T-Mobile’s Business Push, Technology Advantages, and 5G Slicing with Daryl Schoolar

Full Transcript

0m10s Speaker 0

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and forty seventh episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Anner. How you doing, Roger?

0m23s Speaker 1

Hey. I'm great.

0m24s Speaker 0

So, Roger, some interesting changes this week that we could talk about. First thing is Bead. Can you tell us what's changed in terms of the overall environment there?

0m34s Speaker 1

Well, what changed was that Secretary Lutnick, who is Secretary of Commerce, and the NTIA, which is responsible for Bead money, made the statement and issued a release that BEAT is now technology agnostic and no longer has that strong preference for fibre. So that opens up the playing field for FWA and for satellite. And previously, there was like this really heavy fiber preference. And then you had like locations that were subsidized with $60,000 which is like a couple hundred years of ARPU breakeven point. Obviously, yes, we want to have really, really reliable and great internet, but not at a payback period of like five hundred years, right?

1m25s Speaker 1

I think fibre is a long lasting and reliable technology. I don't think it's five hundred year future proof. Or at least I hope not because otherwise progress would have come to a crawl.

1m37s Speaker 0

I agree with you within the context that the government should be efficient with taxpayer dollars.

1m42s Speaker 1

Yeah.

1m42s Speaker 0

I'm not sure the payback time period is the only metric I would use. I mean, carriers and stealth bombers probably have a long payback time too. Right? But those are things that we need.

1m51s Speaker 1

Exactly. Fifty to seventy years. The b 52 is still flying after seventy or eighty years. I hope it's not gonna fly for five hundred years.

2m0s Speaker 0

Right.

2m0s Speaker 1

You know?

2m1s Speaker 0

Fair. But I mean, I think what the technology delivers is also important. Right?

2m4s Speaker 1

Yeah. But hopefully in five hundred years, have better technology than the fiber of 2025.

2m9s Speaker 0

Yeah. It's not gonna be there for five hundred years. Right?

2m11s Speaker 1

Yes. Exactly.

2m12s Speaker 0

But I think it's interesting, and I think it's interesting within the context of the overall macro picture with, you know, Starlink and things like that, and Elon and things like that as well.

2m21s Speaker 1

Well, Elon and President Trump had a slight falling out. So who knows if we're We'll now find out how much of this was actually technology agnostic and how much it was being nice to your friends.

2m35s Speaker 0

Right, exactly, exactly. So yeah. So what else we have on the docket here?

2m39s Speaker 1

What else we have on the docket is a spectrum pipeline. So Senator Thune as the Senate Majority Leader, Senator Cruz as the Chairman of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee, and Senator Wicker, who leads the Telecom Subcommittee, have actually delivered on a bill which will be part of the big reconciliation bill that will deliver a 600 MHz pipeline for fully licensed, full power spectrum. And it shows what White House leadership can do. Because the White House put its weight behind it. The DOD, after four years of putting up a fight under the Biden administration, suddenly found a way to do something that for four years they thought was impossible.

3m31s Speaker 1

And now it became possible. And so you have to really give a big thumbs up and a good job to the senators. And I think it will be good for the country to have 600 megahertz more spectrum. We need that for a lot of things.

3m45s Speaker 0

And does full power imply spectrum sharing or not?

3m48s Speaker 1

No. Full power implies no spectrum sharing.

3m51s Speaker 0

That's another big win for the industry as well.

3m54s Speaker 1

Yeah. And spectrum sharing means you can't do what needs to be done Because the one who controls the spectrum can then do whatever. And consumers and businesses, when they buy something, they don't demand, oh, it might be there, but if the military wants it or if somebody else wants it, they have first steps. I would not buy this. Oh, Roger, yeah.

4m17s Speaker 1

I'm like, Don, sorry, we can't have our podcast because XYZ who controls the spectrum has something better to do today. That's just a non startup from a consumer perspective. So that's really good news. Spectrum pipeline will follow Spectrum authority follows with it. So that's really, really good news.

4m36s Speaker 0

And that's contingent on the what I think is currently being billed as the the big beautiful bill. Right?

