Welcome to episode 145 of the GT 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 join me again this week as fellow analyst Ancho. Let's get started with my first topic and. This week the big 5G event happened in my hometown of Austin, Texas, and I did attend one of the days.

I wrote a Forbes article it posted on Friday. So if our viewers and listeners are interested in my insights go hit my Twitter feed at Will Town Tech and you can read more about it. But I mentioned all that because my first topic is about John Deere and John Deere was at the event. And they were interviewed by light reading.

So if you're not familiar in form Tech and Light reading sponsored the big 5G event. And it's been back and forth between Denver and Austin next year. Apparently it's gonna be in Irving in North Texas, outside of Dallas. But John Deere was interviewed and they were talking about their journey to private 5g, and it's something they've been talking about for quite some time.

I've met with John Deere in the past and they've talked about. Really, primarily the first focus is around using private cellular to automate their factories, and John Deere builds some of the largest, machines in the world. Probably only second to Caterpillar. And what I found interesting in the interview at the show that their executive, his name is Jason Wallen, he's the principal architect for John Deere's Global Information Technology Group, but he talked about that.

On average there's over a thousand miles of ethernet cable in a given John Deere manufacturing facility. And what they're leaning into 5G four is to cut the cord and be able to reconfigure manufacturing lines much more easily and with more agility. Using private cellular, and this is something that you and I have talked about on many podcasts and what I view private 5G to be very well suited for, and likely over half of the addressable market would be in manufacturing.

For that sort of line reconfiguration for, automation of robotics given the tactile control with the ultra low latency that 5G standalone delivers. And so this is just from my perspective, another reinforcement of. Of private 5g. We've also talked about how private cellular has been slowed ramp, and I've spoken in the past to the fact that there are many different paths to get there.

But I thought this was a great opportunity for John Deere to really highlight what they're doing with private 5g. And they actually held an event in Austin earlier this year. I couldn't attend. But Bill Curtis, our analysts and residents that covers iot, OT, attended, and he came away quite impressed with what John Deere's doing.

And, one of the other things, this is a light reading article that was obviously published to support the the interview. But what's really interesting is that John Deere, you think about John Deere as being, an agricultural company, but they've established These technology centers and these activities to support not only manufacturing automation but edge computing and eventually private 5G will find its way into autonomy to pilot, tractors and combines and those sorts of things.

John Deere has been using simply g p s to do that and it's been pretty darn accurate. But I don't know if you caught this article or caught the news of big 5g, but would love to get your insights too. 

I did not catch the big 5G news, 

but I didn't see you were in London or Cambridge, right?

Yeah, 

I was in Cambridge with Arm. I can't talk about what I saw there, but I can say that I was there. And yeah, I just I caught some of this news, like the John Deere stuff. But yeah I think there's a lot of interesting in interesting things that are going on at John Deere specifically.

Yeah. And when you consider the cost of their equipment and maintenance and just like the sheer volume of vehicles and machines that are, that they're building I can totally see why private 5G would be something that they could deploy. And I think that would help them maximize profits and I and improve.

About reliability, because ultimately, what these kinds of big machines is, I think they're technically called heavy industrial equipment. The services and the maintenance are actually much bigger costs than the equipment itself. And, I think John Deere has had some issues with D R M and right to repair and those kinds of things that are going on.

But I do think that they're going to be able to enable. Better firmware better upkeep and more op and more capabilities thanks to private 5g because otherwise, they're dependent on what the cell coverage is in that area or yeah, wifi or whatever else might get deployed. But if they're able to blanket deploy a five private 5G network for farms that use a lot of their equipment, then they could actually enable all kinds of new capabilities that otherwise wouldn't be 

possible.

Yeah, no, I totally agree, and I've talked about AgTech in the past and how connectivity is an important element of that. And yeah, it wouldn't be outside of John Deere's wheelhouse to partner with folks to deploy that infrastructure into, to your point, into agricultural, settings, whether it's farming or it's ranching because.

