Episode 21: Networks in Transition: From HAPS to the Race for AI

Peter Jarich (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to Intelligence & Noise, the GSMA Intelligence podcast where we sift through the news of the week. Try and add a little bit of intelligence to some of the stuff that matters, try and sift through the noise and maybe call out some of the things that you haven't paid attention to. We do it through the lens of the CEO Newsletter. That's something that comes out from the GSMA and our director general. I've said this before, I'll say it again. Congrats if you're on that list. It means you're more important than Tim or I.

It means that you're important enough to be a CEO or at least be on that distribution list.

GSMA Intelligence team puts a lot of work into to helping that go out. And so we're here to help explain why some of the stuff that goes in matters and why some of the stuff that didn't go in maybe matters too. As usual I'm here with Tim, Tim Hatt. Hey Tim, how are you doing?

Tim Hatt (00:49)
Good, Peter, how are you?

Peter Jarich (00:52)
Good, good, good. It is. We are we are well into October, well into Q3, which means we're on that home stretch towards the holidays. But doesn't mean that the news isn't busy. So I think we're going to have a good a good set of discussion today, talking everything from high-altitude platforms to civil.

Defense, public safety, and of course AI, because you can't not talk about about AI. And on that front, as as as I try to do with every every one of these, I'm going to kick off with a a quick story. I think if you've been tuning in recently, you heard a couple times us talking about sort of the move of agentic AI into the consumer space and how we're seeing it with whether it's OpenAI's dots or

Muse from Meta, or some of the other things that are out there waiting to see what's coming out next. And it's interesting because the point that I've been trying to make for me is, you know, we all can question and wonder about what this might mean on traffic and user behavior and what this might mean for telcos as well as society. But it's hard to know until we all start start playing with it, which is why I've been

engaging with this a a good deal. And the interesting part is you start wondering like what to to throw at these things. Right. So for example, you know, I talked about in the past, I've I had Muse book my CES registration and it did it fairly well. I submitted all the documents, I did all the important parts, it did the legwork great. More recently, get a note from

the auto insurance company going, hey, your your your car insurance is due. We're going to auto-renew. And I think if you're not in if you're not in the UK, you're probably not familiar with the fact that there is a whole industry getting you to switch your provider of whatever provider you have. Right? That could be everything from your auto insurance to your pet insurance to your mobile phone to your home insurance to any service that you have that's a subscription because

Prices go up when you are a new subscriber, you can get a good deal. And so there's tons of like I I think the switch your insurance commercial is the UK equivalent of the pharmaceutical commercial in the US. Right? Like

Tim Hatt (03:25)
Bye.

Peter Jarich (03:26)
if if if you're not from the US and you go there, you're like, why are there so many ads for drugs? And if you come to the UK, you're like, Why are there so many ads trying to get me just to switch my my insurance? And then they get a bit of money. And my question was, like, okay, okay, I could go to one of those folks.

And maybe I get a free movie ticket or a Meerkat puppet. They're not giving away the Meerkat puppets anymore, I don't think. Christmas is coming though. Or maybe do I just ask do I just ask my personal agent, right, to do that. And I didn't because I'm I'm lazy and don't want to fill out new paperwork and I'm happy, you know, with the car insurance. But it did make me wonder what

How are we going to see these impact other businesses? And that leads us into the first set of news. So the two things that made it into the CEO Newsletter this week, some news around HAPS that Tim's going to get to, and some news around the newest model released by Meta called Muse Spark.

We're going to talk about the hap side of things more in depth, but let me just say the Muse Spark piece was interesting because this is sort of being flagged as like the first frontier model from Meta. So it shows that they're really trying to compete with the big boys, more competition there. It does bring up the question of is this a winner takes all? How many different frontier models can there be? It brings up issues of frontier versus open weight.

