Episode 19: Signals, Satellites & the Next Big Leap

Peter Jarich (00:00)

Hi everyone, and welcome to Intelligence Noise, the GSMA Intelligence podcast, where we try and take a look at what’s going on in the industry, put it into context, sift through the noise, and try and bring you some intelligence. That’s where the name comes from, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, or if it’s your first time listening in.

If it is your first time listening in, congrats. My name is Peter Jarich. I head up the GSMA Intelligence team. It’s the research and consulting arm of the GSMA. If I’m telling you all sorts of stuff you didn’t know, you can thank me later for all this cool intelligence.

This is Tim. Tim Hatt. Tim joins me on these quite often. Tim heads up our consulting and brings the data and the Canadian perspective.

Tim Hatt (00:42)

I do. This time, to India.

Peter Jarich (00:45)

This time, to India. If you’re wondering, for those of you for whom this is not your first time, and you’re wondering what the heck, why are they in the same frame? We’re in India. Tim and I both are here for the GSMA Board meetings. I’m here for India Mobile Congress. And since we are in the same place at the same time, we thought, let’s get in the same frame.

This is a wonderful conference room. I know it looks like you can tell it’s India just from the nondescript conference room that we are in.

We’re going to go through some of what we think is important stuff that took place over the last week or so. We do this through the lens of the CEO newsletter. That is a newsletter that goes out on Mondays to important people who are part of the GSMA membership. It comes from the desk of our Director General.

The GSMA Intelligence team is lucky enough to be part of the team that helps think about what could make it in. So we have a good view of what was suggested and what didn’t make it in. We’ll talk about what made it in, what we thought was important, what didn’t make it in, and what we thought could have been important.

But as usual, I start off with a quick bit of a story, just because I like telling stories.

I landed here in Delhi. Tim, myself, a bunch of us landed here early, well before the group meetings, the Board meetings, because we did some events with the team here in Delhi. It was a great event.

I arrived with, amongst other folks, the Director General’s EA, our Chief Strategy Officer. We get off the plane, go to pull up our materials. No internet. It’s fine. So this is corporate account. We’re all on the same supplier. I won’t name names. It’s like, we’re here.

Boss is like, “Peter, do you—” I don’t know, just me? Is it a cut note? It’s not just you. Talk to other people. Nope, we’re all in a group.

Boss, super friendly guy, starts talking to other people online. “Hey, are you—yeah, try taking it off airplane mode. Have you reset your phone? Have you taken it off automatic network selection?”

You know, at the time when you’re trying to pull up your documents, you can actually get across the border, maybe fill in that health form you forgot to fill out back a long time ago, because you don’t have an EA to tell you, “Did you fill out your health form?”

So you go on your personal phone, you set your personal phone up, five minutes later you get the message from your carrier that says you’ve almost approached the £75 of overage in five minutes, because data’s charged at, like, what, two pounds a kilobyte.

I mean, we all survived. We’re all here, so it’s fine. But it’s a reminder, I think, of how crucial connectivity is.

I think if you’re on BA, you’ve seen the ads from one of the travel eSIM players, where their travel content curator guy goes, “What are you gonna do when you land? You’re gonna find Wi-Fi, you’re gonna try and search for a SIM.”

But also why reliable connectivity matters, which leads us into the first of the stories.

So, two stories were in the CEO newsletter this last week. One was about Orange Business Services being selected to deliver the network for a pan-European sovereign solution. Particularly important, I think, when we talk about sovereignty.

A lot of times we talk about sovereignty in terms of either sovereign AI services or data residency. This is a good reminder that the networking side of things matters. You want to know where your traffic is going.

It’d be really horrible if you were delivering sovereign services and they were routed through North Korea, unless you’re North Korean. I mean, if it’s a sovereign North Korean solution, maybe that’s what you want. But that’s not the story we’re going to talk about.

What are we going to talk about, Tim?

Tim Hatt (04:37)

Well, we’re going to talk about a new tariff launched by Telecom Italia called Priority.

