Lumen Technologies, Inc. (LUMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. I mean for those of you with a keen eye for detail, you'll notice that I'm not actually Cliff. But given that he's on annual leave today, I thought we'd give him the benefit of the doubt and let him enjoy his holiday. [indiscernible] for that discussion, really, really interesting one and touching on some really key points, I think.

We've got a few questions from the audience that come through already. And if there are any more, please don't hesitate to drop stuff in the chat. In the first place, I think this touches on a little bit of what you guys were closing on, but how crucial is the edge to what telco cloud can ultimately bring to the table? And how much interest is there from enterprises in the edge? Though -- who might want to take that one?

I can go first. Sure. Go ahead.

No, go ahead.

Okay. We definitely see -- we just ended the previous discussion on this note that the telco cloud needs to -- I mean the applications need to get closer to the user. Even 20 millisecond is too much. I mean with 5G, we are even looking at less than 1 millisecond in some cases. And so the only way to do that is to have the edge where the telco cloud is and be as close as possible to the user. And obviously, there is a lot of interest from different enterprises, depending on the application, obviously. Some applications can reside far. It can reside in the Azure Cloud or in the Google Cloud away from the user, or big data analytics and across and for -- but some applications need immediate response like connected cars or IoT devices, which have monitoring sensors and so on and need immediate response. And so for those cases, we have seen people who want to bring it closer. And the only way to bring it closer is you host your app, even if you're doing it on a hyperscaler's device, you have to host that in a telco cloud close to the user to get that close. Otherwise, there's no other way to -- unless you're going to put fiber on your own, that's a different problem. There's no way to get that close to the user.

Michele?

Yes. Just to add to that. We've seen talking at GSMA with a lot of enterprises that they are starting to explore what they can do because it's obvious that latency is not all they need. Sometimes, it's also the artificial intelligence on-prem is saving bandwidth by not sending useless data back to the central cloud. There are a lot of advantages that I think as we go on, that we start to understand how can we leverage the edge, not only for what we think today but also for improving the processes in general. So we have great hope for that.

And Sanjay as well, have you got any thoughts on this one?

Yes, I think the last part of the question, is there interest from the enterprises on the edge? I think so but not necessarily a direct question is asked that way as we go back to the use case that I'm seeing for COVID where workers, enterprise workers are becoming remote or likely a good chunk will stay remote and yet untethered in a sense that they don't have this luxury of multiple broadband private connections. So having an interest in edge or the proximity of the edge to their -- to their end user locations is coming from that perspective, allowing a better overall experience by leveraging that edge and SD-WAN combined.

Right. And Paul, a question that's come here specifically for you, I think. You mentioned IoT is well-managed by telcos. So how can telcos differentiate themselves here as like the best option for managing IoT devices at scale?

Yes. I think telcos can specialize in different areas of IoT that they can really develop good competency. And I think that companies that have better assets around wireless, that bigger 5G deployments, the types of IoT solutions that they would focus on might be different than a company like CenturyLink, the types of things that we would do. I -- the -- because there's a lot of IoT devices don't all want to use the same types of wireless access methodology, so there's situations where managed Wi-Fi is really the best solution, the most economical solution for an enterprise. There are situations we -- where LoRa for IoT data collection is the best wireless alternative. And so I think what we'll see happen is that the telcos will start to kind of fall into camps in the areas where they really build up practices that focus on smart cities, on robotics or on the health care side that will be a more natural fit for them based on their [indiscernible]

Right. And I think we've got 1 more question here that we can probably just address before we head to the break from Bob. Might the edge play a role as an API gateway for firms, with customers using APIs to access firm information and firms using APIs to provide services to customers? Anyone got any thoughts on that?

Well, from the GSMA point of view, we are building now, together with the leading operators across the world, what we call the operator platform, which is meant to expose the network capabilities as well as the edge capabilities to develop [indiscernible] to where they can start program applications that run on the premises or from the customer devices. So we feel that, yes, developers will play an important role in making edge bigger than what it is now, notably finding new ways that we don't even imagine today to use this latency and throughput and AI at close to the premise. I think we have a great hope in that, that will be the revolution for 5G, really.

Yes. Just to add to that, we definitely think APIs are going to play an important role, especially for 5G slicing. I mean how do you request a slice with a particular SLA requirement from the network, and that only has -- can be done by APIs. You're not going to go back and configure networks each time. It's going to be virtual slices, which we'll give, and that is only possible when we integrate our orchestrators with the 5G orchestrators and learn from APIs everything and learn dynamically how to get to that app at the edge.

Perfect. Well, look, I am conscious of time, guys, so I'm probably going to have to be the bad guy and wrap things up. But I just want to say a huge thank you to Sanjay, Michele, Ritesh, Paul and Cliff as well for your panel and for all of your insights, and it was a fantastic discussion. If anyone does want to carry on the discussion, I'm sure you can find all of the panelists in the networking area straight afterwards just for questions typed out. But yes, in the meantime, you've got 40 minutes before the next session starts. So do take time to check out the networking lounge and check out some of the sponsor booths as well. Many thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.