 theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Good evening from Fira Barcelona in Spain. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We are covering with theCUBE MWC23. This is day three, three full days almost of coverage we've given you and don't worry, we've got a great conversation next and another day tomorrow. We're going to be talking with SingTel and Dell next about 5G network slicing, sexy stuff. Please welcome Dennis Wong, VP, Enterprise, 5G and platform from SingTel. And Douglas Lieberman is back with us, our alumni global senior director, VTM and co-creation services, telecom systems business at Dell. Welcome guys, great to have you. Thank you for having us. So Dennis, go ahead and start with you. Talk to the audience about SingTel. You've got a unique insight into some of the challenges 5G brings and the opportunities. What is SingTel seeing there? I think from a SingTel perspective, I think 5G technology brings about a new era of opportunities for all the enterprises and from big to small. I think that's one thing that we are aiming to do. How do we put technology together? And that's why I think that 5G brings about a lot more capabilities, a lot more parameters that for the new technology, new devices, new services that we can explore. I mean, we are giving ourselves a new opportunity to try something that's better than Wi-Fi, that's better than 4G. So I think that's something very exciting for me. What are some of the challenges that you see that you look to partners like Dell to help wipe off the table? I think one of the things that Dell has been doing very closely with us, I think in terms of the network technology, in terms of the rent, in terms of the kind of virtualization, in terms of marketplace, in terms of ecosystem, they are all over the place. So I think for them, they are not looking at just hardware, they are looking at how to support us as a whole ecosystem to work things together. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because it's maybe an overused term, that everyone talks about 5G being the enterprise G. And really, what's interesting about 5G and where Dell is really able to add value in working with partners like Singtel is the disaggregation of 5G and the open side of it and the ability to take different workloads and customize them because of the fact that the whole packet core and the CU and the DU and that architecture is not locked into a single proprietary architecture allows for customization and injection of workloads and allows enterprises to really tune the network to what their workloads need to be. So I wonder, Dennis, can you take us through the anatomy of a 5G deployment? How does it work? Do you start with a sort of green field, sort of test bed? How do you connect it to your 4G networks? Take us through the process. Maybe I will go through from a customer lens. What does a customer think? And what does a customer feel about when we approach them for 5G? I think for most of the customers who are thinking about 5G, they are usually already having some kind of a services that's running on the current technology. Could be 4G, could be Wi-Fi. One very typical example that I can share with you is that one of the customers, he was saying that I'm having Wi-Fi already. Can you prove to me that 5G is better? So what we did was that we actually rolled out this little proprietary 5G in the box. We call it 5G Genie. A Genie stands for Generating Instant Experience. Very interesting name. We pushed that to the customer place. Within 30 minutes, he set up a 5G connectivity in his area and he tested his performance of his Wi-Fi with the Genie on the spot. And immediately, wow, he see that there's a lot of difference in the performance. Now, so the first part is really about getting the customer to feel that why 5G is truly better? Let them experience it. Then after which, we went through with them. Because of this performance, what does it do to your business? From a productivity perspective, security perspective, safety perspective, and they kind of look at it and say wow, that's where the ROI comes from. Then after which, then it's where I think where Dave says, it comes in whereby then we were designed, if it's a factory, we had to design the coverage in the factory because robots are moving. You want to ensure that every part of the factories have the coverage. So we had to design it, we had to build it, put in all the controls and put in all the devices. And then after which, then all things will go. And of course, from a customer perspective, they will still need to run the application. Need to check that the performance is up to the mark. So I think in all, the 5G journey is not really just about putting the network and hear customer, let's use it. There's a lot of conviction, there's a lot of testing, there's a lot of what we call trial and error with the customer. So that, thank you for that explanation. So that's there, we're going to make a business case and they're going to see immediate performance improvements. Then I presume they're going to start building new applications on top. And then maybe that will negatively affect performance, but that's okay, it's like we were talking about the other day, there's so much data pumping, you get equivalent performance, but so much more capability. So how are you guys thinking about that ultimate layer where that value is, the application, the workloads that are going to be new to these networks? We'll take a step back and talk about, for example, the use case he just talked about, which was in autonomous vehicles or robots inside a factory. It's not that it's just more performance, it's reliable performance and consistent performance, because the difference with a cellular solution, a mobile solution, a 5G solution, then a Wi-Fi is the guaranteed spectrum and the isolated spectrum and the lack of competition for that space. I mean, I tell people this all the time, and you can see it right now, if you were to open your phone and look at all the Wi-Fi hotspots that exist right here, there is an enormous amount of contention for the exact same spectrum, and we're all competing with each other. I can't get into the network. Right, and so the more people that walk past us in this queue, the more that there's going to be interference, and so the performance is not guaranteed. And if you have an automated factory, if you have machines that are moving around a factory, if you have robots that need to work together, you can't afford for it to be great one minute and lousy the next minute. You need consistent, high performance, and that's where these 5G networks and private 5G networks are really, really important, because it's not just about faster. Sometimes it's not all about, can I get it there faster? It's I want it faster but reliably and consistently and make sure I get the same experience every time so that I can then build more intricate and complicated applications. If you have a warehouse that's got autonomous robots, the closer I can have those robots get to each other, it means the more packages I can move or the more wells I can make or the more machine parts I can get out the door because I don't have to build into the, oh my God, I lost wifi connectivity for 10 seconds and everything stops until the connectivity comes back and they can resume. And anybody would choose consistent, predictable performance over spiky performance. And you're saying the technology, you're able to better leverage the spectrum, isolate the spectrum for that specific use case. That is the technology enabler. Maybe I can also give you another perspective. Together with the 5G technology is where the multi-edge computing comes into place. And that's where I think one of the things that we work very closely with Adele as well. Because that is very important. With that compute at the edge means that your latency is low. And like what you say is not just low latency, it's consistently low latency. Today, and let's say in Singapore, Singapore is a very small city. You can travel from one end of the city to the other end in one and a half hour and that's it. Singapore is over. If there's no traffic. So everyone was saying Singapore is such a small city. Why would you need an edge? So I'll explain to them. We did a test from a cloud gaming perspective. As we use 4G over the public cloud, it's true that you can get about 10, 15, 20 milliseconds on a good day. But it's on the average, it's about 15, 20 milliseconds. However, you will find that there are times whereby it's back to 150, it's back to 90, it's back to 200. So you can see that it's not just about low latency, it's about consistent low latency. So that's where I think 5G and MEC come as a good pair to make sure that the performance for those factories or what Doug has mentioned, the high performance synchronized services is very important. Beside packing the drones or the robots to go close together, you want it to be synchronized. And if you've seen some of those robots that work together, it's almost synchronized. That's the one thing that dreams that we're going to make sure that we're going to achieve. And then of course on top of all that is security, which is really, really important on all these. I mean, the vulnerabilities of Wi-Fi are well known. There's a hundred different tools that you can download for free to test the security of any Wi-Fi network. I got my VPN and it won't let me on the network. Right, exactly. So the benefit of a 5G solution, a 4G solution is the added layer of security. I'm not saying that it's perfect. There are obviously ways to get around those as well, but every additional layer of security is one less attack factor that you have to worry about every single day. So Dennis, you're pro on the 5G adoption journey. You both have talked about the sensible benefits there and then the capabilities. I want to understand how is Dell actually helping under the covers, SingTel deliver of this connectivity and this consistency and the reliability that your customers expect? Yeah, I think having all these services together, I think other than just what we call the 5G connectivity, I want to mention about the rent, the desegregated kind of services. I think that gives us a lot of opportunity in terms of flexibility, in terms of cost. But I think one