 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. Everyone, welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube Live at MWC23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of the Cube. You know him, you love him. He's here, he's my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight and Sarbjit Johal. One of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, a cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. Lovely to be here. Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? Well, as ever, MWC, you know, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. You know, there's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community. People who traditionally telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside, so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative inward looking industry, right? You know, so should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should we be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal life? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? Somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? Let's take the first steps first. So Ericsson, of course, are quite Vonage, which is a massive API business. So they want to make money, they expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we're moving into a situation as the telco moves into a tech co-model where the tech co-means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take, going through those open APIs, like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers, applications, and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come in, you say, right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it. So we're looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks and we know we want connectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future, the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos and they do need more money because I said the baseline of revenue is pretty static. There's not a lot of growth in there. So they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B to B to X time model though. And it's probably the middleman's going to pay for it rather than the customer. But the techco model, Sarbjit, is to, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on the way in. The techco company models are getting them on the way out like the App Store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product. And then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this that we talk about all kind of developers, like game developers in front end, back end. And they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud. But nowhere you will hear that term telco developer. There's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it. Because telcos and IoT, I think they could go hand in hand there. And the edge computing as well. The one, the glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G, you know that story, right? So we're going to talk about that. So the key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to. And we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers. And then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars, autonomous cars and all that. So even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium, some sort of, they're trying to do that with the open gateway here. They have only eight APIs and it's 20, you know, 23. Eight APIs is nothing, right? They should have started this 10 years back, I think. So yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability. We need to train them. We need to show them some light that, hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can do up two things or five things, nobody will come. So Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, D, Y, and B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds, you know? And you're right in so many ways. But if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory, and it's with the edge of whatever you call it, that what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And like, are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people represented this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia's, the Ericsson's of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships, because they need the combination. They cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. Well, the cloud guys own all those things that you just talked about though. Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. Right, but, right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity. Pipes are very valuable things, right? They're never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live. Plumbers make a lot of money where I live. I don't underestimate them, but I'm saying, can the telcos charge for more than that? Or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing, and we've seen a lot of it here already, is that they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale. The telcos are fundamentally national operators. Some have a little bit of regional. Nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You know what I'm saying, this never gets old. It's true. So one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote, but I was looking at your tweets, 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. That surprised you. No, actually, it doesn't surprise me actually, because the competition is like closing in on them, and the telcos are competing with telcos as well, and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's a bigger players. They can cook up the newer platforms. I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will, but the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage that they are crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that, hey, you pay your fair share, right? You're not paying, you're generating so much content, which traverses our networks, and you're not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention that is that they said the cloud needs Earth. The cloud and Earth, you know, which is like, it's like, there's no physicality to cloud, we know that, right? So, like, I think the Earth, it's the other way around. I think the Earth needs the cloud, because I'm a cloud guy, you know? So- So they need each other, right? I think so too. Yeah, they need each other. When they said cloud needs Earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to, when you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. Chris, this is your world, are they in denial? No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. You know, they're building, as we said, most of the telcos you find have relationships with the cloud guys. I think you're right about this, the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened in the, since U.S. was 96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos, and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it, too? It made the U.S. less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive, and therefore it's not had to driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. So you saw the orange CEO was talking about her investment and the massive fiber investment way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic, you know, to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing and they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes. I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But when they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use, those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network, they're putting a lot of money into it. You know, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out of the bag, I think, to a large extent. Yeah, an orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their first year on foreign net neutrality, but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. Well, we could, I mean, we could of course renationalize, where would that take us? That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it, to renationalize it? So no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here, that creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, that delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And Telcos have been too conservative in the past. I think they need to get together and create standards around, I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the cloud, clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure Stack, there's AWS and there's Google and those are three main ones and three others, right? So that we are fighting on the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multi-cloud, how do we consume that multi-cloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them that will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you. So people are, market actually, is looking for that solution. I think it's the opportunity for these guys, for Telcos, but the problem with Telcos is they are national as you said, Chris, versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they are global corporations and some of the Telcos are global corporations as well. BT covers so many countries, NT decovers so many, DTS and US as well. So they are all over the place. But you know what's interesting is that the TM Forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite a few years now. Google had joined that some years ago as you were in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why is an AWS on the keynote? I was wondering that same thing. They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the Telcos, so I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement. If you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together because they said the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand. You're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we're finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the Telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The Telcos are looking at the ref all the time. Can I do this? Can I do that? It's a fair move. They should be looking for the space in front of the air position. Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls if you will and then ask for the forgiveness. What do you make of that, AWS? Not, you're blind. Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight because I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event, a lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right, maybe they want to have, maybe they're in the afternoon keynote. They want their own time. Do you think we as a man invited them? I imagine so. You would do it. You would do it. Get Max on here. I'm gonna ask them, yeah. But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud, and it says Europe. They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work working and they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks, really interesting. Google's been playing catch-up. We know that. They came in relatively late to the market and they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps you just wasn't right for AWS in the way they wanted to pitch things. So they don't have to be there, do they? And other, but the industry needs them there. That's the number one cloud. Dave, they're working with the industry. Yeah, yeah, of course. They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned, you know, the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas that we're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. Yeah. It's not, it's Espresso. It's not glamour anymore. It's just Espresso. We need the Espresso. I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you how to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step. That's because it's your pension in North America. Exactly. So unions are there and more sort of employee rights and everything, you know, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that, with the exception of UK, you know. But it's like I said that Silicon Valley gets their money on the way out, you know. And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they ask for forgiveness. I think, you know, the East Coast is more close to Europe but in the EU, highly regulated, really focus on, you know, lifetime employment, things like that. But the issue, the telecommunications is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month, whatever we do with it. It's a great business to your point. It's a brilliant business model. Right, so it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And, you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where, you know, the people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off. They made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, telecom Italia, talking about KKR buying a whole underlying network. It's like, what do you want to be in control of? You know, it's a great business. But that's why they complain so much is that they've happened to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirement, right? They've had it good, right? And they've, dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. They're trying to protect the past from the future. Actually, look at the, look at the, every N number of years, there's a new, new, faster network. They have to dig the ground. They have to put the fiber. They have to put the, now, there are so many. Boothwares showing 6G now. We're not even done with 5G yet. And now the next 6G, you know, like, then. 10G's coming. What is it? What is that ripple? That's a different market. Actually, they are getting, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. But you know, and the generational thing is really important because we need to, we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways. But actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier. We've got enough to do that. So 5G gives us enough. The fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot. So therefore that's why the emphasis is on the business market, on that B2B and B2B2X. Go pay for Netflix all day long. All day long. Yeah, one thing. The one thing, Chris, I don't know, I want to know your real points and we have talked to in the past as well. There's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have a think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country and we have global think tanks. But tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on the policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for, you know, smaller number of use cases and then 6G will be like, we need fewer people need at 6G, for example. Why can't we have that sort of, those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, there's a wiser way to go about it. Well, you know, we have- It's like- It's a wide wide way. It's almost a breakup big tech. You're too young to remember that. The ITU used to have a show every four years in Geneva, you know, when they were standards around it. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast of the IT markets and it's changing the balance of power and it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope, by the way, that telecoms now that we're moving to more softwareized environment that we're moving, God forbid we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change. And I think there's hopes for it to change. The hope, the direct, the mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations, you know, from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world is a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey. Well, of course the theme of this event is velocity. Yeah, I know. It's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasses like telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation, we're going to get anything we want on a mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made. We just want the end result. So do you really think, we're only on day one guys, and Chris, we'll start with you. Is the thing really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. We want communicators to be invisible, right? Absolutely. We want it to work. We want it to, when we switch our phones on, we want it to work, and we want to, well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean, that's the, I don't know, velocity, we've got, there is momentum in the industry. There's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms, think about the way they run their own business, where they meet that collision point on the edge as you talked about, Sergio. You know, we do have velocity. We've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking and just designed its own technology, and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees, and we're now having to work with all the different outside forces, shaping us, whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, you know, the hosting guys, the equinixes, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world. So we've got to make us as more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. But you know, I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their land lines again, telcos had to respond, and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty, it was pretty amazing. It did a good job. It was kind of invisible, you know? So props to the telcos for making that happen. They did a great job. So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they got to deal with the future, and they're talking monetization, but to me, monetization is all about data, and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that because they own that, but what kind of an incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that- Yeah, actually, that's a great point. So that's the problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time, and they cannot look at the data. It's a lot more similar to the fintech world, right? I used to work at Visa, and then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in 96, like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, so I think regulation is a problem. That holds you back, the velocity is the antithesis of velocity, you know, it slows you down in. But you know, data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one. That's great, tell me what's on that. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it, if I'm getting the best out of myself. You're paying for that? No, I've said they don't do it yet. I think they should do it. But would you pay for that? I think I would, yeah. Well, we pay a lot for that. I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? No, that's true. You're really overpaying over there, right? Way overpaying. So actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio-operated device, basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like, we need to double click on this like 10 times to find out why Telco has failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and they're being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these Telcos are totally controlled in a very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, you know? Like in the West, most of the West, like the world is bigger than the, you know, five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time, always. So we have a topic we want to hit on. We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But, Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of a sort of technology. So talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on that. You'll have to come back. And it really interesting. So I've been looking at it, you're quite right. I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing and what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you, and telecom's a great example. If you, in fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events, good to see that coming in. Obviously no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest junk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example in the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it, I got the app downloaded and I called my guys going, where's my badge? And I said, oh, it's top left. And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly. So I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight, so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect, because you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it, so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these $1,000 plus devices. Come on, we need below $100 devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in. And then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You know, you've got some massive projects like Neon in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream, but my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible. Anyone can use it. You can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need. And it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. So that's a great point. And what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Subjit, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back. Because as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you for a very spirited, lively conversation. Thank you very much. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC 23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon.