 I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Tech Talks. Tech is our middle name. It's the one o'clock block here today on a given Tuesday. And we have Mike Boutet. Mike Boutet is a 5G specialist, a program manager at AT&T. And wow, we are gonna talk about a status report of 5G. Very important we know about that. Not only for our only individual use on the cell phone, but for the community because it has secondary effects. Hi Mike, nice to see you here. Hey Jay, thanks for the welcome. Post lunch and we're gonna talk tech. Hopefully this'll be exciting and keep everybody awake. Thanks for having me. I'm sure it'll keep everybody awake. Keep me awake anyway. Okay, so first of all, what a great job. It's a job that any techie would love to have. And there you are. And so my question is how'd you get that job? You want everybody to know how to get your job, okay? Ready, go. Awesome and let's put a cherry on top in Hawaii, right? So yeah, I've been doing this job for a year and I've had a long program, a long history of working in big programs for technology. So I've been involved in semiconductor manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, startups, defense, et cetera. So this background I think and some of my experience in timing, timing's everything and AT&T had an opening in Hawaii and I jumped on it last year. And I've been working this since like day one of the pandemic, so it's been a great ride. Oh yeah, so talk about the military. You have the military background. What is that and how does that feed into all of this? Yeah, so I'm also an Air Force reservist. I've been doing this for a long time. I'm a dinosaur. I never thought I'd get here, but I'm almost 30 years. And currently my role is a cyber. So I do cyber, a defensive cyber on the Air Force network, my jobs in Texas. And I've been doing that kind of work for a long time. And just prior to that, it was actually the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Data Officer and Deputy CIO. That's a lot of Chief Information Officer. A lot of officers to remember for the Pacific Air Forces here in Hawaii for three years. So as a reservist, I came on full time and that was a wild ride too because we had a lot of different things going on, some international events as you might remember. So I was there and got to witness all of those. And you're involved in one of the tech conference program at FCA, is it? And that's like the Pacific Communications Conference. Can you talk about that for a minute? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jay. So the FCA Hawaii, and for those that don't know, FCA stands for Armed Forces, Communication and Electronics Association. And it's a Hawaii chapter. We have chapters all over the U.S. And the chapter here is about 700 members. I'm the vice president of programs. So all the events that we do, I do a program similar to yours, different audience. Some of the topics are similar, but it's great because we get to get back to the community. We involved industry, academia and DOD. It's exciting. I'll like to tell you more about that later too. Yeah. Well, you know, on the other hand, I'm a little depressed because I'll never be able to get your job. And there's a lot of people out there listening to this and they realize the confluence of all these experiences you've had, it's hard to have the confluence that you have. I mean, never be able to get... I wanted to be a prosecuting attorney, not for very long, but I know you're an attorney. So maybe we can switch roles for a day. I mean, have a show on that. Yeah, king for a day. But which one is the king? Well, let's talk about 5G. 5G, a technology that has been discussed, you know, for, I don't want to say three years, but I think it's very promising, very fast, but not quite available. It's like still beyond the reach of most people. And if I go get a phone that is enabled for 5G, it may or may not work. Can you talk about the status of the penetration of 5G these days, years away? Yes. So there is a lot of hype and there is some reality as well. I mean, if you watch the Super Bowl, you know, different carriers are marketing their products. I'm with AT&T as we've already discussed, but yeah, there's a huge appetite for faster 5G. It's been being promised for a number of years. AT&T just lit up our massive network on the mainland in parts of Hawaii here that was done within actually last quarter, I believe. And so massive investments have been made. You know, this is my little sales pitch here, but about $135 billion over four or five years. And then also there was an FCC spectrum where they sell the wireless spectrum auction. That just took place. So a lot of the carriers are scooping up the wireless for future programs. So a lot of us, to answer your question about what does it mean to us, a lot of us have 5G phones already. I do. And I haven't noticed a big improvement yet. Actually, you know, my 4G phone may have worked better in spots. So it depends where you are, what phone you have and what antennas you're bouncing off of. But over time, we're gonna roll out infrastructure. We're gonna roll out additional services. The network's gonna get better and the user experience should definitely improve amazingly. So in fact, one of