With the pandemic, the trend right now is that everything is video-related. From video calls to video games, everyone is, at some point, looking at a video screen. Discover how video plays a big role in the future of 5G marketing. Learn more insights on 5G with your host Carrie Charles and her guest Peter Linder. Peter is the Head of the 5G Marketing of Ericsson in North America. Learn what the latest trends are in marketing and how important personal branding is. Tune in and learn more about use cases and how a 5G enterprise works.
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5G Marketing Trends And Insights With Peter Linder Of Ericsson
We have a special episode for you. I have with me the Head of 5G Marketing for North America for Ericsson, Peter Linder. Peter, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited.
The pleasure is all mine, Carrie.
It’s going to be fun. I love talking about marketing and 5G. It’s two of my favorite subjects here but first, what’s interesting to me is that you have been with Ericsson for many years. Your journey is unbelievable. Could you share a little bit about all the roles that you’ve had? How did you land in your current role?
A lot of my journey started when I was a young kid. I literally grew up with a Formula 1 race track in my backyard. A lot of my technology interests and interest for technology came out of that. My father was a teacher, teaching technology as well. Technology was set from the very beginning. In my late teens, I started getting excited about ASICs and this kind of technology. Back then, we had ASIC manufacturing in Sweden.
I had applied for a couple of internships and I realized that Ericsson was the company to join down the road. I joined Ericsson in 1991. A lot of the work that I’ve been doing, you can describe me as a broadband networker. Half of it is in fixed broadband, the first half of my career and the second half of my career is focused on mobile broadband. What brought me into marketing is something that has happened gradually. It was a gradual transition over time. I started in 2003 when I was appointed as the spokesperson for Ericsson. I got to speak to industry analysts and then it was financial analysts. It was gradually expanding.
I enjoyed that piece because it was pushing you to try to understand things deep enough so you could explain them to someone else. That led to an appointment in 2011 as Networked Society Evangelist. We were a group of seven people asked to do things a little bit differently, speak differently at the telecom events, go to other events and talk about what connectivity could do for their industries. Also, a digital component, which was about establishing ourselves in the digital domain, trying to build our personal brand and learn everything about tweaking and LinkedIn back then. This was a side gig for me, but it was a very exciting piece.
When I got the big question in 2014, one of my bosses said, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I went back and thought a little bit about it. I came back and said, “I want to be CMO. It’s really exciting.” He goes to me, “How is that going to happen?” I was pants down. I had to call a few people in our leadership team and they said, “Peter, you’re great, but not for marketing. We would never appoint you in that.” I got annoyed by this. I said, “I know a few things about marketing. I’m going to write about them.”
I created a digital mentor blog about everything I knew in the digital and marketing domain. I wrote 200 episodes. By the time it was time for me to apply for a role in the marketing side of the house in 2018, I didn’t get any questions about the digital marketing component. They felt, “This is a solid bet. We know what he is doing. He is out there and doing all these kinds of crazy things on digital.”
That’s the journey and what I do now is essentially about three components. One-third is about understanding what’s going on in the industry. One-third is about trying to turn that into some content, either a talk track, side, video or something like that. One-third is normally talking about on a stage somewhere or now trying to get excited by the hundreds of people that are on the other side of that camera.
Let’s talk about what’s going on in the industry. From your perspective, what’s the latest on 5G? Where are we now? What are some exciting things that Ericsson is doing?
Digital marketing is about how you will reach all the different people that you will likely never meet.
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Generation in the mobile world is difficult in the last few years. We’re roughly at the backend of the first year in college now. We’re in the third year of 5G, you can say. A lot of it is focused on the early adopters. By the end of 2021, we expect there to be 54 million in America, in the US and Canada. We’ve been building the network and lighting up towers. We’re building out 5G in three different ways. First, we’re lighting up towers for nationwide coverage. We knew that is something we call low-band spectrum, the spectrum that reaches very far. If you try to figure out how far it will reach, go out for a long bike ride.
The second thing we do is mid-band technology. There’s a lot of buzz about that, C-Band, CBRS. There are lots of terminologies. We’ve got some more options coming up here. It’s very much about adding capacity and capabilities, especially from urban areas. If you want to figure out how far it reaches, go out for a long run. The third thing that’s going on is very much what we do with the high-band spectrum. That’s the most powerful application. It doesn’t reach very far. It’s what we do to light up a sports stadium, factory or Downstate populated district. There’s a network build-up that is taking place with all these different technologies.
