 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of JSA, coming to you from Virtual Metro Connect 2021. Joining me today, my good friend Kevin Rocks, he's the EVP of Sales and Marketing at Southreach Networks. Kevin, welcome to JSA TV. Jamie, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Thanks so much again, Kevin for joining us. So excited to catch up, especially on our Virtual Metro Connect 2021 edition. So for our viewers who may not already know, can you tell us a little bit about Southreach Networks? Yeah, Southreach Networks is a relatively new carrier on the scene in the South Florida market. And the company was cobbled together by acquiring a number of different fiber-based assets that they're kind of leveraging to create what we hope over time will become, what we'd like to become is really a formidable player throughout the entire Southeast. So currently today the company has, we have our own fiber optic backbone from Miami, Florida, going up the East Coast to Jacksonville. We also have some fiber access and fiber rights going into Atlanta. And we're targeting all of the various carrier ecosystem clients. So everyone from data center providers, to hyperscalers, to resellers, to agents, to municipalities, consumers of dark fiber, consumers of ethernet-lit services, consumers of dedicated internet access, that's really our customer base. And there's a lot going on, as you're well aware just on a macro level that South Florida in particular has become kind of a growth place in general. It seems like a lot of people, I don't know if it's entirely weather related or it's pandemic related, but it really is kind of an old market, is that everybody wants to have a bolt hole, if not in Florida, somewhere in the South. So it's a good place to be in terms of the trajectory of what the local economies are doing. And we're really excited to be on the forefront of that. And being a small shop, we're not as bureaucratically driven as some of the others. So that really enables us to do a lot of things to be quick, be nimble, and be very responsive to the carriers and the service providers that call upon us. Yeah, there's been an exodus, massive exodus from big cities like LA and New York, going to some hotspots for sure in Florida and Texas. People wanting to leverage their at-home, stay-at-home orders and be in the states that are, well, great weather and great taxes and there's a lot of reasons for it, right? A lot of compelling drivers, yes. Yeah, all right. And for sure, Southreach Networks. I've been watching you guys grow. And particularly your role there, you've just been with Southreach for what, six months now as EVP of sales and marketing? Yeah, I came on board in mid-October and it's been a whirlwind. So as you're well aware, most of my career has been based in the Northeast market, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut throughout. So this is really the first time that I've taken on a completely new geography. And I have to say in a very short span, I'm totally engrossed with what's going on down there that I'm like, wait a minute, I forgot about New York. 60 Hudson Street and all that stuff. So that's kind of in the rear view. Still has a place in my heart, but the focus is now down in South Florida. It's a really exciting place to be in a lot of different projects and things that we're tackling. And we look forward to more of the same. Yeah, and for sure, this has just been an incredibly crazy year. MetroConnect obviously now virtual this year. Just everything's different, especially since typically middle of Southreach networks home in Miami. It's not to have our usual Miami drinks is a little sad. But what do you hope to gain from the event this year? Well, the interesting thing is, yes, so just kind of flipping back a little bit, when I came on board in mid-October, we still didn't really know where we would be in mid-February. So I was very hopeful that we were gonna be able to pull off an in-person event and lovely to be at the Eden Rock and sitting around the pool having great meetings. And all of these MetroConnects in the past that I've been to have always been great because it's a very much a sea level type audience. It's very intimate. You can have lots of really great conversations, so much more so than you get at some of the more high-trafficked trade show events that we've had, throughout the calendar year that we're used to. But once we knew, I guess a few weeks ago, the folks at Capacity notified us that they're going all virtual. We were especially disappointed because it's right in our backyard. And I was kind of thinking, we could probably do this thing outside. It's only a few hundred attendees. We'll do it on tents on the beach or what have you. But it wasn't to be. But I look at this, Jamie, as building the foundation for ITW, right? So right now that's hoping to be an in-person event. And that's really in four months time. So it's really not far down the road. What I really liked and hats off to the capacity to media folks for putting this thing together, irrespective of the environment that we're in right now. But they've got a lot of great line