 It's July, and this is JSA TV, the Newsroom for Tech and Telecom Professionals, and JSA Radio, Your Voice for Tech and Telecom on iHeart Radio. I'm Jamie Stato-Cutia, and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual CEO roundtable, and we've got a stellar one lined up here for you. These monthly broadcasts, of course, lead us up to our on-site CEO roundtables at our executive networking event, the Telecom Exchange for Techs. You know, acronyms, we love them. And new for 2019, Techs is quarterly. Next one up, we're in Toronto, October 3rd. And then back to LA for our third telecom exchange there, November 11th through 12th. More at thetelecomexchange.com. But I think Mr. Philip Marangella might be speaking in Toronto, so definitely come and show up for more Philip love. All right, so let's go ahead and get started. Today's topic, pushing 5G to the edge, the realities, the concerns, and the real life use cases. We have an all-star lineup from four absolutely innovative companies joining us today. And to help us introduce them and moderate our panel, please welcome back Jerry Christensen, who's the founder and CEO of our industry's leading market intelligence and technology insights firm, MindCommerce. Jerry, floor is yours. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you for a great introduction. So yes, we've been focused on 5G and edge computing for quite some time now. And I'm very excited about this panel of experts. And I've got some questions prepared, but also we're going to keep this very open and free flowing. So we'll see what direction it goes. What I'd like to do first is have each one of them introduce themselves. So Jordan, let's start with you. Great. Thank you very much, guys. So my name is Jordan Wired. I'm with Data Bank. For those of you that are not familiar with Data Bank, we are a next generation, hyper cloud and IT service management provider with a very vast portfolio of services, but mostly with a focus on delivering, processing uptime integrity to the edge markets, as well as security and compliance around FedRAMP, Visva, and some of the other things that you need in order to be able to guarantee the integrity of that. So really excited about being on this and thank you for your time. So we'd like to go next, Phillip. Sure. Phillip Marangela here. I'm the chief marketing officer at Edge Connect. We also build data centers. A bit unique in the sense that we span the spectrum from building out hyper local facilities that we call 220 edge pops within buildings all the way to hyperscale data center facilities for large cloud and web hyperscalers and then everything in between. So we have about 40 plus data centers across 30 markets around the world. And again, focused on service providers, network, content, cloud, and we've been doing this for a number of years, building out at the edge. So we kind of have a unique perspective of a lot of those use cases and requirements that the service providers are building out for their customers to enable the opportunity for them to grow. Thank you Phillip. Rob? Yes, good morning. So I'm Robert DeLio, the CEO of Highland. Primarily Highland's around for almost 60 years coming up next year. We're a full term key provider. We build fiber networks. We build cable networks. We build small cell networks. We do a lot of infrastructure building for smart city infrastructures. We do a lot of municipality work or communications and smart highways. Currently Highland, we're operating in about coming up on 12 states now. Some of the major cities, New York City, Chicago, LA, Phoenix, we're working in DC, Virginia, doing some data center work, obviously in those markets today. Currently, also we do a lot of, I think I mentioned smart city infrastructure work as far as PS building. We do bus shelters that have smart digital displays that are attached to them. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Tormann? Yeah, hi. My name is Tormann Larson. I'm the Chief Technology Officer for XNet Systems. XNet Systems is the largest independent provider of what we call distributed networks. Distributed networks in this context is small cell networks, distributed antenna systems, a lot of the CRAN, CloudRAN type deployments. So when you talk about kind of 5G and the edge, we're really at the edge of 5G. We are building out a lot of the radio access networks, out of the carriers, out of that being outside or in buildings. So we are attaching to a lot of the infrastructure that Rob mentioned, terms of sweet lamps, utility poles and so forth, but also bringing it back to locations that maybe in the past have been a hub and could potentially be distributed or edge data centers as well. So all of these things are kind of coming together in the infrastructure we're building, owning and operating. Thank you, Tormann. So to kick things off, I'd like to make a few comments that are not going to be news to the experts here as part of this virtual roundtable, but I think will be a helpful backdrop, especially to those listening in or watching this video. So it's hard to talk about 5G and edge separately. We will talk about them separately to a certain extent, but they're very intertwined, whether that be with respect to the radio access network or the core network. And one of the things I think it's important to keep in mind as we look at rolling out 5G is there's really three different unique classes of service. There's the enhanced mobile broadband. There's the massive machine type communications. There's the ultra reliable low latency communications. And each one of them have their own unique requirements. Some of them are overlapping and some of them are at times mutually exclusive that some of those have to do with capacity, coverage, latency and reliability. So I like each of you to kind of keep that as a backdrop in mind as you answer the questions and Rob, I'd like to direct the first question to you. So as we look at the build out of 5G, and part of that of course is the evolution of the long term evolution standard LTE for 4G. And in particular, as we focus on smart cities, we all know that there's going to be a massive build out, especially on the radio access network part of it, the ran part of it. Provide some of your commentary there about how you see that evolving in general and also if there's any specific examples you can provide us to how well that's going and potential challenges that might be in store for not only a carrier as they roll it out but also a municipality as they implemented and manage it. Yeah, so, so we're building a lot of these major cities where we're doing small cell attachments, utility poles, street light poles, traffic signal poles where some of the municipalities have opened up their infrastructure already. You know, I'll give you an example about New York is a new infrastructure about 12 years ago for us for attachments on the city street light poles. You know, the problem we're seeing is is they're only allowing our carriers or other companies that are providing bills for carriers, the small amount of attachments free. And so, you know, they get 200 300 attachments allowed per year, where they need thousands. So, you know, that's where we're not seeing, you know, the municipalities opening their doors up enough for for permitting for us. These challenges are, you know, we, there's a lot of fiber needs to small cell attachments right so we have to deploy a large large fiber to these attachments. The infrastructure is there in some of the major cities when we get to the war, the rural areas, there's so much of that infrastructure is not there so it's going to be, you know, expensive bills for these, these guys to get out to build, you know, a lot of these attachments for 5G for small cells. Great. Thank you. Herman, would you like to weigh in on that as well? Absolutely. You know, we're faced with it and it's interesting, you know, in a number of the more dense metropolitan areas, some extent we're running out of infrastructure. Right. It's the number of viable locations are dwindling down as you know, we've been building out already 4G. I tell people in our densest network in San Francisco, we already at 130 nodes per square mile. So you if you start thinking about that in some of these municipalities where, you know, it's limited amount of infrastructure as a challenge. The other part of it for 5G specifically, as we've been deploying, you know, 28 gig and 39 gig, we have other limitations of where we could put the equipment on the poles. We really have to kind of be on top of the pole with not only the antennas but actually the radio heads electronics itself as well. And also because of the way it is kind of being built out right now. Some of that is actually pretty big equipment. So it's a whole small self, but from a physical perspective, it could be pretty sizable specifically as we tried to build for multiple operators. So that's obviously introduced some challenges both from aesthetics and loading perspective, maybe even more importantly from a power perspective. These power 5G radios actually consume a lot of power and that's not always available on the locations that we are doing. So I think what Rob mentioned, you know, just to share volume is most probably the biggest issue for the municipality to really kind of come up with a process that accommodating, you know, a program rather than a site by site. Great. So that's some good discussion on some of the ran issues I'd like to transition a little bit over to some of the core issues and when I think of edge edge computing mobile edge computing multi access computing I think of that as being part of the core. You guys might have some other ideas about that I like to direct a question to fill up in that regard. So we've been talking a little bit about 5G and some of the issues, the availability of power and fiber and perhaps there could be some back call there for 5G to help with some of those fiber issues. But when we speak about the edge, one of the things that we often talk about is a multi cloud environment, the prospect of the carriers deploying the edge and the prospect of there being some distributed data centers regardless of where they're located perhaps in an enterprise, a telco closet that a large corporation has. So Phil, I'd love to hear some of your views on that how you see this evolving and you know what you see is the carrier involvement and do we anticipate this over the top model the OTT model perpetuating as it has with some of the apps that we currently have and an edge environment with edge specific apps. I'd love to hear what you have to say about that. Yeah, yeah, sure. So, look, I think, you know, not just for cloud but what we're talking about here and what's interesting with the panel that's brought together today is collectively what we're really trying to do is help rearchitect the internet. Right. And why is that is because the internet has been traditionally download central right and and the way it's been configured. Historically has been good enough to support this core out to the edge distribution notion right. But if you look at whether to cloud, whether be, you know, over the top content. But then you see all these other trends emerging in terms of virtual reality cloud gaming autonomous vehicles. So much data is being created at the edge and being sent back to the core right and so it's just not efficiently constructed and so this is what whether it's a data center, whether it's the network wire line or wireless, whether it's the towers and all the stuff. We're working together to try to help satisfy the demand trends that are coming in terms of the volume of data in the the velocity requirements the latency requirements that that data will require and smartly route that traffic so that it can alleviate those bottlenecks that are happening at the edge. Right. And I think, you know, you know, building out these data centers at the edge where you can do a lot more compute there rather than sending it all the way back to the core will be key to that right and smartly determining what what you keep at the edge. What goes to other edges were back to the core is kind of what we're all working to help