The, adding connectivity and high speed connectivity and ultra low latency can do a lot of really interesting things on farms and ranches. Time will tell, but I plan to spend more time with John Deere. They've actually invited me to tour one of their manufacturing facilities, and I've just been trying to get my my calendar lined up to do that.

But, I'm hoping to do that and write a Forbes article. It's probably gonna be this summer or early fall, but we'll continue to keep everyone updated on those plans. But let's go to your first topic this week. And I did catch this news and so I've got some things to, to say about it, but T-Mobile made a pretty bold claim and that's not unusual for T-Mobile.

They're very aggressive in their marketing, but this is around market share in 100 of their defined top markets. So I'll let you take it away. Yeah. 

At a Moffitt Nathanson investor conference, the C F O of T-Mobile, Peter Ozal came out and said, in the top 100 markets, we are typically in a in the 40% market share.

So basically what they're saying is that they have 4% market share in the top 100 markets, which is. Impressive because there are three carriers. So anyone with over 30% has a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a near majority. Yeah. In terms of market share, which isn't necessarily something that wouldn't one would've ever expected to happen with T-Mobile.

But, they're talking about how in 775 smaller markets and rural towns it has 16.5% penetration. And they're working on improving that with a goal of increasing its coverage in these smaller markets from 13% to 20% as a market share by 2025. So they clearly are really paying attention to market share.

And there are other factors that might affect this ability, like the 800 megahertz deal with Dish. Yeah. There's still some time for that deal, whether or not Dish decides to take it. But overall, I haven't really heard much dispute of this claim. So I'm inclined to assume it's correct.

But yeah it's really interesting to see where T-mobile's at today and it's quite the bold claim, like you said. I kinda believe it, especially considering how much growth they've had. Yeah. But I also think it's motivation for At&t and Verizon to try harder. 

Yeah. And when I read this news, a couple things came to my mind.

One I think it is a credible claim. It's probably a consumer claim, and that's rooted on the fact that They've been first to stand alone and and they've been very aggressively, they were able to very aggressively build out their mid band spectrum assets they acquired from Sprint. And you and I have talked on numerous podcasts, how that's given them an early lead, so I'm not surprised to see that now.

I know that T-Mobile is still building its beachhead with its T-Mobile for business and, they've been really leading with their fixed wireless access solution as a primary business offering. And they've got some other offerings where they private labels some S D Y N and some wireline stuff.

But I do believe that as. Verizon and at and t continue to build out their C-band assets and at and t their one 10 spectrum assets that I, I think that will shift somewhat. And I really certainly think, given the depth of Verizon and at and t's enterprise services portfolios, that the lean very heavily into those buildouts.

To offer differentiated service network slicing to guarantee SLAs for certain quote unquote private or hybrid use cases. And I think this will, stand alone as they close the gap. And I expect it'll start closing pretty rapidly by calendar. Fourth quarter, calendar first quarter of next year.

I think the market share numbers may move around a little bit, but yeah, I mean it's a testament to T-Mobile being out in front, especially with standalone, that's certainly gonna unlock the true promise of 5g. But let's move to my second topic this week. And I, and this is interesting.

I did post a tweet and I actually got a lot of activity on this tweet, which is fun when you do something like that and it makes an impact with others, but at and t I'm calling it sounding sounded the bell, the Leo bell with respect to what T-Mobile and starlink are dealing with concerns.

That are basically, I think founded. And so T-Mobile and starlink really haven't published a lot of details about how they're gonna collaborate together to enable satellite communication. And so the concern that at and t is voicing is that they have been very transparent with a s t space mobile.

And there, there are legitimate concerns around interference with terrestrial signals and that sort of thing. And so they did file a concern or a WRI of grievance or whatever you wanna call it with the fcc this past week. And it'll be interesting to see how the FCC responds, but if you go hit my Twitter feed there, there was a lively exchange on Saturday afternoon around this topic.

