The Next Gen of Wireless Connectivity

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wavelengths, an Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast. I'm your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. It's good to be back in front of the camera. And behind the mic with our Amphenol podcast fam. Thanks again for tuning into another episode. As we continue to explore the top trends, technologies, and the market moving forces that are shaping the larger telecom and broadband industries. As we jump into today's episode, you know the drill. Make sure you're heading to our website, amphenolbroadband.com. Again, amphenolbroadband.com. For more on our solutions and services and other content as well, including episodes of the podcast, blogs, white papers, videos, research. You name it. You can also subscribe to wavelengths on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So just hit that subscribe button, and you'll have a full catalog of previous conversation as well as notifications when we drop new episodes. So let's jump right in. We have quite a bit to unpack. This is gonna be a technology focused deep dive of an episode, and we're gonna be looking into the evolving ecosystem of the wireless revolution and we're gonna be laying out some of the major updates and examples of use case innovation in the core technologies that are defining this sort of next gen of wireless connectivity, including wifi six, five g and six g, then we're gonna also look at some of the applications of those technologies in the context of IoT and industry four point o network. And we're gonna get an analysis more specifically on how this technology revolution is reshaping the broadband industry in general and specifically, you know, around different partnerships, services and solutions provided, and also strategies for expanding their wireless broadband networks. So for a little more context, the way that we access the internet is changing constantly and in an increasingly rapid pace. Right? And at the forefront of that evolution, is, you know, an evolution to the foundational technologies of next-gen wireless connectivity. Again, wifi six, 5g, 6g networks, and then the devices that take advantage of these powerful networks. But as industry four point o's use cases come more standard instead of bleeding edge. As the internet of things further converges OT and IT And as the kinds of devices connecting to these evolving networks grows in scope and in industry touch points, it becomes more important to not only choose the right technology for the right environment, but that also, starts to shape how the broadband industry interacts with and is affected by those end-user decisions and use cases around which wireless network is gonna be right for our current and future wireless connectivity industry four point o needs. Right? So let's jump into it. Here to explore the world of wireless and how it's reshaping the broadband industry is Alan Prouthis CEO of GX C. Alan. Great to have you on. How you doing, man? Wonderful. Thanks. Thanks for having me here to talk about, the entire history of the wireless industry in a few minutes. Yeah. Okay. We've got thirty seconds. Go go. But, no, I appreciate you joining us, Alan. It's a pleasure getting to chat. And just for a little more context for our audience, Alan here previously has had roles as an adviser or board director's member and CEO at other companies in the IoT and Mobile Technologies ecosystem. But again, he's currently CEO at GXC, and GXC see is a cellular mesh solutions company that provides high-performance and versatile private cellular networks for enterprise wireless connectivity. They operate in heavy industry, like industrial manufacturing and in, and extractive industries, excuse me, but as well as a supply chain industries like warehousing, logistics, airports, and marine terminals. So, Alan, you have quite a storied background in the larger, telecom and IoT, and sort of evolving mobile technologies ecosystem and industries. So you know, if anyone's gonna know how these technologies have evolved, over the course of the last several, you know, decades, but also just more recently, it's gonna be you. I'm glad to have you on. Let's jump right into it. The core technologies and ecosystems we're gonna break down again our wifi six, five g, six g, and then some other applications in IoT e context. At a high level, how are these next-gen wireless networks today, their current iterations, how are they comparing to traditional wired broadband connections and more, specifically some of the newer iterations of fiber optic. Right? Are they basically, you know, just playing synergistic but very separate roles or are we starting to see, the standardization of wireless broadband networks start to take over and just fundamentally replace the traditional infrastructure of wired ecosystem. Wow. That's a big question here, Dan. So let me let me start off by saying, how many pairs of shoes do you have in your closet at home? But You're you're talking to a big shoe guy here, so probably too many. But The point is you have a pair of shoes you're wearing now versus the ones you go for a drive with, go to the beach, go to dinner with, work in the garden with. And, you know, technology is sort of the same thing in that, the biggest danger sign to me is when, someone promotes a particular technology saying that it will cure every one of your problems. And I think the answer to your question about all these different