 Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the FIEDA and MWC23. It's just an amazing day. This place is packed. They said 80,000 people. I think it might even be a few more walk-ins. I'm Dave Vellante. Lisa Martin is here. David Nicholson, but right now we have the analyst hot takes with three friends of the Cube. Chris Lewis is back again with me in the co-host seat. Zia's Caravalla, analyst extraordinaire. Great to see you Zee and Sargeet S.J. Johal. Good to see you again, Cube contributor. And it's for a new name for him. He says that is his nickname. Guys, thanks for coming back on. We got the all-male panel. Sorry, but it is what it is. So Zia, this is the first time you've been on at MWC. Takeaways from the show, hot takes. What are you seeing, same wine, new bottle? In a lot of ways, yeah. I mean, I was talking to someone this earlier that if you had come from like MWC five years ago to this year, a lot of the things are the same, telco transformation, cloud. I mean, 5G's a little new. Sustainability is certainly a newer theme here. But I think it highlights just the difficulty I think the telcos have in making this transformation. And I think in some ways I've been unfair to them in some degree, because I've picked on them in the past from that moving fast enough. These are, you know, I think these kind of big transformations almost take like a perfect storm of things to come together to happen, right? And so in the past, we had technologies that maybe you might have lowered OPEX, but they're hard to deploy. You know, they're vertically integrated. We didn't have the software stacks, but it appears today that between, you know, the cloudification of, you know, the, you know, going to cloud native, the software stacks, you know, the APIs, the ecosystems. I think we're actually in a position to see this industry finally move forward. Yeah, and Chris, I mean, you have served this industry for a long time. And you know, when you do that, you get briefed as an analyst. You actually realize, wow, there's a lot of really smart people here and they're actually, they have challenges. They're working through it. So, you know, Zias was saying he's been tough on the industry. You know, what do you think about how the telcos have evolved in the last five years? I think they've changed enormously. I think the problem we have is we're always looking for the great change, the big step change, and there is no big step change in the way they tell you. What telcos deliver to us as individuals, businesses, society, you know, the connectivity piece, that's changed. We get better and better, more reliable connectivity. We're shunting a load more capacity through. What I think has really changed is their attitude to their suppliers, their attitude to their partners, and their attitude to the ecosystem in which they play. Understanding that connectivity is not the end game. Connectivity is part of the emerging end game where it will include storage, compute, connect, and analytics, and everything else. So, I think the realization that they are not playing their own game anymore, it's a much more open game and some things they will continue to do, some things they'll stop doing. We've seen them withdraw from moving into adjacent markets as much as we used to see. So, a lot of them in the past went off to try and do movies, me, you, and so on. And a lot went way into business IT stuff. But they've mainly pulled back from that and they're focusing on, and let's face it, it's not just a 5G show. The fixed environment is unbelievably important. We saw that during the pandemic, having that fixed broadband connection, using Wi-Fi, combining with cellular. Now, we love it, but the problem is in industry is that the users often don't even know the connectivity's there. They only know when it doesn't work, right? If it's not media and it's not business services, what is it? In my view, it will be enabling third parties to deliver the services that will include media, that will include business services, to embedding the connectivity all the way into the application that gets delivered or embedding it so the quality mechanism deliver the gaming much more accurately, or, I'm not a gamer, so I can't comment on that, but the video quality, if you want to have a high quality video, it will come through better. And those cohorts will pay for that value? They, somebody will pay somewhere along the line. That's so fuzzy to me. I still want to know. I do think it's use case dependent. Like, you look at all the work Verizon did at the Super Bowl this year. You know, that's a perfect case where they, you know, they could have upsold. Explain that. I'm not familiar with it. So Verizon provided all the 5G in the Super Bowl. They provided a lot of, they provided private connectivity for the coaches to talk to the sidelines. And those, that's a mission critical application, right? In the NFL, if one side can't talk, the other side gets shut down. You can't communicate with the quarterback or the coaches. There's a lot of risk at that. So, but, you know, there's a case there though, I think where they could have even made that fan facing. Right? And if you're paying 2,000 bucks to go to a game, would you pay 50 bucks more to have, you know, a higher tier of bandwidths so you can post things on social? People that go there want to know, they want people to know they were there. Every football game you go to, you can't use your, your cell. Yeah, I know. All right, let's talk about developers because we saw the eight APIs come out. You know, I think ISVs, they're going to be, you know, a big part of this, but it's like DR just said, hey, eight's better than zero. I