On the application side, we’re very much trying to connect people’s smartphones. It’s enhancing the mobile broadband experience. We’re also looking very much about looking at what we can do for closing the digital divide where fiber hasn’t reached yet and is unlikely to reach. Can we use 5G for fixed wireless applications for broadband? That has started to move. On top of this one is coming a range of IoT applications. That’s coming a little bit in the second wave. A lot of this is focused on broadband applications.
I love how you connected 5G with health and wellness. I feel like, after this show, I need to get out and go for a run and a bike ride. Let’s talk about marketing. How will 5G change media and marketing? We’ll talk a little bit more about digital later. How is this going to change if it hasn’t already?
The first thing that 5G changed is regarding the distribution of different media. When we see 5G, it’s 77%. If we look out in 2026, 77% of the traffic in the mobile network is going to be media-related. What we see is going to be video with high-resolution, delivered both to mobile and larger screens. It is streaming of gaming so that you can play games not only on a game console or a powerful desktop, but you can play games on mobile devices with a lot of the compute taking place, not in the device, but fairly close to it. The third one is AR/VR, where now most of those applications require a wire to a powerful computer. Going forward, we can cut that wire and connect them straight to the mobile network and compute that is in the network.
There is an element of this thing that’s going to change the marketing because we’re going to have all these different tools. A lot of these applications have marketing integrated into them. We’re going to have to relearn that. The second thing I would say is very much about 5G is also powerful in terms of sending traffic up to the network. As marketers, we will have access to a lot more data regarding both how our products are sold, but also how our products are used. We can leverage those. With the fact that there’s the big data movement and 5G together with AI, we can start understanding more things about what people are doing.
Most people don’t know what I do with my car because I’m driving around and there’s no connection to it, but in the future, the car dealers and the service providers would know quite a bit. “He has been going under long right now. We should take him in for a service appointment.” Marketing is going to change that one. The third thing on top of this is what I normally describe as my day job. It’s riding two bullet trains because 5G and the marketing dimension are developing quickly. It’s the whole movement of digital marketing together with what’s going on in 5G. That’s where I see the intersection of interesting things happening.
Digital marketing is a buzzword. I hear about it all the time. It’s the future. It’s now. What does this mean? What is digital marketing? Why do companies, large and small, need to excel in digital marketing to be successful in the future?
We’ve been testing a lot of people’s imaginations of that during the pandemic. Before a typical day and week in my life would be to fly somewhere, seeing customers, getting prepared for a one-hour meeting, presenting a number of different things, interacting around those topics and met with the people in the room. Two days later, I could be on a stage at a conference talking about some similar concept and interacting very much like people in the room.
5G Marketing: 5G marketing will change regarding the distribution of different media. So high-resolution videos, gaming, AR, VR, marketing are going to be different.
You can say I was like the theater person in that role, interacting with people in smaller settings with ten people in the room or larger settings with a few hundred people in the room. When you look at the digital domain, it’s very much, “How do you reach all the different people that you haven’t seen and unlikely will ever meet?” People in that also play a role in a purchasing decision because, before, we were very focused. We tried to figure out, “Who is he or she who is writing the check? Who are some of the key people around them?”
Now, when we’re selling into a more complex environment, it’s hard to identify all the people. They’re selling into perhaps a matrix. We have to reach further. I can give you one example of its effect that hit us in 2020. To our biggest customers, we go out and do something that we call an innovation day. We bring twenty demos to a couple of 5 to 10 different speakers and we would do a show for them for a day. When we can’t do that, we have to pull that off in the digital domain.
All of a sudden, we started seeing that we’re not only reaching the 500,000 people that were in the room. We’re reaching all other people across the whole nation in smaller offices and so on. A lot of digital marketing is about reaching people that are influencing what’s happening, purchasing decisions or support decisions, but that you can’t necessarily reach with leather shoes on the ground. That’s where the exciting piece is, meeting people that you’re never ever going to meet in your whole life, most likely.
It seems to me as a business leader, whether a small business or large business, that video should be a high priority. I know there are so many people that say, “I don’t know much about video and social media. This is a whole new world for me.” What do we do if this is all new for us and we don’t have a large marketing department as an entrepreneur to do this for us? Do we hire someone who specializes in digital marketing? Do we learn it? How do we get in on this? We have got to, as businesses, become good at digital marketing or be left behind.
