Thank you for joining me today on Let's Get Digital.
I am Carrie Charles, your host.
And today I have a very special guest.
And I'm really excited about this guest because Jeff Mucci, the founder and CEO of Arden Media, is also our media partner for the podcast and has been now for like five years.
So.
We have an amazing partnership with Arden, as well as his publications.
And so I wanted him to come on the show for a number of reasons.
He has an exciting announcement.
So stay tuned.
Jeff, thanks for coming on.
I'm so glad you're here, finally.
uh
Yeah, so I want to know first about just about you.
How did you, the man behind RCR Wireless News and soon to be more.
So how did you get in the industry?
Tell me about your path.
Let me start by just talking about RCR wireless.
I had been in telecom most of my career through deregulation and C-Lex, DSL companies, broadband wireless, et cetera.
But in 2009, I was looking around to buy a company and RCR was a print publication, had been around since 1982, was the proverbial Bible of the industry.
And the previous owners closed it, I think it was in February or March of 2009.
And they closed it the day before CTIA when the editors were actually getting ready to go to CTIA and cover the show.
ah And you may remember 2009 was a tough economic downturn year and I'd been looking around to buy a business and an analyst friend of mine said, hey, did you see that RCR
closed?
Well, I called the owners, flew to Detroit that I think that week and bought the assets, hired the editorial team back and uh I created Arden Media.
to buy those assets of RCR Wireless News.
So uh Arden Media is a research-driven news information and event company.
And so I've been a publisher now for the past 16 years.
Wow, tell me more about RCR Wireless News.
A little bit about, I mean just everything.
I want to know, you've talked about the history, tell me about the platform and everything, the sponsors, what type of information you cover, what type of verticals you
cover.
Well, I think that's really going to lead into the conversation about our announcement.
know, RCR Wireless News was created in 1982 when the very first trial and commercial launch of cellular technology started.
So RCR Wireless News stands for Radio Communications Report.
It was a newsletter.
I had heard rumors that it was actually faxed to people back in the day.
uh So it was a way for readers to learn about the industry.
And you got to remember you had the incumbent Bell companies that were assigned a license and then you had entrepreneurs who were assigned licenses.
And this was back in the days of 1G.
So RCR Wireless News has been covering wireless since the inception of cellular technology.
uh
You fast forward to the last year and uh the industry has changed.
uh The media industry has changed and the technology has changed.
If you look back at 2024, carrier CapEx and wireless declined.
You saw a number of companies, the major vendors to the carriers saw their share prices decline.
You saw their sales decline, et cetera.
And so that signal very clearly that a change was adrift.
And at the same time, you're starting to see the hyperscalers and others announce hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in data centers.
So we knew that we needed to evolve beyond wireless.
And we also needed to evolve beyond traditional uh news coverage.
So I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but RCR Wireless News has been.
You know, stood for editorial excellence for over 40 years.
It's, it's a amazing group of people.
Season writers, conference producers.
You know, we truly are a global news information event company.
have a team in London now.
We have an office in London.
We have people across the U S and Latin America.
Our customers include.
You know, the major chip vendors like Qualcomm and NVIDIA and Supermicro and Intel, Nokia, Ericsson, uh all the major test and measurement clients are clients, including the key
size VIAVs, the Anritsus, the Expos, Aspirants.
you know, we cover today uh all network technologies, including wireless.
We cover fiber.
uh We cover enterprise wireless and private networks.
uh
We cover the carriers, particular attention to all the global carriers and how they're changing their business plans.
And now we debuted a new newsletter called AI Infrastructure that goes out daily, six days a week.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that as well.
So ah the industry has changed and the technology has changed and we have evolved as well.
So that's a little bit about RCR Wireless News.
All right, so it's time to pull back the curtain and make the announcement.
When you told me, let's back up just a little bit before we do this.
So I remember we talk a lot, Jeff, and I remember the first time that I met you.