the points you've made is so a lot of money has been put into the 5G network for sure. I remember seeing a piece on television about somewhere in California, I'm gonna say San Francisco. They had 5G nodes here and there and everywhere. And therefore 5G was operating at least in that part of the city. But it strikes me that in order to do 5G, you need different nodes or extra nodes. You have to revamp the nodes in order to have 4G and 5G together on the same node again. And the question is how much of those billions and billions of dollars are just for the nodes? I mean, how much for research and how much for nodes and infrastructure? Wow, I really couldn't answer that question. I'm on the front end of that rolling it out and my customer's the DoD. But I would say, again, it's massive investments and it's not just the carriers. I mean, many companies are revamping and turning towards 5G. And it's not just the speed at which you're getting your data, it's really the user experience that will change everything. No, let me drill down on that. So user experience means what? Is the user experience of the speed or is there something other than the speed we're talking about? Yeah, it's a real simple equation. So your user experience or as a consumer, what do you get out of it? How does this change your life for the better? And so there's a few things going on here. First is the speed. That's the upload, download of the streaming time. Over time, we can expect much faster, much greater speeds. So I'm hearing, again, don't hold me on this, but speeds, orders of magnitude, 20, 50 times greater, depending on where you are, when you are, but over time it's gonna be much faster. The capacity is like a highway. So if you think about going down Alamona Boulevard here, how many cars can you get on that highway at rush hour? So we're widening that highway and the amount of data that can be handled simultaneously going back and forth and the time it takes for the data to go through in milliseconds is improving. So much so that the network is improving, so much so that it's actually, there's a little bit of a lag right now and it results in different things. But over time, that's gonna almost mimic the speed of human thought. So we're not there yet, but we're talking a single digit millisecond. So that's the latency we wanna get after. So speed, capacity, latency, and latency is the amount of time it takes the data from your device to transport through the network and make a return trip back. So all of that adds up to consumer experience, which what the user will experience. Let me react to something you said, and that is this, if I send my signal through the air, it's a radio signal that just goes through the air. It's really nothing to impede it. If I send my signal through an ethernet cable, even a what do you call it? Fiber. Fiber optic. Fiber optic cable, there are things to impede it. And theoretically, tell me if this is right. Theoretically, I could get a faster signal through the air and I could get through a cable. Is this true? It's true. So well, the fiber optics is traveling at the speed of light. So where some of this is slowing down is it has to go through systems or cybersecurity, measures and filters put in place that may impede some of it. There's various places along the way that it's going to impede the traffic. And it's interesting you brought up the wireless signals. So there's actually different types of wireless signals. If you think about the Super Bowl, they were using what they call a millimeter wave at the Super Bowl and other places like factories and maybe hospitals and universities that do research, maybe DoD needs. So you're gonna find that we'll use millimeter wave to work certain use cases where you need a high rate of data. The problem is you need more antennas closer together. It's more like a flashlight. So if you get anything in the way, like a tree or some kind of object, you're not gonna get the same responsiveness, but it's gonna be super fast. So those things we talked about with speed, capacity, latency, all those will drop. The current 4G technology is a little slower but it's working at a wavelength that's lower. It's in the sub, we call it the sub six gigahertz. I don't know I'm getting really technical after lunch. That's okay. But yeah, it depends where you're talking about. In the use cases, like what are you trying to do? We'll drive so much of this. Well, it just strikes me that if you could solve that problem about the obstruction, the tree for example, and make the 5G go around the tree as apparently the 4G does, then you could have it really fast. And if you say it's 20 times the existing up and down speeds, that would be maybe even faster than I'm getting on my internet right now, right here on my computer, which is a combination of all kinds of cables and wires and speeds, from one end to the other, including cable under the ocean I suppose. So something I asked you before the show is, could it be that one of these days our phone using the hotspot kind of mentality, the hotspot approach would be as fast as my internet using internet cabling? Could it be that I can just put my phone down next to my computer and have a competitor's speed using 5G or 6G or whatever coming down