In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we review indicators of improving 5G prospects in 2024 across key areas such as Samsung’s surging Q1 2024 financial results amid AI’s rising tide, growing worldwide 5G connections plus eSIM expansion, the FCC proposing revival of the $9 billion 5G Fund for Rural America, and T-Mobile’s creative new Blink Smart Home bundle package.
Our analytical review spotlighted:
Samsung Surging: Indicating Bumper Q1 2024 Results. Samsung is reporting that its operating profit would reach about 6.6 trillion Korean won ($4.9 billion) in Q1 2024, up from 64 billion won ($473 million) a year earlier, following a challenging 2023 pockmarked by diminished demand for consumer electronics. This represents nearly a tenfold increase year-over-year and appreciably above consensus estimates of 5.4 trillion won ($3.9 billion), according to FactSet. It would also be Samsung’s highest operating profit since Q3 2022. We examine why this is good news for the mobile ecosystem, especially 5G, aligning with the AI-fueled surge in the financial performance of key players such as NVIDIA, Super Micro, SK Hynix, and Micron amid key drivers such as 5G accounting for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025 and around 1 billion eSIM smartphone connections globally by the end of 2025 (according to GSMA Intelligence).
FCC Proposing $9 Billion 5G Fund Revival. The FCC is proposing rules that would revive the 5G Fund for Rural America, allocating up to $9 billion for its initial phase. Funding sources for the program typically come from a combination of government appropriations, revenue generated from spectrum license auctions, and contributions from telecommunications companies participating in the program. We explore how relaunching a program originally adopted in 2020, makes more sense now that the FCC has better mapping to get 5G to areas it believes won’t receive the service without subsidization as well as inputs from the CTIA and the Rural Wireless Association (RWA) that can help optimize the potential 5G funding allocations.
T-Mobile’s Creative New Blink Smart Home Package. T-Mobile is offering a new bundle that enables customers to switch to 5G Home Internet or Small Business Internet and get a free Blink smart home package, including the Blink Outdoor 4 two-camera system and Blink Mini Pan-Tilt camera (a $229.97 value) for a limited time. We address the key selling point of simplified installation where people can go from unboxing to browsing in 15 minutes or less, no professional installation or wasting hours waiting for an appointment window required and how these types of creative bundling packages can help stimulate 5G service adoption.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Ron Westfall: Hello and welcome everyone to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group and I’m joined here today by my distinguished colleague, Olivier Blanchard, our research director focused on key areas such as devices and semiconductors including 5G, naturally. Today, we’ll be focusing on the major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye and that will include, surprise, surprise, indications that maybe the 5G market is due for a bit of a rebound during the course of 2024. And naturally, we’ll dive into why that can be. And so Olivier, welcome back again to The 5G Factor and many thanks for joining today. I’m sure appreciative that you made it back from New York City earlier this week and beyond that, in addition to that, how have you been bearing up?
Olivier Blanchard: Flying around in the US is always an experience and so I’m lucky to be here not because of any particular airline or aircraft manufacturers, engineering and maintenance was, but just the state of air travel when there’s weather.
Ron Westfall: Yes.
Olivier Blanchard: Yes. So I’m happy to be home before the weekend.
Ron Westfall: It’s like a swamp card. Yeah, it’s a little background. There were tremendous April storms that caused the delay, but you got out in time before the earthquake hit the New York, New Jersey, and general regions.
Olivier Blanchard: I missed the earthquake. I am apparently going to be missing the solar eclipse, but I got the rain, so one out of three ain’t bad.
Ron Westfall: Right on. Well, if it’s any consolation, I’ll be missing the eclipse too because I will be out west on Monday. So it all balances out somewhat. But I think we’ve all seen the solar eclipse before, so I think we’ll definitely be able to soldier on. And with that in mind, let’s dive right in because I think it’s important to look naturally take a snapshot of the state of the 5G ecosystem and that includes the economic situation and also other key data points such as subscriber counts and so forth. And we see the mobile industry increasingly moving to 5G Standalone, let’s start there, and 5G-Advanced standards that are going to basically unlock more 5G innovation and as a result hopefully stimulate more diversified revenue streams but also make real the 5G use cases we’ve been hearing about for a while. And actually we’ll touch on that. And I think it’s interesting that as of January of this year, 47 operators are now offering commercial 5G services as 5G Standalone offerings or basically they’re on a standalone network now.