But what are your thoughts? 

My thoughts are that I'm not entirely sure that it's at and t's place to say whether or not T-Mobile and SpaceX have provided enough details on their plans to deploy cellular yeah, like networks with satellite. Satellite network, you operating like a terrestrial network.

Yeah. I know that there are concerns around interference with terrestrial networks. Yeah. But I just think it's really interesting that at and t is telling the FCC what it should be doing in terms of address, in terms of whether or not someone has supplied enough information. I just think, I actually tweeted something about this as well.

Cause I saw this a couple days ago and I thought why does, WHO is at and t to decide whether or not SpaceX and T-Mobile have provided enough information to the fcc? Ultimately, it's the fccs called to decide whether or not they've provided enough information because they're the regulatory body.

So I just find it really interesting that a competitor is pointing out that they don't think there's enough information being provided and maybe there. I don't think I don't think they're necessarily unjustified in making a claim. And I do think that transparency is ultimately a good thing, but I also think T-Mobile and SpaceX have been very limited on how much detail they've provided throughout the entire process.

They've, it's not been very transparent. It's been fairly opaque. I will 100% get behind the fact that they should be more transparent. However I just think it's weird that a competitor is telling a regulator what 

needs to be done? I know, I hear you, man. And initially the optics on it are like, Hey, this is a competitor, making sour grapes with another competitor.

But but yeah, and honestly, I'm not gonna bash the fcc, but we, we have bashed them and the Federal Transportation Administration as well. But sometimes the FCC needs a little bit of push and, it's interesting. I ran into the 5G Americas folks, Chris and Viet at the big 5G event, and we had a little sidebar on this and we were talking about the fcc and what has the chairwoman and the present and, Really accomplished.

And I'm not gonna provide an opinion one way or the other, but I think, sometimes it's important for, the telecommunications industry to to nudge the s e c at times. But yeah I agree with you. The optics. One 

thing to that, add one thing to that. There still is no majority in the FCC because Exactly, and that's what we were talking about, 

Chris in Vietnam.

Yeah. Yeah. 

So if anything I blame Congress. Yeah. I If at least if you at least have a full five panel, you can't have 

deadlocks. Yeah. Yeah we've been throwing them under the bus for a while. But let's move to your second topic and you wanna talk about Dish and, and Dish has had a lot of challenges recently, right?

With the recent cybersecurity hack. And and they've been under the gun to to meet their deadlines for pops. And so you wanna provide an update on what they've what they had stated recently about the, their buildout? 

Yeah. So the other event that was happening this week, which you told me about, was a CT I e 5G 5G summit, which was competing with the big 5G summit.

And at that Summit dishes, EVP of network development, Dave Mayo spoke and he said that the company will hit its 70% coverage requirement in approximately 28 days. So they will meet their June objective. And they said that they've, he or he said that they've learned a lot about Iran and they've really.

Work hard to get boner to work, right? And that they have it now in 50 markets and that they have 70 million pops covered. So they're already well on their way, but they have been working hard and they've been, I think they've been hit pretty hard and criticized quite liberally.

Yeah. So I, I think if they can make it through this difficult early phase. I think that they'll come out the other end a much stronger competitor and hopefully they'll be able to offer some unique differentiated services from the competitors since they're gonna be, a 5G first network.

Yeah. We'll see what happens, but I still think Dish is going to end up being more of an enterprise play than a consumer play. But we'll see what happens long term. And the fcc has really given them a pretty good breadth in terms of giving them room for extensions and things like that.

But yeah there are some other things that FCC has done that I'll be talking about in my next topic that maybe didn't help Dish. 

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. They've been getting lambasted left and right, and it's not surprising to hear Dave Mayo speak to some of the challenges with Open ran mark, Ruan, who we've had on our podcast in the past I spent time with him.