Just for our listeners and viewers, this is a tariff that has been announced by Telecom Italia actually a couple of months ago that was originally designed or started with fibre and Wi-Fi, but now it’s been rolled out to their cellular offerings.

And it is a priority tariff because people are paying for service continuity, particularly when you get into crowded and congested areas.

This is obviously just about quality, reliability, resilience, particularly when you get into crowded areas.

So I think we’ll get into the detail, but the interesting thing about this is there is a networking angle to it. There is, even more importantly, a commercial angle, a monetisation angle.

And I think for me, Peter, that’s what’s interesting here, because we’re starting to see a lot more, and we can point to examples, of operators launching either speed-based tariffs or what we would call differentiated connectivity to sell for things other than just volumes and speeds.

Peter Jarich (05:50)

Yeah, we’ve done a lot of work on that recently. Some internal work, some external work, around 5G monetisation.

For clarity, because it’s interesting, you look at the press, you look at the media, a lot of this, this Priority service, the Priority launch, a lot of confusion. Is it slicing? Is it not slicing?

It’s not slicing. That’s correct. So I think it’s interesting. It’s not slicing, it’s not NSA going to be moving towards slicing. That’s the intention.

And I think the interesting thing here is that we’ve seen—I mean, so we obviously track slicing launches. I’m looking at the numbers here and, yeah, there’s actually more slicing than you would think.

I mean, it looks like it’s been launched in around 57 countries, 110 different MNOs. The majority are actually in Europe.

Tim Hatt (06:29)

Look at that. 40%, biggest share in Europe. We can point to several examples: T-Mobile Germany, EE in the UK, Hutch, Vodafone, Telia Sweden.

And the interesting thing, of course, is that these were really not in the game two or three years ago.

But through a combination of needing to play the monetisation angle and charge for things other than just straight-up volumes, and the fact that there are more regulatory allowances for these kinds of offerings, we’re seeing operators step into the game.

So I think the interesting thing for now will be whether there is a large enough share of the base to really drive up the premiums and have them be sustainable.

And then, secondly, whether service continuity starts to really work into use cases that we see in more AI app usage, like live broadcasts, uploads, stuff that’s going to play on the content uplink, because operators are starting to monetise.

Peter Jarich (07:27)

I mean, I think you’ve seen that if you—it’s also a bit weird. The way the announcement was out, again, the announcement didn’t talk about slicing. Maybe that’s because most consumers don’t care.

But they didn’t talk about how it was rolled out in specific locations, right? That goes back to your point, also a bit from a marketing perspective, a bit like, okay, well, that’s good to know, but why?

Yep. And so the why is obviously why maybe your average consumer doesn’t really care, but saying, look, this will be in this location, this location is where you need that.

I think this goes back to some work that we did more on the millimetre wave side of things, but some work that we did around some survey data from Qualcomm a number of years ago.

What would people pay for? Right? And it was testing a bunch of different things. You know, would you pay for better connectivity for gaming, for music, for interactive comms, or just reliability?

Yep. The answer is no, no, no, no, yes. Like, it’s not use-case dependent. It’s just, I’m buying this because I suspect, I assume it’s going to be good connectivity, and I just want reliable connectivity wherever I have it.

Speed probably doesn’t matter, right?

Tim Hatt (08:31)

Speed—it matters, but not as much as the continuity, to your point.

And I think when we look at the numbers, you referenced some of the research we did earlier, and you can find this 5G monetisation landscaping on our website.

When we deep dive on the individual tariffs, when you look at speeds and QoS tariffs, exactly what we’re talking about here, we think it could add upwards of one percentage point to mobile service revenue growth by the end of the decade.

That may not sound like it’s going to set the world on fire, but particularly in Europe, where growth has been challenged, nothing to be sniffed at.

Peter Jarich (09:02)

And even if it’s a churn reduction, or—I mean, it does become one of these things where when your competitor does it, you still just need to be doing it to keep up.

Yep. And to actually have what people maybe expected from 5G.

