 This is your host, Sublim Bhartiya, and we are back with our 2023 predictions, and today we have with us Alan Pothius, CEO of GXC. Alan, first of all, is great to have you back on the show. Well, thanks for having me, especially here as we're all just trying to get to the end zone of the end of the year. Right. Of course, we cover GXC on a regular basis, but it's a great time to ask you, how do you see GXC talk a bit about the company? GXC is a leading provider of private cellular networks for enterprise, so we enable business critical connectivity for your business, and we're the only creators and users of mesh cellular technology in the world, which enables you to have a high degree of flexibility with your enterprise network for building it out, expanding it, and changing it as your business needs change. And we're headquartered in beautiful Austin, Texas. Excellent. Now it's time for you to pick your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for us. Well, the best thing about giving predictions is there's no report card a year from now, hopefully. So let me throw out a few more easily predictable things and maybe some that we can argue bad or judge harshly in a year. So first of all, we've been hearing about 5G for many years now. Our phone's been telling us we have 5G, but the average person on the street scratches their head and said, what am I really getting out of this besides a new phone, a new contract for three years? And so my number one prediction is really that in 2023, we are actually going to see public networks going much more slowly than private 5G networks. I think now I'm biased because we're in the private 5G network space, but I think you're going to see private 5G networks get a lot more buzz and deliver a lot more value for 5G in 2023. My number two prediction for 2023 is actually you're going to see enterprise really lead the conversation about 5G versus consumer applications. As I said in the first one, you're going to see public networks really diminish in favor of private networks because that's where the value is. And so the conversation is going to be about all this cool stuff you can now do with enterprise 5G because frankly for consumers, if you send us something, what can you do today that you couldn't do a year ago, they really struggle to give you a single answer. And I think in the early days, I think we're going to see enterprise applications like secure, reliable, ubiquitous coverage in your warehouse, in your manufacturing area, in your venue, in your oil and gas operation. There'll be very specific things about, for instance, the AR training, AR maintenance tasks, just connecting very complex environments up, then your consumer who, hey, it's fun to play a Jedi at home with your lightsaber, but it really doesn't justify a worldwide 5G rollout by itself. My third prediction is actually we're going to finally start to see laptops with built-in 5G out of the box. So we saw this many, many years ago when even just cellular data was becoming ubiquitous. And it took a little bit of adoption time because people couldn't figure out what data plan do I need, how does that equate to usage. But I think with enterprise 5G networks growing so quickly now, it makes a lot of sense to have this just embedded in. It's not a big lift to do given the unit price of a laptop. And so you're going to see it in laptops, but I think you'll see it in a lot of other enterprise devices as well. You're going to see much longer device replacement cycles for both consumers and enterprise. The reason is is that we're all, everybody's worried about running into some type of recession or at least a mild one. But frankly, today's devices have just such incredible functionality in them. And all the new phones already have 5G built in them, including for CBRS. There's not really a lot of reason. I mean, this is frankly why the accessory guys do so well, because people are keeping these things for extended amounts of time. They're getting a lot of value out of them. And you think about what we pay for a phone today. People don't pay that for a laptop quite often. It's just that you pay it monthly so you don't realize it. So I think people are going to be keeping their devices for personal and corporate use for much longer. And then the other half of that is just like no one writes a $1,500 check for their top of the line smartphone anymore, they pay at a monthly basis. It's a permanent OPEX charge is the way to think about it. That enables you to get really nice things if you keep them, maybe a little touch longer. And I'm seeing that model be adapted by enterprise as well, because the first time in a decade, we're seeing the cost of capital go from zero to something far above zero. And I think that drives more of an OPEX purchase model. And I think it drives just how you think about investment decisions. So I think we'll see a lot more in that area in the coming year. One more prediction I'll throw out there for you swap is just about telco transformation. I mean, typically we've been trained for decades that communication innovations come from tier one telcos, and that's really been changing. And I think in the new world with this mix of private and public networks, I think that every technology company becomes a communications provider. This is not a new concept. This has been around for quite some time. But I think those lines between traditional tier one telcos and enterprise technology companies is going to blur beyond anything we ever imagine. And really, once you get that data somewhere off that device for your business, what happens to it doesn't ever have to touch a telco. I'm not saying that's something you should do, but it drives the solutions that are being offered by the enterprise technology companies that offer solutions to all these companies. It frankly drives how the telcos think about this, because with many new things, even going back to Wi-Fi, the first reaction is always like, well, we have our stuff. We don't need that. That's going to die anyway. And then a year later, everybody has a Wi-Fi and all their mobile devices. And I think today, the world's a messy place. And I think the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle where it's going to be a combination of how do we make public and private networks work better together to take advantage of them for each of their unique characteristics? Because by doing that, we serve the needs of the end user better. It's not about, although it will be about control. It's really about the more value you can provide to an end