 And we are live. Hi. Hi. So, please introduce yourself. Yes, my name is John Strand. I'm in charge of Strand Consult. We are a company which is 25 years old, which are providing telecom operators worldwide with strategic information about how the market is evolving and which impact regulation have on the industry. So, our clients is more than 170 operators worldwide which actually get access to our knowledge about the industry. Actually, I think around 11 years ago, I was at Mobile World Congress. It was the first time Google was doing a keynote. It was Eric Schmidt. And at the Q&A at the end, I remember you asked a question. Was it something to do with Google trying to take over the whole, with voice over IP, something, some question like that. I think it was the questions regarding what Google was basically saying, you know, what are you doing to invest in this industry? So, I basically said that Eric Schmidt was a man with short arms and deep pockets. He wants to have free access to the industry so that he could deliver a lot of services where he sold advertising on top of it. And it's fun. People are still talking about it 11 years later. And I got so many comments after. Of course it was a friendly environment among the operators, but afterwards it showed up that actually Google is actually benefitting of the huge investments which the industry is making in infrastructure. And they basically don't pay for using the infrastructure with the they sell services on top of. So, I was so nervous in that moment because I was trying to, I was thinking I wanted really to get to the microphone. I wanted to ask Google why they are not open with Android, you know, like the tablets were there, but there was no official support and they were blocking the Play Store and it was like, I thought it was anti-competitive. And in the last 10 years, they've made tens of trillions of dollars of revenue and it's been making ridiculous amount of money just selling this gadget, right? It's a little bit controversial that these American tech giants have come and they're snoop the whole business. Yeah, you can say the fun part is that these tech companies, you know, they try to pretend that they are so nice and they do things so nice and they want to make everyone happy, but in the end of the day they're just focusing on making money. They're super capitalistic and fair enough, but don't pretend you are something which you're not, you know. If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig, yeah. And I think it's unfair, as Europeans, we invented the Linux, we invented the web, I mean, we invented everything, but these American guys are making all the money, kind of. Yeah, and actually in my discussion today, I would like to come back to some of those things regarding House of Reality. The reality is that, yes, they are very good at doing these things. Right now is China, Asia and the US, which is basically running with all the cookies and Europe is just sitting back and I think that we have made a lot of mistakes in Europe. I'm Danish, I love Europe, I'm pro the European Union, but I'm also critical to the European Union, so you can be critical at the same time as you can say you like it. That's a way to improve things, but I think that it's important to say that Europe right now, not in the best position if we look at what's going on and how the world is evolving. You wrote a newsletter that goes out to like 40,000 people, like a lot of tech insiders get this newsletter and all the customers and stuff like that. And one of the last ones, you were talking about this, I wouldn't want to use the word because Google might, they don't like videos that talk about this strange thing that's happening, but because of the in the past year and the strange situation, people staying at home and people using so much of bandwidth, you are writing that the digital adoption has accelerated to a point that it's like 15 years of EU regulations? Yes, you can say that if you, EU makes some very interesting reports, the digital scorecard, where you basically can see how it's digitization in Europe and the reality is that more than 50% that all small-medium enterprises in Europe are basically not digital. And what's interesting is that we talk a lot about technology, we talk about we want to go from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G to 6G. It's one big orgy about technology and every time it's introduced a new G, it gets a lot of attention. The reality is that if we look at what's happening in digitalization across Europe for the last 15 years, we must say that politicians are talking very much about we have to be digital, but the reality is we see a lot of small-medium enterprises which have not been good becoming digital. We see a lot of consumers which are not digital. In a little country like Denmark where there's 5.7 million people and which is a very digital society and where people have a good buying power, there's about 400,000 days which runs around with the phone which only support 2G and 3G. That means that these phones have a chipset which have the same functionality as the phone was put on the market 17 years ago. We see a lot of small-medium enterprises which don't move in this direction and we're just talking about we want to have higher revenues, we want to have fiber to the home, we want to have 5G and all those things, but I think the key problem is consumer adoption, corporate adoption, governments who don't adoption don't become digital. And let me put it into perspective is that the reality today is that the network technology is moving very fast. On top of that you have operators adoption, implementing it which moves significantly slower. The US and Korea is about two years ahead of Europe in 5G. And then in the end you also have the consumers which basically do late adoption for these things. So what are the services we're going to do with these things? And to be honest, a lot of consumers have not seen the advantages of digitalization the same way as you and I and a lot of our friends have seen. But the interesting thing is here because of COVID-19, because of what's going on right now, we see a lot of companies, we see a lot of consumers who see actually the advantage of doing business buying things on the internet, using these video apps like Zoom, like Microsoft Meet, Skype, whatever it is. So we use these solutions to get in contact with other things. I have small kids and they use it for their education. They go to school online. So I think it's interesting to see that the global pandemic which we've been through the last almost a year actually have had a huge impact on the digitalization in Europe and I will actually claim that they have a bigger impact on digitalization in Europe than the last 15 years of regulation. I cannot imagine how much bandwidth has been going on because these ISPs, the guys that handle the backbones and the bandwidth, they must have been working overtime like crazy over the last 12 months, right? There's so much Netflix, YouTube, I don't know if it's doubled in a year but it's like so much more bandwidth people are