 Welcome to the RF Elements Unlicensed Podcast, I'm Caleb, we've got TaSos over here, hello. And this week, we are excited to be hosting Elijah Zeta from AirBridge Broadband in Idaho, so say hi Elijah. Hello, hey. So we'll get to your story in one real quick one second, but before we do, TaSos give the good people out there their call to action. Yes, don't forget to like, listen or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio podcast like Spotify, Google and the other one. All right, Elijah, so really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. You know, you're a busy guy and everything. So we're excited to kind of hear about, you know, what you guys are doing out there. But I guess first, you know, kind of give us some history, how you got started in the industry, how you you found yourself in this position, how you you've turned into here and just, you know, what you're doing out there. Sure. Yeah. So it started, gosh, probably about almost seven years ago. I was doing just a lot of just odd jobs here and there. We'd whack in just what handyman stuff like that. I had a little computer business on the side where I'd fixed computers, things like that. I've always enjoyed technology, computers and IT. And long story short, there was a guy named Bruce who started a he wanted better internet at his house, no matter how much he begged and paid the wisp of the day to get him better internet. They just wouldn't do it, right? And so he contacted a nephew of his who was a part owner of a wisp down in Utah, and he helped him get better internet to his house. Well, of course, his neighbors heard about it, wanted on it, their neighbors, their neighbors, their neighbors. So anyway, one day I heard about it and I called the guy and got on it. I was great, a lot better than Hughes net and all the others. And anyway, so gosh, a couple of years of using this guy's internet, I called him up one day and he was like, Hey, would you like to work for me? I never met the guy day in my life because he actually lived a few hours south and he, so he'd come up and work on it and things like that here and there. So he moved down down to near Boise. And so never met the guy day in my life. And I was like, yes. So he had heard heard about me just through some of his other customers. I had worked on their computers and things like that. So he heard my name floating around. And so I was, I was, I was super excited and worked with him for a couple of years. I did installs, technical support, helped him with infrastructure, just kind of wore all the hats. That was, he had about 150ish customers at the time. And that was called backwards wireless. And anyway, about a hundred and when you got to about 180, 190 customers, he was kind of, he kind of wanted out. And so he contacted some friends of his. So long story short, some friends of his started Airbridge broadband, bought him out and I came along for the ride. That was about six, seven years ago. And so throughout the evolution of this, I've seen it go from about 150 customers to bit over 5,000 right now and growing, growing rapidly. Um, I've done everything from installs to infrastructure, to office, network administration, currently doing network engineering. Uh, so I've kind of, I've kind of worn all the hats currently wear multiple different hats when needed. Uh, but it's, but it's been a fun ride and, and got to loot, see a lot of cool things, meet a lot of cool people and just do some, do some amazing things. Well, I mean, that's, that's a cool story. You know, it's a familiar one. So many of these whiffs over there. So started up because they're like, Hey, there's no internet or, you know, someone rolls up with the, the free internet sign on the side of the van and they're like, Hey kid, you want to come in here? So, um, but yeah, it's, it's always a really good. Well, I was going to say it is the topology around here is really difficult. We have a lot of hills and valleys. Um, and so, you know, like where I'm here now is like 3,200 feet and you can go just like 10 miles and drop down to like 800 feet. And so there's just a lot of rolling hills, valleys, mountains and things like that. So it's a really tough area. And, uh, it's just, you know, you, you'd be doing good to get 12 megabits per second from, you know, DSL a half a mile away from the central office, but then you go out of town. I mean, I mean, um, the, the incumbent of the, of here, I think they, they were like, it was going to be like $5,000 to go like a half a mile just to get us DSL. And they, they said we'd be doing good to get a megabit per second. And so, um, yeah. And so, uh, you know, when I, when I first started with airbridge broadband, I think, I think we immediately put it to like 50 megabits per second over the wireless. And so, um, it's, it's been a lot of, been a lot of fun. That's cool. So, um, you mainly residential or you've got business mixed in or kind of what's the spread there? So we do residential and business. We don't, we don't differentiate, differentiate between the two. Uh, so our, we have, our plans are for businesses and residential. Um, and so we do have more residential than businesses, but we do have a ton of businesses, uh, just because we are more reliable, faster, better customer service than really any of the incumbents and, uh, any, for anybody else in the area. So