user, the more everybody succeeds. And it's easy to lose sight of that sometimes in the mix. But I think that's going to have to drive some more cooperation with any enterprise technology company more than ever becoming a mini telco. Thank you for sharing those operations, of course. I love those. Let's talk a bit about the focus for the company. Where do you see you will be focusing on in 2023? Because you took the reins of the company recently. You're heading the company now. So talk a bit about it from your perspective as well as from the perspective ecosystem. I think our journey sort of mirrors the journey of the overall private-sailor industry in that they've been hearing about it for a couple of years now, since the FCC changed the rules to allow you to do this. And I think 2022 were the early adopters starting to experiment and then seeing that, hey, this is real. It's available now. And it really does add a lot of value to my business. So just in the last, I mean, I've been here since July at JXC, but just especially in the last 90 days, I can't tell you the uptake of activity and engagement that we're having across industry. And I think it's being driven a lot by, you know, we hear about data is the new oil, right? And the more your business operations experience digital transformation, the more data they produce. And in fact, you have to produce that data to enable digital transformation. Well, existing connectivity technologies don't do it. You need a private-sailor network for those business critical functions for that digital transformation to happen. And so I think now that there's been enough early adopters to actually demonstrate that this is a very doable technology with a clear ROI, we're starting to see people with 50, 100, three or 400 sites who are quickly getting through the initial proof of concept stage. Not so much about whether our stuff works because that's the easy part. It's really about how I make sure I can integrate this properly and the rest of my operations. And they're literally trying to see how fast they can deploy this technology over hundreds of sites because of the business impact. So I think that's really the big difference for the year coming up is we're going to be moving from POC to real skill deployments. And I think even though we're down the prediction stage, I think you will see for the first time at the end of next year, people with 50, 100, 150 different sites all with private-sailor networks. So talking a bit about, of course, we are talking about the Rosie picture here, but you know, the fact is there will be a lot of challenges as well. So talking a bit about what are the challenges that you see will be there for the not only larger industry, but how folks like GXC will try to solve or address some of those? Well, if we look at what are the macroeconomic things going on? First of all, as I said before, the cost of capital for the first time in a decade plus has gone from zero to something that you have to pay attention to. Second of all, thanks to demographic trends and just people not participating in the workforce. And people forget we lost a million people alone in the U.S. during COVID in the last two and a half years. So you add a bunch of these things up. And frankly, we have a secular long-term shortage of workers that have every flavor. And then on top of that, you add the concerns about potentially a slowing economy of some type. So it all comes down to you have to optimize revenue-reduced costs as quickly as possible, increase efficiencies. And so I think whatever you're doing, I mean, certainly we tie directly into that, but whatever you're doing out there, you have to not just say, look at this great Chinese technology. It's really about how do you enable that cost efficiency? How do you enable someone to run their operation better? I mean, for instance, we do a lot of work in the warehouse segment and also in the manufacturing area. And you have these campuses or these hundreds of thousands of square foot warehouses where literally we know of circumstances where again, Wi-Fi is great, we're complimentary to it, nobody's replacing it, but it's pretty much stretched to the limits almost of what it was designed to do. So keep it for what it's designed to do. But you have people who literally are carrying stuff 100 feet, everything they pull off a shelf in a warehouse because they don't have connectivity or they're trying to run a business operation that needs to be reliable, secure that drives, directly drives revenue if that goes down. And today's connectivity technologies, before I would say it, just don't do it. And especially when you add in some of the geopolitical threats about hacking and just data integrity. So the trends are all coming together where you need secure, reliable, you need a much higher level of control over your data, and you need to expedite efficiencies any way you can. So the challenges are, how do you then apply a newer technology like this in an area that makes the most difference? Because frankly, with any growing technology or anything in general, you go to where the pain is, you go to where the most pain is, because that's where the value is. And I think lots of friends, I used to have an office in Cupertino, California, and great folks and thank goodness we have them in this country. But it's a bit of a bubble sometimes. And I think when you get out in the wild and you talk to real customers dealing with real problems and have to stand in front of their board and justify investment or justify why isn't a business operation happening in a certain way, you know, you better be focused on solving real problems. And I think that's the biggest challenge is you can always focus on a hundred different things. What are those top three things that move the needle on the company for your business? And I think if you focus on that, whether it's a good or bad economy, I think you're going to do pretty well and we help you do that. Alan, thank you so much for taking time out today and share your predictions. Of course, as you said initially, there was no report card from last time, but this time we have. So when we'll get back again in 2024, we'll look back at some of these predictions. So no pressure there, but we'll look back at these to see which of these came true. But actually some of those predictions that you shared, they will actually move the industry forward. So I do hope they do come true. So I really appreciate your time today and thank you. Well, thanks for having me. Hopefully next time we'll have eggnog and make it more fun.