>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering AT&T Spark. (techy music) Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's all about 5G, you know we've been hearing about 5G for a long, long time, that 5G is coming, it's in cities, there's more cities that it's rolling out to, it's lots of special networks, so we're excited to be here as it becomes real, and we've got a guy who's right in the middle of the weeds, right in all the devices. He's Gordon Mansfield, the VP of converged access and device technology at AT&T, Gordon, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what do you think? You've probably been looking at this 5G stuff for a long, long time. It feels like we're finally getting pretty close. >> We're getting really close, you know, we're gearing up to launch our first 12 markets this year, and just this past weekend we made the first end-to-end call across our production network with a mobile form factor device, so we're real close and we're real excited. >> So, that just happened, right, this first call? >> It just happened this past weekend. So, what were some of the final hurdles to finally get that little milestone that you guys have probably been looking forward to for while? >> Yeah, so the final hurdles is really getting the device modems into, you know, that form factor device, that mobile form factor to where it can be portable, you can carry it-- >> Right. >> And make these fantastic mobile data calls, and so getting that technology, working together, communicating with the network infrastructure, that work just finished, or there's multiple stages, but a critical stage just got completed last week. We were able to take that technology straight to the field in Waco, Texas, and start demonstrating and working with it live in our production network. >> So, do you get the dog out and he can hear his master's voice when you do that first phone call? >> Well... (laughs) You know... >> The old RCA. >> It's pretty close. >> I know, nobody knows what we're even talking about, right, too old. >> (chuckles) They don't, do they? >> So, the other thing that's really interesting about 5G compared to the other, prior roll-outs is really the focus on devices, and you're in charge of devices and devices is a lot more than just handsets, right? >> Yeah. >> This was really designed for the industrial internet and IoT, and really a whole swath of device-to-device communication. How did that kind of change the way you look at your job? >> Yeah, so you know, we've been working on IoT and modules in the IoT space, but with 5G you start to enable lots of new capabilities with very high bandwidth, low latent applications, which allows us to revolutionize various vertical industries, and so now it's no longer just about the smartphone or the tablet, but it's about anything and everything that you can imagine-- >> Right. >> And so, you know, I tell people all the time, you know, when we first start talking about technology we really think about some cool things, but the reality is we barely touch the surface, and so you know, people will just begin to imagine the capabilities that 5G will unleash and you'll start to put, you know, the capabilities into everything from a refrigerator to robot arms on a manufacturing floor and all kinds of points in between. >> Right, you know it's funny, we go to a lot of tech conferences, and we were just at VMworld a couple weeks ago and you know, Michael Dell said on air that, you know, the edge will actually be bigger than the cloud, and right, it's been all about cloud for the last several years. >> Yeah. >> Now it's all about edge. Well, the key to edge is connectivity, and that's a really important piece of the 5G story. >> Absolutely, if you take your compute power and you push it further to the edge you've got to then connect, and so you can put very low-cost, low horsepower components on the edge, connect them, you know, so in a device, connect them to the edge and come up with some pretty powerful capabilities. >> Yeah, and the other interesting thing from your guys' point of view, having dealt with handsets for so long, is just the whole low power, and a lot of the edge type applications are going to be in remote areas, difficult to get to areas, difficult to plumb areas, so the whole experience with low power combined with the low latency is really a big game changer. >> That's absolutely correct, so when you take low power you can put battery devices that last years-- >> Right. >> And have them in remote locations, sensors, et cetera, and have them connect in a low-latent, high-bandwidth way to deliver, you know, anything that you can imagine. >> Right, so it feels to me that there's really not the buzz around 5G that there should be, and I don't know because we've kind of heard about it for a while and it's kind of been in extended development or people just aren't paying attention, but what's interesting, a lot of conversations in the keynotes talking about experiences. >> Mm-hm. >> Really changing the way you can think about developing applications for experiences based on this technology. We saw the NVIDIA demo where they're running NVIDIA processors in their cloud and sending it to a laptop here, where before you'd have to spend thousands of dollars on a local machine. As you look back, what are some of the things that you've seen, either in testing or conversations, that maybe people just don't have any perception of how this is going to change some of their day-to-day activities? >> So, I don't think people, you know, unfortunately we've become immune. The devices, right, the processing power that we put in devices that people carry in their pocket, they keep going up and up. The reality is at some point you've got to flatten that to... From a consumer perspective you've got to flatten that to have a device that people can afford. >> Right. >> And so, with 5G and you start putting things to the edge you start taking away some of the processing power that physically is in the phone and you put that at the edge, to where now people can have really high speed, high capabilities in a relatively low-cost device. >> That's pretty interesting, you're the first person. So, it is really this redistribution of, you know, networking, compute, and store-- >> Mm-hm. >> That's now enabled with this fast networking, where before your options were really not so great. >> Yeah, it's always a balance, but today your only option is to continue to put more and more horsepower into the device itself-- >> Right. >> More processing, compute storage, into the device. By spreading that and having some of it maintained in the network you can maintain, you can manage cost in the end user device that people carry in their pocket. >> Okay, so give you the last word, when you are at a cocktail party on the weekend talking to some people about what you do, what surprises people most about 5G once you tell them it's this new thing that's coming down the pike? >> Well, you know, look, in my job I get to see lots of cool things, and when I start describing some virtual or augmented reality, imagine walking down the street with a pair of glasses and suddenly images, right, start, you know, being fed on top of what you're really looking at. You start, you know, you can imagine a day where, you know, an advertisement may pop up in your field of view, or you know, points of interest that you might want to see, and you know, obviously we've got to control that and manage it to consumer expectations, but that's not as far away as people might imagine. >> Right, and just to recap, you're in 12 markets. >> 12 markets-- >> You're in seven, five more, and then another seven coming, right? >> That's right, so 12 by the end of '18, and seven more in early '19. We're off to a fast start and looking to grow from there. >> All right, Gordon, well congratulations on progress to date and good luck with the roll-out. >> All right, thank you. >> (chuckles) All right, he's Gordon, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (techy music)