do you, um, do you have any like SLAs? I mean, it's the same for both. I mean, there's really no distinguishing between the two. So from our point of view, there's no distinguishing between the two. We have no SLAs. We don't have any of that. Um, we, we offer a flat fee, uh, 40, 50, 60 bucks a month, under bucks a month, whatever plan you want to go with, um, businesses, residential, get the same, get the same service, get the same quality of service, um, everything, everything's the same for us. Well, cool. How about static IPs and stuff like that? Yes, we offer public static IPs. If people want, um, we obviously nat a ton of IPv4 addresses often the majority of our customers, but if people want to a public IP, we do offer that service for an extra $10 a month takes less than five minutes to set up. So, um, we, we do offer that no, no monthly contracts. Uh, so, um, we kind of see that as we try to set ourselves apart from the, the competition, right? And so we do no monthly contracts. And we kind of, in a way, see that is helping hold ourselves accountable because we know that the customer can just call us up one day and say, Hey, I'm switching, right? And so it helps us keep ourselves accountable on the fact that we need to provide a good service to the customers knowing that they're not locked into a contract and that they can switch anytime. That was great. I mean, you know, as we all know customer service is king, especially when you're dealing with coming in user business or something like that. So, you know, when you're not the incumbent, you actually have to like compete and provide good services and stuff like that. But it's also really easy to take over market share. I mean, you know, you guys have a ton of growth, you know, over a relatively short amount of time. So that's good coverage. Um, how much area do you cover? It's like just town cities, you know, if you were, if you were kind of going to go edge to edge on the network, you know, but roughly how far would that be? So right now it would probably take, gosh, I would say almost three hours north-south, uh, to, to go from one end to the other, uh, east-west would probably take two hours, um, ish mostly just because of the topography. So we cover in the town, um, although the biggest, the biggest town in this area currently that we coverage, um, has, I think it's 3,500 people in it or so. Uh, and so it's not a huge town, but there's a lot of other little towns here and there. And so we, we cover middle of town, outside of town, just about the whole entire area. Uh, and so that, that's about how, that's about how big we are. So you're doing mostly like, uh, mountaintops and stuff like that, or your towers on top of mountains or you down in town and maybe using the, the hills and stuff as isolation between your towers. So the way the topography is here is we actually have a few big mountains, um, on the side is of the prairie. We have a prairie here and then we have a valley down below. And so we kind of do both. We actually prefer not to put a tower up on the talls till. And, you know, we do have a couple of towers up on, up on some tall hills, um, but we mostly see those as last, last ditch efforts for, uh, customer hookups. We prefer instead of putting up, you know, five, 200 foot monstrosities to do, you know, a dozen 40 footers. So, um, the, the probably 90, 95% of our towers are 40 feet or less. And, uh, we, we have 180 footer and 190 footer. Um, those are the tallest towers we have. Uh, otherwise we prefer to do a ton of smaller towers so we can get that density and we can get those short shots. So that's one thing that also sets us apart from the competition is the competition will have that really tall tower, five miles out of town, uh, that's on a tall hill and so by the time the RF gets to town, the RF will be, uh, weak and, uh, you know, a lot of noise and things like that. And so we're doing those half mile, mile, three, four, five mile shots. Um, we obviously do have those 10 mile shots out there, uh, but we try to make those more of an exceptions than, than the rule. Thanks. Interesting. And I mean, I've got to imagine too, like it gets a little chilly up there during the winter and, uh, conditions can get a little thick sometimes. So that's those and I are both from regions that never actually see snow. So when we see people, you know, Idaho and then northern parts of the country and, you know, some of the work conditions they have to deal with, we're like, nope, not for us. It's not going to happen. So, but I imagine, you know, not, you know, having a lot of that infrastructure up on those ridges and that helps a lot too. You know, cause you're not having to spend two days to get up to a site to, to manage power and generators and all that. So very interesting. Okay. Yeah. Um, for your distribution, are you mainly five gig or are you doing some CBRS or kind of what some makes look like? So, um, pretty much all of the access points are five gigahertz. Uh, and then we, we did put up one CBRS access point. It was either late last year or early this year. Uh, so we did put up one CBRS AP. There's not that many people on it, you know, a few people. Um, but, uh, but the majority of the access points are five gigahertz and then the 90 plus percent of the back calls are licensed though. Um, so 90 percent of the back calls are going to be 11, um, gigahertz. Uh, well, I guess 24 isn't technically licensed, but it's not five gigahertz. Then you have 60 gigahertz, which is, I guess, technically unlicensed, but there's not much interference there. Um, and then we have licensed light, which is 80 gigahertz, which we have. So like some sick lose, uh, for, for back calls, uh, but the majority of our back calls are, are going to be the 11s. Um, and we do have a few five gigahertz back calls out there. I don't really like using them other than for like the outlying areas, uh, where there's not a lot of RF and it's just going kind of like that last hop to that last hour, there's only a few people coming off of it. And so it doesn't make, it's not financially sound to put, you know, $6,000 backhaul for a few people. And so in those cases, um, we were doing like PowerBeam 620s, uh, but then I got the rocket prisms, ubiquity rocket prisms, and I paired them with the RF element, uh, parabolic dishes, the ultra dish, and man, it made the world the difference between those two things. So cool. So, I mean, so that's, that's good, uh, using, you know, spectrum other than your multipoint spectrum, right? So a lot of ways, you know, we see them, they, they start with five gig on their multipoint and their point-to-point, and there's, there seems to be some transition point, right? Where you finally can afford, let's say, to go license, whatever. How did you guys start? Did you guys just start with, uh, licensed on your back calls or did you grow into that? So backwards wireless I was telling you about, um, was actually pretty much all five giggers just using PowerBeam M5 400. So, um, I go back in the M5 days. Uh, it was using pretty much five gigahertz, but as soon as Airbridge broadband came in, uh, it was pretty much all, all licensed 24 gigahertz. So one, one of the owners of Airbridge broadband, he, he's been in the business for 20 years. He's a super smart guy. Um, he's been a network engineer for, uh, multiple different wisps, and I've learned a lot from him. And so, uh, when he came in, he brought a ton of knowledge and pretty much started out with, with licensed back calls. Who were you guys using? For your license stuff? Uh, the AirFiber 11's, uh, is the biggest, is what we're using right now for the 11 gigahertz. Um, mostly ubiquity products still, um, for, even for the, the back calls and the, the point multi points, the LTU, uh, the prisms, um, for five, five gigahertz. We do have a couple other, like legal wave, six gigahertz and, uh, and things like that, but it's pretty much, uh, we have a few Mimosa B11s, but after comparing the AirFiber 11 and the B11, I prefer the AirFiber 11. I think it's a superior product, even though it only does 56 megahertz instead of 80. Um, I can take two AirFiber 11s, put a little, put them along the same path and, uh, get, I get way better, uh, service, I think, than, than putting up a, than putting up a B11. Very cool. Very cool. Um, have you guys looked at doing any fiber or, you know, is that kind of tough with your terrain and layout and things like that? It's really tough for the terrain. There's not a lot of ton of density here. Um, so there is, uh, there's a town, uh, up north that has some dark fiber that we're looking at getting, put, or put our equipment in and, you know, get on that dark fiber. Um, there is some talk about doing fiber here, not a lot. A lot of it's going to be done with the, the grant money that's going to be coming out because it's just really not feasible and viable for a small business to run fiber in the area, just because there's all only 1,500 homes here in town and the majority of homes are outside that area where you're at, you know, acres, two, three, four acres per lot, and it just becomes way too expensive to get fiber out to these homes. Yeah. I mean, and that really plays into the tool in a toolbox approach. You know, we, we see a lot of ways that are going hybrid, but, you know, or, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, this is the only solution. But I mean, realistically, every terrain is different. You know, I'm sure you're you got a lot of rocky sort of stuff I'm imagining in your ground. So to go dig it up and trench and everything's probably problematic. Your aerial stuff. I mean, I'm sure you're facing issues and stuff of that, too. So I mean, you've always got to have the density, right? So yeah, yeah, fixed wireless is definitely viable. It is. I can give you a really good example on different tools for the toolbox. So we have a bigger town, which is we're looking at you getting on dark fiber, right? And then, you know, here in town, we have wireless and possibly doing fiber. Then we service a town that's a couple hours away. And the only way to get there is over a mountain that is powered solely by solar that goes up and down during the winter, right? They have generators up there, but sometimes the generators don't work, run out of fuel, whatever it goes down. So we actually purchased a starling dish. And so in this town, two hours away, we have about five different towers and we have it all goes to to one tower. And then that one tower goes to the top of the mountain and outright. So we actually purchased a starling dish and we put it at one of the towers in this town. They have. So I configured it so that when the the the main link going over the tall mountain goes down, customer data automatically flows out the starling dish. And it was really cool. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of a tool. It's called Zero Tier. It does SD WAN solutions. It's a layer two virtual switch. It's a package you can put on micro tick routers of the new router OS seven. And so anyway, so I can put a on a router at our head end and a router down here. It's in its town called out city using zero tier. I can create a layer two virtual switch through the starling. I created an OS PF connection through that. And so then customer data flows out the starling management flows through OS PF a layer two virtual connection through OS PF. And so we can maintain management of all our devices in in Elk City, but customer data flows out the starling. So different tools, you know, places like Elk City, two hours plus away, you know, some people out there were like, just get Starlink, right? Just just get Starlink. It's going to be your best bet. And even we use Starlink on those outlying areas, just as a backup, just in case the main link goes down. So you have a lot of tools in two walks in and you can just use what works best. Yeah. Speaking of backup and stuff, I mean, what does LTE 4G 5G coverage look like in your area? So cellular is terrible in our area. You have the the one, you know, the one antenna up on the tallest hill that gets hits a lot of the area. But other than that, you know, you dip down the valleys and you have nothing. In fact, we promote a lot of times we promote Wi-Fi calling through like Verizon or something like that as as a viable solution to a problem for people. And so cellular LTE 4G, there really there is no 5G out here. And it's 4G and even the incumbent cellular provider is still running some some possible 3G stuff and older LTE stuff. So cellular technology in this area is quite behind the times. Yeah, sounds like it. Good for you. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I've always been a big big fan of, you know, going to where the competition isn't, you know, or whatever. You know, I like I see a lot of people fighting for, you know, going into high density areas where there's like nine other providers. It's like, why? There's so many other areas that you can choose that don't have that much competition. You know, so it's very cool, very cool. So you're on a sort of personal journey. You know, you're doing network engineering. How was that? Basically, it just all OJT, you know, just figuring out as you go. Have you done the formal training or, you know, but you so both. So I've learned a ton from his name is Joe, one of the other owners of Airbridge. He's been in the business for 20 years. I've learned a ton from him. He's been a great guy to to learn from. He's got a ton of knowledge. So I've learned a lot from him. So I want to I want to definitely get a shout out to him. He's been a ton. Big help. Other than that, it's been on the job training and then as well as I've tried to further my education. There's not a as you I'm sure you guys are all the way out. There's no like WISP certification out there. However, I have done the best I could to I like I have my CompTIA network plus. I studied past for certified wireless network administrator. I've passed. I've done the ubiquity broadband wireless admin training. I've done the micro tech certified network associate routing engineer. Things like that. And so I think there's a CBRS certification. Gosh, I don't know. I think that's about it. So yeah, so I've done those those kind of things and just continue to try to educate myself. I I go over the CCNA stuff a lot. Not using Cisco specific stuff, though, it's kind of hard to learn the actual CCNA Cisco things. But even that stuff has some some great material in it. Yeah, a lot of good core information for sure. So you guys are primarily micro tape and the switching and routing son. Yeah, we're solely micro tech on the switching and routing. I'm a big fan of micro tech, as you can see. Me too. Yeah, I think they offer a lot for a little, especially the new generation of hardware that's coming out. I think that you can really do a lot with a little and it can go farther than a lot of people think, I think. I think you can do a lot more with it. So yeah, so we pretty much use we have some nittonics for the switching. We have some. Yeah, that's about it. But we've pretty much transitioned even to micro tech for the switching. The new CRS 300 series, the 328P is an awesome switch, I think, and configured correctly. I think they're awesome. We use the 1072s right now for some of our core and edges with a ton of 1036s for a ton of our towers and other 4011s for some of the smaller ones. And so we're I'm really excited for the new generation of hardware still waiting for for version 7 to become a little bit more stable and things like that. Still waiting. I'm really excited. I think the new hardware, the new switch chips are going to be awesome. Because one thing I heard is that the same switch chip that they have in like your your Marraki 2,500 $3,000 switches, they put in these new, you know, 300 switches, 2116s, things like that. So you get a really great switch chip, really good hardware. And I think I think my critique is is a great way to go. Yeah, I love all the the little things that Microtech does outside of this