 From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark event. It's up in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts, really all about 5G. And we're excited to be here. You know, there's been a lot of conversation about 5G for a very, very long time, and we're super excited to have the expert in the field. Maribel Lopez has been following this forever, so Maribel, first off, thanks for stopping by. Thanks for hosting a few segments and great to catch up. Excited to be here. Absolutely, so 5G, you made a funny comment before we went on. He said, Jeff, this 5G's been going on forever, never and ever, but now it's finally starting to come to reality, to fruition. Yeah, I got to see all the Gs. The 2G to 3G, the 4G, now the 5G. And for a couple of years, we were just talking about standards. So what's really exciting to me is that now people are talking about doing production stuff, not just rolling in a test van and prototype equipment, but actual things that we might be able to see deployed within the coming year. People are talking about lighten-up cities, AT&T announced another five cities that they were gonna put, actually seven, I think, on the category. We're gonna do a dozen, I think, now that they had another. Yes, they had seven, they had another five, and then another seven, so we're really starting to see momentum in 5G. It's gonna happen. Right, so there's a bunch of things in 5G that are fundamentally different than the last G. And the first one, right, is it wasn't really developed just for faster voice. That was not the objective of 5G. It's really to take advantage of IoT and this whole kind of machine to machine world in which you're entering. That's a fundamental difference in terms of the applications that it can open up. Yeah, we're seeing, to your point, I mean, we talked a lot about bandwidth before. Yes, you get more bandwidth, but you also get lower latency and that's the thing of how fast something can travel. And that opens up a huge amount of new applications like autonomous driving. If you want a wireless connection and autonomous driving, you need 5G, so you have that really sharp response time to make it happen. If you're doing remote medicine, 5G gives you both bandwidth, but also the latency to see if something's happening so that you can do things that are real-time in nature. So I think it's that real-time in nature with high speed that everybody's talking about. We saw eSports and gaming listed today and the discussion about how you could now do it on a low-end PC because between your 5G network and new software, you've got this huge opportunity with the cloud to just do a whole new different way of gaming and entertainment. So lots of great applications are coming out with 5G. It was pretty interesting on that demo because it was an NVIDIA guy talking about having basically an NVIDIA data center to do all the graphic computation back in the cloud at the NVIDIA data center and then delivering it to whatever kind of low-end edge device that you had in this case, a laptop. The funny thing about the latency that I thought really kind of struck home for me was they talked about when your audio and your video are slightly out of sync when you're watching a video. When it's just off a little bit. Not enough like, wait, this is broken, but enough to actually get nausea. You actually have a physical reaction. So I think that was really interesting. That is what's going to go away when we have the better connectivity speeds, everything else with 5G. And I think that's been one of the things that's been holding back the immersive nature of new applications like VR. So that disconnect that you talked about is really important to get rid of that. And you can get rid of part of that with wireless and part of it with low latency. So if we get the headsets a little smaller and we get more content, I think we'll start to get a better vision of what's happening there. I also think we're starting to see these things come into the enterprise. The enterprises are really taking 5G seriously. They're looking at doing things like their own private 5G networks and things like manufacturing and robotics, for example. Right, right. Yeah, the private 5G, interesting. There's a lot of conversation too about doing it for the first responders to have their own dedicated network. But one of the topics I thought was interesting was the commitment to software and the commitment to open source. And we've kind of seen the rise of the telcos in OpenStack. We've been covering OpenStack I think since 2013. And you could see with each and every passing year that the telco presence within the OpenStack community just increased and it really seemed to find a home. And here they dedicated a whole keynote session to AT&T's embracing of open source. Yeah, open source is actually interesting because I think it's counterintuitive to think that a large enterprise customer like AT&T would go so deep into open source. But when you really think of it, if you want to be innovative and you want to run at what we now consider cloud speed, digital native speed, then you need to have that concept of open source and open APIs to build on top of so that really what you're focusing on is the part of your business that differentiates you, not on building the whole stack. So the days of building your whole stack from scratch are over and open source is really important. And what I found really interesting about that was the takeaway that so many companies, even competitors of each other, had all thrown in on this concept of this open source technology so that they could basically bootstrap their innovation. Right. The other kind of theme that came up which I found really interesting is if you've ever seen Jeff Bezos speak on his investment in Blue Origin, he talks very specifically that he wants to put a platform in play, leveraging the winnings that he's gotten from Amazon, to enable future entrepreneurs to have an infrastructure in which they can build cool applications, in this case for space. We heard the same message here within this kind of 5G, the concept of infinite compute, infinite bandwidth, and infinite storage, asymptotically approaching zero, what applications would you build in that world? And really this constant conversation of experience, whether that be a business experience, a consumer experience, first responder experience is really what's behind the excitement on this 5G conversation. I think there was always a disconnect of when you get data and how quickly you can analyze that data and get it back to somebody to do something meaningful. So this whole experience is about even if you are not holding a 5G handset or some 5G thing in your hand or elsewhere, what that will do is because they've built the 5G infrastructure, you get the opportunity to make 4G better for everybody. So I think people think, oh, I've got to wait for 5G. It's like, no, you're going to see the benefits of 5G long before everybody's ubiquitously deployed and long before everybody has 5G devices, things are just going to work better and that you can get that data faster and new experiences faster. So I'm excited for it. Right, and then the other piece that we hear over and over is AI, machine learning. And again, it's not AI and machine learning just for the sake of AI and machine learning. It's baked into all these other applications to make them all work better. And again, that's another big thing that we hear here at the Keynotes. Yeah, I think the AI machine learning is interesting because we've had it for a long time but now everybody has access to it, right? We've got cloud services that give you algorithms. We've got massive compute and now we've got the ability to take all the data from IoT sensors and other things and get it back to either a centralized place or to do edge compute on it, which I think is really exciting. Right, so just to wrap, get your final impressions on the show and again, you said you've been here for all the Gs. So is the 5G, is this a big difference from our prior step functions? I think it is because of that latency that we talked about and the ability to do much more real-time and data-intensive apps. So you've always had this concept of moving to more data but it had lower latency, it might have had higher costs. Now we're getting that right kind of combination of cost, bandwidth, real-time nature. So I think every G gets better and 5G is just better than 4G, but in different ways. So. All right, and Maribel, thanks again for stopping by and also for helping us out, I guess I was thinking a few segments. Thank you. All right, she's Maribel, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.