 The Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Good afternoon, everyone. The Cube Live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC23, Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of four days of Cube content. I know, it's amazing. We're going to have a great conversation next with Dish and Dell, talking about the value of automation and telecom for 5G. Please welcome Song To, Senior Director of Product Management, Infrastructure Automation at Dell, and Sid Chenomalo, VP of Technology Development at Dish. Guys, great to have you on the Cube. Thank you. It's a pleasure. So let's go ahead and start with you. We know that Dish is developing its own open cloud-native 5G network from the ground up. Talk to us about, before you were working with Dell, what the situation was like and why you brought Dell in to help drive the innovation. Ah, that's a good question. So three years ago, we started the journey. And one thing that was very clear to us is that we want to work with the partners who are going to be the leaders in this space. And it was very clear we're going to be in the clouds side. We're going to be in hybrid cloud. We're going to have our own data centers. Everything that we built is going to replicate a cloud model. Because it was very, like, we said, what is 5G? Fundamentally, if you think about 5G, right? Everyone says, people talk about speeds. Okay, get it. But it's also about vertical industries. It's about customization of a network, application-driven network, that's the way I call it. Because if you walk around the floor, right, now everyone's talking about monetization of 5G. Everyone keeps saying enterprise. So you put two and two together, what do you get? If that means you need to work with the leaders who have been serving enterprises forever, who knows enterprises pain, they know all the problem statements. So we said, okay, let's see who's out there and who can help us. And then, obviously, Dell comes to the picture and said, so we had a good conversation. There was an alignment and where Dell wanted to go long-term. So we saw synergies. So we had a vision. We needed their help. They wanted to get into this space too. So there was an agreement. Let's get to do it together. It's been a good partnership since then. What were some of the challenges that you had at that time going, we've got some challenges here, some risks. We want to move the dish forward and automate. Talk about some of those challenges that helped you understand, yeah, Dell's the right partner for this. Number one, first is when we started this, right? I'll be honest. I don't think we anticipated the complexity. We didn't know what we didn't know. So initially it was learning from Dell who was more like teaching us. This is what you're going to see. This is how it's going to look like. And then we started bringing the telco aspects on top of it. So it was not like I'm going to build a 5G. We said, no, Dell, tell me what does the data center look like? Tell me the day-to-day challenges. How do you bring a server in? How the rack looks like? What are the connectivity? So learning, then you bring the telco as an application. It was not like a telco first. It was like a software first, infrastructure second. Now you bring in the telco part of it. So, I mean, challenges I would say, right? Everything was new on pretty much across the board for us. It was not just one thing. We were doing OpenRAN, which was a brand new. Cloud native was completely new. 5G standalone was new. No one had done that before. And obviously it was hybrid cloud. So I think we were on a stool sitting with the four legs. All were wobbly. We made it. So automation was definitely the key. We knew we had to go at a scale because we were in FCC deployment. We are meeting like we'll be covering 230 million POPs by June of this year. So aggressive timelines. Wait, say that again. How many? So say that again, how many? 230 million. And POPs being points of presence? No. A population. Okay, I'm sorry. Okay, okay, good. Okay, I'm sorry. Very aggressive build out for us. Wow. And automation has to be the key for it because we just cannot, first of all, we cannot scale a company. We're a startup. This wireless is a startup. That's how we started with a handful of people. We obviously hired a lot of people since then, but we said we will never be at the scale of the existing CSPs today. We can't. Time is not on our side and we don't want to be at that scale anyway because we want to be nimble, move fast. So what do you need? Automation. Automation at every layer. And it's a journey. Never stops. No, no, it doesn't stop. Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, she's- Go ahead and get a question in. I don't want to hop. So when most people hear dish, they think of streaming content. They think of alternative to cable provider in that space. But just clarify for us all of the things that dish is involved with today and what dish aspires to be involved with as we move forward. Good question. We want to be in the connectivity space. We want to connect everything. That's our goal, our mission statement. We started with the satellite. Since then we moved on to the IPTV sling, which is the leader. So we are not afraid to take risks, right? So what we own? We own satellites. We know content delivery very well. I think we have done that for many years. We agreed to that. Now we understand wireless. What we want to do is, we want to deliver the data to the customers and whether it could be videos, it could