 This is John Arnold. I am an independent technology analyst based in Toronto and I've been following communications technology for about 20 years, a long time. And what's really cool about that is you get to see new technology waves come and go. And we're in the middle of a big one right now with 5G, AI, cloud, right? These are all very transformative technologies that we couldn't have dreamed about 5 or 10 years ago, with the here today. And as we all know, tech comes much faster than it used to. So adapting to it is a real challenge, but it's also an opportunity, right? When companies understand the potential of it and the ecosystem that creates all of the wonderful technologies that come with these new tools, then you've got some really interesting possibilities. And we're seeing that right now. You know, I follow mostly the North American and the EU markets and they are kind of, they're slow. They're slowly coming along to the 5G story. But here at the Huawei event in, well, we're in Shanghai right now, right? At MWC Shanghai, we're seeing a different story than what you normally see in North America markets and even EU, right? I mean, the Asian carriers, the Asian vendors are pretty far ahead of what we normally see when we think of 5G, mainly because they've been able to implement 5G kind of on a kind of an ecosystem level, rather than say a point solution, one app here, one app there. But they're taking a more holistic view here of the potential for IoT, both in consumer, right? And in business, when you start talking IoT, bringing in AI and all the kind of sensor technologies that enable machines now to be connected. And we start going beyond human-to-human connectivity and bringing in machine connectivity. It really just, it's exponentially a bigger opportunity. And we're seeing deployments here at this conference that really show what's possible. And it's really way ahead, I think, of what we see in most of the Western markets. So I feel lucky to be here to kind of get a front-row seat to what's happening with all of this. It's really impressive to hear them talk about 650 million Chinese people using 5G. Or I was not sure if they said using or have access to, but I'm pretty sure they say using, which is pretty much like huge. It's like all of Europe. I think there's two, I think I see three pieces to this. First is, yes, the scale. They call it China scale. The size of the market in China in particular, but it's probably true in India as well, is like three or four times either North America or EU, when you think about the number of people who could be using it. That's the first thing. Second thing is the 5G, sorry, the mobile devices, there's more prevalence of being 5G enabled here than in North America. So the endpoints are ready to go. And more affordable probably. And probably a lower price point, yeah. And I think the carriers are hungry for this type of thing. Because one of the tricky things with 5G is, especially in the B2B applications, is how do you monetize it? And we're seeing this in the AI world, which is pretty close to where I live every day. AI is very cool, lots of sexy applications, but it's difficult to monetize because it's so new. But this 5G evolution is interesting, but what gets much more interesting is when you hear while we're talking about 5G, so the bridge to 5 and 6, where 6 could be another 5, 10 years away, but 5.5 we're getting into that reality stage where it's there, and the difference between 5 and 5.5 is that the bandwidth capabilities now can support AI natively. And when you get that into the mix, when you add those AI capabilities, then those IoT stories that sound a little like science fiction become real, they become viable right now. And the scale of automation that we're talking here is, we've never seen anything like this before, right? When you start thinking about things like smart homes for consumers, smart cities, right, in urban environments, these are really big opportunities that when you have the right infrastructure in place, the sky's the limit on innovation, right? Because now it's a whole new vocabulary of things you can do that just weren't possible before. One thing that I'm always a little bit speculating or trying to understand is one of the main advantages that I hope comes with 5G is better, not just more bandwidth, but better bandwidth for every user. Like some kind of way that, you know, you don't get this problem where you're in a train station, a stadium or a parking lot, whatever, and suddenly there's 500 people checking their phones at the same time, it doesn't really work. I wonder if there's an order of magnitude better service in that way, or it's just the way they do it is just a whole bunch of tiny little base stations and edge? Well, one of the, to support that point that you brought up, one of the takeaways from the talks we saw today was that the price points, they talked about, you know, the red cap, right? The little, you know, basically the enablers that you stick into your devices. When they come down to that like $10 price point, that's a big one because that makes so much of this more viable economically, right? When it becomes affordable, when it used to be like bandwidth was expensive, no one really wanted to experiment with it. But when, you know, you have the benefits of really what I call silicone economics, right? When the cost curves come down really fast, the smart phones, when they become more 5G enabled, the price points come down, all of a sudden that barrier goes away. For example, when you compare that to like Apple coming out with this VR headset now, it's a great device, but at $300 to $500, how many people are going to buy it? Right? So cost has always been a barrier to adoption, especially in consumer world, but now that's going to go away, I think, pretty quickly. And this really, it's like when you see HDTV for the first time, there's no going back, right? And I think we're going to see that in this world when those 5G applications become very kind of accessible, intuitive and affordable, right? Because now it's like stuff that they didn't know they were missing until they start using it and say, yeah, I want this, right? And it's pretty much like anything that you would think of doing a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi IoT kind of stuff, now people should