>> Narrator: 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.
We're covering Micron Insights 2019.
I'm Dave Vellante and my co-host, David Floyer.
This event is kind of interesting, David.
It basically intersperses Cube interviews
with big TED discussions, thought leadership.
We've heard from automotive, healthcare and 5G discussions.
And Noel Kenehan is here, he's the vice president,
CTO of the emerging business, Ericsson.
You were just on a panel, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thanks a lot, great to be here.
>> You were talking about 5G,
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
99, a lot of our business today
is done with operators, merging 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, either 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 an eco system
that's pumping right along and carriers are adopting.
And the users are just waiting.
So what should we know about 5G?
>> So, I think there's a couple of different things,
one is from a consumer perspective.
You're definitely looking at faster,
better, all the things we've got from the other G's,
all the things you know today, you know.
Faster downloads and movies.
I think what we're, and I'm in the tech business,
not in the prediction business, you know,
I think what we've learned from previous technology,
is that 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,
you're talking about industry 4.0,
and really transforming industries
and cutting the cables in production lines,
allowing monitoring assistance that never happened before,
a lot of used cases that can be helped there.
>> So, I have a young-ish son of 22,
and I look at my bill every month.
The idea of him downloading 10 times more data,
doesn't fill me with a glee, just the opposite.
>> It excites the carriers.
(Laughter)
>> I mean, while we've seen what every, and of course
>> Well, that was the question, how much of a down,
>> Yeah,
>> How much lower is the price going to be on this platform?
Because you have to invest an awful lot in it.
>> Absolutely, so I mean, we're going to see tens...
Orders of magnitude cheaper.
So, even as it is now at 4G, we're seeing a lot
of the unlimited plans coming available.
So, I think we're just going to see more of that.
And then the question, actually a bit question for 5G,
is probably, will you pay for it?
You know, if we talk about H compute and low latency,
if you're a gamer, and I can give you x milliseconds
of latency vs 2x of latency, how much would you pay for that
so, 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 eco-system, you need to get stuff out there
and actually bet.
>> So, some of the economic impact is fuzzy,
but in thinking about past is not prolonged,
but if you think about the other G's as they were adopted,
what can we learn from those and how do you think 5G
will be different inn terms of it's adoptions 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 month ago, just before summer.
Within two months, they had a million 5G subscribers,
with smartphones in their hands.
Two months later, they added 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.
You know, so to jump directly to smartphones
is huge adoption, it's going to happen fast.
>> What are 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.
I know 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 thick and fast,
so all your new devices, most of the high end devices
have 5G capability already in there.
And then the network is 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, you know,
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 the,
sort of the devs?
>> So, we're trying to, and we're working with
a lot of the eco-system.
We have, we call it the D15 studio
in our Santa Clara office.
We're bringing developers in there,
really trying to understand, because, you know,
we talk telecom as well.
So we want to expose things, we want to understand,
Okay do you know if we say quality service,
what does that mean for you, you know,
how do you translate that.
So, we're working with, you know, the cloud players,
where the developers live, to some extent,
to bring in that eco-system and understand how
that all plays together.
>> So, go ahead.
>> If you look at it long term, obviously, it's going to happen.
But, the experience is as I go around the States,
you got all these different 4G's, 3G's Edge's,
still in a very very patchy level of it.
Is this going to be different?
Is this actually going to go into different places.
Because this is a big investment that has to be made.
And a lot of things really 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, in 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, obviously you're going to have denser deployments
in the city than you are in the country side 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, you know,
when we have lower frequencies spectrum,
you can cover 100 miles with one base station.
As you get to the mm wave, which is,
you get super high band widths
when you're at 100's of meters.
>> Yeah
>> So, obviously, one is more suitable
for rural environments, the other is more suitable
for urban environments.
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 G's.
>> So, there's choice there.
>> Absolutely.
>> In terms of how you deploy, or leverage the spectrum.
So, you're saying that the higher performance end
of the spectrum is going to require a greater density
of other components.
And that's when people talk about how it's going to be
a lot more distributed, you know,
pieces of the 5G network, they 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 ATNT's
the advisers of the work are doing a lot
of the heavy lifting, with our support
to actually put the radios and the towers in place.
Then there's a H compute piece as well, which is
different players are putting in that.
So, a lot of that infrastructure is being done, I think.
One thing that we've been pushing quite a lot,
all our install base of radio is 5G upgradeable
via software.
So that means that a lot of the already installed
radios and infrastructure, you're just, you know
a software upgrade, and an hour later it's now 5G ready.
So, I think that's a big piece back to your question
of how quickly can it reach all these 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 H compution,
you have to invest billions in 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 vs 15 milliseconds,
and that might not sound like a lot,
but that's a lot of extra infrastructure
you would need to put out.
So, I think that would still be more true,
and obviously some of that will happen quicker
in a downtown San Francisco, than it will in,
you know, the middle of Nevada, for example.
>> Well, the others that we mentioned before,
it's unclear what new applications
are going to emerge here.
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 said,
the gamers, how much will they pay for it?
So those are some of the uncertainties,
but they'll shake themselves out.
>> Absolutely.
>> These guys are pretty smart.
But 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 boon?
>> Yeah, I mean, invest, no.
>> Party hats!
(laughing)
>> I think it's, when you look at the number
of devices, and, okay, what's a device?
A device is your smartphone,
well, a device is now your car, it's every IOT device
and down to your toaster and all the crazy stuff
the people are talking about, to, I mean,
to every industrial application, to all that H 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.
You know, it's just unimaginable amount of
data storage, the memory you're going to need
in a vehicle, you know.
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, huge opportunity.
>> Well, I'd be willing to pay for some memory
in my appliances, so they'll tell me when
they're going to break.
I just got a new dish washer and I can program it
with my remote, I don't want to program it with my remote.
I just want to know that on Thanksgiving morning,
that it works, and 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 is a huge use case, I can't wait till that happens.
Your, last question.
>> So, I was following up on that last point
you were making.
>> Go ahead.
(load speaker announcing)
So, 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 these devices being put very very close,
to the, 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?
>> I actually, we're not seeing it that much,
I mean if you look across the globe,
China obviously is a lightly unique situation,
massive deployments already happening there,
like I said, South-East Asia, South Korea being
among, you know, the forefront,
big deployments already there.
We're seeing big build from industries already,
and the operators here in US are announcing new cities,
you know, every month, practically,so.
>> Right.
>> They're really full on into this
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, so.
>> I think it depends, I mean,
I was at a meeting the other day in Boston
with a lot of city officials and folks who worked
at the Mayor's office.
They're envisioning Boston, you know,
for the next 50 years, smart cities.
And 5G was like if you did a word cloud,
5G was like, the number one topic.
>> Of course.
>> You know, we talked earlier about sports stadiums,
you could see that being,
>> It's got to be these hotspots,
where it's all very very high value.
>> But the city, in this case, in Boston's case,
they're going to invest.
>> 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.
>> Great, all right, we got to go before they blow us out.
Noel, thanks very much for coming through.
>> Thank you very much.
>> All right, good to have you.
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
in San Francisco. We'll be right back.
(energetic music plays)