using. Yes, but the interesting thing is we haven't seen any cases of operators which have not been able to deliver to their customers what they have demanded. People have been able to get what they need. We don't see stories about networks breaking down or people getting slowed down. It's quite interesting to say that we actually have and that's not only for Europe, that's come for the whole world that the telecommunication industry have actually built a very robust infrastructure and it have been able to handle the explosion we have seen in traffic. I did see this. We don't see the industry getting the credit they actually deserve for being the one who have been able to deliver here when this happened. Imagine this was happening like 15 or 18 or 20 years ago. How would the society have reacted? Now a lot of people can keep on working thanks to the modern technology. You could say if we should be hit by something like this, timing have been correct because we had the infrastructure in place to serve a lot of people and giving them the service they need. I did see some funny story in Greece, I think. I think there was especially on the islands in Greece where they were telling people you're not allowed to go on strange websites and Netflix and all that stuff in working hours because people need to do their working from home. They were talking about maybe, but it also shows that actually the networks out there have kind of like infinite capacity, right? So maybe the telcos have been talking about trying to limit and giving limits, but somehow they can just push a button and there's just so much bandwidth. They have been able to do it and I think for me it's been actually an eye-opener. To be honest, when all these things happen and we saw the explosion in traffic, I said there must be some conjections. We must see some places where it will create problems, but have not. We also seen a lot of operators which have been taking a big responsibility by saying people get more data in their packages, data packages so they get more traffic for the same amount that they paid. They pay anyhow. And we also seen operators across the world being offering special services, special prices for certain segments, poor people and so on. In England, the British operators have done a very nice report describing these things, what they actually have done for the citizens and the same in the US. In a lot of countries, the operators have not been going around bracking about what they've been doing for the consumers, but they've done a lot. I think actually if there's someone which have done something, we could say we talk about the people working in hospitals and so on helping the sick people. Yes, of course they deserve credits. The vaccine companies have been able to produce a vaccine in record time, less than a year, they deserve credits. But I also think the telecommunication industry definitely deserves some credits because of what we see right now. I forgot what the word is, but there are these workers that are what you call priority workers during this strange time, right? And telecom employees are defined as if people have to stay at home and they can't watch Netflix, that will be chaos. That's one thing, but just the fact that we can do things like we do together. In the past, we maybe have met at an event, the conference, Mobile World Congress, we've done an interview. Now we can sit and do it in this way and we get in a very nice quality and things is working. This morning I had a business meeting with a client from the Middle East. In this afternoon I had two business meetings with clients in the US and Latin America, and all those things can be done thanks to the global telecommunication infrastructure which is in place. It's so much into our lives. We assume it's normal, but I've been kind of on broadband when I was in Denmark over the last 20 years. I feel like lucky because I was in Copenhagen and there was fast internet, but there's still millions of people, even in Europe, who have a little bit of a trouble to get good broadband, right? But then there's stuff happening like this Starlink satellite, maybe it's going to help, you know, the Elon Musk project. There is, and then there's a lot of technologies. I would like to go into that discussion, but I think it's all important to say we can on the one side talk about what's happened during COVID-19, but we can also talk about why do we have this infrastructure and what does it take? And the reality is, it's important to say that despite a lot of, what can we say, bad regulation, the operators have been able to deliver these services. And I think it's important to say that we have to focus on what's driving these things and what the fundamental of these things is huge private investments. Globally, every year, the telecommunication industry invests more than a trillion dollars in the infrastructure. A trillion dollars is a giant amount which is invested. It's between 12 and 15% of all the sale an operator have is reinvested every year in the infrastructure. And the technology have a life circle. We can see that the vendors who provide with the technology is developing the technology faster than the operators buy it and the operators buy it and implement it faster than the consumers adopted. But we also see some regulation going in taking place which sometimes have a negative impact on competition, which have a negative impact on investments. And I would very much like to compare a little bit what's happening in the US over historical perspective, very long perspective and compare that to Europe and say some of the things we've done in Europe because we do a lot of regulation in Europe which on the paper looks nice. It looks good. And a lot of the things that politicians want to say and do it's like, yes, we do these things because that's good for the consumers. And to be honest, the European Union don't get the credit they deserve. Very often we see countries take the honor for the good results in the European Union and very often we see the European Union getting blamed for the bad things which happened in Europe. We saw it when the vaccine came out in December 27 should be the day where everyone starting doing the vaccine in the EU was so much ahead and it showed up that they had made some hiccups in the process of handling the vaccine process compared to other countries US, Israel, Emirates and UK. But what's interesting is to say we have seen the numbers of regulation in the European Union which should look nice but in reality a lot of it have had a negative impact. Roaming regulation, there was a lot of operators offering cheap or free roaming to their clients but then EU said, oh, we regulate roaming. But I mean it is kind of awesome that you can travel anywhere in the EU and still be connected. And it wouldn't make sense to not be there because in the US you can travel to any state and your phone is still going to be, you're not going to pay extra, right? But you had an operator like Hutchinson Tree which offered free roaming before roaming became mandatory in the European Union and today tree in numbers of countries is