(upbeat electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to our special Mobile World Congress 2017 coverage. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Monday and Tuesday, February 27th and 28th, and we have on the phone right now, Lynn Comp, who's the Senior Director of the Network Platforms Group within Intel, part of the team doing the whole network transformation. The big announcements that went out prior to Mobile World Congress and hitting the ground on Monday and Tuesday of all next week in Barcelona. Lynn, great to have you on the phone. Thanks for taking the time to walk through some of the big announcements. >> Lynn: Thanks, John, for having us. It's a really exciting Mobile World Congress. We're seeing more and more of the promise of the next generation networks starting to take solution form from ingredient form a couple years ago, so it's a great, great time to be in this business. >> So 5G is happening now. You're seeing it in the network and the cloud and at the client, that you guys use the word "client" but essentially, it's the people with their smartphones and devices, wearables, AIs, and now the client is now cars, and flying drones and potentially, whatever else is connected to the Internet as an Internet of things. This has been a really big moment and I think I want to take some time to kind of unpack with you some of the complexities and kind of what's going on under the hood because 4G to 5G is a huge step up in the announcement and capabilities, and it's not just another device. There's really unique intellectual property involved, there's more power, there's a market leadership in the ecosystem, and really is a new way for service providers to achieve profitability, and get those products that are trying to connect, that need more power, more bandwidth, more capabilities. Can you take a minute just to talk about the key announcements impacting Mobile World Congress from Intel's perspective this week in your area? >> Lynn: Yeah, so we had a group of announcements that came out. Everything from solutions labs where operators are invited in to work with Nokia and Intel starting out to start working through what does it mean to try and manage a network that includes unlicensed and licensed spectrum and all these different usage models, very different model for them, to Ericsson, an initiative with GE and Honeywell and Intel, that is in Innovator's Initiative, where companies are invited to come in in the ecosystem. An early start working through what does it mean to have this kind of network capability? If you think what happened, 2G, 3G, to 4G, you start looking at the iPhone, been around for 10 years, and you've seen how the uses have changed, and how application developers have come up with completely new ways of doing things, like, who would have thought about crowdsourcing traffic patterns for driving directions? We all wanted it years ago, but it was just recently that we were able to have that on a smartphone. They're trying to unleash that with pretty unique companies. I mean, GE and Honeywell, UC Berkeley, you wouldn't necessarily think of them as being first on innovating new usage models for a wireless network, but with something like 5G, with all of these diverse use cases, you end up with a completely different ecosystem, really wanting to come in early and take advantage of the potential that's there. >> Lynn, talk about this end-to-end store because one of the things that got hidden in all the news, and certainly SiliconANGLE covered it, as well as, there was a great article in Fortune about it, but kind of talk about more of the 5G versus Qualcomm, that was kind of the big story that, the battle of the chips, if you will, and the big 5G angle there, but there's more to it and one thing that caught my attention was this end-to-end architecture, and it wasn't just Intel. You guys are a big part of that as an ingredient, but it's not just Intel, and what does that mean, end-to-end, 'cause I can see the wireless pieces and overlaying connecting devices, but where's the end-to-end fit in? Can you give some color on that? >> Lynn: Absolutely. You know what's really fascinating is you've got Intel and we've been in the cloud and heard of the genesis of what would become the consumer and the enterprise cloud from the very start, and so what we've been doing in working in that end-to-end arena is taking things like virtualization, which has allowed these service providers and enterprises to slice up compute resources and instead of having something that's completely locked and dedicated on one workload, they can create slices of different applications that all sit on the same hardware and share it, and so if you look, years ago, many of the service providers, cloud and enterprise, they were looking at utilization rights as maybe 15% of the compute power of a server, and now, a lot of them are aiming for 75 to 85% utilization, and that's just a crazy amount of (mumbles) so bringing that to this market that in traditional, we had single purpose boxes, there's various detections for one thing, but that creates a business challenge if you need to do more than one thing, so really what we're showing, for example, at Mobile World Congress, it's something that we call FlexRAN, and it's an example of how to run a radio area network on a standard server on the technology, and it does implement that network slicing. Its's very similar to the virtualization and the compute slicing, but taking advantage of it to use different bandwidths and different rates for different scenarios, whether IoT or smartphones, or even connected cars. >> So I got to ask you about, the big question I get is, first of all, thanks for that, but the big question I get is, this isn't turning into an app show, we're Mobile World Congress, and apps are everything from cars to just phone apps to network apps, et cetera, and the question that everyone's asking is, we need more bandwidth, and certainly, 5G addresses that, but the service providers are saying, "Do we really need all that power? And "When is it coming?" "What's the timing of all this?" So, specific question to you is, Lynn, is what is Intel doing to accelerate the network transformation for the service providers to get 5G ready, 'cause that seems to be the main theme as the orientation of where the progress bar is