 Hi, my name is Allison Price, and I'm the Director of Marketing and Community at the Open Infra Foundation. But I'm also the Chair of the Outreach Committee for the MAGMA community, and so I'm really excited to be joined by the CTO of Brick, Reg Orton, today to talk about how they are using MAGMA. Welcome, Reg. Hi, Allison. Thanks a lot. So MAGMA is an open source platform for building carrier-grade networks, and the community's mission is to connect the next billion people to life-saving resources like the Internet, which a lot of us may take for granted. So this, I think, directly ties to what you're trying to do, Reg, at Brick. So can you kind of provide an overview of what Brick is and what y'all are trying to achieve? Sure. So Brick started about seven or eight years ago with a goal, as you said, Allison, to connect the next billion. We've gone through a lot of iterations of how we're trying to do that. We started off building hardware, trying to work out, you know, just hardware is an access problem. Is it actually a connectivity problem? Is it the fact that there's just literally not enough connectivity? And now where we're angled towards is it's an affordability problem. So both, yes, while there may be lacking connectivity, which we can build and we can use MAGMA to get there, we need to find more affordable technologies to make that use case work and get more people online and get those people connected that currently aren't. Awesome. So, you know, you said it's been seven years since y'all started. So when did you start using MAGMA and what features drew you to using the technology? So we were one of the really early development partners on MAGMA with the Facebook team. What drew us towards it was this, you know, we've progressed from being, like, really a Wi-Fi-led company towards an LTE base. And that's a pretty big transition for those in the technical note. And the things that attracted us to MAGMA were a few things. One is the, you know, the ability to be open source. So the ability for us to, like, actually dig into the code base, build the features that we needed to deploy our connectivity. Secondly, thinking about connectivity differently. I mean, one thing we've always thought about in, you know, our context is the edge is really important. Like, where the users are is actually where we need to provide the services and the connectivity. In many markets, you can rely on data centers and you can rely on, you know, really fast pipes to get back to those data centers. In our markets, we can't. And so cell towers are often isolated. And MAGMA really allows us to use that distributed architecture to provide a very, very high quality and at the same time a very low cost service. So you kind of went into your use case a little bit. So where are the markets and where are these distributed edge centers that you're serving with MAGMA? So with MAGMA, we're really focusing, I mean, our market is Africa. We're an East African based company. We're based in Nairobi, Kenya. We've done a lot of work across sub-Saharan Africa, you know, in Niger, in West Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, and actually more recently in some of the Asian emerging markets in the Philippines where we're looking at, you know, similar kinds of people groups and similar kinds of customers that really are looking for this very affordable connectivity. I think it's really interesting kind of expanding it to the global market because it's one of the big benefits of open source that we see is because it's accessibility to people. And like you said, the affordability of the software makes it something that everyone can take advantage of it to get access to those life-saving resources. That's one of the really important things about what we've been doing is, you know, how you can provide kind of people that don't have access to getting access to resources, education, you know, healthcare information that, you know, MAGMA allows us to get that kind of to be further and further afield at a really affordable price point. So in addition to the affordability of it, are there any other benefits that y'all have seen after implementing MAGMA a few years ago? Right. And I think this is like how the architecture of MAGMA is built and like this edge-first ability and this big openness of the platform or the architecture has allowed us to build sort of MEK, the mobile edge computing resources where we've deployed education content at the cell tower. So that allows us to deliver really, really high quality services, you know, specific to some target markets. And that's due to how, you know, how it's built and how it's designed. And then even, you know, where we're plugged in. So we have another platform called Mojo, which is our affordability platform that allows users to get access to connectivity for free, you know, offloading that kind of offloading that cost burden to other groups to the, you know, governments or NGOs or actually most primarily digital work for, for corporate customers. We can bank that into MAGMA because of its open architecture. Awesome. So is your team contributing upstream to develop some of these features that you're looking for? Or how are you working with the global community on those feature requests? Yeah, certainly. So we contribute to some. Mostly in the early days, we're quite heavily, heavily contributing to the MAGMA ecosystem. You know, now we're really taking what's being built and applying it in the field. And that's been a really big part of what we've been contributing is, you know, how we can get some real world insights into using, is it different base stations, different networks, different, different use cases around using MAGMA. Well, I think that's one of the most powerful things about operators like you sharing your story is because that's a great way to contribute. It's to share the implementation, the architecture, so that other people who are facing the same challenges, who also want to connect people, they can learn from you and also implement it for their local communities or a region that may not have access. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Reg. I really appreciate you telling your story. It was great having you on the open and for live keynotes today.