It starts with the mindset, especially if we’re in a business that is well-established. We know what we’re doing. We tend to be driving for perfection in everything that we do. When I tried to put some words of digital transformation and what that is to me in terms of a cultural perspective, it starts with putting progress before perfection. Starting by thinking, “I don’t know anything about this. I’m going to do it, but I don’t know how. How do I get there?” It’s a little bit daring to do the first thing.
The hard thing with video is that most people don’t know about it. The easy thing about video is we have a video camera in our smartphone and everybody has got more or less a small type of production unit. When you’ve written a blog, why don’t you take the camera on the phone and record 30 seconds of yourself with your perspective on what that blog was all about and having that accompany your blog? With these kinds of elements, the video is going to become super important to attracting people to whatever other content pieces we’re creating.
Also, trying to make your point in 30 to 90 seconds, “This is what I really think about this particular topic. Right or wrong, I’m doing it right now. This is the quality of our access to it.” Starting there and then the small steps, get yourself a microphone and a light. Watch people on TV, “How do they do it? The news reporters on TV, they know video pretty well,” and gradually improving. Before we went to college, we didn’t know everything that was going to happen in college. We did some summer classes before and then it was pretty much, “Let’s nail the next semester and gradually grow.” It’s a journey like that we’re going through.
You mentioned something about personal branding. This is also a topic that I speak about quite a bit because I believe it’s so important for everyone, not just leaders, but everyone to get their name out there and say, “This is who I am in the marketplace.” Talk about personal branding. What does that mean? Why is it important? What do we do to get ourselves out there and self-promote in this era?
You mentioned one point there, which will start when you say, “Who I am.” A lot of people, when you asked them the question, “Who are you?” They tell you what they do. If you don’t ask the question, “Who are you?” “What do you mean now? I told you what I do.” “It’s not who you are. It starts with a little bit of soul-searching of who you are.” The second thing was a piece of advice I got on my digital journey. I was trying to figure out which pen am I. “Am I the black pen?” In a room of people, do I run up first, grab the black pen and start sketching an idea on the whiteboard and that type of character?
Am I the guy sitting back, waiting with a red pen and saying, “With the black pen, that was nice, but there are some errors here and can be improved here?” The red pen person that’s more or less contributing by critiquing and adding to clarity or maybe you sit even further back in the room is the highlighter person that listens to what people say and say, “That was important. This is important.”
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Those pens give you a little bit of an idea of what roles you can play on the digital arena. The black pen person is perhaps going out there with more original ideas and blowing out the forefront. The red pen is trying to contribute by enhancing, improving, critiquing and making things better. Generally, the larger majority perhaps were highlighting. If you’ve got that nailed regarding who you are, then you can start with becoming a little bit more active because we all benefit from taking an active role in the digital domain, leveraging our LinkedIn and Twitter accounts structurally, relaying, being seen out there and then also reflecting on this thing.
When you’re out in the digital domain, it’s hard to be this buttoned-up and tightened professional Peter with a tie. You need to add some ingredients of who you are and what you love. Are you passionate about Formula 1 racing? Do you love to take pictures and that shines through? You sprinkle in some of your personality or who you are so you don’t come across as 1 of the 100,000 equally in a certain frame, but more like, “This is Peter. He is this and that. He knows a lot about 5G.” It’s the combination of who you are as a person and being daring to expose a little bit. That makes you interesting and allows you to develop your personal brand.
What digital strategies are you using to engage your audience and help people learn more about 5G?
We’re doing one thing, which is the biggest journey for anyone in marketing and the vendor community on 5G. It’s the fact that 5G is moving from being something which you hardly have to explain to the end-users. Smartphones, five billion of that, were 4G connectivity and then all the applications are residing higher up in the network. It’s more or less like when Amazon was selling books. The books were in Seattle. They were going out to all kinds of people across the world selling books and shipping them. There’s nothing to be explained.
As we move towards 5G, it’s changing so many fronts what we’re using 5G for and the potential to use it for different things, especially when it comes to businesses. Most businesses, their interaction with 4G was, “How many sim cards do we need? How big should the buckets be,” and then you were done. Now, with 5G, there are so many more things that need to be explained to businesses. One strategy that we’re applying is we spend a lot of time helping in writing marketing content for service providers to use to their customers. It’s me putting together a story about what 5G can do for sports in a way that the service provider can talk to a sports venue, sports franchise or league about it. They can speak to the concession owners in the venues.
