The neXt Curve reThink Podcast

Ericsson's NewCo and T-Mobile's AI Ambitions (with Earl Lum)

• Leonard Lee, Earl Lum • Season 6 • Episode 41

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Earl Lum of EJL Wireless Research joins Leonard Lee of neXt Curve on another episode of "From The Radio to the RIC" to discuss their impressions and analysis of some big announcements coming out of Ericsson Enterprise Industry Analyst Day and T-Mobile Capital Markets Day which made many suggestions about the future of the telco industry and the RAN which Nvidia, Ericsson, Nokia and T-Mobile aspire to realize through their newly announced AI-RAN lab.

Earl & Leonard discuss the following topic that mattered from Ericsson's Enterprise Industry Analyst event and T-Mobile's Capital Markets Day 2024:

  • Happenings of the week from Ericsson and T-Mobile (1:55)
  • Theme of the week: Differentiated and high-performance networks (4:24)
  • Ericsson announces their NewCo venture with 12 major global operators (5:13)
  • Introducing Network Capabilities as a Service (NCaaS) (7:59)
  • Globally scaling novel network capabilities with the Big 12 (9:18)
  • The NCaaS race for developers (14:00)
  • T-Mobile - What does 5G leadership have to do with NCaaS and vice versa? (17:00)
  • The future of RAN infrastructure with AI-RAN according to T-Mobile, Nvidia, Ericsson, and Nokia (20:00)
  • CradlePoint is now Ericsson (25:40)
  • Ericsson Enterprise 5G coverage: a disruption in the making? (26:30)

Connect with Earl Lum at www.ejlwireless.com. Hit both of us on LinkedIn and take part in our industry and tech insights. 

Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout - https://nextcurvepodcast.buzzsprout.c... - or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.  

Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter.

Next curve.

Leonard Lee:

Hi everyone. Welcome to this next curve. Rethink podcast episode, where we break down the latest tech and industry events and happenings into the insights that matter. And I'm Leonard Lee, executive analyst at next curve joined by the notorious Earl Lum of EGL wireless research. Hey Earl, how's it going? Hey Leonard. Great to be here. really great to have you. And it's hard to believe that it was almost exactly a week, right? It was, yeah, it was a week ago and you're looking much better that we were in Boston and I was heavily, heavily jet lagged because I made a last minute decision to fly out to Boston for Erickson's. Enterprise Industry Analyst Day. And, yeah, it was great to see you there. I wasn't expecting it. I'm sure you didn't expect me.

I'm glad we had a chance to catch up on everything and it was great to have you there again. I wasn't expecting you until you pinged me the day before that you were going to be coming. So that was a nice surprise.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah. Yeah. And, before we get started though, remember. Everyone to like and share and comment on this episode and subscribe to the rethink podcast here on YouTube and on buzzsprout,, take us on the road and on your jog and listen to us on your favorite podcast platform. And, make sure to follow Earl or alum. You want to know anything about radios? This is the man. We've been collaborating for quite some time on this podcast segment that we call, From the Radio to the RIC. And we're ending up talking about a lot more. But today, what we're going to do is take a moment to recap Ericsson's Enterprise Industry Analyst Day. And we'll also talk about some news that broke and some events that happened, since. Actually, so there was T Mobile's Capital Markets Day. Yep. And during that event, there were a lot of announcements. One in particular related to AI RAN, and the lab that T Mobile is setting up in partnership with It's with NVIDIA, Ericsson, Nokia, so really, really interesting stuff happening. It's almost like all the stuff is happening for a purpose.

