Episode 2: SpaceX IPO Reality Check, Network Resilience & the AI Agent Race

Peter Jarich (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to Intelligence and Noise, the official GSMA Intelligence podcast. If you see any others out there, they're counterfeits, don't fall for it. I am Peter Jarich, I am the head of GSMA Intelligence, and I'm here with Tim Hatt. Hey Tim.

Tim Hatt (00:16)
Hey, Peter. Hey guys, how are you? Great to see you.

Peter Jarich (00:19)
Wonderful. Great to be here with you as always. So I think for those of you tuning in, you know what we're here to do. We're gonna talk a bit about what we think is important from the last week, what we think you should be paying attention to, making connections to the research that the team is putting out, telling you why you should care, and then about some other things that we think may or may not be on your radar, but are particularly important before we let you all get on with your days.

So, as is my wont, I'm gonna kick off with a tiny bit of a story, which I think will hopefully be not quite meaningless, but set the stage for some things. So last week I had on my MWC hat, and the reason was to really highlight that, you know, although folks sometimes just think of GSMA and GSMA Intelligence and everything around MWC because that's what they know us for, there's a lot more that we do, and that's part of the reason why.

This podcast today, I've got my Continental hat on. For those of you who like cars or bicycles or anything, you probably know Continental is a company that makes tires. I picked up this hat just a few years ago when I was at a stage of the Tour de France, and I managed to get a good positioning for the caravan to get some swag without having to push aside too many old ladies and small children and trample them for small things.

And, you know, for me, I think it's a reminder — we'll talk a bit about this later — that, you know, every year as an analyst, when the Tour de France friends would come around, you'd get these great sort of news items from Orange talking about all the work that they do to put together the comms, put together everything they can to really support what is one of the, you know, it's a traveling sports event, right? Covers the entirety of France, goes around in 21 stages.

And ensuring that there's connectivity for the fans, for the broadcasters, for all the folks that are actually making the event work is no small feat. And it's a bit of a reminder, as we're coming up upon another major global sporting event just coming up this week, of all that takes place there. But we're gonna get to that, and yeah, we're gonna talk a bit about that later. So let's get into it.

Tim, we're going to talk a bit about the news, framing this as we have within the CEO newsletter. And so I'm gonna kick it off with the story that was picked, one of the stories that was in the newsletter that I thought was particularly important: a story about resilience, right? So the story that really resonated with me most was one talking about, you know, two things that are looking at this topic of resilience.

One is around a $13 million early warning system being put together in Somalia, really about preparing for natural disasters. And at the same time, not necessarily related, from June 1st is the fact that a set of Japanese operators are getting access to some portable batteries to help them with really coming together to look at powering — look at batteries as a way to ensure network resilience.

Now, again, not necessarily the same place, not necessarily the same sort of resilience. But for me, I think this is particularly important because it points to, you know, not just the fact that these networks are critical, that we need to ensure that networks are resilient, but that they also support sort of the resilience of societies. And I think it's something that we maybe take it for granted a bit and we overlook it a bit.

But I think these two things coming together in the same week give a bit of a theme there. I know your team's been doing some work around what's been going on in Somalia, so maybe you can dig into that a bit.

Tim Hatt (04:16)
Yeah, and I do think it's a really interesting story on a few levels. I mean, you talk about Somalia. Somalia is an interesting country. It obviously has been through a turbulent history for some of its recent context. But you now have a situation where the country is very much mobile-first. It's a mobile-first internet population. It's a mobile-first banking population. It's a mobile-first population for accessing government services.

So needing that resiliency, as you say, is very critical in the event of network downtime following a natural disaster or indeed extreme weather event. I think we can say that in this climate change era, I mean, these are not even extra-normal events anymore. I mean, getting hurricanes, getting typhoons, in the case of Japan, having issues that were catastrophic issues that have the potential to do serious damage to the network infrastructure. These are the new normal.

And so for countries needing to invest in that infrastructure and preparedness is very valuable. So that's one point. The other point I think is interesting for Somalia in particular is that when you look at cell broadcast technology, that has come a long way and that has the potential to reach a very disparate population. Somalia has a population, as with many East African countries, really dispersed. So being able to get early warning signs up and down the coastline and into the interior of the country is absolutely essential. And this investment is a good reminder of that.

