The G2 on 5G Podcast - Episode 203: Nokia's 4G Spacesuits, Air Five's Hybrid 5G, Ericsson's Private Network Push, Google Pixel 9 Review, SK Telecom's AI Cloud, and China Mobile's 1 Billion Subscribers"
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Welcome to episode 203 of the GTO on 5G. It's the latest in the scoops 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 Towson and joining me again this week is fellow analyst Anshul Saag. I want to get started with my first topic and this is pretty cool. You and I have talked about Nokia on the moon in the past on other podcasts.

But I caught the news this week that Nokia is actually going to be outfitting the Artemis 3 lunar mission spacesuits with 4G connectivity. And so it's not 5G, but I thought it was something really cool to talk about. It's going to allow a lot of flexibility for the astronauts. And I didn't really know this before I dug into the Artemis 3 mission, but it's the first visit to the South Pole of the Moon.

And by integrating LTE network capability into your spacesuits, and obviously Nokia has helped to deploy or is in the process of helping to deploy the 4G network on the moon. It's going to do a lot of things such as allow astronauts with held it mounted video cameras and that sort of thing to be able to transmit that on the fly. So they're not having to pick up cameras and that sort of thing. And they're going to be a host of other use cases that are involved as well, but

I just thought it was really cool and keeping with the space theme that we like to focus on at times wanted to share. What do you think about all this? Should it obviously they're building a 4g network on the mail where they're going to, so it couldn't be 5g, but still LTE advance gets a lot of the job done. I think it's also just like a function of timing. I think if they had maybe done this at a year or two later,

could potentially be 5g. I also think that there are some, there is some infrastructure that can be updated to 5g. So there's still a chance they could do a software update, but it is cool. I'm a little bit more concerned about who's powering those Artemis missions and how they're going to get to the moon and the state of ULA's launch vehicle. But that's a different discussion. For sure. Again, I just praise the, the capability and the power of cellular connectivity. So I thought that was pretty cool to share this week.

Let's go to your first topic and you want to talk about the converged gateway product. Yeah. So this company actually basically came out today, this morning when I was searching for topics, it just happened to be the news that had just come out as a new company called air five. And they basically have a five G standard, standards based solution that kind of aggregates together five G and cable.

And they call it this like a hybrid fiber coaxial infrastructure. And they're basically going to combine DOCSIS with 5G. And it's a bunch of executives from former cable and wireless companies. And they're basically trying to combine wireless and wired networks into one cohesive 5G infrastructure. So this is a 5G network. It's going to be really interesting to see like how this gets rolled out and deployed.

I don't really know where this needs to be deployed or where there is a need for it. But I have a feeling that it's probably going to be maybe more enterprise focused initially. Because it seems when you look at where this would make sense, you would need to be in a place where both services are available. I don't really know if I see that as a rural opportunity, but it could be.

I think that we could see a lot of different kinds of services that could take advantage of this. But I just think it's going to end up just being another pipe, to be honest with you, unless they're able to really talk about how they're going to take advantage of slicing. But they were very vague in terms of they said, 5g cross all industries and like, okay, it's pretty generic. But I think

Being specialized would potentially limit the application of this technology. So I think if this is broadly applicable, it will fit where it's needed. I'm just still figuring out exactly where I see this hybrid technology being necessary. And maybe it's put in places where maybe wireless is a little bit better than coax. But coax maybe gives you that stability that you might want. But yeah, it's really interesting.

I see that there's new companies propping up, trying to offer new hybrid 5G technologies.

So I didn't check out the the news on this one. It's a piece of it's a consumer premise equipment device, right? So it's designed to be residential. No, it's not a consumer device. It's the whole network. It's from the floor all the way. It's like a complete architecture. It's like a new architecture where they would allow an operator to basically

basically be a 5g based cable operator. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. It makes you wonder what the go to market focus, what the customer demand for something like that would be. But yeah, it's interesting. Cool. Hey, let me hit my second topic. And I caught this on the fierce network, Dan Jones published this a couple of days ago, but

He was talking about Ericsson and their opportunity within private networking. And he cites some Delaware group research around who the major players are in private cellular. According to Delaware, Huawei, if you look globally, and it would make sense just based on the population of China, but

What DeLauro Group states is that Huawei is the leading provider of private networking solutions, followed by Nokia, which is no surprise, and then Ericsson and Bird Place. And what the article goes into detail about is what is Ericsson's opportunity? And they pack where Ericsson and Cradlepoint together are at in the hundreds of millions in revenue.