And so that is about more than half of operators who are expecting to deploy 5G-Advanced within a year after the standards are released. So these are two moving targets that are both important and both interrelated. You have 5G Standalone already making tangible progress and hold on, there’s also 5G-Advanced down the pike. And so that’s I think encouraging that we can see that the operators are ready to pull the trigger in 5G-Advanced once there’s that consensus, but that’s going to take a little more time to become more tangible in terms of it being part of a commercial offering. Now with that in mind, by 2025 next year, 5G networks are likely to cover one third of the world’s population. So that I think is important to bear in mind. Plus the impact of the mobile industry and its customers will be significant and that is resulting, for example, that 5G will account for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025 aligning with that one third of the world’s population stat.
And so in addition to that, I think that’s something that we need to touch on is that the number of eSIM consumer devices launched is growing significantly and it has certainly done so over the last five years and that is that the number of commercial eSIM services is also on the rise as a result. Now this is setting the foundation for eSIM adoption to gather pace over the rest of this decade, let alone the rest of this year, next year. In fact, when we look at GSMA Intelligence’s baseline scenario predicting around 1 billion eSIM smartphone connections globally by the end of 2025 and as a result growing to 6.9 billion by 2030. Now this would account for around three quarters of the total number of smartphone connections by 2030 and North America will be the region with the fastest growth of eSIM adoption due to Apple’s launch of eSIM-only smartphones here in the US back in September of 2022.
And I think it’s important to reflect that eSIM just gives smartphone OEMs and smartphone consumers and users and certainly smartphone businesses or businesses that use smartphones as part of their overall hybrid workforce, simply more flexibility in how they can connect to service and so forth. And I think that is something that will just basically be taking for granted. Long gone will be the days of having to physically take a SIM out of a smartphone and then reinstalling another SIM to get connectivity in say another region of the world. And I’m providing this as background because as we’ve addressed over the last few 5G factors that AI and GenAI has certainly been a major contributor to a rising tide and it’s certainly impacting the mobile ecosystem and the telco space, but it’s going to take more than that and that is the reason why I’m looking at these additional factors.
And so that’s leading to our thesis of is 5G headed for a turnaround by the end of 2024? And exhibit one is Samsung indicating that it’s going to have a robust fiscal Q1 2024, which will be officially announced later in April of 2024. Now as we saw Samsung electronics had a dismal 2023 and that was marred by waning interest in consumer electronics. And we’ve discussed this before that clearly the pandemic had caused a surge that was out of what you can say a normal demand cycle that is a demand supply cycle. That is the numbers went up dramatically because people were basically quarantined, had to stay from their home and so forth. But we don’t need to dwell on that too much. I think what’s important here is that in addition, the South Korean technology giant is looking at operating profits that would reach 6.6 trillion Korean won or $4.9 billion in this Q1 of 2024 up from $473 million just a year earlier.
And that is roughly a ten-fold increase in year over year financial outcome. And that I think is also aligning with the fact that it was well above consensus estimates of $3.9 billion. And so this is all showing that Samsung’s highest operating profit since the third quarter of 2022 is an indicator that yes, 5G will be benefiting from players like Samsung basically staging a massive rebound. And so I think it’s also important to note that chip prices in general have been rising over the last couple quarters plus.
I know we’ve touched on the fact that AI has been a major factor in Nvidia’s juggernaut performance in terms of financial, but also I think a Supermicro is certainly another exhibit as to why stocks related to AI technology, certainly the primary players in it, have definitely benefited and Samsung I think is definitely in place for that because again, it’s the number one memory supplier on a global basis and it’s certainly playing a role in providing memory for naturally AI workloads. And to round it out, SK Hynix, which is a rival South Korean chipmaker, said it expects to spend more than $3.87 billion to create a new semiconductor packaging plant and R&D center in Indiana. And that is to of course capitalize on the growing US demand for chips, but also aligning with the recent investments that the federal government is supporting such as the CHIPS Act. So I’ll stop right there and say, “Hey, Olivier, what is your perspective on say, Samsung’s resurgent financial picture as well as what’s going on with chips and so forth?”
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, so broadly, you’re right, 2003 at least H1 of 2003 was like the tail end of the slump, right?
Ron Westfall: Yes.