I believe it was at the Verizon event, VZ Tough.
the VC tough.
Yeah, in Austin, you're right.
remember that?
That was, what a great event.
That was a wonderful event every year.
Really miss it.
And I remember that we met each other and you said, know, hey, I love your brand, like what you're doing.
How about we do something together?
And with our Sierra Wireless News.
And I was so excited and I was just mind blown because I had so much respect for you, the publication.
And I said, okay.
What what do we do and you said how about a podcast and I got so nervous because I'd never done that before ever
And I didn't even I didn't know anything about it.
I'd been on the radio once and I just said absolutely.
think 50 54 times and I was embarrassed and I thought how am I going to do this podcast?
And, you know, fast forward.
Gosh, how many years has it been?
Five or six years.
And Jeff, you I just owe so much to you.
And I've grown so much through this podcast and also been able to really help the industry and make a difference.
And I just want to say thank you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
It's been a pleasure having you part of our team, so to speak.
And uh you've gone through an evolution on your own.
Remember it was 5G Talk, I think was the initial show.
And then last year we talked about uh the technology is changing, right?
And 5G was big for the past five years and you came up with Let's Get Digital.
And I'd love to hear kind of your take.
Why did you pick Let's Get Digital?
Because I think it'll segue into what I'm doing.
It's really funny because uh I uh was thinking about a new name for the show and I thought, gosh, digital infrastructure, has to really make sense there.
with my personality, I'm not a super serious person.
And I thought, what can I play on?
What could be really cool?
And when I was younger, I sang Olivia Newton-John in a talent show.
I believe it was in junior high.
And I got dressed up and put on the leg warmers and did the whole thing.
I sang Let's Get Physical and I thought, what if I do Let's Get Digital, is that going to be super weird?
And I asked a few people and they said, oh no, let's do it.
You should do it.
Just go for it.
So um anyway, that's how it got started and I'm happy.
I'm happy about the title and I cannot wait for you to announce your new project and your new platform.
So please, let's go.
What is next?
Well, we looked at, again, the technology wireless and how, you know, 5G is broadband and to support 5G, the carriers have been pulling fiber and building fiber networks all across
the country.
But if you're writing about fiber and you're a wireless company, you're not quite 100 % aligned.
And while we had written about Telco Cloud and Telco Edge, and we've done events for years on Telco Cloud and Telco Edge, again,
Wireless is wireless.
So we knew we needed to morph into something else.
And uh the challenge was, how do we do that?
And our answer was RCR Tech.
about uh eight weeks ago, we launched a website called RCR Tech.
We've communicated to our clients the same message I'm telling you.
The technology has changed.
The industry has changed.
We need to evolve as well.
And so we've evolved RCR Wireless to RCR Tech as our kind of umbrella brand.
parent brand, if you will.
uh And it really provides us a broader platform to cover everything that's going on today, uh not only enterprise networks or carrier networks, but also the AI infrastructure world.
And we break down AI infrastructure, yes, the physical data centers, but the network connectivity between them, the GPU chips, the memory chips, the cooling and power that go
behind it.
So we've got a whole ecosystem that we're writing reports about and doing events upon, but ah the big unveil is really RCR Tech.
And it's a broad platform for us to continue what we've been doing for 40 years, which is research-driven news information and events.
And it's all about creating content that builds communities.
And then, you know, the way we make money is we run marketing campaigns to turn those community members into
revenue opportunities for our clients.
But at the end of the day, we're based in research-driven journalism and analysis, and that's core to everything we do.
So I'll pause for a minute and answer any specific questions, but I do want to talk a little bit about RCR Tech and some of the things that we're doing there and how we're
shaping the editorial coverage.
Yes, so do you have an event coming up?
Like is there a flagship event, something that we can look forward to there?
Well, in December, we have a virtual event.
It's called AI Infrastructure Forum.
It's one of eight events that we're doing this year.