I guess part of—and I’ve gone on record a number of times saying last year, the year before, probably as early as 2023. So if it’s 2023 and you’re proud about your slicing pilot, you should be embarrassed of yourself. You should have slicing out there.

Like, this should not be something you’re proud of. You should not be so—it's 2026.

We see actually commercial launches. This isn’t slicing, but it’s supposed to be going in that direction. It will be slicing at some point. It will be.

But why? Part of the reason why we saw slicing going slow—obviously, SA rollouts, that was gonna hold it up.

Yep. But it was also a little bit of regulatory uncertainty, folks being worried. So are we seeing—my impression here is that it’s kind of, okay, we’re going to test the waters, and if we get pushback, great.

But because it feels like a lot of the delays were less about regulators saying, “If you launch slicing, we’re going to slap a fine on you,” but this uncertainty.

Exactly. And so it seems like it’s a bit of an, okay, let’s try something and see what happens. And we can get past that uncertainty and cross that bridge when we get to it.

Tim Hatt (10:32)

Kind of think about it like an estuary. It’s not salt water, it’s not freshwater, it’s a little bit in between. It’s a grey area. It’s like, pick your analogy.

But you’re right. I think particularly in Europe, where if you rewind 10, 15 years ago, net neutrality was not, you know, it was very firm.

You’ve now got a position where the Commission has softened its stance. We’ve had the Digital Networks Act, or DNA, which lays the groundwork for this type of operational activity.

And you’re right, operators are at a point where they’re saying, “Hey, better late than never. I got all this infrastructure in the ground. 5G has been mixed at best from a commercialisation point of view. We’ve got to do something.”

Peter Jarich (11:08)

Network slicing, the brackish water of 5G, as we’re calling it.

Not for nothing, I’ll say, and probably outside the scope of this conversation, we’ve also done some actual economic analysis to look at the impact of net neutrality regulations.

I’d like to think that some of the regulators have done that themselves and have come to the same conclusion that we have, which is no real meaningful impact.

And so, yeah, I mean, let’s just hope.

Anyways, let’s move on to the next story.

So the next story that we want to look at—there were two. These are, reminder, things that were proposed but did not make the cut, but we still think are important.

Two things. One that we’re going to talk about, and we’ll come back to in a second: a new millimetre wave MOU out of Japan to really drive millimetre wave adoption, drive the millimetre wave ecosystem.

And the second was a big purchase of fibre by AT&T. We’ll get that out of the way.

I think the suggestion there, for those of you who are wondering why we suggest that it’s something that could have made it to the newsletter: big purchase, reminder that as we’re in the AI era and we’re ramping up what we need to do around networking, fibre is the literal and figurative backbone of those services.

I’ve got my own sort of questions about why the telcos are buying the fibre themselves. I mean, they’re not literally putting it into the ground. So I would assume whoever’s deploying it, but that’s a question for another day.

Just a reminder of how important that is.

But let’s get back to the story. It’s an MOU out of Japan.

Your—I've got all sorts of thoughts on why it’s important, but yours.

Tim Hatt (13:04)

Well, interesting story here. And just maybe before we get into the details of it, as Peter said, this is an MOU with all four operators in Japan. So there’s consensus on it.

And just for our listeners to remind you what millimetre wave is, millimetre wave is high-band spectrum. We’re talking in the high 20 gigahertz.

What does that mean? Why does that matter?

It matters because it’s very good for handling large volumes of data. It’s less good for travelling distance, what they call propagation.

Peter Jarich (13:33)

Yeah. Tons of bandwidth, tons of spectrum available. It means you can deliver incredible bandwidth, incredible speeds.

You can do it with lower-order modulations because you’re just dealing with tons of contiguous spectrum, right? You don’t need to piece it together in a bunch of spaces. You get giant, giant bands, which in part was what 5G was. 5G assumed giant contiguous bands.

Tim Hatt (13:56)

Giant contiguous bands. And, but it hasn’t been nearly as commonly deployed as lower- or mid-band spectrum.