relative to is it ready for primetime, is it here and now, is it out in the future, is this kind of a pre-announcement, so there's kind of some confusion. Clarify that up. Where's the progress bar and how is Intel accelerating network transformation for folks in the service provider vis-a-vis 5G-ready? >> Lynn: So there's a couple things. So let me start with the accelerating piece because it also relates to the end-to-end piece. When you look at the way that networks have been constructed all the way, end-to-end, it has traditionally been a very, very limited set of solution providers, and they tend to survive pretty granular, pretty high-granular functions, so the appliance, the full appliance, software, hardware, everything, and I would look at some of the smartphones up until you could put new applications on it, as appliances, it did voice, and so, we have this service provider begging us for many years, "Give us an ecosystem that looks like server and PC. "I want a building block ecosystem. "I want to be able to take advantage of fast and free wires "in software and hardware. "I need people to come innovate, "like they go innovate on Amazon," and so building an ecosystem, so Intel Network Builders is something that was started about three years ago, and we had, oh, half dozen to maybe 12 different vendors who were part of it, mostly software vendors. Since then, we have 250-plus number and they range from service providers like GT and Telefonica all the way to the hardware vendors like Cisco and Ericsson, and then the software vendors that you would expect. So that's one thing that we've been really working, for a few years now, on giving these operators building block approaches, supporting them in open source. We had a big announcement from AT&T, talking about how they're putting about seven millions lines of code into the Linux Foundation, and its code has been deployed in their network already, so pretty big departure from normal practice, and then today, we had an announcement that came out, where not only did AT&T and Bell Canada and Orange in that community. Now we've got China Mobile, China Telecom, and a project called Open-O, also joining forces. If you were to map out the topics for these operators, we've got almost all of the top ten. They are joining this project to completely change the way that they run their networks, and that translates into the kind of innovation, the kind of applications that consumers love, that they're already getting out of the cloud, now they can begin to get that piece of innovation and creativity in the network as well. So the building block approach seems to be your strategy for the ecosystem. What's the challenge to keep that rolling and cohesive? How are you guys going to foster that growth on the ecosystem? You guys going to be doing a lot of joint marketing, funding, projects, and (chuckles) how are you going to foster that continuing growth? >> Lynn: Well there's a couple, it's such an opportunity-rich environment right now. Even things that you would assume would be normal and kind of standard practice, like standardized benchmarking, because you want apples-to-apples performance comparison. Well that's something that this industry really hasn't had. We've done very conceptualized testing, so we're working with the operators in a project called OPNSG to make sure that the operators have a uniform way, even if it's synthetic benchmark, but they at least understand this synthetic benchmark has this kind of performance, so they start really being able to translate and have the vendors do comparisons on paper, and they can actually do better comparisons without having to do six months of testing, so that's a really big deal. The other thing that I do want to also say about 5G is we're in a pre-standards world right now. ITU and 3GPP will have standards dropped in 2018 and 2020 is when it will be final, but every time that you're looking at a new wireless standard, there's a lot of pretrials that are happening, and that's because you want to test before you state everything has to work a specific way, so there was a trial just announced in December, with Erisson, AT&T in Austin, Texas in the Intel offices, and so if you happen to be in that office, you're starting to be able to experiment with what you could possibly get out of 5G. You'll see more of that with the Olympics in 2018 and 2020, where you've got, Japan and Korea have said we're going to have 5G at those Olympics. >> So I got to ask you some of the questions that we are going to have some guests on here in theCUBE in the Palo Alto coverage around NFV, network function virtualization, plays right into the software-defined networking virtualization world, so why is NFV and SDN so vital to the network transformation? Why now and what's happening in those two areas, and what's the enabler? >> Lynn: The enabler really started about 10 years ago, the real inspiration for it, when we were all in a world of packet processing engines and network processors, and we had some people in our research labs that realized that a lot of the efficiency in doing packet processing quickly came from parallelism, and we knew there were about two or three years to wait, but that was when multi-core came out, and so this thing called data plane development kit was born. We've referred to it as DPDK. It's now an industry organization, not an Intel invention anymore. The industry's starting to foster it. Now is really when the operators realized, "I can run a network on a general purpose processor." (coughs) Excuse me, so they can use cores for running operating systems and applications, of course, they always do that for compute cores, but they can also use the compute cores for passing packets back and forth. The line rates that we're getting are astonishing. 