4m42s Speaker 1

Yeah. I know it's big. It depends on who you are. It's beautiful on abomation. So that's why I call it the big budget reconciliation bill, so that everybody can be get behind that name and does not object to it.

4m56s Speaker 1

So and then I wanna talk about the service that we're launching July 1.

5m1s Speaker 0

Yes. This is really exciting. Tell us about it.

5m4s Speaker 1

So we are now doing everything that we're doing in English language for our clients. And if you're listening here long enough, I'm sure you you know my mantra now by heart, and you're sick and tired of it. We do the fastest, largest, most agile customer inside service. So right now, we're doing four and a half thousand wireless customers a week, 4,500 home Internet customers in English. Probably in the next several weeks, we're going to push this up to 6,000 per week each.

5m36s Speaker 1

But now we're also doing this in Spanish language. And it's an exact copy and clone of where we ask the same questions in working class Spanish. So we took great care and we went to Spanish or Mexican Spanish translator and asked for a working class Spanish translation of like, what's colloquial Spanish, of all of our questions. And so we have a clear copy. Because the people who come from Latin America, the masses that are coming and that are here are not the college professors who speak like a more upper class Spanish.

6m14s Speaker 1

It's working class people. And so we want to address that in our survey. What's really neat, so it's an exact clone, and so we can run this, and we do run this in parallel. We have 30,000 respondents already, which we accumulated over our product development time. And so we can we already have really, really cool insights.

6m33s Speaker 1

But what's really nifty is what we also what we can do is we're asking on both sides acculturation questions. Like, how comfortable are you with speaking English? How comfortable are you speaking Spanish? Which is like what in academia is called the BAS two agglomeration test. The preferred agglomeration test of acculturation.

6m55s Speaker 1

But then we also are asking about what generation the people are in the country and the country of origin. And the interesting thing, there are things that are plainly obvious that third generation plus Hispanics are looking very, very similar to that of any other ethnic group in The United States. Whereas the differences are getting larger and larger the most recent they're arriving here. What blew me away, and to give you some insights, was not that T Mobile is dominating that sector on the mobile side. But what blew me away, and I'm talking here about Hispanics in total and Spanish speaking in total, But like when I look at first generation, how even stronger T Mobile was, and overall how strong postpaid was.

7m44s Speaker 1

We always go in here with our preconceived notions. And the preconceived notion was that people who come to this country are prepaid customers. And we don't see this in our data. I'm looking here at data with more than 10.

7m56s Speaker 0

Well, to be fair, we do see prepaid folks in there, to be clear.

7m59s Speaker 1

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, we see prepaid folks. But it's not like predominantly prepaid. It is much, much stronger on the postpaid side. I'm looking here at like 10,000 respondents who are first generation Americans.

8m13s Speaker 1

And number one is T Mobile. The strength of T Mobile is terrific. But what's also really interesting when I say like first generation Spanish speakers in this country who are with their carrier less than twelve months, and I see like how strong T Mobile is, right? There was a Breitbart article on how strong Metro was. But Metro is not as strong as T Mobile for the people who are less than a year here.

8m39s Speaker 1

And I think one of the things that shows you here the strength of T Mobile is that they advertise in Spanish that you can have a consular certificate. As a Mexican citizen, you can go to your consulate here in The United States. They give you an ID. AT and T accepts it. You can get in 19 states a driver's license without documentation.

9m0s Speaker 1

And that's enough to sign up for wireless service. Also, what's really, really strong is how strong Spectrum and Xfinity are in that first generation Spanish speaker less than a year in The United States. And it's like, oh my god. That's a big contributing factor to the really strong net add numbers of these providers.

9m20s Speaker 0

Right. And I think there's been some research that I believe our friends at New Street have done as well, looking at some of the sources of growth coming from immigration as well. So I think that tracks as well.

9m29s Speaker 1

Yeah. Well, and we've done that too. Right? And we gave them some hints as well. You know, the other thing when I look at our data, what we found with Hispanics is they have to be really, really upset to give people a low score.

9m44s Speaker 1

We have our heat maps when we look at all the providers in all the categories, 17 different categories. And it's a sea of blue. And when I look at it, I'm like, Okay, we need a different color scale because they like to please, then they're much less confrontational. And when I look at how other ethnicities are rating the carriers, they're rating them a lot lower. Which means to me, the small differences, I have to look at it much more accentuated way.

