hey everyone welcome back to Tech Talk I'm Juliet Beauchamp and I am here with
Jack Gold the founder and principal analyst of J. Gold Associates we are
talking about the intersection of this Huawei ban and 5g so be sure to stick
around alright Jack thank you so much for coming to the studio we really
appreciate it and I'm so excited to hear your thoughts and hear your expertise in
the networking 5g mobile wireless space so thank you thank you thank you for
having me so before we start off let's just give a
brief background of what exactly 5g is and why it's so hyped up at the moment
well 5g means different things at different
people which is typical for the wireless space but but basically 5g is the next
generation of wireless technology that's going to be looking at many improvements
one of course a speed a lot of people focus on the speed speed is important
but there's a lot of other things that are going to be going along with the
speed as well so excuse me one of the additions that are very
important to people is the notion that you're gonna have along with the speed
much more capacity to be able to send data and to actually put people online
not everyone is going to need the multi-gigabyte speeds that 5g promises
but they're going to be many more people and many more devices autonomous devices
cars your refrigerator IOT devices your dog is gonna have a roaming
communications tape oh my gosh I bet yeah yeah
so there's gonna be a lot of that kind of stuff going on it and we right now
it's very hard to provision all of the gazillions of devices there all kinds of
estimates 50 billion hundred billion 200 billion who knows what the real numbers
going to be ultimately it's gonna be a lot and so 5g will make that easier 5g
will also allow you to slice up the network really kind of slice and dice it
to your needs mm-hmm so if you really need a very high speed connection and
you're willing to pay for it I can give you a lot of bandwidth with a lot of
speed if you're an IOT device if if it's your dog and just want to know
where they are you're gonna get pinged every 30 seconds some minute two minutes
whatever it is it's very small amount of data or it's a water meter or it's
something similar like that I can give you a very small slice of the network
and price it accordingly into the pennies potentially if we're talking
about millions of devices from a large power company let's say or or Ford Motor
Company that's a little different because you'll also have entertainment
coming down to the car and things of that nature but there 5g is is showing
that we can really change the network from one that was kind of a fixed
typical Wireless even wired network where everyone gets kind of the same
thing into one where we can slice and dice and make it more of a compute
reliable network where you've got software-defined networking where you've
got network function virtualization where you can do things to the network
that we were never able to do before the difficulty is making that transition
of course yes and this is um my next question that I was actually going to
ask you I mean the premise of 5g it sounds so exciting people I think are
rightly intrigued and excited by it but it's so exciting it's so complex we're
not getting 5g tomorrow right there are a few places where 5g is available now
there are a few cities and there are a few places like Korea where they're
really going a full-bore and trying to get 5g rolled out very very quickly but
for the most part 5g is going to be a process for the most part it's it's a
typical Wireless rollout the major metropolitan areas where the carriers
can charge upfront and get a lot of money and a lot of payback for the
equipment they're putting in place we'll get it first and then it'll roll out to
other places I expect that for me 5g will be real
when I can get at 80 to 85% of the time that I want it not 10 or 15% right sure
and that's gonna take at least 2 to 3 years in my opinion and this is a
question that I have for you with everything that's been going on with the
Huawei band and for those of our viewers who maybe aren't up-to-date this is a
proposed ban it seems like the news changes every day whether or not it's
actually going to go into effect but all stems from security concerns over
Huawei's 5g infrastructure the US doesn't want to use any 5g equipment in
building its 5g networks so how do you think this ban will potentially delay 5g
deployment in the US if at all it probably won't have a major effect in
the US Huawei doesn't have a huge footprint in
the u.s. they do have a very big footprint in many other parts of the
world mm-hmm and what many other parts of the world don't care about the u.s.