offering free roaming in a number of countries outside the European Union like US, like Australia. That's why I use tree. I've been using tree for 20 years. Yes, so basically what I'm saying is it's better than the market find a solution than politicians tell them how to do it. I'm not the type who believe that politicians are the best to design things and tell what's good and bad. We see it also with net neutrality regulation which gives some limitations of how operators can do partnerships with content providers and stimulate the innovation in the service side. Net neutrality regulation sounds great, but it had benefit the big players, the big tech companies come back to that. We see the free Wi-Fi EU have done which is basically like why spend taxpayers money to make free Wi-Fi in certain places. So people move money away from the infrastructure which telecom operators invested in and then over to a free network. It's changed the whole dynamic of the industry. We see the GDPR which is fine in many ways, but the reality is that GDPR have had a lot of negative effects. We never talk about the side effects. We talk about making regulation, making laws which looks good, but we don't look at the reality of these things. I think it's very interesting to understand that if we look at a historical perspective, if you go back to around year 2000, there was six phone manufacturers in European Union, key phone manufacturers, big mobile manufacturers. Today there's zero. Europe was first with 3G. We are among the last one with 5G. In year 2000, the investment in Europe represented 30% of the investment in telecommunication industry. Today it's 15%. If we look at it, it is actually so that if you look over the last 16 years, the average American operator have invested twice as much per capita or household in telecommunication infrastructure than the Europeans. All the regulation in Europe have had a negative impact on investments where in Europe we don't accept consolidation. We believe we need to have four mobile operators in each country. When in the US you have basically three mobile operators covering the whole country and they have a much higher investment level rolling out 5G much faster. We see that the US is the world leader in many things. Basically, if we look at it, in the US all the big tech companies, the Americans or the Chinese, if you could say like that, but in Europe we basically only have Spotify. So the US have a limited regulation, more free market approach where we in Europe believe that regulation is good for business, but the reality is EU have actually proven that overall regulation has a negative impact on the industry. We also see new technologies coming in and we'll come back to your satellite in two seconds, but we started with DSL. We had co-works, cable TV networks. We have fiber to the home. We see new technologies moving in. The satellite is becoming what you call Leo satellites, low orbit satellites, which we basically see these coming in and offering broadband and the latency on these satellite broadband connections will probably be roughly the same latency as we see on broadband delivering over cable TV networks. I wonder this, those satellites isn't like considered a huge threat for the telecom industry because Elon Marches comes with these rockets and then he provides the whole global coverage. No, I think it's a supplement and there's a cost by doing these things and it's just creating micro-dynamics. I think there will be more competition in what we call 5G FWA with using 5G technology on top of a fiber network. So instead of the fiber providers provide with a fiber cable to your house, then the fiber provider is sending its fiber with wireless and then you get the connection that way around. So that's basically what I think there will be a lot of it. The whole roadmap of the telecom technologies is amazing. It's moving so fast and it's so interesting to see how it have evolved and it's so interesting to see that we talk about gigabit, we can now get gigabit in our house, but if you look at the applications, if you want to have Netflix in 4K I think you need 18 megabit or something like that or 20 megabit. So there's no application who use this high-speed broadband and so on. Speed is growing significantly faster than the demand for speed if you could say like that. People say oh it's cool, I have a gigabit or 100 megabit or 200 megabit in my house, but in reality we can't see the difference when we are streaming whatever we use have a 50 megabit or we have a gigabit fiber to the home connection. So when I'm in Denmark I used to like 20 years ago to be deeply have a deep hate a little bit for Danish telecom TDC because they couldn't get enough bandwidths and stuff, but in the last 3-4 years I've been able to have 1000 megabit down and 500 megabit up just over a 50-year-old coax cable with DOCSIS 3.2 that's completely insane and I think this is so much ahead of any other country like who's doing that? I totally agree but we see that in many countries broadband speed worldwide is exploding and we see huge investments in fiber to the home. We see 5G getting rolled out now and even 4G if you go to the Baltic countries like a country like Latvia which have a lot of fiber to the home broadband over 4G FWA is a huge product selling big time. So we actually get and you can say why just use wireless inside our house with Wi-Fi, why not use it into the house. So I think it's interesting to say that yes it's moving fast but we have confidence in Europe where people don't go online and don't use Italy. Italy is living a totally different world and France would even don't ever go to the internet. E-commerce in Italy is quite limited. Probably lots have happened during COVID-19 but in other countries in Europe you have huge numbers of people who actually do e-commerce and buy things online. Of course COVID-19 have had a positive impact on this transformation and particularly in those countries which are moving slow about what's going on right now is interesting but there is countries in Europe which are evolving quite slow and where there's a lot of citizens moving slow and basically all those things you can actually see that in EU digital scorecard if you search on the internet on EU digital scorecard they have some fantastic reports describing these things in details. Nearly 20 years ago 18 years ago I visited my friend in Latvia in Riga and he had 100 megabit at home but the thing is as soon as I tried to connect outside Latvia there wasn't enough bandwidth getting out. It was like a local kind of thing because they didn't have a backbone connection with terabits or whatever they need to get everywhere with that kind of bandwidth. But I wonder what I've been doing in the last 20 years I guess some countries are trying to get fiber to every home but for example when I'm in Copenhagen there's still no fiber like it's only a limited percentage of the city that gets it and don't you think that governments are kind of required to come in there and kind of mandate fiber to every home? Otherwise it's not going to happen that's Jeremy Corbyn in the