be audio data, voice, anything. Or it could be a machine. We just want to be in the connectivity space of connecting everything. And based on, you look around, right? It's all about connectivity. Everything requires connectivity. It's all about data monetization. And we want to be there in every aspect of it. Connectivity is almost the lifeblood these days of everything that we do, right? And in every industry. So I'm talking a little bit about the dish wireless, use case, how some of their challenges in Telco really maybe helped even Dell accelerate its presence in Telco. Absolutely, right. I think one thing that Sid mentioned, 230 million populations. But what does that translate to in terms of infrastructure deployment? Because he said, it's a startup. They started from not a whole lot in terms of coverage. So in terms of 5G deployment, whether it's virtualized or open ran, there needs to be distributed infrastructure that covers the entire United States, right? A certain percentage of the population is still a huge amount of coverage. So deploy tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of servers around the country. Get them set up, get them configured and maintain and monitor and meter, all of that. We help this to essentially roll that out, get it going and then to deploy their RAN workload on top. I mean, that's a very significant undertaking. We were very proud to be able to offer our bare metal orchestrator to facilitate that. But ultimately, their success is their success. We are there to help, right? We are a partner and we're happy to definitely be able to say we got to a point that we are happy and claim some success there. Well, that's why we selected Dell. Thank you. Let's unpack a little bit of some of the successes, some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far working with Dell. Let me give you an example. Today we have an ability to upgrade, update, even swap a RAN vendor overnight entire market. Onward overnight, give me hours, I'll do the entire thing for you from scratch. We can instantiate entire data center racks remotely in a matter of minutes. Can I do that without automation and with the help? We have curated an extraordinary, what do you call, orchestration mechanism of finely tuned data sets and pipelines. It's like a machine. It keeps spinning, it's very good. And again, not something that happened overnight, took us several months to get there with a lot of our partners. And Dell was there. Right. I'd be curious to get your perspectives, each of you, on some of the buzzes that was going on around the show where the telecom plumbing providers have complained about the content streaming through and maybe they need to charge more for access and Netflix hit back and said, well, hold on a minute. You wouldn't have anything to deliver to your customers if it weren't for the content we were producing. Maybe we need licensing fees from you. What is your view on that in terms of this whole over the top conversation? Tish seems sort of kind of in a hybrid position there. Well, it's a very complex question. I think everyone is struggling with it. So I'm not sure if I have the right answer for it. We are definitely unique because we own the content too. Do we want to offer? We probably may offer our own content over the wireless service. There is a pros and cons. I mean, purely from as a MNO service provider. It's a lot of effort and cost for us to deliver a huge amount of bandwidth. But again, the networks are being built to handle huge capacity. So if you don't have video, what do we do? That's also realistic question. I think there is a mechanism where the cost and the value both have to be shared. So that is a win-win for everyone. It's not lob sorry to one and said you carry most of the cost. And I'm transparent. It doesn't work that way long term. And especially given the 5G side with all the slicing capabilities and ability to offer QoS a better quality of experience. I think there's a value to be created here. From a, if you look at the infrastructure necessary to drive all of these things, we've seen just go back to our own consumer experience with the internet. We've gone from text to images to video, to high definition video, to is 8K video absurd? Do we really need to be able to handle that? What are the things that need to be supported as we move forward? Is it that we scale out into this world of billions and billions of things that are connected? Or are there these much bigger, fatter pipelines for things like 8K video or is it a combination of the two? What is Dell thinking of when it thinks of the infrastructure that it builds and how you customize that to address those things? What's on the horizon? Dave, I think that's a very good question, right? Certainly, communication service providers like this has built out the capacity to handle the customers that they want to serve. But there's another aspect of this I think I'd like to add on top of the question you posed. It's not about 8K, 10, say a thousand streams of 8K, I need to be able to handle that. I think the present challenge right now is really say there's a sports stadium that you need to activate so that not about everyone filming that sports game, it's about, hey, I got to tell my whoever, I got a 10 seconds video clip that I got to share with my friends. It's not about copy, right? It's more about can you as a provider The NFL is listening. Exactly. Can you as a provider handle that service because otherwise your customers say, oh, I got into the sports