of the things that we also work closely together is about new technology. As I mentioned also that the marketplace or the partners that Dell brings that's very, very important for us. And then for me, I think that if I look at it from a customer lens again, right? Having the kind of right equipment which we are working together with Dell is important. But I think having the right ecosystem that use the equipment is even more important. I will give you a very simple example. For any organization, for any services that you need to deploy, let's choose an SMB. You will realize that if I want to deploy an application in my office, there's a few things you need to consider. Networks, which could be provided by 5G, right? Then you talk about the public cloud. Then you talk about what we call the public cloud. You talk about the edge. Now, in order for you to deploy this, you realize that everyone of them got to be orchestrated and synchronized. And then as what Doug has mentioned, after you implement the three of them, you still got to consider security across them. So what happens there for us, what we want to do is that we actually build a platform that actually sits on top of all this. This platform actually controls the 5G network, the MEC, as well as what we call the public cloud together. And sitting on top of that is all the applications. Why so? Because, again, anytime you have an application, you know that you have to make sure that the VMs works, the hypervisor works, connectivity works, the compatibility works. So when we build this platform, we put all the ecosystem on board and then it makes it that the customer can have a one stop shop, look at the equipment, look at what we call the equipment, look at the networks, look at the cloud, the IAS, as well as the application it works. As we're working together with Dell, we actually come up and look at some solution that's fit for the market. One of the opportunity that we are looking together with this Dell is in Singapore. How do we actually ship a really packaged bundle to SMEs that has a Dell equipment, our 5G network plus the platform for the ecosystem that can ship to any of the restaurant around. We were thinking a lot, for example, as you move into the restaurant, we always say that please scan your barcode on the table for the menu, you can just go in and buy facial recognition knowing that you are not a staff. So it's a reverse privacy. And then after that, push the menu to your phone directly. And so therefore it cuts again the stop of me trying to scan the menu or waiting for a load. And because with the on-prem equipment from Dell, let's say for example, those things is pushed to the phone instantly. Sometimes we know that when some of this goes to the public cloud and by the time it loads the menu, you are just waiting to avoid the load. So you can see that all this become an experience for the SMEs and the restaurants and stuff. So I think these are some of this great use case that we can foresee in the future. And I think something you just said is really a key part, right? As technologists, sometimes we get wrapped around the technology and we forget about the fact that it's all about the outcome. To the enterprise, they're looking at a workload. They have a very specific thing they want to accomplish. And all this stuff, private 5G and Edge and cloud, they're all really irrelevant. They're just means to get to what their outcome that they want to be is. And when we look at them atomically and as independent little units, we end up with sprawl. And honestly, enterprise are telling us more and more and more, I don't want that. I don't want a science project. I don't want to be responsible for figuring out how all these things are going to play together and have one rack of equipment for my network and one rack of equipment for my private 5G and another rack of equipment for my Edge cloud and another rack of equipment for the Mac. And you start to get data centers inside of a pizza shop where there's no place to put a data center, right? And so the partnership we have with Singtel and exactly what Dennis was just talking about is how do we take all of those and start realizing that with virtualization and containerization and the open architecture that exists with function virtualization and networking today in private 5G, we're able to utilize a common infrastructure stack, a common platform to be able to give you all those functions to run the 5G, to run your core applications, to run the Mac, to do all those things so that we're minimizing the footprint but also minimizing the complexity and that's really the point. So how mature are we today? Where are we? When can we expect deployments? Are there any sort of early case examples you can share? Yeah, like I said, in Singapore itself, we have already solved a little bit of success, especially in Singapore, we are 5G-S-A already. So I think one of a few things that like I mentioned, some of these use case that we did. So the company that I talked to you about is a factory. They took the 5G G and went there and tested against the Wi-Fi, agreed with it. They said, they have deployed it now and it's running. So it's using the 5G to for safety, and safety inspection and remote assistance for training, et cetera. We're using the VR goggles. So I think that's really a life use case. The other life use case is that in Singapore, one of the kind of automotive manufacturing plants is actually using the AGV that's controlled by 5G, that's moving around in the factory in a very, what we call, random manner. In a way that in the past, whereby you will never conceive the automotive factories that is going to go on conveyor belts, but now the AGV is moving as in where and in the ad hoc manner. Yeah, I mean, we've got solutions we've implemented with customers for mining, for example, for the autonomous vehicles in a mine, where after the mine explosion goes off and you've got to gather the minerals in the ores, there's a lot of time they get the weight before humans can go in, but with a 5G solution, we've been able to enable autonomous vehicles to go in there and start the process of collecting that ore without waiting for the humans, substantially improving safety, security, and the output and revenue of those mines. No canary necessary. Is it correct that this capability is not really going to cannibalize Wi-Fi, right? It's going to go into use cases, or will it? Are there situations that overlap where customers have sort of on the edge, no pun intended, tried to use Wi-Fi and then this will cannibalize some piece of the market? Look, there's a Venn diagram somewhere, right? And at the end of the day, no one who's being honest is going to say that 5G is going to replace Wi-Fi. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Not to mention the challenges in adding new devices. If you go to a store and you want to get on their Wi-Fi, you don't want to necessarily add a new SIM to your phone. So there are places where Wi-Fi is still going to remain a very powerful long-term solution that's not going anywhere, especially at the moment because the cost of Wi-Fi, the chips for Wi-Fi are pennies apiece to put in devices. So we're a long way away from 5G being at the same monetary scale as Wi-Fi. But there are a lot of use cases where Wi-Fi is simply doesn't work. I talked about that mining solution. Wi-Fi doesn't work in a mine. It's got the wrong physics properties. It's got the wrong distance limitation. There's all sorts of problems. And so what 5G has opened up is where in the past people tried to make Wi-Fi work and either gave up and ran wired or just dealt with constant problems like all their machines shutting down simultaneously. 5G is enabling them to now have a real solution that works. So it's carving out a niche for itself. In some places it's replacing Wi-Fi without a doubt because it is a better solution. But there are some use cases that are going to remain Wi-Fi for a long time. And how flexible and mobile can that solution be? Because we can't use Wi-Fi here. We have to use a hard line, right? Did we use 5G for our own private network on theCUBE? Or is it because we're going too many places it's just too complicated for us? That's where it comes from. Stick with fixed lines. That's where the next technology of 5G comes from. Slicing. Talk about that. You see that somebody asked me why would somebody need slicing? Then I will ask you that if you are in U.S. or in any country in the world, there's always two ways. You can use a highway and you pay toll. Or you use your small roads. Exactly. Why do you have a highway that you have to pay toll? There is a highway, there's a path, there's a slice. So for operators, we can always say that based on your mission criticality, based on the speed you want, based on the kind of urgency you need, I will give you a slice and that you have to pay a premium for it. So similarly, will it be that 5G is going to be available here and say that Qube will purchase a slice from Telefonica and say that for Qube, this is your 5G. You have a freeway, greenway. It's highly possible. Believe me, we're playing a premium for hard lines at Pope World Congress, I don't know if you see. And to that point, right? And those slicing gives you the opportunity to do profiling and setting up, when I say profiling, different devices and different customers getting different metrics on how they use that network. So some of them will get a super highway, some of them will get a medium-sized highway. Somebody getting a secure highway. Right, a more secure highway. So there's a lot more flexibility with 5G and that's why I said, you know, there's a lot of use cases we'll replace WiFi and it will be very powerful. And that's the places where we're really seeing the adoption really taking off. You guys have done a great job explaining 5G really, why you're a pro 5G, the opportunities, the use cases. Thank you so much for joining us today. Also talking about what Dell and SingTel are doing together. I imagine the journey probably has just begun but you've made tremendous progress so far. It's a great use case. Thank you for sharing it with us today. Thank you very much. Thank you Dave. All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. Stick around, Dave comes up with a very cool rap after this.