But they also point to what Ericsson and Cradlepoint are doing to improve their market position with no surprise use cases around things like mining. And it just got me thinking because I spent a lot of time with Cradlepoint and they have tended to serve more of the traditional branch in SMB. And there's been this bifurcated strategy since Ericsson acquired Cradlepoint in 2020

around Ericsson private networks, the serving the larger enterprises in the more complex network, the deployments, that sort of thing, and having Cradlepoint serve the middle market.

But I am seeing the companies come together and in Cradlepoint be more firmly embedded with Ericsson. And I expect what will result from that will be a joint roadmap, a development and that sort of thing. Because at the end of the day, certainly Ericsson has been very focused on big public mobile network operators. And Cradlepoint has had this niche in the market. I think bringing the two together, Ericsson

can really accelerate their opportunity. Nokia's had, and we don't have a lot of information on Huawei for obvious reasons there, but certainly Nokia, they published a lot of statistics around deployments and country presence and that sort of thing. There is a lot of ground to be made up by Ericsson, but like I always state, and this will be probably the millionth time that I've stated it,

competition breeds innovation. I think there's enough for both Ericsson and Nokia to be effective here. And what I'm also seeing is finally the long tail adoption is beginning to materialize with private. It's taken a while. It's taken longer than a lot of folks would have thought. These cases have been very discreetly focused on manufacturing automation, transportation, logistics. A lot of these cases that you and I talk about on a weekly basis, but

I do think there's lots of opportunity there and it'll be interesting to see how much more closely both Ericsson and Cradleploy integrate to go address that market because for the past few years, it's been this kind of dual strategy, much like Cisco did with Meraki for a number of years. So it'll be interesting to see. I don't know if you read the article, but any thoughts on that before we move to your second topic? I did not see the article, but

I do think that there's definitely some opportunities for cradle point to continue to become more integrated into Ericsson. Don't really know where they are in terms of the integration, but it feels like there's still room for integration and that Ericsson's global reach has not been fully utilized. But I also think it doesn't help that Ericsson has had some challenges

Actually, the last couple of years, I think that's also not helping the integration. And I'm sure there are people that like were needed that probably got laid off at some point. I think there's definitely some time for things to shake out still. And truthfully, I really think a lot of this is going to be dependent on standalone.

And I just think without operators deploying standalone 5g's politicians just don't come out as nicely, especially for enterprise. So I think that a lot of this really rise standalone, which ironically also benefits Ericsson on the core side. So I just, I feel like I'm a broken record talking about 5g core having the things get updated and

graded, but I don't see a way out for side you without. The nice thing about private is that it's typically a much smaller deployment. And from my perspective, installations like John Deere, they're doing core and ran infrastructure in a standalone fashion. So there isn't that typical luggage or baggage that comes along with it, but, but you're right. And I'll also stay.

that a lot of the private networking use cases up until recently, they did sign with LTE, right? It provided the right level of bandwidth and device support. It's when you get into these very, very unique discrete use cases with things in motion, like mining operations, like port operations,

That's when you need the ultra low latency that 5G delivers and the improvement in throughput and that's where they, and there are some really interesting use cases that fully take advantage of 5G. I think we'll start seeing more of that as time goes on this year. But hey, let's go to your second topic. And it seems like you talk about the Google Pixel a lot. You're a big fan and you want to talk specifically about the Pixel 9.

Yeah, so the new pixel learning is officially available today. I've had it for the last or so. I just got a case for it today. Because I'm very clumsy, but I'm gonna take it out of the case. This is it. I am too, man. I've got a case on my iPhone all the time. I'm there's some people who don't believe in cases. I'm very much the opposite. I'm very clumsy. Every phone that I have, if it doesn't have a case, well, we'll get stuffed and damaged. Basically, I've been using this sort and now I can talk about my experience.

embargo has cleared the devices are available. You can turn them pretty much pick them up anywhere. There's a lot of really good trading deals. I would say my number one thought is that the build quality is very much like an iPhone, which is a good thing. It's just very high quality, very premium. This is the nine, the pixel nine, and then the pro has an extra camera right here. But what's cool is they used to say in case there's a lot more cases for this phone than there are other phones because two

Two different phones use the same case, which I think is brilliant. Then there's the larger XL and then there's a Fold. Fold is not available. I will probably be getting one of those as well. And basically what it is, this is a AI phone. This is probably the first phone that really leverages generative AI in a way it's native.