guess, okay. So, but so, the innovation is going to come from ISVs and developers, so what's your, what are your hot takes from this show and out day two, a day and a half in, almost two days in? Yeah, this thing that we have talked, I mentioned many times is skills of gravity. Right? And also to out compete, you have to out educate. That's another theme actually of my talks is, or my research is that to put your technology out there to the practitioners, you have to educate them. And that's the only way to democratize your technology. What telcos have been doing is they have been stuck to the proprietary software and proprietary hardware for too long from Nokia's of the world and other vendors like that. So, now with the open sourcing of some of the components, Oran and a few others, right? And they're open source based antenna. You know, antennas are becoming software now. So with the advantage of these things, which is open source, it helps us democratize that to the outer sort of skirts of the, the practitioners, if you will. And that will bring in more applications, first into the IoT space, and then maybe into the core sort of telephony, if you want. So what does a telco developer look like? I mean, all the blockchain developers and crypto developers are moving into, you know, generative AI, so maybe those worlds come together. You'd like to think though that the developers would understand everything's network-centric today. So you'd like to think they'd understand that how the network responds, you take a simple app like Zoom or something, right? If it notices the bandwidth changes, it should knock down the resolution. If it goes up, you know, then you should, you can add different features and things, and you can make apps a lot smarter that way. Well, G2 was saying today that they didn't deal with Mercedes, you know this probably better than I do, where they're going to embed WebEx in the car, and if you're driving it'll shut off the camera. That's a very basic example. I'm like, okay. I'll give you a better example today. That's my point. Isn't there more that we can do? Well, way more. So you notice that on the SKT stand, the little helicopter, it's a vertical lift helicopter. So it's an electric vertical lift helicopter. Just think of that for a second. And then think of the connectivity to control that, to securely control that. And then I was recently at an event with ZS actually, where we saw an air traffic control system where there was no people manning the tower. It was managed by someone remotely with all the cameras around. So managing all of those different elements, we call it IOT, but actually it's way more than what we thought of as IOT. All those components connecting, communicating securely and safely, because I don't want that helicopter to come down on my head, do you? Yeah. Especially when you're in it. Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned sustainability. Everybody's talking about power. I don't know if you guys have a lot of experience around TCO, but I'm trying to get to, well, is this just because energy costs are so high, and then when the energy becomes cheap again, nobody's going to pay any attention to it? Or is this the real deal? So one of the issues around the, if we want to experience all that connectivity locally or that helicopter also connect that connectivity, we have to ultimately build denser, more reliable networks. So there's a capex. We're going to put more base stations in place, we need more fiber in the ground to support them. Therefore the energy consumption will go up. So we need to be more efficient in the use of energy. Simple as that. How much of the operating expense is energy? Like what percent of it is it? 10%, is it 20%, does anybody know? It depends who you ask, and it depends on the... I can't get an answer to that. I mean, in the enterprise. In the enterprise, yeah. Yeah, in the data centers we have the numbers, I think we have 10 to 15%. Yeah, it's 10 to 12%, something like that. I think it's more than that. Is it much higher? That's what I'm trying to get to. The capex, I've got a feeling it's 30%. I do think we have to get better at understanding how to measure, too. I was talking with John Davidson at Cisco about this, that every rev of silicon they come out with uses more power, but it's a lot more dense. So at the surface you go, well, that's using a lot more power, but you can consolidate 10 switches down to two switches. It's possible, yeah. Well, Intel was on earlier in talking about how they can intelligently control the cores. But it's based off workload, right? That's the thing. So what are you running over it? So I don't think the industry measures that very well. I think we look at things kind of box by box versus look at total consumption. Well, somebody else in the queue was saying, they go full throttle. That the network's just saying, just full throttle everything. And that obviously has to change from a power consumption. I think it's sustainability and sensory or sensors from IOT side, they go hand in hand. Just simple examples, like, you know, lights in the restrooms, you know, like in the public areas, or if somebody goes in there and just only then turns on, the same concept is being applied to servers and compute and storage and everything. And to network. And to network as well. Cell towers. Yeah. Yeah, turn it off, right? Yeah. You know what, the serverless telco? Yeah. No, no, no, no. The cell towers. Well, I'm saying, right, but like serverless, you're not paying for the compute. Exactly. You're not using it. Yeah. So it is serverless from the economics point of view. Yes, it's like that, you know. So it goes to the lowest level, almost like sleep on our laptops, sleep level when you need more power, more compute. I mean, some of that stuff's been in networking equipment for a long time. It just never really got turned on. I want to ask you about private networks. You wrote a piece of, Athanet was acquired by HPE right after Dell announced a relationship with Athanet, which was kind of, it was kind of funny. And so a good move, good judo move by HPE. You know, I asked Dell about it. And they said, look, we're open. They said the right things. We'll see. But I think it's up to HPE. Well, on the network inside Dell is. Yeah. Okay, cool. But you said something in that article you wrote on SiliconANGLE that a lot of people feel like a P5G is going to basically replace wireless or cannibalize wireless. You said you didn't agree with that. Explain why. Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi, sorry, that's a wireless one. No, that's, I mean, that's, it's ridiculous. Pat Gelsinger said that in his last VM role, which I thought was completely irresponsible. That it was going to cannibalize. Cannibalize Wi-Fi globally is what he said, right? Now he had Verizon on stage with them, so. Wi-Fi's too inexpensive and flexible. It's too embedded as well. It's reached near you. Embedded, yeah, yeah. It's reached near ubiquity. It's unlicensed, so a lot of businesses don't want to manage their own spectrum, right? And it's great for, you know, this, right? It does the job, doesn't it? Yeah, for casual activity. Not today. Well, it does for the most part, right? For the most part. But never at these events. If it's engineered correctly, it will, right? Where you need private 5G is when reliability is an absolute must. So, you know, Christy and I visited the Port of Rotterdam, right? Yeah, exactly. So they're putting private 5G there, but there's metal containers everywhere, right? And that's going to disrupt it. And so there are certain use cases where it makes sense. I've been in your basement. Yeah. And you've got some pretty intense equipment there. You're going to have private 5G in your house. For carpeted offices, you know, it does not make sense to bring private, it just, the economics don't make any sense. And, you know, it runs hot, it's... So where's it going to be used? Give us some examples of where we should be looking for. Well, the early ones are obviously in mining, in, say, in ports, in airports, broader in cities, because you've got so many moving parts in there. And always think about it, very expensive moving parts. You know, the cranes in the ports, a normally expensive piece of kit, you're moving all that logistics around. They're managing that over a distance, where the Wi-Fi won't work over the distance. And then, and in mining, we've got these enormous expensive trucks moving around. I think a great new use case, though, so that the Cleveland Browns, actually the first NFL team, to use it for facial recognition to enter the stadium. So instead of having to even pull your phone out, it says, hey, Dave Vellante, you've got four tickets, can we check you all in? And you just walk through. You can apply that to airports. You can put that in a hotel, you can walk up and check it out. Retail. Yeah, retail. And so I think video, video, real-time video analytics, and I think it's a perfect use case for that. But you don't need 5G to do that. You could do that through another mechanism, couldn't you? You could do wire, depending on how mobile you want it to. Like in a stadium, you're pulling those things in and out all the time. You're moving them around and things. Yeah, but you're coming in at a static point. I won't take the contrary view here. See, we can't even agree on that. I don't think, you're going to agree. Yeah, I love it. Let's go with this. I believe the reliability of connection is very important, right? And the moving parts, what are the moving parts in Wi-Fi? We have the NIC cards, there's Wi-Fi cards in these suckers, right? And any machine, they're bigger in size. And the radios for 5G are smaller in size. So, manipulation is an important part of the whole sort of progress to the future, right? And cost, right? I think 5G, cost as well. Yes, cost as well. But cost, we know that it goes down with time, right? So we are already talking about 6G and the 5G stuff will be done pretty soon. That's true. So one of the big boom areas at the moment is 4G, LTE, because the component price has come out so much, it's affordable, you can afford to bring it all together. People don't, because we're still on 5G, we're not 5G stand-alone everywhere, you're not going to get a consistent service. So those components are unbelievably important. The skill sets of the people doing integration to bring them all together are unbelievably important. And the business case within the business. So I was talking to one of the heads of one of the big retail outlets in the UK and I said, when are you going to do 5G in the stores? Well, why would I tear out all the Wi-Fi? You know, I've got perfectly functioning Wi-Fi. Yeah, that's true, it's already there. But I think the technology which disappears in front of you, that's the best technology. Like you don't worry about it, you don't think it's there. Wi-Fi, we think about that, like it's there. And I do think Wi-Fi 5G switching has got to get easier. Like for most users, you don't know which is better. You don't even know how to test it. And to your point, it does need to be invisible where the user doesn't need to think about it. Invisibly, see, we came back to invisible, we talked about that yesterday. Telecoms should be invisible. And it should be, you know? You don't want to be thinking about telecom, but