Olivier Blanchard: Again, not to get too deep into it, but yes, the COVID pandemic rather created a purchasing surge and at the same time created some supply chain issues for a lot of reasons. People were staying home, ships weren’t necessarily carrying as much inventory as possible, and a lot of companies essentially overbought. They bought every chip and every system and component that they could. And so we ended up with bloated inventories that took a really long time to burn off. And so it isn’t that consumers, and even on the enterprise side, users of technology, there wasn’t demand for technology, it’s just things had already been bought. So we had to essentially just burn through those inventories before demand could ramp up production again.
And so we had this huge slump, unfortunately, especially it hit the mobile market, but it hit the PC market even harder. And we saw this quarter after quarter after quarter just really disappointing results and we started seeing some signs of normalization around the end of H1 2023. And then by the beginning of this year, we’re not completely out the woods yet, but we could start to see a return to growth. There were definitely some indicators with PC OEM specifically, I think with mobile OEMs that started before that and the rebound has been a little bit faster. And Samsung just on the foundry side, just want to remind everybody that TSMC has the number one position globally with the biggest market share. I think they’re at 61, close to 62% of the global foundry business.
And Samsung is number two with somewhere between, they hover between 10 and 12, I think they’re at 11 and a half right now or something. So Samsung is a huge player in the semiconductor business. And so for them to suggest that business is up again, the demand is up, production is up, and especially profitability is good, that’s a whole other issue, but that’s good. It just basically falls in line with what we’re seeing for the rest of the market. On the profitability of Samsung’s business, I mean obviously everybody in the last two years, three years even, showed extreme discipline because there was no growth. Companies turned inward and basically said, “Okay, where can we become more efficient? It wasn’t so much a question of where can we cut costs, but where can we trim fat where we’d be more efficient with our processes?”
And so what we’re seeing coming out of this slump is the benefits of this fiscal discipline perpetuated or basically carrying on into this period of growth, which means higher profitability for services, that’s kind of a given, but also for hardware as well. And I’d also add that because of AI, again, to your point, AI is basically driving everything. And I think it’s for chipmakers whose solutions work well with AI, whether they have an AI component to it or they just work as a great complement to AI solutions. For instance, memory, we’ll talk about Samsung real quick, but Micron for instance isn’t necessarily the company you would associate with AI, but because memory is so important to AI processes, having the right memory attached to an SOC that has an NPU or some kind of other powerful AI forward process is going to be really useful.
And so for chipmakers, AI has created a market that is essentially a seller’s market for the Silicon vendors as opposed to buyer’s market everywhere else. And Nvidia has a captive audience and could probably charge anything they want for some of their GPUs and it feels like they are. So I think that we’re going to start to see prices drop as more entries into the market create more competition for Nvidia. But right now, yeah, profitability looks really strong in the semiconductor market and that’s the compound reason why all those elements conspiring to create the perfect storm of profitability and growth.
Ron Westfall: Yes, and I think you brought out some very important distinctions. This is not across the board. There is still a lot of struggle out there. And so the good news is that AI, GenAI specifically, is generating a rising tide that impacts many sectors and telecom is one of them. And what we’re hoping to link that to is that are there specific mobile ecosystem 5G drivers that can also create a resurgence? And as we know that part of the unevenness is that many of the top tier operators have dialed back their CapEx. We know that that’s impacted many of these suppliers and to the point where you have smaller suppliers such as Casa Systems unfortunately filing for bankruptcy, but also some key players such as Dish, CommScope, and Lumen looking at some notable challenges during the course of 2024. And so we’re looking at rays of light, if you will, in terms of why is it that okay, we’re getting through the darkest part of the forest and that the mobile ecosystem, 5G in particular can benefit in addition to AI being a broad driver but also some specifics.
And that will lead into my next reason for what is it that’s on the horizon that could indicate 5G’s prospects will improve. And that is because FCC Chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, moved to relaunch a program that was originally adopted in 2020 and now that the commission is looking at to basically use to map 5G areas that I believe won’t receive service without subsidization. And so that specifically is the 5G Fund, no relation to the Human Fund. And with the revival of the 5G Fund, what we’re looking at is that if enacted the proposed rules would revive the 5G Fund for rural America allocating up to $9 billion for its initial phase. So $9 billion can be a difference maker regardless of any industry. And certainly this is good news for the telecom industry, at least in the US, assuming that this is all implemented without too much delay, but at least the discussion is stimulating, let’s revive it and let’s move it forward.