UK he suggests everybody in the UK should get fiber if they don't do that, how are they going to get it? Listen, I love when politicians saying that, that's just like saying you could have free ice cream it's a proposal which is very similar to say that now as a politician I want to give to remove COVID-19 tomorrow and to be honest there's no reason to spend tax payers money on subsidizing infrastructure. The industry is making enough money to build the infrastructure which can serve everyone that they need. In Denmark 97% of all Danes have access to 100 megabit connection and we can see in those countries where you subsidize broadband we can actually see it have a negative effect we can see what's happening as you do a mapping and you say these areas you can get subsidies for broadband but we have a certain amount every year so we find some criteria where we allocate the subsidies and we can see those areas where we can get a stand but being a geographic area where you can get subsidies we can see the operators stop investing in those areas and we know with the new technologies like 5G we will be able to deliver even in the most remote places a very nice band which is even today and in the future so I think that there can be some few places but the industry have the money to solve that maybe if I was a politician I would give money from the from the poor people and give the money to rich telecom operators which pay high dividends to their shareholders I would prefer to go to the telecom operators and say okay how do we fix that you have the money, you know how to deploy this technology you know what service is best and so on how can we do these things and then find a way where we are working together and saying okay we give you some regulatory grace and other things and of course I cannot see why we are going to give subsidies to operators like Deutsche Telecom or subsidies to Orange in France or subsidies to BT in UK or TDC in Denmark I think it's absurd there's no reason to give subsidies to these kind of companies they don't need subsidies they make tons of money and they have the money where it takes and it's interesting to see here if you have the right political framework you can actually have you can actually have a high investment level what they have been able to do in the US is actually by having a different telecom policy the reality is that the American operators have invested significant more infrastructure than the Europeans and that's a reality so over the 16 years if you look at the investment per household, per capita in the US and compared to Europe the American operators have invested twice as much as the Europeans twice as much there is something about having when I'm in Denmark and I look at the price of my subscription I go on this oyster thing and it costs like barely $10 per month and I get 100 gigabytes of LTE bandwidth and I'm sure they're updating it right now to 5G that's that's something that nobody can even remotely dream about in the US like they're paying 100 bucks for their in the US you can get a very nice mobile subscription for like $29 including unlimited international calls and so on there is but what you look compare the US prices you have to remember the US in Europe you buy sim only and you don't get subsidized to your phones in America when you look at the price Americans basically get a new phone every second year so what's including the price in America is subsidies for the new iPhone but why are they so interested in subsidizing Apple? I don't really understand this kind of thing because pretty much all this money is going to Apple I totally agree they should be promoting cheap phones like Huawei phones I use Huawei I totally agree if we look at what's going on in this industry I think it's very important to say that we have a lot of operators who have been subsidizing subsidizing the phones in the beginning of the industry was great because we got the penetration up, the adoption up you could buy a phone for 10 euro cents or 1 euro whatever and basically you got online and you pay a high price per minute and then the price is declined but if you look at what you pay for your mobile subscription and what you get for the money this is the best deal in town if you look at your wallet what do people pay money for let's say they pay 20 euros a month or 25 euros a month for the mobile subscription and then by the price is a bit lower but what do they pay then they pay 10 euros for Spotify then they pay 11 or 12 or 13 euros for Netflix and then they pay about 15 euros for Office 365 and so on so if we look at all the joy and happiness we get for the money we pay for mobile subscription what we pay is actually quite low we get a lot of value for money so I think it's I think it's basically what we're doing is we have nothing against paying money for Disney Plus or Netflix, HBO Spotify Office 365 or other services but it's a big problem to pay a little bit extra for mobile subscription and then people is lying in queue in front stores to buy an iPhone which costs like 1500 euros it's a certain 100 euros or 1200 euros depending on what we're talking about it's I think sometimes people don't realize and you could say people don't realize it that means that the operators have not been good enough telling what is what is the what's the benefit of the telecommunication what is the benefit why does it have a high value for you so operators have just been focusing on raising to the bottom who can offer the cheapest prices instead of telling customers what they actually get for the money and in the European Union whether they have been focused on this regulation and there's also the European Union with Magritte Vesta which is fantastically smart in many ways you can say there's a lot of focus on the on regulation of the big tech companies but look at it Magritte Vesta she became head of competition in 2014 in November 2014 and basically she said she's gonna fight big tech and she said we're doing all those things but all the regulation we have seen in the European Union related to telecommunication have had that impact that in that period big tech Facebook, Amazon, Google whatever their market share their turnover and their profitability in the European Union have increased and the best way to explain it is to say that if you bought take said you have your pension savings you put them into to the telecom index when Magritte Vesta came in power in November 2014 and you said how much how was gone from my investment in 2014 to September 2020 you would have a negative return of your investment was by 6.8% let's say if you put 100 euros into telecom shares in 2014 you will actually have 93.2 euros euros left of your money you have lost money if you put them into what's called the world media entertainment index which including also Netflix and some of these players your 100 euros will have been increased with 72.53% and if you put your money into the fang shares Facebook, the apples, the Netflix, the Google shares you will have a return of your investment of 474% are you sure it's the right way to blame the politicians for this issue