A lot of it is about creating marketing content that our customers ideally liked so much that they take to use it towards their customers. One of the extreme cases that we’ve done is we have built a factory here in Texas, where we have applied 5G extensively in this factory. By applying 5G networks in a variety of different forms in that factory, I can go out to our factory people and ask, “What are you doing in this case? Which new use cases are you up to this week?” I can take that information and go to the AT&Ts, Verizons and T-Mobiles of the world and explain, “This is what we’re doing in our factory. We think you can go and talk about these things to all other manufacturing plants in the United States.”
They’re very much transforming the marketing from trying to market a product I’m selling to my real customer to stories that work towards their end customers. Gradually, we’re progressing and driving this forward because there are so many things that are changing. It started with Amazon and books. Amazon is selling pretty much everything now. This is more or less what the network of the future will be able to do. We have to support a whole slew of applications. We need to help people understand that in the language that people get, not necessarily the telecom acronyms that we normally use.
You mentioned manufacturing. I’ve been reading so much about the transformation in manufacturing and it’s evolving with 5G and automation. I’ve been hearing too about Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. How will all of these change the manufacturing world? What’s ahead of us there?
You can look at a little bit of a scene of what’s happening in the telecom industry and get some ideas and hints. When 1G and 2G came up, we normally produce those kinds of products in the regions where they were consumed. In Latin America, we produced in Brazil. In North America, we produced here in the US. For 3G and 4G, let’s say in the late 1990s, we said, “We’re going to move this overseas.” We moved all the production to low-cost countries.
5G Marketing: The hard thing about video is that most people don’t know about it. The easy thing about video is that everybody can do it. Everyone has a phone and some sort of production unit.
Now, we’re at a point where we’re seeing a different shift in focus. It’s this more focus of, “We need to bring back manufacturing closer to customers.” That’s driven by it because there’s a lot more new political dimension to it. It’s about the fact that more and more things are customized. People don’t want to buy a car that is standing in a lot for three months. They want you to order it the way you want to have it and then get it configured. It doesn’t stand on a lot at all. There’s customization and new political movement that drives and you want to avoid shipping.
Now, the biggest hassle in the world is finding shipping containers that you can ship stuff in. If you move production closer to where the customers are, that is the first thing. In order to move production, especially in a high-cost country, you have to think about a couple of different things. You will need to automate it to a significantly higher level because the people that are buying your products don’t care so much about where you produce them. They wouldn’t put an extra big price tag on it if you probably produce next door. You have to automate a lot of it. That’s one of the key elements of the industry for an auto.
The second thing is you have to look at how you produce it and make it more environmentally friendly, “What can you do when you produce it?” In our factory, for example, we’ve got solar panels across all garages, which has contributed to the electricity we consume. We’ve got water tanks, which we collect rainwater, which we purify and then use in the factory. We’ve got ice tanks that we cooled down at night and then use the ice during the day to cool the factory. There’s a number of different things we can do to make the manufacturing a lot leaner on the environment.
The third bit is we’re not so much bringing back manufacturing of old products that we already produced abroad, but it’s the new generation, latest products and fanciest ones. We start with those ones in the market. For example, in our factory, we don’t produce 3G and 4G radios. We started with 5G radios, the new things. Therefore, you can start tweaking, tuning and working with your customers in different ways.
Also, we can ship it across the United States with ground freight instead of air freight from overseas. There’s a whole range of dynamics in this. If you try to remember three things about what’s going on, it’s mean, your latest and greatest product. It’s lean. It’s automated significantly. It’s green. It has to be more environmentally friendly than how we were producing things in the past.
You mentioned your factory and use cases. What are some exciting use cases with 5G? Maybe a few that we haven’t heard of?
When I look at use cases, we’ve done numerous studies over the years. In the first one, we started with 400. Since then, it has gone upwards. The tricky part with use cases is a little bit trying to group them into different kinds of groups. We’re seeing two broadband-related use cases. It’s enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access. What’s going on in the enhanced mobile broadband is very much focused on streaming of high video quality, games, AR/VR and also things that go out of the way. For example, if you’re in a sports stadium and watching a concert or a game, everybody can share their experiences live.
