 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Micron Insight 2019, brought to you by Micron. We're back at Pier 27 in San Francisco. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're covering Micron Insight 2019. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, David Floyer. And this event is kind of interesting, David. It basically intersperses CUBE interviews with big tent discussions, thought leadership. We've heard from Automotive, Healthcare, and 5G discussions, and no Keenahan is here. He's the Vice President and CTO of the Emerging Business at Ericsson, and you were just on a panel. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot, great to be here. You were talking about 5G and we're going to talk about 5G, so first of all, talk about the emerging business at Ericsson and your whole group. Yeah, so Ericsson, we, you know, 99th, a lot of our business today is done with operators, emerging business group. We're sort of looking at the intersection of industry, cloud computing, our traditional mobile network operator customers, and how do we put those together and look for new products or business models and really create something new for customers? So when you talk about 5G, everybody gets all excited. Certainly the technology community is excited about it. There's a whole value chain and ecosystem that's pumping right along, the carriers are adopting, and the users are just waiting. So what should we know about 5G? So I, you know, I think there's a couple of different things. One is from a consumer perspective, you're definitely looking at faster, you know, better, all the things we've got from the other Gs, all the things you know today, you know, faster downloads of movies. I think what we're, and I'm in the tech business, not in the prediction business, you know, so I think what we've learned from previous technologies we almost don't know what the new applications are. We're trying to make the platform as easy as possible for developers to utilize what the network actually has to offer. So I think that's a big part of what we're trying to do. The other part is enhancing what you have today as a consumer is massive, but also industries is a huge pull on 5G. So we talk about industry 4.0 and really transforming industries and cutting the cables in production lines, allowing monitoring of systems that never happened before. A lot of use cases that can be helped there. So I have a youngish son of 22 and I look at my bill every month and the idea of him downloading 10 times more data doesn't fill me with glee. Just the opposite. Exciting carriers. Yeah. I mean, what we've seen with every, every, and of course. Well, that was the question. How much of a down, how much lower is the price going to be on this platform? You've got to invest an awful lot in it. Absolutely. So I mean, we're going to see it 10 orders of magnitude cheaper. So even as it is now with 4G, we're seeing a lot of the unlimited plans coming available and so on. I think we're just going to see more of that. And then the question, actually a big question for 5G is what will you pay for? You know, if we talk about edge compute and low latency, if you're a gamer and I can give you X milliseconds of latency versus, you know, two X milliseconds, how much would you pay for that? So I think what we know at the moment is people will pay for that. We don't know exactly how much and that's where you need the ecosystem and you need to get stuff out there and actually build. So some of the economic impact is fuzzy, but in thinking, I don't pass this, not prologue, but if you think about the other Gs as they sort of were adopted, what can we learn from those and how do you think 5G will be different in terms of its adoption and economic impact? Well, so if you look at adoption, I mean, just the number of contracts we have, the number of deployments we have globally, just off the charts in terms of where we were with 4G, Korea launched a few months ago just before the summer. Within two months, they had a million 5G subscribers with smartphones in their hands. Two months later, they had a second million subscribers. I mean, for a market to go from zero to that in that period of time with smartphones, if we go back to 4G, all of that was with dongles and sort of hotspots and routers, so to jump directly to smartphones, huge adoption is going to happen fast. What are the sequence, what's the sequence of events that have to occur for adoption to really take off? So obviously, you need to build out the networks and the operators are doing that at pretty high speed. You need to have the devices ready and all the devices now, it's not like you have a 5G-only device, it's obviously capable of all the 4G things and then it's better when you have 5G, so the devices are going to come ticking fast, so all your new devices, most of the high-end devices have 5G capability already in there and then the network's just getting built out more and more and then of course, the application developers actually understanding how can I take advantage of those new capabilities and then you'll start to see, okay, wow, I didn't, this wasn't possible before, it's not just a faster download, it's really, there's just new experiences happening. From a development standpoint, how much access do they have to the technology, do they have to wait till this is all built out, obviously not, but what's the status of sort of the devs? So we're trying to and we're working with a lot of the ecosystem, we have, we call it the D15 Studio in our Santa Clara office, we're bringing developers in there and really trying to understand, because we talk telecom as well, so we want to expose things, we want to understand, okay, do you know what we're, if we say quality of service, what does that mean for you? How do you translate that? So, and we're working with the cloud players where the developers live to some extent to bring in that ecosystem and understand how it all plays together. So, go ahead, please. Yeah, so I was gonna, if you're looking at it long-term, obviously it's going to happen, but the experience is as I go around the States is that you've got all these different 4G, 3Gs, edges, still in a very, very patchy level of it. Is this going to be different? Is this going to actually go in the different places because it's a big investment that has to be made? A lot of things very close together. Yes, yes. And that seems to be a recipe for everything being all right in the cities, but as soon as you go outside the open areas, it's going to be very patchy. How does that compare, for example, with Elon Musk's idea of doing stuff from the sky? Well, everything comes down to economics. So it's obviously you're going to have denser deployments in the cities than you are in the countryside and so on. One of the big advantages with 5G is, and not to get too deep into the technical part, but you can use all the spectrum that's available. And spectrum is super important as we get, when we have lower frequency spectrum, you can cover 100 miles with one base station. As you get to the millimeter wave, which is you get super high bandwidths, then you're at hundreds of meters. So obviously one is more suitable for a rural environment, the other is more suitable for an urban environment. So obviously having those working together in one technology allows you to deploy everything and get the benefits in a much broader area than we had for any of the previous cities. So there's choice there in terms of how you deploy or leverage the spectrum. So you're saying that at the higher performance end of the spectrum, it's going to require a greater density of other components. And that's where when people talk about, oh, there's going to be a lot more distributed pieces of the 5G network that have to get built out. So who does that? Who's putting those pieces of the value chain in? So different players, obviously the mobile network operators, the AT&T's and Verizon's of the world are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. With our support to actually put the radios and the towers in place. Then there's an edge compute piece as well, which is different players are putting in that. So a lot of that infrastructure's being done. I think one thing that we've been pushing quite a lot, all our install base of radios is 5G upgradeable via software. So that means that a lot of the already installed radios and infrastructure, you're just software upgrade, an hour later it's now 5G ready. So I think that's a big piece of this and back to your question of how quickly and it can reach all those areas. Are there any specific commercial blockers that you see that you're thinking through? I think just understanding some of the more challenging, when you look at if you're deploying edge compute and you have to invest billions and really getting that far out to the edge. I think there's some questions still there, like I said, how much would you pay for 20 milliseconds versus 15 milliseconds? And that might sound like a lot, but that's a lot of extra infrastructure you would need to put out. So I think that's still being worked through and obviously some of that will happen quicker in a downtown San Francisco than it will in middle of Nevada. Well, and the others that you mentioned before, it's unclear what new applications are going to emerge here. And so it's almost like I build it and they will come and then we'll figure it out and then we'll figure out how to charge for it. Like you say, the gamers, how much will they pay for it? So those are some of the uncertainties, but they'll shake themselves out. Absolutely, absolutely. These guys are pretty smart about doing it. What about Micron and the role of memory players and storage players? How will this affect them? It's a huge opportunity when you... Big boom? Yeah, I mean invest, no. Party hats. I think it's when you look at the number of devices and okay, what's a device? The devices are smartphone. Well, the device is now your car. It's every IoT device and down to your toaster and all the crazy stuff people are talking about. To, I mean, to every industrial application, to all that edge compute. So you're distributing now a lot of different compute memory storage across different parts of the network. So, I mean, they talked earlier in the panel about phones having terabytes of data. It's just unimaginable the amount of data storage memory you're going to need in a vehicle. They're looking at terabytes per hour of data and then how much of that should they shift off the vehicle? How much do they keep there? So, I think a huge opportunity. Well, I'd be willing to pay for some memory in my appliances that tell me when they're going to break. I just got a new dishwasher and I can program it with my remote. I don't want to program it. I just want to know that on Thanksgiving morning, and it works, but in a week before it's going to break, I want to know so I can deal with it. Preventative maintenance, that's a big use case. That's a huge use case. I can't wait till that happens. Your last question. So, I was going to be, I was following up on that last point you were making. Ladies and gentlemen, microphone inside 2019, resuming on the main stage. We need to take our seats. Again, this cost of everything, this value that you're going to get out of it. It seems to me that this is going to take a long time to push out, and before it actually settles down, and people will actually know whether they're going to pay for this. And then one thing in particular is, there's a lot of resistance in the States anyway to all of these devices being put very, very close to it. For example, putting all the devices down a road, for example, that seems to me very expensive and going to get a lot of reaction from consumers. Is that not the case? So I actually, we're not seeing it that much. I mean, if you look across the globe, China obviously is a slightly unique situation, massive deployments already happening there. Like I said, Southeast Asia, South Korea being among the forefront, big deployments already there. We're seeing big pull from industries already, and the operators here in U.S. are announcing new cities every month, practically. So they're really full on interest, and to some extent it's really just, there's a capacity need to have the spectrum they need to make the investments, and they're doing it as we speak. I think it depends. I mean, I was at a meeting the other day in Boston with a lot of city officials and folks that worked for the mayor's office. They're envisioning Boston for the next 50 years, smart cities, and 5G was like, if you did a word cloud, 5G was like the number one topic. You know, we talked earlier about sports stadiums, you could see that being, you know, use cases. There's going to be these hot spots where it's very, very high. But the city, in this case, in Boston's case, they're going to invest, right? And I think that's going to be a differentiator for cities. If you have this amazing infrastructure, you know, 5G infrastructure that allows you to take advantage of that, be it just from, they talked about traffic congestion and what the city can do, and then what the businesses and the consumers can do in that area, that can end up being a differentiator for innovation companies going there and so on. So. All right, we've got to go before they blow us out. No, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. All right, great to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Micron Insight 2019 from San Francisco. Right back.