facilitate and alleviate these incoming these upcoming bottlenecks that we're seeing. So I'll leave it out there I'm sure Jordan also has has seen a lot of this and has has thoughts on it as well. Yeah, it's been turned over to Jordan as well. I'd love to hear your perspective. You know, it's interesting and felt really hit the nail right on the head. If you look at the edge computing market. It's looking to exceed 11 billion dollars by 2024 with a keg or about 35%. It's not going anywhere but it's being driven by a significantly large and collective amount of different attributes and different types of technologies to also re architect the way that the internet works. You know, you had mentioned something about cloud on rings right and for us edge computing at a data bank level is really within proximity to the process and where the data needs to be and then once that data is captured. How do we actually manage and guarantee the uptick or the integrity of that. And part of that is being able to provide the aggregation to different types of multi multi cloud and it service management frameworks right because as we continue to push out and more processing and more types of innovation and applications and all these different things it's not one fits all. Especially you know if you look at X to net part of the digital bridge family that data bank is part of, you know, we are strategically working to be able to connect while being able to address the one to many type of requirements that are needed in order to be able to deliver this right. So, from our perspective, the over the top a lot of the network function virtualizations SD way and a lot of these other different types of transformational technologies. We embrace those and we work in co op with them to really be able to condition it and provide those different paths and routes in order to get to what the desired outcome is from the consumer. Great, thank you Jordan. So piggybacking on that Jordan another question back to you and then I like to have some others way on as well is data you talked a lot about data and so to fill up as well the need to have edge computing. Because otherwise you've got a back call back to the centralized core power computing infrastructure which obviously induces delay and so that's going to be a big problem for some of these ultra reliable low latency applications like virtual and any kind of virtual centralized service like augmented reality or all times vehicles. A big question is about data. Who owns it. It's a big rhetorical question. Who has the care of custody, especially if if it's an OTT model where maybe it's a third party that's actually managing the app on the edge computing infrastructure. So what are some of your thoughts around that Jordan, how is the whole data ownership and and custody issue going to evolve. That's a great question. And, you know, when we're looking at data, we are still limited in one universal thing and that's the speed of light until we figure out how to leverage black holes and start jumping around at different universes. This is the one common thing that we all have to kind of address right with that being said, we look at it as in a partnership with all sorts of other providers right data that doesn't own the data, right. We own and have the responsibility for supporting that data and aggregating that data with other types of strategic partners and stuff like that. So, ultimately, what I would say is it's collectively owned, but the ownership is really more scoped through a guarantee service level agreement right and being able to say we guarantee this type of performance for this type of environment or this type of guarantee for this type of objective or outcome that the business or the consumer wants. But ultimately, that data goes across a lot of different providers again, especially with the OTTs and all the new types of platforms. We're all just working together to make a really nice meal. Great. Thank you, Jordan. So, Phil, I'd like to go back to you on this one as well and I'm going to amend the question just a little bit because I want to make sure I'm clear on what I'm trying to get out with this. So, there's a lot of data that's going to be created by 5G and edge computing and autonomous vehicle, for example. So, who owns that data and who has the right to do stuff with it for lack of better words. And so, you know, is it the automobile manufacturer? If they're providing transportation as a service? Is it the carrier? Is it maybe a third party? Is it the end user? Is it all the above? And how do you see that data being used, whether it's real-time data, do you see it being syndicated? I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, as a data center operator, you know, it's up to our customers in terms of how they want to use the data and how they want to share it. But I think what's more important when you think about these use cases and what people are doing is that, you know, what's important is this edge-peering notion in terms of the transfer of the data and how you more efficiently and effectively distribute that data between the kind of supply chain of the creators and consumers of that data. And then, you know, those ecosystems that evolve, right? In autonomous vehicle, it's not just Ford, but it's also, you know, it's like Bosch that has a lot of systems on it. It's, you know, Bridgestone. It's the municipality. They all want access to it and to leverage it to be smarter about how they, you know, so the car can become more autonomous in and of itself, how the streets can be more efficient in terms of traffic flows and this, that and the other. And what we're trying to do is just build that platform where you can interact with the different ecosystems across whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's cloud gaming, right? And allow people to transfer that data, right? Just think about the airports that, you know, it can't just be United Airlines only has access to dollars. You want to be able to switch from one airline to another within that same, you know, that's why you have the