 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We are running one of the industry's largest and most important hybrid tech events with AWS and it's a massive ecosystem of partners right now. There are two live CUBE sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program and we're pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to talk about the next generation and cloud innovation. George Elisea is joined by me, the Director of Product Management for EC2 Edge at AWS. George, welcome to the program. Glad to be here in person. Thank you for having me. Isn't it great to be here in person? It's awesome to be here in person finally. So one of the things that was very clear is the AWS flywheel of innovation and there was no slowdown with what's happened in the last 22 months. Amazing announcements, new leadership. We talked a little bit about 5G yesterday but let's talk more about that. Everyone is excited about 5G, consumers, businesses. What's going on? So yeah, I wanted to talk to you today about a new service that we launched called AWS Private 5G. Essentially it's a service that allows any AWS customer to build their own Private 5G network. And what we've tried to do with the service is make it that simple and cost effective for anyone without any telco experience or expertise really to build their own Private 5G network. So you just have to go to your AWS console, describe the parameters of a network, simple stuff like where do you want it to be located, the throughput, the number of devices. And AWS will build a plan for your network and seep you everything that you need. Just plug it together, turn it on and the network automatically configures itself. All you got to do is pop your SIM cards that we sent you into your mobile devices and you have a Private 5G network working on your premises. One of the things that we know and love about AWS is it's customer obsession. It's focused on the customers. That whole flywheel of all the innovation that comes out as Adam was saying yesterday to the customers, we deliver this, but you wanted more. We said we deliver this, but you wanted more. Talk to me a little bit about some of the customer catalysts for Private 5G. Yeah, actually one of the good examples is where we are right now. More and more AWS customers need to connect an increased number of devices, right? And these devices become more data hungry. You know, they need to push data around. They also become more and more wireless, right? So when you are trying to connect devices in the manufacturing floor, be it sensors, you know, to connect the tracks, forklifts, or in a convention center, you look at how many devices there are around us. When you're trying to connect these devices with a wired network, you quickly run into physical problems. Like it's hard to lay cable anywhere. And customers try to use Wi-Fi for many of these use cases, but as the number of devices grows into the thousands and you need to push more and more data around, you quickly reach the limitations of what the Wi-Fi technology. And also Wi-Fi is not really great at covering really open large spaces. So that's where these customers, you know, think of college campuses, convention centers, manufacturing floors, all of these customers, really what they need to be able to do is to leverage the power of the mobile networks. However, doing that by yourself is pretty hard. So that's what we aim to enable here. We aim to enable these customers to build very easily and cost effectively their own. Okay, George, so I have to ask, I'm totally curious, I love this announcement because it brings together kind of the edge story, but also I'm a bandwidth lover. I love more broadband. Give me more broadband. Faster, cheaper, more broadband. How does it work? So take me through the use case of what do I need to deploy? Do I need to have a backhaul connection? What does that look like? Is there a certain bandwidth requirements? How big is the footprint? What's the radius? Just walk me through, how do I roll this out? Yeah, sure. Some of that stuff actually depends on your requirements, right? How much of a space do you want to cover? Basically what we see if you were in preview right now. So we're seeping you the simplest configuration which is basically these things called small cells. They're radio units and antennas. And all you have to do is connect them to your local network that has internet access. These things connect and automatically connect home to the cloud and basically integrate and build up your whole network. All you need is that internet connection and they don't know what to do. Now, how big is the network? You can make it pretty big. You can cover hundreds of thousands of square feet with cellular networks, with mobile networks. The bigger space you want to cover, the more of these radio units we're going to see view. So classic wireless radios. Yes. You light up the area with 5G connected to the network. That's your choke point. The bigger the pipe. The bigger pipe that talks to the cloud. I mean, well, there's two things to consider here. There is local connectivity. So devices talking to each other and then there's connectivity back to somewhere else like the internet or the cloud. There are use cases, for example, let's say video feeds that you want to push up to do some inference in the cloud. In these use cases, you're basically pushing all of the data up. There is no east-west connectivity locally. And that's where our simplest configuration works best. There are other use cases where there is a lot of connectivity and devices talk to each other locally, like in this place, for example, right? In this case, we can see through that second configuration where we actually see through a MANAT hardware, AWS MANAT hardware, on-premises. And that runs the smarts of the network and allows all of your data traffic to remain local. That's waveling, they're outposts or both. It's a different configuration of AWS Private 5G. It's a MANAT service. We take care of it. You, basically, it has a pricing model which is very customer-friendly because you like most AWS services, you can start with no upfront fees. You can scale and pay as you scale. So it's designed to deploy easily. How big is the footprint? Just something just curious. Is it a pole? Is it like an antenna? Is it like a small antenna? Well, the antenna is, you know, the small cell, they call them small cells in cellular land. It's this big. And you can hide this. There is actually a demo in the Venetian of the Private 5G service, so you can actually see it in action. But yeah, that thing can cover 10,000 square feet, just one of them. So you can think of how to get it. So I can bring this to Palo Alto, put a 5G network downtown and be like the king. You could, yes. You could have your own Private 5G network. You can monetize that joint. Next on the queue. Great stuff. So in terms of industries adopting this, you gave us some examples, obviously, convention centers, you know, campuses, universities. I'm just curious, given the amount of acceleration that we've seen in every industry the last 22 months where organizations must become digital, they depend on that for their livelihood. We saw this, all these pivots, right? 