxembourg government. . That would require regulatory approval there. And then Intel side is American company, so it would require approval in the US as well. Yeah. So I really think there's a lot of hurdles in the way of making this possible, but , do think that this would be a net positive for the industry especially since these are both C band companies.

They probably, they, they have a lot of spectrum in that area. And they very likely could have more contiguous spectrum. But in, in total, satellite's getting very interesting and it this kind of fulfills the prophecy of what I said, that we'll probably see consolidation in satellite before it becomes mainstream.

And I think this is just the. 

I agree and I can't really provide the details, but I recently had a conversation with Chris Sambar. He runs networks for at and t and so it is heating up. I think the consolidation ahead of satellite moving to the next iteration, which. Current iteration 1.0, whatever you wanna call it, is around emergency, contact and texting.

And certainly Apple started that that sort of, that watershed, if you want to call it around the i, the recent iPhone launch and support for emergency text messaging through satellite. But I think, satellite's gonna become more, more integral and more integrated into mobile networks.

I'll just leave it at that and I think you'll start seeing some more news from the likes of at and T-Mobile and Verizon as well. But let's move to my second topic. And actually I was made aware of this through a relationship with with BA Base Sales, but there's a company called NextLight, and they're municipal fiber operator.

They're based in Longmont, Colorado. And there was an announcement this week around and a demonstration this week around, What they are doing to facilitate a smart city and really their attempt to make the Colorado front range smart through a private networking deployment. And I'm very familiar with the area I actually own in the Fort Collins area.

And it is the the location where Colorado State University. Their campus is located. And so this makes a lot of sense from academic and that sort of thing. And if you're not familiar with Longmont Fort Collins, it's also over the years developed into a real tech hub. And so you have tons of companies out there.

HP has a 5G lab in Fort Collins, but you've got a lot of hard drive manufacturers that are based in Longmont. You have a lot of technology companies in. The founder of fat Tire Beer, new Belgian beer. He was actually an HP engineer, and he and his wife started that company many years ago. So technology is very prevalent in the Colorado front range.

But just a few of the the details here. Next slide actually launched its fiber operation in 2014. So it's been almost a decade. And what they're doing is they're working to leverage that for back haul.  basically to stand up a C B R S 3.5 gigahertz based private network. And the applications for Longmont.

It's primarily intended to keep school children connected to their homework.  while traveling through the city, but certainly there'll be other smart city applications. And I recently wrote about this in a Forbes post last week, talked about N T and how they're helping the city of Las Vegas. I called it Get Smart.

I like to do movie references there. And I spoke to not only education, but a host of other number of use of use cases. So this may be initially for education, but it can help connect the unconnected. , it can support, smart traffic monitoring, smart parking, a whole host of things because that part of Colorado, it's becoming more and more congested.

I don't know if you've ever driven up and down 75 there, but it can get crazy. But I think, Hey, here's a, here's another great example of the democratization of licensed spectrum with ongo and cbr r s. And what it's doing there. But I don't know. This is probably a smaller news item. Don't know if you caught it, but what do you think about all that?

It's 

definitely something I did not see. Yeah. But I think we're gonna see a lot of stories like this happening in the future in all kinds of cities. Yeah. And this is just a clear indication that there are some applications of 5G that will help to accelerate, digital transformation and modernization of infrastructure.

this just seems like a smaller scale version of 

that. Yeah. And my, my only my final comment on this is private networking has taken, some while to get going.  There've been lots of proof of concepts, but not a lot of, production wins within the enterprise. And I think that's gonna change because the benefit to manufacturing automation.

We're beginning to see some of the early wins around municipality deployments, like the city of Las Vegas and now Longmont. It's seeming the use case, at least initially with C B R S is around municipality, smart city, smart building type deployments. But let's move your second topic.

You wanna talk about Rogers and Shaw coming together and an update there in. 

Yeah, so Rogers and Shaw are two of the, some of the biggest operators in Canada. And this was a merger that was not really for sure going to happen. There was a lot of uncertainty and this is a 20 billion acquisi.

of Shaw by Mer, by Rogers. Yeah. And, there are some conditions that were being put on this deal to make this a a acquisition possible. And that would create the number two company in Canada. , which would then require them. Divest from a Shaw mobile company called Freedom Mobile.

And they would've to sell that to Kevin Core's Videotron. There's definitely some, hurdles that they had to overcome. This deal was announced two years ago, so it was not smooth sailing. And I have a feeling.  There are 21 conditions to this merger. Wow. Which I have a feeling that not all of them will be met as they rarely are.

And that Rogers needs to set up a Western headquarters in Calgary, create 3000 new jobs in Western Canada, and invest in 5.5 billion Canadian to expand 5G coverage and services. So there's a lot of conditions being put on this merger. I'm not gonna go through all 21 of them. , but it's clear that this is a, a big shift in Canada for consumers and businesses.