Some of the things that you could do are point your camera to certain players and you get graphical overlays. Imagine if you take the graphical overlays that you got at the TV at home, you get that on your smartphone by pointing out to different players and what’s going on in the scene. That is something that’s happening as we’re transforming the mobile experience of the experience of sports venues. We’re approaching 100 venues in the US for sports venues where there’s going to be 5G.
This was something that during the pandemic, everybody thought, “This is bad. Now, we’re going to stop doing it.” It’s perfect for building now. There’s no fan in the arena. We can put up some ladders and keep them there for three days and there won’t be a big issue. Mobile broadband is very much about that one and creating a consistent experience for video. I would be surprised if we start offloading streaming services to other things. I see five years in this thing that we can use for streaming all the time.
The fixed wireless dimension is very much about providing 5G to people that don’t have fiber or won’t get fiber-fast enough. You can see it’s a good example, “What about all these homeworkers that didn’t have fiber or they were struggling with the capacity?” The fastest way to bring them up to speed would be to put a pocket router with 5G connectivity to it and Wi-Fi in the home. I see a lot of this movement. It’s not so fancy, but for people that don’t have broadband, being able to get it with getting a pocket router rather than digging and all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the side.
5G should be mean, lean, and green.
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I see that when there’s something that is accelerating the deployment where there is a need, someone working from home or someone getting educated from home. These ones are fairly down to earth. If we then look at the IoT application, it’s perhaps where more of the fancy stuff is taking place. It’s growing up in four different categories. Massive IoT, which we talked about these small types of sensors. It’s something generating data, which like a vineyard, checking out the moisture in the land or was trying to predict, “Now is the day the grapes are ripe for picking.” In the agriculture sector, there’s so much wasted food that’s already happening on the farm. When we can connect the farms to determine when is the right time to harvest, there would be a big difference.
You’ve got the broadband IoT, which is what I would describe as, think about your smartphone. We take the technology access for a smartphone. We put it into another device. We’re not going to charge $50 a month and generate seven gigabytes a month either, but it’s for different applications of that nature. We’re seeing a lot of those things happening where people are essentially leveraging 4G and 5G to building into different types of devices. When I checked, there were 22 different types of 5G devices. Even though the bulk is for smartphones and fixed wireless terminals, a lot of other things are starting to evolve.
Perhaps, the most exciting category is when we talk about critical IoT. When we start talking about connecting cars, GM cars in 2024 will have 5G integrated. It’s starting to be able to download software to them and having cars talking to each other. They don’t run into each other. There’s an exciting field there. The whole industry automation IoT is when we’re connecting automated guided vehicles in a warehouse or manufacturing plant so they can drive around there. Someone described it as like where there’s not a carpet in a business, in the warehouse or manufacturing side of the house and connecting the applications there.
We’re starting to see. Use cases are hard because you can come up with a lot of them. The hardest part is to answer the question, “What are the three important ones that make it takes off?” I often try to explain to people, “Try to look at use places instead. Where do we want 5G for a good reason?” “In the manufacturing plants.” “That is a good place because we can cover it with a few radios and start doing things. The next challenge is, what are the three most important use cases to make you put it there in the first place?”
It’s a little bit like when you open a hamburger restaurant. You have to have burgers, fries, and sodas. Otherwise, you can’t open it. The other stuff can come down the road. A lot of the use case development is focusing on finding suitable use places like sports venues. Figuring out what are the three use cases that make it put it there and then you can start scaling to more and more of those. In parallel with that, there’s a use case evolution that is all the other things that come, the apple pies, the sundaes, the coffees, the nuggets.
As we’ve seen in our factory, those are things that you come when you got the infrastructure there. Let people drive and say, “What can we do now? What do we do next?” It starts with the foundation. Long story short, don’t always start with trying to figure out the use cases, then keep that from getting you going. Start by thinking, “What are the three things that can make us start with this?” Be satisfied with that and knowing there’s a lot more in the pipe, which is hard to figure out upfront.
It makes so much sense to build that foundation and the infrastructure first. Everything comes off of that because every time you solve a problem and you have a solution, there’s another problem that’s created that needs another solution.