And how that all plays out. So there's a lot of interesting things there, but you know, w what I think is particularly interesting that was called out a bit by by our analysts on this and went to the newsletter is also I as we feed this stuff into and we know that again Meta is doing a push on the consumer side, does this shift things for telcos in terms of people switching their behaviors?

I mean, again, there's there's a whole industry in getting folks to either buy new phones or switch phones or switch suppliers. And it's an interesting question. I mean, Tim, are you've

Tim Hatt (05:46)
Yeah.

Peter Jarich (05:47)
been here in the UK much longer than I mean, how often do you take advantage of the get free movie tickets for switching your provider and I mean or how actually how long have you been with your current cell phone provider? Is it more than a decade?

Tim Hatt (06:03)
The fact that I can't tell you the answer probably gives you enough to know on that one. And the answer is

Peter Jarich (06:08)
Yeah.

Tim Hatt (06:08)
I probably switch more than I do, but this is a good point.

Peter Jarich (06:15)
It's easy,

man. I mean, I mean, I mean, number portability, e sim, we live in a it's a really good no, I think most of us just same here, right? Same, it's it's it's good, it works. I know how to pay the bills, it's set up. I don't have any complaints with it, and so I don't switch. I guess that is a interesting question of as we roll out some of these solutions and they become easier. Again, it's it's not really the point of Muse Spark, Frontier. I hope we're I hope we're not using frontier models.

To help people pick what cell phone carrier they should it's not that complicated, folks, but

Tim Hatt (06:49)
Well,

it could be where you have your anniversary dinner, who your next cell phone provider is, whichever, whichever you like. The other interesting thing, just quick on that, Peter, before we transition is this is a paid model here. For most of the activity on Muse, it's a paid subscription and they're going right in at the deep end, despite, you know, only having a limited beta period. So obviously looking for a quick ROI against the investments they have.

Peter Jarich (07:16)
Yeah. No, they're try

Tim Hatt (07:17)
Let's see how that pays out.

Peter Jarich (07:18)
th they've got a lot of questions about the money they're they're piling into it. HAPS. We use that term like everyone. And I, as many folks know, I was I was I was I started my my career kind of before we even called it HAPS in the hap space. But tell people for they don't for and give some people a background here before we go into news, what is HAPS?

Tim Hatt (07:43)
Yeah,

let's just give a quick explainer. So HAPS stands for high-altitude platforms and they sit, these are connectivity platforms that sit in the stratosphere. So we talk a lot about satellite on this podcast. You've heard us talking about that. Key difference with HAPS is that HAPS flight about 20 kilometers above sea level that's in the atmosphere versus lower Thorbiter LEO satellites, which are about 500 to a thousand. So it's a much lower altitude. They have bigger payloads.

And they can be scrambled up at short notice. They tend to last for about 100 days before they need maintenance or refueling versus satellites, which are many years in the making. So key differences, but in the same league in terms of trying to provide non-terrestrial network (NTN) connectivity. And things have improved a lot.

Peter Jarich (08:34)
The news.

Yeah, and the news just just it was a bundle of two things. So most recently it was NTT DOCOMO talking about some work they're doing with AALTO, how they're integrating AI into the platform. AALTO has a HAPS platform. I think the big piece that they sell on a thing called the Basket, which is a great, great term, which is basically an LTE and no B. It's got a

radio head BBU, we've got a picture here. It's got some, yeah, it's pretty, pretty cool looking. It's exactly what you'd expect. LTE band 20, 28, 10 megahertz bandwidth. Looks like in development is 5G, two sectors per basket. So that was mostly I think it was a lot of work around using AI, integrating AI into the solution to better.

Plan for demand, better plan antenna tilting. And then the I mean to some extent it felt like one of those things of it was an incremental addition to what they're doing, which w whenever I see that stuff, it's kind of like someone said, Hey, we we need some PR. We haven't talked about this in a while. Well it it didn't feel like the kind of thing like momentous, this is a new thing. It's a let's remind folks that we're out there to tell them what we're doing. It built on then in September, there was a HAPS trial,

From I don't know how they pronounce it. Sceye, SoftBank. And this is sort of again, it was a HAPS trial, plans to go commercial in 27, but this is sort of the other side of the things. Whereas AALTO was sort of the comms platform, this is actually the infrastructure platform, if you will, big pretty, shiny, shiny blimp.

