We've had a lot of people from a lot

of different industries on XR for Business, and many of them have

espoused how much things are going to change when the world finally

has a global 5G network to work on. Well, in today's episode, we have

one of the folks responsible for laying the groundwork for that

network -- Nokia's Sandro Tavares -- on to talk about how that's

coming along.

Alan: Thank you for joining the

XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest

is Sandro Tavares, and Sandro is with Nokia. He has more than 20

years of international experience in the telecoms industry, with the

past 18 working with the Nokia family of companies. He's had several

key roles that have been integral in shaping the latest evolution

steps in the mobile industry and communicating these advances to

Nokia service provider customers around the world. He is currently

the Head of Mobile Networks Marketing, a position in which he leads a

global team focused on promoting Nokia solutions for mobile networks,

including 5G. To learn more about the great work that Sandro and his

team at Nokia are doing, you can visit nokia.com

and if you want to dig even deeper, you can just type in "Nokia

5G" into Google.

Sandro, welcome to the show.

Sandro: Thank you very much,

Alan. Thanks for having me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

I'm super excited about this. We've had people from telcos, people

from industry. We've had all sorts of great people on the show. But

we've never had somebody from a company that is building the literal

infrastructure that all of XR will run on. And that's 5G.

Sandro: Yeah, that's great to

hear. Really an honor to be here and to be the first one discussing

this topic with you guys.

Alan: So tell us, what are you

guys doing at Nokia? Why will this impact XR?

Sandro: Well, I would say that probably a lot of the listeners, they know Nokia for the devices, right? From the cell phones in the past and the early stages of the smartphones. But Nokia has actual history that goes much beyond that. It's a company that was founded 150 years ago. It started as a paper mill in the countryside of Finland. It has evolved through several different industries. And in the last decades, it has been focused on technology. So our two biggest businesses in the past were the handset business, so the devices, the cell phones as we know them, and then the networks that actually support these devices. So the networks that are provided to service providers, operators all over the world. Then after Nokia has divested these devices business few years ago, then we focused 100 percent on our networks business. And this is what we are doing now. We build basically all generations of telecommunications in the past, and now we are heavily focused on making 5G a reality. And that's where basically what takes my time throughout most of the days, just talking to customers and discussing about the benefits that 5G will bring to the world, that just goes much beyond just providing broadband. And looking to the applications that can be built with 5G, quite a lot of them are actually going to be enabled by XR technologies. So you can think about a myriad of applications where XR, AR, and VR are going to be important and that are going to be leveraging 5G to actually get brought to the market and delivered to customers.

Alan: Obviously I'm a little biased, being the XR for Business Podcast. Let's dive into some of those use cases. Let's take a broad. I was told real millimeter-wave 5G in its perfect condition will be able to be 100 to 1000 times faster than what we're using currently. And to put that in perspective, somebody said you'll be able to download the entire Game of Thrones, not an