Invisible Infrastructure with T-Mobile for Business

Pushkin.

This episode is a paid partnership with T Mobile for Business.

One of the.

Reasons I've enjoyed the revisionist history partnership with T Mobile for Business is that every time I sit down for one of our periodic conversations, I learned something I would otherwise have not even thought about. The conversation you're about to hear falls into that category. In fact, as I introduce it to you, it sounds like the start of

There's two ideas I want to explore today. The first one is is something that I've been struck by and I'm sure all of you guys have been struck by, which is that the benefits to technological advancement are largely hidden. In other words, only insiders kind of know what the implications of them are from the outside. You're just you can't observe from the outside and know how it changes

Thank you, first and foremost, great to be here with you today, and it's great to see you again. So what Teamable and Tea Mobile for Business have been doing is innovating our network and creating the most advanced five G network frankly in America and likely on the planet. We call it five G Advanced Capabilities. And then with our business customers, we're really bringing this capability to life. That's called slicing. And to your point, this is a

A couple questions about slicing before we get into a Seaman's Energy and CNN. First off, I want to dedicate a slice, because that's a way of what ensuring the reliability of those transactions exactly.

So what's beautiful about slicing is it gives us the ability to use multiple knobs and levers. One can be dedicating a piece. One could be increasing the reliability or the performance of the network to adapt to the needs in real time. Others can be and we're getting a little bit more technical here, but latency. How quickly is that transaction happening? How quickly are you talking to the network and that signal coming back? Some transactions require super

When did you guys start develop slicing? This is how new great great questions.

So f Mobile was the first company in America to deploy what's called five G standalone, and five G standalone enabled this set of capabilities. The first slice at scale that we deployed was with F one in Las Vegas three years ago, and ever since then, there's been writer cop a Major League Baseball All Star Week as an example, all of these things have used slicing capability to ensure that the business can do what they want.

And is it an evolving technology otherwise it's the slicing of today better than the slicing of two years ago.

Yeah, wonderful question. Just in twenty twenty five, we announced two very major, first of their kind slices in the US.

Yeah, guy, tell us a little bit about what you do at CNN and how you came to be interested in working with T Mobile and using this superslice.

Yeah.

Sure.

So I oversee all of our partnerships, advertising relationships across the country. I'm all about coming up with smart solutions that drive better business outcomes for partners and our advertisers. We're going through this pivotal moment of transformation, and I'm glad to be overseeing the ad business as we embark upon this.

How has technology altered the way you do your work?

Oh?

Yeah, I mean.

Just taking a step back.

The media landscape has changed drastically over the last let's say thirteen years or so. You know, back in twenty twelve, it was all about cable and broadcast TV. It was all about satellite trucks and fixed locations, and for me, it was all about trying to get as much money

So that's i'd.

Say the biggest change.

And with that also, we're becoming a digital first, direct to consumer brands, and so we're creating these standalone products that actually reach audiences across every screen, device and platform and reaches them where they're at. And that gets really interesting when you're dealing with marketers like T Mobile and delivering their messages in new and innovative ways.

I'm curious about the first conversations you had with T Mobile. What was the problem that you defined that you want to solve? Yeah, and how did you how did you see slicing as as fitting into this solution that you imagine.

So, as we embark upon this digital transformation and to basically transform CNN into a brand of the future, we're trying to define the future of news and so with that, our reporters really need to stay connected, you know, reporting live from a natural disaster or you know, in a moment of celebration like New Year's Eve or Super Bowl or July fourth or Thanksgiving or whatever that might be, or if they're in far flung places, you know, where

Well, I want you to jump in here because one of the interesting things here is that as I when you're speaking, guy, I'm beIN a journalist my whole life, aware of all the limitations of the various technologies I've used over the years. But the thing is I have no insight into what is possible technologically right, I just know what I've been given. So I'm just curious how does the process of educating a company like CNN into

What I loved about working with them is like any large enterprise, that's a little bit of prove it to me and show it to me. And so when the supermobile hadn't yet even launched when we started talking to CNN, but we knew that frontline journalism was such an incredible use case for all the reasons. The guy articulated that, hey, when breaking us is happening, the camera that you have in the video camera that you have in your pocket on your phone may be that first way of that

Really like, yeah, we did a test before we embarked upon this.