So I think what we see in Somalia versus the other country, Japan, is something we're going to see and are seeing across the world of mobile technology being used as a source of resilience for the country.

Peter Jarich (06:10)
Yeah.

And like I said, I think obviously very different stories, very different places. But for me what's really interesting is the one is about how we're looking at ensuring that networks are a part of looking at those natural disasters. But none of that matters if the networks aren't operating themselves or if the network goes down.

I mean, think about it, right? It just seems really foolish to say, great, we're gonna leverage this network to make sure that we're prepared for when a natural disaster comes. When that natural disaster comes, if that network goes down, then what's the point, right? So it has to be end-to-end. And you've got to make sure that you're thinking through what's going on.

But, and you hit it, I think it's maybe it's part of just the problem of where we are in the industry, but there's so many times that I listen to other podcasts or I'll read articles that talk about, well, and you know, you may not know this, but people in some of these countries are mobile-first and mobile is like — like we see this every day and it's sort of not a revelation, right?

Tim Hatt (07:09)
It's not a revelation. For Somalia, again, I come back to that country, mobile phone penetration is about 55 to 60%. So it's not ubiquitous yet, but that has doubled in recent years. And whereas people don't own computers, they don't have broadband connections because the infrastructure isn't available and there are affordability concerns.

So having that mobile channel as a way to reach people, not only for services and banking and core communications, but for warning of impending disasters, can make the difference literally between people being safe or severely injured or worse, and can make the difference for an economy being able to pull itself back from the event of these things taking place.

So we see it, even though these announcements are for two countries, I think the interesting thing, Peter, is that we see it much further. We see it in the Philippines. We see it in Indonesia. We've seen parts of the US actually bring in early warning systems. Anybody on the Pacific Rim is potentially exposed to this type of thing from a tsunami and a typhoon. All of that is relevant. And so these are very much kind of, I think, litmus tests for how the technology will work in other places.

Peter Jarich (08:31)
And it's, I mean, you know, the concept of how we're looking at networks and how we're looking at mobile networks to, one, need to be resilient, but also need to be resilient because they're delivering those early warnings, I think is not going away.

And this is the part of the podcast where probably some folks are gonna say, please, please don't go there, but 6G, right? I mean, obviously within the context of Somalia, whereas you pointed out, penetration is still fairly low. We're probably not gonna be talking about 6G, but this is in part the reason why when folks look at 6G, there's so much excitement about technologies like ISAC, integrated sensing and communications.

Because that can be a part of, you know, thinking of networks as dual-use technologies, where they can be part of early warning systems, they can be part of a solution for helping to prepare for probably less of a natural disaster and more of a man-made disaster in that case.

But again, how do we think about that network not just delivering comms, but actually being part of a critical infrastructure that helps keep us all safe? But then again, we'll need some solid uptime, or else that value prop goes away, right?

Tim Hatt (09:50)
Well, let's peel the onion back on that a bit. You bring up an interesting transition to 6G and ISAC and the sensing story there. I mean, just for our audience, walk us through how that works and how that changes from past kind of sensing technologies.

Peter Jarich (10:06)
Yeah, so, and then to be fair, I think part of the reason why ISAC is getting a lot of attention is because it's one of the few new things, really genuinely new things coming out of 6G. But really, at a basic level, the concept is how do we use the mobile network, the signals that are coming out through — you know, the signals that obviously are used for communications —

to do more than communicate, do more than to pass data back and forth, voice back and forth, video back and forth, but use those signals, use the network to actually give you sensing information about the real world, right?

You know, at a very basic level, you could think about — and I've seen some good examples, heard some good examples — of if this had been in place, people could have said, hey, you know, there's a ship headed towards this bridge that's about to hit a bridge, right? Or, at a more aggregate level, what does traffic flow look like? Or, at a very pinpoint level, where is a car or where does people flow look like?

Now, there are obviously some concerns there around safety and privacy, right? To the extent that if you can identify specific people, and maybe you have some information there, then we need to make sure that we're safeguarding against that.