And we'll see, what the net result will be as far as whether or not they'll meet their requirements. And whether this will be a net benefit for consumers. But, in Canada they haven even have less competition than we do in the US Yeah. As far as cellular operators go. So I think there was a reason, lot of reason why people were opposed to this acquisi.

Most likely because it's gonna reduce competition and increase prices even more. And they're already paying more than we are to begin with. . And on top of that that supposedly one of the requirements is that they will have to pay a billion dollars Canadian if they do not meet their commitments.

Wow. So we'll see what happens there. But that, billion Canadian can be fairly.  If the combined company is as large as it seems, it will be. . And yeah, I think this is a there's some benefits there, in terms of maybe potentially improving 5G coverage.

But I have a feeling that prices will not improve in Canada as a result of 

this merger. Yeah, my only comment is that the Canadian market is quite interesting, right? Because. The population densities cluster around a handful of large cities within like 

a hundred miles of the US border.

Yeah. And so that provides some pretty unique challenges, getting coverage into those those less population dense areas. So it's tricky.  and obviously the expense in deploying any sort of mobile network, especially a 5G network is not a trivial undertaking.

And it's all based on repatriating getting those investments paid back with with subscribers a as well as driving innovative, new services, on top of that 5G network. Again, it's not a trivial exercise at all, and and I agree with you. The, there, there isn't a ton of competition in the Canadian market.

And if I'm Canadian and I'm looking at this on the surface, I'd be concerned, and that's probably why there are 21 different provisions to making this thing, a reality including a penalty if those aren't met. But we'll we'll definitely, keep our listeners and viewers posted as things develop in the great white.

So let's hit my third and final topic this week, and I want to talk about Cisco, and they're working with Indian telecom companies to drive private networking momentum. But on the surface, I've got a big question there. Because you and I have talked about this on prior podcasts, the Indian market, it seems that the big mobile network operators like the Reliances and The Barte Air Tiles of the world.

The, they've, been able to convince the Indian government that with respect to private networking, there shouldn't be any sort of similar C B R S, equivalent to democratize license spectrum and allow smaller CSPs to get in there and compete. And so from my perspective, if this becomes purely a telco play and Cisco is working directly with the largest mobile network operators in India, can it be successful longer term?

Because I think. . One of the reasons why we're seeing so much momentum in the US is because of ONGO and C B R S and democratizing the access to license spectrum and allowing municipalities like Longmont that we were talking about earlier in Las Vegas actually, either through General Access or through Powell licensing, have access to mid band Spectrum and deploy their own network.

So at the end of the day, this is interesting. I didn't read, double click into the article, but I'm assuming. Cisco with its country digital acceleration program is probably a part of this investigation because that program's been very instrumental.  And helping the chicken and egg scenario with getting certain parts of the world that are, say, ECMO a little more economically disadvantaged access to the latest technology, including 5g.

But but this is, this will be interesting to play out, but I'm wondering are you thinking the same thing I'm thinking, or do you have a different take on this? 

No, I, my, my thoughts are pretty much aligned with yours on this. I. . It's just one of those things where they're looking for growth opportunities and I think India's gonna be one of the biggest growth opportunities for 5G services and applications even though they launched their 5G network among some of the latest in the world.

Yep. Good insight, man.   let's let's wrap things up with your final topic and you want to talk about apple and its support of standalone on a couple different networks. 

Yeah, so we've actually talked about this about a month ago when the beta first released, but iOS 16.4 is actually a pretty big release.

It's expanding 5G support to add standalone on T-mobile, which is what we talked about. Yeah. But it's also adding some new 5G capabilities in Canada for iPhone users on Bell and Rogers. They're gonna get their new 5G plus icon, which, basically means that they can start using some of the faster mid band spectrum.

Also I looked into a little more deeply Macau and Turkey are also getting 5G support for the first time as well. Google find users are going to be able to use iPhones for 5G now which they couldn't do previously. A big part of that is because the network is run by T-Mobile mostly, and t-Mobile's enabling standalone and that's going to make, Google find more competitive on the 5G front for iOS users.

. And yeah it's really interesting to see. More countries are getting, 5G capabilities, standalones becoming a standard feature. And iOS 16.4 is a big release for 5G on i, on iPhone and for iPhone users. So I think it's gonna help improve developer uptake of 5G standalone applications.

Cuz now there's a huge swath of devices that they know they can support it on iOS because previously there weren't yeah I think it's.  and that plus all the Samsung devices that support standalone officially we'll see about more, more now more devices. Cause all the modems do it. It's really just about qualifying software.

Yeah. And yeah, I think it's really exciting for what might happen later in the year. 

Yeah, no, that's great news. Like you and I have spoken about on prior podcasts, standalone unlocks the true potential of 5G and devices have to catch up to that in order for that to become a reality. Hey my friend, another great podcast this week.

Why don't you take us home? 

Absolutely. We hope our viewers and listeners found this week's topics interesting. If anyone out there would like to provide insights on a specific 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will is at Will Tomak and I'm at on. We hope you have a great weekend, and please tune in again next week.