 Hello everyone and welcome to our panel on magma and how it's being used in various businesses and various deployments today. We have a group of six leaders in the industry who have all found new and novel ways to use magma to build business or build product. I'm going to do a brief introduction and I'll let them tell their little bit about their story. We have with us today Aiyu Sharma who's the founder and CEO of MotoGene, Sasha Dach, who's a development lead in the telecom and connectivity space at Deutsche Telekom, Mariel Triggs, the CEO of Miraldet, Jim Mainz, the CEO of Shoelace Wireless, Boris Renske, founder and CEO of FreedomFi, and Jesse Ratch, the CTO North America of Bicells who's representing a user story from a company called WeConnect. So I want to start this off with the key question. What about magma compelled you to choose it to build your business or build a business around it? I don't have any particular order for this. I'll just tag our speakers as I have them listed. So Aiyu, why don't you start us off? Sure, thanks Phil. So MotoGene is in the business of an audience engagement. So delivering low latency, immersive and engaging experiences requires both real time and predictable responses from the infrastructure. So one of the key component of this infrastructure is packet core. And today, most of these packet core solutions that are available in the market do not offer that flexibility, exposure, and resource control that is needed to deliver those experiences. Magma enables those modern day networking requirements without being tied to a specific render in a more agnostic way. It provides programmability, openness, desegregation. It is developed and by the community and for the community. So this is the perfect fit for MotoGene to leverage magma and contribute back and hopefully it will lead to wider and mass adoption. Thanks Aiyush. So Sasha, it's interesting to see a very large M&O operator taking an interest in a product like magma. This is not a typical thing that the major network operators typically do. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how you've come to join into the magma experience. Yeah, of course. I think it all started with the TIP Wi-Fi program. So I'm doing Wi-Fi business for quite a while. And yeah, we had this idea of bringing together the data that we collecting from various places into one place where it actually makes sense and we can derive some kind of network intelligence out of it. And I think by the time we met Cha and all of the team of magma and yeah, those guys were really, really amazing. And we operate this more or less always look from a telco perspective to the problems and it's very interesting to see people looking from the other side, looking more from the IT side to the problem and solving it the different way as we would naturally do it in our world. And so yeah, this is a learning and understanding experience and also giving us some new insights how we could also solve problems, how we could tackle problems differently. And yeah, I think also for the disaggregation and softwareization of the telco industry, it's quite necessary that we join open projects, that we work together as a community and that we understand that something like magma can only help all of us in the industry, also us MNOs to get better and faster time to market and reduce our TCO. Thank you, Sasha. That's actually very intriguing to hear how you're seeing magma as a target to help reduce the cost of ownership, which is really a major focus of what the project is all about. Marielle, you are working in a space that is especially fascinating to me and serving a community that has been largely ignored by the large mobile operators or where it hasn't been economic for the mobile operators to bring service to them. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how magma has helped you support your community. Sure. Thanks, Phillip. My name is Marielle. I run a non-profit mirror net and we work with the native communities in order to control their internet access future. And like you said, for a lot of our rural partners, there is no return on investment. So when it comes to how they're going to get connected, it's they're going to have to connect themselves. In 2017, we started our first pilot and I believe the first field deployment of magma with the Havasapai tribe at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So this is a location that's the most remote community in the lower 48 states. And with the tech core that we had, it was a buy sales equipment and it was the first magma core. And we were able to get the broadband to the bottom of the Grand Canyon within half a day's work and $15,000. So what this allowed for is for broadband in a place that never had it. And that's the important part of it and why we've definitely stuck with magma. We are working with communities to really realize their vision of how they want to connect to the internet. And part of that is the formation of figuring out how you want to connect for the internet. So in 2017 and 2018, we did a lot of pilot deployments that 2019, well mostly 2020 with COVID, we ended up deploying a lot of emergency networks. So what magma allowed us to do is quickly and cheaply get people online, fast within the tribal communities. And every single one of our emergency and pilot deployments grew into full deployments or are growing into full deployments. We are helping with over, probably around two dozen networks right now. And we have over 100 clients that we consult with. So what I see in magma is this flexibility of both the hardware that it can work with, it's agnostic there, but also that you can run a core on the cloud that's completely and easily to support. Or if they're more concerned about data sovereignty and want to have complete control