On this episode of the Six Five Webcast – The 5G Factor, hosts Ron Westfall and Tom Hollingsworth delve into the pivotal developments shaping the future of 5G technology and its broader implications.
Their discussion covers:
- The significance of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Spectrum Research and Development (R&D) Plan for future government and private sector decisions.
- Insights from the 5G Americas Analyst Forum, highlighting T-Mobile and AT&T’s advocacy for addressing spectrum shortages and the potential repurposing of lower 3 GHz and 7 GHz bands.
- Ericsson’s unveiling of seven new 5G Advanced software products aimed at enhancing network performance, user experience, and operational efficiency.
- The introduction of Private 5G by Wilson Connectivity, marking a significant step forward in the private 5G market with enhanced capabilities and security.
Learn more about the Six Five Webcast – The 5G Factor at The Futurum Group.
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Disclaimer: Six Five Webcast – The 5G Factor is for information and entertainment purposes only. Please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors.
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 excited about today’s episode because my distinguished colleague, Tom Hollingsworth, the Networking Nerd and Event Lead at Tech Field Day will be joining me. And this has been pretty consistent. It’s always a pleasure to be co-hosting with Tom. And Tom, how are you coming along since our last recording? What’s new?
Tom Hollingsworth: We’ve been busy getting prepped for our next event coming up next week. So I’ve been heads-down, taking a lot of briefings. There were some earnings reports that came out this week that had everybody kind of excited. So I’m looking forward to a chance to talk about some of the stuff that we’ve seen over the last week and maybe educate some of our listeners out there about some of the cool stuff happening.
Ron Westfall: Yes, and I think this is also an opportunity to talk about what we’ve been working on this week, and that is Networking Field Day 36. It’s November 6th and 7th after Election Day. And we’re very intrigued and excited about the lineup, because it includes Arista Networks, Itential, PathSolutions, Elisity, and Aviz Networks. So it’s a pretty compelling combination, I think, of startups, independents, and well, Arista Networks has graduated to a publicly traded company that’s mature. Anything to add, Tom, about what’s going on with Networking Field Day next week?
Tom Hollingsworth: Well, we’re excited to be hearing from first-time presenters like Elisity and Meter, of course, because they’re doing some interesting stuff in the marketplace. But like you said, some of the companies that have been around for a while, we want to get an update on what they’re working on. And I’ve been told there’s going to be at least two different product launches that are going to be happening during the event. I can’t say anymore, but you should definitely tune in.
Ron Westfall: That’s perfect, rounding it out with Meter and Elisity, all of these companies, all six of them, just that. They’re going to be coming out with, I think, very insightful information for all of us. But I think it’s a testament that companies are launching and coming out with press releases to align with Tech Field Day. So what’s not to like? And with that, let’s dive into The 5G Factor itself, because we have a lot of ground to cover. And I’m going to start with something that has been pressing that certainly came out at the recent 5G Americas event. When talking at least with the top tier operators such as T-Mobile and AT&T, one thing that is keeping them up at night some, that is driving the key decision makers, is what to do about spectrum. Now this is not unique to this timeframe, but I think it’s becoming more acute. And part of the reason is that the US does not have an updated comprehensive national spectrum plan in place.
And that’s why I thought it was notable in terms of, okay, we see T-Mobile, AT&T, and other operators really knocking on the door of the US government saying, “Hey, we need to fix this. We need to figure out ways to improve our spectrum situation, because scarcity is going to impact, well, at the end of the day, the quality of 5G services. It’s going to make a difference in how effectively the operators cannot not only compete, but certainly serve customers.” So the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the National Spectrum Research and Development Plan, and this new plan will serve as a tool basically to guide government decisions on spectrum-related research, shape private sector efforts, and provide a shared reference for stakeholders. And the overall goal is to make sure that the US can claim leadership when it comes to spectrum R&D, and certainly China comes to mind when this goal is spotlighted.
Specifically, the plan identified opportunities for spectrum-related R&D in four categories. And for example, one is innovation areas for use-inspired research, which is, I think, important because it’s being driven by likely operational spectrum use cases. That is, let’s link the R&D more closely to where it will actually make a difference, where it’ll actually make use cases, well, real. And these are often linked to specific frequency bands, normally placing high importance on cost-effectiveness and also potentially coupling it with specific application needs or constraints. On the last 5G Factor, on a recent 5G Factor, talked about how Band 14 was vital to enabling AT&T to support the public safety critical infrastructure out there across an LTE network. And so we’re anticipating more of the same. It also informs the overall national spectrum strategy that recognizes the spectrum needs of the mobile network operators, and that includes the lower three gigahertz and seven gigahertz bands for more study and potential repurposing for full-powered license use. And so this is basically to level set as to why spectrum policy is important, why spectrum R&D is vital. And Tom, from your view, what are you seeing here that can be a difference-maker that is like, “A-ha, this is something that could actually help?”