Could be. We'll see what that end goal is,, once they get it all together.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah, some people call it a coinkydink. We might be looking at that kind of situation here. So, hey, let's, dig into this. So, we showed up Thursday morning, right? You and I,, across the street and, from the 1 Boston Plaza. Hopefully I got that right. Right, which is has become the traditional spot for the enterprise industry analyst day, which, you and I've gone for a couple

of years. Already. I think they created it to explain bondage and to explain a cradle point.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah. This whole enterprise thing has been a big deal for quite some time, right? At least, I would say two, three years. Where there's been a lot of anticipation of the enterprise slash industrial opportunity, really opening up for 5G and creating, of course, all this fabulous, new revenue opportunities in a space that, telcos for the, for the most part, haven't really made too many inroads and haven't really had a plan, right? And so, yeah,

I think the private 5G segment or piece of it is a part that they talked about. And again, it's, for Ericsson specifically, they have never been very good in the enterprise, in terms of going to market their channel partners, et cetera. So this is a, renewed focus for the company to figure out how they're actually gonna, make it work. And get revenues that are going to be hopefully growing over time.

Leonard Lee:

So the event was kicked off by Eric Agudin, who is the global CTO of Ericsson. And he really led his talk with this topic of differentiated networks and high performance networks and what he anticipates. And sees as a growing demand for these services and network capabilities as operators continue to evolve and mature their networks along this 5G. Evolutionary path, right? Yeah, I think this is a preamble that he set up to start talking about that big news item that came out of the event, which was the announcement of what they call new co, right? Exactly? Yes. And we asked, hey, what's the name? Is there a name for the new co? And of course, Nikolas Huldolf, who is the President and CEO of Vonage, answered by saying no. And of course, I raised my hand and said, Hey,

that's a cool name. Exactly. Which he then answered, we're not using that Leonard find better one.

Leonard Lee:

And I thought that yeah I draw a few more laughs for that one, but I didn't, so I was a little bit disappointed, but yeah, that was a really big announcement.

What did you think? It, it will. Accelerate the sole network API thing that's been going on with Kamara and everything else that's been happening from the Nokia side and their partnerships and whatnot. And certainly it remains to be seen exactly how much revenue is going to be generated by all of this. But it's certainly. And potentially gets rid of a very big roadblock in terms of dealing with each one of these telcos individually if you were the developer and now there's a clearing house or marketplace for all of their combined APIs that you can get access to via Vonage or via Google. So it's certainly a positive thing. And again, the question is. How quickly does this actually get the developer community on board and we start seeing applications and other services that are going to generate revenues for the operators.

Leonard Lee:

I agree with you. 1 of the ways I characterize this upon the breaking of the news, and I didn't have a lot of time to really digest the details at that point was that it really is essential. And, one of the things I mentioned to Nicholas is that this is a pretty catalytic move, right? It's actually making something happen around these APIs and, one of the things that everyone should be clear about is, the open gateway initiative and the Linux foundation project, which is tomorrow, which is defining these network APIs. Those are just establishing standards and defining those interfaces. It's not actually implementing anything. And to your point that Earl what the new code does is actually implements a marketplace through an aggregator type business model that is. Operating in a what you know, I'm calling now a network capability as a service model, right? And the reason why I say network capability is that turn came up several times. In fact, if you look at the press releases, there's mentioned a network capabilities and that's what we're really looking at. And you can look at capabilities in terms of, let's say, a network function But then also a more abstracted service that the new co might actually design now whether or not they're going to do that. That's an open question is something that I did ask Eric as well as Nicholas, but I think. That's really where the opportunity is going to lie. I think with the many of the functions, we see some of the sea pass players. They're all already dabbling in some of these services, especially related to security and fraud. But as these APIs become. More well defined and standardized. I think there's an opportunity for entities like the new co to define services that are going to be value added on top of baseline API services that these APIs expose and participants networks and then provides additional value. For developers to tap into. And so everyone knows there's 12 operators who are now committing and also are slated to invest into this new code. And it's not a entity that has been established yet. But what Erickson shared with us at the event as well as in press releases that they've managed to get. Some of the world's largest telco operators on board, and I'll just name the ones that are participating. So our American Mobile, AT& T Bartier Tel, Deutsche Telekom, Orange Reliance Geo, Singtel. Telefonica, Telstra, T Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone. So that's quite the mouthful and they represent a large portion of the global subscription base for mobile and yeah it's a pretty big deal, and it is grabbing the bulls and by the bull, by the horns making something happen, right? That which is beyond just defining APIs and stuff like that, those are mechanics of things. That's not actually the business. This is actually trying to establish a business and a and a capability that that developers can tap into.

