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TMobile TBones AT&T & Verizon w/ TPriority

TMobile TBones AT&T & Verizon w/ TPriority

The Six Five team discusses TMobile TBones AT&T & Verizon w/ TPriority

If you are interested in watching the full episode you can check it out here.

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: So, you had a chance to go spend some time up in the Northwest. I don’t know if you saw T-Mobile. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But that’s where a lot of their headquarter is, but they had a big capital markets day and that was public information. So, what’s going on there? Well, who do they T-Bone and why?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so it’s interesting. As you and I were in San Francisco at Dreamforce, literally, the exact hours of Salesforce’s analyst program on Wednesday were exactly the same time. So, we weren’t able to go. You and I both got invites. We were going to talk with senior leadership there, but it didn’t happen. So, instead of that, I flew up to Seattle and Bellevue. I visited a company I can’t talk about in Bellevue, but I did very publicly say that I went to HQ to talk about that. First thing is, again, I tuned more into the T-Mobile for business than anything else up there. If you want T-Mobile consumer, my analysts, Will Townsend and Anshel Sag, have already done the breakdown. In fact, they did it onsite and it’s already published. Check it out. But a couple things. So, the company brought out a new capability called T-Priority. This is for first responders. You might be familiar with FirstNet, AT&T, Verizon, which essentially to have guaranteed communications in terms of crisis, something like 9/11, something worse than 9/11, power going out. This thing has to just work. Age of 5G, if you are familiar with it, there’s a couple modalities, I’ll call it full 5G, when you have changed the Core, you’ve changed the Edge. It’s called SA. It’s required to do all the fancy stuff. What I mean by fancy stuff is you can fractionalize the bandwidth, right? You can have certain streams that you can modulate the amount of data, the bandwidth, but also the latency. That’s called a slice. You can modulate it. New York, this wasn’t some thesis product that we’re building.

It wasn’t hey, this product is GA. This was we very much have a customer and it’s called the City of New York. This is a gigantic win over AT&T and Verizon, hence the T-Mobile T-boning with T-Priority. It’s a huge win for them. The other announcement was AI-RAN. This is essentially getting Jensen up. Jensen was there. Wow. I mean he literally just went cross town. I don’t know if he stayed in San Francisco or he chauffeured to his house in the south and then came back in, but he was there to talk about… Now a lot of things you can do with AI-RAN. Dan, in our work with Ericsson, we have discussed this a lot where first of all, energy, you can turn off the nodes based on the type of traffic and you’re predicting the type of traffic. You can also do better beamforming that interacts with the chipset on the smartphone to just make everything go faster at lower power, highest performance with the lowest latency. But this was really focused on inference with applications, right? We’ve seen GPUs on the Edge, let’s say, in Korea as it relates to doing gaming, where you’re not actually doing gaming on your PC. Most of that is going on inside of a cement bunker, whether it’s small racks of GPUs. You could just imagine leasing out this inference capability on the Edge, whether it be for cars, low latency stuff, right? Stuff you could do in your house. Smaller countries are doing this, but the larger ones just aren’t able to do this because they didn’t have the full tech.

This is a really exclamation point on the benefits of T-Mobile having a superior network. Final thing that I’m going to bring up is IntentCX. So, T-Mobile already has the highest rated customer service platform out there. What they did is they’re aligning forces with Sam Altman at OpenAI. Yes, he was on stage too talking about, and I did a lot of research on this, they’re DIY-ing their AI for customer service, exactly doing what Benioff the same day or the day before said you shouldn’t do. So, we’re going to have to see. All in all, every interaction I have with T-Mobile says that they’re not just a carrier, they’re a technology company unlike AT&T and Verizon. I know that sounds harsh. Yes, all three of them are our research clients, but the way that they’re doing this… I even showed up on a Friday afternoon at 5:00, Dan, I don’t drink a lot, but my gosh, there were 100 executives at HQ drinking IPAs and wine, it’s free, having real conversations. It just felt different. I walked outside, there was music going on in this beautiful campus outside of Bellevue. I’ll leave it there.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, you hit a lot of things. I mean, you got Jensen and Sam to show up. That’s indicative of intent in my opinion. Carriers, cool AI leaders, carriers are boring. 5G is old news. So, that to me says a lot. I really think they continue the trend line of being un-carrier. They continue the trend line of trying to be differentiated and unique. I think having that type of presentation there says a lot. I thought the interesting partnership, the OpenAI, I mean we know customer service is going to be probably the most disrupted immediately. It’s one of the most obvious immediate use cases. Nobody likes waiting on hold for long periods of time for an agent to answer the phone. Nobody like those typical pre-canned FAQ answers that you’d get from a chatbot. So, being able to bring together the capabilities of a deep learning and reinforcement network of learning of someone’s personal and account information, coupling that with generative text, and then of course, automating all that is going to be something that will deliver a great service experience. T-Mobile is all about that. So, that to me was really, really interesting. But also, like I said, I’ll just simply put, since you covered most of the actual announcements, is I think it’s just a signal of intent to be different. It’s a signal of intent that they’re not going to just go status quo. They’re going to continue to build and evolve. Heck, maybe someday T-Mobile could be worth as much as OpenAI. Sorry, I wanted to throw that out there

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s an ingest, folks. I think we talked about that last… Did we talk about that last week, this insane valuation? You had some pretty hot tweets that you put out.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I won’t even say I’m that hot. I can’t fathom it. I just can’t understand it. Goldman Sachs or OpenAI, they’re worth the same. Okay, sure. One loses $5 billion a year and one has a license to print money. I’m not saying that someday it won’t make sense, but it feels like a Ponzi scheme for these investors that came in late. Satya put $10 billion in and got 49% of it like 18 months ago. That’s returned 15 times for Microsoft. But it’s just like a last in, first out. We all agree that these generative models, tons of competition. Anyways, I don’t want to go down that path. Interesting stuff, T-Mobile, congratulations.

Author Information

Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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