the pike? And I won't need any of the routers and all the equipment that goes with the existing ethernet cable. Yeah, you're talking about the convergence of a lot of different hardware, right? So we're seeing over time that things are getting compressed. The hardware is becoming all virtualized, things like the cloud, you might have heard of virtual machines, which basically compress and converge the architecture of the technology stack. It makes things work a lot faster, easier stand up and take down, less cost. That's why a lot of cloud offerings are so compelling. So on the front end, the 5G, we're gonna see the same thing happening, right? So you mentioned the phone, for example, that is a use case. I'm not an expert in that particular use case, but if we were to look at other things that could be devices, like for example, I made a smoothie this morning and my blender is connected and my phone and then my car, if you have an eye watch, things like that sensors on your body. So right now, if you were to take a drive from your home to work, all these things are currently connected maybe in some way to the internet. But if you were to take that and again, increase it by orders of magnitude, go from thousands to hundreds of thousands or millions of devices per square mile or kilometer, you're gonna find that you're gonna have a whole different experience because suddenly you have all this input from devices, you gotta manage that effectively. So it requires a lot of intelligence. The network needs to manage that and the cybersecurity around all that, the umbrella that covers security piece. But things like everything from satellites to land to things under the sea are water meters, clean energy use, street lights or cell phones, things we wear, I mean, it's gonna be endless and we're already heading that direction. That's called the internet of things or IoT. So that's huge. And the so what is, what is this gonna do for us? How will our lives change? So we can already see some of this unfolding. Autonomous vehicles, like I came from Phoenix about four or five years ago and Google was doing Waze autonomous vehicles. You can actually get a ride on one of those with no driver, driverless vehicle. That it requires a very low latency, high reliability kind of wireless connection to make that work. And then when you introduce artificial intelligence and machine learning, which are just mathematical programs to do things that would normally take us a long amount of time to do manually. Now we get rid of all the boring tasks and then suddenly we can do an immersive, entertainment experience, immersive training experience, virtual augmented reality. Again, going back to the football analogy, maybe you could see items, the goal line, multiple things superimposed over the images, player statistics. So those types of things could be done and some of those have come out, like the one I saw advertised on Sunday was, you can watch the game with seven different screens for example, or seven different plays happening, angles of the play at the same time. So that's just an example of the impact of IoT, Internet of Things. Yeah, well, I mean, it lets your mind fly really, but this reminds me of a moment I had when I was doing radio for white public radio. We talked about some computer program and a guy called up with a question. And his question was, you guys are talking about computers and all the sophisticated software and everything, but you haven't explained what electricity is. And what, what did you say? Well, I turned to my guest and I said, this is, this one's for you. And he was stuck with answering the question about what is electricity? But it ends in parallel to what I'm gonna ask you now. And so what is the difference? Kiska say the difference between 5G and 4G or 6G or whatever. What does G mean? And how does it change the guts in my phone? Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't wanna add any more confusion onto that because there's so much hype around it. So 4G is a technology we're all currently used to and it's given us amazing things. Just think of our, using our phones to navigate. Most of us wouldn't drive without it these days. But 5G will, like I said, we'll even bring it to a higher level. You know, I think another way to think about 5G is it's not just the wireless and things that are connected, but it's a lot of things. And it's just more than one vendor or more than one part of the industry. So things are gonna change on the device and sensor levels. We talked about some of those, like the satellites all the way to the sea, those kind of sensors. The radio access networks, like you described the radio waves, which are just as equally as fascinating as electricity if you think about waves of electrons moving through the air or waves of radio frequency moving through the air. And you have unlicensed, licensed fixed wireless access points that we're using in our homes today. You know, how do we collapse those things? You have the core base station, which is really it manages all this and orchestrates it all across the network. So that's an improvement in technology. The network itself is getting faster, it's self healing, it's a nexus for many touch points. It's for the, you know, for