And I think that's a key differentiating factor. If you compare the Nokia partnerships that have been announced on the network APIs, again, the partnerships may also allow for some paths for the developers to be able to get access and everything, but it's not creating a business model. Like new co is doing, which is really how I think that's different than what's been announced before. And again, hopefully it'll allow for a faster road map to monetization for these operators in terms of how that marketplace is going to act. And that'll happen sometime, ideally in, 2 1 of 2025 is when that's supposed to get all the regulatory approvals cleared. And again, it's a 50 50 joint venture, so Ericsson has 50 percent and the other 12 operators have the other remaining 50%. And again, it currently doesn't include China. It doesn't include Korea and Japan, and we'll see what happens. But again, it's a very big chunk of the global market, and hopefully it'll make it as close to turnkey for a lot of these software developers to be able to leverage into, whatever cool things are going to do with these with exposing these network APIs.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought up South Korea because recently they, the three announced, I think it was an MOU or something like that that they were going to create a regional exchange themselves, right? Where they would that would serve as a broker. For services via these open APIs through a exchange type of vehicle. And so it's more than likely we're going to see a number of these, both. Global scale as well as regional, maybe even local exchanges start to pop up that cater to certain developer communities that cater to certain specific markets and certain scales of applications and access needs, right? Because some of these use cases are not going to be global at scale, and these services are not going to be global at scale. They may. Solve a more regional

or local problem, right? It's right. And I think we should expect that the three Chinese mobile operators are going to do something similar for the China market. And so it's going

Leonard Lee:

to be interesting to see how this stuff plays out. But once one thing is certain, there needs to be a differentiation play. And that I think we still need to wait and see what that actually looks like. The other thing I think that's really interesting is that with this announcement, they managed to get T Mobile, AT& T, and Verizon. Engaged in this, right? This new co venture, which I think is really interesting. So speaking of regional scope, I think that's covered there. And so there, there can be some nice regional problems in the North American market that can be addressed. Then of course you have telephonic In the mix as well. So Europe plus LATCAM with Deutsche Telekom, Orange, right? Then you have also Bharti Airtel. Yep.

And Reliance. So you have India. There's India. A big chunk of India is included. So yeah, it's a, So it's a huge footprint if you look at it from a geographical perspective. And again, it clears away to get scale. And I think that's, that was the issue in that if you had to deal with each of these operators specifically and separately how long would that take and how much effort would that be? And how difficult would it be to actually get something done if you were the developer and would you have to have. How are many versions of your. App service or whatever it is that's using that network API, because you had to individually broker a deal with each of these operators and how long would have that have taken.

Leonard Lee:

And this approach you mentioned Nokia before does differ from what we've seen in Nokia and their efforts there with network as code where they're approaching SIs, trying to build their network of. Developers right that broaden their market with developers, which I think they're looking at as size is really being the source of that market as one of the things that new code is going to take advantage of is. Vonage is a developer community, which is, I think about two, is it 1. 2 million? So it's a large number of developers. And Google's developer community. Yeah. And then the Google developer community. But I also, if I'm not mistaken, Nokia also has Google in their camp, but it's interesting how the you see these different plays, different strategies and approaching the. what? I, again I call this the network capability as a service opportunity, right? In terms of a business fundamental business model. This is what you know, it's different from c. PAS is different from context center as a service. And it's different than network as a service, right? This is really going back to us, an abstraction layer above the network that really marshals an interaction between these new network capabilities, okay, which can either be functions or extracted service services that then developers can access. And I'm sure that notion will be challenged, but Hey. We're all trying to figure out what this stuff is.