because on the other hand I would say that it's a it's kind of a huge mistake the telecom has been doing giving all the platform to Apple in this way and Apple is just selling iPhones and you know like on this bandwagon with Apple and pretty much giving them trillions of dollars to Apple instead of keeping it for themselves I agree but the operators is even despite the fact I've been living of operators for 25 years they're not always the smartest guys to be honest fair enough and they've done a lot of mistakes they didn't understand to define the replacement of SMS so they tried to do it so and Apple messaging took that part they was not they launched themselves as a music and video company they believe that in the future they should make money on video calls and they should make money on music to people Spotify took the music business FaceTime Apple WhatsApp Microsoft meets and so on have been taking the video call business from them so the operators have not been so smart if you could say it like that but a lot of the regulation which have been put on top of the telecommunication industry in Europe and the fact that the European Union have not accepted them to consolidate to get the scale then that had a negative impact on what they can do because they have been struggling in Denmark we need 4 operators in a country with 5.7 million people in America prices are still declining competition is very tough and you have also very appealing prices in the US if you look across it and you just want the same only product you can get prices which unpair what you see in Europe in even cheaper than some European countries like the Czech Republic Germany for that sake and I think it's important to say that that the reality is that in America mobile operates can serve 340 million mobile subscribers and there's still competition and in Europe we have across the European countries we have more than 120 operators you don't get any scale by creating synergies across countries you need to have an in market consultation and I must say that we have in the European Union saying all the big tech companies that's a problem but honestly all the regulation done in the European Union which has been going for these people basically had the opposite impact and the fun part is we have GDPR in Europe but if we look at the fines which have been given on GDPR compared to what they can do in the US where they don't have GDPR but they have other privacy laws Facebook got a 5 billion dollars fine in the US that will never happen in Europe the same way so you could say that West Asia also had some issues regarding the consultation of the industry and she lost some cases court cases and so on and to be honest I think that she's a gifted woman she's very smart and I think that there's nothing wrong in her analysis but I think the problem is that the medicine she's writing prescriptions on is not having the effect that she and her people expected to have they actually have a side effect which is bigger than the effect I'm a huge fan and I'm hoping things are going to go in the right direction and she's also ahead of digital for EU she's not only competition, she's like doing the whole digital strategy and to be honest I've been drinking wine with her I've been drinking coffee with her and I think she's a remarkable woman she says all the right things but what I'm living off is looking at the numbers and I can't I can't say the numbers are different I must say that since she got into power Google, Facebook and Amazon have basically increased their turnover their market share in Europe full stop on behalf of European companies so just look at it, the total in Europe that have been on the GDPR fines have been about 177 million euros in fines but in the US where they have a different way of handling privacy Facebook got a fine of 5 billion dollars it's it is people don't realize that we do something in Europe which sounds good but GDPR have a negative effect there's a reason why Google and Facebook loves GDPR there's a reason why they recommend the Americans to copy the GDPR model it's because they don't see it as a threat they can see that the GDPR model is a threat for small startup companies where it's difficult to be compliant with all these things and it limited innovation and of course we're going to take care of consumer data of course we're going to protect the consumers but we can do that in many other ways than putting in the model which is great for those which can afford to implement the model and basically with small companies it's just an extra burden on top of their business and I think it's important to say if we look at this digital ecosystem and we look at all the big companies we're proud and then we say yes I'm Danish, I'm European I'm proud but honestly if I look at the market cap and look at these companies and say where the European companies if we look at the size of these companies the market cap which I have in this slide you see big companies like the value of Apple is bigger than the value of the whole tech industry in Europe the value of Amazon is bigger than the whole European industry Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and so on the biggest tech company in Europe is SAP so just look at this slide it just proves it where the European companies we used to have 6 mobile phone manufacturers in Europe now we have zero this is why I'm trying to show this slide because in 2003 I bought this for 299 Krona so that's like 50 dollars and then there was like 199 per month with a 3 in Denmark and this was 5 years or so before the iPhone so it had a big touch screen it could do video it could do it had a little camera that could flip and it was Symbian so it was it was European, like the Nokia operating system kind of thing Nokia was huge there's this other thing that my website is called ARM devices and I think the most important company in tech is like ARM but it's been sold off to Japanese and now they want to sell it to US Nvidia is going to take it over maybe I don't know somebody has been sleeping at some point because we had everything and we just gave it to them I totally agree, another thing is in the US they're not using Chinese equipment for the networks in Europe we've been doing it we have the two biggest manufacturers two of the big manufacturers Ericsson, Nokia and Europe and in Europe we have basically say open the market for the Chinese the reality is that Huawei have better conditions and basically what have the politicians done I think it's again we just have to look at the numbers I'm always saying evidence-based regulation look at the facts and when I look at these things I just say I grow up with this industry I remember I was sitting on the advisory board of Mobile World Congress for a couple of years I remember when Mobile World Congress started in Cannes I remember when it was so small that basically everyone which was basically the rock stars they met at one of the hotels and it was getting drinks in the evening and sitting in the bar when was that, what year? that must be like 24 years ago, something like that so then we were talking about 97, 