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April Tech News Salad: Satellites, AI, Enterprise 5G & Consumer Bits – The Curse of The Pub Edition
17 Plays20 hours ago
In this episode, April Tech News Salad: Satellites, AI, Enterprise 5G & Consumer Bits – PUB Edition, we investigate the biggest stories shaping the tech landscape right now. From satellite M&A breakthroughs expanding global connectivity to the different paths telcos are taking with AI and the worrying circularity of the AI economy, we unpack what actually matters beyond the headlines.
We also dive into how 5G is evolving for business use cases discussing the fan-favorite private 5G market, and the latest consumer tech signals worth watching.
Firstly recorded in a relaxed airport lounge with an Aperol Spritz, then re-recorded multiple times due to challenges with sound quality, this episode, now categorized as a pub edition, blends sharp insight with candid views —perfect for anyone trying to keep up in a chill way without getting lost in the noise.
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Episode Preview
00:00:04
Pablo Tomasi
Welcome back to the Telco Drift, a podcast exploring tech telecoms and other sci-fi stories. I am Pablo, your host, and in today's episode we will go through a few recent developments that worth discussing and that I think should be on your radar.
00:00:20
Pablo Tomasi
Now we will chat about satellite AI, network slicing, and emerging strategies. This was initially supposed to be a pub episode. um However, I tried to record it. There was actually lounge, not a pub.
00:00:35
Pablo Tomasi
The sound was terrible. So then I recorded again in the studio. Sound was somehow still terrible. Recorded again, nothing
Satellite Industry News
00:00:44
Pablo Tomasi
better. And now this, I think, is like the fourth time also that i'm trying to record this episode so clearly there is a little bit of a curse on the pub episode but hopefully the fourth time is gonna be the charm so let's see let's see what we get here now let's let's get started though let's dive into the the main themes of today's episode so first of all satellite is quite a hot market right now and it should be in your radar whether you're a believer or not
00:01:15
Pablo Tomasi
The most interesting announcement that that we've seen recently is definitely Amazon Leo acquisition of Global Star Now, if you know me, if you have been following me on LinkedIn, if you read what I wrote with my other analyst hat, you know a bit skeptical about whether this acquisition will do what Amazon Leo wants it to do.
00:01:36
Pablo Tomasi
And could this acquisition be only about spectrum? Possibly, is the spectrum good enough for what Amazon Leo wants to do? That's up for debate.
00:01:47
Pablo Tomasi
The bottom line though is nothing related on whether the acquisition will be successful or not. It's that this is a chess game that is being played right now. There's like an 11 billion dollars chip that was put on the table.
00:02:00
Pablo Tomasi
So lots of things happening.
Book Recommendations and Message for Amy
00:02:03
Pablo Tomasi
this marker and just selecting another couple of very quick satellite related announcement DT partnered with Starlink to launch the Starlink broadband and i think if you're a telco positioning yourself as a sovereign player Starlink is not the right partner for you because Starlink is as far as you can think from a sovereign partner at this point in time Now the other interesting thing that has happened, AST SpaceMobile, Bluebird 7, failed to reach right orbit It was launched using Blue Origin Reusable Glenn Rocket.
00:02:43
Pablo Tomasi
it's ah you know It happens in this market, though the impact of this, I think, is bigger for AST because of the more limited number of satellites the company wants to have in this constellation.
00:02:55
Pablo Tomasi
on a more positive side from sort this failed attempt to launch the satellite in orbit the reusable rocket, by the way there is reference there, Never tell me the odds, I love that reference managed to land, so something positive came out of a very unfortunate launch overall There are many other things that I could say about satellite, you know, the relevance of sovereignty, the relevance of supply chain, but, you know, not not going to go through all of that right now.
AI in Telecoms: Strategies and Skepticism
00:03:28
Pablo Tomasi
instead will move from satellite to literature so last episode i had the pleasure to have my good friend amy join me on the podcast and we talked about a little bit of everything we did not have time however to discuss new book recommendation so you know later on i i caught up with her and here a couple of her recommendations one is uh Babel or Babel the Necessity of Violence and the other recommendation is The Master And Margherita so Amy if you're listening to the podcast and now you're like you know a core fan of the podcast let me know just to ensure that I didn't butcher your recommendation and you know feel free to comment if I missed anything so what's next after books?
00:04:14
Pablo Tomasi
well has to be AI There are a couple of positive things about AI and a couple of negative negative things about AI. On the positive side, it's interesting to see telcos taking different paths.
00:04:27
Pablo Tomasi
This is rare in the market. it Usually telcos do the same thing. Think about 5GSA adoption. Someone may do it earlier, someone later on, but everyone is going in the same direction.
00:04:40
Pablo Tomasi
With AI things are a little bit different. So for instance SK Telecom has been partnered with ARM and Korean AI chip startup Rebellions to develop an AI inference server solution.
00:04:55
Pablo Tomasi
if we stick to Naver Cloud Korean market, know NVIDIA has been working with our multiple partners including LGI Research, Naver Cloud SK Telecom, advancing with the aim to advance Sovereign AI Foundation models.
00:05:12
Pablo Tomasi
This is something not everyone is going to be doing and that's again why AI can create different fortunes in the telecom world. if you look at interesting things happening in europe, deutschland launched its AI factory and i think orange has been working also to to launch an AI factory but no, that was positive right?
00:05:35
Pablo Tomasi
on the more negative side of a eye um this probably could be seen as oversimplifying things but there is a certain circularity in the economy vi so if you look closely and not even that closely you will see that some suppliers are investing in those companies that will then buy their own products.
00:06:03
Pablo Tomasi
So effectively i want to sell apples, I'm giving money to someone to buy my apples. Apple was probably not there great comparison but but do you see the the sense of it.
00:06:18
Pablo Tomasi
um It's it's a little bit worrying because there are all these investments and you know there is this growth that is kind of being fueled by by yourself by creating a demand and there is an expectation that eventually someone's going to start splashing lots of money.
00:06:35
Pablo Tomasi
on AI, someone new. I'm a bit skeptical about that and that I think it's it's a little bit worrying but let me know if I'm oversimplifying this too much, possibly, very likely, I
Setbacks in VR Development
00:06:47
Pablo Tomasi
am. Just something to keep in mind I think that so far the output, the end company will actually pay for that much AI is still not there I think Instead, if I'm looking on the impact that AI is having right now, well, there's been announcement from Meta and Microsoft announcing layoffs because of the high cost of AI. And this brings another negative side of the AI story. It's like, if AI succeeds, it's going to optimize a lot of processes and your job is at risk.
00:07:21
Pablo Tomasi
However, even if it doesn't succeed, your job is at risk because AI is so costly that companies are reducing their headcounts in order to improve their balance sheet because AI costs much to to develop and to implement.
00:07:38
Pablo Tomasi
so you know, the average Joe like myself, we're kind of living with that sword upon our head and just waiting for it to fall or not a little bit on the negative side definitely and sticking on the negative side of things believe There have been rumors that Apple has stopped to scale back the future development of its Vision Pro.
00:08:03
Pablo Tomasi
For those that are not familiar with it, the Vision Pro is the ridiculously expensive VR asset that it was developing. So it seems that resources have been shifted towards other projects and lighter AI classes.
00:08:17
Pablo Tomasi
at the same time I believe that sort of Meta also started putting on the chopping board its metaverse there was like an 80 billion something thing investment now I don't know if you've seen it I never really understood why people would want to engage in the metaverse But clearly VR hasn't had a a good few months.
5G+ Launch and Network Slicing Challenges
00:08:42
Pablo Tomasi
And it's strange. I also remember, you know, playing with the PlayStation 5, they also had their own VR headset. I believe they also discontinued it. I actually like that product very much, but clearly VR is not hitting the mark in terms of driving customer, whereas I consume rent or price usage of it.
00:09:04
Pablo Tomasi
And when talking about VR and AI, perfect plugin for a movie recommendation. The movie is called Nirvana and it touches on sort of VR element, AI element and also consciousness. So make sure to to have a look at it and let me know what do you think about it.