They launched it, it flew from New Mexico, honestly, launching from Roswell. Do these folks launch from Roswell because for those folks who don't know, Roswell's like the where where apparently in the US all they keep all the UFOs that they catch. So I don't know, maybe there's I don't know if you do that just because the local community wants things launched because it brings in tourists who then make jokes. But they launched it from Roswell, it flew across the ocean to Japan. It seemed to work. So two different things.

From HAPS side of things. Your perspective, Tim, I mean I mean, for me, I guess the big question is why are we talk so much about satellite. Why don't we talk much more about HAPS and and should we?

Tim Hatt (11:10)
So the reason we don't talk as much about HAPS is they don't get the headlines because they don't have the level of investment capital and Elon Musk is the world behind them. But they have been going for a while. And I think they've sat in sort of the shadow because they don't, as I said, they don't have the technological bravado that a LEO satellite does, but they're significant because they can perform tasks that are needed from lower, you

altitudes below 500 kilometers, things like disaster recovery, emergency response, being able to scramble up. And I think it's significant, Peter, that these announcements are coming out of Japan, because that country is prone to natural disasters. We've seen earthquakes,

Peter Jarich (11:54)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Hatt (11:56)
we've seen typhoons, and this is very much an evolution after several years. All these companies are part of the HAPS Alliance. And so I think we're now seeing AI coming.

Frame to hone some of the technical challenges that have been at play for years. And as those start to get refined, I think we're going to see this commercial deployment in action from the mobile operators and others starting from next year, as you say.

Peter Jarich (12:22)
Yeah, I think I think it's I think from my standpoint, again, I mentioned this early on. First one of my first jobs was for a company that was trying to build some of these things early on. And so it's always like I've always been interested in it and I kind of I've been asking myself that question of i if you think about it, right? You've got sort of satellite, you've got Geo, you've got LEO, you've got V LEO, you've got

airplanes and then somewhere between the airplanes and the V LEO, right, are these are these are these HAPS platforms, which can be, I mean, we're talking here a lot about sort of sort of the blimp dirigible type thing, but you could also use drones, these giant plane type drones. You know it seems like there are some some clear benefits here, right? Lower latency, higher capacity, because the spot beam, if you're if you're lower down, you're you're spreading the

You're spreading the RF over a smaller area. You can bring these down and service them. You can upgrade the technology more clearly than if something is way up in space. Obviously, you can you can target the capacity and with sovereignty seems to be, you know, you know, you can obviously have much more control on that. But I think and you hit it right, as I thought about this of why we don't talk about it more. It's just not as ambitious.

Right, these are local, right? We're talking about a solution launched for Japan. We're not talking about something that's going to be global or going to cover an entire an entire region. I mean, there are some technical issues. The nice thing is when you're in space, you can have an antenna array that's the size of a football field. A little bit harder to do if you're not, and especially if you've got some of the turbulence, 'cause it's not completely turbulence free up in the stratosphere. But it's it's the other thing that I think and you can tell me what

You think about this. And obviously you get better coverage from satellite because you're covering a bigger area. But what struck me, and let's go back to your comment about Musk, is that let's look at these two announcements, right? You've got one where they're talking about the comms platform, one talking about the infrastructure. But those are like two different companies that are having things pieced together, as opposed to a Musk who is launching the satellites, building

Tim Hatt (14:33)
Yep. Yep.