It’s like putting up 200 bowling pins along the wall. If you are trying to hit more than once, it’s absolutely impossible. If you approach it from a use place perspective, it’s fairly easy to describe, “Go to university,” and ask, “If you have 5G across the whole campus, what would you do?” You get pretty sharp responses back when you ask people that question rather than saying, “What are the use cases you need?” Otherwise, we end up in endless conversations. You can tighten it up. Especially from a marketing perspective, when you’ve done that job and figured out what are the use cases that make sense for a sports venue, then you can drive your digital marketing machine and say, “This is what sports are doing in 2021.”
5G solutions on private networks are shaping the future for the enterprise. What would a 5G-powered enterprise look like?
5G Marketing: The combination of who you are as a person and daring to expose what makes you interesting allows you to develop your personal brand.
A 5G-powered enterprise look like is you can divide it between vertical-specific aspects of your business, which is different from a factory compared to a warehouse compared to a university and you can look at more at horizontal enablers. A 5G-powered enterprise can be described in a couple of different playing cornerstones in what you could consider. The first one, a 5G-powered enterprise use 5G smartphones for personal communication. As we’ve learned during the pandemic, we will be more and more dependent in the future on video-related communication, not so much just making phone calls and sending mails. We will use the smartphone also for video-related communication as we have communicated with friends and family during the pandemic.
There’s a communication element there. Also, we need to make sure as any business that you can connect all your employees from home. Some of them that are connected that’s in the fiber footprint, you don’t have any problem. For everybody outside of the fiber footprint, 5G is a great solution for remote working. It might be in a temporary home or as you move in between different locations. The ability to connect the workforce, where they decide to work outside of the fiber footprint, that’s the second point.
The third point is we will have ultra-mobile workforces in the future. We are talking perhaps 50/50 in our office, half time in the office, half time out of the office. If you would have more workers in the future that are fundamentally out, not only salespeople that travel the whole way all the time, but also people that continuously work remotely. We can connect those ones both with the 5G-powered smartphone and the 5G-powered laptop without the need for a pocket router or anything in between as they’re moving around between different locations. I see a lot of interest from branch offices if we take a larger company to connect the branch office with fixed wireless access, either for primary or backup connectivity.
I see 5G playing a role for small businesses. If you have a small business with 4, 5, 6, or 10 employees, the local IT is a hassle. What if you could connect into that business with 5G and then hopefully with wireless, by having most of the applications running remotely at the edge, you don’t need any local IT? It’s taking out the local IT out to small businesses. On the other end, if you’re to look at larger enterprises, you have the campuses. Are you going to put up a 5G lab and doing 5G innovations in the corner of your business or are you going to be doing it all across the business in a campus-wide network where you have 5G across the whole campus?
You can create innovations. You can use your employees as digital pioneers, guinea pigs, or whatever you call them to test your application at your campus and then places like warehouses and factories. There’s a whole range. This horizontal enablement is taking place pretty much before we haven’t talked about any specific vertical applications that the industry is using. A lot of the tools are already in place for pushing forward this now.
I would like to get your thoughts on this. Looking ahead at a few years in the future. What’s our world going to look like with 5G, with our workforce, the way we live and do business?
There are a couple of things. I want to say it in two different ways. The first is the difference that we’re going to make for our children. It’s like my daughter and I was having conversations. She thinks I’m so old-school because I use handbooks and cookbooks for solving problems. It takes me half an hour to find them and another half an hour to get something meaningful out of them. She would say, “Dad, when are we ever going to start? The best way to do it is through YouTube. You ask a question and you’ll get some responses. By five minutes, you’re ready to go.”
Her kid is going to laugh at this and say, “YouTube, that was so old-school. Why don’t you just put on the glasses and ask Siri the recipe for Swedish meatballs? I need to cook now. What do I need? What do I do?” When you get this instant transfer of knowledge, which is enabled by when you have some different tools, it could be the AR glasses or AR-powered other things and then applications residing at the edge, you have to learn something in advance. For a lot of other things, you can learn not while doing but learn at doing. There’s an instant knowledge transfer that’s taking place. That is one important thing.