things that, continue to evolve and expand and impact our lives is that it's the right tool for the right job, and they pretty much all have a place, and they were all designed for really different things to start. And the trick is really applying the right technology to the right job at the right time. And if you wanna target from a business theory standpoint, like a standard Clayton Christianson Harvard Business School Jobs to be done perspective. What's the job you're trying to do? It's it sounds simple, but the industry, especially one, where you need a lot of really smart engineers to make stuff work. Sometimes you get into these almost like, religious level arguments about, the minutia of technology that frankly ninety-nine percent of people in the world really don't care about. It's really about how it provides business value, how does it hit a price point, how do you maintain it? And how does it future-proof you to some extent, in terms of where your business is going in the future? Yeah. And I think that's probably the best perspective to apply to our conversation today as we explore these evolutions to foundational next-gen wireless technologies, you know, I think we're gonna see a lot of crossover in terms of, you know, Wi-Fi six is going to benefit from five g and six g doing their jobs. Right. Right? Neither ecosystem is trying to sort of take over and replace one or the other because, like you said, each one has a place, each one helps serve our industry four point zero reality differently, and at a different scale. So I think with that, Let's start getting into some of the specific buckets of technologies here and how they are evolving. So, really, what we're gonna do is we're gonna explore the latest developments in each And then we're gonna touch on some developments that I did some research on and that I've seen that I think are important for understanding the evolution of the industry and get your take on you know, if you agree that this is one of the, you know, core areas that is defining the future of the industry, your thoughts on some recent news, all that good stuff. So let's, let's start with Wi-Fi six. So Wi Fi six in general, has brought better security, faster speed, energy efficiency and lower latency compared to its previous iterations. There's now more devices with, with six e certification on the market. You know, it's pretty standard at this point, and it's so standard that we're already talking about Wi Fi Right? So what are some of the latest updates to WiFi six and six e technology itself that you find most important in shaping some of their use cases and proliferation of this gen of wifi as the new standard. It's hard to really imagine a world without wifi at this point, isn't it? But, you know, if we think back to when wifi was first adopted in place most technologies, whether it's wifi or mobile phones or fax machine or know, whatever technology you can name, it really starts in enterprise and then as volumes go up it trickles into consumer. And You know, Wi-Fi six is a great evolution, as is Wi-Fi six e of the Wi-Fi we all know and love. And just like we went from Wi-Fi just in one particular spectrum at two point four gigahertz and then expanded to five gigahertz. And, you know, but wifi was never really designed, for mobility. WiFi wasn't really conceived, you know, it's a best effort type of technology in that. You ever try to hook up a WiFi network in New York City. Do you have those firms at all they do? Is charge you a huge bucket of money to get your WiFi to network to work when there's a literally a hundred other networks trying to hit the same spectra at the same time. Because for instance, WiFi is awesome, and there's a lot of things that does well, but we've evolved it really far now and really stretching the limits up. So in the latest five, five, six, there's more channels available. You have more mimo type capabilities. You know, you have increased the latency and security a bit. But you're still everybody's sort of fighting for the spectrum that's allocated for WiFi, and there's not a concept. And, again, I'm the guy. I'm the business guy. Okay. I'm the guy that figured out how to make money with all this stuff. And how to apply the business problems. But generally speaking, Wi-Fi, everybody's sort of banging on the same Spectrum at the same time. It doesn't have a concept of one connection is scheduled around another connection. And so that's why you have so many interference problems with WiFi. Then probably you're getting better with that reversion, but still with whom it'll need to be a wide by having Chase. What y five six is then trying to do is opening up additional spectrum higher up in the stack and the six gigahertz to just provide more highway for cars to go on as the analogy you think of it. Which is great. But there's this little link called physics. So the good news is you have more spectrum that you can do more stuff on with And that's that's a good thing. The bad news is that, that spectrum is higher up in the spectrum band. And, the basic physics triangle is the higher you go up in spectrum the more data it can carry. I'm sorry. Yeah, the more data it can carry, but the less distance it goes. And so you actually need to deploy, quite a few more, access points for the more you get into WiFi six e than you would if we're even, current wifi running on point four or five. So again, it's not to say it's a bad thing. It's for what it's made for it's excellent. So office