different terminals and gates and so forth. And that's what we're trying to enable, because when I talk about this re architecting the Internet, that has to scale out at the edge and make it easy for folks to interact. And what's important is that the networks don't say, hey, this is my 5G, I've built this out, I paid all this money, and I'm only letting you ride on my network because a, a provider or a service provider like a Google or, you know, Facebook or what have you, we want access to all those networks. And so we're just trying to provide a platform for them to interconnect seamlessly and efficiently. Great. Thank you, Phil. So we've talked some about infrastructure. We talked about Edge and data. I'd like to turn things back over to Rob and to Tormin. I'll start with Tormin first. The open ended rhetorical question is what are some of the leading 5G Edge supported applications going to be? And you could pick any segment you want. If you want to look at the consumer segment or enterprise industrial or government, what do you see as some of the leading applications? You could pick any one of them. And when you answer the question, Tormin, let us know some of the challenges in supporting it, whether it be reliability, capacity coverage or latency. I'd like to hear some of your views on that Tormin. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe to piggyback to a little bit what you asked about in terms of data. One of the things we are seeing right now, which is kind of related to 5G is this notion of private networks, right? And you talk about being at the edge. Those are really at the edge. And you talk about having the need for edge compute. And in these cases, it's actually maybe a little bit opposite of what Philip said. It is actually application. If you are in manufacturing, you don't want Google and Facebook and all of those have access to that data. Or you're in healthcare, right? Same thing. So now you have specific applications out of that is based on a lot of data, so the broadband aspect of what you mentioned earlier, or massive IoT type applications that are specific to that locality or that hospital if you want. Or you also have mission critical applications like in manufacturing where they don't want to be interfered with. So for example, we had a customer just this week that had 20,000 cyber attacks on their network. You know, you don't want to be in those cases, maybe connected to the internet, right? So those are just some applications that we're seeing. And now it's like, okay, how do you tie that then maybe to... If you are in those facilities, you also want kind of the public layer of functionality. You want actually the internet, but here's the application that you want to segregate. Those are... I don't know what answer you are looking for, but we see that as a pretty interesting evolution not only for 5G but in general in the water industry. And even with 5G and kind of combining it a little bit what we're doing on the RAN side, where you're ending up with this concept of networks within networks. So for example, in a stadium where we are deploying 5G today, you not need 5G outside because it's in the stadium that you have some of these applications that really are driving the need for higher bandwidth and like I said, augmented or virtual reality type applications. But they are not applicable when you walk to the restaurant across the street because that's not where they have the right or want to provide them because they want to bring people into the stadium. So hopefully I gave you a little bit of a flavor of some of the stuff we're seeing. That's great. I'd like to actually drill down to that a little bit more and give some others a chance to weigh in as well. You bring up some great topics, the notion that there's going to be public networks and there's going to be private networks. It also fits in with the multi-cloud environment thing that we talked about earlier. And Rob, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well. From an infrastructure perspective, how do we support this in a way so that if there's a wireless network and as Tormund was saying, they have different types of privacy and security requirements than say a public network. How do we build out the infrastructure in a way to support this multi-cloud environment to ensure security and privacy in both contexts? Being the public cloud per se and the other one being the private cloud that you might see in an industrial application, for example. Yeah, so we see most of our clients today are building their networks, their own fiber networks back to their own facilities or and or to the carriers facilities. So they'll own those networks. Generally when we're building networks for the cities or municipalities or government agencies, they're not going to share their networks with any other carriers just from a security standpoint. We do see streetlight infrastructure and utility poles where they will allow, you know, there'll be multiple fiber networks on those poles. Again, they should be separated so that there's no risk of security where they're crossing. As far as applications, we're seeing all different types of applications where we're deploying these networks to. So as Tormund mentioned, stadiums, we're deploying them out to subway stations. We're deploying them out to bus shelters where we can put these networks on what we call a smart bus shelter. We see kiosks going in and replaces of old phone boots. So we'll see networks being built to those to those new kiosks. All of these can be used for 5G applications. Okay, fantastic. Jordan, I'd like to go back to you. Consumer versus business 5G apps. Which one and why? What's going to be the big ROI? Consumer versus business. You know, I think the ROI is going to be at least from an infrastructure perspective, the amount of data and the amount of consumption and infrastructure that's required in order to support it. I wouldn't say it's necessarily one or the other. I think it's maybe a little too early for that in a time to tell. But our interest kind of going back again from the four