ban and they're gonna go ahead with way anyway but it is interesting because
Huawei had had has had a major impact on 5g even in the u.s. because they've been
very aggressive in trying to get us presents so they've been very price
aggressive they've talked to a lot of carriers many carriers have looked at
them significant as a significant supplier what if the ban stays in place
and that's a big if we'll see what actually happens what it means is that
the competitors like the traditional competitors like Nokia and Ericsson will
have a leg up but there will be a lot of other competitors Samsung is now a major
provider of 5g equipment not just phones mm-hmm of course they'll do the phones
as well but you've got other competitors and other Chinese competitors
interesting of ZTE for instance is a major supplier not in the US but of
other parts of the world 5g equipment and then you've got other
up and comers I mean it ultimately could help somebody like a Cisco who wants to
be much more of an infrastructure player so it'll be interesting to see how this
all plays out the bottom line to my way of thinking is that it's not in the US
it's not gonna have a major impact whether it's whether they're banned or
not find you'll still be rolling out and roughly the timeframe that the carriers
are talking about which is starting this year but really more next year in the
year after and whether it's my way or Ericsson or Nokia users won't care won't
know and one other thing that I want to touch on is that over the weekend news
came out that the Trump administration potentially wants to consider not
allowing any 5g equipment for u.s. networks to be built in China what do
you think about that is that even with the realm of possibility I think that's
virtually impossible given that most equipment most electronics equipment
today has at least some subset of components built in China mm-hmm whether
it's just circuit boards or whether it's assembly or chips a lot of chips of
course built in China it would probably be I guess it's not impossible but it'd
be very very difficult to find anybody who doesn't have some kind of supply
chain coming through China these days and so to ban it completely I mean you
could you could blame a ban the major vendors like Huawei like ZTE perhaps
others but to say you cannot nokia ericsson you can't they have any Chinese
components I think that's probably impossible very interesting and to our
viewers who are interested in learning a little bit more about this I did a tech
feed on it and we will link that below but Jack another question for you is
once 5g is available how is it going to change networks not just me on my cell
phone scene if I have a 5g connection but how will it change the actual
physical networks so the physical networks are gonna change dramatically
with what people call the core network or today it's it's been transitioning
over the last couple of years if we look back three four or five years ago
networks were basically fixed components there was a box that you brought in that
was a switch there was a box that you brought in that was a base station there
was a box that you brought in that was a data center what we're moving to is much
more of a compute model for networks where I bring in instead of fixed
function I bring in a general purpose computer I put a couple of peripherals
around it and I program it to be whatever I need it to be what that means
is that the the carriers the operators have much more flexibility and buying
equipment they have much more flexibility in changing the services
because if you got a fixed piece of equipment it's very hard to change the
service I want to offer you you know if I if I saw you a washing machine it's
hard to turn it into a dryer sure but that's where they're trying to get to
right and that's where the network were 4G started but 5g is really going to
sell right so we're gonna move essentially from a network
a fixed core fixed-function core into a much more of a data center computing
model where I can program the computer to do whatever I needed to do give you
as I said earlier more bandwidth or give you specialized services or give you you
know maybe you pay more and you get a priority because your public service and
you know your police or fire and you need to make sure that you can get on
the network I can program that into the machine now and it just knows that I can
give you that service whereas before we've been very very difficult to do
that and similar vania what does this really mean for enterprise network
architecture and once five years available do you think that enterprises
really need to spring and do want jump right into it or do they should they
take the time really assess of 5g is what they need so there are two pieces
for that question one is the devices sure so I think
people will move very quickly to 5g devices once they're available but again
I think it's a year or two before you can really get enough critical mass for
me at least to go out and buy a 5g device and in fact in the next two years
maybe even as much as three years the underlying technology between a being
offered as a 5g service is going to be able to eat it's gonna be 4G LTE is
gonna be a base layer and then we'll gradually move into the 5g realm so 4G
is not going away anytime soon okay and then of course the question is how much
benefit do you really gain from for the average user on 5g I guess if you're
doing online gaming and you need the best capability possible you go to 5g
but for emails it's probably gonna make very little difference right from an
enterprise perspective so that's a device side that's the end user side an
enterprise perspective the question becomes and carriers of imposing this if
I give you five G and I can put it in your building why do you need things
like Wi-Fi or high speed Wi-Fi that's a much more difficult issue so there will