situation, you know, your house. Anything with carpet is the way I try to think about wifi it's really good at. The second you take wifi outside though it sticks. It's just the limitation of the protocol behind the technology. So, the good news is four of those situations where it shines where it was really designed to work in. Again, offices, home, to some extent, the mall, depending how it's deployed. Restaurants works really well. Keep using it. Keep keep adding on. But when you try to do other things, it tends to bog down. So how is that reality of its, you know, focused application, I guess, coming more into focus, right, like knowing where it plays its role and it playing its role best How is that context shaping how wireless broadband providers maneuver the ecosystem and decide where we're not to provide services, you know, how to choose product partners, etcetera. Right? So the answer is pretty different for enterprise and consumer. And it and it depends which tried which side of the equation you're trying to scan. And the way to think about it too, and and it's the reason the private cellular networks are starting to take off so quickly. You know, we all of course love public networks. But also their public networks are optimized. Think of, a quick quiz. What percentage of people listening to this have TikTok on their phone. Right? I don't for security concerns, for some government stuff I used to do. But the point being that, public networks are optimized for, basically, download, for people sucking data down to watch videos, get emails, and there's a little bit of uplink on it. Sailor networks are good also when you're on the receiving side of video or data like that because It's really hard to tune a WiFi network, for particular use cases where private sailor really shines is because we can take our network and say, oh, you want half it allocated to upload because you're in a factory, you're in a warehouse, you're on a farm, And you're actually generating a lot of data, you're trying to keep off a public network. So you can perform some kind of process on it before you decide to send it to a cloud. And that level of tunability is something that's missing both in public networks, and it's missing in wifi. So when you talk about the use cases, when it comes to enterprise, again, WiFi is great for connecting your laptops, your printer, for video stuff, for video calls within the company. They're great for that kind of thing. But when you talk about connecting up Lots of stuff. It'll be going up versus down. That's where you really need your own cellular network. I also wanna touch on, and I'll do this for some of the other technologies too, but the evolving ecosystem of tech that is supporting WiFi six connections, on either side, either, you know, on the, device side or on just facilitating the connection in the first place. For example, TI recently announced that it's going to launch, a new pair of Wi-Fi six companion integrated circuits that are specifically for IoT system designs. So that's one example. We also saw Cisco, announced Wi Fi six access points for small enterprises So I don't necessarily, you know, we don't need to get into each of their specific company, strategies or decisions, but it's just to paint a larger picture of we're seeing more big players in, you know, sort of the periphery of telco and broadband, deliver solutions that are trying to, I guess, amplify the possibilities around what WiFi six can do, what networks, it supports, and it seems to be, you know, heading in the direction of trying to better support the OTIT convergence that's defining the expansion of IoT. So what are your thoughts there? I mean, is that is that sort of the right way to be thinking about WiFi six development based on what you were saying earlier that it kinda has, you know, it has a great purpose, but it's a more niche and focused purpose. Should we be trying to think of all the different ways that WiFi six can grow its scope or should Wi-Fi six be trying to hone in on refining its already existing scope and, yeah, what are your thoughts? All the players that typically participate in the wifi ecosystem today will are jumping on the wifi six and six e bandwagon. So whether it's the Ciscos, the TIs, the Broadcoms, all those people for enterprise, and for consumer use. Or are gonna continue to adopt latest technologies because of the advantages, that they provide. But the question is do they open up new and additional use cases. You know, not as much. Like, when you talk about IoT, Wi-Fi has never really been a particularly strong IoT connectivity technology because it's very battery inefficient. Remember years ago talking to someone, because again, I I once built an IoT network covering seventy million people in the US. So I've done use cases at almost every You've got some practice and experience. Yeah. I've I've I've had sufficient scars from all that. And, again, I the only thing I care about is solving a customer problem and creating a business So, there are if it's a powered application, WiFi becomes, more applicable, but so many things in IoT are actually battery driven, And once you get on the battery driven side, WiFi tends to be a really, really bad solution. And if you don't believe me, how often do you charge your smartphone in your pocket? You know, and your WiFi is always on to take advantage of that when you're on one of those networks. So it's not to say WiFi is back because it's not. It's actually good, but it it has certain