(intel sound logo) >> [Announcer] Live from Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by INTEL. >> Okay welcome back everyone to our special two days of coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. I'm John Furrier, here in the Palo Alo Studios covering what's happening in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Of course this is our day two of wall to wall coverage. Eight a.m. to six p.m. for two days and of course, as we kick off our day two and get early morning here in California or mid morning, they're ending the day in Barcelona and all the news is dropping. Again, it's continuing the theme of 5G, IoT and the notion of the super demos, all the flare and glam around IoT, AI and everything else. On the phone right now in Barcelona, Spain, is our friend and analyst with the Futuriom Group, Scott Raynovich, who will also be co-hosting with the CUBE at ONS, Open Networking Summit. Longtime industry analyst, guru in the space around mobile, certainly SDN and what's going on. Scott, welcome and thanks for taking the time to call in from Barcelona. >> [Scott] Thanks, John. Great to be here, and also I might add some color to one thing you said, when you said the day was winding down. (John laughs) Apparently in Barcelona the day never ends. It just goes all the way through. >> Well the show is ending but now the real action happens, all the hallway conversations at dinner and certainly we know that you take a nap around this time and go out and get ready to burn the midnight oil 'til three in the morning. We have many stories of Barcelona, but let's get down to it. What's happened today in Barcelona? What's the big story? What are you seeing on the ground there? What's the vibe? Give us some insight into what's happening, the experiences you're having and what's the big stories today coming out of Mobile World Congress. >> [Scott] Yeah sure, John. Well there's, as you know, there's a lot of hype about a lot of buzz words, so you got to throw all the buzz words out there: IoT, 5g, self driving cars, VR, AR, augmented reality. If you run through the halls you see a lot of those gizmos and gadgets and I would say the scene has shifted a lot in recent years. As you know a couple years ago it was all about Samsung's big tablet or the latest phone and now it's more about these kind of more advanced technologies, they call them interactive technologies that we're going to see coming down the road the next few years, so there's lots of stuff. >> The show has been very telco orientated and still really is a device and telco show basically. The device guys had their moment in the sun on Saturday and Sunday, but Monday kicked off really the telco show. This is really about ... The telco is trying to figure out their future. Their core competency over the years has been how to provision subscribers and billing, and been trying to figure out the over the top, and now as you look at the software that's coming out with the 5g plus the end to end, some of the things happening at the network transformation area. There's some real action happening. I want to just get your thoughts on is this the time where we're starting to see the needle move on the progress of really bringing the kind of networks that are going to power the cool technologies and promises of use cases, whether it's e-sports up to driving cars that are essentially data centers. Huge amount of data problems, huge amount of network reconfiguration, is this the time where there is an inflection point? What's your thoughts? >> [Scott] Yeah, that's a great point. You have the service providers for a number of years have felt a little bit - I don't know what the word is - spurned by success. They created all this plumbing and they put this massive investment into LTE, broadband, that really enabled all these applications, but it was more people like Apple and Netflix and Amazon that kind of stole the show by leveraging that bandwidth for these new services. Cloud services, music services, of course Netflix, the most popular internet service in the world, and so the service providers kind of feel like 5G is another opportunity that they don't want to squander and so they're being very careful about how to position that. But to your point, they have realized that they absolutely need to virtualize their network because what's going to addle a 5G is you have this massive amount of bandwidth but you need to splice it up into different - they called them actually network slices - so that you can provide all these advanced services, and that's where the service providers want to figure out how they're going to monetize that. So it's certainly a launchpad for the technology and the somewhat maligned technology known as NFV, Network Function Virtualization, but I think that the pressure to get 5G out is going to accelerate their investment in NFV because they need that cloud platform to kind of serve up all these next generation services. >> Is the telco's NFV efforts going to make them more cloud ready in your mind? Is that the sentiment? Is it that, do they have to kind of do a lot of things right now? And the question is, what are the use cases if they are cloud ready and if they can get their act together, the network layer to power these aps that are going to be running on 5G, so you know? >> [Scott] Yeah, yeah. I think so, I mean they're progressing. AT&T makes periodic announcements that they've virtualized whatever it is, 30 or 40 percent of the network, and Verizon has a pretty interesting company Radisys, which recently got a 70 million dollar contract from Verizon to install NFV infrastructure. Now that's not ... 