Welcome to episode 146 of the G two on 5g. It's the latest insight scoop on everything. 5G 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 as fellow analyst Ancho Sag. Let's get started with my first topic, and I wanna talk about SoftBank, Nvidia, Hey, I think Nvidia comes up in every conversation it seems on a daily basis, especially since their stock just skyrocketed that one day when they provided guidance that they had 4 billion in revenue upside over the next few quarters here, but.

I wanna talk about a new piece of silicon that they're launching. Grace Hopper. And if you know who Grace Hopper is she was a computer scientist and I believe a rear admiral, so a very accomplished woman. And there's actually a Grace Hopper organization and it's focused on empowering women and stem, and my daughters have participated in that program.

But anyway, Grace Hopper is an icon and Nvidia has Taken her name to, to name the super chip. And what's really cool about it is that it's integrating. Both an R M C P U and an Nvidia G P U to supercharge vRAN use cases. And, GPUs are are very flexible. They're designed for multi-use, but in distributed unit applications, those tend to be very taxing.

And so with Grace Hopper integrating the CPU and the GPU together They're expecting, Nvidia is expecting to be able to deliver significant throughput performance. And what's interesting is this announcement that broke just recently with SoftBank, basically SoftBank has an exclusive timeframe with respect to being first mover for deployment.

And SoftBank is, obviously SoftBank, we've talked about SoftBank. They have their vision fund. They're also a mobile network operator in Japan, but, They're gonna lean into Grace Hopper to supercharge their open ran deployment. So again, I think, NVIDIA is so in vogue right now.

Generative AI is, as in vogue as well. And this just points to another opportunity for Nvidia to really Go head to head with Intel because these COT servers that are being used for a lot of these open round deployments are just they're not providing the right level of throughput that's needed for some of these very, very complex telecommunication workloads.

But I know that's a lot. But I'm wondering if you caught this anal and if you have any insights. I did catch 

this. The one thing I thought was interesting was this, is, this possibly could have come out of the relationship that SoftBank Nvidia had when Nvidia tried to acquire ARM from SoftBank.

Oh, okay. So I feel like that could have been the genesis of this. That deal did not go through. But clearly Nvidia still has good enough technology that SoftBank clearly wanted to continue to work with them outside of the acquisition. Yeah. But in general, I think NVIDIA is becoming more aggressive in telecom.

And, they already have quite a bit of a reputation when it comes to their ability to accelerate ai. And to do it in a. Easy way in terms of software. But I do think that Nvidia is like the first mover here, I think in a lot of ways. But I do think that Nvidia will have competition from Intel and a M D and others.

Because there's going to, there are going to be refreshes. There will be more standardization of a lot of the AI workloads that are being put on these processors. And optimizations will improve. But currently Nvidia does have the most comprehensive solution for AI deployment almost in any market, which I think is part of their strategy.

And yeah, it's really interesting to see, Nvidia really starting to ship a lot of these technologies into actual implementations in, networks or whatever data center it is. And I think that's why they had to guide their financials so much higher. For the next financial quarter.

Yeah. And I think this, they're probably gonna have this throughout the year, to be honest with you until the competition starts to roll out competitive products. 

Yeah. And it's not their first foray in into the telecommunications world. I think on a prior podcast I spoke about their relationship with at and t and what they're doing to help at and t leverage AI for more intelligent truck roles and that sort of thing and to, diagnose and remediate network performance issues.

I think we're gonna 

hear too, if you remember that. 

Yeah, I do. Yeah. So I think we're gonna hear a lot more about Nvidia within the telecommunications industry. But let's move to your first topic and you're gonna talk about Motorola launching the Razor and Razor Plus in the US again, and I remember.

Man, my first razor, what a sweet phone that was. And so it sounds like there are a lot of excited people about this, right? 

Yeah. So there's some interesting stuff going on here. One they are rebooting the Raz Razor. They already rebooted the Razor brand in 2020. Yeah. But they weren't really competitive in some ways.

They, weren't like, they didn't really have things together fully, Samsung kind of had the. A leadership spot there. And Samsung was just do, couldn't do no wrong. And they were owning the flip market in the fold market. And I think Motorola has made incremental improvements from generation to generation, but with this new razor series, which is being called the Razor 40 series globally, but in the US it's just being called the Razor.

