 Good evening, everyone. I'm David Smith. I'm the Chair of the Future Forum Board of Directors, and I'll welcome all of you guys here to the LBJ Library and to another great Future Forum event. Few matters of housekeeping before we get rolling with Mark. I want to thank our sponsors for the Future Forum, Texas Monthly, Hayes and Boone, James and Heather Parsons, James Cahin Jr., Joe Cook's catering, the Ratlaflaw firm, Wilson Sasone, Goodrich, and Rossati for all they do and all they contribute to the organization. I'd also like to introduce, we have two new board members on the Future Forum board. One of them's here, Vikrant Reddy. Vikrant joins us. We're excited to have Vikrant. He's a Senior Policy Analysis in the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. One of the things that we've started to do thanks to Carsey, where's Carsey? Carsey, Mr. is we've started a series of member happy hours that meet approximately bimonthly. Our next one is going to be at the Hotel Ella on Wednesday, May 21st, starting at 5.30. Appetizers will be provided in the bar. We'll offer a discounted drinks until 7. This is a great way to go in a more informal setting and get to know a lot of the great people in the Future Forum. And also, it's a great place for us to get to know the membership as well as get ideas for Future Forum events. Lastly, join us immediately after Mark's talk for reception, more merriment, and a little bit of food. So we hope you'll stick around for that. And also, for those of you who are Future Forum members, thank you for your continued involvement and support. For those of you who are not, I would encourage all of y'all to really consider joining, say, a terrific organization and it does a lot. And I really think that it is, if not the heart and soul of the LBJ Library, certainly the next generation of people who are going to keep this place being special for future generations. I'm going to introduce a guy who really needs very little introduction to this crowd, but I'm going to do it anyways. Mark Strauma, who all of you know as former legislator from North Austin, now heads up the Austin Office of Google Fiber. From 2004 to 2013, Mark represented North Austin area and Texas House of Representatives. And he received honorable mention on Texas Monthly 10 best legislators list in three of his five sessions in the House. I personally really miss Mark being over the legislature and being a part of that body. He was always a joy to work with over there and really always was on the leading edge of working with both sides of the aisle on particularly educational issues, but also on tech issues. And I think he really did a great job representing this community and the things that this community holds dear. Prior to running for public office, Mark founded the first Internet company to enable American to fill out voter registration forms on the Internet. He was very, very engaged in rock the vote. And we will actually be doing something on voting rights next year. We're already planning on it that we hope you'll come back for, Mark. Having said that, I'd like for everyone to welcome Mark back here to the LBJ Library. And I can't wait to hear you talk about what we have to look forward to with Google Fiber. So, Mark, all yours. I don't mind. Now I'm not going to carry it around like a rock star. Good to see you guys. Thank you for coming out with the understanding that I hope you had an advance that you would be walking back to your car in a torrential downpour. So, I appreciate that this represents some significant commitment. And it's good to be back in front of the future forum not wearing a tie. I think I've been on a few different panels here and I never got to come as the real me. I am glad to be here in particular because I think the world of Katherine Robb and of this organization and of this library and the resource that it represents for Austin. It's just something I'm proud of this institution. So, as you just heard, when I was in my early 30s, I started a company that created the first application that enabled any website to offer its users or its visitors the ability to fill out a voter registration form on the Internet. And in the 2000 election, 700,000 Americans used that technology to register to vote. Which is to say, if you don't mind my saying so, that at the age of 33, I had registered almost as many voters as Jesse Jackson. But I hadn't worked nearly as hard as he did to do it. Think about what it took to register 700,000 voters the traditional way. Think of how many volunteers you had to organize. Think of how much paper and pencils and logistics. Think of the amount of shoe leather that was worn out registering 700,000 voters the old fashioned way. I hired some college students from this university. I paid them with pizza and chocolate bars. They wrote some code, stuck it on a server. The Internet did the rest of the work. That is the transformational power of technology. And it has revolutionized not only the democratic process, the political process, the way we recreate, the way we travel, the way we do business. It has changed things in ways that materially improved the human condition, in my view. So now let's go meta for a minute. 170,000 years or so ago our early ancestors invented clothing. That was a useful innovation, depending on how you feel about that kind of thing. 