inherent, characteristics that just make it good for some things, the things the WiFi already does, and less good for those things that Don't go. Like, I remember this one application, believe it or not it was a WiFi connected mouse trap. And then, and believe it or try to build their mouse transit. This is one of those CES conversations that you seem to have after three drinks. And, guy was telling me I was gonna change role with WiFi mouse traps. And I said, really, I said, well, it's great that it notifies you if it snaps. I said, but how often you have to charge it. It's like, well, we got it up from three days to, like, five now. And I'm thinking, can you imagine collecting a mouse traps and charging them every five days, seven days. I mean, really? Yeah. It doesn't sound very realistic. I mean, the last mouse trap I said I probably didn't look at for months. So let's be honest. Exactly. Now you wanna know if something happens, but my point is you're not gonna know when the battery's dead. So that's that's the inherent limitation. So I'd say the things the WiFi does really well today. Like, you know, the connection we're talking on right now. It's really, really good at that. But in terms of a lot of battery operated devices. The other thing that Wi-Fi, is much better at is indoor. So indoor, again, with carpeted very defined spaces. WiFi tends to do really well in. The second you go to big open spaces, For instance, if you if you look at cellular versus any kind of cellular access point, the industry statistics based on and very rigorous testing is For every one sailor access point, you actually need ten with WiFi outside. That number, by the way, I've not seen the numbers for six e yet because it's we're operating on a higher spectrum bin. And I guarantee you that number is gonna be worse. And again, not to geek out, but just to give you another reference point, was an interesting report I read about a year ago, Verizon did on just the difference between deploying in two point like five g from two point five gigahertz to three point five gigahertz in spectrum. And because spectrum is a, a water rhythmic, change as you go up, you need sixteen times the antenna just to jump from two point five to three point five bands for deployments. And now we're talking about you're going to six gigahertz in Wi-Fi. So that's why I'm saying, like those kits you buy, like you go to Costco or whatever, and you have, like, a pack like your mesh Wi-Fi stuff, and they usually have like three in there. Most of those now are gonna have four or five with sixty. Just to cover the same space. So it's great. You get a great experience out of it for what it is, but if you take it outside that very defined environment, try to go outside with it, or, like, a big industrial space, it just doesn't work. So then last note here on Wi-Fi six and six e, with all that context in mind, what advice or strategies would you offer to, players in the wireless broadband services ecosystem for you know, developing what types of services they even provide around wifi, six and six e or sort of how they frame those around this constantly evolving ecosystem that is trying to, you know, really validate WiFi six as a foundational IoT technology, in both personal and professional settings, what are your thoughts there? I'd tell you what I'd really love to see with this stuff because everyone talks about what you could do. But actually doing it's a whole different story. I would love it if it... it's sort of like, the unfortunate period fifteen years ago when you bought a new PC and it had, like, twenty junk applications on, which got a very pejorative name. I won't repeat, of stuff you tried to, like, you know, uninstall as soon as you got your laptop or or desktop. But the one good thing about it, there was always couple things on that you actually could use that showed you value very quickly under your new purchase. And I think the biggest gap in some of these new technologies is We make it too hard to get immediate value out of it. So if you were to say, look, I'm gonna package up these two or three elustry of applications that as soon as you buy that new, WiFi six or WiFi, especially WiFi six e, thing that, hey, I could do this thing I couldn't do before. You know, what's really a cool little application? You could simply bake on that box that people could play with? I mean, how many years now has your phone said you had five g, which I would call marketing five g versus reality five g, for most of these public networks. And what's the one single thing you've been able to do with the now that you couldn't do before? You couldn't name one. And I think that's the trick is show an example that right away, hey, I can do this thing I couldn't do before. It's really cool. And everybody should buy more of this. I love it. The industry should, you know, evangelize its wins and it's, its evolutions a little more clearly. I like that. If you're gonna sell somebody a new microwave, how do I give it in that first meal? Yeah. I like that. And I like that. Now you're getting me hungry. Alright. So I don't keep getting hungry. Let's jump over to five g. So okay. We've laid out the wifi six, the wifi six e, evolutions and impacts to the wireless broadband industry. With five g, you know, five g is also reaching a point of standardization. I've got a state of 5G report here, from Viyavi solutions, and I just wanna highlight a few things that they found. Obviously, this is one report, but I think it