Now, funding sources for the program typically come from a combination of government appropriations, revenue generated from spectrum licensing options, and contributions from the telcos themselves who are participating in the program. Also, in addition to allocating $9 billion to extend 5G mobile broadband services as well as voice to rural areas or any challenged area is the relaunched 5G Fund incorporates incentives of up to $900 million to encourage the adoption of Open RAN Access Network or Open RAN technology, which can ultimately help with competition, help with priorities that are related to domestic employment and so forth. As we know that, yes, 5G overall had some challenges. The Open RAN market in particular has had some specific challenges where there’s still debate as to whether or not a telco such as AT&T’s point something that as genuinely Open RAN. I say that it’s in the eye of the beholder. Basically the operator is going to declare what it is that they understand as Open RAN and that could drive investment in the area specifically.
But I think there’s pretty broad consensus that Open RAN is behind expectations and that as a result it’s having its own specific set of challenges. And we already touched on the Dish Network being a factor because they basically had committed to deploying on an Open RAN only network. And so you could see there are just challenges in making Open RAN more mainstream despite the backing of government organizations and despite the backing of top tier telcos who like the idea of it. Now in addition to this, there was an ex parte communication that the CTIA had already filed and it’s emphasizing that the value of scheduling the 5G Fund option, after final funding decisions are made in the broadband access equity and deployment program, or simply known as, “BEAD”. Now, this approach would allow the SEC to incorporate crucial deployment information that can influence the scope of the 5G Fund.
So the upshot here, is that BEAD funding is already in place. And, it’s primarily at fiber deployments. Now, what we need to do is revisit where are the fiber deployments actually addressing gaps, particularly when it comes to the digital divide. Where then can 5G then be optimized in terms of deployments that are funded by government? The potential comeback of the 5G Fund, which has no relation to the Human Fund by the way. And what the development is that FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel moved to relaunch a program that was originally adopted in 2020. Now that the commission has better mapping to get 5G to areas I believe won’t receive the service without subsidization. Now if enacted, the proposed rules would revive the 5G Fund for rural America and that would allocate up to $9 billion for its initial phase. And so that’s big money. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, $9 billion is going to drive again the investment and also the prioritization from the mobile ecosystem.
Now, funding sources for the program typically come from a combination of government appropriations, revenue generated from spectrum license auctions, and contributions from the telco companies who participate in the program. Now, in addition to allocating $9 billion to extend voice and 5G mobile broadband services to the rural areas, the relaunched 5G Fund incorporates incentives of up to $900 million to encourage the adoption of Open RAN technology, which can ultimately benefit competition and also diversify supply chain and so forth. Now we know that 5G has gone through a challenging phase, but Open RAN in particular has not fulfilled some of its initial expectations. And so this would certainly be good news for what can be characterized as the beleaguered Open RAN segment. And yes, there are ongoing debates about what is actually Open RAN. Ultimately, it’s in the eye of the operator and as we saw at the AT&T-Ericsson partnership, Open RAN is going to proceed, but it’ll be at a more cautious pace if you will.
Now in addition to that, there’s an ex parte communication from the CTIA, which is emphasizing the value of scheduling the 5G Fund options after final funding decisions are made with the BEAD Program, also Broadband Access, Equity, and Deployment. Now, this would allow the SEC to incorporate crucial deployment information that can influence the scope of the 5G Fund. And the reason is I think this is stemming from lessons learned with some of the bidding with the BEAD Program, some of the successful bids were unable to fulfill the requirements and as a result they simply fell through. And so naturally what we’re looking to do here is to avoid that altogether, at least minimize that type of scenario. Now while BEAD funding is not directly going to mobile broadband deployment, it can result in a deployment of fiber broadband backhaul facilities and fixed wireless services that can aid the deployment and expansion of 5G coverage in rural areas.
And I think that’s important to also recognize that 5G fixed wireless access as well as fiber backhaul are going to be integral to this. And as we know, any new 5G deployment, it’ll be using a fiber backhaul because of the economic benefits that are built in with using it. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5G FWA or small cells or edge deployments, whatever the scenario is, fiber will be the backhaul choice. In addition, the Rural Wireless Association is engaged in multiple discussions with FCC officials expect expressing concerns of a reverse auction model. We addressed that already, but I think it’s important that the funds be distributed on an equitable basis. So there can be avoiding say overbidding scenarios that would then take everybody back to the drawing board. And so with that, Olivier, from your perspective, is the 5G Fund good news or is it basically a chimera or what are some other factors you’re seeing that are influencing closing the digital divide and getting more 5G out to the rural areas?