Why? Because it doesn’t travel as far. That means for an operator you’ve got to work with your suppliers to deploy more base stations. That costs money.

So really it’s been more used in dense urban areas, city centres. Some of the US operators have done this.

And the Japanese operators are doing it now in large part because, A, they need more capacity, and B, Japan has a lot of very dense cities.

Peter Jarich (14:28)

Yeah. I think, and you know, we can credit—and it’s not genius, no offence—but I think it is really worthwhile going back to there was Sprint in the US who originally talked about this idea of a layer cake.

Yep. And I think we talk about it a lot ourselves and the GSMA spectrum programme, that you need all types of spectrum, right?

You need that low band where there’s not as much bandwidth, but it covers lots and lots of area. You need the mid-band where it’s sort of—I don’t want to say Goldilocks—but a little bit in the middle.

And then you need that high band where it doesn’t travel as far, but you can hit those dense areas.

And I think, as a reminder, as I think about why for me the story for why this MOU is important is, one, we know 5G. We’ve all seen the charts. We’ve got our charts, everyone else has their charts of how 5G scaled faster than any other technology.

And why is that? It’s because there were phones. There were a lot of phones, thus you got 5G phones. You’re going to have more 5G adoption, right? That’s clear.

So the question here then is, when we think about millimetre wave, what is your guess? I’m gonna pull up my notes here.

Before I pull up my notes, how many commercial millimetre wave phones do you think are out there?

Tim Hatt (16:45)

You put me on the spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guess? I’m gonna guess 34.

Okay, 34. That’s probably—

Peter Jarich (16:48)

So I went out and I actually—and good friends at the GSA maintain this data—checked their database. It’s great. If you’re looking for this, really you can cut, slice, dice it in all sorts of ways.

According to them, I guess according to their GSA database, there are 92 commercial millimetre wave devices, but that’s of all sorts.

When you go to look at phones, you get down to 52. Okay. And that 52 includes different versions, like this is the version of the Samsung Galaxy S26 launched in this country and that, or different variations.

So it’s probably not far from your mid-thirties. I mean, so it’s 52, a bunch of those. So this goes back: if you want to see, if you’re an operator and you’ve deployed this spectrum because I want to offload traffic onto it, because I’ve got these hotspots.

And again, this goes back to that research I mentioned earlier that we did with Qualcomm looking at some of their data.

In those crowded places where there’s lots of traffic, there’s super value to deploying the spectrum, but only if people have the phones that can use it, right?

If you’ve got a whole bunch of people without—if the ecosystem isn’t there—what’s the point?

Tim Hatt (17:08)

There’s also another angle to this which I think is interesting. We’ll come onto this a little bit, Peter, when we talk about the things we’ve been seeing and hearing in Delhi this week, but it’s another example of telco collaboration on infrastructure strategy.

In completely different contexts, we see the US operators JVing themselves up to have a neutral satellite access there.

Peter Jarich (17:41)

Yep, yep, that’s fair. That’s a really good point.

You know, we see this here in Japan where this is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but where it makes a lot more sense to do it even with your competitors than going in alone.

Because it’s not competitive, and it’s interesting because I’ve had this conversation a few times.

So I was at NOVA last week. Great.

And one of the big value props of NOVA was bringing together the telco space and sort of the tech space.

Yep. So what do you mean, bringing them together? They know each other, they talk all the time. But they are different worlds and don’t talk as much.

And the opening keynote was reminded of X up there talking about, you know, Chatham House rules, so can’t tell you what anyone said. I can talk about what’s said, can’t tell you who said it.

Great, no media, and then antitrust. Let’s all—here’s the antitrust policy. And the guy next to me is like, “Well, that’s a new one for me. I’ve never been in a conference where they’ve given an antitrust message.”

And the guy next to him is like, “It’s a telco thing.”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a real thing,” because it is a serious thing, right? Because we don’t want a bunch of people in a room saying, “So how about we just don’t do—can we all agree that this is—”

Like, that is critical. Like, this is about driving competition.