This month, by the way, we have an NTN event that happened yesterday, and we've got a 60 event coming up.
So we've got some exciting events that perform exceptionally well.
And oftentimes we're getting 2,000 registrations for these events, and sometimes 600 to 800 people will actually attend throughout the day.
So our virtual events
are extraordinary in terms of their engagement.
But in December, we have AI infrastructure forum.
And uh we are planning an invitation only dinner type event in December.
We're looking at Northern Virginia or Texas.
We're kind of looking.
Virginia has always been the hotbed of data centers.
And we'll talk about the history of telecom in a minute.
But you look at what's going on in Texas.
Texas is pretty interesting as well.
So uh we want to have the first of what I think will be several invitation only exclusive type events where we'll get uh analysts and key leaders in the sector to do roundtable
discussions.
We'll have our chief analyst, Sean Kinney, help facilitate and guide us through those discussions.
But it's really meant to bring thought leaders together in a room.
And that's what we're planning for December.
So stay tuned for invitations.
I know you're gonna be there and help us with that.
And then we hope to replicate that around the country as we move our virtual events to more physical events again, ah because we believe there's real value in that ah eye to
eye, face to face contact and the networking that goes along with uh events.
So you said you were gonna talk a little bit more about RCR tech and maybe get into the AI aspect, so let's go.
So, you know, go to rcrtech.com right now and uh look at it.
It's not your typical news uh website that has a it is a set up as a newsletter website.
So we debuted the AI infrastructure newsletter, I guess, about 12 weeks ago.
Kelly has been writing it daily.
And you'll notice at the very top of one of the newsletters, it's Kelly.
giving you an overview of the key trends of the day, the key insights of the day.
so it's our goal is to provide in five minutes or less what our readers need to know about AI infrastructure.
So it's Kelly's voice at the top.
mean, keep in mind, we've got very seasoned journalists.
Kelly's been writing for RCR for nearly 20 years, right?
And so she has context to the news release of the day.
So it's not rewriting press releases.
It's her talking about
the trends of the day, the trends of the week, original content, and then we'll have some of our own original news insight stories.
And then we curate uh links to research or the original sources of press releases or other sources.
So it's meant to be a give our readers what they need to know in five minutes or less, original and curated content from a seasoned journalist.
So check out that newsletter and you'll see the same thing now on RCR Wireless.
That newsletter is shaped the same way.
I've gotten extraordinarily good feedback from people saying, you know, it's really nice to hear from Kelly or Kat talk about what's going on for the day.
Our editor in London, James Blackman, again, has been covering telecom for 20 plus years.
His expertise is around enterprise.
So uh the carriers have been talking about enterprise and how they have to serve the enterprise better.
And that's where their growth and margin is going to come from.
So what James does is he writes about
He has a newsletter, a weekly newsletter called the Enterprise Edition.
So he writes not only about the carriers serving the enterprise and the revenue growth for carriers in the enterprise sector, but he also writes about private wireless networks.
So enterprises are building their own private networks.
so James covers those globally for mining, for ports, for manufacturing, et cetera, a lot of use cases in there.
And he'll also be layering in AI infrastructure use cases from
various enterprise vertical markets.
uh you can look from this broader platform, RCR Tech.
It provides us to move into new verticals, launch newsletters with seasoned journalists, and really provide the readers what they need to know in five minutes or less, original
content, curated content from seasoned journalists.
And wait, to subscribe, tell us again, how do we subscribe?
to RCR Tech.
There's a big red button there that says subscribe.
Put your email in and you'll have the flexibility to opt out anytime you want.
uh I do encourage you to check our events section on RCR Tech.
You'll see our upcoming events.
You'll see our past events.
In our past events, there'll be links to all the different sessions.
You'll also see on RCR Tech something called RCR Trends.
And that is where our editors identify on a monthly or quarterly basis, key trends.
And they'll write a narrative about what the key trend is, some insights, some key uh &A activity or whatever the product announcements have been.