00:09:22
Pablo Tomasi
so in all this dark and gloom what type of news can you know change this narrative and of course has to be private networks now recently Vodafone UK launched a 5g plus local slicing and 5g boost and effectively it's you know the 5G plus of slicing is what you what the title says you're gonna have their virtual local local slice in an area up to five square kilometers is targeted at stadium logistics hubs university camps and so on so what I like is that we see more productization of network slicing but I think the the bottleneck remains the same I don't think the network, the power network was designed with so much capacity everywhere to sustain both consumers as well as different types of slicing of course telcos are telling me a different story but
00:10:17
Pablo Tomasi
um you know why would you really deploy a costly network with such higher capacity than realistically needed over a certain amount of time of course you can have a chat with your type and you can get additional infrastructure additional run but the moment you're doing that shouldn't you just better look at a fully dedicated one I think so, but we'll see. Good to see there's some innovation and also Globalstar XCOM RAN and turn product was recently
MVNOs Market Dynamics And Innovation
00:10:47
Pablo Tomasi
launched in the market. So there is there's some lag into the niche version of the private networks market.
00:10:56
Pablo Tomasi
So moving on then on the strategic side of things, maybe a little bit more consumer and I don't talk a lot about consumers because the consumer market is not giving me anything interesting honestly, it's like I'm sorry for the analysts covering consumers, it's kind of boring but I'm trying very hard so maybe I just need to you know put more efforts into finding interesting consumer stuff and but going back to sort of that strategic shift, MVNOs may well as be players to watch out for driving innovation, so US Mobile for instance is bundling its MVNO proposition across all three large telcos with starting satellite broadband and i think this is something that's going to be replicated, will be replicated in in other countries
00:11:42
Pablo Tomasi
And interestingly, I think there was ah an article, don't remember, from where we T-Mobile said we're not interested in having Starlink becoming an MVNO for us because ah they wouldn't increase our total addressable market.
00:11:59
Pablo Tomasi
And that's that's a fair point. Probably though, I don't think that should be the only reason not to get Starlink more involved into the mobile world.
00:12:12
Pablo Tomasi
I think there is like a little bit of a risk of, you know, a company with high ambition and a company that no one really knows where wants to go. So any punch with that is high risk, high reward if you want.
00:12:28
Pablo Tomasi
But sticking to MVNO's supermarket chain, Lidl is set to expand its MVNO operation to potentially 30 countries. So I like the size of this and I like sort of what could represent like a new competitive player entering different market. MVNO's is interesting because some have been successful. i've been I believe Tesco Mobile in the UK has been quite successful.
00:12:51
Pablo Tomasi
um but i also remember a few like disney mobile, espn mobile or in italy mtv mobile that failed to be you know to gain scale, failed to be successful and it's interesting because the basic and you know proposition is always the same i'm gonna target a very narrow very niche segment of the market that creates synergies with my main business so that's it that's what an MVNO normally tries to do some people manage to do that and some people don't so let's see where the little MVNO will end up
00:13:28
Pablo Tomasi
And last thing that I want to discuss, we move again away from MVNOs and this time Nokia has announced that it will sell its fixed wireless access part of the business to Inseego
Nokia's Strategic Shift
00:13:40
Pablo Tomasi
Yes, they will retain a stake in it, but effectively shows Nokia getting out of the hardware bit to focus on the areas that it highlighted as you know high growth. So the mobile infrastructure side, the fixed network, the IP and so on.
00:13:55
Pablo Tomasi
so nokia announced the strategy and now starting to divest the parts that were not considered profitable enough or whose market was not big enough for nokia and if you look at nokia listed results well some of the best that they decided to make were like bringing good results so kudos to them clearly the the strategy that they are undertaking so far is giving them the good results and just a bit unfortunate for the private network market but those were the announcements i want to discuss, now hopefully while i start editing this i will get some decent sound quality because ah honestly i can't i can't think of recording this again but did i miss anything, did miss a new announcement anything else you agree or disagree just feel free to comment and let me know if i missed anything if i should include anything else and also if you like this type of very kind of rough and a little bit over the place summary of recent announcement so feel free to comment and see you next time