intelligent mesh to transport the wireless into a wire and fiber optics and to manage the antenna network. So all that's gonna get much smarter with 5G. It's again, orders of magnitude better than what we had. And so, you know, the use cases are just, we're just starting to grapple with what that means and how, and the future is gonna be exciting. You know, I can't predict what it's gonna be, but we have some use cases. We're gonna try to roll out here in Hawaii over time. And it should be really exciting. Yeah, but by the look at the, some questions that come to mind, another one question. In fact, we have somebody who sent this in just now. Why do some people believe that 5G is harmful to their health? It's just the kind of thing where, you know, I could have something wrong with, you know, some radio waves that I didn't have before going into my brain or maybe making me, you know, taking my hair away. You never know, who knows? Yeah, there's been, boy, if you watch some of the internet stuff, it's pretty amazing to see how some of these rumors get started. So because a lot of the 5G towers were going up, I'm thinking about in UK, I saw news I read months ago, people were ripping down and burning, apparently burning down cell towers that had 5G because they were linking it to bad effects, you know, adverse health effects and some even amazingly to, you know, COVID. So, and I think, you know, it's kind of a cause versus correlation. So it doesn't really cause it or it's just correlated in time. And I remember the first wireless networks we started putting up, people had the same concerns and then those kind of faded away. Easy to research this one. The FDA, WHO, the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, the EU, National Institutes of Health, many others all consider 5G safe. And this is based on the body of scientific evidence that's saying, you know, we've tested this and we do not see any adverse health effects and no increased risk of cancer. That's also a big worry. So, you know, that's a big topic in and of itself, but from everything I've read and seen and experienced firsthand, that's what the safety aspects are. And the cost, you know, if I go out and get my Samsung updated, upgraded, what do I have? I have a 20 now. If I went to a next one, whatever, 21. I think it's 21, yeah. 21 with 5G, enabled for 5G. It's going to cost me more. I'm not sure that's because of the 5G or just the technology in general. And then if I have to replace the nodes, you know, on the streets of San Francisco or wherever else, that's going to cost somebody some money. And at the end of the day, you know, the consumer will pay for those cost increases. The query, you know, how substantial an increase are we facing going forward to make 5G ubiquitous in this country? Yeah, that's a really good point. So, what we've noticed is that technology also brings down the price. So, when you think of computing, many years ago, I worked in a corporate data center and the cost of the storage was very high, like one tear, I forget what it cost, but we priced out a tear bite. And we're just, we watch that fall and fall and fall and get cheaper and cheaper. And over time, you know, it makes huge impacts. So, for example, let's take radiology, right? So, if you're going to get a 3D rendering of something, you've got a health element, that takes a lot of technology to scan the patient. And a lot of computing power for radiologists to look at that and make a diagnosis and store that information. So, technology actually makes that all cheaper and faster. So, in one respect, you could say, it's not going to reduce infrastructure costs, but the services and the value, but from the end user could increase. And in the commercial space, how might that improve like a restaurant's revenues, for example, or a hospital's revenues by giving them patient-friendly devices and applications to use, right? For health purposes, for example. And the reason I bring that up is I actually worked in healthcare for a while in radiology, and I was, I saw all that evolved and it was pretty amazing to watch. I think the same thing is going to happen here. You know, offering a thought about that is, and this goes to computers in general. The idea of having it faster is not just for the thrill of having it fast. There's something else, and that is if I'm working on something and I have to wait for the computer to respond to me, it slows down my thought process, it really does. But if the computer responds to me instantaneously, then my work process is faster and I can work better. And I can get more done, I can use the best that I have in my brain, actually, if I'm able to get a media response. So it's not just a thrill. It's not just theoretical. A fast response, a fast communication arrangement will help me do my work. Let me ask you this. And suppose, okay, we have more nodes, we have new technology, which, you know, it's new. One thing that characterizes, you know, we don't know all the corners of it just yet. And especially when you try to put it together with AI, there's all these huge possibilities out there. The first question I would like to propose or pound to you is what about hacking? We have read a lot about hacking. We've read about bad