With Samsung Networks at Mobile World Congress, and he was very transparent about the fact that they have learned a lot because they are building a greenfield, very highly disaggregated 5G network with a cloudified core with open round. And I've spoken to the integration challenges with that.

The, on the surface the CapEx looks very attractive, but if your opex gets eaten up. By lots of integration, issues, then it sort of negates, a lot of that. Now, there's also a positive aspect that, this is leveraging a highly domesticated supply chain for 5g, which was one of the impetus around The US government, banning Huawei and Z T E to a lesser extent.

But they're being transparent. And I agree with you, and I think I've mentioned this on prior podcasts, dish can absolutely not go head to head and compete with at and t and Verizon and expect to build market share. They're gonna have to be differentiated. I've spoken to the possibility of maybe they focus a little more aggressively on iot.

But certainly T-Mobile is doing that with its t I O T initiative. So they are gonna have to do something different and they would be very wise to focus on enterprise and maybe it's, private network deployment, but again, T-Mobile and at and t are doing the same thing as well.

So they'll have to find their niche because they just. They don't have the financial stamina to go head to head with say, an at and t and with the T-mobile from my perspective. But with that, let me move to my third and final topic and I wanna talk about SK telecom. And so in 2018, they were issued 28 gigahertz licenses and with a requirement that by.

May of this year that they had to build out 15,000 cell sites. And so I think most of our viewers and listeners understand 28 gigahertz. It's in the millimeter wave. Spectrum band tie, band spectrum, fantastic performance, but very weak propagation that's challenged with line of sight and reflection, with glass and metal and that sort of thing.

And so unfortunately, SK Telecom was stripped of their their license because they had only basically met 10%. A little over 10% of that 15,000 unit deployment or that site deployment and didn't satisfy the requirement so that, the Korean government claw that back now. And they, and there are no plans for SK Telecom to do any further deployments on that.

From my perspective, and we've talked about millimeter wave in the past, it's going to be very nichey. It's going to be used for within venues. It's gonna be used within, densely populated urban areas because the densification is just tremendously expensive. So I'm not, I'm not surprised, South Korea has been definitely a leader with respect to not only 5G deployment but really, launching very innovative use cases, many of them consumer.

But where I really believe Millimeter wave is gonna have a big factor is it's gonna be in sort of those venues for for a neutral host replacement. I see, I see it being valuable in some manufacturing scenarios, but. But again, millimeter wave is difficult.

It's expensive. It is new to 5g. So we didn't have this level of spectrum or height of spectrum in the LTE world. And I expect it to be pretty easy, but, there are a lot of companies like Samsung Networks like Qualcom and others that are working to improve the propagation and and improve the economics of millimeter wave.

But I don't know if you caught this news, but, any insights on your part? I did catch 

the news. All right, cool. But I didn't realize what the percentage was that they needed to hit. 

They're way off. They were way off by a factor of 90% basically. 

Here's the thing. Verizon still hasn't covered, I think, more than a couple percentage points of the country with millimeter wave.

Yeah. I think maybe the requirements are potentially too high. I think the reality is when you look at the networks, what millimeter wave does best and how it works. You really don't want to roll it out first. You want millimeter wave to be the last spectrum that you deploy. Yeah. 

Compliment what you're doing with low and mid.

Exactly. Yeah. You basically use to fill. What I call capacity holes, co or capacity black holes, where no matter how much spectrum you throw at it nothing will alleviate the con the congestion in that area. That's where you deploy millimeter wave because it takes away so much congestion.

And it resolves a lot of issues that I actually think Korea will have as more and more users. Take advantage of 5g. As 5G apps start to increase usage I really think you're gonna see an increased demand for millimeter wave. Yeah, I think millimeter wave is inevitable. I just think that it's very I call it hot spotty in the sense that you're going to want to deploy it in the places where you have the most density.

Yeah. Or at least the most need for capacity. And I really think that we can use millimeter wave to alleviate congestion. And I really don't think we've even scratched the surface of what's actually possible with millimeter wave, cuz. I don't think Coachella has effectively utilized it any really i density festival.

