 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for tech, telecom, and data center professionals. I'm Buffy Harakitas, coming to you from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada for Channel Partners 2022. And joining me today is Nathan Sehringer, general manager of independent fiber networks. Nathan, welcome to JSA TV. Well, thank you. So Nathan, can you give viewers a little bit more details about independent fiber networks? Yeah, so Independence Fiber Network is a regionally based fiber network, mainly in Western Ohio, where we're owned by 22 telco companies, and we're a middle mile network that have in the recent years, we've expanded our fiber footprint and have our own network on top of what the middle mile network is where we're starting to expand our services and where we could serve potential businesses, because Independence Fiber Network is exclusively a business to business fiber network. So recently you announced some exciting news with a 44 mile fiber ring gateway and has a very unique public-private partnership to it. Can you give us a little bit more details about that? Yeah, so Independence Fiber Network engaged a government agency with a bunch of Southern Dayton, Ohio communities and cities to work a public-private partnership where they had already started to construct a fiber optic network between the communities for joint services and stuff like that with the state, and then they had us come in and complete the second phase of their project. And doing that, both entities got fiber throughout the entire project, and then we all got to build it at 50 cents on a dollar. So they paid for the first phase, we paid for the second phase. And that also works for them because they want the connectivity in the fiber network to connect up their local cities with the state regional offices and access to the internet. And then we could help them monetize that fiber with our expert as a private organization. So we worked out an agreement with them that also helps give them some revenues based off of our fiber sales of that network. Wow, so exciting. And there's so many more announcements that you guys have coming up the pike, including some additional expansions. Can you give us some more information about that? Yeah, so there's kind of a couple of different things that's going on. A lot of cities are now building their own fiber networks. We're working with them. They do not have the expertise to manage and operate a fiber network. So as they get a lot of these COVID funds and a lot of these broadband funds that are being disseminated by the federal government, we're actually working out arrangements with them. So we have a numerous unique private public partnerships that are cropping up all across our regional footprint. In addition to that, we had a group of Indiana I-Lex that came together and they formed a new entity and we're gonna be managing and expanding our network throughout the entire state of Indiana, kind of replicating our model in Ohio and just extending it further, making this kind of a super regional now between Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. That's pretty impressive, yeah. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about DDoS and the rise there. How does your company help other enterprises and businesses stay safe when it comes to these rising DDoS attacks? So that's a great question. So years ago, we only had very rudimentary, very manual ways of stopping DDoS attacks, kind of like I referred to earlier. We're a middle-mile network. So our network was used to pretty much deliver internet into our network to the small little fiber islands of our shareholders and other entities that are connected with our network. So it was a big problem. So we worked with a company called Carrero, purchased their hardware and software and we put that at the edge of where we received the IP for our network that we spread across and resell and then we scrub it right at the edge and then now people do not have to worry about it. Our basic DDoS offering for enterprise and any channel also has DDoS mitigation where they do not even have to worry about it. That it is something that it is not gonna hurt their IT with their business or enterprise or their, I guess, their organization if they're a disseminating broadband, so. Yeah, it's critical in today's landscape for sure. Is there anything else you'd like to add today? No, I just appreciate you guys allowing me to speak. We're kind of excited to be here at the Channel Partners thing. We're trying to branch out our market channels as a whole, as our network grows, as we kind of move from that middle mile and having some of our own network to now moving into more metro areas with our private public partnerships. So we're finding a need to kind of branch off, find some of these agencies, these MSPs that could possibly utilize our level of connectivity, our superior dedicated services that we can offer a high-level enterprise education, et cetera, all the market channels. So we're looking for those partnerships and this has so far been a good opportunity to seek out those organizations. So agents, partners, where can they go to find more details? That's really easy question. You can go to ifnetwork.biz. My name's kind of plastered all over it, so you can personally reach out to me. We're a small organization, but with a big footprint. So yeah, you can reach out to that and there will be the contact information there and then we can get in touch. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us today on JSA TV and viewers, thank you so much for tuning in to another fabulous episode of JSA TV here at Channel Partners 2022. Be sure to follow JSA on LinkedIn and Twitter and add hashtag GreenerData for all you need to know about the launch of our book and movement GreenerData on Earth Day, April 22nd. Happy channel networking.