Video Audio
A universe of possibility lies before us a world where conductivity is like air ubiquitous ever present and changing our lives. by unlocking 5g, Qualcomm is connecting the planet in ways previously impossible. Access becomes a fundamental feature of our lives. Always context aware and intelligent. We have transformed what came before. This is the time when breakthroughs and mobile technology remove barriers to innovation and transform industries, creating jobs that didn't exist. With Qualcomm spearheading 5g immersive experiences, connected cars, smart connected factories operating without wires, multiplayer, cloud gaming, ai in the palm of your hand, 5g capable always connected PCs and its battery life measured in days instead of hours, and the true Internet of Things which by 20 2525 5g world is here. And it's cloaking the planet in conductivity. Welcome to the invention age.
Molly Wood
Welcome. Wow, we timed that. Well. It's like radio precision. Welcome. Thank you for joining us and look at all the cameras going up. We were just standing backstage saying, Hey, I think people are kind of interested in 5g. I'm Molly Wood. I host a show on National Public Radio called that marketplace tech. I'm delighted to be joined by Cristiano Amon president of Qualcomm today, who I think is going to give us all the specifics we've all been waiting for and what exactly is going to happen when 5g arrives go?
Cristiano Amon
We do. We do our best, you know, good morning. Very happy to be here. It's really exciting for Qualcomm to be talking about 5g.
Molly Wood
It seems like you've been talking about 5g a lot for a little while, not just here.
Cristiano Amon
Yeah. We've been talking about 5g. I think we started this conversation interesting going back about two years ago. And you know, it was the end of 17 that I think we and a few other companies in in the wireless echo system decided to accelerate 5g by one year. I think it's very clear. Just looking at now people today say Where is it? Where is it? I think, unlimited data rates with gigabit speeds and low latency. I don't I don't think people will say like the the one that so I think there's definitely demand and then I think would be in throughout the year of 2018. You know, developing technology started to see launches in 2019. And I think 2020 will be the year it will scale and we're very happy to see that the industry had progressive that today. Even if you want to use it in 4g waiting for the 5g base station to come in that best four five 4g phone you can buy is a 5g phone That's the ecosystem move on the devices are being launched. And I think you're getting ready for a very big transition and into wireless industry.
Molly Wood
So I want to talk about predictions because I know that that is the the soul of our panel today, our conversation, but first, can you give me that real sense of like, Where is the landscape now compared to maybe some of the marketing that we're hearing?
Cristiano Amon
Okay. So it's a it's always a fascinating topic. I, you know, especially for a company like Qualcomm, I remember about three quarters ago didn't like, as we going in, though, to the borders, the sentiment was, you know, this 5g, it's, there's a high skepticism, you know, I think if demand is not going to be there, it's going to be pushed out and, and then just into quarters, if your numbers are too conservative, why why are you only talking about 200 million in 2020? It should be much bigger. So I think we're what we saw is we went to a A transition of getting the technology to beginning to launch you go from trials and pilots to commercial launches. Now you actually have, you know, a large number of operators that starting deployed across the United States and Europe and China and Korea, and in Japan with the pre launch of Australia and many other regions. And the network is going now from the initial launch sites, to metropolitan areas, I think it's fair to assume 2020 we're going to see 5g in all, you know, the major cities in the United States. I think Teemo just launched, you know, the nationwide platform. So I think we are in the process of building coverage. It takes time. We see at Qualcomm that, you know, people, you know, being impatient for it. That's a very good sign, unlike 3g and 4g that people said what are we going to do with it? If people are saying why is not here yet, but I think we've seen a lot of good progress. And the good thing as I said before the device ecosystem is already move. It's already moved towards 5g especially because if people going to keep their phone for three years, four years, most of the operators know you know we want to read they want to reach you with the 5g coverage and you don't have a 5g ready phone.
Molly Wood
How are I want to talk about both the consumer experience and the the business opportunity, that ecosystem? How are consumers when you say 5g is going to be in a major city?
Cristiano Amon
Yes.