The second thing that’s important, if you look at all the different mobile generations of what they’ve done. They’ve been shrinking the world. When 1G was introduced, I was working in a wholesale business. At 8:00 in the morning, you had to be in the office at 8:00 every day because, between 8:00 to 9:00, all the salespeople call in their orders from the day before and you had to take them down. The next guy calling was a person between 8:00 and 8:15. The next guy. You’re sitting there and writing down all the different orders so we can ship them. They couldn’t be shipped that day. They went out the day after. He was introduced, the salesperson as soon as they stepped out from a customer, they’ll call you and give you the order. The whole order flow became a lot faster. We shrunk that piece of the world.
When 2G came, it was very much about text messages and mail. All of a sudden, everybody was expecting a response to a question. You should get it instantly. The executives or salesperson started texting, “Peter, what’s this? When can we deliver that?” You got instant responses. We were shrinking that window. The same thing has been going on with 3G and then we start to connect laptops in the beginning. All of a sudden, you can move around and you have a slide deck. You could work with slide decks on the road in a way that you haven’t been able to before.
People will be more and more dependent on video-related communication in the future.
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With 4G, it was very much the whole app economy that was shrinking the world so you can lord everything. With 5G, you can shrink the world further. The shrinking is going to take place because we’re going to have a lot of devices here. We’re going to have cloud-computing capabilities at the edge and there are going to be very quick loops of feedbacks between these two different areas. You will be able to see more or less in real-time, “How many of this have we sold? How are people using this? How much are they using it? What kind of things could we tweak to make that use support to use a lot easier?”
We’re going to shrink the world fundamentally from when data appears to when we can take action within a business. Perhaps, that’s going to drive a completely different new level of innovation. When you build innovation, it’s not about the brightest and greatest ideas from your innovators in the technical department. It’s going to be, “Here are great ideas that are coming from observing how your customers are buying and using your products.” That’s where somewhere near is where the big thing is that we’re going to see for sure transition.
Peter, as the Head of 5G Marketing for North America for Ericsson, I’m sure that you speak a lot. You’re on panels a lot. I looked at your LinkedIn and there are videos everywhere and articles and things. For people to be able to reach out to you if that’s okay, where can you be reached?
I can be reached in a number of different ways. The easiest is by email, [email protected]. If you don’t find it there, you can find it on LinkedIn. You can reach me on Twitter. I had the idea when I started tweeting that my tweeting life was about one-liners. My Twitter handle is @OneLinders. You can find me the same on Instagram. It’s primarily more private stuff there and pictures of where I’m traveling and so on. It’s a bit more used to see it on professional stuff as well.
If you’re interested in my private project on digital mentoring, you can find that on TweeterLinder.com. You’ll find some ideas where I share about. A lot about this thing that we talked about here about video development and how we can become better as virtual speakers, which is its single biggest transition I’ve gone through. That’s where you find me. You can also find a lot about Ericsson and my position at Ericsson.com/5G. It’s about anything we do on 5G. Ericsson.com under About Us and Careers, you’ll find a lot of our open positions. Those open positions are structured under eleven different categories so that you can either go in that way or search and find. We have all positions globally in one location for you.
I’ve learned a lot from you, Peter. What I’m going to do is follow you on everything and watch what you do and use it as a model to help me learn. I appreciate it so much. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for being on the show. This has been so helpful. I truly appreciate it.
The pleasure is all mine. It’s a great show to be on. I’m proud that I’ve been given the opportunity to interact with you and your audience.
Thank you, Peter. You take care. We’ll talk soon.
Thank you very much.
Important Links:
- Ericsson
- LinkedIn – Peter Linder
- [email protected]
- @OneLinders – Twitter
- Instagram – Peter Linder
- TweeterLinder.com
- Ericsson.com/5G
About Peter Linder
Peter Linder is Ericsson’s 5G Evangelist, responsible for 5G Customer Engagement Marketing in North America. He has been with the company for nearly 30 years. As a top 100 global influencer on 5G, Peter’s expertise is in fixed and mobile broadband networks, as well as digital transformation for network operators. His experiences come from marketing, strategy, business development and portfolio management roles. He blends this with his strong passion for mentoring about digital transformation.
At Ericsson, Peter focuses on 5G’s ability to shape the future of connected technology, and how 5G and IoT will change the way we work and live. Beyond the 5G ecosystem, Peter has extensive knowledge on smart cities, Industrial IoT, virtual reality, autonomous transport and more. Onalytica ranked him as the #1 most influential expert across all tech sector topics on LinkedIn in 2020.
Peter speaks three languages and considers himself a global citizen. He holds a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in International Business Management, both from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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