70 million dollars is a drop in the bucket in terms of capital spending for a small virtualization platform like Radisys, but that's a pretty big move and so I think you're seeing this stuff finally becoming real, and they are going to have, within a few ... We'll wait for them because they're a much more flexible platform. It's based on the cloud web scale model, where you snap in a bunch of servers and all the networking is virtualized and you can move things around in the cloud and they want to take advantage of new services they can offer, whether that's a virtualized enterprise security service, you know security service in the cloud where you go into the Verizon Data Center and you order it up and you have a cloud security model that it will protect you, or other what we call Virtual Network Functions, another hot area you've probably heard of SD-WAN. There are a lot of SD-WAN services being rolled out >> Cool >> and that's a virtualized WAN solution that doesn't require you to, say you have a bunch of branch offices around the world, you don't have to ship them all routers and then hook them up with expensive leased lines. You can kind of close them in with the cloud if you will, and there are a bunch of hot companies in that area, including Aryaka Networks, Velo Cloud, Viptela, which are all mentioned as active acquisition targets these days, so there's definitely still a lot of virtualization thought going on but I will say it took a backseat to, this year it took a backseat to 5g and IoT. >> Yeah great commentary. I got to say, I talked with Intel with an exclusive interview with Sandra Rivera from Intel GM, with Communications Network Platforms Group, and we were talking about the dynamics and I think the big IoT thing has been autonomous vehicles. Obviously smart cities is, you've got some surveillance, you've got cameras and stuff in towns and cities, and certainly the smart home. You can't move an inch in the industry without hearing about echo and google in the home, kind of voice activated automation. Then you've got media entertainment, you mentioned Netflix. You know all these things are essentially coming back to rear its data center environment. This is like the data center meets consumer, and we were commenting that the autonomous vehicle is essentially a data center on wheels and that there's going to be trade offs between low latency high bandwidth and true mobility. You know car is not going to be dictated by millimeter wave technology because they might have different frequencies, so this brings up this diversity of network. And so I'll get your thoughts on how you see the market evolving with the pressure for open source software, you mentioned SD WAN it's software defined, WAN software defined radio, software defined networks, software defined data center, the whole world is software defined so the role of open standards both on open source software as well as open wireless if you will, meaning not one vendor is going to own it, how do you grok that? How do you pull that picture together and how do you advise your clients on what this actually means for them and their impact? >> [Scott] Yeah that's a great question. Well, you kind of hit the nail on the head with the question, because I spent much of the show looking at all of the ... If you want to break it up into two buckets of things here, you talked about cloud and WAN, so the infrastructure that builds the data center but as you pointed out, this is a service provider show, so a lot of the discussion is around connectivity standards of course, and it's really amazing John. It's amazing. You know we can boil these things down into these neat little buzz words >> IoT and 5G - but just today, I talked to people about at least five different forms of IoT standards and of course 5G today was a super controversial topic. So let me just break those off one by one. With IoT connectivity, you have something called LoRaWAN, which is a open standard, an IoT open standard, and there's about 500 members signed onto the LoRaWAN alliance, including Cisco and IBM and China Electric, so that has a fair amount of momentum. It has certain characteristics. Very low bandwidth, and not in real time so it's, I'll just give you one example. If you want a connected cow, John, I saw a connected cow, and the idea is that is be large. When a massive operation wanted, you want to track your livestock, so you need a very low cost device that does that. That's an example. You also have so called MBIOT, which Cisco's pushing pretty hard narrow band IoT, with another standard that's going to be used for IoT applications. You have the 3GPP working on LPWAN, which is kind of like a 2G recycled for IoT. The characteristics of IoT have to be really cheap there has to be really low power, so you can't use LTE right? So that's another one. Then you have a couple of hot private companies. SigFox, which has over 100 million dollars funding, and it might even be hundreds of millions of dollars at this point, based in France. Another company called Ingenu, which is spun out