I haven't really seen it used effectively. And guess what? The places where I've seen the best performance of 5G networks is places where it's millimeter waves is helping to alleviate. And even then I think those deployments are fairly early. And probably don't have the same kind of beam forming capabilities as modern millimeter wave deployments do.

So I still think there's lots of room for improvement with 5G performance, and I think a big component of that is millimeter wave and deploying it in the right place. And I think it's gonna be very similar to how if you remember Gigabit LTE was deployed that, 256 qum. Kind of scenario.

I, I think that's gonna be a similar situation where the high modulation stuff, 4G is gonna probably flip to moon meter wave. Pretty soon. It hasn't already. Yeah. I think it's just a function of density and I think you, it's hard to have density if you don't have the network built out first.

Yeah. No, I agree. And. It'll be interesting. I'm gonna continue to monitor this in South Korea cuz it'll be interesting to see, with the clawback of the spectrum, what, what service providers might step up to make a run at deployment. But I think your point is really solid too.

What needs to happen is you need to get your low band and your mid band deployed. And then it's it's a layered approach. And hey, in the US as an example at and t and Verizon are still getting their mid band deployed. And so it'll be interesting to see how millimeter wave, gets layered in as the final, element.

And then it'll be interesting to, continue to watch. South Korea that's been very savvy from a 5G deployment and app perspective to see what, what's done with this now that it's been clogged back. But with that, we're nearing the end of the podcast, but let's go to your third and final topic.

And you're gonna talk about Dish a little bit here as well, but you wanna talk about 12 gigahertz, and I know there's been, a fight between Dish and SpaceX and you want to provide an update. Yeah. So 

interestingly enough, This was a scenario where Dish had filed multiple I don't know, papers messed, they posted documents online claiming that, 12 gigahertz spectrum should not be used for terrestrial use for 5g.

And that it should be preserved for satellite communications, right? Yeah. Specifically between 12.2 and 12.7 gigahertz. Which is part of the KU band that starlink One Web and other satellite operators use for to connect user germs. Yeah. And Dish Network was looking for permission to operate a high power two-way mobile service with the spectrum and dish basically Lost this argument on May 18th because the FCC voted to protect star length's access to this 12 gigahertz spectrum.

And they, they lost this argument. But it's really interesting because SpaceX was very heavily out there criticizing this move. And the FCC has effectively declined to authorize two-way high power terrestrial mobile services. And yeah, I think we're in this place where we're running out of spectrum and more and more people are starting to compete with each other over what's possible, what's available, and we'll see what happens.

Yeah. Sub six, that, you're Right. So it's there's a lot of, there's a lot of sp spectrum scarcity when you look at sub six. And hey, like at t filings, grievance, with with the fcc with Timo and starlink that I spoke to earlier.

Hey, you give Dish some credit for making a run at it. I do believe that they have enough assets to to be viable as a fourth player here. And the fcc, they've really gotta get, a handle on this whole Leo space race and, and carving out, spectrum to facilitate this.

So we don't have contention like we were discussing with my second topic this week. There's, but there's only one issue. 

The fccs regulatory authority to hold auctions has not been renewed by Congress. 

Yep. Yeah. Which that's a problem. That's a problem. I thought that was resolved. And the 5G Americas, folks reminded me of that very point.

We gotta get our act together. We gotta be pipelining spectrum as well. We can't have these start stops and, hey, The FCC is listening, or, we're watching this podcast. Hey, come on. We'd love to have you on and have a discussion around this topic.

But anyway, hey buddy, it's been another great podcast this week. I know you were in England last week. I'm headed to Italy the week that we're gonna be posting the podcast. So I'm glad we could do this on a Saturday for our viewers and listeners. But why don't you take us home? 

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 5G topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media, will is at Will Town Tech and I'm at anshelsag. We hope you have a great weekend and please tune in again next week and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.