70,000 years later came ceramic pottery, another transformative innovation. And in general, in those times, innovation moved in that type of increment. 20 or 30, 40,000 years would go by and somebody would invent a wheel or fire or something really useful. But then there would be long periods where things didn't change a whole lot. Then about 2,000 years ago came an innovation that accelerated the pace of all other innovations. And that innovation was paper. And with paper, it became possible, for the first time really, to share information across distance and time. Until then, your ability to share information was limited by your ability to carve something into the wall of a cave or to send a smoke signal to somebody with a line of sight to you or to communicate an oral tradition. But with paper, it became possible to transmit information across distance and time in a way that just fundamentally wasn't possible before. And then around 500 years ago or so came an even more disruptive innovation, the printing press. And suddenly it became possible to share information across distance and time at scale. And then look what happened to the pace of human innovation. You get democracy and free markets and the enlightenment and the industrial revolution and ultimately it leads us to where we are today in the digital age. And in the digital age, the ability to share information across distance and time at scale has accelerated to a line that is almost straight up. Because now through the internet, we can share information in ways that were not remotely comprehensible a long time ago. And that's a pretty exciting thing to be a part of. And I will argue that the next generation of that transformation is coming in the form of 100 times faster internet service. So let's start with a baseline. In America, we pay quite a bit for internet service. Did I skip one there? Did I skip one there? No, that's the first one. American internet service ranks pretty high compared to countries that we compete with. If you accept my contention that the ability to share information across distance and time at scale is important to innovation, then it's important fundamentally to economic competitiveness and therefore it's an important national interest. And we're not performing very well on a cost measurement. We perform even worse on a speed measurement. And there are a lot of different measurements of average internet speeds. You can find lots of different ranking systems, but in none of them are we top tier. In none of them are we top tier. And in some of them, we rank even worse than in this one. Now you have probably, I'm sure you're all familiar with Moore's Law, which says that the processing power of a computer chip will roughly double roughly every 18 months. And you may be less familiar with the fact that there is a Moore's Law equivalent for computer storage. But you probably understand this empirically and anecdotally because if you refresh your computer every five years or so, you'll find that it's got a tremendous amount more storage capacity for a lot less money each time you do that. Internet speed had one brief period where it enjoyed a slope similar to Moore's Law. And that was in the late 90s, early part of the last decade, when we transitioned from dial-up internet service to broadband internet service. And you probably, at least some of you in this crowd, can remember what that transition was like. And before you think about how big a deal the transition was, go back for a minute and just think about how you felt about dial-up internet service when that was all you knew. It was awesome, right? Holy cow, I can email people. I don't have to send them a letter or a fax. You didn't know that dial-up internet service was terribly, terribly slow because you had not experienced broadband. But what broadband did for you, now you can argue the acceleration of internet speed from dial-up to broadband is just a difference in degree. It is, it's just faster. But the things you can do on the internet in a broadband environment are not different in degree. They're different in kind. You could not have Netflix in a dial-up-enabled world. You could not have YouTube in a dial-up enabled world. You really couldn't even have Facebook. The things you use the internet for in a broadband-enabled world are different in kind than the things you could do in dial-up. And the speed that fiber is introducing to this market, the speed that is achievable when you have fiber optic connectivity to the end user, is the equivalent of a Moore's law for internet speeds. And it is an order of magnitude change similar to the transition from dial-up to broadband. Now, what will we do with that speed? It remains to be seen. It's fun to speculate about, but no one knows. If we were to engage in a little raw speculation, just for fun, I would certainly think that gigabit internet speed is going to create incredible opportunities for electronic health care delivery. I would hope that it will create immersive online educational experiences. I would bet that it will lead to some kick-ass gaming applications. But the truth is we really don't know what people will do with a gigabit. It is, in some measure, an article of faith with me based on my entire life's experience, that given this speed, people are going to create awesome things to do with it. I can think of one application that I suspect gigabit speed at the home in the