Tom Hollingsworth: I think that the big thing is that the government is pushing them to do use-inspired research. This is no longer just a situation where they’re going to be putting up spectrum blocks for auction and then hoping that somebody’s going to do something with them. And we’ve seen this recently in the millimeter wave bands where some of the companies are starting to give those back, because well, it turns out we really didn’t have a plan for these all along. We just wanted to buy them because they were there. It’s the same problem that I have when I go to the store. I’m like, “Oh, this thing’s on sale. I should probably buy it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but it’s on sale and I should buy it.” And now that’s not going to work out, because in my case, you end up with a garage full of junk. But if you’re a provider, you’re ending up with a virtual garage full of spectrum that you can’t really do anything with because it’s not contiguous. You don’t have any idea of how it’s going to work.
And so what the government’s basically saying now is, “Let’s take a step back. Let’s make sure you have a use for it before you go off and buy it. And we want to show we see those things. And we’re going to give you accelerators to do R&D in it.” Because before, it was as much about denying it to other providers as it was being able to do anything with it. Well, now I’m going to give you money if you actually do something with it. And that’s kind of the kick in the pants that some of these providers need to just get off their laurels and get it done. And then the other thing is when you look at the fact that they want to do dynamic spectrum sharing where you are trying to pull together all of these resources and dynamically adjust so that more users can get on at the same time, anybody who’s ever gone to a sporting event or been in a hospital knows that the more users that you get in a given area, the less performant your system is. And so they’re wanting to investigate doing things like maybe tuning the antennas a little bit more, doing better noise accommodation, because everything now has a much higher noise floor than it used to because of all of the devices that are out there transmitting, and then even using things like digital twins to be able to do modeling of the system to make those changes more impactful when they actually do put them out as opposed to just clicking a knob or pushing a button and going, “Well, I hope that worked.”
Ron Westfall: Exactly. I couldn’t agree more and so could the mobile operators. There’s that buyer’s remorse scenario that played out with millimeter wave, and I think there’s about a four-year window where the mobile operators are sweating about the spectrum scarcity. In fact, at 5G Americas, AT&T and T-Mobile were pretty consistent and persistent about we are facing a spectrum scarcity situation where the innovation is actually working with new companies or whoever can solve how to optimize spectrum, how to again have spectrum sharing enabled with the resources that exist. And that’s why they’re so on board with, okay, let’s have a national spectrum plan that is more rational, that’s linked to R&D, being based on use case outcomes versus, okay, the highest bidder. And I think that’s going to correlate with correcting the mid-band spectrum imbalances that are out there. That means that the mobile connectivity is no longer going to be so dependent on auction outcomes.
I think we’ve seen the results there are decidedly mixed. Or they can adjust results in the stranded spectrum scenarios and it’s not helping anybody. And so as a result, I think this is something that will be welcomed. I don’t think there’s going to be any partisan issues when it comes to, okay, let’s have a new improved national spectrum plant in place. And hopefully it won’t cause this four-year window of sweating for the US mobile operators. And that’s something that I think will happen. But again, government isn’t exactly rapid in its decision-making. But I think these are very important steps to avoid some unfortunate scenarios. With that, that is leading into our second topic, and that is networks that are programmable. Ericsson came out with, I think, a very important announcement, and that is its new 5G advanced software offering, so emphasis on the software part here. And there are three key factors to this new Ericsson push. That is first, it’s looking at high-performing programmable networks that are designed to enable operators to better align networks to improve business outcomes.
So that was a constant theme at 5G Americas. It’s not so much about technical issues, although that’s still out there as we see with spectrum sharing and scarcity concerns. But also, next they came out with seven new 5G advanced software products for high performing programmable network needs. That again can help with the revenue diversification, improving the user experience and also overall operational efficiency. And finally, 5G advanced strengthens RAN’s software portfolio of theirs with technology such as AI powered RAN, intent driven networks, and service aware RAN. Now this is something we’ve been talking about for a while, but I think we’re definitely getting closer to achieving these goals. We saw Ericsson partner with Nokia and naturally NVIDIA, as well as T-Mobile, to come out with the AI RAN Innovation Center. So this is where they’re putting money on the table to really make some of these capabilities happen on the AI RAN side.