Peter Jarich (14:34)
the satellites. Basically, it's it's DIY, right? And you think about, you see what what Amazon's doing, where it's also we're going to build these things ourselves, we're going to launch themselves. It's a scale and an ambition that just makes it, I don't wanna say more interesting, but more newsworthy than this. It's it's I'm going to build this thing myself and put it up into space to compete with telcos on a global level or partner with them versus.

I'm going to piece something together from different folks where I don't actually own the entire solution to provide better coverage in an emergency should it take place.

Tim Hatt (15:15)
And

I think one way to think about it, so I think you're right in how to characterize it. Think one way to think about it is HAPS are a little bit more tactical, whereas satellites are a bit more strategic. You know, we use

Peter Jarich (15:26)
Yep. Yep.

Tim Hatt (15:26)
that comparison. And I go back, people have probably heard of Google Loon. That is really the forerunner of what we see as modern day HAPS. Of course, Google Loon was a balloon launched by Google's X factory back about 10 years ago. Ultimately went through a cycle of innovation and then was retired.

Because it didn't have the economics to get it done. Now, I think what's changed is a lot of these technical improvements are changing how the HAPS economics look. And so the interesting point, Peter, we'll see whether Japan, Philippines, the US, UK, other countries that have coastal lines prone to extreme weather start to invest both government defense agencies and mobile operators invest in HAPS as a tactical solution to complement.

And I think that's where we're going. I think it's that agnostic

Peter Jarich (16:15)
Yeah. No, and I think I think tact

Tim Hatt (16:17)
solution.

Peter Jarich (16:19)
tactical tactical is key and actually leads us, I think for I think you hit it there where and and I'd push back on the term solution because I think I think I have this sort of worldview of telecom products that I've honed over the years. I make it sound like it's it's it's like Jarek's Law. No, well let's let's not call it that. There are products and solutions. Products serve a very specific purpose.

Versus solutions which are are much broader. And this feels like it's a tactical product to solve a specific need versus a broader platform or or solution. Which again will doesn't mean it's not important. If there's an emergency, if you need coverage, if you need something, I think as we go on, as we think about how this fits into public safety, clearly value there, but it's just not as broad. But the tactical comment brings us to the second news piece. So

We had two pieces that were were put forward, didn't go in. The one we want to talk about before mentioning the second one was what took place in in Sweden. And this was the allocation of some 700 megahertz spectrum for the public safety network coming forward. So for again, I'm guessing that

There's probably more people that know what HAPS is, Tim, that than know the ins and outs of the public safety

Tim Hatt (17:49)
okay.

Peter Jarich (17:49)
network in in Sweden. No offense to all our Swedish listeners out there. But this is allocationist spectrum that's going to be used to replace their their TETRA network, which is called Rakel. Be establishing the Swedish emergency network. Points to them. The acronym is Sven, Sven.

S W E N. That is a brilliant hats hats off to the establishment of Sven, the Swedish Emergency Network. Telia will be doing the RAN. At the same time, Telenor and Tele2 are going to be giving some support. You'll be roaming over to them for coverage and capacity. The core network will be run owned by the government, run by the government.

So just for some background here, operational. So the TETRA network's been operational for about 20 years. Got about six to seven hundred folks, six hundred and fifty folks that are that are using it. They'll be building this new network over the next few years. And then it's operational in 2028 with a hopeful shutdown in 2030. I mean, I think the reason why we'd suggested this to go in is I think the

you know, just the focus on how telcos are playing a role in public safety, leveraging their networks, leveraging their network capabilities, looking at different ways that they can can roll out those solutions. There are some issues here, but Tim,

Tim Hatt (19:29)
Go.

Peter Jarich (19:30)
I mean, seems pretty narrow. Maybe there's a reason why it didn't get in. I mean, worth worth folks knowing about here, anything? I mean I think there's a few things that maybe are

Below the radar, so to speak, but anyone should care about this?