stadium every time I could not even text my daughter? Yeah. So how do you then scale up the infrastructure as needed, the bandwidth as needed and scale back down when it's not maybe because the infrastructure can potentially be repurposed for a different workload too. That requires automation, right? From bottom to top all the way infrastructure, all the way up to the workload. And that's I think a question that people are starting to ask. I'm not sure. You guys have thought about that too as a... I mean, instant gratification is the new thing, right? Everyone wants instant response, everyone feedback, everything. So connectivity is given. I do think there is a space for both billions of devices and the 8K and probably 16K in the future. It's going to happen in the technology walls. That's why I like say the 5G and especially the way we architect our own network. We call it network of networks. I'm not designing a network that is only for one monolithic application or one stack only. We are actually programmable network because I know network A is for 8K. Network B is for IoT. Network C is for vehicular. Network D is for something else. And the leash can keep on growing. I don't think we can stifle innovation at any level and say, well, you can't do this because we are not ready. World is going to move too fast. Technology is too fast for all of us. But do you have to prioritize? If there's a business, it's all top-down driven, not much of a technology driven. If there's a business, as I said, there's a value to be made, it's prioritized. What's your, stick with you, your observations. This is day three of MWC 23. Lot of talk here on desegregation. A lot of talk about open-run. A lot of talk about private 5G wireless networks. But also some controversy. You brought up the Netflix controversy. What are some of the messages that you've heard so far from this event and then Son will ask you the same question. That excite you about the direction that the industry is going and where dish wireless stands within it? I mean, I didn't have a chance to walk the floor. But for wherever I have been in the last two and a half days, one thing that stood out is people are no longer talking about gigabits capacity anymore. They are talking about monetization of the network. Everyone is talking APIs now. Yeah. That's what, that's the buzzword. If I say monetization, API. I got a beautiful network. Not tell me how to make money off it. And how do I work with each other? It's no longer about I want to own it all. What can I do to partner with A, partner with B? How can we all grow together? I think that's the theme that I see this year compared to the previous years where it was always about like, hey, build the best 5G network with the high speeds, big radios. I don't even see radios, by the way. Interesting. Yeah, so the actual, it's almost fascinating when you toil in obscurity to build these critical components and then people ignore you. So I feel for the radio people. Being a long-term infrastructure guy. What have you been seeing here that's interesting? A few things that I feel quite excited about from the conversation I've had. One is on the private mobility side, as Lisa you said. I'm seeing certainly customers, partners, and even in the booth talking about what the use cases are, right? Rather than, hey, here's the code technology. We're actually people talking about use cases now. And with the communication service providers and the operators, I'm hearing, of course, I mean, this doesn't have that problem because it's building a whole new. But there are other providers that are saying, hey, we acknowledge that we need to transform and we are on the way too. Rather than saying, can I not do it and still live with the modern world? So I feel that we always need to be ready to change because the world, the market, and all other factors will cause us to either change or really to change. And I think we are changing. Open system is becoming more of a expected future. It's just, how do we get there, right? What do we need to learn as we get there? And we're happy to provide the support as a partner, the automation technology, and even the solutions to enable that from Dell's perspective. So dish in particular, dish wireless, despite the fact that everyone's heard of dish. Dish has been around for a long time. Where you sit within dish, dish wireless, you described it as a startup. You don't feel encumbered by a lot of the legacy things that maybe some other providers do. Is that a fair statement? Or are you having to navigate that? We call it ambidextrous management in the CTO world where it's like, got to keep the lights on, got to keep the existing revenue flowing. Also got to innovate. How do you blend the two? Is that a challenge? Well, probably not a challenge for me. I'm on the wireless technology and architecture side. So I get to do the cool stuff. You don't have to worry about day to day operations and complexity and revenue. Someone else is managing that complex part. They let me play with my toys. Well played. Well played. Guys, it's been great having you on the program talking about what dish wireless is doing with Dell. Thanks to Dell. We're going to be watching this space to see how you continue to innovate. Thank you so much for joining us on the program. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Our pleasure. We're our guests and for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from MWC23. Stick around. Our next guest joins Dave and me in just a minute.