of great speakers. I've already had a number of reach outs and outreaches in terms of meetings, a lot of up and coming, a lot of investors, a lot of people, everyone is just so eager to kind of make things happen. And thankfully in our industry, I think we're really blessed in that, even because of the pandemic and less so, it's just, there's been the demand for communications continues to grow exponentially. So all we need to do, we just need to get in a room together so we can talk face to face and even grow it even further. So I hope that it's gonna be a very successful show. And I hope that we use it as a platform to build for the next in-person event. Yeah, there's definite tremendous buzz as we enter into it next week over at Metro Connect and folks at capacity, they never disappoint. And for sure, it's a lead up to ITW in just a few months away and back in DC. So... Yes, back in DC. I'm very happy about that. I love the old hotel too, but we'll take this new place. I think it's just over the border in Maryland. But it'll be nice. It's a train ride down for us as folks in the Northeast, probably not too far from you. And just to see people, I guess the unfortunate aspect is a lot of the international folks that could have potentially attended, that's gonna be a challenge for them. Because really when you're at ITW, you're almost like a guest within your own country because there's so many international folks there. We'll miss that flavor, but if we can pull this off, then it could be the stepping stone to many more in-person events going through 2021 and to next year. Yeah, us Americans have to show up for sure. We have to show up in droves. Yeah, yeah. In numbers, yes. All right, back to South Beach Networks though. I wanna make sure we get this in, looking out towards the rest of 2021. What can we expect? We can expect a lot of success-based builds. So in addition to having this fiber optic backbone, we have a lot of ingress and egress on-ramps and off-ramps that tie into a lot of the cable landing stations. And the traffic that is now going up through South America into a head end in Miami, up through Jacksonville, now with Virginia Beach and NJFX, it all goes up through Europe and out the other side and keeps coming back down. So we're kind of almost like a midway point in that traffic. So we wanna continue to expand and do laterals off of our backbone to continue to do on-ramps with these various cable systems and there's a number of others that are coming on board in the very near term. So you'll probably see some press around that. And we also want to expand laterals into the metros. So getting a little bit deeper into not just Miami, but Boca Raton, West Palm, going up the coast to Jacksonville in particular. And what we're really excited about is the area in kind of central coastal Florida on the East Coast is somewhat of an underserved market in a very large populated state like Florida. So once you get past West Palm going north before you kind of get up into the Jacksonville region, there's a lot of kind of gaps in that area in terms of service providers, access to fiber. So we're trying to utilize and leverage our backbone to get into some of the MDU multi-dwelling units, some of the homeowner associations, utilities, municipalities, supporting a lot of the 5G players in their cell tower, site selection, things of that nature. So we're really excited about that as well. So between that and we do have an upcoming press release coming out about some high capacity offerings that we're going to be having going just between the data centers. It's a data center focused product, which is 10G, 100G, connecting all the various data centers from Jacksonville to Miami. We're really excited about that press announcement which is forthcoming. So those are just a few of the things that we're looking to do this year. Where can we go for more information on South Beach? Oh, sure. Well, srnetworks.net is our website and I'm very easy. Kevin, firstname.lastkevin.rocks and srnetworks.net, all of the information will be there. We're going to continue to post things on our blog site. We're going to be using a lot of social media. We'll be making these announcements about this new high capacity service we're offering between the data centers. We also have a flagship data center of our own at 36 Northeast Second in Miami, which we kind of call as the annex to the NAP, which is a diverse connected data center to the NAP of the Americas and some of the other data centers that are intra-building within 36 Northeast Second. So that's some basic information on how to get ahold of us and any type of needs for ethernet capacity, dedicated internet access, dark fiber. That's where you go. Love it. Absolutely so exciting. Always great to learn what South Beach Networks is up to, but also you, Kevin, I'm so excited to catch up. Thank you so much for your time. Likewise, Jamie, thank you very much. Thank you to the JSA-NA team. We love working with you guys. It's been a fantastic year thus far and let's keep it going. Absolutely. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA-TV and JSA-Podcast. Happy networking.