We needed to make sure that the text tell me a little about the tests actually worked.

I mean, we had engineers and field journalists using the technology and just you know, seeing whether the signal was stronger than some of the other partners that we work with telecommunications company, and it proves shall remain nameless, well yeah, name their names, but it proved to work, and it proved to be steady, and it gave our tech and product teams the confidence and our newsroom to actually say,

So it's like you're at some event and there's there's some I can I can I mentionine there are there are moments when there's one hundred reporters in a scene and the networks might be incredibly congested.

In Yeah, it was both about congestion and areas with lots of demand, like New York City was one of the areas where the tests were happening.

It's important not only from a journalism standpoint, but it was important for a T Mobile and CNN relationship standpoint. It allowed us to deepen our relationship because it's a win win win, and it kind of sets some blueprint for how we want to be working with T mobile more in the future. You know, the satellite to sell secure that our journalists have while they're out in the field enables them to do the job that they need

And so it's.

Something that you know, we think is never been done before, watershed and really demonstrative of where we want to go as a company moving forward.

I remember when I was starting out as a report of the Washington Post, I was given a what it's called a trash eighty a radio shack like calling it a computer is too way, too flattering, and it had two cups. Do you have the cups? You ran to a pay phone and you put the cups on each of the two things of it, and then you hones you use tones to try and if you were covering a big event, to be like three pay like half a mile away, and then there would be a line

This technology allows like our reporters to literally have a satellite truck inter hands, so they're not dealing with cups and strings and like waiting onlines for other reporters to finish.

I'll give you a real example that was playing out at F one, which is the photographers from any news outlets. Their workflow was they would take pictures and then they would hand their SD card, the memory card from inside the camera to a runner. The runner would then literally

Yeah, Steve, I'm sorry. I feel we've been we've been

I'm an engineer yeap originally?

Yeah? And what kind of engineer actually?

Marine engineer?

Interesting? How would you describe your your current job with Semens Energy.

I've got a great job with Semens Energy.

So my organization, my team's we service the power plants across the United States. Power plants no different than your car. Every so often they have to do periodic maintenance. We show up with a crew of people, take the turbines, the generators apart, stem to stern and spect them, repair them, modernize them, upgrade them, and then return them too service to help power America. So last year, Siemens energy equipment generated about twenty five percent of electricity used in the United States.

There's over twenty two.

Hundred units spread out across eleven hundred sites in forty eight states.

Twenty two hundred units.

Correct.

How many people work for you.

In my organization?

Yeah, I have about fifteen hundred, and then I bring out about another three thousand contractors every year.

Oh wow.

Basically, if a generator goes down somewhere, or a power plant goes down somewhere, you're the person who gets called.

That's correct.

How did you come to want to work with T mobile for business? Tell me how that came about. What was it they offered you that you solded.

We have teams on site, so when we go to a power plant, a small event for us might be thirty people on a site for thirty's you know. A big event for us could be three hundred people on site for six months, and it's all about that that.

Way for six you might you might be as on a site for as long as six months.

Oh yeah, absolutely, and over.

The close that six months or are you what are you doing here? They seemed taking it. You're taking the whole thing down and going through it.

Take taking apart, rebuild it. You know, there might have been a uh.

Some sort of damage to the equipment, you know, waiting on other parts to show up, you know, you know, we we've we've had events that have taken over a year on different sites. But for our people on site, you're kind of comparing your trusting history and we used to have to show up with boxes and boxes.

Of drawings and manuals.

And the connectivity that we get now lets our people access our engineers globally, whether they're sitting in Germany, India, the US. It allows them to talk to the factories, It allows them to access drawings, process procede. But then

We do that three hundred times a year.

Yeah. Yeah, So logistically, what you're running is something incredibly complicated. So walk me through. You've got this group of you say as many as you say, as many as sixty or three hundred was.

St Yeah, potentially out of site.

Yeah, so you show up and what walk me through? What the first couple of steps are and how this kind of connectivity would make a difference.

I mean, we hire union workers, we're partnered with the UBC and hire middle rights. So first thing is sign up. Then it's go to safety training, go to site orientation training. Customer will bring the unit down, lock out, tag out, make sure that all the systems are safe to work on. Then take the machine apart. As the machines coming apart, you're inspecting every piece is in the condition it should be, is it worn, is it broken?

Does it need to be replaced? Are we modernizing it?

How these machines are? How big it is a sensing.

From what I work on. You know, on a small side it's about eighty.

Megawatts on the on the large size up to like fifteen hundred megawatts, So fifteen hundred megawats power a million and a half homes. Yeah, yeah, And you know, there's there's nothing we work on that you're moving with hand.

Everything's being moved with a crane.

You're dealing with a complex piece of machinery. You're a German based company, You're you You had to show up with boxes and boxes of manuals and you had to be in communication with people who presumably designed the machines back in Europe.

Yep.

Talk a little bit about the difficulties of that earlier paradigm.

Doing, you know, to the the earliest parts of my career. You know, if you wanted to send a picture or a sketch of what you found at the site, you actually had to send it by mail, you know, and turn it around.

And then you know, you could fax it.

And then all of a sudden you could attach a digital picture to an electronic communication. And you know, now with this technology, you know, we can live stream and four K and hey this is what I'm looking at you you see this? Okay, Hey I want to see from this view? You know, in the technology just allows that real time regardless of where the people are sitting. You know, collaboration as well as access to all the technical information.

What's the big payoff for you? Is it that you can now speed up the process of doing these this kind of.

Maintenance absolutely for the customer, the owner of the power plant, whether it's a utility, an independent power producer, or some sort of municipality.

You know, bringing that unit back sooner is beneficial to them.

Getting my cruise off site sooner saves me money, lets me send them to another site.

So it's all about the speed.

And you know, the last thing we want to be slowed down with is communicating with engineering, getting that technical answer, you know, you know, getting that support. You know, I need whatever environment my people are working at to seem like they're sitting at headquarters and have access to all the same information.

Yeah, so T mobile gives you now able to equip all of those technicians with essentially a dedicated slice, a supermobile dedicated step.

And you know, as you can imagine, you know, maybe unlike where people are reporting, you know, everything that we're happening.

Is is kind of more remote.

You know, your power plants are generally found in your city centers and your hubs, So it's that connectivity, whether it's five G or satellite, you know, lots of different options, but it's connecting our people to what they need.

And how did you find out about about supermobile, Well.

It was kind of an initially organic conversation. They came to us said, hey, we think we've got something for you. You know, we're always trying to get our people that bandwidth on site, and you know, we brought them the problem like to you know, what what can you do? And that's what started the conversation.

For T mobile. It's I mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating, Like, we start with what are our customers pain points? And we knew with Semen's energy, remote workforce, work or safety efficiency were things that were incredibly important and so as we were designing and building supermobile as a solution, we really fought through what customers, what industries do we think will really benefit from this value proposition

The case studies you've got like F one, Yeah, you've got like frontline journalists, you know, reporting on You've got like the power plans that we can't live without you enrolling out something like this. Do you choose early case studies that you think will kind of capture the attention of I mean, this seems to be an art behind it. Who you are.

This is why I love business and B to B. I mean, like just listening to these stories about solutions that are serving Americans, whether the end consumer that's receiving the electricity or the power of the energy, or the person at home or on the go who's consuming news content. Like everything in our lives in some way is touched

We'll be right back and we're back.

Who needs this technology? Who hasn't adopted?