And then they'll bundle in other articles that we've written or others have written about that particular trend.
And it's rcrtech.com.
There we go.
All right.
Very clear.
So Jeff, I know that you've been around for a long time and in the industry.
But you look so good.
You look so young.
Well, that's a whole other podcast we'll have to do.
oh
been covering telecom for years.
Why don't we start there?
There we go.
You've been covering telecom.
That's a better way to put it.
You have been covering telecom for years.
Where we were, you talked a little bit about that, where we are now, where are we going?
And what do you see in our future down the road?
Well, I'm no expert and there people a whole lot smarter than me.
I guess I do want to go back to, started out my career in commercial real estate, right?
And then in 1990, 1991, the SNL crisis in the banks, the real estate market imploded and a friend of mine from college who out of college had gone to work for Sprint and a group of
investors had bought a, he included, had bought a business called Shared Tenant Services and they provided in-building communication services to
roughly 100 million square feet of class A office building across the country.
And they needed someone who could liaison with the real estate owners and the real estate leasing agents.
And here I am kind of looking for something to do.
And so they hired me and that was my entree into telecom.
And then deregulation occurred and ended up starting a CLEC and I started a DSL company.
It was backed by Morgan Stanley.
And then I was part of the founding team of Clearwire that Goldman Sachs backed.
And so
you know, right place at the right time.
lot of just a lot of technology changes in the mid 90s because of regulatory change.
And then the early 2000s, you know, I was part of the team at ClearWire that launched the first broadband wireless network in the country in Jacksonville, Florida.
And so, and by the way, we had an analyst write a white paper about defining broadband wireless.
And here what I'm going to say at that time, 2003, broadband wireless was 256K.
So you think about today, you go to speed test and on your mobile phone, you're getting 200 megabits per second down.
It's incredible.
So, and I think this is really the theme of, uh you know, the processing and the signaling and the MIMO technology that allows for, you know, more bandwidth on a device and the
compute power on the device.
But uh long story short, I think what, you know, the more time goes on, the more time repeats itself, right?
It just keeps building on it, right?
And you need faster chips and you need more bandwidth.
And um so I remember going to New York to moderate a CEO panel.
uh And I'd been out of telecom for about 10 years, right?
I had restructured some companies for investors and I'd bought RCR and I'd go up there and it was the same people I knew from 10 years before, like the Hunter newbies and
You know, I remember Alec, oh gosh, was like they were partying like they were in 1999.
know, the data centers, the interconnectivity and you know, what started as May East and May West with industrial internet, now we had to have interconnects for all the carriers.
And then you had, you know, Google and the cable companies that needed to get content and video closer to their.
So again, data centers grew up.
But to me it was like, wait a minute, we did that 10 years ago when I was building fiber networks and that sort of thing.
And then you look where we are today, it's AI, you're looking at a 1000X, 100,000X increase in data and the need to process that data.
And so to me that the trillions of dollars that are being spent into data centers, at the end of the day, when you peel the onion back, it's...
It's a bigger data center.
It's a bigger telecom hotel.
It's uh being populated with racks of servers and lots of fiber.
And the use case really determines, you know, is that rack going to have more storage?
Is it going have more network?
Is it going to have more memory?
That's kind of akin to 10 years ago when you heard the term bare uh metal servers, right?
And I remember going to trade shows and
you would see these servers that would have varying degrees of storage or networking or compute.
And depending on the application, where was the data?
If the data's on the edge, you might need more compute because you got to process data to make decisions at the edge.
lot of the same today with uh the large language models being built.
And now you have inferencing with enterprise and others starting to train their models and deploy them.
But it's all
you know, you got to have real time decision making in an automated system.
And but we're operating at a scale that's unprecedented.
ah So it's pretty exciting.
It's we don't know the outcome yet, but we all we know that there's a awful lot of capital being deployed, which is not too different from 1999 when, you know, I raised a couple
hundred million dollars to build a regional DSL company.
And we deployed over 100 million in capital and 400 central offices in 12 months.
That's a drop in the bucket compared to, you know, what Meta and the other guys are doing today where they're deploying, you know, a hundred billion dollars, right?
But at the end of the day, it's buildings, it's servers, it's connectivity, it's chips.
It's just done on a whole entirely different scale, which is exciting for all of us.
It's exciting for us to cover AI infrastructure, right?
uh And so I think we're just like we were 40 years ago at the inception of RCR wireless.
We're here with RCR Tech at the inception of something that people just don't know, right?
When 1G was launched ah in 1982, I don't think people really fathomed that 5G would offer the speeds that we have today and change our lives with.
The internet wouldn't exist without, you know, processing power and AI, we just don't know where it's going to end up.
But I know for us that are building and operating in the market, it's a new staffing.
We'll talk about staffing and labor.
It is just, it's invigorating frankly, but I think a big difference, and this is a really important point, when you had deregulation in the 90s and you had a lot of capital going
in to build broadband networks, my company and many others, you didn't have revenue.
So all you did was ramp up expenses, deploy capital, and then the Bell companies could forward price their models in a way that we couldn't.
So all of us, we all went out of business, right?
A lot of capital and you've talked to Dan Caruso and others, Zayo made it and know, the level threes and the et cetera's, but what's different about this time is the hyperscalers
have cashflow.
And in many cases, they're funding this growth out of cashflow.
That did not exist during the telecom boom and bust, the dot com bust.
So it's a materially different time.
And I think that's a real key differentiator in terms of what's going on today.
Hmm.
Such good points.
I'm thinking about your comment.
I mean, it's so exciting, right?
Everything that's happening, we're in the middle of it.
There's all this growth possibility, AI.
But then we're a little nervous too, right?
How is this going to affect our jobs?
I guess it's about jobs.
I'm constantly reading.
Every single morning I read, first thing in morning, and I'm just reading and reading about how AI is going to affect the job market and specific jobs.
I was reading the other day, obviously we all know this, a CEO of Anthropic said that half of all entry level white collar jobs could be wiped out by AI within five years.
And I'm looking at entry level jobs.
We have uh kids that are just graduated from college and looking for jobs and they can't find jobs.
in.
So I think that's the piece of this excitement that is the challenge is the psychological safety of people.
What is going to happen to me?
So do you have thoughts on that?
how is this going to affect our workforce and maybe specifically our telecom workforce and data center?
Well, I think uh the first point I make is if you're not leaning into AI, you need to be and you need to look at everything you do day in and day out.
And it's not only applies to you and me as business owners, but everyone.
They need to look at how, can they break their work product into steps and then try a use case.
of using AI to accelerate that, to increase their productivity.
So I think across the board in every function, you need to be doing that.
I think that's point number one.
If you don't, you're gonna be left behind.
I think one of the things that's not talked about is, you know, my kids have just graduated from college and they've grown up with using AI and I really don't, it's like
using phones in the classroom and all the uproar about that.
But, you know, I think, I don't know how to,
measure how kids are using AI to write papers and that sort of thing.
the kids of today, while it has probably, it's been said that this job market for recent grads is probably one of the most difficult one in 10, maybe even 20 years, they do have
innate skills.
They are AI native because they have been using GEN.AI as a daily routine.
And I don't think they've...
They fully have unlocked the potential that they have.
So I think the world is not going to come to an for these folks.
uh while they may fall behind a couple of years getting ramped up, I think you're going to find that that AI native skill set uh is going to allow them to move ahead very quickly.
I think the bigger challenge is the older generations, ah will they lean into it?
And fortunately, I think if you do a search today on Google, it returns their version of AI.
So I think we're being pulled along with it, whether we like it or not.
But I think in terms of
labor markets uh in telecom.