of their network, it can be on a local core. It can change and grow as they need. And what magma allows neural net to do is to be the support that is necessary at the different phases as the tribes grow their networks and their network vision so that they can eventually realize and control their internet future. So that's what I love about magma, the flexibility, the fact that it's a tech agnostic and open to almost everything it seems. And that it allows for our clients to grow. Thanks, Mariel. Really appreciate that. And I think what I want to do is next go to Jesse. And you have actually very similar story, but a very different kind of community. Tell us a little bit about what happened with WeConnect and how magma was able to allow you to do a deployment in a place that was underserved or unserved. Right. So yeah, WeConnect is just one of the many, the thousands of the WISC operators within the United States. So yeah, it's always been a challenge, the adoption and deployment of an LTE or Arsene 5G network. It's always been a very difficult adoption. And the goal from the buy-sells end has always been to make the product more Wi-Fi like. And magma really helps in that side of things because reducing the complexity of the actual deployment and having a simple gateway that could be installed at each site while supporting a lot of the feature sets that are required for a fixed wireless operator. So for example, the layer 2 bridging functionality within magma that was added really makes it more Wi-Fi like. To the point they can use their own GSP server to do the signing of the addresses. So bridging that technical gap and complexity that is normally inherent with an LTE core that really supports the adoption of these networks. But of course, the cost is also a huge factor. And by having the solution that's widely available and open source based, plus having the companies in this case with Wi-Fi like Freedom 5, commercializing the solution, having very affordable gateways that could be deployed at each power site. That makes this technology available and a possibility to deploy in these alterable situations. To the point where subscriber counts could be less than 10 and you can still make some ROL license for those kind of coverage areas. Thank you, Jesse. And Jim, Shulase is taking a little bit of a different approach and working with the magma project to help improve wireless service overall. Tell us a little bit about that and how the magma team has helped you in that effort. Sure. And thanks, Phil. I'm also working heavily with my buddy there, Sasha. So magma is a critical component for us to enable the adoption and deployment of our technology. And what we focus on is the market challenge of insatiable mobile internet demand. As fast as an operator builds out a network, it gets consumed, which creates a lot of stress on their infrastructure and business models. And that was fine when operators are going from 2G to 3G, 4G, and so on, where they can actually make more money. But now 5G and 6G becomes challenging, especially when unlimited plans. And in the event of $5 unlimited plans in some part of the country, we have to look at different models. I think one thing Sasha said that our approach is that we look at the world differently. So instead of looking from the network out, we look from the user or the device back. And there's plenty of spectrum. And if you can intelligently harvest it. So we developed client technology that's multi-path traffic staring and switching in aggregation. So we can take advantage of any available and accessible licensed and unlicensed spectrum to provide great connectivity experience at affordable costs for operator. So what magma key component that offered is we need to make it easy for this capacity, whether it's Wi-Fi or private LTE, to be augmented into the network so we can leverage both of those spectrum and then be able to intelligently steer that traffic. And the other key thing, you know, it's been invaluable for us for magma, is that it brings us to a wealth of innovative partners. I mean, Boris has helped us. I think we've obviously Sasha, but a countless other ones that, you know, trying to do it alone yourself, you can't do it. So we can accelerate this adoption and deployment of providing this additional capacity throughout the network. Thanks. Thanks, Jim. And I think it's actually really valuable insight to talk about how the community environment that an open source project like magma is able to bring to have people willing to help each other along their journey. So Boris, I've left you for last, but I think you're in a unique position among this group because you've been helping many of the players through FreedomFi and the work that you've done as you take magma and build an ecosystem of services and product packaging around it. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how magma has been helpful to you and why you see that as a compelling story to build a business around. Sure, Phil. Thanks. So at FreedomFi, we basically, as you Phil pointed out, deliver a commercial distribution of magma. So magma is our bread and butter. And the journey has started actually probably two and a half years ago, even before magma was open sourced. So most of the company DNA, the team and myself included, comes from basically enterprise open source. Prior to FreedomFi, many of us at FreedomFi worked at a company called Mirantis, which focused on productizing open source cloud infrastructure. And already at that time, we had quite a bit of exposure to the telecom industry because our product at Mirantis was used as an NFV infrastructure for many of the telecom operators. And myself and many of my colleagues had kind of a front row seat watching the disruption that open source brought to the enterprise infrastructure space. And