What I love about supermobile is that there's three key capabilities, So let's start there. One is the slicing that we've talked a lot about. I think of that is intelligent adaptive connectivity that meets the performance and real time requirements of businesses. The second one that we haven't got into very much is built in security to ensure that as part of any layer cybersecurity defense posture that our businesses are taking, we're helping protect also at the network layer.

Yeah, Steve, I had to come back to promote and I'm curious about as you've kind of experienced this technology, and I thought about how it affects your workflow and all these do you is there a point at which you start to reimagine what your uh, these job sites looked like. I asked this questionly because I remember we did. We did a tea mobile conversation once with these firefighters,

Yeah.

The the idea of a tablet, you know, in an engineer, a technician or a craftsman's hand, you know, with with the work instructions, the ability to pull a drawing versus walking back to a trailer to do that, and then the ability to really just collaborate, you know, on the deck plates, you know, with a with an engineering organization,

That's really interesting. Give me a concrete example of a step you could a limit name.

You know, And one example I love is the see what I see right?

Yeah, if we were inspecting a roll of blades, you could, instead of me going through and documenting what each blade is, you know, taking pictures of it, go through and write a meticulous report. Hey, I just visually inspected these I'm gonna let you visually inspect them with me.

Okay, hey, they're acceptable as is versus.

You know, getting into dimensioning and visual inspections just to communicate to an engineering organization.

Yeah.

Yeah, like with the camera on the phone, right, be a supermobile now literally you can to use a consumer term FaceTime in someone an expert and let them in real time see what the technician on site is seeing and a system.

Guy just is there a point where we start to reimagine what covering an event looks like when we when we radically improve the kind of underlying connectivity connectivity.

We launched last month a new streaming service. It's this adaptive live news experience that's designed for the modern news consumer. Live when it matters, deep one accounts, available anytime, anywhere. It's basically having the entire cn and experience in the palm of your hands on the phone. And you know, with that, we it's going to force us the opportunity to do some really cool things with our journalists. We think in this new age of AI, headlines are going

So that's into the next level.

A question for all three of you, what would what do you want next? So all of you have described a technology that allows an existing set of processes to be done much more reliably, and is there something what's on your wish list? What could the technology go?

Love this question? I mean, at the heart of it, slicing is replacing what used to take wires to do. You mentioned it at the beginning, which was fixed locations and satellite trucks. We talked about F one at the end of the day. Over the last X number of decades has been this massive transition and transformation from needing to physically connect everything with a wire to now we can use slicing to emulate what wireline networks used to

You haven't mentioned MO. I keep waiting for you to mention healthcare because I feel like the implications here for healthcare are huge.

Yes, yes, I mean we talked to actually once before a little bit about healthcare. But what I for healthcare The way we think about it is one, emergency medical services are first responders, so they absolutely have access to

I had a conversation of heartbreaking conversation with a guy, an ear doc in Chicago, who is training kids in the kind of rudimentary principles of first response, because on the South side of Chicago, it's the public who comes upon a gunshot with victim first right, and there's might be a five or ten minute window where some civilian is just sitting with the body and he was trying to teach them about, you know, compress the wound or whatever.

We're thinking about the Seama's energy example of what I see. But I fundamentally believe in know that over time, what

That was my next That was my next I had. It was I thought that Steve would be the natural one to because clearly that's you were talking about connecting to the guy back in Germany. Yes, but maybe the thing that you're doing with your with this connectivity is bringing in AI and having diagnostics that way, right, am I Right?

We don't know what we don't know yet with it, you know, but the promise of just we've got years worth of running data, We've got years worth of inspection reports.

The data demands of having a kind of open interaction with I'm assuming they're they're far greater than interaction with the human being. It was if I'm if I'm Steve, or I'm one of Steve's people and I'm on site and I have some problem and I want to be able to contact the specialist in Germany, or I want to have access to to it to an ll M that is like, got all the manuals, and one is much more data intentioned than the other.

