Recap of Mavenir Global Analyst Day 2025 (with Earl Lum)

Leonard Lee, Executive Analyst at neXt Curve, and Earl Lum, President of EJL Wireless, were invited to Mavenir's Global Analyst Event 2025, which took place in Allen, Texas. 

After skipping a couple of years of the event, it was good to catch up with the Mavenir leadership team and with Earl to get an update on the state of Mavenir after its re-capitalization in July of 2025, it's new charter and strategy, and the state of Open RAN.

As many of you know, Mavenir has been a bellwether of the Open RAN movement. Early on, they were pioneering the movement and the open technologies that have shaped the standard and the architectures that persist today. 

Leonard and Earl unpack the following:
💥 The vibe and highlights of Mavenir Global Analyst Event 2025.
💥 The state of Open RAN Squid Game and Mavenir's post-recapitalization strategy.
💥 Open RAN for NTN - the new Open RAN frontier.
💥 AI for operations and 5G modernization.
💥 5G core with Mavenir's converged core software and strategy.
💥 AI for monetization with conversational AI and security.

Hit Leonard, Earl up on LinkedIn and take part in their industry and tech insights.

Check out  Earl and his research at EJL Wireless Research at www.ejlwireless.com.

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

Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com and our Substack (https://substack.com/@nextcurve) for the tech and industry insights that matter.

NOTE: The transcript is AI-generated and will contain errors.

Transcript

0:06

Next curve.

Leonard Lee: 0:10

Hey everyone, this is Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Curve. And uh, welcome to this episode of the Next Curve re Rethink podcast. And we're here in Dallas, I think it's Allen, sunny Dallas. Yeah. Very wet, muggy, and thunderous Dallas. this is Allen, Texas actually. not too far away from Plano, And, we're here for ER's Global Analyst Event 2025. Skipped out last year. I think they, pass me over because of my, they still love you. Previous statements about open ran, they didn't pass me over. Love you guys, guys. I had more statements. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone knows about open ran Squid game, but it was really great to be back and I'm here with my good buddy, Earl Lo of EJ l Wireless. So yes, it's been, what's up man? Been a

Earl Lum: 1:03

very busy last couple of days and going over the new rebooted. Yes. In the air. Yes. Yes. And their focus on ai. Yes. As well as, I think the highlight is always the customers that they have that come and give presentations. And this year, yeah, it was pretty cool with the two customers that they had yesterday, Uhhuh with one-on-one outta Germany.

Leonard Lee: 1:25

Yeah.

Earl Lum: 1:25

was it, text talk Text. Text talk.

Leonard Lee: 1:27

Yes.

Earl Lum: 1:28

On, free mobile services via ad

Leonard Lee: 1:30

server. Yeah. Data. Really interesting. Yeah. I was really impressed with some of the business model innovations that, they've implemented and continued to innovate on in order to give, affordable, if not free connectivity, to, folks that are underserved, unserved, and, low income, and, Okay. Mobile is such a essential thing. We highly discount and that's one of the things that we talked about a lot actually.

Earl Lum: 1:57

Yes. And the past. In a country that has the highest payments for mobile, for monthly service, that free would be good even. Half what we pay would be great.

Leonard Lee: 2:09

T-Mobile. There's also an argument that, everyone's looking at paying for, services like ai. So these applications that quote unquote sit on top of the network and, maybe underappreciate the value of, connectivity in general, but yes, definitely, it's essential, but also it can be expensive for, lower income households. So that was really cool that, they're doing, a lot of innovation on that front in terms of The way they're positioning themselves as MVNO and their purpose, right?

Earl Lum: 2:38

And powered by obviously Avenue Core, packet Core and all of the provisionings and,

Leonard Lee: 2:42

and it requires them to have some significant capabilities on the charging side of things. and then on, the ad side as well, the monetization side. So it's a testament to the importance of BSS as well as OSS and, fostering flexibility and enabling business model innovation, like what we're, I think agility. agility is one of those keywords

Earl Lum: 3:05

Time to market seems to be one of the potential differentiators for Avenir in terms of their solution. Relative to the incumbents.