But the programmability is definitely tied into this. For example, among these seven new features is real time AI powered automation. And again, they’re linked at the hip, AI being to advance automation, and it can certainly occur across RAN implementations. And that is to enable operators to scale more efficiently, handle more complex scenarios and quite simply keep up with the demands out there. And why not use AI to keep up with, say, being able to offer AI as a service, enabling AI inferencing at the edge using their assets? And as a note, this new set of software products will be available between this quarter and also the first quarter of ’25. This is around the corner. This is something that we’ll be seeing in production certainly in ’25. With that, Tom, what do you see about network programmability that’s different this time? It’s been talked about for a while. Do you see this Ericsson announcement as really pushing these capabilities forward across the 5G ecosystem?
Tom Hollingsworth: I think I do, and part of it comes from the fact that we’ve spent so much time deploying these 5G assets out there just so that we can do these kinds of things. When you look back at the history of mobile operators, even LTE was this customized, cobbled together system that mostly worked a lot of the time, but sometimes it didn’t. And man, I hope we can make this work. But really by building this on more commodity hardware, by building this with more off-the-shelf software, we’re able to move some of these developments that have been taking place in the networking arena into 5G. The one that stood out to me was intent-based networking. If you’re not familiar with the ideas behind intent-based networking, it’s real easy. You go in and you say, “I want the network to do X,” and then it’s up to the software to figure out how to configure the network to accomplish the business goal.
So no longer do you have to think in things like VLANs or border routers. Instead, you think in business goals, business units, subscriber units, cells, things like that. And you can make it more declarative by saying, “I want to see X,” and then let the software go out and take care of that. And by using more AI-driven functionality, it can even adjust on the fly. So you can set things like minimum thresholds. If a user quality falls below a certain metric, then bring these other assets online or shunt people to other towers or whatever it happens to be. And more importantly, energy efficiency is something you and I have talked about a lot across a variety of things that we’ve been doing. Most people don’t understand how much it costs to keep the lights on at one of these places across all of the devices that they’re using.
So if they can slip into a lower power mode or more focused in times when there’s less load, I don’t know, 5:00 AM. There’s not a whole lot of people jumping on the towers, so if I can reduce usage during that time, that provides me with cost savings that could not have been realized any other way. So I think that Ericsson’s onto something here. And by positioning this to the service provider market, what they’re saying is that, “We’re the best partner to go with, because we not only give you better technology, but we help you save money to implement more of those features.” And I think that’s something that’s going to be valuable as people start looking at the bottom line of these subscription services, is how can I get the most performance for the least amount of investment?
Ron Westfall: Yes, and I think it’ll also boost the network API proposition out there. Networks that are programmable will just be more flexible and agile and be able to use APIs to address a fast emerging use case to allow developers to inject more innovation into the service offerings. And it’s pushing forward to this ultimate goal of autonomous networks. And I think it is somewhat running in parallel with, say, autonomous vehicles. Yes, it’s a great vision, but it’s a journey. It’s going to require some blood, sweat, and tears to get to it. And it’s going to take some time. However, I think announcements like this are indicating that we’re getting closer in a meaningful way, that hopefully that natural language prompts can actually make the intent-based networking capabilities applicable in the real world.
This is tying into our next area of focus, and that is a company, Wilson Connectivity, that just recently rebranded itself. It had been Wilson Electronics for many years. It had actually started off about a quarter century ago, speaking of vehicles, enabling radio connectivity on vehicles and being able to track them. But now they have definitely expanded their portfolio. They have matured, and what they’re doing is taking an approach that allows customers to support both the public existing networks as well as private networks on a unified power efficient wireless infrastructure. Again, that power efficiency factor is spotlighted. And I think this is linking closely to the TM Forum’s objective of enabling autonomous networks in production environments. That means zero weight, zero touch, zero trouble. I know the term zero can be viewed as over-hyping it, however it gets the idea across. All of these capabilities will just be a lot more efficiently implemented, and well, quite simply, more user-friendly. And that aligns with zero trust security.
So here is, I think, the tiebreaker. It’s okay. You can have very compelling AI engines and have really cool chat boxes, but there’s the data that’s out there within these organizations managed where they can be trained and then fine-tuned and aligned to enable something like an autonomous network that includes certainly a private 5G component and also supporting the SLAs and so forth that come with, say, a private 5G network offering, regardless of who is providing it. And so what I think is also different about Wilson Connectivity is that they’re combining DAS solutions with the capabilities of private 5G. And I think that’s something that’s going to be increasing demand, because there’s just a lot of distributed antenna technology out there. It’s a classical brownfield environment. People who are going to implement private 5G will want it to work. It’s already in place and already not broken.
And that certainly includes distributed antenna systems, but also includes Wi-Fi. And that was something that was a key takeaway at the 5G Americas event, is that there’s going to be a big demand, we believe, for unified observability and management platforms that can allow an organization or operator to know what’s going on with the Wi-Fi network, with the private 5G network, with the DAS implementation, you name it, whatever the combination that’s needed, is required. And I think what’s also important to note is that Wilson’s DAS solutions can distribute RF sources from the 150 megahertz range all the way up to five gigahertz. So within today’s private 5G environments, that will certainly be helpful. And so with that, from this Wilson Connectivity rebranding and emphasizing combining these capabilities, Tom, what do you see here that could help catalyze private 5G limitations?