Tim Hatt (19:42)
I

think you hit it right. It's not so much the story in Sweden per se that makes waves here. It's that it speaks to the wider use of 5G and critical comms, the use and requirement of sovereignty to be built into how connectivity contracts are structured. I do think there's a question here, Peter, on the fact that this spectrum was not

allocated through a competitive process. This was just assigned. And I think there are questions around spectrum management there. But I think the interesting point for me here is when you look at this and first responders can be police, ambulance, defense, military, all of the above, it's the fact that governments now recognize the need for robust and resiliency.

And that is built into how the network's designed. And I think that's going to be critical through the rest of the 5G era and particularly into the 6G era. How do you see this?

Peter Jarich (20:52)
Yeah, so I think it's 100%, right? Top line, obvious bits, spectrum is a national asset, leveraging it for things like resilience for public safety, great. The move from TETRA to mobile, right? Again, the network's been out there for twenty years. We can use some new technologies, the role of resilience, a focus on public safety. That's all I think I think those are all things worth underscoring. And kind of like the Hap story, worth bringing to the fore, 'cause they're sometimes not noticed. I think the architecture here is interesting. You got a government owned core.

You've got dedicated spectrum that's going to be launched by Telia. You've got this, you know, leveraging commercial RAN with backups from Tele2 Telenor. So I think there's a whole bunch of cool parts there. What's interesting for me is so you know, when we when we decided that was so we included this in the or pitched this as part of what was going out to everyone, and then ultimately sort of decided maybe let's let's pull it back. And I think there was some, you know, as you mentioned.

Does it set good precedent about how the spectrum is allocated? Not quite sure. What does it mean? Is it a bit niche? I connected with an old colleague who's he's basically an analyst and consultant in the public safety space, in the critical communications world. He's the kind of guy that goes to the European Association of Public Safety folks to hear what they're doing. He you know goes to the BAFTA, that's and the and the you know, all of the not BAFTA, BAPCO. BAFTA's very, very he does not go to BAFTA. That would be that I would he's he's he's an award winning actor as well. No. BAPCO, which is the British public safety association's event and APCO in the US. So he knows this space in and out. And it's interesting because I kicked off with that point of saying, Look,

I think some concerns maybe. And obviously internally, you know how, you know, we work with operators and there's always concerns when you know, of how you allocate spectrum and he's like, Yeah, tell that person to just grow up. He's like, That is the most stupid thing. Tell that person to just grow up. He's like, This is public safety. Like like, yes, you could take a long time to get this done. They wanna have this stuff up and running in the next few years 'cause the TETRA network is running down. You're going to take an extra few years to figure that out? He's like like like that's just

That's just not how this works. And he called like a whole bunch of interesting things of like, you know, the difficulty of just making sure that it's not as easy as just switching over. You gotta switch over devices, you gotta have dual use devices while you're doing that switch over. You gotta have interworking of those devices, obviously with the TETRA network, but with those apps which include like station alerting, device management, dispatch, and then even and he was calling out sort of the focus now on things like sidelink, where he's like, Look, you know.

Your average public safety device right now, so the you know output power, the SAR limits, emissions limits on our devices sort of limit yourself to like 250 milliwatts for radiation purposes. It's like your public safety devices, that's three watts because you need to be able to talk to another device if there isn't a network. Right.

Tim Hatt (24:02)
Mm.

Peter Jarich (24:03)
So if the network isn't there, you still need to be able to do device to device.

Which means and he's like, you know, there's a whole lot that you don't think about about building these public these these public safety networks. And you know, he was calling a lot of the work that's being done asidelink he actually called out some of the work that the GSMA is doing with the TCCA to ensure roaming across borders, right? And he said the Nordics are are pretty high up there. But I think it's interesting to see how this will

will play out. He called the Nordics as some of the most advanced in this. By the way, I'm I'm calling him like like he's an unnamed person. His name's Ken Rabin. He runs a company called CritComms Insights. So if you're in that space you'll you'll probably know about him. But I do think that critical communications and we think and defense, not the same but not wholly unrelated are verticals we're going to see as we think about

5G delivering, you know, delivering priority, delivering slicing and who needs that more. I think we will see those called out as as key verticals a lot more going forward.