And I think that’s always then super sensitive, right? They’re super sensitive about how do we make sure—and we take it seriously, right? We take every conversation, right? A whiff, the closest whiff of anything, right? Sort of, whoa, let’s shut that down.

So where there is room for collaboration, that is in a non-competitive way, it’s a great example of how you can drive the ecosystem in a way that supports everyone.

Tim Hatt (19:12)

100%. And I think we’re gonna just see more of that in general when it comes to—we’re still two to three years away from 6G, but we’ll come onto this. That’s gonna change the MO of how you design—

Peter Jarich (19:24)

The US operators and their JV around spectrum just got signature. I know it was announced before, but I guess they just—it’s further on.

Yep. I mean, some other things just really quickly I would say on the millimetre wave front.

You know, if I look at—and just to give an idea of where it’s at, I mean, if we look at our own numbers here, there’s still some activity, but it’s not—

Right. So if we just look at the number of deployments over the last year, right? We’ve got Costa Rica. I mean, this is just over the last almost 18 months.

Over the last 18 months, it’s not a lot, right? I mean, it’s Costa Rica on 26 GHz, India 26, UK, Sri Lanka, Japan. So it’s not a lot.

And I think part of the reason why it’s not a lot is that there is this question of how expensive is it, right?

Because I can deploy this, but if the ecosystem isn’t there, then it means you don’t have scale, which means it’s going to cost a lot.

I’m going to have to deploy a lot of this to get coverage of any meaningful amount. And if there are not devices out there to use it, I get it, right?

I’m a CFO, I’m a network planner, I look at this and go, “What’s the return on—”

Tim Hatt (20:40)

It’s the chicken-and-egg problem. We see it in so many contexts.

We talk about millimetre wave here. You’ve pulled out five country examples. That’s a—and millimetre wave spectrum is a fraction of the deployed spectrum for cellular use.

But you see this with 5G SA as well. One of the gates to that is whether there’s handset compatibility. That’s taken a while.

We see it in NTN. 3GPP standards for NTN have changed the game in terms of scale.

That doesn’t mean anything unless you have devices that people can tap into it with.

Peter Jarich (21:07)

It is. We’re saying on the docket, we’ve got Burundi, Colombia, Moldova, Norway, Sweden and Tunisia. So super.

I mean, we’re not talking tier-one markets, but there is still some interest.

I just have a hard time believing, if I’m Moldova, trying to figure out what the economic value prop is there.

And we did this—I’ll go back. We did this work years and years and years ago looking at the economics, the TCO, of delivering 5G over millimetre wave, right?

And the numbers are pretty—I mean, you know, this goes back. The numbers, if you look at our analysis—and then we’ll link to it so you don’t have to go and search for it—but, you know, the numbers are pretty impressive.

Where if you look at just using mid-band 3.5 versus a combination with millimetre wave, you know, the TCO is actually impressive across a bunch of different markets.

We modelled Europe, China, urban, rural. We’re talking about, in some situations, given the number of connected users, you’re driving like 30% less.

But that depends upon having connected users. And if you don’t have the devices, right, that’s an assumption that’s in there. You need to drive this.

We can hammer this to death. You guys get the point. Fingers crossed, thumbs up. Let’s hope that this MOU goes anywhere.

Stories on our minds. This is the Willie Nelson section now. We can switch over the—I'll use Suno to create an AI-generated mashup of those two songs to note that we’re in that section.

This is where we talk about other things. Weren’t even part of consideration for the MOU or for the CEO newsletter. Weren’t in there, and where we’re travelling.

Travelling—we’ll get to, we’re here in Delhi, we’ll talk a bit about what we’re hearing from, or at least the vibe here across the group meetings here in Delhi.

But before we get to that, two stories. Tim, you want to talk about a lawsuit?

Tim Hatt (23:11)

A lawsuit brought against OpenAI by a US tech advocacy group in a California court. And it is a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI has broken the law by virtue of its jailbreak on Hugging Face.

Why do I bring this up? I bring this up because we’ve talked about AI security and LLM development several times in the last few months.

This is interesting, though, because it’s the first legal case, at least that I’m aware of, where it is essentially challenging the precedent of legal liability when you have a case that AI agents are involved.

We’re gonna have to watch this carefully because if it rules in favour of the advocacy group and against OpenAI, that opens the AI industry up to a paradigm shift in how it has to regulate its own products.

Let’s go think about it, Peter. If you have an agent that goes and does something bad and you say, “Hey, that wasn’t me, that was my agent,” is that a tenable defence?

We’re gonna find that out. And given the sentiment that, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI and others, not least the president, have been talking about in not wanting to regulate AI, this would totally fly in the face of that.

So I think we’re headed to a key moment in how you—in the crossing of AI development versus its regulation. I think a few thoughts.

Peter Jarich (24:40)

One, that’s President Advocacy Group. Because given that Hugging Face is being bought by NVIDIA, yep, I wonder who has the courage and the guts to sue—to—I mean, either side you’re suing OpenAI. Yeah, it feels like you’re gonna make a lot of enemies one way or another.

But that’s interesting.

I just like to say I love my AI agents, and they’re all great. Never had a problem. So, never had a problem.

I mean, I’ve been telling folks, if you haven’t used these on a consumer, on an individual level, it is worth playing with.

Honestly, like, I’ve had Muse register me for CES, get my hotel, check every couple days on the rate of the hotel, cancel my reservation and rebook it to save me a couple hundred dollars.

I mean, these seem like minor things, but it’s not bad.

Peter Jarich (25:00)

No, and I think—and we’ll get this, but talking to folks, like, I have no idea how many tokens is the ticket.

Yep. Like, God knows. God knows how many acres of forest I’ve burned through by saving—by saving a couple hundred dollars, a hundred pounds, on a hotel reservation.

But it is an interesting one.

My story, so my story was a little bit more academic in nature, I guess. So some Google researchers did some analysis around the economics of their work.

And it was really more about talking about their Project Suncatcher, putting some of their TPUs into space to test them out.

What are they testing them for? A whole lot of cool stuff about, I guess they call it a scalable approach to building compute systems for AI in space, which is, you know, backing on their low Earth orbit sort of launches, putting some of their TPUs up there, seeing if it works.

Because they want to get to a constellation, small constellation, but something that can test this out.

Cool.

But what’s interesting is—and this was put out in a journal called Joule, wasn’t familiar with it—there’s a really interesting part where they look at the economics.

And their economics actually look to say, okay, at what point does this become economically viable?

Because you sort of think about, okay, cool, there’s reasons to maybe put some of this stuff up into space. Yeah, but we’re still talking about launching lots of satellites versus the proven model of building a data centre here, where it may not be free power, but I’ve got power here and I kind of know what I’m doing.

And they looked at this from the perspective of this idea of $200 per kilogram of launch payload capacity has been cited by a whole bunch of folks, including SpaceX, as this threshold after which you can start to do things more economically.

This doesn’t have to be just for these ambitious programme-type things.

And so they did the math, they did some economic modelling, and I think we’ve seen this a lot. Assumptions are always the sticking point for economic modelling, right?

What did you think right here?

But they kind of looked at this and said, okay, if we look at the cost trajectory of what SpaceX has been doing to date, and you assume—I guess they assume a sort of learning curve that says if they keep decreasing prices by this point, then you can get to this $200 per kilogram price, maybe around 2035.

Okay. And they back this off to say, if you get to that sort of price point, then you’re looking at about $800 kilowatts per year for a Starlink V2-type constellation.

What does that mean? They said, well, in comparison to sort of terrestrial data centres in the US, you’re looking at 570.

So 810 versus 570, it’s not quite the same, but it says you’re kind of in the same ballpark.

And I think it’s an interesting sort of—it’s an interesting question, because you then get to the idea of it’s not just sort of this weird idea of putting things in space for the heck of it.

You go, okay, it could kind of become economically viable.

Of course, as I said, the problem with any economic analysis is, well, this assumes that between every year between now and 2035, they’re actually getting the same price decreases.