Olivier Blanchard: Right. No, the 5G Fund is great. It’s not a canard. So no, it is great. We have a huge amount of land mass in this country. We have over 300 million people. 5G deployments are costly. It takes time. And however you feel about capitalism versus socialism, which I don’t. Coming from France, I think of capitalism and socialism working together. I think that the government has a role to play without picking and choosing winners. I mean, obviously that would be not a positive thing. But I think with the amount of taxes that we pay and looking at the common good, the government has a role to play, whether it’s local, municipal, county, state, federal, infrastructure is part of the government’s responsibility in terms of planning, in terms of facilitating and accelerating investments, whether it’s rail or electricity or roads and broadband is part of that now.
It may not have been so at the time of the forefathers, but it is nowadays. And I think any effort, whether it’s private, nonprofits, or governments to expand, accelerate, and facilitate broadband investments and adoption and deployments, especially in underserved markets. So obviously rural areas, but also different parts of the country that might not be technically rural, but that may have been put on the back burner because other areas got prioritized. I think that’s really good. We’re seeing something a little bit similar in the EV market with electrification. So we had the first wave of electrification in the early 20th century and now we’re seeing a resurgence of that that’s being led by the transition to EVs. And so all of that to me works in the same way. And we’re already seeing the benefits of that for end users on the EV side and the electrification side and also commercially, so services, service providers, vehicle OEMs.
And so there’s a parallel to be found here where the more broadband you have, the better it is. The more you have service providers being able to move in and serve those areas, the more likely it is that consumers and businesses will buy new devices that are optimized for 5G. And so the entire thing is not so much a question of spend, I think it’s an investment, it’s an investment in education, it’s an investment in jobs, it’s an investment in the economy. I don’t know what the figure is, but I’m assuming that for every billion that’s invested in 5G deployments in underserved areas, we will see a multiple fold positive impact in economic growth for those areas. So anyway, long way to say yes, it’s a good thing, it’s a positive thing.
Ron Westfall: Well, yeah, I think we’re on the same page as this. Hopefully there won’t be too many protracted delays. Yeah, there could be some hopefully minimal delays. But I think these are excellent points. I think we’re seeing increased synergies between the telecommunication sector and the transportation sector and the energy sector. And I think this is something that we’re going to quite simply see more of. And it also relates to the fact that when it comes to addressing gaps, you’re right, it’s not necessarily all rural, but it’s primarily rural, is that let’s optimize it. Okay, if we know fiber can address this neighborhood, then let’s see where it can make sense to optimize a 5G deployment, for example, in terms of architecting the backhaul capabilities and so forth. So this is constantly evolving, it’s dynamic, but it’s good to see that there’s this cross-modal, if you will, planning that is also being kicked in.
And I think that’s going to help the 5G Fund and related funds in terms of success. And this is another indicator that, yes, more good news for 5G on the horizon. And related to that, and for our third and final segment, is what about the telco operators and how they can capitalize on this and perhaps come up with more creative bundles. And we just saw that T-Mobile is now giving people more encouragement to make the move to 5G internet itself. As of now, the customers can switch to 5G Home Internet or Small Business Internet as T-Mobile markets it and get a free Blink Smart Home package. And that includes the Blink Outdoor 4 two camera system and Blink Pan-Tilt Camera, which is a $229 and 97 cent value. And yes, it is for a limited time, but it’s actually I think pretty cool bundling because it’s going to be free if you decide to onboard with T-Mobile’s 5G Home Internet.
And moving, as most of us know, can be stressful. I think virtually all of us have been through it. And it can also mean gaps in internet coverage as a result. And this is tied into what we’re talking about with the 5G Fund. And so what I think is a key selling point about this solution is that it has a simple setup. People can go from unboxing it to browsing and then about 15 minutes or less. And so it doesn’t require any truck rolls or professional installation or wasting hours and an appointment window and so forth. Things that all of us just look at with dread. And so I think this is an encouraging way for folks to basically realize that 5G can have many benefits that are for situational applications or for smart stadiums and smart construction sites and so on. And with that, Olivier, what are you seeing in terms of things that are creative or innovative in terms of making 5G more attractive for quite simply monetization?