And, again, when you look at those capabilities, I think Eric alluded to again, the high performance differentiated networks, the latency, the quality of service, speed, reliability. All of those things positioning I think all of those are capabilities specifically for a private network, depending on who's the end customer and which one of those you need to tap into and what are the services again, if it's specifically for robotics or whatever that's happening out there that you want to leverage that's inherent within the network.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah. And so why don't we, why don't we blend a little bit of some of the things that we heard from the T Mobile Capital Markets Day in here? Because one of the things that is pretty obvious is T Mobile really likes to flex their muscles about their 5G deployment and the maturity of their 5G network, right? Which is in the U. S. market is the only one that is standalone. 5G standalone. So they assert, right? Exactly. Their participation in this is interesting because it really pushes the competitive envelope of 5G amongst all participants, actually, because, the T Mobile network is going to obviously be able to Capitalize on 5g advance, which they made a big very big deal out of that will enable them to take advantage of a lot of these really advantageous bets that they made on spectrum. But I felt that they're really trying to push the industry overall from a competitive perspective toward getting the ball moving on 5g evolution,

right? We're touting obviously their superior spectrum because it was all lower, in frequency, better in coverage, et cetera, during capital markets day. But again, I think over the past several years, while they were, not the leader, trying to figure out how they could be more nimble and do things in a different way, in terms of digitization Steve talked about how, we don't want people spending half a day in a T Mobile store trying to port over their phone and all of this other stuff from a customer experience. It needs to be fully digital and they can do it without having to go into the store because they can do it over the air and all of these other experiences that they're talking about to try to advance the telco model from, where it has been stuck in this very analog of again, having to go into the store for several hours to figure out how to get a new phone or how to get something ported over or how to get a new service instead of just doing it on the device itself. So I think T Mobile also has been one that has been an operator to rock the boat and to stir the pot in terms of They were highly negative and anti millimeter wave in the early days of 5G here in the U. S. And continue to remind everyone of what Verizon was trying to do, which is crazy, right? On small cell millimeter waves. Thank you. I think their tactic continues to try to push the envelope on the tech side, and that's what my takeaway was in listening to their plan on how they're leveraging that. And obviously I think they're going to try a lot of different things. What and the question is going to be what really sticks, what actually is feasible and is going to work given all of these wonderful potential R and D projects that they have going on with the, the AI ran it, et cetera.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah, and the AI RAN was a big announcement that came out of that event, which is that collaboration between T Mobile, NVIDIA, Ericsson, and Nokia. The whole idea there, they're really pitching the future of the telco RAN infrastructure and making it AI native, I guess, is like the, simplest way of describing it, looking at how do we reinvent and rethink a network infrastructure and architecture based on NVIDIA stack is really what it boils down to.

And the good thing is at least both Ericsson and Nokia were included in that announcement. At least that sets the tone. Yeah, in terms of their ecosystem. And again, I think they're trying to extract whatever they can out of the technology, whatever that's going to give them an advantage. And whatever is also going to increase their efficiency as a mobile operator. And I think that's something that every mobile operator needs to be looking at is how do you get to that level? And I think the first thing is you somehow have to get the SA and stand alone at some point and bite the bullet. On the back haul and on separating out or having a dual core and all of those wonderful things that just have to happen to migrate from where NSA is today. And I think again, that's going to be a question for every CFO at the mobile operator entities to figure out how much is this going to cost them to be able to do it.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah. And another big theme. Of AI ran is this idea of converged AI compute and the ran compute arc one is really the, that hardware platform, it's based off of GB 200 MVL two. So it's just the server size version of a Grace Blackwell GPU unit. Okay. And you know the Grace processor is a CPU, right? It's arm based, right? Then you have Blackwell. Which is the up and coming GPU, the new GPU that's coming from NVIDIA. And so it's two to one, two GPUs to one, grace CPU. The whole idea is that you can handle all the RAM processing on these boxes. As well as any of the third party or ancillary AI computing, as well as the infrastructure intelligence, right? Because we have to remember the whole idea is to make the rant more intelligent. And so that's one of the things that a lot of people don't talk about. They like to talk about AI compute for third party, but then, there's this big question of the cost of intelligence for a smarter ran. And what does that load? And and how does that factor into, all the things that we were concerned about before sustainability.