There's two tiers, the thousand dollars razor. Then there's a, I want to say it's $1,200 razor. Or it might be the other way around. Yeah. Pricing is, yeah. So the Razor Plus is a thousand dollars and then the regular razor, I think is like 800 bucks. Ok. So they're helping bring down the cost of foldables and they're doing it with a really competitive model because the actual Razor Plus, which is the thousand dollars model, is the same price or cheaper than what Samsung is offering today, but it has a gigantic.

3.6 inch front screen where the cameras are cut out of the display. So almost the whole half outside part of the phone is just screen and it's gorgeous. Wow. I wish I had one to show you, but they didn't send me one yet. And they had their launch of that yesterday or before yesterday. But what's also interesting is the top tier model will come with a Snapdragon eight plus Gen one.

So it will not be the absolute latest. And then the cheaper razor will be the Snapdragon seven gen one. So they're trying they're offering lower performance SOCs in order to, I believe, offer a more affordable product in general. I wish it was a Snapchat eight gen two cuz it would probably be way more performance and better battery life.

But, costs are costs and the regular razor's gonna have a smaller screen, which looks a lot more like what the Samsungs have today. But the plus we'll have this gigantic outside screen, which is three times bigger than what Samsung has today. And yeah, inside screen when it's unfolded is a 6.9 inch screen.

So it's a huge screen. But when you fold it in half, it's real easy to pocket. I have a, the the op, the oppo phone that I reviewed, and it's so small in your hand when you folded in half. And when you unfold it, it's the same size screen as an ultra, as 23 Ultra, it's kinda the best of both worlds.

I think Motorola really knows that they have a winner. All of the reviewers that I know that went to the event or have seen the device in person are absolutely in love with it. I think they're going have a big winner here. I'll quickly rattle off some specs. The The cameras are 32 megapixels on the ma on the plus model.

And the crazy part is the outside screen gets up to 1100. Its bright. So because it's an outside screen and you're most likely to look at it with daylight, it will never be too dark for you to see outside when you're just glancing. And yeah it's literally double the size of the old razor screen from 2022, I think.

Yeah they've made huge improvements. Everybody seems to be really a big fan o of this device. And Motorola is already rolling out quite a bit of advertising for this. It'll be available on every carrier except Verizon, which is surprising because the original razor and almost every razor that's come out until now has been a Verizon device or a Verizon exclusive.

Yeah, that is interesting. The nineties are calling, so I. Can't wait for you to share some images of that. I'm sure you'll be doing a Forbes article on on your insights there. But let's move to my second topic and I wanna talk about Nokia. And this week they launched 5G core networking software for specific industry needs.

And what I really like about this is that they're leaning into their historically very strong RAM capabilities to develop some solutions speci specifically for public and wide area networking. Verticals like utilities and and safety and first responder and that sort of thing.

And and this just really extends what Nokia has been doing from a private networking perspective. And what I found interesting is that today the addressable market for these solutions is about 1 billion euros, but they believe that can increase by 50% within the next three to four years.

And they view this as a significant opportunity to grow their share on a market that they're already pretty well established in. And these solutions, they pre-announced them they're gonna support both LTE E and 5g. And they're expecting it was a little, ambiguous, but commercially available later this year.

Likely third quarter or fourth quarter. But I don't know if you caught the announcement, but I think it's pretty compelling. And again it really, I. From my perspective provides Nokia further momentum because, they've really been leading the charge in private.

Now, I will admit Ericson, Cradlepoint are quickly catching up and Samsung's continues to do very well in vRAN and in private deploys as well. But what are your thoughts? 

One question I had for you is, do you think that this software will help Nokia's customers? Deploy with their customers cuz nokia's not really directly working with a lot of the actual customers. They usually have some kind of integrator in between. Yeah. So these integrators you do you see this as a way to accelerate integrators deployments of private 5G networks? I 

believe so. And I think one of the knocks that Nokia has gotten has been usability and com, complex, sort of architectural requirements that, that requires some heavy lifting.

I've heard the term a lot of the stuff they're doing is quote unquote, carrier grade and. Hey, traditionally the Nokia's and the Ericssons and the Samsungs of the world they charge, they charge a little hefty sum there for the integration for these big massive public mobile networks.