98 something like that it's amazing you mentioned and I see a lot about Huawei and that it says about security and it's not about anti-competition because the way I see when you have this slide the one that you have right there and it shows the big big buckets of American giants that are bigger than all of Europe I think the thing is, as I understand Huawei has the best technology the cheapest price per the value and I think it's anti-competition, isn't it like the US we have to stop these guys I want to split it up in two parts Huawei have a lot of stories they tell they have created a myth one of the myths is that the reason why they have been facing this ban we see across the world is because a crazy American president had a trade war with China the reality is, that's not the case the case is that this goes back to 2005 and Trump's policy when it comes to Huawei is very identical with the policy Obama implemented way back so that's a reality why do we have these things is because the reality is that the reality is that let me say it in different ways in the past telecommunication networks was just something you and I used to communicate with each other Covid-19 proven that telecommunication networks is actually the fundament for the modern society that's the reason why we basically can the society is working today to be honest I always say to people that the most vital infrastructure in the society is that the fighter plane we see a force have or is that the telecommunication infrastructure and then people say that's a telecommunication infrastructure and then I said okay would NATO buy Chinese fighter planes no, would they buy Russian submarines no so why should we buy Chinese telecommunication infrastructure this is not about proving of this Huawei is a Chinese company they are part of the Chinese system the close relationship to the Chinese government and all those things it's not about proof it's about basically is we don't buy Chinese fighter planes we don't buy Russian submarines that's the NATO that's the whole NATO we're living and we're defending some values we don't share the Chinese values we don't democracy the same way as China is doing and China is basically what I'm looking at these things I said it's very important to say that's one thing when I hear this story about Huawei is ahead they have both patents and all those things no, they have a lot of patents but what's important is the essential patents and the essential patents that's owned by Qualcomm which is American Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung that's the key players when it comes to patents and that one that Huawei have the best equipment the two leading 5G markets in the world is US and Korea and that's without using Chinese equipment they're using Western equipment Korean equipment from Samsung equipment from Ericsson and Nokia yeah but that's because they want to make a big bubble another one of these big bubbles be an American one isn't that a little bit what they're trying to do no, because the Americans says we're not in the wireless industry that's not true because if you look at it I don't buy that and I don't consider Ericsson as a Swedish company and Nokia as a Finnish company Nokia is a merger of Nokia Siemens Alcatel was his French, Siemens was German and Lusens which was American Nokia is huge in America Ericsson's CEO he's Swedish but he's also an American citizen he lives in America so Ericsson has manufacturing in the US and they have Cisco, they have Qualcomm they they have Apple, they have Google so Google, you also if you look at the wireless ecosystem you basically have to say that the reality is that there's a lot of players and you have to look at the whole ecosystem not only the ran part yeah but when I look at my I've been using Huawei exclusively for the last 5 years because I dropped them on the floor they don't break and you know like Samsung and iPhones they break every second like they're like covered in a shell of glass what I'm trying to say is that 2019 around that time Huawei was going to be number one in front of Samsung in the smartphone business like selling, they were already selling more than Apple and they were overtaking Samsung to be number one and this this thing that the US does and tells Huawei you're not allowed to sell Google apps you're not allowed to put Google apps on the phones anymore that totally destroyed their whole market instantly and this is like crazy kind of I think it's anti competitive because I think I get much more per dollar for these I totally agree but it's very important to and you can talk about phones and that's one thing but we have to distinguish between the phones and the infrastructure so first thing is it's very important when the Americans do these things they have an entity list and the entity list basically saying you're not allowed to sell technology to companies who which have relationships to the defense industry producing to the defense industry and blah blah blah all those things fine that's the entity list and that's very clear in the US and we also have the Weimar agreement which is basically an organization which is 47 or 49 countries based in Geneva including all the Europeans the North Americans and so on and that basically says you're not allowed to sell high tech to countries like Iran and North Korea and so on so they're not allowed to have mobile phones in Iran no they are but you're not allowed to sell advanced computers to Iran for instance and that's because they trying to build up a nuclear industry and can produce nuclear bombs and stuff like that so it's very important to understand there's a lot of saying saying we don't want to do we don't want to do technology transfer to systems which we consider as terrorist countries which are sponsoring terrorists around the world or systems which basically are fighting against our values if you could say like that in the old days we put a ban on South Africa and Chile because South Africa had the apartheid system and Chile had a dictator and so on now it's Venezuela and Cuba and so on so that's fair enough but that's a US choice US they can develop their own technologies the US when you talk about military the US military is like 20 times bigger than the Chinese military the Chinese have the biggest army in the world they have the biggest army in the world but you must remember China is moving very fast and becoming much more aggressive and it's interesting to see if you look at what's happening in Hong Kong people is changing I think it's important to understand that the China we have today is not the same China we had 5 years ago I think that's very important to understand we have a China which don't accept the same thing as in the past and the way they react is much harder and you just see what's happening in Hong Kong and yes, it's correct Huawei makes some nice phones fine for me but my opinion is this is about national security we can do business with China we can do a lot of business with China but we have to distinguish between security policy and trade policy it's two different things China have similar policy basically