residential environment is going to unleash. When I first got to Google on my first day in the office, this calendar entry pops up in my calendar and it says, go to room X and meet with person Y. I go to room X, person Y is not there. But a big-screen TV in high definition is displaying person Y to me, who is a thousand miles away. And I had a 30-minute, real-time, high-definition video conference with that person. In and of itself, that is nothing spectacular. You have probably used video conference technology from a hotel to catch up with your kids back home or however you have used video conferencing technology, you have probably used it. But today's video conferencing experience is pretty limited mainly from bandwidth. When you have a lot of bandwidth, and we have a lot of bandwidth connecting Google offices to each other, and you connect a high-definition video camera and a strong microphone and a high-definition big-screen TV and you start doing video conferencing in high definition with no pixelation caused by the limited bandwidth, with no asynchronous asynchronicity between voice and video caused by limited bandwidth. When you have a high bandwidth connection empowering a high-definition video conferencing, let me just tell you, the first five minutes of that first meeting I had with a person on a television felt a little weird. By the second five minutes, it felt normal. By the second day of doing meetings like that, I could not imagine how I had ever done business without that technology. It is the first technology I've encountered since cell phones and email that I now look back on and say, how did I ever live without that technology? What did we do before video conferencing? When you have to travel for Google, you book your travel on this internal corporate website. You go to that website to book your trip, and the first screen you get is going somewhere. Have you tried video conferencing? Half the time, I'm like, yeah, they're right. I could just video conference. I don't need to go because having a meeting in high definition on video conference is really almost as good as being in the room with somebody in a lot of ways. It's really extraordinary. It's gotten to the point, in fact, this past Friday, you know, in the Mountain View headquarters, I've got a few of the people here from Mountain View today, you know, they, by Friday afternoon, you know, they have a little bit of a happy hour in the office. I've gotten to the point where I tune into the happy hour by video conference. I hang out with people. It works. You never knew what an unsatisfactory user interface the telephone was until you start video conferencing in high definition. And now I just can't stand talking to a disembodied voice on a device held up to my ear. I can't see their expressions. I don't know if they're about to say something. I don't know if they're nodding in agreement or shaking their head in frustration. I don't know if they're fully dressed or in their underwear. It's a completely unsatisfying user interface that I never knew didn't work until I had this new technology. And that's the kind of thing, that's the kind of thing that I hope gigabit internet speeds are going to unleash. Now, two final points, and then we can address questions. First, if you had told me when I started working at Google Fiber that the way Google was going to make the internet 100 times faster was by sprinkling fiber fairy dust around Austin, I probably would have believed you. In fact, the way Google makes the internet 100 times faster is by taking the fiber optic material that is the backbone of the internet that transmits data at something approaching the speed of light from city to city and country to country and extends that fiber optic cable all the way to the inside of your home. And that super fast conductive material means that the data flowing to your house never has to slow down. It's not impossible to do. It's not novel technology. That technology has been there for a while. And now you see that technology not just from us is getting wider adoption because the market is starting to demonstrate demand for that type of speed, for that type of technology. The process of building that network is a significant one. It's not a matter of sprinkling fiber fairy dust. It is actually a matter of deploying an entirely new communications network throughout the city all the way to your front curb and to your home. Where there is aerial infrastructure, we will deploy it on that aerial infrastructure and that will have a lighter impact. Where there is no aerial infrastructure, it has to go underground. And deploying an entirely new underground network in an already built out metropolitan area like this one is a challenge. It is a significant investment. It is a massive undertaking. I have learned more about construction and infrastructure in the last nine months since I joined Google Fiber than I ever thought I would know. When I drive through the neighborhood with my wife now, I'm noticing little vaults on the side of the road that have been there forever, but I never saw them before. And the way the aerial infrastructure connects neighborhoods and houses to houses is stuff that I just always took for granted, the way you take it for granted when you turn the tap and the water comes out and you can drink it. But all of those things are really the miracle of modern municipal