But obviously, probably the use case that comes to many people's minds, and if it hasn't already, it will seem very obvious when I say it, it's things like drones, like missiles, like how do we make this part of a national defense solution? You obviously need some good granularity. Some of that works better when you talk about higher frequency solutions, mostly because you've got a lot more bandwidth there, right?

Tim Hatt (11:51)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Jarich (11:52)
Obviously, those higher frequency solutions are more expensive, which leads some people to say maybe it's not quite feasible. But then you sort of look to the solutions that say, well, maybe we pair this with cameras, right? And you're using radar systems that exist, but camera systems along with this. And so we have sensor fusion.

You have some folks that say, well, we can do bottom-up with the cell network, top-down with satellite network. And so I think there's a lot of ideas, or even not satellite, but mounted on planes. So I think there's a lot of folks looking at this.

The basic idea being, though, of how do networks become part of a broader resilience and warning system? Because even going back to the idea from Somalia, right? It's not, you know, it's not just the network that is part of the solution. There's all sorts of things that come together.

So it's not like we're saying, yay, you know, mobile saves the day and all you need is mobile and nothing else matters. Not at all the case, right? But how do we make sure we're thinking about those capabilities as part of that?

And yeah, so I think that's the ISAC story in a nutshell.

Tim Hatt (12:56)
Yeah.

It's going to be fascinating to watch it play out. And I think your point on there needs to be an ecosystem in place for early warning systems is spot on.

I think the other interesting point here is, you know, with smaller, lower-income markets, being able to democratize technology so it is available for use. Seeing this in practice is a very positive signal and something that, let's be honest, in the modern tech-dominated news cycle doesn't get to the top of the agenda a lot.

I think bringing this up on this type of podcast is super valuable. And I would very much encourage our listeners to go and check that story out because it isn't isolated to these two countries. It's something that we are going to see as part of the new normal for countries, excuse me, and their preparedness for weather events and other natural disasters.

Peter Jarich (13:53)
And there is — and there are so many different pieces to that, which kind of probably leads us into the next sort of story. But to your point about democratizing technology, right? I was saying it's interesting to hear what other folks say.

And I was listening to another podcast this weekend that was talking about, you know, AI and the impact of AI and particularly memory prices on everything. I think they were talking a bit about the price of a PS5 going up and the price of all sorts of things.

That's — and by the way, I mean this is, you know, for us, this is really interesting, but in developing world countries, those phones that are really important are going up in price. I'm like, yeah, no, no, no, duh. Thanks. I'm glad that I'm glad that the rest of the world is recognizing that, right?

But it is this idea that democratization of technology felt like it was — felt like the trajectory was pretty, pretty clear.

Tim Hatt (14:48)
No.

Peter Jarich (14:48)
And then AI has come and driven up the prices, which kind of leads us to the next story.

So there were a whole bunch of things that could have been chosen in terms of the other stories for the CEO newsletter, some public-private partnerships that were going on, a lot of stuff around sovereignty. It was a big week last week for a lot of announcements out of France.

Obviously, every time you see people committing to building in one particular country, single-country focus oftentimes tends to be around sovereign focuses. Interesting report that came out a little bit after that from DCIT here in the UK about the Rewiring the State report, which specifically called out some major supplier risks, not surprisingly all with US companies, Microsoft, AWS, and Palantir, and Palantir being a big case study for them.

So, but we're gonna have lots of time across the year to talk about sovereignty and talk about sovereign stories.

The story that I think you're gonna want to talk about that wasn't really chosen but was in the intro. Let's talk a bit about the SpaceX IPO, Tim. So, it's kind of cheating, right? 'Cause it was kind of in the newsletter to the extent that was in the intro, but it wasn't covered. You can't — there's no way, there's no way to ignore it, right? So maybe, yeah.

Tim Hatt (16:03)
There's just no way to, yeah, there's no way to ignore it, and it is...

Peter Jarich (16:07)
Why do people care? I mean, for those folks who are under a rock or were too busy watching movies or doing something, why, yeah.

Tim Hatt (16:12)
Yeah. Well, let's just do a quick — let me do a quick level set for our listeners on the SpaceX IPO.

So SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, has been around as a private company for many years. It now has reached a size and stage where it wants to IPO to raise funding to help fund its expansion.