encapsulates kinda where we're at with five g. Five g networks are now available in forty-seven out of the world's seventy largest economies by GDP. Currently, almost twenty-five hundred cities globally have commercial 5G networks. This is across ninety-two countries, and the manufacturing sector is emerging as a leader in private five g networks globally, about forty-four percent of publicly announced appointments, so a plurality there. Give me some of your thoughts there on just at a high level. What are the latest updates 5G technology that you find to be most impactful and, you know, consequential to shaping the industry, shaping potential use cases, and, you know, feel free to comment on any of those stats too on just the growth of five g. Yeah. I think we first of all have to differentiate between public five g and private five g. So public five g was, first of all, is here is very broadly, available now. But when you get beyond your personal smartphone device, There's not a whole lot of stuff that connects to it yet. That's changing very quickly, though. I, you know, it came back, wow. It's going on, seven weeks already from the the biggest mobile show in the world, MWC and Barcelona. Now I was with, the leadership of a large tech company was saying in the last three months, before they show, they saw a six x increase in availability of five g devices. And, this is a household technology name telling me this. So, I think the device ecosystem is very quickly catching up. And then behind the device ecosystem, you need to use cases. But Part of the challenge of five g is because it uses Spectrum that's a little bit higher in the bands than what we use just to have a conversation or text on our phone. You need a higher density of, antennas when you deploy it and all of which require backhaul. So it's a pretty heavy lift to get all that stuff up out there. And, you'll see it continuing like everything. I, and, and then, you know, when we talk about an industrial building or we talk about warehouse. I like to call a warehouse, a fabrication cage with storage. In that all these buildings are basically made of metal girders. And even with our homes, you know, most coverage is outside. Most consumption is inside of network usage. And so how do you do that? And that's the whole reason the private cellular space is taking off so fast. Because even if you have deployed public five g somewhere, A lot of that signal is a good thing. In fact, there was a Verizon study also from, a little over a year ago that did studies that showed, because windows have the emissivity code for energy efficiency that keep, you know, heat out and cold, you know, air conditioning or whatever in. We'll guess what radio waves or energy. And so you actually get better penetration indoors through a brick wall than you do through a modern energy-efficient window. So because of that, and because of metal construction of commercial buildings, you need your own network. And so the first phase was deploying WiFi. And I, we have site surveys of buildings that show like twenty, literally twenty wifi routers on one edge, trying to shoot up down sideways around warehouse racks or equipment. It can only get coverage in half the warehouse. And that's why you're seeing private private five g, really being embraced by private networks for enterprise And that's really where I think you're gonna see a lot of the innovation in enterprise, assuming five g in the short term. Because again, if I were to say from whatever operator you use in North America or Europe, what's that cool thing you can do with a public five g network you couldn't do before? I'd be hard pressed to tell you. And I bet you you couldn't tell me either. But when you get to the enterprise space and now you're enabling super secure environment, really high control of all your data, coverage everywhere where you need it, the ability to hang other networks on your master cellular network that you control, is a game changer for a lot of these companies. I think that's one of the most important distinctions and takeaways from this pod cast episode is just that sort of forking, right, of public versus private five g technology developments, use cases, and how they will then further sort of bake in the common understanding of what five g can do, but also how wireless broadband providers maneuver providing services around 5G. So I'm curious, if you see that forking being, you know, A point where the wireless broadband industry also starts to kind of fork in terms of which players provide which services. Or, is this something that is, basically just let's expand the portfolio with we'll provide the private, we'll provide the public, We'll provide the wifi, six sixty seven. Right? How is that, dynamic shaping the actual services and solutions that UC wireless broadband players, provide. Oh, I see it's it's happening already. So, basically, it it's it's a difference in approach where traditional telcos sort of have their way of doing things just based on their history like everybody. But what we're talking about when you get to private five g is an enterprise technology play. So it's all the enterprise technology providers are the ones driving the applications. Because again, enterprise applications really don't come from public network operators for the most part. Well, onesie twosie maybe pop out, but for the most part, it's gonna come from all the big tech names we we know and love. And so these are the people that are looking at private 5g is a way to add a lot of value with new applications and services. Like, take an example of everybody's sort of freaking out over chat GPT and AI lately. But the freak out, like, when you go to a trade show, is watching all these robotic dogs and robotic this and robotic that walk around. Right? And if you look at what's happening in manufacturing, what's happening in warehouses, there are all these autonomous robotic vehicles. Well, guess what? If you don't want them to run over people or run into each other, for co just for collision avoidance alone, you need a private silo network. It doesn't work on WiFi. Latency is not low enough. You don't have the coverage everywhere to do it on our WiFi network. You have to go to a private cellular So some of the most cutting edge, productivity, cost efficient type of things that everyone's adopting very quickly require a very robust low latency network that has coverage everywhere. And, you know, to highlight some of those other stats from my earlier state of five g report, the manufacturing sector is clearly guiding I think a lot of the innovative use cases, four, five g, and will also act as a bed probably a foundation for how we see private five g networks develop. You know, for example, you know, just to pinpoint one country Actually, it looks like recently, you know, the US has actually overtaken China, which was a leader in, five g and IoT deployments, but, you know, there's different assessments on that sort of ranking. But to just look at China, for example, the country said that, from twenty twenty-one to twenty twenty-five, it plans to establish over ten thousand five g powered factories to help bolster the application of five g technology in industrial internet. So, you know, we're seeing, countries and private entities to deploy five g in a heavy industry setting and at scale. Do you see the manufacturing sector as continuing to be the sector where we will, see the most innovative use cases and kind of the most sort of a definitional ecosystem for how private five g networks refine their solutions, their technologies, all that, or do you see any other sectors kinda stepping up to the plate that the broadband industry should be keeping an eye on? So I think it's one important sector, but there are others. And just as a comment about China, one is we need to take any assistance to coming out of China with a little skepticism. And two, everything in China is a very top that approach. So the government decides, hey, guess what? Everybody's gonna adopt this, and everybody has to adopt it. So it's not market forces driving it. It's It's more of a central planning, adopting it. But, manufacturing is one of the leading categories. And, we've seen that a lot, especially like in the US here we have, you know, a band called CBRS, a hundred and fifty megahertz anybody can use for LTE or five g, which is really accelerated things. But, you know, I've been spending a lot of time dealing with international opportunities lately because some of, a lot of, our customers now are saying, Hey, we need you to follow this around the planet to all our sites. And, I mean, there are dozens of countries now around the world They may not have exactly the same methodology we have using a shared piece of spectrum, but most of them have created some accommodation for people to do private networks. So typically, you either go to the operator in country and you do a sublicense for a campus. Or you can get your own, piece of it. And that's that's basically what we see happening in Europe right now, especially in Germany with a lot of the, industrial guys, jumping into this very aggressively. But in terms of other segments, you know, the one I can't overemphasize enough is really warehousing right now. Because again, everything they do in a warehouse, whether it's scanning stuff internal applications running on tablets. A fun fact is we're now approaching seventy percent of all forklifts in the country are electric. And those big batteries, have to be constantly monitored for usage or else they're gonna die halfway during the day. If you look at this, the roofs on warehouses, it's multiple football fields, which are becoming prime locations for solar. And you have to have good connectivity to be able to manage all this stuff. It keeps going on and on. So we're seeing a really incredible amount of activity from the whole warehouse logistics space. The other one that is a real pleasant surprise to me is really a smart agriculture. You know, ag has always been threatening to be very meaningful, especially in the IT space. You get into the problem of connectivity, and you get into a couple problems. One is there's not connectivity in a lot of farms, even in the US. And when you get outside the US, very little. And even if you have that connectivity though, some of the new pharma equipment, like, I think, John Deere had a tractor at CES in January that had almost three dozen, like, four k cameras on it looking at every leaf as it drives. And it decides what the squirt, you know, what the fertilize, what the kill. You know, you're seeing videos now of these, like, things that are lasering all the weeds as you go along. But these things are becoming multi-million dollar mobile data platforms. And even if you had coverage where they were operating, There's so much data coming off of these things. It would bankrupt you to put it all in a public network. And so the idea that you can have a private network take a look at all this