Leonard Lee: 3:13

Yeah. So, this year there was a lot of talk from Avenir Focus, let's call it focus, on NTN, a little, less about AI ran than I thought, but more of AI in Ran or for ran. Versus all this aspirational

Earl Lum: 3:33

right on Ran. Right. I mean, they're still going to be supporting the DUCU side Of an open ran, network. And there'll be some type of learning, whether it's ML AI or whatever the heck it is, with or without A GPU, depending on the configuration. And, so they're still involved in open ran and certainly, the one-on-one presentation From the CEO dictates to, their play on the core side of that. They didn't win the ran side for that particular deal, but they are, involved heavily as the sole core network provider for one-on-one and being able to port. all of the 12 and a half million MVNO subs become an m and o subs onto the network. Mm-hmm. Uh, was a pretty big event. And to be able to finish that this year, I think, points to the fact that they're still in open ran and they're gonna continue to still play in open ran. So, but not on the radio side necessarily. but maybe that will be much more profitable form avenue.

Leonard Lee: 4:30

definitely leveraging what they've learned, from their. Open ran adventures with NTN. Right. And I think they see, or it's being

Earl Lum: 4:39

ported now to NTN given what they learn on the terrestrial side of open

Leonard Lee: 4:43

But there's definitely attitude change, or at least that's the impression that I got. From Pardeep and, the other members of the leadership team where with Open they're becoming a little bit more opportunistic, they're gonna press forward a little bit more, when, there is no standard and there is no time to wait for. Standards to gel, they will go outside of 3G PP just to deliver on solutions, right?

Earl Lum: 5:08

Correct.

Leonard Lee: 5:08

I think that's really healthy

Earl Lum: 5:10

because if you're not in control of that timeline, that's

Leonard Lee: 5:12

not always good. So they might have learned something from the open ran squid games, don't you think? Open is not always good. No. it's important. It's nice. It sounds nice, but at the end of the day, this is about business and this is if you want to, and if you can deliver a

Earl Lum: 5:30

custom solution that someone's willing to pay for, yeah. That's always going to win over waiting for the standards to catch up to whatever your solution is.

Leonard Lee: 5:38

Yeah. they also, focused on AI monetization. They talked about a number of AI infused or enabled, solutions for security or advanced call screening, which is pretty cool. there's conversational and this, is part of a whole suite of conversational AI offerings that they're working on with some of their clients and customers. So That's kind of interesting. I mean, it's an emerging area, right?

Earl Lum: 6:04

But I mean, security obviously is paramount for every mobile operator. Right. And I sat in on that breakout and, Didn't realize how many different ways you could try to hack in and spoof Oh yeah. A call, a message. Yeah. every which way. And it seems like, at least one deal that Avenir got with Airtel mm-hmm. Seems to be, going well. And I think, the security is ultimately, it could be a major. growth area for the company if they're able to execute on this and prove that their value and time to market is gonna be much faster than the incumbents and their offerings on the security side.

Leonard Lee: 6:40

Yeah. and I think that's, this is gonna be an important area, and we've talked about it before about how operators have the opportunity to become, trusted, trusted infrastructure providers or just. Basically be trusted trust brokers in, in a lot of ways. And, Brandon Larson, who got up there. Hey Brandon, how's it going man? Who's the SVP, who leads the AI and a bunch of other stuff? He's like the innovation guy. we had a, a quick chat about that, but he got up on stage to say, Hey, operators, you guys are trusted. why would you wanna trust anything to, unknown third party or a startup? Operators have that unique role in being entrusted, partner for consumers and businesses. But I think that still has to be earned. we have to remember that there's been a number of breaches, right? Data breaches and I think operators need to reconstitute that trust with, customers and, businesses. Right, right. You know, both, I mean, if consumer and business

Earl Lum: 7:45

simple, two factor authentication. Yeah. It's all done on your mobile. That has to be secure.

Leonard Lee: 7:51

Yeah. And so I think. Mavin Air has an opportunity to, enable, these operators to reconstitute that foundation of trust. it'll be interesting to see how they work with customers to do that.'cause I think that's gonna be a big opportunity. I mean, there's so much focus on the network, but security and trust, I think you're gonna be end right, end up becoming huge opportunities. But think their

Earl Lum: 8:14

ability that what's their play quickly spin a customized or a tweak solution. Yeah. That may take someone, some other company much longer to do. Yeah. Is one of those differentiators because they can Hopefully spin it in weeks instead of months or however much longer it would take for, a normal framework type of a provider. So if they're able to deliver it, then I don't see an operator wanting to wait that long.

Leonard Lee: 8:41

Yeah.

