 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan coming to you from virtual PTC 21. Joining me today is Walter Cannon, Vice President of Business Development at Zenfine Networks. Walter, welcome back to JSA TV. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Always good to be online and see you guys. Wonderful, same here, same here Walter. So let's start off by telling our viewers about Zenfine Networks. Can you do that for us? Yeah, so Zenfine Networks started in 2014. And I like to call it our startup version 2.0 where we had had a company back in the early 2000s grew that company eventually sold it to West Nile Crown Castle. During that time period, we learned about a lot of different things. And one of the things we saw was there was gonna be a breath of growth in the mobile area. And with the coming of then 4G and 5G, we knew that there was gonna be a lot of issues that had to be addressed at the infrastructure level. So we set out to try to address those issues. And we addressed them in a lot of different ways. And that's evident right now in the solutions that we provide in the marketplace, which are our various collagen adaptive fiber network that we have are pretty interesting what we've done. We actually designed a new cable plant that we were the first to use in the US, we believe. And then in addition to that, we have purpose built network, neighborhood network edge co-location facilities that house a lot of the mobile network operators. And then our wireless siting opportunities. And we continue to grow that as well, in addition to investigating stuff like smart street furniture and some of the other stuff that's happening now as a way to deliver better solutions for our customers. Wonderful. Well, I do understand that Zenfine Networks is leading the way in 5G development with fiber deployment in specifically New York City and New Jersey. Now, despite the pandemic, Walter, Zenfine made a huge impact in those cities. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. We've had a pretty phenomenal year on actually not just on the mobile side of our business, but on the telecom solution side of our business and continue to provide excellent connectivity because of the way we designed our fiber plant, we can deploy a lot faster. In addition to that, we've come up with some unique things that we will be bringing to the marketplace around better ways to do siting. We continue to grow in New Jersey, have won some huge opportunities in Northern New Jersey where we're building. And we also have built two new purpose-built neighborhood network edge co-location facilities. I'd like to take a minute and talk about those. So these are unique. And the fact that we saw that, you know, a lot of these, the way that these networks are deployed is really from a centralized data center or collection play and then spreading out with fiber, running out of them to various radio heads or macro sites or antennas. What we wanted to do, what we also saw is that the cost of traditional data center space is pretty expensive. We learned during the early years of the 2000s that we saw the early guys in the neutral host business deploying sites using quasi-co-location facilities and everything from gas stations to houses to whatever. And we said, there's gotta be a better way. So what we came up with was the concept of a neighborhood network edge co-location facility, which is basically shared power and cooling. Our sites are in a thousand square feet. We have most of the major carriers coming in, back hall is already there, front hall is already there. So this makes, this streamlines the effort for deploying small cells and other devices out in the cities. Excellent, excellent. So needless to say, Xanthi Networks has had huge growth and success during 2020, despite overcoming challenging times and other obstacles that may come your way, but you really pushed ahead. Could you tell us how you were able to do that? Well, I guess by diversification of AR revenue streams, like I talked about the telecom site did really well. In addition to that, we also got a bigger push in New Jersey, us merging with Cross River Fiber gave us a sense of fiber plant that we were able to continue to grow. We've added, I believe, about 200 miles of fiber over the last 12 to 14 months. In addition to that, we've added a lot of thousands of new sites that we're deploying that's not in the contract as well. So that's been our biggest focus continue to look for new revenue streams, whether they be in selling our current solutions, our bread and butter, like wireless siding and fiber connectivity or network edge. We built two data set to these network neighborhood network edge co-location facilities and over a year and under a year. So, these types of things is what's happening to keep us a job to grow. Our team is really set to be innovative. I like to say we're a engineering construction firm that happens to own assets. And that gives us the ability to come up with the unique solutions for our customers. Walter, as you're looking to identify those additional income streams or revenue streams and really pushing that innovation through, what are some of the connectivity trends that you're watching closely in 2021? So yeah, so I'm glad you brought that up. Good question. So I think, and I like to always preface this by saying the things that you see on television a lot where the views of the speakers not necessarily the views of VinFi networks. So we spend a lot of time with a lot of different conferences and agencies and analysts and talking directly and interfacing with our customers, doing lessons, learn to figure out not just what are the current best practices, but what are some of the ideas we can use we can bring forward and what are the creative ways we can work on solving solutions for. So, and with that said, I think there's, we believe there's opportunity and sort of a shared virtual spectrum infrastructure as well to put on top of the platform that we've already built, which will work with spectrums like CBRS, Wi-Fi and others. So we see some growth there. I don't know if we'll necessarily be a Wi-Fi provider but we wanna support those. And we also wanna be able to help our carriers and our other customers utilize those spectrums. So that's something that's key to us. We've had some initial talks as well with using these facilities that we have. We have our purpose built and as well as, in addition to 45 different neighborhood network edge co-location facilities around the New York metro area, which is pretty interesting. And these are places where we could have, provide also content providers with access to being on our network and being a cross-connect away from the carriers. You see a lot of the content guys, you know, the things, the thing guys, the Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google and others, they are coming up with sort of caching devices and smart mobile edge computing devices that they're deploying directly next to the carrier equipment. So that's probably another area of growth. In addition to that, on the telecom solution side, we've expanded and we have partnerships with companies like Packet, Fabric, Megaport and others where we're trying to just add another niche to give our customers better service and make everything a cross-connect away. That's the goal, right, is simplicity. Well, you know, simplicity might sound cheap, but actually it's not always cheap, but it's the best solution, economic solution for our customers. A lot happening as NFI networks. We will definitely be watching, where can our viewers go to learn more and get those updates? So, okay. We are always on all the social media platforms. We actually have now a YouTube channel as well. And then last but not least, we have our website, www.zenfi.com. So, or, you know, look me up, just call me. We'll talk to you at any time. People that know me, I've always never been afraid to speak, so I hope you to reach out to us personally. You can reach me on LinkedIn, you can reach me everywhere, you know, and just feel free to give us a call. I've been pretty busy over during COVID. Actually, since we started the company in 2014, we've been growing at some very big rates. We have over 1,300 route models of Fiverr, over 5,000 nodes in the contract that continue to deploy more wireless nodes. We had our best, again, our re-interring, yeah, one of our best years competing on the telecom solution side, providing connectivity to both wholesale carriers and enterprise customers. When the pandemic started, we had one of our biggest customer or partners had a problem where they had ordered a circuit, had it been delivered, and we delivered the circuit to them in 48 hours. So this is the type of flexibility that we're able to do. So again, reach out to Zenfine where we can be found all over. We will find you and wishing you much more success at Zenfine Networks. Thank you so much for your time here today, Walter. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And thank you viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA Podcast. Happy networking.