Tim Hatt (29:39)

Those payloads—yeah.

Peter Jarich

Yeah, this assumes they would have to have like 180 launches per year for the analysis. Now SpaceX says they’re gonna surpass that, doing one an hour, you know, or get to the point where it’s just off the charts.

So there are a lot of assumptions there, and there’s a huge—this also assumes like a Starlink satellite versus other prices.

So tons and tons of assumptions that, if any are off, the numbers get thrown out.

Tim Hatt (29:39)

But it’s an interesting thought that this isn’t maybe just, “Let’s throw these things into space because I don’t have to deal with zoning or whatever else.”

But it is interesting, and there’s a bigger point here, which is that this space is a frontier economy.

You’re talking about supply and demand of economics that literally have never existed before.

And so we’re now getting into conversations where the infrastructure is being laid in space for a new type of orbital economy, where we’re having to project what the cost structure is of reaching that, and yet there are such a few number of companies that are involved in that space right now.

We’re gonna see a lot more.

Peter Jarich (30:09)

And that brings—so, I mean, for those who were keeping track, Tim’s on record: slicing is the brackish water of 5G. Space is the—space is the final frontier economy.

I said frontier economy. Final was, you know, “Space, the final frontier.” That I am right.

Tim Hatt (30:32)

I’ll pitch that to George Lucas as a Star Wars follow-up.

Economics. We need to be space economics. You know, you know, that’s not a word, actually. Chief economist reporting to Darth?

Peter Jarich (31:03)

That would be—I mean, you know, it’s—I swear people don’t remember that was the—I forget what US president said he wanted a one-armed economist because they always say, “On the one hand this, on the one hand…”

That’s pretty Darth Vader would be the one who would make that happen.

So it’s worth maybe at the end here talking about—we often talk about where we’re going next. It’s worthwhile saying where we are right now.

We are here in Delhi. For those folks who don’t know, again, I mentioned we’re here for the Board meeting and India Mobile Congress.

For those folks who don’t know, the Board meeting—when we talk about the Board meeting, it’s not—I know it’s a bit inside baseball, but maybe people like inside baseball.

It’s not just the Board meeting, right?

So what happens at these is that you’ve got one day, you’ve got the GSMA Board all coming together. That’s the CEOs of all the board members.

But won’t bother to tell you who’s on the board, how that’s chosen, it’s somewhere in the public records now anyways.

And then the two days before then it’s the group meetings, right?

So it’s the Technology Group, all the CTOs of those big operators. It’s the Policy Group, all the Chief Regulatory Officers. It’s the Strategy Group. It’s the spectrum experts. It’s all of those folks.

So they all come together for two days. They have the Board meeting. You do some other stuff in the middle there. You might guess there’s a reception or two.

So we’re lucky enough to sit in at a bunch of those meetings, present at a bunch of those things, present some of our research analysis.

Speak for Tim—I’d like to keep my job, so we’re not gonna talk about what’s on the agenda. We’re not gonna share the agendas.

But what I’ve—I think there have been some clear takeaways.

Yeah. What, from your—I mean, actually, and part of the reason why I was thinking about that is one of those clear takeaways is Tim’s point about sort of space being a frontier economy.

I think this is one of the things that we’re seeing across conversations, at receptions, talking to people, this question of what do the economics, what do the business models look like?

Which is interesting because I think we’ve spent—and if you’ve been at MWC and you’ve been to the satellite summit that we’ve hosted—I think for a number of years it was, well, here’s how things are gonna go and here’s operators are partnering.

I think now we’re at a point where you’re seeing services launch. We’re getting to the, you know, we’re getting to the question of what do the business models look like.

And there are big questions of who’s competing, who’s collaborating.

We’ve got V1 satellites and then V2s coming up. What could a V3 or V4 look like? What does that mean to the economics?

So there really, I think, there are a lot of questions out there of still the technology, but also the business model side of this.