walls and the roof, private versus public, all these different types of aspects. You know, we just want to provide whatever those guarantees are for that. And the more data and the more consumption equals more density. EDGE obviously allows to thin out a lot of that data which drives a high ROI and high yield from a financial savings perspective. But ultimately, I think time will tell. It's a little too early right now for that. Great. Phillip, what do you think and also answer within the context of the private networks? What kind of killer apps do you see on private networks and how do you see that comparing to the broader consumer perspective on 5G? Yeah, I mean, I'll just say, you know, from a 5G perspective, you know, 4G for a lot of the applications and workloads that we see today is still good enough, right? But, you know, we still have to prepare and build out 5G, right, for the future, the kind of tidal wave of data that's coming. In terms of those use cases, again, private or public, you know, you see smart cities, you see smart homes, you see industrial IOT and consumer IOT. You know, like Jordan said, it's the wave is starting to swell, but, you know, it's too early necessarily to determine. I think I'd probably lean more on the enterprises and some of the things that they're trying to build out and those, you know, kind of volume of requirements are going to kind of be a leading indicator. But it doesn't matter to us, right? We're just a platform to help enable whether it's consumer, whether it's government, whether it's enterprise, to kind of support that and work with the networks, the clouds, the content guys to all try to figure this out seamlessly. All right, fantastic. So as we wind down here, one final question I'd like each of you to provide an answer to if you can perhaps somewhat briefly. And that would be 5G, when's it going to be here? You know, we're all seeing on LinkedIn and the media, these pictures of these great one gig downloads. Of course, that's focusing on the radio access network. But what about the core? What about the whole latency and one of the reasons why we're having this discussion is, you know, there's 5G and edge because you need to keep that latency low. So Tormin, when's 5G going to get here? I know it's somewhat of a rhetorical question, so you can answer it from whatever perspective you want. When are we going to have it? No, it's a good question. Obviously, from an infrastructure perspective on the RAN side, we're already building 5G networks right now for our customers. And obviously, some of the carriers already launched a service. I think maybe the bigger question in the context here is, you know, when do we really start seeing a difference from a consumer perspective or a business perspective? How does it really start transforming, you know, businesses and really have the impact that you mentioned earlier? I think if you look at kind of a little bit of history, we are several years away from that. Two, three years before we start seeing some real applications that are more than kind of a next step from 4G. But, Ken, you need the basis and that's what we're building as we speak. Rob? Yeah, I agree with Tormin. You know, I will put it in two parts. I think our major cities will see the infrastructure built a little faster. I think the rural areas will be a little bit more of a challenge as it will be pretty expensive to build out those markets. But I agree, we're still several years away. Bill? Yep, I agree. I think the networks in particular are still going to make use of, you know, large investment in 4G and try to maximize that for as much and as long as they can. So 5G, I think, you know, you're going to see trials and proof of concepts and so forth. But in earnest, it won't be to the mid-20s where you start to see 5G really take hold across many markets across the country. Jordan? It's not if it's when. So from an infrastructure provider, we're ready for it. We've been ready for it. We've got the backing. We've got the capabilities within the four walls on the roof. We've got the connectivity, all the different on-ramps, the management, the security. Really, it's just as it continues to organically progress, right? But from the data center operator side, we're hoping it's going to be sooner and later. But time will tell. Great answers. I really appreciate that. And one of my, I'll add my personal view on that one. I really think that fixed wireless is going to be very important for 5G for the foreseeable future. And that there's going to be some challenges with mobility, not only with the obvious things like rolling out the smart antennas and things like beamforming, but also with handover. Tormann brought up a great example of an in-venue app, you know, maybe in a stadium where it makes sense to have your edge compute there and your 5G coverage there. But what about when somebody attempts to walk out of the stadium and they need to hand over to LTE and maybe the edge compute is not even available there. So, you know, there's going to be all kinds of interesting issues that are going to come up. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate your views. You're great experts. And this has been a really good panel. I really appreciate it. And thank you, Jerry. Your insights always amazing. And I have to say this entire panel, your views on pushing 5G to the edge. I really appreciate this all-star panelist. Again, Rob DeLeo, Hyland, Phillip Marangela, Edge Connects, Jordan Wired, Data Bank, Tormid Larson, Extenet Systems. Of course, Jerry Christensen, founder of MindCommerce. And viewers, thank you for tuning in. And if you liked today's content, come hear us live to our CEO Round Tables at Telecom Exchange again quarterly, next one up, Toronto, October 3rd, with just a few speaker seats and sponsorships remaining. So go ahead and check out more at the telecomexchange.com. And to feature your thought leader here next time on our monthly virtual CEO Round Tables, email us PR at jsa.net. That's it for this Friday. Thanks for tuning in to JSA TV. And until next time, happy networking.