 The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hi everybody, welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira live. The CUBE's ongoing coverage is day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis, about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Tatoghi. And that year, when Erickson tapped out of its space, she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would have been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. That's great to see you. Chris, awesome to see you. Good to be back. You guys remember the narrative back then? There was this lady running around, this crazy lady that I met at Google Cloud next. The cloud's going to take over Telco and everybody's like, wow, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in. So what do you think? What's changed since you first caused all those ripples? I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting, Chris. We heard on the keynotes, we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked a CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with AWS. But why do you think they weren't here? Well, I mean, they are here. I mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled in the keynote? They weren't on the keynote stage. You know, at the AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want to be on the stage with the Google guys and the Azure guys. What they're doing, they're building out, they're doing so much stuff, as Danielle said, with Telcos, changing the ecosystem, which is what's happening with cloud. Clouds making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business, right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listen to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money. But they're now having to open up. They're having to leverage the cloud. They're having to leverage the services that talk to you and people that provide. And they're changing the way they work. So, okay, in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor. And your whole premise was, look, you got to lean into the cloud or you're screwed. The flip side of that is if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? No, I think they're finding it, right? So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud as a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also, I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the public cloud, is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? I know. Right, now, hyperscalers are doing it, right? They spend easily approaching over $100 billion in CapEx. That rivals this industry. And so, when you have a player like that in industry, driving and investing so much, Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's writing your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice, especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. So you advise these companies all the time. I mean, the issue is they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So the multiple relationships, and as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationships, they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments, to become more IT-centric, to move to that software-centric Telco. And they're also then, with the hyperscalers, going to market in different ways, sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What it means from an analyst's point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market, but we used to have nicely well-defined markets previously. Now everyone's in it together, you know? It's great. And it's making people change the way they think about services. What I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the supply, the value chain think, this is what we can get hold of this stuff now. We can go into the network through the cloud, and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society's a whole lot. It's really exciting. But your premise is basically, you were saying they should ride on the top, over the top of the cloud vendors. Okay, but don't they lose all the data if they do that? I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really, really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and AWS start to take over that data. Well, they can't take it. They can't. They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data, like no enterprises would use them. So I think the data is safe. I think, obviously, every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right? And we always talk about 10 and 20 years, there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country, right? And there will be a way for every telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it's just, you're going to be able to stand on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. You guys got to explain this to me, because when I say data, I'm not talking about personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the plumbing data, which is... It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the stream-manifessional way that needs to be done. Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson right where he basically said we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs? What the Ericsson have done, obviously, with the Vonage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features like quality on demand type features, for example, or even pulling, we still use a lot of SMS, right? So pulling that out using those APIs so that it will be charged in some way. Like Twitter is charging me for APIs now, I mean, API calls, that's the deal. You know what it is, I think it's Twilio. Oh, okay. Right? No reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio-like service themselves. It's a horizontal play, though, right? Correct. Two developers charged by the API. It doesn't need to be an industry standard to do that, as opposed to... Well, I think that's what they just announced. I mean, they just announced that. Yeah. Right, now, I haven't looked at that API set, right? There's like eight of them? There's eight of them. Twilio has... It's a start. You guys started so many days. It's a summary of them. And there's all the TM forum, there's all the other stands. Right, eight is better than zero. Right, I mean, for an industry that didn't really understand, you know, APIs as a feature, as a product, as a service, right? For Matt's granite, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say, we've partnered and we're unveiling, right, pay-by-the-use APIs. I was Ford. I was like, that is insane. I liked this keynote, actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefit he said. We're super diverse. He said, I usually talk about that, and, you know, greening of the network, but I want you to talk about it a little bit. But that surprised me. But, you know, I've seen, in the enterprise, this is not my space, as you know, you guys won't live this. But I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, you know, fail. I mean, they got to do something, right? So 4G, you know, they didn't really make the business case, the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion as having. Where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same freaking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new API network gateway theme that Matt's talked about yesterday will work, but they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They, you know, they need to start charging people who are using the network more money. Those who are, you know, using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. Yeah, the orange CEO, I mean, she basically said, hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more. Well, it's the choice to make a return on a capital. I mean, it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable, we use them. And we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true, like we're working from home. We need, there's got to be a better experience in Zoom, in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. But Daniel, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. And we're at a mobile world conference, but actually, what we're beginning to hear, and Crystal Brem did say this exactly, it's about the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more of the cost of return and investment is better from fiber. Mobile, we're going to change every so many years because of a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that. You'll crash the system if you do that. And the other thing which I disagree on, it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what, it's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. But I think you're saying, let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting. Not at all. And so, you don't think so? Because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. Are they hanging on to the connectivity or should they let that go? And go toward the developer. I mean, AWS had two announcements on the 21st, a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. As a managed service. Correct. And so, I don't know how the telco world, I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco. And now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now, do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not. But it's not N20, you can't know. Right, but private networks can be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos, they don't have as much funding, right? Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos. And those smaller telcos, I think are going to be more developer friendly. They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. Well, certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build, they launched it, reinvent a developer experience, built around their network. And again, I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs. But I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Rowan is trying to do. Okay, and then they're doing Open RAN, but is it, you know, they're not really concerned, they're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability. And is that the right play? In this discussion, Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by disaggregating and being able to share, especially RAN sharing, for example, in the short term, in rural environments. So we'll see some of that happening. And it will change it, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing RAN providers, build their services and offer their value. You've got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos vary dramatically, whether it's Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relationships really, and the managed services elements of that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this image. When you're very balanced in your analysis, and I appreciate that. I try to be. But I am not. When DR went off, this is my question, when DR went off a couple of years ago on the clouds going to take over the world, you were skeptical, you gave a balanced approach. Have you moderated your thoughts on that? I believe the telecom industry is a very strong industry. It's my industry, of course, I love it. But there was a relationship, it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players, the equipment guys are changing. There's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future, but every country needs a very strong telecom environment to be able to support the site as a whole, people, individuals. Well, I think two years ago we were talking about should they or should they, and now it's an inevitability. I don't think we were done yet. They're all using the hyperscalers. We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environment in which they had control of everything, in order to reduce, if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost, they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. That was all we thought. It's been harder than you thought? It's been easier than I thought. You think it's gone faster than you thought? It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean, pushing on this flywheel, I thought for sure it would take, you know, five to 10 years. It is moving, I mean, the maths thing, the AWS announcements last week, you know, they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia, which is probably one of the most, you know, sort of data, private places in the world. It's happening really fast. I mean, I feel like I can't even go to sleep because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. Guys, this is awesome. So awesome having you back on. Chris, thanks for co-hosting with me. I appreciate you staying here. Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. We got a lot of action here. We're going to come out and check out your venue. Yeah, the Chitogi buses that are outside. The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE.