5G and Cloud Computing: a panel with AWS, Verizon, Movandi, Quadric

On September 17th, 2020, Cota Capital held a new episode of Cota Access, a recurring webinar where we bring together founders, thought leaders, and leading executives to explore a variety of business and technology trends and topics that fundamentally impact large enterprises.
This one was about 5G and Cloud Computing, and featured four great panelists, in addition to the best moderator ever (me!):

• Maryam Rofougaran — Co-CEO, COO, Founder of Movandi
• Veerbhan Kheterpal — CEO, Co-Founder of Quadric
• Sebastian Dreisch — Global Head GTM and BD at AWS Wavelength
• Sanyogita Shamsunder, PhD — VP of Technology Development and 5G Labs at Verizon
• Simone Brunozzi (moderator) — Operating Partner at Cota Capital

The focus was on technology, costs, and applications. We decided to not cover anything related to health concerns, as others already did.

A full recording of the event is available here for you to view, and it lasts for about one hour:

5G and Cloud Computing panel with Verizon, Amazon Web Services, Movandi and Quadric

Most important highlights

I want to highlight some of the most important points that we discussed, roughly following the same order in the video recording.

1. Every ten years or so, a new generation of mobile and wireless connectivity comes alive, and brings along significant technological innovations. 1G emerged in 1979 in Japan, 2G in Finland in 1991, to 5G now in 2019–2020.
2. 5G offers lower latency, higher throughput in a reliable way, providing a different quality of service (QoS) than what was possible before with network slicing and other technologies.
3. You can build new user experiences or enable promising ones such as Augmented Reality, moving processing between devices and edge computing in the best combination possible.
4. The Cloud computing consumption model, made popular by Amazon Web Services and now offered by other large cloud providers as well, is now being extended to “Edge computing”, thanks to a more reliable connectivity offered by 5G.
5. There are significant new technologies being introduced, in addition to the expansion of the spectrum being utilized. With Massive MIMO, each element of an antenna transmits separately and supports smaller antennas. Beam forming increases the gain and reduces interference.
   Other technologies that we didn’t discuss in the panel include Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC).
6. The baseline of users goes up, as more rural areas will be connected by the proliferation of new base stations being installed worldwide.
7. Large investments will be required to install millions of new base stations worldwide, but Maryam from Movandi offered a very insightful view of what the “Millimeter wave” part of the spectrum (above 30 GHz) could offer. In the traditional model for deployment (4G and older), you would start with a macro cell and you would keep adding cells. In Millimeter wave the cell has to shrink and you need more small cells to get the same coverage (massive deployment cost). However, you have characteristics that would allow for creative ways of deployment to reduce cost and time. Her company, Movandi, has been focusing on this, offering a Smart repeater relay and a Beam forming local system which lower the cost by 50% while maintaining the same latency. Why? Because these repeaters can replace high cost small cells and have been designed with modularity in mind.
8. New use cases and applications are becoming possible. An example?
   Using AWS Wavelength, medical doctors performing colonoscopy relied in the past on an end device connected with an on-premise server. Now, you can get rid of the server, and simply offload the processing, reliably, to a close “edge” location.
   Videogame streaming is also a use case where something already running in the cloud is coming closer to you.
   Future of connected vehicles: data is exchanged between IoT devices, but that data can be overwhelming or malicious. A neutral broker that can process with high capacity enables new applications to exist.
9. Even more lightweight devices, where processing and storage happens mostly at the edge of the cloud, and not on the device itself. (Veerbhan from Quadric).
10. On driverless cars and autonomous vehicles: even if 5G cannot replace the local processing needs from sensors, it could enable data exchanges between vehicles or other IoT devices. Sebastian provided a good example: Driverless car A is approaching a crossing, and another camera (perhaps inside car B, or on a light pole) catches a cyclist about to go through a red light, that camera can inform car A and let it stop even before its sensors catch the cyclist.
11. Veerbhan from Quadric and Maryam from Movandi share what’s specific of building a startup in this space: longer sales cycles, longer deployments because it’s a new technology, financial models have to adjust and adapt to a new approach to this industry.

If you’re interested in the full conversation, I recommend you scroll back to the top of this post and watch the full video.

More about 5G and entrepreneurship

Finally, if you want to explore more about 5G and connectivity and hear from a great entrepreneur, check out my recent podcast interview with Sam Heidari, former CEO of Quantenna, which went public in 2016 with more than $120M in revenues (a 100x increase in just 6 years):

I hope you enjoyed this post, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

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Disclosures

While the author of this publication is an Operating Partner with Cota Capital Management, LLC (“Cota Capital”), the views expressed are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cota Capital or any of its affiliates. Certain information presented herein has been provided by, or obtained from, third party sources. The author strives to be accurate, but neither the author nor Cota Capital guarantees the accuracy or completeness of any information.

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