 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 with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's all about 5G. We've been hearing about 5G for a long, long time, but 5G is coming. It's in cities. There's more cities that it's rolling out to. It's lots of special networks. So we're excited to be here as it becomes real, and we've got a guy who's right in the middle of the weeds, right in all the devices. He's Gordon Mansfield, the VP of Converged Access in Device Technology at AT&T. Gordon, welcome. Thank you. So what do you think? You've probably been looking at this 5G stuff for a long, long time. It feels like we're finally getting pretty close. We're getting really close. We're gearing up to launch our first 12 markets this year, and just this past weekend, we made the first end-to-end call across our production network with a mobile form factor device. So we're real close, and we're real excited. So that just happened, right, this first call? Just happened this past weekend. So where were some of the final hurdles to finally get that little milestone that you guys've probably been looking forward to for a while? Yeah, so the final hurdles is really getting the device modems into that form factor device, that mobile form factor to where it can be portable. You can carry it and make these fantastic mobile data calls, and so getting that technology working together, communicating with the network infrastructure. That work just finished, or just multiple stages, but a critical stage just got completed last week. We were able to take that technology straight to the field in Waco, Texas, and start demonstrating and working with it live on our production network. So do you get the dog out, and he can hear his master's voice when you do that first phone call? Well, yeah. The old RCA? It's pretty close. I know nobody knows what we're even talking about, right? Too old. So the other thing that's really interesting about 5G compared to the other prior rollouts is really the focus on devices. And you're in charge of devices, and devices is a lot more than just handsets, right? This was really designed for the industrial internet, and IoT, and really a whole swath of device-to-device communication. How did that kind of change the way you look at your job? Yeah, so we've been working on IoT and modules in the IoT space. But with 5G, you start to enable lots of new capabilities with very high bandwidth, low latent applications, which allows us to revolutionize various vertical industries. And so now it's no longer just about the smartphone or the tablet, but it's about anything and everything that you can imagine. And so I tell people all the time, when we first start talking about technology, we really think about some cool things, but the reality is we barely touch the surface. And so people will just begin to imagine the capabilities that 5G will unleash, and you'll start to put the capabilities into everything from a refrigerator to robot arms on a manufacturing floor, and all kinds of points in between. Right, it's funny, we've had a lot of tech conferences, and we were just at VMworld a couple weeks ago. And Michael Dell said on air that the edge will actually be bigger than the cloud. It's been all about cloud for the last several years. Now it's all about edge. Well, the key to edge is connectivity, and that's a really important piece of the 5G story. Absolutely, if you take your compute power and you push it further to the edge, you've got to then connect. And so you can put very low cost, low horsepower components on the edge, connect them, so in a device, connect them to the edge and come up with some pretty powerful capabilities. Yeah, and the other interesting thing from your guys point of view, having dealt with handsets for so long, it's just the whole low power. And a lot of the edge type applications are going to be in remote areas, difficult to get to areas, difficult to plumb areas. So the whole experience with low power combined with the low latency is really a big game changer. That's absolutely correct. So when you take low power, you can put battery devices that last years and have them in remote locations, sensors, et cetera, and have them connect in a low latent high band with way to deliver anything that you can imagine. So it feels to me that there's really not the buzz around 5G that there should be. And I don't know, because we've kind of heard about it for a while and it's kind of been an extended development or people just aren't paying attention. But what's interesting, a lot of the conversations in the keynote is talking about experiences, really changing the way you can think about developing applications for experiences based on this technology. We saw the NVIDIA demo where they're running NVIDIA processors in their cloud and sending it to a laptop here where before you'd have to spend thousands of dollars on a local machine. As you look back, what are some of the things that you've seen either in testing or in conversations that maybe people just don't have any perception of how this is going to change some of their day to day activities? So I don't think people, you know, unfortunately we become immune to the devices, right? The processing power that we put in devices that people carry in their pocket, they keep going up and up. The reality is at some point, you've got to flatten that from a consumer perspective. You've got to flatten that to have a device that people can afford. And so with 5G and you start putting things to the edge, you start taking away some of the processing power that physically is in the phone, and you put that at the edge to where now people can have really high-speed, high capabilities in a relatively low-cost device. That's pretty interesting, you're the first person. So it is really this redistribution of, you know, networking, compute, and store that's now enabled with this fast networking where before your options were really not so great. Yeah, it's always a balance, but today your only option is to continue to put more and more horsepower into the device itself, more processing compute storage into the device. By spreading that and having some of it maintained in the network, you can maintain, you can manage cost in the end user device that people carry in their pocket. Okay, so give you the last word. When you are at a cocktail party on the weekend, talking to some people about what you do, what surprises people most about 5G? Won't you tell them this is a new thing that's coming down the pike? Well, you know, look, in my job, I get to see lots of cool things. And when I start describing some virtual or augmented reality, imagine walking down the street with a pair of glasses, and suddenly images, right, start being fed on top of what you're really looking at. You start, you know, you can imagine a day where an advertisement may pop up in your field of view or, you know, points of interest that you might want to see. And, you know, obviously we've got to control that and manage it to consumer expectations. But that's not as far away as people might imagine. Right, and just to recap, you're in 12 markets. 12 markets. You're in five more and then another seven coming, right? That's right, so 12 by the end of 18 and seven more in early 19, we're off to a fast start and looking to grow from there. All right, Gordon, well, congratulations on progress to date and good luck with the rollout. All right, thank you. All right, he's Gordon, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.