I think what's notable about this is that, you know, when the prospectus came out two, two and a half weeks ago, what immediately jumped out at people was this astronomically — no pun intended — astronomically large total addressable market that the company sees itself as being potentially able to access. And that market is the biggest in history at $28.5 trillion.

The question for us was, okay, this is a multifaceted business. It has its fingers in AI, it's got connectivity businesses, which is what we pay most attention to with Starlink. It also has other kind of space-related lines of business.

And so we wanted to really pull back and see within this massive purported market that they say, what does that actually mean in practice?

And I think what we wanted to do — we published a Spotlight on this a week ago — you know, and our point was really to say, within the Starlink line of business and the Starlink mobile line of business, how realistic is that given what we know about the technology and what we know about the addressable base?

And I'll be interested to get your reaction here, Peter, but, you know, when we looked at the numbers, you know, SpaceX was saying, okay, we think there's a total addressable base and essentially everybody. We're just going to put the whole global population up as our TAM here for mobile. And we're going, okay, that's interesting because right now this is a sort of service that is still in its infancy with a number of mobile operator carrier partners, big ambitions, but that's a really big jump. How do you get to that?

And when we actually run the numbers, you know, we get — we think a much more realistic TAM for Starlink Mobile is around about 5% of what SpaceX is saying it is.

Peter Jarich (18:31)
Well, and this — I mean, there's a couple things to unpack there, but I think it's interesting because, you know, just for reference for everyone, really for us the big interest was a bunch of people, customers, members, bosses, just saying, look, these numbers are just bonkers. Can you go and put something out there which puts them into context and actually explains, like, what's realistic? Because these numbers are out there and people are quoting them left and right, and then can we get some context around them?

And it worked out well for us, right? Because it was, you know, we'd earlier put out some work. I think hopefully some of you will have seen that. We talked a bit about MWC, we've talked about a lot, but just to look to say, you know, what would happen if you gave Starlink all the IMT spectrum that there is, what sort of service can they deliver to what share of the population?

And so we had numbers, we had data to back this up.

It is a bit, though, I think to be fair, right? It's a bit of this, like, what are we trying to get to with the concept of total addressable market? Right? Because on the one hand, total addressable market could mean, you know, hey, I've developed a new type of coffee that I think is great. My total addressable market is everyone who drinks coffee in the world. Right? That is my addressable market, right? Whether or not, you know, even if I'm producing 10 pounds of coffee a year, but the market is huge.

The serviceable market with my 10 pounds of coffee is a lot less. And I think that's a bit of what we're trying to get to here, right? Is that yes, that is an addressable market for them, but what they could actually service is only a part of that. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Tim Hatt (20:15)
That's 100% spot on. And I think — and I want to be clear and on the record — like, you have to respect the innovation that Starlink and SpaceX are bringing. We are not trying to prejudge that. What we're trying to do is bring a rigorous, evidence-based approach to assessing that total addressable market.

And when we do that, if you look at a mobile service that is running basically at parity with LTE, so around 15 to 20 megabits per second, that's what we think the threshold will be for people that, if they're going to sign up to this type of D2D service, and then when you apply that criteria and the capacity constraints you talked about due to the available spectrum, the laws of physics, you get to the serviceable addressable market, which is, we think, a small fraction of what SpaceX has put out.

So there is uncertainty here. SpaceX does have a massive first-mover advantage versus its satellite competitors in D2D. They're vertically integrated. They have very ambitious plans for volumes of satellites in space. So we have no doubt that there will be a large expansion in their infrastructure and large campaign to do this.

But I think the question for us really is, whereas this started out as primarily a rural service, potentially to bundle in with their broadband product, you know, they were pretty explicit in the IPO about seeing themselves as a connectivity provider, full stop, and moving to be a provider of choice in cities as well.

And right now we just don't see the spectrum or infrastructure enablers that would let that happen, at least in any kind of way to themselves.

Peter Jarich (21:59)
And that had to be the tagline, right? I mean, I think a lot of folks knew that the aspiration, especially when you have sort of like — like when the brand went out there, right, and the trademark was out there for Starlink Mobile, you know, sort of there was the expectation that this is going to be more than the existing sort of world service.

But when you go out there and say the TAM is everything, you're basically putting it out there saying we're going after all of it.