But yeah, I, yeah, I. That's a long way to answer your question, but I believe yes, this will help integrators and simplify what they're doing with with private networking deployments. And and we've talked about this on prior, podcasts as well. The ramp and private wireless has been I think slower than a lot of.

Folks have expected, but it just takes time. You've gotta get the spectrum out there. I think ongo has done a great job, C B R S and and then also it's just all these different routes to deployment that, basically enterprises have to take a pause and evaluate.

And I think I've I'm on record stating that I really believe that we're gonna see the momentum on private, wireless really pick up the latter part of this year. But time will tell. But let's go to your second topic and you wanna talk about Cleveland Clinic and what they're doing to deploy 5G in hospitals.

And by the way, I think 5G is a huge use case opportunity deployment scenario for hospitals. And I'll share my insights after you get started. 

Yeah. So this came from an Axios article where Cleveland Clinic said that they're working with Verizon business to. Basically deploy 5G inside hospitals.

And that they will have their first fully enabled 5G facility by July. And that they believe there are enough 5G devices today to enable a lot of these smart hospital applications where, they're potentially able to use NFC and beacons and. 5G connectivity for devices where they can always know where everyone and everything is in real time.

Cuz there's so many different moving parts to a hospital, including the human parts and it's real, it's, being able to manage all those things is really challenging. Yeah. And I think we all can agree that 5G is almost a perfect application for that. Ideally it would've been wifi but it, there's so much interference.

And to get the right spectrum in place. I think that's a real component of it. And, they're talking about how 5G is able to deliver these super low latency connectivity compared to 70 milliseconds on 4g. Yeah. And that the latency is a real big component of it.

And Cleveland Clinic has facilities around the world now. So there's a chance that they could actually deploy this globally. And it could be a model for other hospitals. But it's really interesting to see that they're really aggressive on it. And there already are 5G hospitals. The Department of veteran the va, has a Palo Alto Healthcare System. And that was actually the first 5G enabled hospital in the us and that was in February of 2020. But I think there's still a lot more room. For improvement. And unfortunately, the, the healthcare industry moves pretty slowly, regulations and other things.

I'm hoping that this will help accelerate the growth of 5G in, in healthcare and enable, better healthcare outcomes at lower costs. 

Yeah, I agree. And when I worked in corporate America, I spent some time with a company, I may have spoken about this on prior podcasts, but helped launch a digital signage company into the healthcare space for mounting solutions, point of care and that sort of thing within hospitals and.

One of the cha one of the big challenges in hospitals, at least older hospitals is the material that's used. So a lot of concrete, a lot of steel that blocks propagation. And you e you know, even if you densify it with wifi it's difficult to get consistent connectivity. And That's where, l t e and 5G really shine within hospitals.

And then when you look at 5g, to your point, ultra low latency, and a standalone deployment that's sub five millisecond, you're gonna be able to do some really interesting things. I've seen a lot of, a r VR R applications and you can cut the cord using AR and VR to do things like determine, where you're gonna, fix a brake in an arm or.

That sort of thing. Or if you're placing pens into bones and that sort of thing. I think there's a tremendous there's a tremendous application there. And that's something that, obviously you're very focused on for our firm. And then I would say finally, 5G is massive device support.

To your point, you've got sensors, you've got beacons, you've got You have imaging equipment, you have all types of, medical equipment that needs to be connected. That's feeding into electronic medical recording systems. Removing the the challenge of having, people input data into those em r systems, which creates.

Typically there are mistakes made and that can be catastrophic, especially when it comes to life and death situations. Yeah, I think we're really gonna see 5G shine and we're gonna continue to hear about more use cases in healthcare. But with that, let's move to my third and final topic, and I wanna talk about NT to N T t.

DoCoMo say that fast three times really quickly. And they're taking a page from Rakuten Symphony. And they're jumping into the 5G open ran infrastructure game. And I think this is interesting. So this is the second Japanese operator that really wants to get in there and leverage their lessons learned and then monetize that for other telcos.

So what NTT DoCoMo is saying is that they expect to have a competitive open ran solution on the market by the end of the year. They are this is gonna be a part of their orex line, and they've already said that under Orex, they've signed up five partners, KT Vodafone, smart Communications Dish, and Singal.