Molly Wood
What is that going to mean for the how are they going to experience that
Cristiano Amon
for the ones for the ones that are already seeing coverage like we're fortunate we have, you know, with Verizon, 5g coverage and our campuses in San Diego and and in our neighborhood, but it wants to start to see coverage. The first thing you're going to see is you have much higher speeds is the order of magnitude increase with lower latency in some of the services that you do every day. They become much better the way I like to describe this. We can spend in a We should have a conversation about all the new use cases it was some of the esoteric use cases which 5g will be able to enable. But we have a mature I think mobile society today and like 4g, transform music like I'm sure all of us right now I think I'm sure that the people in the audience don't carry CDs to their cars, you know that often and they use stream a lot of musics video, it's going to be the thing of 5g it's going to be the main platform for distribution of video is going to make the streaming services is going to evolve that to full broadcast because you have a reliable connection. You can see news and sport and will will finally deliver on user content generation I think, you know, everyone will become kind of a broadcaster because you can you have the speed to upload high quality to the cloud. So video is going to be the first thing that people will see and then in a couple months you hear from companies like Google, you hear from companies like Microsoft, the future of gaming, I think 5g will make mainstream gaming, a thing of the mobile industry is going to go from console to mobile devices. And that's just like the very first instantiation of services, we can talk a lot of a lot of more other services that will come in in the future.
Molly Wood
Well, yeah, let's talk about other platforms, because there is this idea that we may in fact evolve out of the smartphone form factor. And that 5g can enable a lot of that, in fact, to Qualcomm just announced an automotive platform here. Like let's talk about some of those more esoteric or even harder to imagine use cases that involve ambient computing or cars or Alright, so not looking at my phone all the time. I don't actually want to do that.
Cristiano Amon
So that's a good discussion. And I want to start start with the consumer. But maybe at CES banquet, we'll start with a consumer. We believe welcome that it's very likely that we will see compassion devices I don't, I don't expect that the phones going to get replaced. But today we know that even some of the chips we do like the Snapdragon, the limitation right now is actually the size of the screen you have, you have the processing power. And now with connection with 5g, the power of the hyperscale Cloud it's do pretty much any use case you want. You're limited by the size of the screen. And you I think it's the evolution that we seeing in mixed reality, it's very likely that you're going to start to see devices that people can wear that look like eyeglasses, not like a big helmet look like an eyeglasses. And with that, you can start to see applications of computer devices. I think it's very, it's not a technology issue anymore. We we seen in many of our partners in our ecosystem, building prototypes, you can do a lot of the processing on the cloud. You can have glasses, with cameras and with that, you can You know, use augmented reality, social, I think I like to describe that you will be able to walk into a meeting and to facial recognition, immediately go to the to the cloud, look at all the different social networks get information about the person I've ever meet. So we're going to have like a black mirror episode. But I think the technology, it's going to enable that you'll do a lot of processing in the cloud. And you're going to have those devices but the transformation is going to be enormous. As you can see, you'll take things like that you'll take like a five g power HoloLens into the enterprise, how you change the way to work, that's going to go into computers. The computers is another form factor, we're very excited about it, I think we are going to move to the always connected PC. The reason I say that is that productivity now is being defined but what you do on the phone, every year you do more productivity on your phone. And now that's that's kind of set in expectations. And then on top of that, if you believe it just look have a very successful story of the evolution of Microsoft, when the enterprise IT infrastructures go to the cloud, they run, you know, office 365, all of your data leave the hard drive goes to one drive, they need a connected, 5g connected PC. So that's going to change the form factor. And then automotive is the one that is the biggest transformation because, you know, he ranges from fundamentally upgrading your navigation systems. As the car is connecting to the cars to the pedestrians to the cloud, you can populate the map of location of all of those things and how they move how fast they move, use machine learning to make predictions to how this is going to augment, you know, a death and autonomy and also transform the car company into a cable operator as you can actually distribute content to all the different screens in the car. So it's a lot of transformation. And I would like to summarize this. The reason you see so many use cases is because the elevator pitch on what 5g does think about connecting what ever is the the phone you have the car you have. The Internet of Things device is basically a technology that has a very high pot wide pipeline that connects to the cloud 100% of the time. So what it basically is, it doesn't matter if you run things on the on the end device, if you run to the cloud, you have the latency and the bandwidth to connect those two systems. So then you start thinking about eat whatever application unlimited computing power, because you can all demand with the cloud, unlimited storage, unlimited data. And I think that's what started to enable all of those different use cases. I was
Molly Wood
so many questions raised by all of those different things I'm going to I'm going to start with infrastructure because we talked Yesterday and he raised this really interesting point, which is that, yes, infrastructure deployment currently is a blocker, and needs to be accelerated. But that because of these sort of differentiating differentiating use cases, the infrastructure deployment may not be entirely controlled by mobile operators, which is sort of what we are used to. Right. Now. Talk to me about that paradigm. Yes. And how it might change?