we did a report which you go to our website you can get it for free about all the companies which abandon China how China actually banned companies you have it basically we have Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix and then they have the counter version like Baidu, Tengen and so on all these Chinese companies which you basically have it the Western version and the Chinese version and the Western versions are basically not welcome in China it's also important to understand when Western companies establish in China you cannot just do a company you have to get a local partner and you have to do a knowledge transfer could you imagine when Europe said if you want to establish a foreign company in Europe you have to do it together with a local partner and you have to transfer knowledge to the local partner else you are not allowed to do business here but this is a little bit because they didn't want to give all their money to Apple and Facebook and maybe that makes sense a little bit in one way because this is because they want to go in it's basically in their 2025 plan they want to go in and start to dominate the numbers of industries and they're already doing it but they're not exporting any of that stuff like all this stuff is only available in China which is a little bit weird I'm sure the Europeans and Magritte Wester and all these guys and maybe Joe Biden should just go and put pressure and say to the Chinese open up YouTube access but it won't happen you must remember one thing, the Chinese system is built on censorship and in China you have a security law which basically says that companies have to share the information with the government and I can actually send you an interesting link with an interview with a girl which has basically been looking at the surveillance society it makes some variations from the George Marsh Foundation it's amazing, done a research about surveillance industry in China, it's unbelievable it makes George Orwell like a kids book writer a guy who makes books for kids it's really amazing, I think it's important to say but I think we should focus on saying this is some geopolitical things here Biden's policy will not change from Trump's is very identical with Obama's policy which basically is also a policy which is bipartisan in the US, it means the Republicans and Democrats agree with it and the Europeans is actually moving in the same direction so I think it's fair to say yes I think the key problem is that in China they basically have to understand that we maybe will put higher demands if they want to get access to our markets in the future I think they should just open source to the hardware if they want to set it to us make it 100% open source so there's no chance for having a backdoor in this thing because we can go in and look at it just run Linux on all these base stations and stuff open stuff you come back to open in a short while but honestly it's not the solution and there's been made a lot of security reports about that in particular when we talk about telecommunication one thing is a device which you put in the network, you can always remove that but the important thing is the same way as we talk in the bio-mental about a food chain the last one in the food chain is basically the animal who gets all the pollution from all the previous animals in the food chain if you could say like that and the fundament for the modern society and telecommunication infrastructure is very important that the telecommunication infrastructure is clean and we can rely on the suppliers we have there so that we have clean networks I just think that maybe the EU is really shooting themselves in the foot because if they were to be able to get much cheaper 5G network infrastructure let's say by working with Huawei then by saying no to them they're losing out again and the Americans can again control us in some kind of way like they can say you can stay behind us and that's why 5G is not going to develop as fast in Europe but let's say let's take the assumption that Huawei and Chinese equipment is a way to fast track 5G in Europe ok Huawei is sitting on a very nice we have made a report about that where we have been looking at all the telecommunication infrastructure there is across 122 networks in Europe where we describe which one is using Chinese which is not on the website and to be honest what's interesting is that if the Chinese infrastructure was a good medicine to fast track Europe why are we not first with 5G why is US 2 years ahead of us without using Chinese equipment why is Korea 2 years of us without using Chinese equipment that's the reality and again we have to look at facts so I think the debate that Huawei and the Chinese want to turn it into a trade policy decision I say this have nothing to do with trade policy this is about national security talk to politicians they say exactly the same we can do a lot of business with China but it's important that the telecommunication infrastructure is a fundamental society but then I don't want to get too much into a controversial kind of issues but when you look at the whole revelations from Edward Snowden which everybody kind of was guessing that was happening that everything was pretty much tracked by the NSA and the CIA everything in Europe even at one point Merkel's phone was being tapped all these things why would we trust why would we put all our lives on Google and Facebook and all that stuff and not have one problem with that but then at the same time Huawei hardware that might be cheaper and let us not pay the Americans so much for the infrastructure that's a very good question it's very simple to answer basically there's a big difference between US and China US is a democracy they share the values with us and thanks to the American Europe became free from Nazi Germany in 1945 thanks to the American and the fact that those would be putting the key funding into the Europe, into the NATO the Western Europe have been free from Second World War and still even today and thanks to the American the wall went down and thanks to the American what they have been doing actually the European countries have saved a lot of money during the Cold War on their defense budget which they have spent on increasing the living standards for Europeans instead of spending the money on defense where the Americans have basically have paid half of the budget in NATO that's the reason you have a discussion about the numbers of European countries who spend more on their defense budget than they do today and where basically all the NATO countries have agreed about this and it was not a Trump invention that was going way back it's important to say that there's a huge difference America is a democracy China is not they do have issues still with the democracy when they have people storming the capital and when one guy can have more votes but still lose the election you had a guy walking into the parliament in Spain a couple of years ago shooting with a gun in the air you have had the same in England nothing new but I wish the US with the downscale a little bit their military they call it the