of east San Diego qualcon hotbed with a lot of really interesting IT and they have a technology called RPMA, so those two companies are building networks worldwide based on proprietary standards. They've said, "We're going to build an IoT network, "a radio network for IoT all over the world, "and it's going to be based on our proprietary technology, "'cuz it works better," so that ... I just gave you IoT, right? Okay, and then you have 5G, which dozens of service providers (incoming call beep) all have different things about that and actually argued about 5G doesn't exist right? Right so you have Verizon rolling out a pretty standard 5G trial and then you have something called 5GNR, New Radio, which is a multi spectrum flavor of 5G that Qualcomm and are fooling around with, and then you have people like Nokia saying, "Woah, woah, woah slow down. We can't push 5G "before its time. We don't want it to fragment, you know? (vibrating phone) "We don't want it to just "splinter all over the place," >> Yeah. >> [Scott] You know, pull like an Android. So I don't know, that was a mouthful but if you- >> So what does it mean? Is it ... >> You get the idea of how these buzzwords, when you unpack them, they get really complicated. >> Is it forking? Is 5G essentially a land grab right now, or is this all part of the evolution in your mind, because it does seem that you need a catalyst. Obviously Intel's taking a leadership position. They've done a deal with Nokia. You've seen some Ericcson announcement but then you've got Qualcomm on the other side with Snapdragon and you know the competition between Intel and Qualcomm is at an all time high, certainly on the handset side. But at the end of the day, the network is the key at this point, and so the question is, is 5G going to be broken down by the forking? >> 5G is a hype grab, it's totally a grab. >> It's a hype grab. (laughs) >> [Scott] Because 5G will not exist for at least ... They won't be rolling it out 'til 2020 and I heard several people argue today that it's really 2021, so it's not a land grab until it actually exists, right? So it's all about positioning your marketing around it, but just to give you an example of one of the controversies today was accelerating. Should we accelerate to 5G? You know and then BT came out and said, "Well we have to be careful because it's really expensive." 5G is actually going to be more expensive than LTE. If you don't have the return on investment, you know you're going to kill yourself, so people are confused. >> Scott, Intel claims they're going to have 5G in Winter Olympics in Korea. That is what they told me on the record. Not sure if that is a trial network or is that going to be just some data stations? >> [Scott] Yeah they'll have some form of 5G. I mean what I'm trying to point out with all these things is when somebody says the buzz word, it doesn't mean one thing, right? >> Yeah. >> [Scott] It means like yeah, it means several things. And it'll certainly be pretty standard 5G trials. I'm just saying right now we don't even know what that is. Nobody has even settled on what the spectrum is for 5G. There's like been four different announcements about different spectrums and then you have this 5GNR thing which is a multi spectrum technology, so it's really hard to say. I'd be shocked if anybody at Intel definitively knows what 5G looks like at this point. >> Well certainly it begs a question for a follow up conversation around what is 5G. Certainly people will argue what that means in terms of bandwidth, but the question we had on The CUBE yesterday was, "What aps are even ready for a gigabyte "and what does that mean?" Is that fixed wire, is that true mobility, is that latency versus bandwidth, and et cetera et cetera. You know the debate will rage on. Honestly I just want to see more bandwidth. I love connectivity so. Alright Scott, thanks so much for taking the time. I got to ask you a final question. You know, what's the best party so far in Barcelona? What's the best tapas you've had? What's the scene like in and around town? What's some of the buzz? >> [Scott] (laughing) Well I haven't been to any big parties to tell you the truth, I've mostly been to private dinners. The food is amazing and so is the wine. >> Yeah. >> [Scott] It's pretty hard to go wrong in Barcelona. It's probably like a foodie's paradise I would say. >> Yeah it certainly is. When we were there last time it was amazing. Great gothic vibe there, great little restaurants. Scott Raynovich here inside the CUBE and Scott you got some new credentials here. You're still at rayno on twitter but you now have a new firm called Futuriom - F-u-t-u-r-i-o-m Research. Congratulations. >> [Scott] Futuriom, yep. >> Futuriom. So appreciate it and thanks for taking the time, want to give you a shout out for the new gig and you'll be hosting for the CUBE at the Open Networking Summit, ONS, coming up. Appreciate that and thanks for calling in and sharing the insight, what's happening in Spain and Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Thanks so much. >> [Scott] Thanks, John. It was geat. Thanks for having, that was great stuff. >> Great. We'll be back with more after this short break. This is special two days coverage inside the Studios of Palo Alto live, here in California, breaking down what's happening in Barcelona with all the news, the analysis.