 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Micron Insight 2019, brought to you by Micron. Welcome back to Pier 27 in lovely San Francisco, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, David Floyer. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, Evan Kirstel is here. He's a social digital influencer. First time on theCUBE, Evan, great to see you. Thanks for having me. First time's the best. You're very welcome. And it is beautiful out here. October is the best month in San Francisco, way better, way warmer than July. I mean, you live out here, holy cow. All right, let's get right into it. You're just fresh off of Mobile World Congress down in LA. This morning, yeah, 5G on the brain. Yeah, so what do we need to know about 5G? You know, I think my big takeaway as an industry observer is that 5G is real and it's now. I mean, we've seen five, 10 years maybe of hype and expectation and marketing buzz and even spin. But I think we're now in the business of practical deployments, scaling, rollouts of networks. And that's, you know, as an industry observer, it's quite exciting. So what does 5G mean for the average user? I mean, is it going to be like going from dial up to high speed internet or? You know, it's going to be interesting. The average user, I think will experience, you know, like a 10x increase in their current experience on mobile in terms of uploads and downloads and speed and latency and that kind of thing, which is super exciting. It's going to blow people's minds. 10x, I'm stoked if they get a 10x. I mean, when, when can I get this? It's when and it's where, right? I mean, if you look at how these networks are evolving, there are hundreds of thousands of small cells of base stations that have to be deployed nationally to get 5G ubiquitous across the country. So it's when, it's where, it's how, but we're here, we're at the starting point and look for the next years and months ahead to see that real traction. But if I can just break in here for a second. If I look now when I travel around the country, I still have 4G, I still have 3G, I still have Edge, I have all the old ones are still there and it's taken forever even just to get to 4G. So isn't there, isn't the rollout of this going to take a long time as a 10 year horizon? I think to get ubiquitous coverage, indoor, outdoor, suburban, urban, rural, it's going to take 10 years. But if you look at those hot spots that generate a lot of activity, whether it's indoor coverage in an enterprise, whether it's the Bruins playing in Boston Garden. I mean, those are where 5G is really going to come in to play first and then it's going to sort of go outside of those urban dense areas. You mean like the fan experience? The fan experience is huge. I mean, if you go to any baseball, basketball, football game, you know what the experience is like. Pretty bad, right? Yeah, horrible. So those kind of hot spots are ripe for 5G like right away today now. So, and by the way, David, sometimes I get 5G on my phone and I feel like it's fake 5G, it's like HD ready, but what's that all about? Well, you know, these networks evolve and so the carriers are maximizing 4G, including giga speed on 4G and 5G is really if an overlay to these existing networks. And so as you get your next Samsung 5G-enabled device as Apple next year comes out with a 5G iPad, you'll then begin to use these services as you use your existing devices. Can you help us understand the fundamental architecture of 5G? My understanding is it's, you know, no base of more distributed and that's part of the reason why it's taking so long to roll out, but what do we need to know about that? I think it's a brand new interface. So if you think about the current radio on 4G, they reinvented the wheel with 5G, which means you can support a huge number of endpoints of IoT devices, of wearables, of home access points. And so it enables almost 10 to 100x more devices in terms of scale. So while the end user may think this is business as usual, what's really happening on the network side is pretty revolutionary. And once the networks are primed and built and ready, what's going to be happening on the device side is going to be really extraordinary. You're talking about 8K video on a mobile device or augmented reality through new kinds of glasses. And so it's sort of a chicken and egg a little bit, which is going to come first, the network or the incredible new devices. So we're seeing now the networks being put in place for those wave of devices. Yeah, which makes sense. The device manufacturers don't want to over rotate to something that's not quite ready. But if you look at the network, you have to have a lot of devices very close to each other, don't you? I mean, in my area, that holding these hearings about radiation and everything else like that, which is never really a problem unless you're underneath an old hole. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of FUD, fear uncertainty, dialed to around 5G. Yeah. And just the practical thing, you've got to have all of these, lots of these very close and the exposure to having a gap of some sort is pretty high. Yeah, I think it's an issue of frequencies as well. Right now we're seeing very high frequency 5G deployed for those dense urban, suburban areas. We're going to see more spectrum rolled out next year. The FCC is putting out new auctions. So you'll see lower bit rate 5G rolled out for suburban and rural areas. So it's a work in progress, but the fact that we have first devices, first silicon, first software, first networks is kind of a big inflection point. But I'm inferring this, at the back end, there can be a lot of machine to machine communications. So that kind of sets up this whole IoT and edge discussion. And