actors, state actors, individual actors, commercial actors, criminal actors, you know, hacking us left and right. And most recently, yesterday in a small town in Florida, somebody hacked the water system and changed the percentage of hydrogen peroxide that was going into the water supply for this little town near Tampa, near the ball game. And you're saying to yourself, gee, whiz, that's really awful, but that's an example. In fact, a new book came out by a woman named Pearl Roy. Just today, talking about all these hacking possibilities and sort of terrorism, tech terrorism events that have happened that we didn't know about and that could happen. So clearly, does Fajji open up new possibilities for hacking? Yeah, great, great question. So I can speak a little bit for AT&T and then I'll do a use case. So, you know, AT&T covers like 99% of the US population. And we probe, you know, our cybersecurity services are really amazing. We do like something on the order of 90 billion vulnerability probes daily. And now we have these massive centers, global network operations center that check for these types of vulnerabilities and alert our customers and try to avoid these things when we're going downstream. So a little bit of background, but the Tampa one is really interesting because it deals with infrastructure. And, you know, these types of things have been known for a while. And so here on the island, we have, you know, department of Homeland Security and many others actively looking for risks in trying to patch up vulnerabilities. But within 5G, you know, new vulnerabilities will create, you're never going to have a 100% safe network. So they'll always be new ones. So you got to build into security right from the software development. And to do that, you know, we're one of the things we're looking at is, you know, for example, in San Antonio, the DOD is trying to accelerate some of the use cases around 5G security and cloud. So let's take a look at that. What does that mean for the Department of Defense? What does it mean for infrastructure? And San Antonio is very, the local government is very aligned with things going on and around joint-based San Antonio. So they have a great partnership there. We also have some great partnerships here in Hawaii as well to take a look at those types of things. Yeah. Well, it's a study. We better keep track on the back end, too, you know. One thing that strikes me, you're talking about the IoT of the Internet of Things and how there are more and more gadgets, you know, on the telephone networks and all the networks going forward in every which way. But in Hawaii, you know, we live in a world service primarily by undersea cables. You know, there was a time I remember we had a number of people at the East-West Center working on satellite technology, but satellite technology proved to be too expensive or relative to undersea cable technology. So it's all, or most of it, is undersea cable technology right now. So, you know, what's interesting though is that Hawaii, which is definitely, you know, dependent on undersea cable transmission, if Hawaii increases the data that flows between here and the mainland, it's going to be the weakest link theory. And if we don't have pipes under the water that carry, you know, data at a rapid rate, it doesn't matter if we have fast technology in our phone. It's going to be limited by the weakest link. Am I right? Yeah, correct. So there are undersea cables and they're, you know, they're redundant and resilient, so appealing to a great extent, but there's also a satellite as well. So you have another path, an alternative path for communications to travel, but those could become the bottleneck. So things that, you know, I'm thinking about Starlink, Elon Musk, he's launched a thousand satellites already. I think there was one recently. And the goal was to put like 10,000 satellites into the air. And over time, you know, that could be another way in which we can manage some of the network traffic. You know, we talked with the commander of Barking Sands just a couple of weeks ago here on one of our shows and it was pretty high tech stuff over there and the Air Force is running it. And I wonder, I wonder about, you know, whether Hawaii offers employment or industrial opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities in this area. You know, as he was saying, you know, this is new technology. There's a lot of things we don't know about it yet. A lot of, you know, accessory uses and subordinate technologies that would, that would, you know, able, you could hang it on 5G maybe. And it would be wonderful if Hawaii could finally get its act together on a tech industry, a telecom industry, and have some of the, you know, the clever people coming out of UH out of computer science and otherwise get involved and make a buck and develop an industry that is not tourism, you know, but diversify the economy into technology, a dream that both you and I have had for a while. But, query, what opportunities come to mind when you think of 5G, 5G and these new possibilities and these students and the like who theoretically had some training in the area? Yeah, great question. So you had a recent episode with Connie Lau, the CEO from Hawaiian Electric and also Jason Chung