It is worth noting, though, right, that when you look at that $28.5 trillion TAM, most of that is not in connectivity. Most of that—

Tim Hatt (22:37)
That's—

Peter Jarich (22:38)
is not in the launch services. It's all in sort of this faith that AI is going to grow and faith that there will be tons of enterprise, and that's particularly interesting because I'm pretty sure the way they called it, I was — was enterprise AI applications.

Tim Hatt (22:55)
Yep.

Peter Jarich (22:55)
Now, there is a bit of a tie-in there, right? To the proposal to launch a million-satellite constellation for delivering AI data centers in space. So there's a tie-in there, but the vast bulk of that giant $28.5 trillion TAM comes from those enterprise applications, right?

So it's stuff that we are less likely to figure out how to model anytime soon, anyways. Is that fair?

Tim Hatt (23:27)
That's fair. It's a little bit more into the future, but it does go to, as you say, the floating data center concept that Elon Musk has floated. It goes to, frankly, SpaceX's vision of having human economies that move beyond our planet. And it goes to servicing demand for AI that, for AI, they predict will not be able to be soaked up by existing compute capacity on Earth.

So there are a number of really interesting questions there. I think what it also — the last point I make on this is that, you know, the IPO is coming up this week. There are a lot of, obvious, you know, points of interest with that. There's been a lot of investor anticipation of it. We know that.

But I think looped in — and now we're going to talk about this in a bit with some of the other big IPOs this week — there's still, you know, question mark on the longevity and how much of the purported addressable markets are realistic for this. And I think this is an AI question in general, but this is why we're living through super interesting times to test out these questions in practice.

Peter Jarich (24:38)
Minor correction. I think the floating in the ocean was the Peter Thiel-backed company. Musk is in the sky. What we don't have is someone who's promised data centers at the core of the Earth.

That's gonna come, right? We've got the sky, we've got the ocean. We need someone who's gonna come up with either something at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or maybe tapping the magma, tapping the heat of magma to develop — it's gonna... If you're out there, I wanna hear about it.

All the best. It's gonna come. Now we're gonna get to — and we're taking suggestions for what to call the final segment before we say goodbye. We're thinking it's On Our Minds and On the Road, and trying to find some musical cues for that.

But let's start with the On Our Minds part. These are sort of other things that are maybe in the news that we think are cool.

I'll kick it off because I kind of gave a lead into this anyways, talking about events. We've got the Tour de France — that's coming up in July, kicking off in Barcelona. So I need to find a reason to go visit our offices in Barcelona to see the Grand Départ.

But for those of you who also didn't catch the other one, there's this. And I was actually talking with a colleague who did not know what these — these three lions, as drawn by someone who's never ever seen a lion in their life, but decided to make a picture of a lion. We have the World Cup coming up soon.

And I think for me, and it all kind of ties together, right? We talked about the importance of networks, but we've got a piece of analysis coming up. Check it out in the research. It hasn't been posted yet, but it will be this week.

Really thinking about the role of connectivity and operators, and I think this is another thing that kind of — it's in the background. But what I think is even more in the background, I think we know that the, you know, the interesting part for me is, is we all know the big story, right?

The big story is yes, connectivity, connectivity, connectivity. It's great to have lots of solid connectivity, and we know as people are using their devices in stadiums at these events, how critical that is, right? To have a good fan experience. Wonderful.

I think that's — and telcos do a wonderful job talking about how they've upped the capacity. I think you see them all talking about the amount of data.

But I think what's interesting, and we try and call this out in the analysis, is how it's more than that, right? It's not just the fan experience, it's also delivering slicing for B2B services, for broadcasting, for even things like ancillary things like making sure that people who are visiting have roaming services or speed-based services, or even if you look at what T-Mobile US did, right, where they launched live translation services from the core of the network, right?

Big coincidence that that is ready in time for a bunch of people coming from outside of the US to come and visit. Probably not.

So I think it's — I think for me, the analysis was really good just to delve into all of the things that are sort of under the surface, but probably even more important, right? Because it's just as important that all those services taking place, including public safety.

And yes, we can make that tie into, in the future, you're gonna want things like ISAC, you're gonna want protection for those high-value properties. That they're there.