just think of doing 5G and then having no range issues. Well, yeah, yeah, I mean the technologies now to kind of get 5G caliber bandwidth out there with the technologies, right, is much more accessible than it ever was before, right, going through, growing, you know, doesn't have to be line of sight, right, and developing, you know, putting access points on the towers. But what I find that gets really interesting, you know, is when you start getting into these, like the stadium, like I talked about hosting the Asia Games here in, I can't remember the city, but the idea is, you know, when you have these large gatherings, the social events, this is a great opportunity to showcase the technology. Because now you've got a lot of people in one place, all using the same applications at the same time, really interesting possibilities for what you can do to make this really relate to people, you know, there's the one-to-one, which is okay. But when you start talking on a community-based level, it gets a little more interesting because now you start getting into markets, which is something that marketers love. Because rather than advertising one-to-one to individuals, now you're advertising the communities. Now it gets a little more, you know, the economics start to get interesting, right? So it's going to be fun to watch. I wasn't able to come to China for three years because of the strange thing that happened in the world. But then when I came back, I saw so much development. It's going so fast. And when I go to Shenzhen, it just feels like I'm in the future. And they have like, I mean, it's free market competition, right? But there's also this kind of just, it feels like somebody decides at the top, we have to do this, go all the way, go all in, and they just go like crazy. And there is a hook and compete with that. Like, there's this whole trade story, right? With some continents a little bit more jealous about what's happening here or something, I'm not sure what they are. But it's like, this is remarkable how fast things are going here. It's, you know, and Huawei is not the only company that's innovating here, of course. You know, you get Samsung and Korea. The Asian markets, because they're starting from a clean slate, they don't have all of that wired and legacy infrastructure to deal with like we do in North America and Europe. There's a bit of an advantage there when you can leapfrog and go straight into the good stuff and it's more importantly though is companies like Huawei who have a vision for the future. That they're not just developing tomorrow's technology, they're developing tomorrow's, you know, bigger picture solutions, right? They talk about an intelligent world, right? They're thinking much bigger than the next iteration of an iPhone and not many companies are in a position to do that but the more I learn about what they're doing here in China and coming here to China to see it firsthand, you see that, you know, this level of commitment to the technology is pretty impressive and when you have a strong leadership culture that says we're going to do this, they're finding a way, not everything succeeds, right? There's hits and misses, but there's going to be more hits and eventually that starts to pay off. Look how long it took for Amazon to be profitable, right? Now they're the most valuable company on the planet and similar here, you don't get the rewards unless you take some of the risks and just push ahead because you have faith in the technology. Eventually when the technology is good, the market will catch up to it. It just may take a little longer but it's happening faster here and that provides the proof points that say, hey, the West is ready, should be ready for it now too. It feels like some of these ideas have been talked about for decades and some might say 5G is just marketing or hype, but it's not, it's kind of enabling these long ago ideas that now could be actually realized in a big way. I think so, yeah, I mean, you can look, you don't get big results unless you dream big and you see that here in spades, coming to the campus here at Wildway and what they're doing. It's not just what they're doing but it's how they think about the future because they view the technology in terms of digital world, digital transformation and the more we shift from the analog, legacy world to the digital world, this is really the world our kids are going to inherit. They natively understand this and the things that sounded like science fiction five or ten years ago are kind of everyday things for digital natives now. So it's not as radical as you might think but where they're taking it, I see, as I said, larger scale thinking, not just point solutions but really solutions that rethink entire processes like whether it's mining, whether it's energy generation and talk about smart cities, agriculture, healthcare, education, you name it. Every industry is primed for reinvention when you start thinking about digital transformation and when you view everything in that lens, all of a sudden every process, every task, every outcome, you can start framing it and saying, well there's better ways you can do it with digital technologies. Well, we start looking for the approaches from these vendors that have the right solutions. It starts to make a lot more sense. Now whether it's going to translate into disruption for jobs, whether it translates into disruption for being entirely kind of technically, automatically driven and kind of losing something that makes us human, that remains to be seen. But when you talk about the potential, just purely what technology can do, it makes a lot of sense. Whether that's really what we want to do and put all of our faith in technology, that remains to be seen. But you don't find out until you try and you see, right? But clearly there's a lot of things that can be done with automated and digital technologies that do improve things that are safer, smarter, faster, cheaper, things that businesses relate to, obviously. So the potential is there and you have nothing to lose for trying, right? And it's an exciting Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2023. The next three days, it's going to be fun to watch. Oh, sure will. And it's my first time, by the way, so I'm looking forward. Everything is a learning experience for me, so I'm really happy to be here.