Funnier enough, it doesn't ship with Android 16, which is supposed to be the next generation of Android, but we'll probably won't be getting that for another couple months. But they also turned on satellite messaging today, which is a feature for use only inside the Google messages app.

So you don't have service and contact authorities through that service. I don't know whose power yet. Haven't had a chance to find out that information, but like many other capabilities, this one was actually inherited through the Samsung modem that they have in here because they manufacture the tensor G4 with Samsung. It is a derivative of Samsung's Exynos chips, but it is not the same chip as the Exynos 2400. It actually has less CPU force.

A different GPU, but in general, I found this one to be really good. The camera is of course incredible. My favorite feature on this new phone, other than Gemini live, which you can actually get on the Moto flip.

our model Razor Plus, which I also have, you could also get on the S24. So it's not exclusive to Pixel. But what is exclusive to Pixel are some of the camera features, which is one we're called Admi, where you can take a picture of yourself with someone, hand the phone and then they can get in the photo and you take this picture for them. Yeah, we talked about that last week, right? So you can actually do I haven't had a chance, but I've taken some incredible pictures of my daughter, my dog,

And my favorite feature of all of them is the nighttime panorama. So you can take a panorama at night, which nobody else really allows you to do. It's really difficult because most panoramas require daylight to be stitched properly. And this one, it does an incredible job. You've seen some of the pictures I posted. Yeah. But yeah, in general, it's a really good song. It's probably the most competitive I've ever seen from Google ever with Apple. And I think that this is running on Verizon.

They so graciously activated the E-SIM. The US version is the only one with millimeter wave, which is right there. And I think Japan might get it too, but this is like a visor looking camera bump. A lot of people say that it looks like someone from Star Trek. I just think there's different ways to see it, but in general, it's a great phone. I recommend it to anyone who either wants to switch from

Apple to Android, or wants a more pure Android experience. And there's a lot of good things about it. It's not perfect. But I do see that based on what I'm able to talk about, which is now everything, it is a really great phone. And I may make the full my my daily driver, which is difficult because I've been a Samsung daily driver guy on the Android side for a long time.

Yeah. But so we talk about the camera configuration. I remember when Apple introduced the three lenses and it reminded me of an Orelco shaver. It was quite interesting, but hey, I had a question for you. So you talked about how the Pixel 9 from a design perspective, a hardware perspective supports generative AI. I thought that was mainly software. What hardware features allow it to be generative AI enabled?

It's mostly the, there is a onboard Google tensor for AI processing. So they have customized course on the G4 for AI inferencing, but I would say most of the stuff they're doing right now is actually in the cloud.

And I think because of that, so it enables scale, but it's also really not unique to the phone. So like the pixel editor, it's all cloud. It just happens to be exclusive to pixel. And that's where a lot of the generative AI happens. But like that Gemini live is a generative AI powered assistant and that's available on this phone in the S 24, wherever it is. So like I have all three phones in hand.

that can do Gemini live right now. This is the line. I think when you look at what's possible, it's still very cloud focused. And I think that's because the models are still too big to run locally, but with time, I think we'll see more definitely prioritization and use lower precision models. No, I totally agree with AI PCs, right? And that's an area that you cover too.

It's only a matter of time before there are smaller language models that can be run at the network edge more economically to do things that don't require the super horsepower that, say, a GPU in the cloud enables, right? And I would expect the same thing for smartphones as they become more sophisticated. I would expect companies like Mediatak and Qualcomm will continue to integrate

And certainly Google with its Tensor Core will do the same there. And beyond Sodos, though, I've played around with generative AI apps that generate songs. You just type in all the prompts, you tell it what kind of song, country or pop, and it puts it out. And I just thought that was all a large language model in the cloud. But it's cool to know that the mobile handset folks are

optimizing their handsets for next generation AI. I think we talked about Huawei for, this is years ago, it's probably five, six years ago, they introduced their Karin chipset and it was an AI enabled chipset, but it was really focused on understanding user behavior and optimizing experience for browser or email client type heavier users. But it's exciting to see the evolution of AI as a news from that.

to generate them and what that's going to unlock from a creativity standpoint and productivity standpoint. But hey, let me hit my third and final topic. I'm going to talk about AI as well. I'm going to talk about SKU Telecom again. And on a prior podcast, I talked about how they have big designs on being

or just reinventing themselves into an AI telco provider. And here's another proof point behind that. This was on Mobile World Live on the 21st.