I mean, the big question though, Tim, I think for me is who's out first, the US or Canada? Who goes out? Who goes out? Who goes out? Who goes out early? Who goes out earlier?

Tim Hatt (28:27)
You preempted my question. Well, I like our chances of getting out of the group. We start off quite soon. You know, in terms of who goes out first, I'm going to hedge my bets on that. I'll probably say the US, just because Canada getting behind our team is very, very, very strong. But what's your take on that?

Peter Jarich (28:56)
I mean, it seems like the big US, the big US hopefuls — the folks that are actually playing abroad — have had some good international experiences and are in their prime. So I know there's some hopes there. I've heard that quarters would be considered a good, considered a good showing.

It's — I think regardless, as always, it's gonna be some good stories. And I think we wouldn't hear those stories if it weren't for all of the networks.

Tim Hatt (29:36)
And it's interesting just before we go on, I mean, I think even when we look back four years ago to the Qatar World Cup, when we looked at the numbers there, that was, you know, one of the highest-grossing data events in history. I think for the networks in Qatar was the single highest per capita.

And then you fast-forward to Super Bowls, to Olympics, to Taylor Swift concerts. One thing we're seeing now is these major global sporting events being a test bed for new technology, number one, and also a validation.

So I think it will be interesting to see at this World Cup when AIs and Gen AIs now in there, what do we see with uplink data traffic? What do we see with sharing? What do we see with fan zones? Like, how do these things play out in practice? I think those are going to be really interesting questions.

Peter Jarich (30:26)
I can only imagine, to your point, I can only imagine the number of, like, queries you're gonna be getting to ChatGPT of just random things that probably don't matter, but I think it's become, for so many people, it's become the new norm, right, of how they engage.

I wouldn't be surprised — I mean, there'll probably be a lot of people talking to their AI friends, asking them—

Tim Hatt (30:52)
This is—

my friend, who will be asking, "Has Canada ever got out of Europe?" One. We'll see the response quickly.

Peter Jarich (31:01)
Which leads to, I think, an article that you and I were chatting about earlier today in the FT, around maybe the future of OpenAI.

Tim Hatt (31:12)
Yeah, so the FT came up with a great story on the weekend. And it's really a prelude to OpenAI's anticipated strategy pivot.

So OpenAI, everybody knows, is sort of an iconic AI company, launched ChatGPT, arguably the start of what we now know as the AI era.

The interesting story here and what the FT is trailing is that OpenAI, for all its global success, is realizing that actually, to be successful, it's going to need to be profitable. And two, that it's going to need to put its money on agents more than just chatbots.

Right now, ChatGPT is closing in on a billion users. It might actually be there. That's great. But if you look at the price tag on it, it's not enormous.

where you have Anthropic, its rival competitor, really pushing headlong into agentic and the business sphere.

And I think for OpenAI, they are likely going to be IPO-ing later this year. To do that, they will need a credible story to meet investor questions around the sustainability of the AI boom.

And they see that as having an agentic tool that enables kind of a quasi-workforce beyond what we now know as the human workforce. And two, ultimately driving higher pricing in the business segment.

Right now, I think business is around—

Peter Jarich (32:43)
Do you do you think—

Tim Hatt (32:44)
40% of the revenue. So trying to get that up is really important.

Peter Jarich (32:48)
Do you think—

do you think they went to ChatGPT and asked, "Do we need to be profitable to have a successful IPO?" Because it's, you know, you put it like that, right? They've come to the recognition that being profitable will be important to being successful.

And I think, you know, what I think is interesting, and we've seen that, right, with the success of Anthropic really coming off of Claude Code, and the coding side of things. And obviously, you know, OpenAI has made more success with Codex.

It's definitely an important story. I think what was maybe telling for me, though, is, right, and yeah, to your point, right? The idea that obviously enterprise users are paying for this. Consumers are probably just going, you know, a lot of consumers, some pay, but most just go on, you know, the free version.

But what's interesting is from the article, and I'll just call this out because I got it in front of me, is, you know, they quote Thibaut Sotio, who's leading all the core products and platforms, saying, "It will transcend the actual surface. What we're building towards is where you have your own personal agent that's capable of helping you across everything in your life."