10m13s Speaker 1

But what's also interesting is that we see the same trend as we see with English speakers, young people are a lot more confrontational.

10m21s Speaker 0

Well, think one of things that people don't typically tend to immigrate when they're very old, right? And so

10m25s Speaker 1

Yes.

10m26s Speaker 0

One of the things that this is true of US demography in general is that the racial demography of people that are 40 is very different than folks that are 40. And immigration is the same way. Right? Like, as we get more and more people come to our country, they come here young. Right?

10m41s Speaker 0

And so the preferences of those younger folks will bleed through into the different ethnicities that tend to be immigrating at that younger age as well.

10m49s Speaker 1

Yeah. And so by the way, with immigration being curtailed, it will be very interesting to see how that pans out for the different providers. We've shown this to our carrier clients of the impact that we think it will have. The other thing that's really interesting is when you compare the NPS figures, is T Mobile is leading in NPS in all categories, excluding dropped calls. In dropped calls, Verizon is still the leader.

11m18s Speaker 1

And on spoke to a salesperson over the phone, everybody's a tie. Other than that, T Mobile has the highest scores, which is really, really interesting. So in a way, they get also very highly rated. The other thing that I thought was very interesting is that the Spanish speakers are rating the cable companies better than the English speakers. And comparatively speaking, also AT and T is rated a lot better, not a lot, but somewhat better than among English speakers.

11m51s Speaker 1

So that's really, really interesting. But then it's the same, with one more exception, it's the same. Mint, which is among English speakers, like this runaway number one provider where you have that ARPU versus NPS going really through the roof, that we don't see that in Spanish speakers.

12m12s Speaker 0

Mint and Visible both tend to have less Spanish speakers than are represented in the general population.

12m17s Speaker 1

Yes. But Visible is doing a lot better among Spanish speakers. So that's really, really cool. And so we now have we have a full staff of Spanish speakers, native Spanish speakers now within the team. So we're rocking and rolling.

12m34s Speaker 1

It's really, really cool.

12m36s Speaker 0

Not only is it kind of everything we bring to the English side, right, but it's the same speed, the same agility, same ability to kind of drive quick insights.

12m44s Speaker 1

And it's so hard. It is so hard. It's already hard to do this English. It is extremely hard to do this in Spanish. Like, when we first went out to try and find somebody to do this with, we heard back, yeah, we can do 500 respondents maybe a week.

13m2s Speaker 1

And I'm like, no, that's not enough. And we asked like six, seven different providers and we couldn't find anybody. So we'll put it this way. We are the largest survey buyer at the largest survey provider in the country. I don't know if that makes us the largest survey buyer in the country now, but we're not small.

13m23s Speaker 1

And so we have significant weight now. And so we got wholesale access on a platform. And that allowed us to do this. Because now we're running this actually as multiple surveys, because we found that people in some states need more money and respond faster than in other states. And so we really fine tuned that.

13m45s Speaker 1

And that's how we can get 1,500. And it is very costly, and it was very costly to get there. It was very painful. You know, a big shout out to Megan, Megan Hea and XJ Wang, who stood this up on a technical side. And we get now 1,500.

14m2s Speaker 1

But, yeah, it's really, really hard.

14m4s Speaker 0

It's hard. And getting everything marching in line is difficult too.

14m7s Speaker 1

When you say, Roger, this is hard. I'm like, yeah. All the easy things have been done. We specialize on hard. And so we're really able to do this exactly at the same pace with numbers that nobody else told us was possible, like three times the numbers that they said that they could do, we can do, or that they couldn't do.

14m25s Speaker 1

Now I'm very, very proud of the team. Really cool.

14m27s Speaker 0

Cool. This is something we're doing an ongoing basis now, and I'm sure we'll have lots more data points to share on that front going forward. And, you know, I know I'm personally looking forward to really diving deep and getting to know this new product better and learning more from what we can do by kind of just really having this side by side super fast product that allows us to compare across language preference and, you know, generations and acculturation and so forth. So very, very exciting.

14m54s Speaker 1

Alright. We'll talk next week. Alright. Thank you.