America. They're really a remarkable accomplishment of innovation and ingenuity. And I feel a sense of regret that I took them for granted for so long and I have a profound appreciation for the ingenuity that enables us to deploy this complex infrastructure to serve our households and our businesses. But I want you to know you're going to feel the construction effort. You're going to see it. You're going to see people up on poles. You're going to see crews working in streets. There's going to be times when they have to block off one side of the road while they dig a tunnel across to the other side. It's just a massive, massive project. And on the other end of it is a more competitive, higher speed, better quality internet marketplace in Austin that is a benefit to every consumer in Austin, not just the ones who adopt our technology. It's going to make everybody's services better and more affordable and has already started to do that. The second point I wanted to make was about the process that we will go through over the course of the in the future as we deploy this and start marketing it. So everybody always asks me, where are you going to build it? When can I get it? And let me attempt to answer that this way, although there are still a lot of questions that I can't give you detailed answers to yet because we don't have those detailed answers. In general, what you need to know about it is this. We will build this network throughout the city to nodes that are cabinets. These are the cabinets I was referring to that are on the side of the road that you may not ever notice if you're like me, but that are part of the communications infrastructure of the city. The fiber will connect to those nodes and then the homes connected to that node, we will have a marketing campaign. We will call the homes connected to that node. There are a few hundred homes per node. We will call that a fiber hood. It's just a word we invented made up. Doesn't really mean anything except the homes connected to that node. You will live in a fiber hood and you will have the opportunity for your fiber hood to qualify for service. If enough people in that fiber hood want the service, then we will lay the last mile of fiber in front of each home and connect those who subscribe. It will be a transparent process where you can go to a website, put in your address, find out what fiber hood you're a part of, find out how many people need to subscribe, keep a running tab. There are people who probably check that website every day, how many more people still need to subscribe for my fiber hood to qualify for service. And then once it qualifies, we lay the fiber and we install. It's not a quit process. It's not an easy process, but it is a transparent process and everybody will have a chance to, each community will have a chance to, in a sense, control its own destiny. In Kansas City, that has resulted in some really cool stuff happening, like communities gathering together to rally their neighbors, to drive enough demand to qualify the fiber hood. And in Kansas City, in the first round of marketing, 180 out of 202 fiber hoods qualified for service. So that was pretty great and we'd love to see that kind of result in Austin, but it'll be a function of demand for the service. The last thing I'll say about Kansas City is this. They've had some really cool stuff happen in Kansas City since Google Fiber came to town. Fitch upgraded their bond rating and called out the new fiber optic service in town as one of the things driving the economic vitality of the region that would cause them to improve their debt rating. There is this cool community called the Kansas City startup village, which was a group of entrepreneurs who went and bought up the homes in the first fiber hood that qualified and got service installed and just started launching small businesses out of all those homes and they eventually they kind of took over most of the neighborhood and now it's this thriving little entrepreneurial enclave and attracting entrepreneurs from outside Kansas City, attracting investment in homegrown entrepreneurs from outside Kansas. So local entrepreneurs are now attracting investment from out of state because of the unique opportunity. And imagine what this could mean for Austin. Kansas City has a remarkably entrepreneurial community. It has a lot of kindredness with Austin. But for Austin to be on the cutting edge of this next generation internet that will lead to applications we can't imagine today, but that will be as transformative of the way we use the internet and the role the internet plays in society as Netflix and YouTube and Facebook have been vis-a-vis the evolution from dial up to broadband. If you think about what it means to Austin to be one of the first markets to have the opportunity to explore the possibilities of that level of service, of that new technology, it's a huge thing for Austin. And when you combine it with a university here that has one of the top 10 computer science departments in the country that also has things like the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the ACE Center and all the other great things going on here with technology. When you combine that with being the center of state government and the culture and the community we have here and the interest I get from the music industry in what we're doing, the opportunity for them to have simultaneous jam sessions by video conference like I described to you with bands in Kansas City and in the future fiber markets. It's going to create some really cool stuff that is fun to think about and completely impossible to predict. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you have with what time we have left and I appreciate you all coming out tonight. Do you mean why didn't we put some wires in there before or why didn't they put some space for it? Right. So that's the good thing about Arial. The bad thing about Arial is they're visible, right? So you trade accessible for visible, right? So there's no question Arial is a lot easier to work with to upgrade over time. On the other hand, Arial is probably not as secure from weather events. So if you want to protect against outages, you're making tradeoffs with those things. Would it have been possible for the underground infrastructure in the city to have been architected in a way that was more future proof, more adaptable? I'm not an expert on that. Like I said, in the last nine months I've learned a whole lot about outside plant construction, but I'm still not an expert by any stretch. What I've observed is two things. One, it is really hard to upgrade the existing underground plant. There is a lot of stuff underground. You can't see it. You need really good records of where things are and those records don't always exist. So one of the things that we're working with the city closely on is using our construction process, which is going to involve a whole bunch of the city's underground infrastructure. When we go out and do construction, we have to dig a pothole, look and see what's there. We will document what we find there. In the cases where the city's records aren't great about what's already down there, we will be updating those records. So one outcome that the city has pushed us for and that we think is a good one is that at the end of our process, all the places where we have had to dig holes, we will not only be returning to the city a document, a digital record of where our stuff is, but also where the other stuff that we find down there is. It would be easier in the future to upgrade, to evolve networks over time if those records can be kept really clean. The second thing I would say is, again, I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the folks at Google are. And as I understand it, a fiber optic network, there is no technology in the laboratory today that we're going to say 10 years from now, I wish we had, when we were digging up all those holes, I wish we had put something other than fiber, that a fiber optic network is future proof for the next several decades. And so somebody 40 years from now might come back and say, man, they should have done it differently, but we are trying to be sensitive to whatever, to sort of everything that's knowable today in building a network that's future proof and in leaving behind a record that enables further expansion. And that is one last thing. The city does prioritize in reviewing our network design that we maintain sufficient additional clearance for there to be future network improvements, not necessarily of communications infrastructure, but water and wastewater, and all the other things you have to have for this city to grow. And so all of that is taken into account. It's an extraordinarily complex deal. And I will tell you the folks at the city who have to manage all that, my hat's off to them. It's a really hard, it's a really hard deal. Yes, sir. Right. So the cost was on a cost per megabit basis. So if you think about it, we're offering a thousand megabits down and up. And so on a per megabit basis, our number, you know, we will compare very favorably to the rest of the world at the price we're offering in Kansas City and at the speed we're offering. Now, how much market has to be delivered at that price and that speed before it changes the international rankings? I've never done that math. I don't know. I would think more than a few. You'd have to be, you'd have to have a pretty good amount of market share to move the international rankings. Yes, sir. You're talking about residential, what I was saying. Yeah. We will, we've publicly announced there will be a small business product here. Enterprise has different requirements that we're not prepared to meet those. I mean, here's why I say that. If you're an enterprise with, you know, mission critical requirements for, you know, five nines of uptime or more and all kinds of redundancy and super quick service levels and all of that, you need a more established provider than we were new, even though we're backed by Google, we're new to this business. And it'll be a while, if ever, before it makes sense for us to try to compete in the enterprise marketplace. I hope that answers. Yes, sir. If you mean how is the material different? It may not be. I think we're very particular about the materials we procure, but I would, yeah. It depends on what they're offering you. But I will just, let me just tell you what our offering is and you can ask for a comparison from whoever's trying to sell you something different. It's a thousand megabits up and a thousand megabits per second down, a gigabit up and a gigabit down. It's a symmetrical connection. It's enabled by fiber optic connectivity all the way to your home. And that is not a unique offering in this market. There are other providers offering that. You just got to make sure that's what you're being offered, right? That's how I would answer that. Yeah. Yes, sir. That's a good question. That's a good question that I probably should have addressed in my opening remarks. So I would, I think in a number of ways. Well, there's two ways to get at that. One is what applications will emerge in a gigabit enabled environment that will strengthen democracy the way online voter registration on, and all the other forms of online activism that emerged with the advent of the internet. In my view, they, those did strengthen democracy, by the way. And I don't know the answer to that question. I haven't, surprisingly, I guess, I haven't thought through what application I would develop for a gigabit enabled world that might make democracy better. I'm guessing it'll involve interactivity. One thing I would say about a symmetrical connection that's a gig up and a gig down, you know, most internet connections today have much more down speed than up speed. And that, when you make it symmetrical, when you make it as fast to send information as to receive information, I think that may lead to a change in the way we think about and use the internet. I think we have a predisposition in our minds sort of to think of the internet primarily as receiving and occasionally about sending information. And that's really because we have this sort of archetype in our heads of an internet that makes it easier to receive than to send information. So when I think about what impact it might have, big picture on democracy. One impact might be that this notion of user-generated content and every person a publisher may have, may be more empowered by a symmetrical connection. That's one. Bigger impact on digital inclusion with probably an ancillary effect on democracy, but let's talk about digital inclusion for a minute because you mentioned that. First is, and you're sitting right behind the leadership from the city of Austin that are responsible for the cities that have a role to play in the city's digital inclusion effort and its community connections program. When Google Fiber announced that it was coming to Austin, it in through in a partnership with the city donated 100 connections, gigabit connections, to the city that the city had went through a very arduous process of selecting a broad cross-section of community organizations and public institutions, libraries and schools, who end their geographically diverse. And they, you know, it's just a good mix. They had a really good thorough objective process of choosing them. And those 100 entities have been designated. You can look them up on the city's website and they'll all be receiving a gigabit connection for free. That's a big deal. And I don't want to diminish that at all by my next statement, which is a bigger deal is that part of the Google Fiber product offering includes today's broadband speeds, roughly five megs down, one meg up. If you pay a $300 construction fee, you get today's broadband speeds for free for seven years. So now you can say, you can take that $300, you can finance it over 12 months. So for $25 a month for one year, you get seven years of internet connectivity for no additional cost. I've just spent the last half hour telling you what a big deal I think it is to go from today's broadband speeds to gigabit speeds. But I believe it is a much bigger deal to go from no internet service to some internet service. And so my goal is to get as much subscription to that no monthly fee internet service as possible from that segment of the market that today is totally disconnected from the internet and all the things that the internet enables. To me, that's the biggest impact we may have. Yes, ma'am. You just named a couple of communities I used to represent. So they've got my cell phone number and I would say a significant amount. But right now we have to focus on Austin. Like I said, this is a massive, massive effort. And we got to get Austin right first. Yes, sir. We do. And if you know any, have them call me. It's a smart thing to do. If you're building a new building, if you're building a new subdivision, if you have a green field of any sort, going back to your question about why didn't people anticipate these needs to upgrade networks over time, it's a lot easier to do that now than when they poured the cement in the streets whenever they poured the cement in the streets that I live on. Those were poured a long time ago and they might not have anticipated the internet when they poured that. But now people should plan for this. And whether they're building a tall building or whether they're building a sprawling subdivision, it's a good idea for those developers to anticipate the need to have a future-proof infrastructure. Yes, ma'am. So the city is not funding our network deployment and there are no economic incentives involved, none of that stuff. The city is a partner, though, through the community connections program that I just mentioned. And because this deployment will require a lot of partnership with the city in managing the impact of the construction on the citizens. So, you know, for example, they've been really clear with us. Don't think you're building anything downtown during South by Southwest, you know? I mean, we have to work very closely with the city on all kinds of logistics, not to mention permitting and making sure that we know as much as can be known about the existing underground infrastructure, most of which is the cities, right? Water utilities and that kind of stuff. We have to know as much as possible about what's there so that we can construct responsibly. So that's now the fiber. Who owns the fiber? It's our fiber. So we build this network at our expense and we own the fiber. And there are other providers who already also have fiber underground. There are some companies that are in the business of building fiber and then leasing it out to other companies. And where there is available dark fiber, that's another one, I guess, if anybody in the room has some dark fiber that you want to lease to us, we will take it. But where there is dark fiber available, we will access it on reasonable terms. But most of the hard part of this build is what is called the last mile, the part that extends all the way to your house. And there isn't dark fiber that we can acquire there. We'll have to build our network there. Yes, sir. This is a good question. And it reminds me of the part of her question that I didn't answer, which was what are the other cities? You mentioned Kansas City and Austin. The third is Provo, Utah, which is not rural by any stretch, but it's a smaller city. And Provo had actually built its own fiber network all the way to the home at the taxpayer's expense. And I suspect, I wasn't there and I, you know, I haven't done an exhaustive retrospective on this, but I suspect their analysis was similar to what the concern you're raising, which was they didn't feel like they could attract the private sector investment that would result in that network. And so they did it themselves. What they found, I think, was that managing that network on an ongoing basis was a significant challenge. And monetizing it was even harder and something that a municipality wasn't well suited to, or at least they felt that they weren't well suited to. And so then they decided to take private bids for somebody to come and acquire the network and manage it for them. And they ended up choosing Google to do that. And they were not delivering gigabit speeds. They had fiber all the way to the home, but there's a whole bunch more than that to generate gigabit speeds off of that fiber. And so for the citizens of Provo, what they got when Google Fiber acquired that network was our investment in upgrading the utility of that network to them. And now they've all got gigabit internet speed. So it's been a great partnership so far. To the larger question about rural America, I mean, there's no question. I spent some time describing how big a construction undertaking this is to give you a sense of why it doesn't happen overnight. And while we've announced that there are nine additional metropolitan areas that we're looking at for possible expansion, it's just not going to happen overnight. And to try to contemplate when we would get to 100% of America, having that type of fiber deployment, I mean, I'm staggered by what it's going to take to just build Austin. It's a big undertaking. Yes, man. Let me do the second one first. Direct impact on jobs is hard for me to answer because a lot of our construction gets done through contractors and I actually don't have visibility and the number of jobs they're projecting they're projecting to directly create. I think the better thing to look at because at some point that network will be built and then there won't be a whole lot of construction jobs building it, right? So I think the better thing to look at is the indirect effect on job creation of just being one of the first gigabit cities and what it means for entrepreneurs in Austin, what it means for work from home and why it might make corporations think that they want to have a headquarters or a big investment here because it creates so much opportunity for Austin to grow its economy. And like I said, in Kansas City, they've already started to see that effect. So your first question about UT. I wish I had something to announce. I don't. But let me tell you, UT is on it. At the region level, those guys have my cell phone too from when I was a legislator and I get phone calls. We want Google Fiber at UT. We want our students to have the fastest internet service in the world. We want to leverage all the assets of the computer science and engineering departments here and the UT is on it. They've made it clear that they want to figure out a partnership and we have to just figure out what the right partnership is. And we're working through it and I'm, you know, we want to have a relationship with UT and UT seems to want to have a relationship with us. So something good should come of that, but I don't have anything yet. Bill, did I see your hand? Can I just say the first, because I've known you, yeah, go ahead. Okay, wait, first of all, when you started with what are your future plans? And because of the way I came to know you when I was a politician, I really dreaded where that was going. So I'm so grateful for where it ended up. Future plans after the network is deployed for how to leverage the network. That's the question. Let me talk specifically about TV. Of course, there is a TV product. Google Fiber is not just gigabit internet service, but it's also a television service. And I actually just two weeks ago went on a install visit in Kansas City, watched a customer get installed and saw the television service before we had installed it, switched him over, and after, and I will say the gigabit pipe delivering your video over IP creates a really good image on the screen. Now it depends on the TV, but it's cool. And it's just more data populating the video screen, right? So it's just going to be crisper and clearer. The, did you mention 4K? TV is, yeah, okay, should have known. 4K TV is going to do a lot better over a gigabit pipe. I mean, I think gigabit and 4K, I don't know what the future of 4K is. 4K is a new television standard that you thought you had made your, bought your last TV when you got your new HDTV, but you may be in for a new technology. I don't know if that'll fall into the category of technologies you can't imagine how you lived without, but I think gigabit, gigabit enables 4K in exactly the way that you're contemplating, I think, by asking the question. I'm not sure how 4K, I don't, what I can't tell you is how limiting is brought to traditional broadband on the use of 4K technology, but I gotta think you're gonna enjoy your 4K TV more over a gig when you get a 4K TV and when there's some programming in 4K to watch on that TV. It's a complex ecosystem, it's all gotta come together. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am? You may have to tell me when to stop. Okay, sure. So Dark Fiber is a fiber that some private company has deployed underground or ariely that they deployed with the intention of leasing it to somebody for a profit. So they probably had some other reason to be deploying something, and they decided to put some extra capacity, I think kind of along the lines of what you were suggesting, and they figured we'll install some extra capacity, we'll incur the additional marginal cost of building some extra capacity, and we'll sell it to somebody. That's what Dark Fiber is. If I didn't answer the question about rural, it is because I don't really know the solution for rural. One solution for rural towns is build their own fiber networks the way Provo did. It got them a fiber network. It's a hard thing for a municipality to manage themselves. And the private investment getting to rural America, you know, like I said, I mean we're in two market, three markets now, we're looking at some more. It's going to take us a long time to build an entirely new network in those markets. It'll take us a long time to grow beyond that footprint. And so I don't, you know, what we do hope, I mean I think Google has been pretty explicit about this, is that we don't want just us to be the ones investing in gigabit internet speeds. We want to bring the whole industry up to that standard. And I think Google has already demonstrated that it's having that effect. Yes, ma'am? How do we fall behind? I don't think it's just that because our population, there is enough population concentrated in the urban areas that even in the urban areas we're not getting a competitive speed and price. And I think that the, I mean, I think the reason is that one of the reasons is that there just hasn't been enough competition. It's a hard market to enter. I can testify to that very much from a firsthand perspective. It's a difficult market to enter. And so I think it has presented consumers with limited options, which has limited the quality of their options. Yes, sir? As far as what? I can't, really. I can tell you this. Google is a kind, and this will probably be my last answer. It looks like I'm out of time. I'll stay around. So here's what I can tell you. We feel an enormous sense of urgency, but we have to do it right. We feel an enormous sense of urgency because, A, getting this product to market faster is good for the business. We've sensed and measured pretty extraordinary demand. And, C, the whole premise of our business is that speed matters. So let me... Two years. To close on this point, that speed matters. If you think about how Google got to be Google, there are a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that when you went to Google for a search, back in the slow days of the Internet, even slower days of the Internet, it got you results faster. It had that very clean homepage that didn't require you to load a lot of graphics. And even if it was just milliseconds faster, it made you want to go back to that search engine versus ones that got you results slower. Google has, since that initial experience, seeing the effect that speed has on consumer behavior has always optimized for speed. When I got inside, I read about this test they did where they shrunk the size of the map on Google Maps, and they did A, B tests. And they wanted to see what the effect of shrinking the size, because when you shrink the size of the map, it makes the page load infinitesimally quicker, probably imperceptible, except that when people, the people who got the smaller map that loaded faster used Google Maps 20% more than the people who didn't. I go home and I see my seven and four-year-old daughters playing on the iPad with their backs up against the wall on the other side of which is our Wi-Fi router. They don't know what a Wi-Fi router is. They don't know that that happens to be the point in the house where the internet service is fastest. They just naturally gravitated there because that's where they had the best experience. That's the effect of speed. That's the impact that this will have. Thank you guys for having me out.