Cool idea, right? It goes back to your point of recognizing that agentic is sort of, you know, we talked before about generative AI and now it's agentic AI.

My worry there is it still goes back to this personal agent, right? Whereas I think what the main difference here is that we're seeing is that Anthropic really heads down on the B2B side of things, heads down on coding.

Every time I load up my TV and they want me to watch something on YouTube, it's something from Dario saying, "I've got real issues with consumer AI."

Tim Hatt (34:29)
Yeah.

Peter Jarich (34:30)
And yet we still, and maybe it's because of the history, right? We still have, as part of this pivot and discussion of this pivot, you've still got OpenAI saying, yeah, personally.

And it's a bit of hedging, and I get it, right? I maybe need to say this if you look at the stuff that's going on, let's say, in China, where you've got in China—

Tim Hatt (34:47)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Jarich (34:48)
tons of consumers that are going after agentic. They're, you know, the stories of consumers that are going and having OpenClaw loaded on their laptops and they're doing that.

The flip side, which I think is really interesting, is I started seeing some stuff on social about the grand Mac Mini resales, where there's a whole bunch of people that went and bought Mac Minis because they were gonna load OpenClaw on, and then were like, yeah, this is just too hard and it's not worth it, right?

So I think the consumer side of agentic is maybe overhyped. And I hope that, to your point, OpenAI, if this is really the pivot that they sort of — it's a real — because if it's not a real pivot, if it's just sort of a, "well, maybe," but we have to pay lip service, that's not gonna be so—

Tim Hatt (35:36)
And I think it will be a test for Sam Altman, who has, let's be honest, been through a checkered last couple of years, most recently emerging from court victoriously with that legal battle over Elon Musk, but also having questions over the long-term strategy and the deals with his various partners.

This is a big bet. And it also shows, I think, Peter, just how fast the innovation cycle is moving right now.

Peter Jarich (36:05)
And why messaging is so key? Because you're right. Because it is also new. And I think on the one hand, you can look at this chasing for capacity, which is people buying capacity. And people talk about it as, is it a circular economy in a bad way? Not the kind that we all — not the resilient kind.

Which is why getting these stories out there are important.

But before we head off on the circular economy and on the sustainability side of things, we're not going to pay too much attention to the On the Road story today, but you've got a quick anecdote from a recent trip.

Tim Hatt (36:44)
Yeah, just super quick. So I was in Brussels last week for an ESG workshop with our European team and the European authorities and a number of the mobile operators there.

We have an ESG benchmark that we run to track telco progress on ESG priorities.

The interesting thing I want to flag from that is now that you're seeing a lot of biodiversity connections to telco networks. We're now seeing a lot of the sensing capabilities you talked about in the opening story of our discussion today, you know, being embedded on towers and other mobile infrastructure to monitor the planet's progress on biodiversity.

That's now a key part of how the ESG story is shaping up. I thought that was just, again, something that doesn't get a lot of visibility, wouldn't be at the top of the news cycle, but I just wanted to flag that as where I think something is changing in that ESG domain that people should be aware of.

Peter Jarich (37:40)
Yeah, I think when we think about the role of telco in terms of sustainability, right? So oftentimes it just comes down to energy efficiency and energy efficiency, and that makes—

Tim Hatt (37:51)
Yeah.

Peter Jarich (37:52)
sense because it's, you know, something that's tangible and obviously hits the bottom line, but there's so many different angles, and it was good to see.

Well, we will talk more next week about On the Road because we do have a number of events coming up, including MWC Shanghai, including DTW Ignite. But we'll talk more about that next week.

We'll probably talk more football, because we'll actually start seeing what's taking place. I know so little about football, so Tim will school me, and who knows. We'll maybe have a guest on or see if we can, you know, maybe someone who's kicked out of the tournament.

But anyways, I said it last week. I will say it again. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Tim.

This is the place where you're supposed to say go and rate us on your favorite platform, and this is the place where I say don't. Just give us another few, give us another few episodes to get to our stride.

And then, but what you can do is go and give us comments. Would love to hear what you want to hear from us, what you are thinking about that you would like us to talk about, and any other tips and tricks or ideas for segment names, because we are open and maybe even take some sponsorships if you want.

Anyways, thank you, Tim. Thank you, everyone. See you all next week.