Tim Hatt (25:17)
And

the fact that you detail it out, you know, very methodically there, I think is helpful to give people the context needed that if you are a mobile operator or a supplier in this area, the way of working with a government client for critical comms is completely different to how you'd have to

Peter Jarich (25:34)
A hundred percent.

Tim Hatt (25:35)
work in a normal B2B environment, let alone consumer.

Peter Jarich (25:38)
Yeah.

Tim Hatt (25:39)
So it is as much as we talk about the revenue model, we talk about, you know, monetization here, like just the straight up ops.

For managing this are complex.

Peter Jarich (25:50)
The other story that didn't make it in because maybe a bit of AI exhaustion was the announcement from NVIDIA that they're going to be putting an extra two billion of investment into Europe that's on top of the eight billion they've already committed. We'll probably talk more about this next week. So by the time this drops, I will have come back from NVIDIA's GTC. So we'll we'll talk more there. But this is really part of a

you know, set of trips. Jensen Huang from a video is making London, Paris, Germany, visiting a lot of places to talk about the investments that are being made. I think it culminates with Germany on Monday of this week. So be the Monday before when this drops. Was in Germany talking with the chancellor there about about investments. And obviously Germany's fully on board with industrial AI

You've seen investments in work with Siemens in NVIDIA, with Mercedes, a big focus on how to renovate and move forward and take the industrial just that whole vertical forward with AI. And so we'll be interesting to see what we hear, what comes out of an GTC. It's not a coincidence that GTC is in Berlin right right before this. So there is a plan according to various folks.

There was again a a a big event on Monday. Excited to talk about it more next week. With that, that's the kickoff to the Willie Nelson segment, The On the Road and On Our Minds. On the Road, I'll be in GTC. We'll try and do a little bit of filming from there if I can. I will not unless someone takes it for me, I will not take a picture with Jensen Huang.

I will not be one of the throng of people running up to get my selfie with Jensen just because I don't want to say it's beneath me but I just don't want to get trampled in the I don't want to get trampled in the in the in the crowd of people that are that are that are running to go see him. But it should be a good event. I've got two stories, Tim. Let me kick off with one then we'll go to your sort of extra short stories that I think are worth calling out. The first one

picked this up from our good folks at mobile world live it was the fact that was recommitting or or noting its recommitment to europe and this is i think interesting one because you know we know oppo's got multiple brands oppo oneplus realme one plus pulled out of europe and so i think to some extent this is a reminder that hey we're still here we have we have other

we have other other models we're committed to the market. Hey, hey, hey, don't we're not going anywhere. But that their focus is very much on the premium side of things, right? They're saying that there's a commitment to Europe, yes, but they really want to drive those sales of their fine devices, that's their flagship series. They wanna want to double those sales in 27 versus 26. It's interesting because this goes back to something that we talked about, which is that low end's going away.

Right. This is this is this is one of the, I mean, OPPO OnePlus, these were the companies that were out there to say, hey, this is mass market premium, mass market flagship, everyday flagship. We're going to bring great quality for low prices. And you now see that with the memory crisis, with the ram crisis, the incentive to sell phones on the low end is driving everyone, you know, is going away, and it's driving everyone to push the high end.

Not a great not not not not super I mean I d I don't I don't know what that means for you and what level of phones you're buying, Tim, but hands the affordability, something that we're all working on a good deal here at the GSMA.

Tim Hatt (29:56)
Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. The price tiers are starting to shrink there. And I think the fact you see it towards the high end speaks to both supply and demand drivers. I think we're also seeing a consolidation among the OEM model share as we get into more advanced use cases. I expect we'll see that with AI as well.

Peter Jarich (30:22)
Yeah.