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, so unfortunately not as much creativity as I’d like to see for a technology that’s as transformative as 5G has been. I guess one of the weird paradoxes of 5G is that initially even Apple fought back against it, “We don’t need 5G, right?” Which is funny to think about now, but there was a point early on in the introduction of 5G where 5G had to pitch itself, sell itself to people because everybody was like, “LT is fine, I don’t need this. Everything’s great.” And then now with streaming and videos and everything else, obviously 5G is becoming the normal standard. And so kudos to 5G for having slipped into our DMs in a way and become sort of the normal expectation of performance. And I’m not even talking about millimeter wave, just like sub-6 is fine.
And so I think because it’s not as big of a deal, consumers mainly have transitioned to 5G or they don’t necessarily know when they’re going from LT to 5G and back and forth. And so I don’t feel that there’s really a noticeable push for people to do anything. It’s just sort of there. It’s connectivity. You have slow Wi-Fi, fast Wi-Fi, slow broadband, fast broadband. It’s part of moving around and existing. So I don’t know. I think that selling or at least bundling cameras instead of bundling phones or something else is smart because it ties the service to the home. Your cameras are going to be at the home or your small business, so automatically, even mentally, it creates this sort of mental ecosystem of, okay, it’s connectivity here and here’s something that helps me keep an eye on this and that uses data.
I think the one thing I’d like to see, especially with AI forward PCs hitting the market this year, is a little bit more focus on enabling and just making it really easy for people to get 5G PCs essentially just to get the category out there. We have the ability, we can put modems like LTE and 5G modems and laptops so that we don’t have to ever use Wi-Fi if we don’t want to. And it’s still really difficult to enable this because the plans are weird.
Sometimes they’re not available, they might be expensive. The carriers I don’t think have done as much to try to get that off the ground as they could. So the cameras are nice, but I’d like to see bundling with other devices and the PC still being such a core central piece of what we do. And aside from phones being a really good transition between business, education, and home, it’s time. If anyone is listening, just make it easy, make it painless, and make the 5G PC category what it should be. Take the pain away, carriers. Give the people what they want, it’ll be worth it. But anyway, yeah, the cameras are a good start.
Ron Westfall: Less pain and more gain. Amen. And yes. Now those are my thoughts as well in terms of how else can operators stimulate a 5G uptake and certainly 5G connected devices, 5G connected laptops specifically are going to be essential because of what you pointed out, Wi-Fi security lapses, Wi-Fi isn’t available. Being dependent on another third party for overall connectivity when it comes to distributed workforces, major organizations, enterprises, government agencies, whatever the case is, they’re going to really need to adopt 5G connected devices to avoid those nightmare security breach scenarios. It could be ransomware, it could be a vicious malware, whatever the case is.
So buy that insurance, have that peace of mind. And yes, so I think that is another piece of that puzzle of why 5G is due for a comeback, a rebound in 2024. So these are excellent points. And yes, things like Fixed Wireless Access are definitely contributing to that. That’s been one clear success story that’s unique to 5G, but I think we’re going to anticipate more of that. That’s also good to see any creative bundling that we haven’t really seen before coming out in terms of 5G. And certainly I think we touched on a couple of key ones, and T-Mobile is basically coming to the forefront in this key regard. And so with that, again, thank you so much Olivier for hopping on after your New York City travel travails and providing excellent insight on what’s going on in the mobile ecosystem and 5G.
Olivier Blanchard: Well, thank you. It’s good to be back and to close out my week with The 5G Factor.
Ron Westfall: All right, on a up note. And so with that, again, thank you everyone and our viewing audience for joining. Again, always keep us in mind in terms of bookmarking and reserving our podcasts when they come out. And with that, thank you everyone and have a great secure 5G day.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
5G Factor: Key MWC24 Takeaways – Semis and Devices
5G Factor: Key MWC24 Takeaways – The Cloud and Telcos
5G Factor: AI RAN and Telco AI Rising
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
Olivier Blanchard has extensive experience managing product innovation, technology adoption, digital integration, and change management for industry leaders in the B2B, B2C, B2G sectors, and the IT channel. His passion is helping decision-makers and their organizations understand the many risks and opportunities of technology-driven disruption, and leverage innovation to build stronger, better, more competitive companies. Read Full Bio.