Tim Hatt (33:27)

No question. I think on the satellite side there is—it’s a frenemy world of partners being competitors and competitors being partners depending on the situation.

But I take away, at least on that topic, everybody agrees this is here to stay. It’s a question of how you make the best of it and really scale up what will be a comprehensive network of terrestrial and non-terrestrial infrastructure.

The other thing I think, Peter, is interesting, just as kind of high-level reflections—of course we can’t get into the details of conversations, etc.—but I think there’s huge amounts of alignment on the need for AI monetisation.

You know, we’re at a point, we talked about it, we’ve talked about it on this podcast, 5G is past the halfway point on its ten-year cycle. Very mixed success so far.

But AI has kind of entered the frame as something that straddles different technologies, and there’s a huge amount of focus to get a—

Peter Jarich (34:29)

100%.

And I think I’ve said this before and I’ve had some conversations. I think sometimes we need to be careful because a lot of times when we think about AI monetisation, we do think about AI revenue generation.

And you can monetise by being more efficient. Yep. Penny saved is a penny earned, great.

But you can’t save your way to growth.

So I think that’s where the questions are coming in, and big questions in terms of: is this about infrastructure? Hey, we’re telcos, we know infrastructure, we understand this.

Is it services? Do I deliver services on top of that infrastructure? Is it consumer? Yep. We’ve seen the token metering plans.

Is this a way to help telcos get back to metering? Or is it enterprise, because that’s the big untapped market?

These are all—and the answer is never yes or no, it’s all the above.

But it’s a lot to grapple with right now. And I think it’s fun just to see the different models that are out there.

Tim Hatt (35:24)

100%.

And I think as well, just looking ahead towards the end of the decade, I think there’s also this point that sort of 6G can’t just be another G.

There’s gotta be a new way to approach investment and looking at the returns.

Peter Jarich (35:39)

And that’s really tightly tied to that AI question.

And these were—going back to even some of the conversations we had at NOVA—it’s very much—and I have a bit of a concern that we’re kind of tying 6G to AI just because it’s the cool—I’m looking for an excuse. I’m looking for a justification.

We know 6G is coming. What’s gonna justify? Well, there’s this AI thing.

I mean, similar to maybe we talked about the metaverse a few years ago. It’s gonna be the metaverse because we need some excuse to justify all of this, and we saw where that went.

Yeah. So it does feel a bit maybe too much, especially given the uncertainty of AI.

But there is this recognition that 6G is coming. We know it’s coming, and you’re not gonna stop that.

But we also don’t fully know what the business model is.

Yep. And so there’s gotta be a fundamental rethink there.

Tim Hatt (36:24)

There’s gotta be a rethink. And I think we’re seeing now the urgency for that.

It’s an interesting time, right, to be in the sector, not just telco but tech. Things are moving fast.

Peter Jarich (36:34)

Yeah, no, definitely. And I think we’re seeing that. That’s another reason why it’s great to be here in India.

India Mobile Congress, or IMC, is obviously a big event where you see the ecosystem here, but you see the stuff that the operators are doing and you see really all of this at play, right?

You’ve got the innovation that’s coming out of Jio, the innovation that’s coming out of Airtel, you’ve got the financial issues with folks like Vi, you’ve got the BSNL stuff that’s still out there.

It brings to the fore the difficulty financially of being a mobile operator, how you need to think about that, but the need to innovate.

You’ve got homegrown ecosystems coming together here. It’s a lot, it’s a lot going on and a good time to be here.

So with that, thank you, Tim.

Tim Hatt (36:54)

Thank you, Peter.

Peter Jarich (36:56)

Thank you, everyone, for bearing with us as we are here in one place.

Please tune in. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. Leave us comments, send us notes, rate us, tell us what you like, what you don’t like.

It’s how we will make this better and hopefully not worse.

But in the meantime, let me remind you that as you’re seeking out intelligence, embrace a little noise and try and catch up with—if I say it the same way next week, because every time it will be a little bit different, which makes it fun.

We’ll see you guys next week.

Tim Hatt (37:52)

See you guys.