22 months ago, how do we survive this? How do we thrive? Consumers now are, whether it's an end user consumer or it's an enterprise, have this expectation that we're going to be able to communicate no matter where we are 24 by seven, whether it's healthcare, financial services. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries in particular that you think are really prime for this Private 5G. Yeah, so manufacturing is a really great example because you have to cover large spaces. You have thousands of devices, sensors, et cetera. And using other solutions like Wi-Fi does not provide you the depth of capabilities. Like, for example, advanced security capabilities or even capabilities to prioritize traffic from some devices over others, which is what a 5G network can do for you. But also, it involves large spaces, both indoors and outdoors. Actually, Amazon is a really great example of using this, we're working with Amazon fulfillment centers. These are the warehouses that fulfill your orders when you order online. And they are a mix of indoor space and outdoor space and you can think of, I don't know if you've seen pictures or videos, there's robots running around, there's sensors everywhere, there's packing lines, et cetera, all of these things in order to operate performantly, but also securely and safely for the people that are around, need to be well-connected at a very high reliability rate. So, Amazon Fulfillment Networks is actually using AWS Private 5G to connect all of these devices. The really key thing here is you don't have to go drop 1,000 of these access points we're talking about, you can probably cover your space with five, 10 of these. So, your operational expenses, your maintenance goes down and there is less interruption of your normal operations, like you don't have to stop your manufacturing line for someone to come in and fix your Wi-Fi access. It's great for campuses, like college campuses. College campus is a great one, we've worked with college campuses, including the CMU University in the past, with some of our partners to deploy some of our partners. You have these distribution, DAS systems, distribution, whatever they call it, salary, whatever, amplifying, getting extra coverage. This seems to be a good fit for that. How, you mentioned this is a preview. How do people get involved? Is there like a criteria? How do, when's it going to be available? You'll get priority zone, we'll get you one. You can tell I'm ready to jump in. Take us through the program, what's the plans? So currently we're in that preview mode, so we're shipping you this small configuration, the simpler configuration, that you can sign up on the AWS website, and as we scale our operations, our supply chain, because this involves also hardware, et cetera, we're going to go to General Availability GA over the next few months and we'll have both configurations open. So I encourage everyone who is interested, go to the AWS website and sign up. We're rushing to get that in customer's hands because we're getting overwhelmingly positive feedback on what we build. This is transformative. I mean, clearly what you're talking about here is going to transform industries and help organizations transform themselves and outpace the competitors that are in the rearview mirror who aren't going to be able to take advantage of this. We're on the show floor, we've got lots of people here. Where can people actually go and see this preview? Test it out. There is an actual demo in the Venetian. I can't remember, sorry, I can't remember the room. I think it's on the, yes, actually it's on the four on the third floor where the meeting rooms are on outside 3501, if anyone wants to go to. We're going to stop by in lunchtime. Yes. Yeah, you can see it in action and you could see a future where everything, you look around, there's thousands of devices here. You could power all of these devices with a single cell and really scale that out. What's the throughput in the 5G? Just curious on obviously range is better than Wi-Fi. Range is better for outdoors obviously or big factories. What's the throughput on the spectrum? Depending on the spectrum that you choose and that's actually a really good save way. The device, the service that we build, it's spectrum agnostic so it can be used on, right now we're using it on what we call CBRS spectrum which is the free for all, you can use it yourself but also customers can bring their own spectrum and we're working with a bunch of CSPs, operators to build advanced bundles where you can work this on licensed spectrum. So if you're going up the spectrum in what they call millimeter wave. It could be a spectrum owner to bring your own license. You could. So Telco, right? Yeah, you could be a Telco bring your own and work with us as a partner or some actually manufacturing customers have purchased rights to small spectrum bands so they can use those in combination with this service to deploy. So to your original question as you're going back up the spectrum you can drive more and more throughput. It's not unheard of to drive one gig to a single device. So the low hanging fruit is the use cases that have critical need for edge connectivity. Manufacturing, certain maybe retail or whatever that they'll do the deployment. We can see this being applicable because you can start super small you can see this being applicable even to branch offices, right? Like let's say I was talking to a customer yesterday they were thinking, oh I have all these branch offices I don't even want to have IT there. It just wants something that very quickly and easily I can manage centrally and it just connects. Can I shoot a fixed wireless shot to the wavelength or do I have to have backhaul with wired gig? Oh, actually we are planning to, I talked about where the smarts of the network live in the, they can live in a region they can live in a local zone they can live in a wavelength zone so we're combining more and more of these products as well. Super exciting. Shooting obviously is an obvious thing that we should be working on. Incredible work, George, that you and the team have done transforming industries and I don't know if they're feeling there's might be a cube too is that would it be two dot oh John? There you go, I'm ready to go. He's ready to go, George thank you so much for joining me today. It's great to be here, thanks for having me. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.