military industrial complex right and let's use force when they go around the world and changing regimes and stuff like that like the Chinese they going around the world just giving them people money like investing they go around Africa and putting billions of dollars in their schools and roads but listen if you look at the countries if you look at the countries which they have the close relationship to China they have that in common that is countries which is non-democratic more or less dictatorships which don't respect human rights I think it's very important to understand China have more than one million Muslims in working camps today we talk about the human rights if you look at what's going on in Hong Kong right now I think when you talk to politicians as we do what's going on in Hong Kong this changes in Hong Kong have changed a lot of politicians opinion regarding China and going back to the European Union saying listen I think in the European Union we have a lot of good values in Europe we have good values things is moving in a good way we have a democratic democratic process but we have to focus on digitization moving to the next steps and we have to look at innovation and if we look at innovation I must say that these American tech companies are very innovative they're capable to make cool products people like yes but what is a Huawei phone without an android operating system what is an Huawei phone without the Google app store it's not attractive and Huawei cannot build an infrastructure without using American chipsets and they need American technology and I think it's important to say if we look at the innovation going on and one thing was very interesting also in America that is what we call the private mobile networks so we talk about that companies are replacing the wifi networks in the factories with 5G networks and in the US you have what's called the CBRS alliance that's basically you can call it very tiny small operators or a whole ecosystem of companies innovative services where you basically get some spectrum or access to some spectrum or do it together with a mobile operator and then you build a network on a factory or it could be in a subway or it could be in an airport or in a shopping mall or whatever and when you look at the innovation that's happening in the US right now in the CBRS area and if you go to the CBRS alliance website and look at that one it's amazing what does the CBRS have to do with the 5G spectrum this is 5G, this is all 5G so it's kind of like a system for roaming so basically in the US in Europe you say the operators are sharing some of their spectrum but in the US you can as a company get access to 5G spectrum in a limited geographic area so if you have like a big factory car factory for instance W whatever then you basically build a network you build a network in that area and then basically you build a whole 5G network but you connect your machines and your devices on it and you could actually also open up that network from mobile subscribers so they could roam on it and this network could roam with other networks so it's enabling a lot of innovation in terms of new IoT devices or stuff like that new devices, new services software companies, startup companies who do these kind of things there's a lot of innovation taking place there so I just want to move one step further and say yes security will become important when we connect all these things and that's what's the reason why it's important but we have to understand security in the networks is very important to go ahead of the devices and then we talk about we talk about this open-ran which is not open they abuse the open-source name but the open-ran alliance is trying to say that we need to create competition on the infrastructure side and the open-ran alliance is basically 287 companies 82 American companies 44 Chinese and 38 European companies plus a number of other companies which basically is talking about making a kind of an open-source radio networks and to be honest there's so many me's going around on that I could talk about that for days but I think it's quite interesting to see what's going on there but networks is changing and basically the whole idea is in some European countries they believe that open-ran is what's going to replace Huawei and to be honest it will not help so I think it's important to understand that driving this industry is what we call the 44 things business models, business models, business models that's driving the innovation in the industry companies have some possibilities free market approach is working yes we're going to take care of the consumers we're going to be sure there's good products I think there's a lot of possibilities in this industry and I think it's important to understand that if we try to find out how to stimulate innovation small companies and all that and also in Europe try to go out and hail those tech companies in Europe who are doing a great job it would be interesting but I think it's important to understand that there is a lot of possibilities but in Europe right now we are falling behind and then I would say you can go to our website you can sign up for a free newsletter free research notes there's a lot of free reports and stuff you can get in order but I think it's important to say and I hope that we can find a way to move Europe in the right direction make it more interesting to do these things maybe you can talk just a little bit about this you've been doing for 24 years these reports so there's just reports and a whole bunch of stuff in the industry right talking about the roaming investments here let me try to go back oops that's a lot how do people pay to get access to all your reports there's a lot of free content we have a free model we have a lot of free research notes our newsletter is just for free we have a lot of free reports if you want to understand a lot of things you go and you can sign up and get it when we have some reports which cost money but we make money on operators that's where we make our revenue and our clients is all over North America Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia it's all over the world all right there's so many interesting topics going on and it's to do with politics is to do with we try to look at the whole part where you look at politics, technology regulations understanding everything here all right so it's very interesting how things are accelerating in this strange time and 2021 is going to be exciting hopefully some new tech innovation that people can take to improve a lot of things in society I hope so I want to say thank you for a great interview I hope I can entertain your viewers some more in the future all right and I think you have a fantastic blog or video blog whatever you call it your YouTube channel, it's amazing and I look forward to come back to you all right, thanks a lot let's connect and I look forward to your next reports and all these huge tech guys and hopefully Europe will find a way to come back a little bit in the tech world with some competition to these US giants I would be happy to see that I love competition thank you