 Hi everyone and welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, coming to you from ITW 2021. Joining me today is Jim Nulti, CEO of Bandwidth IG. Thanks for joining us, Jim. It's great to have you. Yeah, thank you, Barb. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure spending time with you. Yeah, likewise, absolutely. And you know, we're coming together at an interesting time because of course, ITW is one of the first of opportunities that we're going to have, you know, as an industry to get back together in person. I know that you're heading over to the DC area to attend ITW in person this year. Tell us about that. What are you most looking forward to this year? Oh, man, just seeing people getting out of my cave and maybe even shaving. I think my wife would be pleased with that. But, you know, we had the fortune, the good fortune of starting our business about six months before the world shut down. So, getting a chance to sit down in front of customers and explain to them why we think we're different and how we can help them, I think would be, I mean, that's what we've been waiting for all these 18 months now. So, yeah, we're very excited to get out and rub elbows with everybody again. Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully this is just gonna be the start of many more opportunities like that. Yeah, and I know that you're speaking on a panel, actually, at ITW, it's called Data Cloud and Edge. Where are the new data center hubs? Can you give us a bit of a sneak peek on what you'll be talking about? Yeah, you know, most of the networks that are built, they were built 20 plus years ago and back then the hubs were telco central offices and carrier pops. And today the hubs are data centers. They're the major points of interconnection. And the networks between those data centers act basically as a central nervous system for just about any app that's in use today. So whether your business has moved to Billings, Montana or Branson, Missouri, you are going to eventually traverse between a data center and another market. And the scale of bandwidth demand that falls between those hub sites is just gonna continue to grow. And that's a sweet spot that we're focused in. Interesting, and you touched on sort of legacy fiber and I'm curious, you know, there is this misconception that once fibers in, once it's in the ground that it's just good forever, that's not really true though, right? I mean, can you talk about that and what? Yeah, so I think it is a misconception. So legacy network operators in my mind, and I'm gonna use the D word here, I are gonna be forced in the near term to be decommissioning certain segments of their network. And the reason I say that is it's basically four things that a cloud or a digitally transformed business is looking for when they're trying to source network. One is low latency. You know, two is low signal loss. Three is maximum diversity and four is inventory. So signal loss gets impaired anytime you add a splice or you try to mash an incompatible cable together. Latency increases when you have to take an indirect route between sites. Diversity is a risk when your network operator, your network provider is in the same ditch as everybody else and then inventory is a problem. You know, if your network was placed 20 plus years ago there were only 400 million people on the internet at that time and there's a likelihood that there's only 144 fibers on that route. So we've got customers that are actually doing business with us today buying 144 fibers themselves. Oh, yeah. Interesting. And talk about the market specifically that you've chosen to support. And so there's, you know, I know for you there's Silicon Valley's a very important market as well as Atlanta. Why did you choose those locations? Yeah, thank you for that question. We saw them as neglected markets. So we saw a bubbling data center development going on in both of those places with no signal that the incumbent carriers were preparing to invest in their networks. So that disconnect led us to both markets and that's why we were spending time there. And in both cases we started out with relatively modest investments in those markets, relatively small networks that we started building out which just expanded rapidly as we, you know started to get acknowledged in the market and got the reception that we got from the customers doing business there. And last question for you and you touched on this a little bit. I mean, you launched six months before the world kind of shifted in a unexpected and dramatic way but you've accomplished so much and it's been such a pleasure to be, you know a partner with you to some extent as we've been able to watch this and share in some of your successes with you but can you talk about some of the highlights? Can you give us a bit of a recap over the last eight months? And we've appreciated being partners with you guys as well. We think that that partnership has worked out very well for us. So in the South Bay we've got 34 data centers on net today all populated with the 1728 count cable by the end of the year this year we'll have about 60 route miles in the South Bay all constructed all underground, all brand new cable. Atlanta, we've got 14 data centers on that currently we've got about 50 route miles built again, all populated with the 1728 cable and we see more opportunity for development in the Atlanta market as well. As far as customers go, we're doing business with a couple of dozen at the moment which may not sound that impressive but when you realize that there's a handful of those customers that have capital T's at the end of their market caps that, you know, it feels a little better to us. Those customers frankly love our network because it is brand new, it's all underground and hasn't been chopped up. And so in some cases they're running a C plus L band on their optronics which allows them to get up to 30 terabits per second across a pair of fibers which is an enormous amount of bandwidth. And we think that that level of demand is only going to continue to grow it's going to become more common as we go. So for all the people that are tuning in here and maybe hearing about bandwidth IG for the first time or being reintroduced to you and wanting to find more information, where can they go? Where can they go to learn more? Well, we've got a beautiful website that our partners at JSA helped us develop at bandwidthigene.com and you can search us out when we get to ITW and hopefully we'll get a chance to spend some time together. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jim. It really is always such a pleasure to connect with you to hear what's happening in your world and reminder to our audience. Jim mentioned go talk to the folks at bandwidth IG when you're at ITW and don't forget to attend his session when Jim speaks on data cloud and edge what are the new data hubs at ITW August 30th at 4 p.m. And thank you. Thank you, Jim and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.