Cristiano Amon
Yes, in and I want to really clarify that point. Because it's a it's a really important one. I feel the industry in general, let's say the wireless industry, you know, companies that do what we do, many of the partners of our ecosystem to build devices, the infrastructure companies, companies like Ericsson, and Nokia, and Samsung, they have been executing on the technology and I think we're build that technology to maturity so we really can scale and I think this is a great progress has been done. Same thing with the carriers, what is really happening, and I think that it's what's pacing the screen. coverage but we're making progress as an industry. I think every day you'll see new CDs, new markets being light up for 5g across the globe, what's really happening is 5g requires more sites, more towers, you have to densify. And, and the situation that you have special in the United States operators have to negotiate municipality by municipality, sometimes neighborhood by neighborhood how to get new facts. So it takes a very short period of time to deploy a base station, it takes a long period of time to get the new sites. And I think if anything to bring a sense of awarness, I think the you know, it's going to five G's going to be important infrastructure is going to be no different than essential infrastructure, just like the power grid, because this is how fundamentally things will be connected to the internet. And for that, it requires a build up and it's interesting, you see, you see the contrast. In one hand, people say Where is 5g? I wanted I wanted now, I can't wait it. But I don't want any sites in my neighborhood. Those things are not in this, you know, compatible. And I think as an industry, I think we needed to continue to bring awareness, continue to bring the benefits of 5g and and help the operators, you know, deployment work as fast as they can.
Molly Wood
What is the role of policy there? How do you see, you know, companies like yours working with policymakers going forward?
Cristiano Amon
Okay, I'll say the in the FCC has shown tremendous leadership in the United States even how did they define, you know, how, what are the economics, you know, guidelines, I think, you know, for lease of sites for build out that you're bringing awareness, it's just, it's an ongoing battle because the networks have been built. But what I like to do and the policy side, one thing that we see not only the United States, we see that in United States, we see China with the Arab we see kind of everywhere. When when 4g happens, and I and I keep bringing this example just because I find it interesting, I like to do the contrast, especially on a look at over 10 years. When 4g happens, everybody in their blackberries is sending messages to each other saying, Who needs 100 megabit so we don't need this. And And what happened is your head, few countries and economies that took the bet Korea took the bed in the United States took the bet United States actually was the first nation to build a nationwide 4g and with that a digital economy really flourish. He started a new business model. So Uber, you see, you saw, you know, the growth of Facebook and Instagram, you saw the social networks. You see, you saw a lot of different services and economy came out. Every other developed economy took notice. So what we see today in terms of policy, there's not a single develop nation that is not worried about Need to get 5g now I need to get that build because they could be an impact on the comparatives of my economy across manufacturing, across the industrial, of course, you know, the CD services, the evolution of digital services. And I think for that we seen more than we ever saw in any other generation willingness of the administration's to get 5g deployed, and that's a good sign.