Tom Hollingsworth: Honestly, I think this is a good move for them, because one of the issues that you run into with companies that are very well known for doing one thing like DAS is that that becomes associated with that company very directly. So in order to get the new capabilities out there, you really do have to remind people. Oh, by the way, we’re going to do something new, so we probably need to change the name. Remember when IHOP tried to rebrand as the International House of Burgers? And everyone’s like, “Yeah, but you’re IHOP.” This is kind of the opposite of that, right? They want people to know that they’re doing more. And I think that you can’t just get by on a DAS system anymore. You have to have these new capabilities. You honestly have to be the one-stop shop to do this. I’m assuming that most of the people who listen to the 5G Factor are familiar with distributed antenna systems.
If not quick, a Google will tell you these are the kinds of things where they basically drop a cellular site on top of a hospital roof so that you can get cell coverage inside of the hospital. Except now with the advent of things like guest Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi calling, they’re less valuable and necessary, and they’re definitely not worth the money that you’re paying for them. Because these are not things you typically manage by yourself. You have somebody to manage them for you. So for the companies like Wilson that are trying to offer these services still, they’re trying to get it to the point where they can still continue to make those high margin revenues while providing more than just, oh, we’ll make the cell phones work inside of the hospital. And so that’s why doing things like power consumption monitoring and things like that or providing that kind of service for an outdoor area is so valuable.
And one of the other things that you have to understand for a lot of these things coming out now, these IoT devices, I reference medical a lot because that’s still where you see a lot of DAS implementations. Think about the number of devices that are getting put on networks in hospitals now that have functionality that is either very small, low powered Wi-Fi, or in some cases, even cellular capable. You really need to have good connectivity. And I think that that’s the value of what a company like Wilson can bring to the table, provided they can get people to understand that they’re doing more than just doing DAS.
Ron Westfall: Yes, and I think that’s a very critical point, Tom. There’s still an education component here. Yes, there are plenty of folks who are familiar with wireless implementations and they’re comfortable with Wi-Fi. They might even have private LTE, and that’s certainly part of the mix here. But at the end of the day, it’s about, okay, why private 5G? And I think it aligns with those indoor, outdoor scenarios. Campuses are a great example. It could be a hospital campus. It could be a college campus, an industrial campus. And yes, for the carpeted areas, the Wi-Fi can work very suitably. And in some limited scenarios, it can also work even on outdoor basis. But we’re talking about the flexibility of a 5G network. You have to have it in places where it’s a mining operation or energy exploration. There’s just no way around it. Wi-Fi cannot simply meet those scenarios. Plus, it’s a matter of fleets and other things that are integral to so many organizations. Again, you need Wi-Fi for being able to support that part of the organization. And that’s, I think, why Wilson Connectivity, as well as players like Salona, are in a prime position to take advantage of this burgeoning demand in this area, and they’re going to be able to ride on private 5G coattails, which will expand.
Again, it went through a hype cycle like so many other technologies that are new on the scene, and it got over hypes, and now folks are like, “Really, private 5G?” But believe me, these private 5G implementations are expanding on a daily basis. People have kicked the tires more. There’s more awareness. The capabilities have improved. There are solutions that are more streamlined, so there’s less complexity involved. And AI is assisting in this regard. And that includes, for example, the Ericsson announcement. Programmability can help with optimizing outdoor siting for a private 5G network implementation, as an example. And so with that, on that note, I guess, we can call it, I appreciate everybody for joining today’s 5G Factor. Tom, once again, always a pleasure to have you on to talk things 5G.
Tom Hollingsworth: Absolutely. It’s always a pleasure to be here, Ron, and there’s always really good stuff coming out of the industry if you know where to look for it. And I’m always happy to jump on and discuss all of these cool things with you. So make sure you stay tuned to Networking Field Day. Next week, we’re going to have some great presentations from the presenters out there, and some of this is technology that you’ll probably be seeing coming to a 5G network before you know it.
Ron Westfall: Right on, yes. Networking Field Day, it’s on Tech Field Day’s site, the Futurum Group website. Check it out, just like The 5G Factor itself. Please bookmark it. And also, we’re on Techstrong TV. What’s not to like? We just have so many ways that you can check out our perspectives and what’s going on. That’s very important, and not just the 5G ecosystem, but on Tech Field Day, what’s going on in the overall networking industry. It’s all interrelated. And again, thank you, everyone, for joining. Have a great 5G and private 5G day for that matter.
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.