of course, that means more data. What can you sort of tell us about sort of how that's going to affect really the amount of data and how we use that data? Oh, the data explosion is extraordinary. I mean, we experienced this as early adopters here at the table every day. And so no one's ever said, my network is fast enough, is good enough, secure enough. There's always that insatiable appetite now given the connected world in which we live. And so it's not just the network speed, it's the input output of the device. I mean, we have latency that frankly, from these networks operates at the speed of the human brain in milliseconds in terms of input, output on the network. And so that's really going to change the user experience too. And the way you do gaming or collaboration or video conferencing, video calls, all these services we use today will be much more tuned to how we live and work. So dial up to high speed internet was obviously. Are you on dial up, Dave? Are you telling me? You go back, I'm old, so I remember this stuff. But that was a significant change, obviously. A step change, yeah. Really a step function, exactly. But subsequent to that, it was, I could do more, but it was just so much more data and apps were flowing through the network that it really didn't change the experience. A little bit maybe, actually, be careful. I watched the Patriots game on the plane, on the NFL app on the way out here, which I could probably have done a year or two ago. But so that was, that's goodness. But generally speaking, the experience is substantially similar. Will, you said a 10X before, will the user actually see a difference? Like that kind of dial up to high speed step function or is it going to be sort of a slow roll? I think the user will see a big improvement because of the efficiencies of the network and the way in which data is kind of throttled and limited today with three and four G networks. I think more interestingly is how businesses and enterprises and SMBs will consume five G. I mean, there are a lot of antiquated networks out there, whether it's legacy wired networks, DSL, whether it's crappy Wi-Fi that we all experience in hotel rooms, five G has the opportunity to come in and really displace all of that legacy crap that's in our networks and give users in those enterprises, hotels, venues, a brand new experience. And when's the last time you had bad hotel Wi-Fi, right? So the idea of getting rid of a legacy network and delivering those high speed services from the public network and sort of private networking is a really exciting opportunity for the carriers and really for the B2B enterprise. Well, the technology suppliers are pumped about this. They're pumped and they look at their profitability, their revenue, their sales, everything's up. Well, and the thing is that the carriers, like I say, they have no choice. I mean, to remain competitive, they have to consume, they have to spend more. And what a great time in the mobile industry, I mean, to be a consumer of devices and services. I mean, the consumers, the businesses are winning in this market. So tell us about Mobile World Congress. What was the vibe? It was very buzzy. I mean, there were lots of real world applications on display, whether wearable devices for health care and hospital IT applications. There were examples of remote controlled autonomous shipping and autonomous trucking, monitored, supervised with 5G. There were examples of vehicle-to-vehicle communications for accident and safety purposes being deployed in the next generation of cars, baked in. And so 5G's gotten very practical now. It's like, okay, we've built this network. We have silicon, we have software, we have storage memory. How do we deploy it? So it's very focused on deployment usage and applications. If you take that one of automotive, for example, if you've got health and life and if you can't guarantee that you've got connectivity to it, what's the value? For example, wouldn't you prefer a vehicle-to-vehicle direct communication as opposed to going outside to some third party that's much faster, much more safer? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there's a new technology called V2X, or vehicle-to-vehicle standards that are being baked so that- But that's not 5G. It's based on the, there's a 5G as a family of standards and so one of the technologies within the 5G family is vehicle-to-vehicle, Qualcomm's doing some amazing work there. And once the automobile manufacturers bake that technology into cars, the car manufacturers can then build in vehicle avoidance, vehicle collision technology, and so forth. So, I'm referring to, let's just talk about AI, right? I mean- Lots of talk, yeah. Mobile World Congress, you're going to hear a lot about it here. What about the ecosystem that's emerging to support 5G? There's got to be a whole value chain, specialized chips. I mean, obviously, Micron wants to pop on that bandwagon. The whole supply chain has to come together and Micron powering all of these devices with memory and storage, to the application developers, to the OEMs, to the network providers, and so that ecosystem is getting really baked, fully baked and integrated, and that was on display at MWC too, so all these things are coming together, and I think it's pretty exciting as a long-time skeptic like yourself, I saw some real-world examples. I see, I'm excited about it. I just, I'm just not holding my breath. Don't hold your breath, it's not recommended. No, but I can't wait, that's great. Evan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks so much. I appreciate your insights. Thanks so much. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back from Micron Insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE.