 The Newsroom for Tech and Telecom Professionals and JSA Radio. Your voice for Tech and Telecom on iHeart Radio. I'm Dean Perine and on behalf of our team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly roundtable. We are bringing together top thought leaders talking about topics important to our industry and our monthly virtual roundtable series available right here on our JSA TV YouTube channel as well as on JSA Radio. The only Tech and Telecom podcast series currently available on iHeart Radio. These monthly roundtables lead us up to our on-site CEO roundtables at our industry networking event the Telecom Exchange. Next one up is on June 20th and 21st on Wall Street in downtown New York City. More information can be found at thetelecomexchange.com All right folks this is going to be a fun one today. A few topic subjects have been as buzzy as 5G and IoT which only makes sense then that we would bring together some expert panelists to talk about that very subject and that is 5G and its impact on IoT. This roundtable is brought to you on our JSA video platform which allows our panelists to log in virtually from anywhere around the world streaming live video feeds, care of our partners, the video collaboration managed service provider, Pinnacle. So thank you very much for that Pinnacle. I want to welcome our live audience here today and also those of you who are downloading on demand. So let's go ahead and get started. I am honored to introduce our guest moderator Mr. Irwin Lazar Irwin is the Vice President and Service Director at Numerity's Research. He manages research operations, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in unified communications and collaboration. Covering the collaboration space as an analyst for over 15 years. Irwin thanks very much for being here today. With that I am going to turn it over to you if you would kindly introduce the panelists and we'll get going. Great thank you Dean and thank you to all of you who are joining us as Dean mentioned either live or on demand. Pleased to have a wonderful panel of industry luminaries around the 5G and IoT space. And so let me start with quickly introducing everyone and then I'll give them a chance to tell you a little bit more about what they do and what their interest areas are around 5G and IoT. So first up is Terry McCabe who is CTO of Mobile Enterprise at Mitel. Second is Sayeed Sayeed Hussain who is founder and CTO at Eris. And then Utkar Dalawal who is CEO and founder of Future Wireless Technologies. So Terry why don't you tell us a little bit about your involvement in the 5G and IoT space within Mitel. Sure. So basically we're looking at the impact that 5G has on digital transformation and how IoT is going to shape the way in which employees interact with each other, the way in which businesses interact with their customers. How do you use the internet of things, the instrumented environment that we live in and will live in going forward? How does that affect the way in which communication services are rendered? And you know we're not waiting for 5G, 5G is something that we see enabling a massive growth in what is already being developed in a 4G and a pre-standards environment. So you know 5G, wonderful enabler but we're not sitting back waiting for 5G to enable us to get some of these services started. Interesting. Okay. Say it. Ursi? Absolutely. I agree with that comment that Terry just made. We believe that 5G will just add another transport capability but the other thing to keep in mind is that 5G has a wide range of capabilities. The low latency of the high performance will be geared to a certain set of users who may not necessarily be using it for IoT but 5G standard encompasses all of the low power, wide area network technologies which we believe is what's going to drive the large scale adoption of a set of sensor-based devices which wouldn't happen otherwise. It's a combination of impacts. You know the frankly the speeds, the high performance of 5G is unlikely to be really needed by a wide variety of IoT devices applications. It's going to be the high end, the people who really need a lot of data, a lot of low latency, etc. Some applications like adding to the capabilities that exist for the connected card, autonomous driving markets perhaps but the sensor market will be driven by the slower performance, the higher latency perhaps but in a unified way where the network can adapt all of the necessary data transports that 5G encompasses. So that's what we're looking at. We expect that to be a very important part of IoT in general. The concern I have is that it'll take some time to get the coverage that's necessary to make 5G viable for a large class of applications that need widespread distribution and service coverage. Okay. So I'll come back to some of those topics in a second but let me let Ufar introduce himself to our audience. Yes, so I'm Uptar Daliwal. I have many interests and I like to amplify what Terry and Zeev said. I agree with them but I would go a bit more than that. I think as we transition to this world of 2020 and beyond where new business models, new service models will be enabled. So really I think as we transition from 4G we'll be reaching a world where new services and new values will be unleashed right from the networks that we've built and the networks we are going to build. So as we transition to 5G it's more than just back wireless. It's also about how do we transform business models. Remember the rise of the internet giants really took over the revenue stream from most mobile operators. I've seen a lack of ROI, a revenue stream so that's the challenge we have. Interesting. And so some great topics for us to circle back on. So let's start with a state of 5G today is 5G, I've seen the projections of real world deployments coming in the early 2020s to now trials running today and it seems like we've sped up the movement of 5G into production environments. Where are we today with respect to 5G? Terry, why don't you kick us off? I think what we are seeing unfortunately there's the marketing and there's the reality as usual and we all know that with 4G we certainly in the North American market had some confusion over definitions of 4G and I think you're going to get the same thing with 5G unfortunately. There isn't going to be a clean generational cut over. So we are seeing some early adoption of 5G for residential broadband supplements. So really going to that additional capacity, additional spectrum being made available for last mile, last kilometer connectivity. That's something that we'll see before 2020 and I think you're already seeing announcements out of Verizon and AT&T regarding that. We're seeing some things in Japan and Korea there but those aren't really the 5G that we're talking about. You know we've been talking about IoT connected devices, low latency, massive deployment and those low power applications aren't necessarily enabled by the pre 5G 5G that we will see. So 2020 and beyond I think that's really what we're talking about for skilled implementation and there are going to be some very big differences between the regional rollouts. You look at 4G, 4G in Europe versus 4G in North America, very different picture. Scales of operator deployments are different and the regional coverage is different and I think we're going to see some of that even perhaps more with 5G because as Uppcar said earlier some of the carriers out there are having a much more difficult time justifying the capex of going to a new generation of technology than others are and that's going to shape how quickly these things roll out. So when we say the applications have to find a way to be realized if maybe 5G technology or a mashup of 5G and other technologies. We've seen some things with 4G recently round the introduction of profiles that allow increasing IoT capabilities from 4G and that's an important stepping stone and I think we'll see a lot of carriers try to leverage that as a way to address IoT before the major investment of 5G. So Zil, let me follow up with you on a question based on what Terry said as you're playing in the IoT space today, are you limited by the fact that the initial rollouts are residential focused and that the true full 5G infrastructure to support things like IoT may be still a few years away or how do you begin to deliver IoT solutions without necessarily being dependent on the speed of rollout of 5G? I think Terry has it right. I think there's a big difference between the marketing and reality of 5G. The standards make a difference obviously. One of the biggest concerns that we've had for example and the people who have been transitioning even to 4G has been the fact that unlike 2G, 3G where the spectrum being used for those technologies around the world was very consistent, 4G was a problem. Even within the US if you picked a certain radio that didn't have a certain band you were limited by the number of service operators who could provide the capabilities that you need and around the world it became even worse. We have some large customers who are looking at international deployments who are literally saying oh boy I have to keep six different radios to worry about how I'm going to provide services around the world in 4G. The problem that we see with 5G is not really the fact that technology has to evolve but it's not driven by the IoT requirements, it's driven by the people who need faster and faster smartphone capabilities, faster approaches for downloading data for other applications other than IoT. The fact that technology is transitioned relatively quickly is a big problem. I'm hoping that the low power stuff will actually have some longevity because that's where people get very concerned. When you're talking about 10, 20, 50 billion depending on whose number you believe, devices out there, if you have to make a change, if you have to make a technology change after even the devices that are deployed out there have served their useful life it's a problem. We need to make sure that the 5G coverage is stable and that we don't move away from 4G too quickly. My anticipation is that the standards will stabilize by the end of this decade, 2020. So IoT will really pick up steam in 5G as Teri mentioned, I think in the next decade. The estimates that I see from the ITU is that 4G-LT is supposed to be around through 2035, that's good. I'm hoping that 5G will not stop certain carriers from increasing their 4G-LT coverage because that could be a big issue for the customers who need it today. So you mentioned the economics and obviously that's a big issue whenever you're looking at a technology like 5G that requires very significant infrastructure investments. Where are service providers looking to monetize 5G? How can they build the business cases for making the investment? So just to carry on the thread what Ze just mentioned earlier and what Teri brought up. So just for the audience, I personally see 5G as an overlay technology. It will be an add-on capability. And most operators right now are still trying to monetize and build out using infrastructure and service providers that is cost-effective. They're very reluctant, right? So let's distinguish what mobile operators, ISP providers are going to provide and what new services and capabilities and new models in this world of data science and predictive analytics is going to unleash, right? So the overlay networks of sensory IoT, I would go even beyond what Ze mentioned about 30 billion. I see a world in 10 years time of a trillion devices. The question when we get to a trillion devices, if you add up how many sensors you have around you, is how are we going to connect, right? So we have a connectivity economics thing. So yes, coming back to your question again, yeah, the operators struggling actually. We are all, we're actually taking some of the benefit of that, right? Right now, if you saw Verizon, Verizon joined the unlimited bundle package, because you cannot afford not to stay in the game, right? So the game is poker and it's becoming really a high-level poker game. Does service providers have a sense of where their opportunities are to monetize? I mean, looking at RQ over the last few years, it's been relatively flat, at least in the consumer space, a lot of what you see here, at least here in the US, are providers chasing each other, taking their customers away, and then losing them back based on the next deal. Where are the opportunities for new revenue streams that you see? So as you saw the new build on the hill, right, of allowing data sharing. So question again would be all these players have been building up data, and some of them having been leveraging the data, the data has been going over to the internet giants, the Googles and the Facebooks have been using all that