at the same time, we're always extremely puzzled how a little of it actually percolated into the higher layers of the telecom infrastructure around the network core. So speaking about what we at FreedomFi are excited about vis-à-vis magma, first of all, we are very much excited that all of you guys are excited, because it's a testament to us kind of being on a right track to an extent. But more generally speaking, I personally think that there are certain types of software in general that tend to land themselves better to an open source kind of a community-driven development model. And those are the types of software that tend to be kind of an implementation of a lower layer like generic functionality that can be used ubiquitously across all users. So like operating systems or databases or container orchestrators or even like web servers are all good examples of that where we have seen open source just come in and dominate. And if you look at the enabler of the telecom 5G connectivity, the network core, particularly the lower layers of the network core that deal with the data plane components or user plane as people in the telecom industry call that, they very much resemble that of like an operating system or like an enterprise SDM where we know historically open source is dominated. And I think that the magma to date is probably a project with the strongest community momentum to implement the 5G telecom network core, specifically the data plane components of it, in an open source kind of a community fashion under the Linux Foundation umbrella, which we believe is kind of a winning recipe and as a company betting on it and betting on the fact that magma will effectively become the Linux of network core down the road. Thanks Boris. That's actually a very keen insight on the types of projects that tend to be successful or dominant open source projects and how a project like magma fits into that. For the rest of this, I don't want to direct questions throughout the team, but I'll just toss a couple of questions out and see if anyone wants to take a shot at answering them and how you can build on that. Tell me a little bit about what your team is actually doing with magma right now and how this recent transition to a fully open community based product and project and support from the Linux Foundation is helping us achieve those objectives. I'll take a shot at it. Thanks. Yeah, so I mean for any startup to succeed and thrive, it's very important to innovate at speed and in a frugal manner. So how we are leveraging magma and how it is helping us in all these three elements is first is frugality. So we are able to use obviously the commodity hardware here. So that enables us to have a frugal systems built. And second is innovation. Boris touched on it and we're working with Boris on several aspects of enabling some of those features. And he talked about very important function, which is very critical and vital for the overall solution we are offering to our sports fans and the audience engagement people who where we engage with the audience. So and those are decoupling of forwarding plane with the control plane and forwarding plane would be in the 5G specifically moving forward. We would not only see a trend that forwarding plane would be much more simplified on prem and rest of the functions could be ported onto the cloud. So innovation point of view having a very lightweight system on prem and rest of the heavy processing could be done in the cloud. It's very, very important from access technology point of view having agnostic to just the LTE or CBRS having Wi-Fi as well as other systems being enabled in future satellite perhaps Leo satellites enables us to do things faster because some of the stadiums will not just have private LTE or CBRS they will have Wi-Fi existing and we can't we will have to work in a retrofication mode or we will have to work in a brownfield scenario rather than just to repent replace mode. So this is very, very innovative solution for us. It helps us from frugality point of view to leverage the commodity hardware and it enables us to do those at speed. Whereas if you engage with the with the current set of vendors it's very difficult to get just one feature done to kind of you know ask them to open specific functions exposure functions for example and it's pretty pulling teeth out of lion's mouth and it's this is the flexibility and this is the power of open source and this is the power of open community and to touch upon Linux foundation I mean there's no company better in the world when it comes to delivering outcomes and tangible outcomes using open source and I had the the privilege and and fortune to kind of work with Linux foundation and several other projects and me and my team are super excited that this a to to to see the community members who are really committed to drive this forward and b to have a support from the company like Linux foundation who really know how to take the the community outputs and convert that into tangible outcomes. Thank you I'm I'm actually fascinated by the insight that you've made on cost that it's not just that magma is available as a free open source software system that you can use without direct cost but the impact that magma's design principles have on on the cost of the rest of the products that you run it on the product or platform agnostic approach and the open interface to different different radio vendors and radio suppliers has on that total cost of ownership so thank you I think I'll I'll direct my next question to Jesse and Marielle as as operators and innovators in serving underserved and unserved communities what do you need from the magma team or as we move into a community project what would be I think that the biggest thing that you think we can enable through that community that is not in