be 5g Private Networks built into enterprises and in some cases it makes
sense to do so in many cases however it will I don't see Wi-Fi going away I
don't expect Wi-Fi to go away anytime soon Wi-Fi of course has been upgraded
as well it has some very high speed networks 5g does have a better security
model okay so if you were an inch price that had a 4G component before
perhaps you were sending trucks out on the road 5g will give you enhanced
security so perhaps theta won't get stolen or whatever but I I think it's
gonna be a slow roll from enterprise perspective I don't think they have to
rush into this this isn't something that you have to do in the next six months
even though a lot of people would like you to mm-hmm this is a two three four
year process and enterprises don't move that quickly anyway I mean there are
still enterprises with ten-year-old Wi-Fi systems in place you know mm-hmm
8o 2011 n which has been around forever or even G which even is just even worse
so it this will absolutely have an impact on enterprises it will have
absolutely have an impact from the perspective of capabilities available to
you from a an operator carrier it will have impact because there will be
enhanced services think of it as kind of wireless as a service where the
carrier's will come in and manage your whole net or we can put it private 5g
network for you if you wanted to do that they'll do that with Wi-Fi today too if
you want but this isn't something that you have to immediately go out and run
to it's it's a it study it well make sure that you're really getting benefit
before you move got it so even though there's so much hype surrounding it just
take a step back do your research it seems like good advice for most things
anyway right there's always a lot of hype around new technology right and
then the question is do I really need it absolutely and the last thing that I
just wanted to ask you about briefly you mentioned this a little bit earlier that
the benefit to 5g is basically that lots of things can be connected lots of lots
of potential for IOT you lots of potential for edge can you talk a little
bit about that and maybe how how 5 G's potential for IOT and edge can affect or
benefit enterprise sure so so one of the advantages that I didn't talk about
earlier around 5g is that it's not just higher speed mm-hmm it's much lower
latency right and latency has a major effect when you're an end-user or even
when you're a machine tool right where if I have to if I'm an end-user I'm on
my phone and it takes and I'm entering data about a customer and it takes 30
seconds or a minute for that data to come back
you know I'm lost I'm not gonna use it I'm not even gonna use the tool latency
for for 5g could be as low as a few milliseconds or even microseconds Oh
so you won't notice now that assumes a lot of things right assumes the network
isn't loaded it assumes you're close to a tower there's there's a lot of caveats
there so you have to be a little bit careful and again this is the hype cycle
right I tell you that it can be what is it yeah and so when I talk to clients I
advise them look look at it from a realistic perspective where are you
going to be using this stuff how close are you to the tower etcetera so there's
a lot of caveats but latency has a major impact when
you're for instance have a car driving and there the car just saw a pedestrian
it thinks it's not pedestrian it's gonna do processing at the local edge the edge
computer is now your car mm-hmm by the way everyone pretty much carries around
an edge computer today people don't realize it it's called your phone yes
there's a lot of processing done on your phone I have a you know smart watch a
lot of people do right guess where the edge computer is it's your phone right
everything is gonna have edge and it's gonna have AI and it's can have a lot of
we haven't even talked about AI that's a whole different discussion but that's
gonna be a major portion of this as well mm-hmm but when you're an autonomous
vehicle you have to make decisions instantaneously or you're gonna kill
somebody yeah if it takes 15 seconds to come back
information come back from the cloud I just run you over
yeah that's it's got to be 15 microseconds so 5g makes a huge
improvement potentially a huge improvement in that it also 5g because
of the latency allows computing to really be distributed so I can have
multiple stages of edge computer I have one on my wrist that looks at my heart
rate my phone becomes more of an edge computer a second edge computer then
there's an intermediate one perhaps there's one in this building if I'm an
enterprise there certainly will be a server in the building and then it goes
off to the cloud not everything needs to go off to the cloud and in fact you
don't want everything to go off the cloud because the security and privacy
concerns yeah of course again a long discussion we could have but edge
computing becomes much more practical when you have a high speed low latency
network than it any other way got it interesting there's
I know that I feels like all I ever talk about is all of the great and exciting
things surrounding 5g so I do appreciate you being here giving me maybe a little
bit of a dose of reality that ya type up but not everyone needs it right now but
I certainly have felt like I need it right now so thank you so much for
coming in Jack really appreciate it learned a lot and we will be sure to
keep everyone updated about potential 5g rollout what to expect any potential
delays in regards to the Huawei band absolute in the future so yeah thank you
so much my pleasure thank you and thank you so much for watching this episode of
tech talk if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and
subscribe to our Channel and check out the links below Jack we will link your
socials we'll link your website as well if you want any more info about Jack and
thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time