And Mobile World Live covered SK Telecom's announcement with Lambda. They're a cloud provider. And what the partnership entails is enabling SK Telecom to expand its AonCloud services by offering a GPU as a service to potential customers. And that's based on the Lambda cloud computing platform. And hey, here's another revenue opportunity. It's not a traditional service.

mobile play, but it's certainly focused on enterprise. When you look at others in the US, when you look at AT&T and Verizon and recently with T-Mobile for Business, they've built out their enterprise portfolio.

I think it's an interesting strategy, right? One of the challenges with getting access to GPAs is just costs, whether that's an operational cost or whether that's a capital expense in building up your data center, right? So I think it's innovative. What's interesting is obviously executing on their plan here. We talked about, I think, on a podcast, their AI pyramid. This is squarely focused on infrastructure, but what

What do you think? Is it, is it worth anything or isn't just a window dressing? I think it's, it's hard to tell, to be honest. Just having a partnership doesn't really tell me much in terms of reality. I think it's a little bit of lending credibility by working with Lambda. But I also think that these partnerships have to be put in place for anything to get done. But I don't know.

I feel like this could be something, it could also be nothing. So at this point, I'm not really trying to assess it in any meaningful way, but I believe that SKToneCon will give this a good try and actually try to do something with this. Because I think they put a good effort in almost everything I've seen. I think we might see something out of this. I hope we do. But it does seem like a lot of carriers are trying to look for ways to use AI to streamline their operations.

For sure. And telecom, I've talked about this before, they tended to be an innovator. They're certainly not focused squarely on building out a network and focusing on unlimited data plans. They've been very innovative and yeast kings and that sort of thing. And this is just another example of that. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I think this cake just got stuck in the oven, so it's going to take time for it to bake to see if it's going to be tasty or not. But

But hey, buddy, with sound, let's hit your third and final topic. We're going to talk about China a little bit more. China Mobile in particular, and I did catch this news, but they achieved a pretty big milestone recently. Yes. So they have crossed the 1 billion subscriber threshold.

That's crazy. Because that means that there is one carrier in the world that controls a billion machines. Unsurprisingly, about 527 million of those customers are on 5G. So they've still got a lot of customers to transfer. They got 13 million more on 5G in the last month.

They also reported that they had $6 billion in revenue for the quarter, actually for the first half of the year, up 3% year on year. So what this means, in my opinion, is that

The Chinese market has stabilized. And that's why I think we're seeing, we saw good earnings from companies like Qualcomm and other mobile vendors because the Chinese market has re re re stabilized where it was before. Even maybe it's growing a little. So I think it's a positive for the industry. Um,

They are talking about launching 5G. We've talked about that in previous podcasts. I think the next phase for them will be getting 5G events out there and getting new applications that take advantage of it.

And they said that according to they're expecting that China's adoption of 5g will be at 90% by 2030. So they, we already know their past 50% list China mobile is. And yeah, I think things are moving really well for them and think there will be some interesting growth opportunities with new industries taking advantage of 5g advanced, but we'll see where these subscribers settle over time.

And whether we start to talk more about connections versus subscribers, just because we're going to do a lot more devices that don't have a person attached to them with a connection. Yeah. I wonder, yeah, that's a very good point. And I wonder what the average revenue per user, the R community is. I would assume it's likely lower than the West. Sure. And there's a lot of sensors that are a part of those connections as well. And to your point,

The only way you're really going to lift R2 in my mind is to focus on use case, right? And services and things that really take advantage of the network. It gets back to that old adage, access. And over the last couple of Gs, 3G, 4G, that was the focus. It was all about access. It was about unlimited plans and then POTTs. Basically,

took advantage of those billions and billions of dollars in investment. I'll tell you, this is an interesting stat that I just researched for a research paper I'm writing. And this was published in 23, but it was the GSMA intelligence reports that the expected capital expenditure by mobile network operators between 2023 and the end of the year

It's going to get pretty close to $1.5 trillion. That is a lot of dough. And you got to do more with that investment and infrastructure than just provide access to subscribers. So it's going to be really incumbent that we're seeing SK Telecom be pretty innovative. It's going to be really incumbent for not only the China mobiles in the world, but the Horizons, the ATLTs, the Vodafones to do that as well. But

Cool, bud. Hey, man, it's been another great podcast. 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 FavG topic for a future podcast, please reach out to us on social media. Will is at Will.Tech, and I'm at Autosun. We hope you have a great weekend, and please tune in next week, and don't forget to rate us and subscribe.