from Chamber of Commerce. I listened to that one, it was great. You asked a similar question and it was great because, you know, we wanna build a more resilient workforce here. And so some of the ways is, you know, obviously we've been pushing, we say we. The folks who've been around for a while realize the importance of STEM, education, science, technology, engineering, math. And in my role as a FCA VP events, I indirectly helped support. We gave away $120,000 last year to 40 recipients. I think those are the right numbers in STEM. So these up and coming folks who are young adults who are graduating from high school, going into college. So we're helping them. That's one way we're doing that locally. But there's so much more that can be done with partnerships. I've reached out personally to University of Hawaii and Pacific Hawaii University. And, you know, I said, how can we make the partnerships tighter? How can we engage industry, bring in academia and to build use cases for the DOD locally? A lot of more work to be done there. I've got a few ideas on how I wanna proceed, but it's exciting. I'm really enjoying that work. A couple of other things come to mind. And that is, you know, here we are. I recall in the middle of the Trump administration, he was going to advance 5G. I don't know if you ever, you know, were involved in that or got the benefit of it. But what he said, he's gonna spend some money on 5G. And I never heard more about it. So I'm assuming it was one of those initiatives that didn't go anywhere was just rhetoric. But at the end of the day, China is doing 5G and China has the ability through its type of government to make an edict along those lines and, you know, and deploy and enforce it the next day. You know, they don't have the burdens of democracy. And they're ahead of us. They're ahead of us on that. And my impression is they're also ahead of us on AI, which is really critical to the future of information technology. So, you know, my sense of it is that while we do have the technology and a lot of this great technology comes out of the US, we're slow in deploying it. And, you know, query is that consistent with your understanding and query, what do we do to catch up? To make 5G put in 5G, a chicken in every pot, you know, have 5G everywhere and thus, you know, increase the speed at which commerce takes place and education and thinking and communication of all kinds. How do we do that now? Yeah, wow, that's a really strategic question. So a country's power, you know, there's many ways to wield it, but strategically you're gonna have information you're gonna have, you know, the military technology, right? And those will help form, you know, defense and economic advantages. And so, yeah, you know, there's countries west of here that have gotten a jump on this, some of the 5G technology rolling out. And a lot of it can be mandated based on, you know, the hierarchical form of government, as you mentioned. I'm still really optimistic because, you know, this, we live in a country with so much innovation and everyone wants to come here and we really get the best and brightest. So I think, especially with the Department of Defense, they have a 5G strategy laid out. They're investing billions of dollars, they're calling industry to action, you know, to innovate and to start building up use cases. So I think we're gonna find, even here on the island, a lot more things happening, so stay tuned. Okay, you know, the same note, I wanna go back to the job thing, your job. Where does your job take you? I mean, first of all, the first thing is, be an expert in 5G, what does it take? You have to lie awake at night, thinking about it at two o'clock in the morning. You have to go to special websites and get trained and retrained and updated and retrained again to keep, you know, keep current on this high technology. How do you do that? And would you always be able to do that? And will there come a time, Mike, when you are a dinosaur, is that coming? Wow, I hope not. But, you know, I've taken a commitment to myself, is to be a lifetime learner. So once I get past that, it's good. Now I just gotta create the time and get rid of the distractions to do it. That's the most challenging part. But fortunately, I'm with a company that allows a lot of great training. That's a big part of it. And I have to be an aggressive student. You know, I'm not going to classes. You know, there's no class on it. Some of this is just breaking, you know, it's being rolled out very quickly and new technologies coming on its heels. So it's a really fast-moving train. It's an exciting ride. I enjoy the job. And I would like to encourage, you know, folks that are interested in this. This is going to be, I think, a really great train. You know, hit your wagon of this and start getting the experience and education you need to be part of this. Mike Coutt, AT&T 5G specialist and many other things, a program manager for AT&T. Thank you so much for sharing and answering my questions. And engaging in this free-wheeling conversation we've had. Thank you so much. And I hope we can do it again. That would love to. Thank you, Jay, for all your time and the great work your show doesn't think, Tech. All right, you take care. You take care. Aloha.