No, that's fair. That's fair. And I think I think it's interesting because that's you're you called out the important part there is the supply side of things. Because it's not that there's not a demand for necessarily low end devices. It's just it's just there'll be a lack of supply because people won't be making those. And I think, yes, in Europe that's one thing. But if that means that these big manufacturers focus things on that high end, what does that leave other markets for? I mean, I guess I would say, you know, or is it leave for other markets rather? I mean, I would say that for the OEMs, that means someone's going to do it. If there is an opportunity there.

Tim Hatt (30:50)
Yep, it opens

up a door. Opens up a door. Yep. No question.

Peter Jarich (30:51)
Someone's someone's going to figure out how do how do I make this how do I make some more efficient devices? How

do I market the idea that it's sort of a the opposite of Apple marketing, the marketing of good enough is good enough. You know, maybe this is, you know, look, you're not filming the next Oscar winning movie on your phone. Maybe you don't need to spend two thousand pounds, maybe trying to get a more efficient and this is something I think I think we don't talk about in the whole

Conversation around sovereign digital services. We don't talk around OSs. I am, I am betting, I'm not going to put a timeline on it, which means that I'll I'll be right because this will happen eventually. Is that someone's going roll out some sort of new sovereign focused OS, which will be super efficient? I mean, if I am if I'm in a country where device affordability is an issue and I can roll out some sort of new OS that I can claim is.

Not interfered with by other folks. I own it. It's efficient, which means it can run on low-end devices. There's an incentive there, right? It may not work. It may not be any good. But I can see that. And then on the telco side of things, I guess it just means we're going to be seeing a big push on financing, longer, longer purchases, right? It used to be two years, three years, how long you lock someone into a contract if you have to fund that phone and insurance.

Right. I think I think as yeah.

Tim Hatt (32:18)
And does it start to

reenergize the refurbished market? We track this data through our ESG benchmark. We know that's going up about five percentage points a year. Does this start to impact that?

Peter Jarich (32:31)
It's gotta.

I mean it's it's it's gotta if if if only to refurb those devices into markets where they can't afford them. Tim, what's your what

is your minor story, but not minor?

Tim Hatt (32:38)
Yeah. So just

coming on quickly. So the European mobile operator MSS story, we had mentioned this before. This is the rumored now confirmed intent to explore a joint bid on MSS spectrum between Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefonica. Why do I bring it up? I bring it up even though we've talked before in that it is an official partnership to explore that.

Two, the satellite provider, constellation provider who would service this neutral access layer is yet to be decided. Major opening. And then three, I think it's interesting, Peter, that we also contemporaneously at the same time had comments from the US ambassador to the EU on a potential backlash from the US should Europe.

Push through its model of reserving a third of that MSS spectrum for homegrown companies. And I think this gets into this whole world where sovereignty may be at the cost of international trade and how that plays out is a really interesting question for us.

Peter Jarich (33:53)
Yeah, it's a real I think it's it's it's interesting because, you know, I was I was recently we had a a customer come through with a long laundry list of questions around what 6G is going to look like going forward and what it means to their potentially to their infrastructure shipments. And for those folks who haven't seen them, the timing was good. Just because we've released some of our well, we released our 6G forecasts. So we've got some numbers into you know where we think the markets are they're going to pick up first, how quickly it's going to ramp.

But a lot of the questions more like do we think at new do we look at new form factors? How does AM AI impact? And at the end it was a lot of geopolitical questions. It was, you know, how do we think this will impact sort of anything? And to your point, I think we're seeing you it's just becoming a lot more complicated. And and if doing that impacts you get some backlash, it's there is no there's there's no answer.

But it it yeah, definitely makes it definitely makes it more fun. I'm sure something that we're going to see. I know we've still we're still almost six months out, but definitely going to see a lot of MWC and hopefully we'll

Tim Hatt (35:08)
Very good, and I think you know there yourself.