And it'll be, from my perspective when I caught this it'll be really interesting to see if there's enough room for another, mobile network operator to do what Rakuten is doing. And I was, initially when Tyra and his team at Rakuten launched Symphony, I was a little, let's not say bullish on the de on the idea because mobile network operators are very competitive and could they really be successful?

But, time has proven that, Rakuten has been successful with Symphony. And so I don't know if you caught this news but I thought it was interesting. We've got another, an m and o jumping into the open round infrastructure. 

It's interesting. I wonder how much of this has to do with the N T side.

Just because NTT has so much like of a consult, it's like a consulting business. And they 

do a lot of, they're an integrator. Yeah, they're an integrator. They're working with Cisco on lots of 5g Smart city type deployments. You're 

absolutely right. I wonder how much of this is being driven by the NTT side.

Yeah. Just because NTT DoCoMo is a carrier. And I don't really know what their relationships are like outside of Japan. Yeah. And I feel like n t has a lot of relationships outside Japan, so it'll be interesting to see how this works out. It wasn't necessarily smooth sailing for Rakuten in this space.

It will be interesting to see how they actually approach this and whether or not actions are being profitable. 

Yeah. No, I agree buddy. Hey, let's hit your third and final and, I caught wind at this as well and it's actually quite fascinating, but you wanna talk about Amazon? And the possibility of they're launching M V N O for Prime members and I'm a Prime member.

I bet you're a prime member. I bet probably everyone that tunes into our podcast is a prime member. 

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. Cuz they have increased their prime prices to $130 or $140 a year. Yeah. If you remember, it used to be 99 bucks. But the interesting thing is that this was like a rumored thing that came out from Bloomberg.

And a lot of people, a lot of carriers that were initially included in this story included at and T-Mobile and Verizon. And all of their spokespeople have denied that they're being involved in these talks. It's just people have not and if you look at the share price of Dish, it's up like over 10% I think.

On these, on this news, it might even be 20%. So yeah, they clearly got a big pop of news for this. But really the idea is that they would offer an M V O service to their customers probably through Dish is what it sounds like. And you know what? It's entirely possible that Dish could actually offer them, a wholesale price to get enough customers on the network to justify dishes.

Overall growth and investment in their network. Yeah. Yeah. So I do think this is possible. I don't really know what the plan will look like. I have a feeling it'll probably be a small plan. Yeah. Maybe like a five to 10 gig cap and maybe even speed throttled as well, but it's free with Prime.

But, they've, there have been rumors of free services from Amazon in the past. Like a streaming service, which they eventually did launch. So there, there might be some truth to this rumor. But I do think it is really interesting because it did cause T-Mobile shares to drop as well as at t's as well as Verizon.

Yeah. Clearly there's a concern that a Amazon M V N O running on dish could put downward price pressure on the big three carriers whom they compete with. 

It's interesting and I do the move on, on Dish's part because, and I've spoken about this on prior podcasts, they're gonna have to approach the market differently than the big three.

Because they just, the, if they go head to head, just traditionally that's not gonna be a winning proposition for them. I've talked about, Possibility of iot. So I think this really plays to that idea, be differentiated. I, yeah, I saw this the sort of the stock dips too on, the at ts and T-Mobile's and Verizons.

But I think this is more, and just in my humble opinion, I think. If you were to be able to have, basically, some free service to your point that's throttled or capped and it comes with your prime membership. I think that does more to cannibalize and eat into other prepaid services than necessarily postpaid services.

That's just one guy's opinion because I do think to your point it's not gonna be an unlimited plan. It's not, it's probably not gonna be a full featured phone. It's gonna be something that's gonna be a little more competitive, on the prepaid front.

This reminds me of something that that we're seeing a lot of the carriers do. Yeah. Which is trying to convert a lot of their prepaid to postpaid. So yeah, it's possible that a lot of the carriers see this is a, as a potential continuation of that trend or acceleration where low end prepaid like customers might end up.

Being commoditized like this. Yeah. And they might just be pushing more and more people to postpaid as much as they can before they get all of their prepaid customers completely evaporated. So that's a, just a thought that I had mi while you were talking about it.

All 

right, cool. Hey, it's been another great podcast. 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 Well Town, and I'm Atha saag.

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