at the same time, telecoms want to be more visible. They want to be visible like Netflix, don't they? I still don't see the path. It's fuzzy to me the path of how they're not going to repeat what happened with over-the-tops providers if they're invisible. Well, if you think about what telcos deliver to consumers to businesses, then extending that connectivity into your home to help you support, to secure and extend your connection into Zeus's basement, whatever it is. And then you talk to that. It's awesome setup. And then in the business environment, there's a big change going on from the old NPLS networks, the old rigid structures of networks to SD1, where the control point is moved outside, which can be under control of the telco, could be under control of a third-party integrator. So there's a lot changing. I think we obsess about the relative role of the telco. The demand is phenomenal for connectivity. So address that, fulfill that. And if they do that, then they'll start to build trust in other areas. But don't you think they're going to address that and fulfill that? I mean, they're good at it. That's their wheelhouse. And it's a $1.6 trillion market, right? So it's not to be sniffed at. So that's fixed on mobile together, obviously. It's a big market and do we keep changing if as long as the service is good, we don't move away from it. So back to the APIs, the eight APIs, right? Eight APIs is a joke, actually, almost. I think they released it a little too early. They released it on the main stage. You know, like what? What is this, right? But of course they will grow into hundreds and thousands of APIs, but they have to spend a lot of time and effort in that sort of context. I don't actually like to see the GSMA work with like AWS and Microsoft and VMware and like software companies and create some standardization across their APIs. Yeah, I spoke to them. Yes, I mean guys. Is that not what they're doing? No, they said we are not in the business of defining standards. They use a different term, not standard. Believe me, seriously. Like I was like, are you kidding me? But let's make it, there aren't just eight APIs out there. There's so many of them. The TM forums have been defining them and it's open data architecture. You know, the telcos themselves are defining them. The standards we've talked about earlier earlier with Danielle. There's a lot of APIs out there. But the consistency of APIs, so we can bring them together to bring all the different service together that will support us in our different lives is really important. I think telcos will do it. It's in their interest. All right guys, we've got a wrap. Let's go around the horn here. Starting with Chris, Zia Sinan, Sarbjit, who's bringing us home. Number one hot take from Mobile World Congress, MWC 23, day two. My favorite hot take is the willingness of all the participants who have been traditional telco players. You looked inwardly at the industry, looking outside for help, for partnerships, and to build an ecosystem, a more open ecosystem, which will address our requirements. Zia? Yeah, I was going to talk with you. I think for the first time ever when I've met with the telcos here, I think they're actually, I don't think they know how to get there yet, but they're at least aware of the fact that they need to understand how to build a big ecosystem around them. So if you think back like, 50 years ago, IBM and Compute was the center of everything in your company, and then the ecosystem surrounded it. I think today with digital transformation being network-centric, the telcos actually have the opportunity to be that center of excellence and then build an ecosystem around them. I think the SIs are actually in a really interesting place to help them do that, because they understand everything top to bottom, but pre-pandemic I'm not sure the telcos really understand. I think they understand it today. I'm just not sure they know how to get there. Subjeev? I've seen a lot of O-RAN demos and testing companies, and I'm amazed by it. Everything is turning into software, almost everything. The parts which are not have turned into software, I mean, they will soon, but everybody says that we need the hardware to run something, right? But that hardware, in my view, is getting miniaturized and it's becoming smaller and smaller, the antennas are becoming smaller, the equipment is getting smaller. That means the cost on the physical, physicality of the assets is going down, but the cost on the software side will go up for telcos in future and software is a messy business. Not everybody can do it, so only few will survive, I believe, so that's what we're- Software-defined telco. So, I'm on a mission, I've been looking for the monetization path, and what I haven't seen yet is you want to follow the money, follow the data, I say. So, the next two days, I'm going to be looking for that data play, that potential, the way in which this industry is going to break down the data silos, I think there's this potential gold mine there, but I haven't figured it out yet. I said, a subject for another day, David. Guys, thanks so much for coming on, you guys are extraordinary partners with theCUBE friends and great analysts, and congratulations and thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks a lot. All right, this is a wrap on day two, MWC23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. Rob, Hope, and team are just covering all the news. John Furrier's in the Palo Alto studio. We're rocking all that news, taking all that news and putting it on video. Go to thecube.net, you'll see everything on demand. Thanks for watching, this is a wrap on day two. We'll see you tomorrow.