Earl Lum: 8:41

For, their existing suppliers to come up with a potential solution if ER can come up with it in several weeks. Right. Well that's the

Leonard Lee: 8:49

thing about Avenir, right? Then you got an impression of that, this year at this, event and, I haven't been here in a year. like I said, I got passed over. Right. Last year, again, no

Earl Lum: 9:01

radios this year.

Leonard Lee: 9:02

Yeah, no radios by the way. Yeah. They got rid of that. They've been a pioneer. They're an innovation partner. It is a reminder for me because when you look at their footprint, NTN and some of the other domains they're playing in is actually remarkable how much work they've done, how much innovation they've been involved with, and. Facilitating the emergence of these new, market opportunities.

Earl Lum: 9:28

I mean, last year was the first time they talked about NTN at this particular event with, one of their customers. And if you look at the roadmap now in terms of, where they're gonna be by end of next year, there's a lot happening on the NTN side.

Leonard Lee: 9:42

Yeah. I think. The telco modernization is still going to be the primary opportunity for these guys, since there's such a heavy, software oriented company. obviously one of the opportunities they're looking at is the whole 5G core transition, and, I think they're pretty well positioned there. They've always had an offering. it's something that. They have deep legacy in and, maybe this is a time for them to shine and, for them to catalyze that opportunity. we got the update on their core products, the 5G core, converged, core products, from Michael Cooper, not the Michael Cooper. Of the La Lakers of old, you know, Michael Cooper, who is the SVP of, the core business right at Avenir. And so I had a chance to talk to him quite a bit about what's going on there in terms of the opportunity going forward because, you know, the whole 5G core, transition has been so delayed. Right? Right. everyone thought it was gonna happen. Yeah, was supposed to happen a long time ago. Long time ago, but then, seriously, in retrospect, even just talking to Michael and his team, that 5G core transition probably was not ready to take place. At the outset of, the first 5G deployments, a lot of people argue that NSA killed everything and ruined the 5G Promise, but when you look at holistically what the readiness was of the ecosystem, available devices that could take advantage of 5G Core and features. That it, it wasn't quite there, right? I mean, it was almost like a necessary bridge just from a financial perspective. but yeah, I can totally understand how the technology players, were frustrated by that. Right?

Earl Lum: 11:41

but now with. Essay coming on board. The question is, is what are you going to do with it? I know that you have it now, and obviously you can do slicing. What are you slicing? How are you making money off of that slice? and is that slicing capability available from day one when you switch on that 5G SA core? Or how long do you have to wait before all of those microservices and whatever is available that you can start to sell to your businesses or whatever tier of your subscriber base?

Leonard Lee: 12:14

Yeah. And that was one of the things that I mentioned is that there's too much myopic thinking about, what the 5G Core brings to the table. And what I mean by that is, these things that have been, pushed. As value proposition, selling points that are really just, a technical nuance of what 5G Core brings, but it doesn't have any material, bearing on what it means from A business perspective, Right. So if you say, Hey, we have 5G. Well what is that? Is that a virtual, private network, slice of, the, could be, yeah. But those are the things that start to get you closer to the actual, business value proposition versus just saying network slicing. Right. That's more of a operational. Thing, uplink package that you can sell. Right? Right. That's already been demonstrated. Yeah. But then you have like microservices based network, function exposure. That's possible. The billing and

Earl Lum: 13:16

charging have to be integrated with all that too.

Leonard Lee: 13:19

Right. But the important thing is how does that all come together and enabling something new? Right. But then oftentimes what we hear is, just these one dimensional, expressions of value. And I think that's also what's currently, hindering, operators from really understanding what the opportunity is. They just can't see it because everyone's talking networks slicing is like, ah, we've been talking about that since, 2016.

Earl Lum: 13:47

Right?

Leonard Lee: 13:48

And we saw demos and,

Earl Lum: 13:50

none of those, I think the one, the best. Example that I've seen so far is Formula one, right? In Vegas with T-Mobile, and you give the slicing to each one of the teams that are in the pits or whatever, and that's probably the, or at the golf tournament, at the, what was it? The rider's cup, right? Where they did slicing there. Mostly seems like sports or video. Ericsson also talked about,, video slicing to Yeah, for the broadcasters. As one of those low hanging fruit areas to, to generate and monetize.

Leonard Lee: 14:22

So yeah, I think T-Mobile is doing a pretty good job of at least helping. The industry outside of China understand the value

Earl Lum: 14:32

And and their value is more enterprise slicing versus consumer slicing.

Leonard Lee: 14:36

Yeah.

Earl Lum: 14:36

And the consumer slicing could get really complicated from a microservices as. What is that little service of the Uplink TikTok video person versus Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just doing A-A-V-P-N for the McLaurin team at F1 in Vegas, right? Yeah. Through that slice. And the other team gets whatever their slice

Leonard Lee: 14:55

then also T-Mobile has the, emergency services, right. Slice, I forgot what the name of it. Is, I haven't spoken to T-Mobile in a while, so that's why, it's

Earl Lum: 15:06

t something my memory

Leonard Lee: 15:06

purchase things when I Yeah. T something. Yes. T net or t something. I think it's T net. Yeah. We're doing a wonderful job of massacring as opposed to we're not apologetic. Yeah. Yeah. The network slicing version of FirstNet. Exactly. yeah. That's not on band 14. Yeah. But hey, at least we're giving you guys prop. So, yeah. That, but yeah, great event. As usual. I'm trying to think what else. They talk about a lot of stuff. a lot of the, AI for operations, right. That was also another interesting thing. but I think a lot of those discussions are anchored in some of these, let's say boiler plate. Discussions around autonomous networks, that are being shepherded by TM Forum. Right. I don't see anything too unique there, but there seems to be some sense of how you go about getting a customer down the path of maturity. from some of the commentary that Pradeep and, team made, and I had a conversation with, Brandon later on about, what are some ground truths, that they're dealing with as they're working with customers to discover. How to get to the next step, right? If they're like at level two, what does it take to get to three? Right? And, you know this, right? Is

Earl Lum: 16:29

it linear? Is it exponential? Yeah. How much pain do you have to go through every time you bump up a level? Right?

Leonard Lee: 16:33

Yeah. and one of the interesting comments that, he made was take baby steps, right? Which is completely counter to what we heard, from the industry so not a step function, but yeah. Yeah. Many, many steps. Many, many steps. No big bang. Don't go buy a, crap ton of GPUs without. Knowing why you're buying it, really take, baby steps and start to, investigate what is the economics of that automation, because that's one of the things that is being completely ignored. And it's oftentimes what, undermines a lot of, I think it's

Earl Lum: 17:07

important that if you're gonna implement something, what is the closed loop feedback of that implementation? And did you get what you wanted? Did you exceed it? Did you miss that mark? And ultimately like anything, what is the ROI that you got outta it?

Leonard Lee: 17:22

Does it scale? Does it scale economically, but also technically? And this is the thing that, I talk about all time is called the cost of intelligence. It's not just about intelligence. How much does it frigging cost? And one of the things that generative AI presents organization is a challenge of really understanding what the economics are, right? Right. So finops for gen ai, not really there. there are some tools that are emerging that give you some visibility to that, but there's Also growing recognition that, generative AI is unpredictable. it's not deterministic, task execution. the cost of the intelligence can vary for the very same task. Right. I mean, it's good stuff. That's why I really enjoy coming to this, conference. You get a good, feel for the landscape, especially, how's open ran doing? Right. and I think

Earl Lum: 18:15

the company's much more focused. Yeah. Now, that certainly was a distraction, a significant distraction for the company. and they've been able to take what they've learned from that and now pour it over to the NTN side where they're in A pretty good first mover advantage from what it looks like in terms of their partners and the Leo and Geo, side of things in terms of their services.

Leonard Lee: 18:37

Yeah, but I'll tell you this right now, Ms. John Baker. John Baker, we love you, man. Yes.

Earl Lum: 18:42

We miss version 35 of that logo chart.

Leonard Lee: 18:45

Yeah, exactly. He's a great guy, right? He is. Yeah. So, anyways, I think. That's pretty much a wrap, right? So we're gonna be headed back. I'm gonna go back to San Diego. He's going back. Go back to Boston. Yeah. And hopefully we'll get outta here because right now they have some really bad weather here in Dallas. But we appreciate you listening to this episode. If you made it this far, much love. And, remember to subscribe to Next Curve Rethink podcast at www. That next-curve.com on YouTube as well as on Substack. And also make sure to follow, earl@ejwirelessdot.com dot com. Thank you so much and we will see you next time. Take care.

Earl Lum: 19:33

Bye-bye.