Peter Jarich (35:10)
yeah,

last yeah, one last one last story. Saw this and not sure where I picked it up, but NuSys studying industry sources and I had to look this up when I saw this. What Newsis is. It's a it's a South Korean news agency. Not my my my Google my my my Chrome history now shows that I was I was also looking at a Sri Lankan grooming product company.

That's the wrong news, sis. So never heard of this company, but it is real, I guess if you're in South Korea, was reporting based on industry sources, that the government there had allocated a bunch of GPUs and a bunch of them just don't seem to be in use. So I guess the way that they were saying is that projects involving twenty five government ministries receive twenty eight hundred GPUs, twenty eight percent of the total.

10,000 were allocated, but recorded a utilization rate of 39 or 37.9%. And what's interesting is, I mean, this is, you know, as a sort of sample, it's almost like an economic sort of experiment. You're looking at, hey, if if you throw these things out there, how do people use them? And you get an interesting distribution, right? Large companies were you had the highest utilization, 80%.

Research institutes at 60, small, medium at 55, and you see this sort of trailing down. I think it's interesting. There's a whole lot. Don't know how did they promote it evenly to all those groups. I don't know. Is the market structure drive these sort of things? But you see this definitely matching some of what we've seen from our enterprise survey. So again, we we run a big enterprise survey every year, talk to enterprises from around the world on what they're doing, and you see that adoption of AI.

Built on company size. And I think from my standpoint, I guess just to loop this back, it's it's one part of a function of is your organization set up to adopt and integrate these technologies to skills. Do you have a workforce that you can upskill to do these things that have the skills? Larger organizations have big processes for that, smaller ones maybe not. So it's an interesting

Just sort of nugget out there. I mean, Tim on the skills front, we've only got a few minutes, but we're seeing that in terms of skills size of company versus skills versus AI with some of the work that we're doing on skills?

Tim Hatt (37:43)
Yeah, we are looking at this at a sector level on skills transformation in terms of driving competitiveness in the AI era. Think in general, your point, there is a widespread recognition of the need for modernizing the skill set. But two, a lot of it comes down to not just one single AI discipline, but rather a multitude of things, umbrella by governance and having.

Proper systems in place. So I think that the story you're talking about speaks to that broader pattern.

Peter Jarich (38:16)
Yeah, and you can't just I think for me it's just a it's not just a build it and they will come. I think there's this feeling that everyone's racing towards AI, throw these things out there, they're going to get used. You do have to if you really want them to get used. Yeah, large companies will will figure it out. In most countries, small medium enterprises are the bulk of the companies out there. So you either have to roll out the skills or roll out promotion to get this stuff used.

I'm sure that's familiar to a lot of folks who are listening. With that, I think we are coming up upon the top of I guess the attention span of folks. They probably don't don't want to listen to us much longer. So thank you, Tim. Are you going anywhere soon? You're you're you're you're

Tim Hatt (39:01)
I've

got various, my next trip is to Doha in early December and then various customer visits in Europe.

Peter Jarich (39:11)
As we get closer, watch for a little bit of previews of what we expect from Doha, news from there. Again, I'll be, as I mentioned, I've got a whirlwind of travel coming up that I'll be be talking about over the next few weeks. GTC headed to China to see what's going on there the week after that. And then the US to support a managed services team as well as the Brooklyn Six G summit and future net North America, all in one week, those three things. When I when I go to see our managed services team in Atlanta.

I might try and see if the pandas are there yet, but we'll we'll we'll see. So stay tuned. Thank you for everyone out there. If you're listening and enjoy this, leave us a comment, leave us a rating. Everyone tells me ratings are how people promote their work. So please, if you're liking it, do that. Tell us tell us if you like us, tell us if you don't. We'd love to get some good feedback. But in the meantime, we'll talk to you next week. And remember, in your search for intelligence, you need to embrace a little noise.

That's what we're here for. Thank you very much. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Hatt (40:12)
Thanks Peter. Thanks guys.