Yeah. And again, how much is this going to cost a mobile operator to implement? How much is it going to cost T Mobile to do? And again, is it changing the architecture from a distributed RAN into a more centralized? Ran to the cloud or wherever they want to be, and where do these servers sit physically in the network is going to be an important part of this new architecture that they're looking at.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah, and so these are going to be things that I'm sure that the, that all the participants, Nokia, Ericsson, T Mobile, as well as NVIDIA are going to discover. They're going to figure out how does all this stuff work? So it'll be interesting to watch how all of this develops in the lab and how quickly things actually get deployed out into T Mobile's network and,

We'll see. And is anyone else going to have the money to be able to do this? I think is a important question to ask. And what is the cost of this technology to get you to this version of AI RAN versus maybe another. Architecture for a Iran,

Leonard Lee:

but yeah, and I think one of the hopes is that with these, let's say a Iran capability sets, right? As you make a transition from traditional what we know and love as the ran today with its functions and features and service delivery capability, non functional capabilities how that expands with a I ran and then. How do these network APIs in terms of new AI ran enabled network capabilities, how do those enhance the value proposition of something like new, what NewCo is gonna be looking to deliver to developers? And so there's that big question as well, but it seems like all this stuff is interrelated. And it is being positioned to get people thinking or the industry to think in terms of thinking different.

Yeah. And again, it's leveraging and making use of the assets of their 5g network and a better use of it. Hopefully. And, but again, it's predicated on having a certain baseline that T Mobile has a luxury of having that a lot of the other operators haven't migrated to yet or not fully there yet. And so I think it'll be an interesting way to look at what they're doing and what can be gleaned from what they're doing for other operators to see, is this the right path that they need to go down or do they need to go down a different path?

Leonard Lee:

So let's talk about the other big headline or. Topic of interest that surfaced. There was a lot of talk about neutral host, right? And that topic was encapsulated in a lot of the presentation material related to cradle point, which is now Erickson. Exactly. Rebranded. Yeah. Now we have. Three main product groups within Ericsson. Ericsson Cradlepoint, right? So it's not like Cradlepoint totally disappeared. It's now a product group. Ericsson Private 5G, right? Which is a lot of that traditional Ericsson. Private 5G largely focused on industrial Ericsson enterprise 5G coverage. Now, this one is really interesting. And you want to take a shot at explaining to our audience what this little nugget is all about.

Yeah, essentially what enterprise 5G coverage Bring to the table for the first time for the industry, at least from an in-building perspective is that Ericsson is going to provide a neutral host turnkey solution that will, from day one, have connectivity to all three nationwide mobile operators here in the United States. So at and t, Verizon, T-Mobile will all be connected into this neutral host solution. And so if you're an enterprise client, typically, if you want in building signal coverage, the first thing you ask anyone is I want everyone in my building. And usually what happens is everyone says, sure. But they're lying and they don't deliver all three operators. They might have to typically they start with one. And so the client ends up being extremely disappointed. So this takes away that uncertainty and I don't even know how to stress. How important that is from an uncertainty perspective of guaranteeing that all three signals are going to be in your building from day one, when the network is turned on is a huge event within the in building marketplace, because no one's been able to say that the prior neutral host companies that were the tower codes, like American tower and crown castle. They were all saying that they could potentially get all three in. Or prior when Sprint was still around, it had not merged to get all four of them in, and that's never happened, and I think this is a unique opportunity for Ericsson to take advantage of, again, given the relationships they have with all of these operators, and certainly it's a proving point. and could migrate to other regions and other countries where they can have the same setup in the UK, in France, in Germany, where again, they could do something that the other DAS suppliers may or may not be able to do, which is to have all of the nationwide operators in those specific countries be in the building from day one. And again, this is leveraging radio dot. So this is not your traditional DAS system. that is out there. It's using the radio dot system and I think it's going to be pretty cool. And according to them, it'll be up to 10 million square feet. And you could also layer on a private 5G network on top of this neutral host option that they have. So is it something for a stadium? Not at this particular point in time, but you can certainly hack it and change the radios and have higher power radios and a different architecture. As long as they can bring the neutral host part, then they could be for, any venue at all that's out there. So I think that's a very important key thing to note and we'll see how quickly they can make a dent in the market.