Molly Wood
What is the let's talk about the backend the cloud, because that's a big part of it's not a part that you necessarily can control a little bit, maybe a little bit. I do want to talk about the parts you can control and the parts again, what is your role in that? And whose clouds are we going to be talking about
Cristiano Amon
here? Okay, um, the reason that I the answer that way. The, the, the transformation from 5g, it's really kind of, you know, it's so broad that is actually changing the architecture of the cloud. So today, when you think about the Cloud and just look at the of the mobile environment today you have big data centers, you know, big buildings, you know, concrete walls, a lot of servers, a lot of power, a lot of, you know, a lot of air conditioning, and you have all of the fiber going in, then you have the telco network, and you have your device. 5g is starting to bring the cloud to all of the different applications. That's why, for example, the 5g era applications will develop much faster than DLS. Because the less become less relevant. The app, you know, it's connected with the cloud. So what 5g is doing is bringing the cloud out of the data center to the edge. And that's where we started to see the development of the edge cloud. You see a lot of companies all the operators building the mobile edge cloud. You see a lot of the cloud companies building the edge box, are they taking them outside and you see the distribution of the cloud winning from Central data centers to a distributed network of computing. That is to make the full bandwidth of the latency for example, application such as gaming required the cloud to get closer to the device. Same thing, applications for mixed reality like the black mirror, I think commentary, you know, I made. So that's changing the cloud. So the cloud is looking for how can we build more capacity getting closer to the devices to run those use cases building the edge, and I think our role in this that's while coming from the mobile side, we actually develop our first influence, you know, cloud product, focus on the edge we actually announced at CES, the that we already have one hyper scholar customer that is building you know, that platform at the edge, it is all about getting the cloud out of the data center and push it out closer, you know, toward the end devices. And when you do that, you cannot afford air conditioning and in the building, you have to have a solution that looks more like a mobile type solution.
Molly Wood
Is it? I know, I blindsided you a little bit this question yesterday, but is that also a potentially more climate friendly set of solutions? Because data centers now are there's a lot of conversation about
Cristiano Amon
look, I think, you know, we the the wireless industry in the electronics industries is not a big you know, carbon emission industry, but I think what you can say is everything that is going to reduce you know, power becomes more efficient will contribute the way I say this is also what we doing for automotive. For autonomy, it's, it's the easiest thing to understand why Qualcomm end up becoming successful and why do we get, you know, expand our business? Why do we get a major, you know, OEM Oh, you know, Design Award. It's because you can't really run the server in a trunk of a car, especially when you think that you're going to electrification, you have To increase the number of miles that they have on our battery, so you start to have to be more efficient with power and everything points to mobile, the best thing about the mobile industry. And it has been good for us and good for many of the partners, this game of mobile, it's, it's the largest scale on electronics versus any other industry, you have billions of people on earth, all of them have a smartphone. And in that scale and our mobile technology to have so much capabilities that you can go to all those other industry and then when you go to the other industries, you take the attributes of running on a battery powered device that is very efficient from a power standpoint.
Molly Wood
We could probably do that conversation all day, but we'll just we'll move on. What are let's talk about the parts that Qualcomm can control. What are the what is the, you know, the part of this ecosystem that you can accelerate and have already and then the parts that you need other companies or governments or, you know, actors to get on board with? All right, well
Cristiano Amon
The Qualcomm business model, by definition, we need other players and other actors. So like, we were the opposite of a vertical company, the Qualcomm in a business model is we would develop the fundamental technology, we licensed the technology that everybody can build with, you know, we license our standard essential patents. And then we build a horizontal platform that people can innovate on top. So our, the, the part that we can control is actually to build as fast as we can and ecosystems of companies that can build products with this technology, then build applications. And I think we have to count on all of them on the device makers, the infrastructure companies, the the application developers, the iOS developers, and now the companies. They're involved in all the different use cases, all the industries it's fascinating to answer that question because when we look of our of our history of our company and wireless, there's always the same number of players across the wireless ecosystem. What is unique this time 5g is no longer an exclusive technology of the wireless sector 5g is part of the automotive industry conversation is part of the of the Internet of Things conversation is part of the computing conversation square the cloud conversation. And I think we have to count on all those companies sharing the vision and investing specifically on the government side. I think it is what governments are doing and need to continue to do more spectrum. I think the for for wireless, I think the the, the decisions that were being made, last mile connection to the Internet is wireless. So every spectrum wind up one way or the other, been allocated to wireless or more spectrum, easy or or regulation that allows infrastructure to be deployed. And and I think, incentives of being for company to be, you know, motivated to invest in This technology which is going to last, you know, more than a decade, and we're just at the beginning of this great transition.
Molly Wood
Let's talk about licensing for just a second, which is that of course, Qualcomm was involved in a high profile battle with Apple, the FTC is you're in currently in a legal battle around licensing, with that background in mind not commenting on anything current. How might you change the way you approach licensing 5g technology given that it is so important?