play today in magma itself for other commercial products let me see am I starting blocks well a lot of it because of the open source nature is actually being taken care of so we work on a network of our engineers we have engineers that we hire but we also have a huge volunteer corps that kind of help us figure out what's happening in the future and one of the things that we needed actually was stability in support and product and freedom by actually helped a lot with that when it comes to the we use in supporting our tips our tribal ISPs as they grow a lot of them will stick with magma and they want to be able to transfer over to a commercial system like freedom five at the same time we have to support you know we have clients that have it staff of a couple dozen and they want to log on to GitHub and they want to see where this is going and they want to see what it's about and see its guts and because of its nature they feel like they get to know the system more so than the proprietary corps out there and it's funny here now you should one of the things that often happens is that there's a huge sticker shock when it when they realize how easy it is to run their own private LTE network and the cost savings that they have and the the flexibility they haven't chosen your equipment that they're not beholden to CPEs that necessarily cost $700 I know they can buy $100 CPE and know the risks this is what's been huge the transparency so as our clients grow they can see what you know what where they want to go and help inform their vision and the now commercial pieces that are surrounding it so that they can also do a handoff where they want to do the handoff if they just want to run a fund office they can just run a fund office if they want to run a fund office and smart hands they can do that and if they want to grow their own internal capacity and learn how to run the stuff on them for themselves there's trainings that are easy to adapt to them and meet them or the rest that's what I'm living about magma that's fabulous thanks Jesse anything you'd like to add or thoughts I mean kind of build off I think Merrill's key point is the support obviously you know I need an open source that you're not going to have with a traditional vendor right that level of different shared support I think companies like 3M5 definitely fill in a lot of that gap and void so you know more I think partners like that are helpful my understanding is magma's also teams also looking to potentially have some some support like sessions potentially with a with a team so I think things like that would definitely help the more you know more commercialization and more deployments of magma for sure because that's always I think the the most skittish point that you know most I guess operators I speak with you know whenever they have with magma's you know what's the support I mean if I have an outage do I reach and things like that but yeah that transparency is also you know a big bonus you know again vendor side they're going to be afraid you know coming from myself you know vendor side you know you're usually you're usually pretty careful and providing you know what the actual roadmap is because things can change and you try not to you know share too much for you know certain reasons you know obviously that's more of the open source nature of magma but being able to see like very clearly what the roadmap looks like you know what everyone's working on you can get you know up to the the day status and you know look at github see what's inside it's it's you know that is very refreshing I think for a number of people but yeah the support is you know I think that's really the key so let's you know if we have decent support there I think that that would probably be the last roadblocker I think that some might have with magma feature wise you know magma actually does have the majority of at least much of the operators I'm working with are already support so are already need so that you know obviously roadmap's looking good to add more I think when it comes to some of the more enterprise type applications they're looking for more of a true Wi-Fi bridge and you know to support something like that you know you kind of need like a another layer on the top of everything to truly bridge devices behind your user or the UE so with that you know VXLAN, GRD protocols things of that nature are kind of required my understanding is work for some testing is being done in that area but if those kind of protocols can be supported to support true bridging to the devices behind the CPU that's going to open up yeah all the enterprise cases for sure. Thanks, thanks very much we are quickly coming up on time so I would like to solicit any further comments either Sasha or or Jim and then Boris I think I have a last question that I'm saving for you so Sasha, Jim anything? I was going to comment on the previous topic but I will then maybe say one last question. It's related. I'll make a point in terms of the two things that we're working on now with Magma and involving Sasha too he's participating in is is which critical that we see what Magma is doing and you alluded to it earlier Phil is in terms of how do we just increase the capacity how do we serve the underserved and how do we make the existing efficient so the two initiatives that we're working on is one is a schema framework actually Sasha need open schema and what that does is to let us understand what's going on the network because you don't know necessarily how do you decide where to put your assets out there if you don't know essentially what the the challenges are so a standardized way to collect data from the UE and also the access technologies the devices themselves is critical component so anybody wants to participate that there's a Magma channel on Slack it's called open