Firstly, apologies – if you went to bed last night wondering where the RCR newsletter was, or woke this morning wondering the same. The website fairies have been tinkering in the back-end, and so we have combined yesterday’s and today’s as one. Because it’s Friday, we have also collected together all the latest insights, opinion, and news in the second section – just to round-up the week for you.

Secondly, can we talk about private 5G – just for a moment? Because T-Mobile, the knockabout consumer brand in US telecoms, has just knocked it out of the park with this MLB deal – 30 stadiums, 30 networks, all supplied by T-Mobile, all made by Ericsson. It is starting to look like a serious contender in the enterprise game, too. These are all fully-dedicated all-edge affairs – so no public cores and no public slices. They use uncontested local swathes of its mid-band n41 spectrum at 2.5 GHz (between 2469-2690 MHz). It is the kind of solution that, a year ago, only Verizon would have delivered. But Big Red’s rivals in the US have both picked up their private/hybrid 5G games in the enterprise space. AT&T is busy besides, as we have covered in these pages. 

So kudos to T-Mobile. Of course, there is something in the air, anyway; the technology – IoT sensing, a standard business line in corporate spreadsheets; AI sense-making, hooked up to language interfaces, chained along by software agents; 5G connectivity, public and private, and variations between; distributed compute, from the cloud to the edge – is starting to move in sync. The enterprise market, as RCR has written for years, is the only story in telco town. Apart from AI – which is in every town (and for which enterprise adoption is the defining narrative, too). On telcos, the GSMA spoke to RCR at its big Barcelona bash this month about how AI is moving inside networks, as well – in practical fashion now to optimize traffic, manage slices, and automate operations.

But I like the outward-looking story better, about the role of telcos in the broader AI infrastructure story, and in the bigger economic one. And in that context, one should consider Musk’s Terafactory, and what it tells us (if it needs telling) about how the top-feeders in tech will navigate such inconveniences as global supply chains – by buying the whole ranch; in this case, $20 billion to build the world’s largest computer chip facility in Texas (where else?). Chips for industrial robotics, self-driving cars, orbital data centers – and no one to wait on, and less to pay. Money makes money. It is just like Bezos’s reported $100 billion automation fund – to purchase and automate US manufacturing facilities, and presumably to fire human workers.

The technologies are lining up, innovation is going industrial-scale, networks will be needed, and some telco operators will be transformed. While the richest men in the world can afford to think bigger and bigger.