data first, decide what's important, maybe do some kind of action to it on your own servers, and then decide what goes to a public cloud. That's a really powerful thing. So that's a really, really, busy one for us right now as well. Yeah. Both those sectors are ones that we need to keep an eye on. And, honestly, we could probably do a whole episode just on, you know, the possibilities and innovative use cases for, five g, six g in smart ag. So maybe we'll have to bring you back on for that. Right? Well, Dan, let's mention, you know, I'm an hour west of Philadelphia in Amish country. So when people don't realize it, but do you know the Amish or one of the earliest adopters of mobile phones? Really? Well, because they weren't allowed to have phones in their house for religious reasons because they were connected to a public, electrical grid. But they had an exception for mobile phones because they could charge them from a generator, when they needed to. And and so for somehow it got around the rules. And so the Amish believe it or not, one of the earliest adopters of mobile phones. Wow. That is that is gonna win me a trivia game. That's for sure. So you mentioned something in your last answer about, sort of the the international expansion, right, that some of your clients are now saying, hey, can you follow us, across the globe, help us provide solutions that address international scale and maneuver, you know, international regulations, all that good stuff. How is that international proliferation standardization of, you know, we'll hone in on on five g specifically? How is that impacting wireless broadband providers today? And do you have any advice strategy for that, sort of, international approach Are they prepared for maintaining this broad access to five g, right, that that is becoming more of a standard in, leading economies? Give us your thoughts there. Oh, boy. That's another big question. You know, every country has its own, licensing scheme for allocating spectrum for five g. And then separate from that, they have an approach to licensing for private networks. More and more assignments, just a simple paper filing. Some of it is more active like we have, in terms of a priority of use for some of the spectrum in the US. So the trick is to really understand the specifics of the specific geographic location you're going in. And make sure that, what it really comes down to is the equipment. So, one of the reasons like you saw manufacturing go early because manufacturing companies tend to be really big. And so, like, the Eric's Eric's and the Nokia's could take the same gear they used for telcos, and they could use it for the top two hundred biggest manufacturing companies. Once you get beyond that though, the economics don't work because like the most premium, expensive Cadillac overkill gear for most companies. And you have a completely different ecosystem of network gear and software, that is really tailor made to an enterprise. And so the trick is when you're deploying this stuff is It's one thing to deploy it, but then it's who's providing tier one, tier two support. You know, what's gonna happen in the future? Because frankly, most people start, deploying LTE because there's many more things you can connect immediately. And then as you add five g, as you go, How does it all sort of fit together from a Spectrum standpoint, from an equipment standpoint? So these are all things you really need to consider to make sure you're not running down a dead-end street on this stuff. But again, it's it's I think the trick is thinking about it like an enterprise technology deployment. And I think probably the biggest mistake the industry could make is to treat, enterprise customers as though you're trying to make them BB telcos. Alright, Alan. We're just scratching the surface here. We have more breakdown on our conversation, surrounding the wireless revolution, but that's all the time we have for this part of the conversation. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna cap it here. Gonna be back with a part two that continues to explore, some of these, technology ecosystems at play in an IoT context, and we'll also learn a little bit more about GX's cellular mesh solutions and how they compare where they fit into this wireless revolution ecosystem. But till then, we'll go ahead and call it here with part one of our conversation. Alan Proithis, CEO of cellular mesh solutions company, GXC. Thank you so much for your time on Wavelengths today. If folks want to look into GXC a little bit more before a part two. How can they learn more? Really easy, Daniel. Just go to gxc.io. That's g x e dot I o. You'll find, more about private cellular and, and mesh that you've ever dreamed of. I love it. I love it. Alright, Alan. Thank you so much for your time. We'll have you back on very soon for part two. Till then, I really appreciate your time. And thank you everyone for tuning into part one of this part conversation with our guest, Alan Proitos, here on Wavelength, an Amphenol Broadband podcast. Make sure you're heading to GXC's website to catch up a little bit more on their solutions before part two and head to our website, amphenolbroadband.com, for previous episodes of the podcast, more info on our solutions and services, and don't forget to subscribe to wavelengths on Apple Podcasts, in Spotify so you don't miss part two. We'll be back very soon till then, I'm your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. We'll catch you on the next one.