Leonard Lee:

In a lot of ways, this mirrors what they've done with NewCo, right? In that they've aggregated these carrier participants into this service. And so it's interesting to see this managed service, if you will, business model or approach being utilized here as well.

And there could be a couple of different business models too. Traditionally, the And customer or the building owner, whoever had to pay upfront a hundred percent for the total cost of the network, given that it's going to be a fully turnkey managed services that could be distributed over a period of time. So they don't have to bear the full price of it upfront and then could be amortized over how many years. And I think that makes it easier from a barrier to entry for a lot of the building owners that are not willing to pay that big chunk of money to get that network deployed.

Leonard Lee:

So yeah, one of the things that we posted, or at least I posted, and I tagged you on it, is that we had both, at the event, described the solution to OSA as being disruptive, right? We never give this designation. Lightly, right? Because first off, I'm not a big fan. I think you only say something is disruptive. Once it's actually disrupted something, but he showed us a picture of what that disruption looks like. Right. So, I thought that was pretty

and again, to be fair, that was probably a. 50 sector type of a stadium bass that he showed within a building and et cetera, and that's not necessarily an enterprise application where you have four floors and maybe, a couple of 100, 000 square feet to cover. And you're not trying to provide service to. 100, 000 people. But I think he made the point in terms of all of the plumbing that's typically required in a DAS solution, the craziness of taking a macro radio and cranking it down in power by 99 percent using attenuators and then feeding that into a head end for a DAS. So there's a lot of pieces in a traditional DAS that take up a lot of room and waste a lot of power, et cetera. And again, this could be disruptive in that you have one nine U high rack mounted box on a wall that he showed. But again that's probably looking at a couple of sectors and not 50 plus that you would find in a stadium, but he made his point in terms of how crazy it could be. Way to keep them honest,

Leonard Lee:

but still, I thought they did a really good job of providing this shock value, or at least selling the disruption. I've been so focused on all the AI supercomputing stuff for the last few months, I took my eye off the telco ball for a while, but now getting back into it. Wow, there's some serious stuff going on here. And so I think it's going to be a very exciting next few months at the least,

right? Yeah, absolutely. And T Mobile is usually one of the big sponsors of MWC Las Vegas. So we'll see if they're able to talk about this AIRAN roadmap during MWC Las Vegas, or are they going to stick with what they've done in the past in their booth? Yeah. And we'll have to wait and see and see what else is going on with Open RAN, the CBRS alliance and all the stuff that's happening here in the U. S.

Leonard Lee:

Yeah, and I'll look forward to that update from you. I'm skipping out this year. So it's all on you, Earl. You're going to have to report back to me with all of your

Well, I will let you know what is good and what is ugly. The good, bad, and ugly.

Leonard Lee:

Exactly. Telecom. Yes. So, hey everyone, thanks for hanging out with us. We really appreciate your listenership and viewership and we hope that the discussion here was insightful and valuable to you. Make sure that you check out Earl Lam, his research at EJL wireless research at www. ejlwireless. com. Any other ways that you

want folks to contact you? All my stuff is on LinkedIn, so they can reach me there on the website. So they know how to get ahold of me. I would assume. I hope

Leonard Lee:

you can

find

Leonard Lee:

him here as well. He's exactly. Yes. So yeah. Make sure to subscribe though. Subscribe to our

podcast, which absolutely. Yeah, which we have important things to say, and hopefully you have questions that you're asking yourself after you listen to this. Oh, I'm sure always people do, right?

Leonard Lee:

Oh, that's the hope. Yeah. Yeah. Yes subscribe to the podcast featured on the NextCurve YouTube channel. Check out the audio version on Buzzsprout and find us on your favorite podcast sites. Also subscribe to the next curve research portal at www. next curve. com for the tech and industry insights that matter. And we will see you next time. Definitely after MWC America's or is it Las Vegas, 2020, Las Vegas. Yes. Where Earl will give his hot takes and cold takes good mediocre takes and whatever it takes. Yeah, and so until then take care and we will see you. Thanks. Bye. Bye

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