The CEO of BT earlier this year announced uh that they're gonna lay off, I think, 50-some-odd thousand people and they're gonna continue reducing their workforce because of
AI and other automation opportunities.
So there is gonna be displacement, uh but there also is gonna be opportunity.
It's kinda like when AT &T, I think eight or nine years ago, announced their domain 2.0 and they were leaning into being a software-driven network company
versus a hardware network driven company.
they, uh gosh, I'm drawing a blank on CEO's name now, but no longer there.
But he was saying, you need to learn software, you're not gonna have a job here.
He was that direct, right?
So I think what we have here is people need to know AI, they need to lean into it.
uh There will be new opportunities that we don't yet know for new graduates and folks that have experience, but you gotta lean into it.
You gotta be ready to embrace it.
uh But it's gonna have a material impact on software.
jobs.
It used to be if you had a computer science degree, it was you punched your own ticket, right?
You're going to make a lot of money.
But today, I talked with a fellow publisher this week who is eliminating uh coding positions because AI is doing the entry level coding that they used to hire people to do.
know, software development is being directly impacted by AI.
um It's a brave new world out there.
But you know,
uh You can't use AI to build a data center.
You can't use AI to build racks.
can't lay fiber with AI.
uh Now you can't automate processes.
uh I think AI ops, you look at telecom and you look at how they monitor their networks and manage their networks, I think AI will have a big impact.
We're going to be writing about dark AI ops or dark ops, like dark factories that operate without people.
You're going to need fewer people in customer service.
You're going to need fewer people in network operations.
So it's going to shape and change the industry.
It sure is.
And what I'm telling people now is upskill, upskill, reskill, upskill, reskill.
And you may just need to do that yourself.
I took an AI course recently.
It was an all-day course.
Actually, it was two days long.
And I needed to learn it.
So I would say that that's crucial that we all, no matter what age, we need to learn AI.
We need to upskill.
We need to get into that world because there's going to be more jobs created.
with AI and in those types of skill sets.
So there'll be more opportunity and you want to be able to take advantage of it.
I couldn't agree more with everything you said.
The installation, repair, maintenance jobs, those are very low risk of being replaced with AI.
Construction, skilled trades, again, very low risk.
Kids coming out of high school and college and they pay well too.
It's tough to find.
the return to vocation, you when I was in high school back in the day, you know, we had auto shop and you had vocational skills being taught and that really was taken out of the
high school.
You're seeing a return to that.
And I think there's been a lot written this year about the value of a college degree.
It's not what it used to be.
And the sooner that folks get into trades that will not be replaced by AI, six figure jobs, you get certified, start your own business.
I don't care what it is, HVAC, electrical, construction.
uh There's a world of opportunity out there and I think it's kind of nice to go back to folks learn to use their hands and do something real, right?
uh We're gonna need those assets and that infrastructure in this country.
So, so true.
Okay, Jeff, one more time.
How do we find out more about RCR Tech?
Well, go to rcrtech.com, hit the subscribe button.
While you're there, check on the upcoming events.
Sign up for one of our upcoming events, AI Infrastructure.
Forum is going to be in December.
If you have an interest in attending AI Infrastructure uh Forum, register for the event.
if you want to come to our private exclusive event, you can certainly contact me at jmoochee at ardentmedia.com.
If you're interested in sponsoring one of our events, sponsoring one of our newsletters, uh please reach out to me or uh Fiona Smart at fsmart.com.
at ArdMedia.com and join the Qualcomm's and the Vidya's, the Intel's, the Supermicro's and Dell's and all of our other great customers who have been receiving tremendous ROI by
investing in programs with uh what is now RCR Tech.
Jeff, thank you.
Thank you for being my friend.
Thank you for the opportunity with RCR Wireless and now RCR Tech to partner with the podcast.
And I appreciate you.
And thank you for coming on the show.
I'm super excited about the new brand.
I know it's going to be a huge hit.
I cannot wait for the events.
Yes, take care.