Cristiano Amon
So we, I think, just reacting to the legal bed, I think we've been through a lot, I think, I think it's so behind us right now was to have, you know, the, we appeal on the FTC case that we're again, we're very happy with the stay and we're waiting for the appeal but I think we we actually have a business that is moving forward as you know, striving and and we've been successful and continue to build stability. This business. What is interesting about that is 5g actually underscores the importance and the validity of the Qualcomm life in the business model, because this is a time where cellular technology, it's going to many other industries. And therefore you need to have a model that actually allow other industry to have access to the technology that do IP for the cambio products. And because of that, we continue to see traction in the middle of all of those things that we have to deal with it. We've been signing five D license and continue to sign privacy license. And I think the at the end of the day, the industry understands that to building a horizontal model that more people can innovate, have access to the technology versus being a vertical company. That's the way to go, especially if 5g is going to go to other industries as well.
Molly Wood
All right, and then I want to ask you because you have mentioned Black Mirror a couple times You seem to sort of be saying in a slightly good way that 5g is also going to be generating and potentially collecting data at a scale that we've never seen if every single device is connected all the time, is this an opportunity to build in privacy at the infrastructure level?
Cristiano Amon
Excellent question. Good to see you too.
Molly Wood
So we have three minutes and 24 seconds I feel like we can totally cover it but
Cristiano Amon
but but I yeah, I you know, I think it's a it's a good discussion on how we live in a connected society today. And I think everything is connected is going to become more connected and I and I think we all today, you know, see the benefits so you know, it can always you know, everything in access, you're always going to have problems but I think the benefits and the growth and the opportunities of the wireless the wireless industry caters enormous he actually you know, I you know, I've been born raised in Brazil, it many people connect with the first time the internet using wireless devices, it really bridge the digital divide. And I think is it created a lot of opportunities. So the wireless industry has done a lot of good. And we're going to get more connected with 5g, I think what's going to happen. And you starting to see that discussion, I think that's all positive. We all have, as we get connected to the cloud, we are going to have our digital twin, like we, you know, we have our physical beings, but everything that we do, there's going to be our data is going to be a proxy of ourselves into the cloud. And I think it's starting to, it's about evolving regulation and bring awareness that as a citizen, your physical being, you're entitled to some, you know, rights and, and, and you have some obligations, and that's going to apply to your digital being as well. And I think regulation is going to catch up, and we're going to start to see, you know, a greater understanding because that's how the society is evolving. So I think connectivity is good to be in a connected society. Good. It reduces the discussion. So I think we have seen the benefits of, you know, having a connected in the form, you know, society and I think 5g is going to be no different than that.
Molly Wood
Okay, but I have one minute and 36 seconds left. And so I wonder, Is this an opportunity for Qualcomm to say, though we're going to build in not just the edge processing, but maybe some on device processing for the time when you don't want to be?
Cristiano Amon
Yes, I feel that this is also going to be a great opportunity to create trusted suppliers of technology security is being one of the key focus. I will you know, just to get into the details, we've been innovating on the number of features of a Snapdragon platform even creating a secure processor unit and I think we have been building dedicated hardware to store your biometric keys to store your credit credentials. Eventually, eventually, we want to get to the point And in 5g enables that if you think about 5g, connected to the cloud, login and password, or is just to use to authenticate you in the cloud and have a proxy over self. So if you're always connected and you have protection of your biometrics, you can authenticate every time, we can actually eliminate login and password that's going to be, you know, major achievement. And on top of that, creating a mechanism that allow our partners to be able to set you know, privacy and security rules. It's one of the fastest growing area of investment, because this is it is done unique. I think we tend to think of consumer privacy. But I want to go back to this conversation about 5g going to other industries. We have customers and then we have, you know, great partnership, some of those customers that came some events showing how 5g for example, is transforming their industry. One of our customers is a large European power grid operator, and they're applying 5g to the power grid of course The circuit breakers all the way to the customer premise circuit breakers on the enterprise. And think about you have a natural disaster. The latency of 5g with the cloud connected the power grid, you can self heal the network. One thing is for somebody to hack into your Facebook account is to your photos. The other thing is to take down the power grid. So as we go into automotive as we go into this industry, security requirements are going up and he's all about building trusted suppliers of technology.
Molly Wood
Cristiano Amon is president of Qualcomm thanks so much for the time today. I feel like we could have done that conversation for another half hour, but we gotta go.
Cristiano Amon
Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much.