traffic, data, analytics. So the real challenge now is, can these guys, can the service providers, right, and the new entrants, right, remember, more and more these operators are becoming more and more vertically integrated, they're acquiring other services like entertainment and other kinds of value-added services. How do they leverage all the data analytics and predictions behind that? And so those will help the business models. And of course, create lots of battles between the electronic freedom foundation, and the business model. It didn't, right? Yeah. So see, I had a question for you a little bit, to build on what you brought up earlier about speed, not necessarily speed being the key benefit of 5G, but also some of the low latency characteristics, what are some of the kinds of things that 5G will enable in an IoT world that aren't possible today in 4G, Wi-Fi, other kinds of services that are out there? That's not a good question. I think that 5G will enable that end of the application spectrum, which really needs high performance. And I think some of those applications are yet to be determined. We have seen customers wanting to do video feeds from certain devices that are monitoring either the driver of a vehicle or providing the capability of doing downloads of information at a much more rapid pace. I think that 5G will also enable in certain classes of automotive applications the ability to get functions that we wouldn't try to do today in 2G, 3G, or 4G, because it simply aren't fast enough. I don't believe 5G will be successful in the autonomous car revolution because the performance requirements there are pretty enormous. Certainly not necessarily the highest end of the self-driving car solutions, but certainly the level or two down from there has been defined by the autonomous car industry. That is where having some of this low latency high data rates will allow information to be sent to the vehicles and the fleets and the trucks at a rate fast enough for them to take advantage of that. So as you think about that potential future where you might have millions or even trillions as Utkar mentioned of devices, obviously it probably isn't scalable to have all of those devices connecting across 5G network back to a data center. How do we build out that infrastructure to potentially do localize processing? Where does that happen in a 5G environment? That's a darn good question. If I might just address one comment which I think is very important, remote processing, which Cisco likes to call fun computing and there are other terms associated with that are going to be key. We have to avoid creating haystacks of data while I absolutely agree that data analytics are vital to these applications. We have a tendency to create what I call somebody else actually term this coin. I love it. Data museums and we have to avoid that. We need to have relevancy that data has to arrive in a timely manner for the business purpose for that application to be fulfilled. Unless we can do that in a good way and make sure that the data is sent regardless of the transport of the information that is being sent, unless we can make sure that what we send is relevant to the application, we're in trouble. I think that the fog computing requirements that will be set, not necessarily at the sensors because they may be very dumb or the truth of the sensors will be out there, but certainly at the various gateways and other network elements along the way to provide that level of, I hate to use the word filtering, but I'd rather say remote processing of that information that is vital to the applications. Is that an opportunity I think for service providers to get into that space where they may have to have a lot more intelligence versus just carrying this? Absolutely. I think, okay, so I'll perhaps be a little argumentative here and question whether the service providers are in a position to do some of these things. Realistically speaking, the DNA of the organization is a critical factor and we're talking here about a very fundamentally different approach towards not just building a network but managing facilities. In principle, a service provider ought to be able to create those, let's say, shared resources, these fog data centers at the network edge, but there are all these issues of multi-tenancy and data sovereignty that are going to be very, very difficult to manage and if you look at who's done the best job of cracking those problems to date, that is new disruptive players. It's Amazon who would have thought Amazon would have any qualification in that space, but they have done a tremendous job. So the idea that connected car is going to be, if you'll pardon the expression, driven by the carrier community and carrier technologies, I'm not so sure. Yeah, I agree with that. So just taking on those steps or what Z mentioned and Terry, just to keep it going, keep the flow going, yes, don't get argumentative yet, I agree. So I'm busy, evolved in network transformation, bringing software defined networking to the mobile edge. So how do we bring, so we haven't been able to be successful as they are. We haven't been able to evolve the radio, but what we have been successful is transforming the data networks. So moving the software defined networking right to the mobile edge. Now the challenge we have right, like Terry's mentioned, is once we've got these connected cars, which we've been trying to do for the last 15 years, and to just bring a simple model in the connected car of active vehicle safety, we will have active vehicle safety in the next few years. There's no, the DOTs on that road. So as we have the active vehicle safety, what do we do with the car that's connected? Do we put storage in there? Do we put local computing? How much we put it in there, right? And then once we put it in there, how are we going to realize the connectivity around it? So when the cars parked, what do we do with the car parked? Can we use the parked car as a network densification model? So those are the some of the things that I'm busy involving is network transformation, using different business models and different players that have been sitting around for the last five or 10, 20 years. So does that pretend that 5G isn't necessarily the requirement that there could be evolution of messaging among connected devices? Exactly. Remember, I said overlay, right? So the operators want to leverage. Remember also that as we transformation into this 4G, there was consolidation on equipment manufacturers. So they have very little wiggle room on breaking down pricing. So they're struggling trying to get their revenue and their ROIs together. So how can they leverage existing 4G networks for even longer legibility? Let me ask you another question, just sort of honing in again on the economics and business case around 5G. Are you starting to see businesses looking at the kinds of services that can be delivered in a more connected world? We talked quite a bit about connected cars, but do businesses outside of the large automakers see any value in 5G or they're starting to look at it as more than just higher speed connectivity? Correct. So some of them. So it's all about bringing new service and business models. Remember, it's about risk reduction and risk management. So how can these guys use services of data and video in an economic way to reduce their risk or reduce their predictive. So there's more and more needs to have in better services. Anyone else have any comment about what they're seeing in terms of the kinds of services that are being enabled by 5G? Zee here, I think that that's a bit early at this stage yet. I have yet to see a single 5G capable radio that I would say could be used in an IoT application today. And I don't anticipate that for a number of years. I mean, people are still wrapping their heads around LTE 4G radio's availability, pricing for large scale deployments. I think what one, you know, we're still seeing interesting evolutionary stages here with LTE. If you look at some of the recent rate plan announcements and network, let's say, updates around machine profile for LTE, where you're now seeing a dramatic change in the cost of a subscription for a sensor device. Now, it's dramatic when you compare it to what a traditional consumer ARPU is. It's still a long way from what it needs if you're going to have a trillion devices out there. So we've taken a step on the path, but there are many more steps to come. I'll take an example. And if you look at logistical tracking, for the last number of years, you have solutions that at the level of tracking perhaps a shipment container on a global basis. There's a business case for that. But you're not going to track an individual box or parcel with real-time data unless it's a very high-value object. Well, as the cost comes down, then the range of things which you can start to track, you know, today you go on to UPS and you can see where your parcel is, you can imagine and it's becoming reality that you will be able to track not just where it is, but its environmental conditions. If you're shipping medical materials, you'll have the ability to see what its historical lifetime shipment condition was. If you're shipping food or perishables, the cost effectiveness of tracking through the entire lifetime of that object becomes practical. And that's where the trillion, you know, when you get to the point where you have disposable sensors embedded in objects that you're transporting through the world, that's when we've really reached the point where it's transformational. But there's many steps on the path. It doesn't mean you have to wait until you've reached those economics before you can start to insert this in high-value transactions and tracking the drama that is delivering these packages is absolutely important. Correct. So as Terry was saying is transformation, let me throw another buzzword in here, guys, network slicing, right? So we will see, I'm busy involved in, as Terry knows I'm busy involved in enabling neutral venue hosting. So as we transform the networks to the mobile edge, we will be transforming and providing network slicing on different services and running on top of it. So a little, so those will be really, but so I think we'll see those subtle changes in the network, right? And those will be indicators that 5G is arriving, right? Rather than seeing a massive mobile radio head in my cell phone, right, at 38 gigs, right? We're still far away for when we're going to light up those street lamp posts, right? We're willing me to wave radio heads as an example. We're winding down. We've got a couple of minutes left. One last question I just kind of put out to everybody. There's a lot of different variants as a 4G and high cost of having to have different kinds of radios that speak on the Verizon network and the AT&T network and global networks and so on. Will 5G solve that? Will we have a single global universal 5G standard? Whoever would like to take that one? I think we'll have a standard, but we won't have consistent availability of spectrum. We're already seeing it fragmentation of spectrum allocations. Regulators just can't solve that problem and I don't see it happening with 5G. Correct, correct. So I'm an RF guy, it doesn't tell you, but I am. So my Holy Grail has always been SDR. So how do we use spectrum? How do we do what the military guys have been doing that's dynamic spectrum allocation? And we see signs of that. We see spectrum access managers coming online. We've seen new spectrums in 3.5 gigs and 5 gigs being made available, lightly reusing spectrums that are not occupied, right? And so the challenge we have again is how are we going to bundle these spectrum slots together, right? And make services out well. With that, we'll have to wrap up to the time. I really would like to thank all of you for joining us today, as well as our distinguished panel. And Dean, let me turn it up over to you for some closing comments. Thank you. You bet. Thank you, Erwin, for moderating today and thank you, panelists. You were all exceedingly insightful. Frankly, I thought maybe we should just order some lunch and keep this thing going all afternoon. I feel like we just barely scraped the surface. I can't thank you enough for joining us today. Also, thank you to our audience for joining us if you would like to see this and our other monthly virtual roundtables on demand plus the calendar for upcoming roundtables both virtually and at Telecom Exchange, check out jamescato.com and the telecomexchange.com. If you'd like your C-level to be featured here next, email us at pr at jamescato.com. Thanks again, everyone, for tuning in to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals and JSA radio, your voice for tech and telecom on iHeart radio. We will see you soon.