160 gigabits per second, which at the time, we were getting six million packets per second. Very unimpressive 10 years ago, but now, for many of those applications, we're at line rate, so that allows you to then separate the hardware and the software, which is where virtualization comes in, and when you do that, you aren't actually embedding software and hardware together in creating an appliance that, if you needed to do a software update, you might as well update the hardware, too, 'cause there's absolutely no new software load that can happen unless you're in an environment with virtualization or something like containers. So that's why NFV, network function virtualization is important. Gives the operator the ability to use general purpose processors for more than one thing, and have the ability to have future proofing of workloads where a new application or a new use becomes really popular, you don't have to issue new hardware, they just need to spin up the new virtual machine and be able to put function in it. >> So that, I got-- >> Lynn: If you went back and, we were talking about 5G and all of this new way of managing the network, now management in orchestration, it's really important but SDN is also really critical, both for cloud and for comm, because it gives you one map of the connections on the network, so you know what is connected where, and it gives you the ability to remotely change how the servers or how the hardware is connected together. If you were going to ask the CIO, "What's your biggest problem today?" they would tell you that it's almost impossible for them to be able to spin up a fully functional, new application that meets all the security protocols because they don't have a network map of everything that's connected to everything. They don't really have an easy way to be able to issue a command and then have all of the reconfigurations happen. A lot of the information's embedded in router tables. >> Yeah. >> Lynn: So it makes it very, very hard to take advantage of a really complicated network connection map, and be agile. That's where SDN comes in. It just kind of like a command control center, whereas NFV gives them the ability to have agility and spin up new functions very quickly. >> Yeah, and certainly that's where the good security part of the action is. Lynn, I want to get your final thoughts on the final question is this Mobile World Congress, it really encapsulates years and years in the industry of kind of a tipping point, and this is kind of my observation, and I want to get your thoughts on this and reaction to it, is the telcos and the service providers are finally at a moment where there's been so much pressure on the business model. We heard this, you can go on back many, many years ago, "Oh, over the top, " and you're starting to see more and more pressure. This seems to be the year that people have a focus on seeing a straight and narrow set of solutions, building blocks and a ecosystem that poised to go to the next level, where there can be a business model that actually can scale, whether it's scaling the edge, or having the core of the network work well, and up and down the stack. Can you talk about the key challenges that these service providers have to do to address that key profitability equation that being a sustainable entity rather than being the pipes? >> Lynn: Well it comes down to being able to respond to the needs of the user. I will refer to a couple demos that we have in the data center section of our booth, and one of them is so impressive to China Telecom that have put together on complete commercial off-the-shelf hardware that a cloud vendor might use. A demo that shows 4K video running from a virtualized, fixed wireline connection, so one of the cable kind of usage. Now 4K video goes over a virtualized environment from a cable-like environment, to what we call virtual INF, and that's the way that you get different messages passed between different kinds of systems. So INF is wireless, so they've got 4K video from cable out to a wireless capability, running in a virtualized environment at performance in hardware that can be used in the cloud, it could be used in communication service providers 'cause it's general purpose. That kind of capability gives a company like China Telecom the flexibility they need, so with 5G, it's the usage model for 5G that's most important. Turns out to be fixed wireless, because it's so expensive for them to deploy in fiber, well, they have the ability to do it and they can spin it up, maybe not in real time, but certainly, it's not going to take a three-month rollout. >> Yes, and-- >> Lynn: So hopefully, that gives you one example. >> Well that's great enablement 'cause in a lot of execution, well, I thought it gave me one more idea for a question, so since I have my final, final question for you is, what are you most excited about 'cause you sounded super excited with that demo. What other exciting things are happening in the Intel demo area from Intel that's exciting for you, that you could share with the folks listening and watching? >> Lynn: So, I used to never be a believer in augmented reality. (John chuckling) I thought, who's going to walk around with goggles, it's just silly, (coughs) it seemed to me like a toy and maybe I shouldn't admit that on a radio show but I became a believer, and I started to really understand how powerful it could be when Pokemon Go took over all the world in over the summer, to this, an immersive experience, and it's sort of reality, but you're interacting with a brand, or in the booth, we have a really cool virtual reality demo and it was with Nokia next and it's showing 5G network transformation. The thing about virtual reality, we have to really have low latency for it to feel real, quote-unquote, and so, it harnesses the power that we can see just emerging with 5G, and then we get this really great immersive experience, so that, I think, is one that innovate how popular brands like Disney or Disney World or Disneyland, that immersive experience, so I think we're just starting to scratch the surface on the opportunities there. >> Lynn, thanks so much for spending the time. Know you got to go and run. Thanks so much for the commentary. We are low latency here inside theCUBE, bringing you all the action. It's a good title for a show, low latency. Really fast, bringing all the action. Lynn, thanks so much for sharing the color and congratulations on your success at Mobile World Congress and looking forward to getting more post-show, post-mortem after the event's over. Thanks for taking the time. We'll be back with more coverage of Mobile World Congress for a special CUBE live in studio in Palo Alto, covering all the action in Barcelona on Monday and Tuesday, 27th and 28th. I'm John Furrier. Wrap it with more after this short break, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) (bright electronic music)