Right, Absolutely, it really boils down to are you using text, are you using voice? Or are you using video? Because the AI compute itself, that's its own server, its own mechanism that's sitting and processing. But then the mechanism by which you're bringing that information to and from is where it gets more intensive based on the modality that you're using. So if it's a chat AI, it could be relatively limited bandwidth, this required voice bit more and then video the most.

Yeah, yeah, guy. Have you thought about that in the context of is that a challenge or a question that comes up with at CNN about or well, it's just the future of reporting, you know, because I was thinking in this conversation, you know, we're talking about what we're really talking about with all of these conversations is we are making we are increasing the sophistication of the point of can action between us whoever has this device or whatever,

I think that all of these advances in technology are just going to enable us to do what we do on steroids much much better.

It's also going to enable us to.

Potentially provide value or utility to the general public in society.

So just getting back.

To the thing like allowing us to do things better. We defined real time journalism on cable TV forty.

Five years ago.

We were the first network to have twenty four to seven news, and that costs a lot of money to do right. And so what we're hoping is with all of these advances in technology and literally not needing those satellite tracks and not needing that camera crew and literally having all of this in the palm of your hand, it'll allow us to do that much more efficiently. And then lastly, I would say with the utility piece, which is kind of you know, this hasn't been vetted. This

That are in need.

Is there a way that we, through super mobile can connect to the local EMS or could assess what's going on and say there's a need for X, Y and Z in this moment. So we're not just reporting what's going on, but we're also able to help solve for whatever disaster or problem is happening any time. So that's kind of like the next step where you know, this.

War reporting war reporting, which is the most confusing and kind of mistake prone. The idea that are a reporter on the scene could be taking video and having you know, identify that that was that plane you see was this kind of plane that belonged to this country and not that country, and that that that missile you see was

Yeah, yeah, we.

Should probably wrap up. But there's a couple of themes I wanted to kind of end up. The first one is that the the effects of technological innovation are unpredictable and unknowable. I don't imagine no, correct if I'm wrong. When you guys were coming up with slicing and with supermobile, you did not anticipate all the ways in which the

That's exactly right. I mean again, thinking about the arc of time here, twenty years ago, no one predicted slicing was coming. You know, arguably five years ago, no one saw the rise of AI in the way that it's actually played out from about three years ago. But yeah, we're building mobile networks and as we're thinking about the future of now five G to six G and what are those use cases and how can they serve businesses?

Point Number two Reflection number two from our conversation is that the systems that we have built as a modern economy are probably a lot less efficient than we think it was. We assume we're doing a pretty good job. Then a new technology comes along, we're like, oh, actually you could do it way better. Right, So just when you think you've optimized a system, you think that, oh, I send the reporter, I got a satellite truck behind the reporter. We're fine, this is the way we do news,

Or just in terms of like storytelling formats, you know, super mobile enable vertical video, which is becoming really hot right now. It's the predominant way that people are consuming video on social media, etc. We're just getting into that game and we're going to be able to tell these visually arresting stories in live formats and vertical video mobile for storytelling leveraging that and I think the future.

You know, the best does you have to come?

I have no idea what it will now, but I just I already see some future applications of where this could go.

And then the third thing, and maybe the most important thing is the thing I alluded to earlier, is we are working towards a new definition of trust.

Here.

We've been thinking about trust for generations now as being about transparency and fairness and predictability. But now we're adding this fourth component of reliability. I can reduce the number of you know, catastrophic power outages or system breakdowns. I can reduce the error rate of a journalist of the

Thanks to Thank you all of you.

An unlikely pairing that proves not so unlikely in the Thanks so much, Milcolm good Singer.

This episode was made in partnership with Tea Mobile for Businessiness at iHeartMedia Special thanks to Moe Kattaba Chief Marketing Officer T Mobile for Business, Guy Griggs, Senior Vice president AD Sales and Client Partnerships at CNN, Steve Douglas, Senior Vice President's Service Operations Siemens Energy, and the entire production crew at iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Nina Bird, Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan, editing by Karen Chakerji, mastering by