industry that you can do with it. I was just watching some cool videos of, you know, like GPS asset tracking and stuff like that because it can, you know, through the scripting language as and the USB interface, it can talk to a lot of other devices and, you know, relay that over an IP network and stuff like that. So it's really, really cool stuff. It is. And it's something to where you can actually still find consultants that are reasonably priced, right? You know, you, yeah, you know, you try to bring in a Cisco or a Juniper consultant in and you just you start scratching out checks real hard and fast for that sort of thing where, you know, there's there and it's also in this industry, there's so much self-generated knowledge and stuff like that because there's, you know, so proliphant, you know, in this industry for sure. So very cool stuff. That's pretty much in general, though. I mean, that's why, again, I love this industry so much. I mean, you know, the the whips that are in here are so helpful with each other, too, right? So, I mean, it really doesn't matter what you're using somebody else is. And they're probably more than willing to help you, you know, or educate you or, you know, or try and solve that problem for you, which is really cool. Yes, definitely. I don't think I've ever seen a Verizon tech next to an AT&T van trying to help them sort out their problems. No, no. That's funny. So, you know, what do you think right now? You know, we're the industry or your business or maybe the industry as a whole is what are some of the biggest challenges you guys face on a daily basis or even big picture basis? So some of the challenges we face now is, I would say five gigahertz is becoming a little bit crowded. Thanks to our film that's helped a ton. So we're greatly anticipating the, you know, six gigahertz waiting for the gear to come out and everything to sort itself out through there. So waiting on that. Gosh, pricing on equipment. So our our our poo is a little bit lower than a lot of some of their wizards out there. And so we can find it a bit challenging to afford the higher end Toronto gear to justify that. And so so that's a bit challenging off, you know, some of the grants coming down the pike are going to be, you know, mandating 100 by 100 things like that, which is going to mandate, you know, we'll have to use the the Toronto, the canvium, things like that is as awesome as ubiquity is. And I love the ubiquity gear. It just can sometimes struggle a bit with the 100 by 100, 200 by 200 speeds, things like that. And so and as well as the grant funding coming down the pike is very skewed towards fiber. And so we're we're trying to make some connections, relationships there to show that, hey, wireless has its place. You know, satellite has its place. Wireless has its place. Fiber has its place. But, you know, some of the some of the other incumbents around here are trying to tell people that they're going to get fiber to those houses that are 10 miles up in the boonies somewhere. And it's just not going to happen. Right. And so I would say that's some of our some of our biggest challenges. And some of the biggest challenges we face. So I'm interested in your take on six gig, right? Because, I mean, it was, you know, it was all the rage and people are talking about it, not talking about it. Some people are waiting to build out, you know, for six gig, they don't want to build out any more on five gig. I mean, do you find yourself not going into a new area because you're waiting for six gig or something like that? Some new hardware to come out or, you know, do you guys, if you find an area, you just go into it with what you have. Yeah. So, yeah, we don't wait at all. I am greatly anticipating, you know, like the EP&P 4600 looks like it's going to be a great product line. We aren't waiting. We are looking to put up, you know, LTU, you know, wave, wave gear, you know, ubiquity wave, the 60 gigahertz, 60 gigahertz stuff. So no, we're not going to wait with the LTU and the RF elements and horns. We feel like we can just go straight ahead and plop forward. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, a lot of the waiting, you know, I can understand a bit of it, but if you sit on your thumbs for the next, you know, a year, six months, whatever it turns out actually being fourth live, you know, it's just opportunity path that you buy and let other people come in and set up shop, you know. That is a small business kind of what we're mentioning about the customer's service side and reputation, you know, you get kind of dug in and as a local business, you know, they can get to know you personally and everything. And you're like, hey, we're here. So, you know, when the incumbents try to throw a lot of marketing bucks around or, you know, some of these grand people, the newbies that roll into town, you're like, look, we're here. We've been established here for a year or two, whatever the time is, you know. And of course, it's going to be, you know, competition is always a tough fight, but at the same time, like if you're not there now in the beginning of all this, then you're just going to get completely blown out of the water. So we've definitely been preaching folks, you know, don't wait for the perfect solution. Just get it done, get it done now. Then if you tweak or upgrade or something, you know, down