schema so you can participate in that activity the other one that's equally excited is once you know this information you have that is how do we harvest all this capacity like I said unless inspection the majority of the time that use your mobile phone Wi-Fi is around but not necessarily use so there's a motivational aspect that but there's also simplification how do we make it simple for these capacity providers you know first Wi-Fi but eventually it's going to be predominantly private LTE to join what we call an augmented network so we're working with the Magnetine with Shaw and Jenny and and Sasha and some other partners to develop a smart contract based on augmented augmented network roaming solution so you know there's there's around 750 the billion access points out there so how do we harness all that energy to reduce the cost for the operators so they can expend in serving other areas or providing new services so those are the two key initiatives that we're working on with the Magma thanks thanks thanks Jim the the obligatory sub-project advertising so and and maybe maybe I can add something and this is what what really drives me for for magma is there if you look at DT we have some guiding principles at six I don't give you all of them but one of them is getting things done and normally in our telco industry it's like if you want to do a project you have to go and start an RFI and then you start something else and then you go to a trial and then you go to something and it takes you years to get something done and essentially if you if you do something like that magma journey I think yesterday evening I looked something in the code because I was interested in how something is working and and then I just got on github and looked how it's working so I think this is a is a kind of a different world that we are approaching there and that we operate this yeah I need to get better in and to get things faster done and deliver more value to our customers so thank you thanks so so Boris we're we're actually at time but I'm going to give you the last word around this thought which is one of the one of the things we're doing with our open source project is building community and building a community that is able to work in an open way but one of the difficulties of that and in using those products commercially is the ability to support those those activities and both mariel and jesse touched on the value that having freedom fi available to them got them and having a support model for an open source project tell me your thoughts and just how valuable that that independent support model that you're building is in building that dynamic community that lets magma as a whole be more successful sure so I mean there is this is not something that you know we have invented there is pretty much everybody today has touched on the many pluses of leveraging an open source project starting with the you know cost efficiency of it however the cost efficiency and the many pluses only come out if you know there is a way to kind of a package and consistently kind of commercialize and support the project so I guess let me just try to rephrase it if any one of the organizations presenting here wanted to go and use magma and there were nobody in the ecosystem that could provide a kind of a supported commercial version of it it would actually be quite expensive simply because of the learning simply because of you know understanding which is the stable version what bugs to fix some things like that so because of that historically the way that you know open source projects across the board have become successful is that there are a number of entities such as freedom fly that actually you know build a commercial tested distribution of it so this way on one hand you kind of you know leverage the community contribution to the r&d and development and the open roadmap side of it but at the same time it's prepackaged in such a way that you know it's fairly straightforward to use for you know anybody who's trying to take advantage of it so and this is specifically a kind of you know the journey that we're on at freedom fly today and I will say that you know we're probably not you know like 100 where we need to be like if I was to put myself into the shoes of an end user I think if you were to take magma even the one that you know we ship to the end user the user experience can be improved dramatically like what you get from us probably quite a bit better than what you get if you just pulled it from an open source repo and try to figure your way out yourself but we still have a long way to go from like a you know like a true consumer type of experience but I think one of the probably most important things that that needs to happen down the line is this this this this type of work like the packaging needs to be a really kind of you know consumer friendly the first kind of magma growth was about making it like getting it to the necessary level of minimum feature function for it to be useful and then for this feature function to be stable and now I think that we're kind of there but it's still largely kind of like an enterprise product that is not very straightforward to deploy unless you're like an experienced telco the next big leap for us at freedom find I think should be you know for everybody in the ecosystem at large is to really make it more kind of a you know end user friendly and you know consumer deployable and kind of a more of like a push-about experience thanks well that we're at time we're actually a little bit over our time so I want to thank our panelists for coming and sharing this diverse view of how a product like magma can impact communities can support the growth of business and can enable new and novel technology uses within the telecom community thank you all thank you Phil thank you