the road a little bit, then that's always an opportunity. Or feed them tasty brisket. They like that too. Yeah. So, yes. I mean, we feel confident in offering a hundred by twenty five off of the LTU, right? You throw up a 30 degree RFLman horn off the LTU. Even though a 20 makers wide channel, you get that 10X by 10X modulation. You can offer that hundred by 25. And we've been offering 50 by 10 off of the AC for five years, right? With the RFLman horns and even the AC gear, we've been doing that. So when, you know, when Airborne's Broadway first started, the fastest you could get was like three by one, right? For like 50 bucks a month. And you were doing good to get that. And we came in at 50 bucks a month and offered 20 by 10, 40 bucks a month gave you 40 by 10. And so we've been, we feel confident that, you know, just go where it's needed right now. It's available, right? You can do it. Last, last question I have about that is, so what is your, could we talk about the average use, right? You said three by one, it's like really, you know, like seven by two is what people use, you know, what they actually need versus, you know, what they say they want and stuff. What's your average, you know, customer usage roughly? So I can't remember exactly, but it's about two and a half, 2.5, three megabits per second average per user, whether somebody has 150, 20 megabit per second. On average people use 2.5 megabits per second. You'll have that person that uses the full 20, uses the full 100. Sure. But, you know, it's not very much. And so, yeah, I think we push somewhere around 16-ish gigabits per second at our peak. And that's for 5,000 customers, so that's, yeah. So I'm kind of related to that too, you know, with all the different speed packages do you have, do people gravitate towards the higher speed packages or is like a middle mix? You know, what does that generally look like, some sort of bell curve or? Yeah, so it's a kind of a mix. So our area-ish here, there's not a ton of people that can really afford sometimes the higher plan. So we have a ton that are on the lower and a ton that are on the higher. So it's really a mixed of people that are on the higher and lower. It's kind of a 50-50 split. There's no, you know, it's not like we have 90% on the lower and 10% on the higher or vice versa. It's really a 50-50 split. How many people in your area are asking you when you're gonna have gig in it? Not much, not many actually. We have quite a few that want the 100 make plans and things like that, but we don't really don't get a lot of phone calls that want the like, you know, gig by gig or something like that. Yeah, I think a lot of people around here that, you know, if they can watch the Netflix, if they can, you know, play their games, they're happy and they're not really worried about the whole gig by gig. Exactly, if you have a reliable connection and they never get a hiccup, though why ask for anything more, right? Yeah, I really think a 100 meg is gonna be the sweet sort of optimal spot for a long time, right? So, I mean, most people could get by with a solid 20, no problem, right? Yeah, most, you know, I have some heavy users, but, you know, so much is going on, gotta have a gig, gotta have a gig. And I'm like, when are you really sickly gonna use all this traffic? I think a 100 is, you know, for the most time, you know, you're watching multiple 4K streams, playing some games, you know, you're doing all you're really gonna do unless some sort of wild, crazy tech comes out of there that, you know, I don't know, some sort of weird AR nonsense or something like that, but that's been coming down the pipe for like the last 10 years now and it's not even remotely close to happening. So, yeah, no, I think it's definitely a sweet spot. And, you know, with the current, the LCU stuff, you can do it, the AX equipment that we're gonna start seeing here pretty much in the very near term. You know, I think we're in a really good spot from a technology perspective. A lot of it is just marketing perception for sure. Yeah. All right, well, we've got a pretty good bit of information here, you know, it's always really interesting to kind of learn where people come from, how they get started, the different networks, you know, we've had some in the Wisp operators and they all run completely different networks and it's really good to get that sort of different perception or view on things. So anything in particular, you kind of wanna, you know, cover or, you know, we've been paling you with questions so far, so you wanna talk about or I wanna bring up or anything? Yeah, just a couple of quick things, couple of quick shout outs to our fellowmen. So when I first started with the backwards wireless, he was using nano stations as access points, right? And yeah, and then nano station M5s and we moved to the ubiquity rocket M5s with the ubiquity sector, so it was a good upgrade. And so the actual real first tower that we put up, it was ubiquity sectors with rocket 5ACs. Airbridge came in and put up a 90 foot tower with RF element, horns, prisms, and it was awesome. And, you know, I was doing installs back in those days and I would do an install off of the rocket at A5AC with the ubiquity sectors and I'm like, I've got perfect line of sight. I know it's pointed right at me because I'm the one that put the sector on the tower. And like my chains are off, the signal's not very good on all these things. And so I was like, guys, we gotta swap this out for RF elements, horns and prisms. And I tell you what, we did, and this even gain isn't everything, right? The specifications you see on paper aren't everything. The ubiquity sectors technically might have more gain, but I tell you what, we swapped out that ubiquity sector for that RF elements in the prism and the signal dropped by like 10 dB, got like 10 dB better, perfect chains and everything. So RF element horns are the best. Another quick story I would say is that, you know, we put up a big tower and we put a 90 degree sector, symmetrical sector, right? Well, we quickly filled that up and we just put another 90 degree sector right on top of it. We quickly filled that up and put another and another. So at some point we have 490 degrees symmetrical horns all pointed in the same direction right on top of each other. And, you know, we're like, okay, you know, modulation is suffering. I mean, it was still really good, especially considering it's up on a grain style, a lot of noise and things like that. So we came in, re-engineered the site. We swapped out the 490 degrees symmetrical for four asymmetrical 20s. So we took the 30s and we swapped them on edge to do 20s. And so we have the same number of APs just, and the same number of sectors, but instead of 490s we have 420s. And I tell you what, that made the world a difference too. Yeah. And so it's definitely better to do it that way than the 490s stacked on top of each other. You have to do it at first, go for it, but I would highly encourage, you know, just do 30 degrees here, 20 degrees, whatever it's needed to try and get that density instead of stacking APs on top of each other. Learning curve, right? Yeah, learning curve. And I think I would say too, is that I think you can do a lot more with ubiquity and macro-tech than a lot of people might give the equipment credit for. I have seen, you know, KNBM, Toronto, it's all super great gear, don't get me wrong. You can, you know, I saw, you know, with a NIG 70 and 73, Toronto pushed 200 megabits per second. You're just not going to do that with ubiquity, right? But I do think that between RFM and micro-tech and ubiquity, there is, they can do a lot more I think than a lot of people can give them credit for. For sure, for sure. The rocket prism, I mean, all the ubiquity APs, those rocket prisms, some good-costing micro-tech routers, have made a lot of people a lot of money over the years. A lot of money over the years for sure. But yeah, it's like everything else, man. You just got to know what your tool is and how to swing it. So for sure, for sure. Yeah, I mean, if you need the Toronto, go for it. It's awesome gear, the hardware is great. It can, again, I mean, it can push 200, 300 megabits per second into a customer in places that, even like you're just, ubiquity just isn't going to do. And so if those are the, if that's what you're doing, that's what you need. But if what you're looking at is doing 50 megabits per second and 100 megabits per second, the RFM, micro-tech and ubiquity can do that, I think. Yeah, I mean, we still see a lot of people that are pulling both different styles, right? So yeah, high density and you need that sort of capacity or things like that. Go one way, the other areas, go where it's most cost effective, look at what your ROI is going to be and make the best decision for you, not just the near term or because it's fancy and shiny, but realistically thinking what it's going to look like two, three, five years down the road. So, yep. Well, very cool, very cool. Well, that's about everything that I've got. And I know a lot of you've got a busy day ahead of you as always, the adventures of a wisp. Always keep you on your toes, right? Yeah, wisp life, never a boring moment for sure, so. Never. I guess in closing, anyone looking to find you? You know, they got any questions or you don't want to talk about your experiences or anything like that. If you don't mind, we can throw your email address up or what's the best way for people to find you? Yeah, so the best way to find me is probably email is just alyja at airbridgebroadband.com or I'm also on LinkedIn. You can find me at alyjazata. I'm friends with Tossos and Caleb and some of the others in the wisp industry. So, just if you see me on their connections list, that's gonna be me. And that's pretty much where I'm at. I'm not too much of a social media guy. I'm not on Twitter and all that stuff. Probably best for your sanity, you say. Yeah, good for you. Good for you. Well, very cool, very cool. Tossos, people looking for us, where can they find us as always? They could find us on social media, anywhere on Facebook, Instagram and a lot of the wisp groups that are there. Of course, you could always find us at our website, RFelements.com, you could always email us, Tossos at RFelements.com, Caleb at RFelements.com and for anybody else that's out there, like alyja that might wanna be on the show, we'd love to have you on. So, if you're out there, if you're curious, send us an email, send us a private message or something like that and let's get you on here talking and introduce you to the rest of the wisp world. All right, all right, well, until next time, everybody. We'll talk to you later. Bye. See ya. Sit so long.