 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha. My name is Matt Darnell, host of Hawaii Tech Today. I'm pleased to be here with Greg Jackson. Greg here is a military veteran for 20 years of IT experience. Thank you very much for your service. Appreciate that. He's done phone support, web development, consulting at the sea level, at a very high level with folks. Father of three children, congratulations on that for sure. And he's really got a passion for technology and people. He's got a real technical background and has the ability to bridge the gap between technical discussions and what people actually need. Because as we know, traditional end users don't speak in technical terms. They know what they need, how they want to do that. But yeah, he is very relatable and we're very pleased to have you, Greg. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Absolutely. So today we're going to talk about internet providers in Hawaii and the differences and some things that you will find with that. But we'll start off with some current events. And some of the things I'd seen out there was that, Sheila, do we want one of the main lock providers? And I always thought on my home, you know, we have the code to get in there. But now you can link your Alexa, your Amazon Alexa with your lock. So to get into your house, you just say your password, your private pin, and the door just unlocks. That's amazing. Tell me a little bit more about how it works. Yeah. So when you get the lock, you go ahead and you enable Unique Pin. So it would be if we were living the same household, I would have a pin, you would have a pin. And then to get in, you just stand in front of your door and you can just say the password and the door will open there. And it gets to the point where you think it's 2018, why do I still have keys for my car, for all these different things? It seems to me that more things are going to be tied to cellular phones and have that kind of identification. And I always complain, why do I have to have a key to get in my car? How many different ways are there to identify me from my voice, from my fingerprints, all those kind of things? I'm sure this is a matter of time until cars come that way where it's a fingerprint to go ahead and start the car and stop the car. Yeah. That sounds a little bit like what I saw in Shark Tank. Have you seen that? I have not. So Shark Tank, they had some folks on there where they showed the remote locks. So you've got proximity locks, you've got using the internet. You can send temporary locks. I don't know, I didn't follow the history or what the outcome was, but it's very interesting. It was an app you put on your phone? I think, yeah, I think that's kind of how it worked. Okay. Well, and the opportunities are endless. And Amazon even has that service now where this person, instead of leaving on your doorstep, right? I mean, they will open your door and put it there. And apparently there's a camera on them the whole time. So they literally take two steps inside the house, put the package down, and then, I'm not sure what carrier that works with, and it's possible that's only a trial of the mainland. Cars too, right? Is on cars too? So you could, I think they were doing the Mars will go in the house? No. No. I think they were doing, they would actually deliver it to your vehicle. Really? Yeah. I think that's the last thing I heard. Oh, and put it in the trunk or what have you? Or wherever you allow them. Oh, wow. Okay. So it's just, this internet of things is such a huge, and with all these things connected to the internet, it's just, it's Skynet. Here's the Terminator movie. It's absolutely Skynet. So to get in your car, open the door, and I still remember, this hasn't happened yet, but people, I was reading something, this was 10 years ago, and there was something really visionary that your refrigerator knows you're low on milk. Your refrigerator tells your watch. Your watch tells your car, so as you're driving down the road, your car is interrogating all these stores, trying to figure out who's got the best price on milk. Your car knows what you need, so it's plugged in and those kind of things. So absolutely, it's really going to be a very, very connected world. And the, another thing I was reading about, have you ever used MoviePass? No. MoviePass, it's a subscription that you can buy, and it used to be that you could go to a movie a day, and you had an app on your phone, and you'd walk up to the theater. You had to be within a, use GPS, so you couldn't do it from your home. They wanted you to be there at the theater, and you could go to a movie a day. It was $9, like $10 a month for that, and just amazing how it would work with the app. You just walk up, you go, this movie I want to see you punching your app, and then they would give you your ticket. But yeah, so if anyone, everybody says they're going downhill now, and it's changed from one a day to, I believe, four a month. I can see why. And unlimited path, but yeah. So those kinds of things really are tough. And even, have you ever, I've never done a Lyft or an Uber. Have you ever ridden in one of those? Yeah. Okay. They're across the board, there's a wide variety of experiences I've had. Okay. Lyft and Uber, or one, both? I think Uber's the one I mainly ride. Yeah, I've never ridden one. But with Lyft, you're going to be able to buy a monthly pass. Similar to, you know, the bike rentals you find around town, you can just have this, and you have this pass, and you pay maybe, I think it's like $400 a month, and you get 60 rides. Wherever you need to go, you know, within this area. It's just a matter of, you know, you're buying a ride. And I can't help but think that cars, you know, when our kids are our age, right, when they're old, a car is not going to be something everybody owns. I'm not old. I am. But it'll be one of those things, it'll be kind of like an ambulance. Right. The very rich people will have, they have their own ambulance. You know, they have a big mansion, they have their own ambulance. And you and I, when we need an ambulance, we call for it. Right. If we want to take a plane, we go to the airport to get it. You know, but, you know, rich people, you know, have their own plane, that type of thing. But the vast majority of people, they're not going to own cars. Why would you own a car? When you need a car, you call for it, and then, and you get that. And it's like a subscription-based, almost. Absolutely. I mean, you have a subscription or it'll be like a short-term rental. You know, where you can go to pick up a car, take it, and drop it off at another place. Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, just like with the bike, so they have it around town. So it's really getting that pay-away. And with this, with the self-driving automation, it's, it's, there's no question. You know, in middle of the night, you need a car that just shows up right in front of your door. And that kind of kind of thing. So I think Lyft and Uber and, and it's got to be, you know, GM and all those companies, it's got to be going crazy, trying to figure out, what are they going to do to keep people buying cars? And they're all going to be electric and they're going to be, it's like your Roomba. Your Roomba vacuum cleaner knows when it's running low on battery and it goes home to recharge, right? Yeah. Same thing with these cars. They'll just drive around to their low on battery and there'll be three or four tow trucks around, you know, to maintain them. But I really think 20, 30 years, owning a car, you know, is going to be a luxury there. You know, when you factor in like the car payment or the fuel, the insurance, parking fees, you know, four, 600 bucks a month, doesn't sound that bad. Absolutely not. And it's, you know, you have the time you read that an AI car, you know, the self-driving is safer than a human. And the other half of the time you read it's just as bad or even worse. Yeah. And here in Hawaii, the way they're cutting up H1, you know, there's, it's hard for me to know which one is the lane, because they kind of dig in and they take out the old strips, they put in new strips and, you know, I'm trying to figure out which is the lane. And they, they, they get to that point where they talk about with this AI and cars that, you know, for some reason, it's come to the time where a car has got two choices. It's going to run over the lady with the baby carriage or it's going to crash into these school kids. Yeah. And how, how does a machine make those kind of, I mean, that was the only, for whatever reason, it came to that point. So it's just so much to think about, you know, those things are going in. And, you know, and speaking of AI, you know, one of the, one of the new Microsoft updates, you know, they, they're doing their, have you ever, have you ever captured your screen on your computer? Yeah. And what they'll do now, it's gotten a lot smarter and this is actually, I think it's going to be really cool that if you see something, if you screenshot, like, shoes, it'll automatically look for those shoes for you, say on Amazon and search for that. So just add AI, like, if you, oh, what is this person? You know, you're watching a movie and you screenshot that person, it'll bring you to their IMDb page, that kind of a thing. So, to me, that's really smart kind of, you know, artificial intelligence where, you know, that's what computers are supposed to do, compute, you know, and those kind of AIs, and I mean, I'm looking forward to the day where, you know, I'm analyzing my email. So, I could come up in the morning and say, show me the last email from Greg about the contract for customer XYZ. And it's already analyzed and got that, you know, that metadata information out of the email. Right. You know, what we have to do now. Because again, I mean, it's true, I tell my boys, they don't believe it, but a computer, that used to be a person. That was a job. You were a computer. Are you? These numbers, I want you to compute them. So, you know, I think that kind of AI, when you bring that into something you do, that makes your life easier, is really, really good. Yeah. And, if anybody here has gotten, been bit by the black dot bug, have you heard about that at all? No, tell me more. Yeah. There's something called Unicode, which is, but you know, we're all used to normal, what are called ASCII characters, the alphabet and the zero and the numbers. And there are special, smiley faces and those kind of characters. But, and that's really good if you speak English and you write, you know, in English. But if, you know, all other languages, you know, that does not work. So Unicode kind of encompasses everything. And there are thousands of Unicode characters and some of them are hidden, like what tells it to go to the next line to back up, to go forward. So on Instagram and Snapchat, people are embedding thousands of these commands, the hidden commands and a little black dot. So on the screen, you see a little black dot. If you click it, it freezes your phone instantly. Because your phone just goes crazy trying to go forward, back, forward, back, back and forth. Yeah. So it's WhatsApp, it's on Android, it's on iOS, it's on Snapchat, all those kind of things. So if you get something strange that says, you know, push me or click here on that black dot, you definitely don't click the black dot. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You know, and I've got a little pop quiz for you here. Okay. Okay. Do you know how the Android releases are named? Um, sounds like pastries or things. They're out to desserts. So, C is this, B, you know, all the, okay. So I'm kind of disappointed. So you don't know any of the names of the Android releases? Um, you know what it was? Nope. Oh my goodness. All right. Next. It was Oreo, by the way. Oh. Okay. So, speaking of Uber, I was, I was reading that Uber in 2020, they're going to have a flying car service. So we're beyond just the car, it's a flying car now. And they have these spaceports, and you get an Uber car to take you to the spaceport, and then you catch the Uber plane to the other spaceport, and then you're going to go ahead and catch an Uber car to your final destination. And it's all going to be autonomous. It's like Elon's thing where he's going to go underground with his, his cars. No, that's a choo-choo train. That's like, is that LA to San Francisco, or is that LA to Vegas? I thought he was going to have actual vehicles, but you might be right. It might be more of a rail system. I'm sure I'm right. But, but, yeah. And when I look at the, you know, the prototypes for that, I mean, it looks like the Jetsons, like George Jetsons house. It was long, a cylinder, yet a little, you know, little putt-putt spaceships going in and out. That just doesn't sound very safe. You know, it, like, like air buses, 99.9% of the time they fly themselves. They take off, they land. You know, I was talking to a pilot one time, and he says, all the money I've ever made in my career, it'll be for five minutes. There'll be five minutes where I need to do something that's really important. If I do the wrong thing, but in this 30 years of flying, there'll be five minutes in his career, kind of like the sully guy when he, you know, flew into the Hudson River, you know, he didn't fly, he landed there, kind of thing. Is it, it's kind of like the Amazon delivery thing where they're doing the drones and their delivering packages? No, this is for people. Yeah, but I mean, imagine the amount of traffic that's coming, right? Now you've, you know, we're talking about I imagine there'll be corridors, you know, different kind of things, and I mean, I doubt you could have that right next to Honolulu Airport, but I could see them something in Honolulu, and maybe something out in the country, something of a couple A, that, you know, or even Kanioi, you know, to go over the Coal Lows. It's interesting. And I'm sure they'll have tourist packages where you just want to go over Yellowstone, you want to look at the Coal Lows, or you know, you're in West Virginia and you want to look at the mountains out there, and another really interesting thing was, was Tesla roof tiles. And, you know, you've heard of Tesla before, they make the cars and they have the Tesla Powerwalls, and now they have, you know, they've announced these, but they've talked about how they're working. They're just roof tiles that look like regular roof tiles. They'll be cheaper than Shingle when you count the electricity you're going to save over the next 20 years, right? But they just produce, there's no panels on your roof. You just put regular tiles, but they're, they're producing electricity and they're all networked in. I want some for my car. I think that's very possible. You know, it's funny, whenever you look at a competition of people, then they're trying to go a long distance with just solar powered. Right. Or they look nothing like regular cars. So what you and I want to drive is very different from what, if economy and saving oil and energy was the most important thing. Forget about comfort, air conditioning, you know, no Bluetooth. You're lying down, you have bicycle spoke wheels, you know, we're not going to have the spinner rims, those kind of things. So, yeah, it's really an exciting thing. And I just hope with, you know, with with H.E.I., I live in Kailua and I can't get the power plan that lets me put, you know, panels on and sell back to the grid. They say our grid is oversaturated and it's really a shame when you look at, you know, how, you know, they're stifling, you know. What does oversaturated mean? I mean, you feed too much power back. I mean, don't we use them? Well, what I've heard is that on the days that there's not sun, they don't have the capacity for the houses because they're used to that. Interesting. Yeah. So again, my name is Matt Darnell with the Hawaii Tech Today. Thank you for joining us and have a great and see you in a little while. Hello. Hey, hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Andrew Lanning, the security guy. I host a program called Security Matters, Hawaii. And I hope you'll join us on Fridays. We are at 10 a.m. And we're going to be talking about those security things that really should be important to you and, you know, maybe get behind the scenes on some things that you may not know about the industry or about products or even about your habits. Security's all about people, processes and products. And we hope to bring that to you in an informative and hopefully a useful way. So again, 10 a.m. on Fridays, Security Matters, Hawaii, on Think Tech Hawaii. Join me. Thank you. Hello. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawai.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Aloha. Again, my name is Matt Darnell. And I am the host for Hawaii Tech Today. And again, I'm joined here by Greg Jackson. Again, very glad to have you here, Greg. So let's talk internet now. And, you know, I've been in this business, you know, this is my third day in the business. But I can remember when a 56K kilobit circuit, a frame relay, that was considered absolutely, I mean, that was the cat's meow. And obviously, that was probably mid-90s type of thing. And it's changed a lot, you know, since then. But let's talk about different kinds of technology. And right now, we have three prevalent. And one, that's probably a little more on the fringe. And the first one is cable. And that company now is Charter. Charter, Spectrum, Time Warner, Oceanic Roadrunner. I think in reverse order, that is how it was, yeah. And I still call them Charter. I still call them Roadrunner. I still call them all those kind of things. And have that. And they bring you internet over the cable connection. And the same cable connection that brings you your TV and have that. And you use a technology called DOCSIS. That's the protocol. It's a great technology, even to the point that the latest specification lets you get 10 gigabytes down, excuse me, 10 gigabits down and 10 gig up as well. Symmetrical. But the thing that people always say about that is if you've got that one coax going down your street, everybody on your street is using that bandwidth there. So it's not really a dedicated high infrastructure. I mean, you've got some locations that use coax out to a main junction box. And a lot of times what you see in the infrastructure is fiber from the junction box back to the office. So in older infrastructures. When you say office, what does that mean? So for cable companies and phone companies, they centralize it some location. And they use different technologies to manage the traffic. So phone companies might use a C.O. And then they have like a backhaul of data. And then with cable companies, they have coax from the house to the curb. And then maybe to the curb, they have like a junction box. So they have a bunch of coax cables aggregating in a small box. And then they use like fiber optics from there on back. So if you've got the right capacity, depending on your cable infrastructure, you're not going to see a whole lot of, you know, choking of speed. But in some locations you have coax going all the way back or even further back. And that's when you run into situations like that. And it's kind of synonymous. Let me know if you agree with like roads. You've got H1, which is four or five lanes. And that's your fiber optic cable. So it's the backbone. And then you've got these exits. And maybe from there you exit down to a two lane road. And then from there you exit down to a one lane road. And then from there you exit down to a driveway. So you've got the backbone that's feeding everything has got a lot of bandwidth. And they kind of peel off of that for every stop. Because actually there's only three, I think, three entry points in and out of Hawaii to go to the rest of the world. So everything starts there. And that's a matter of where does it go. We have HawaiiTel, downtown and that that. So with cable, you're able to get your voice on the internet and as well as phone. Triple play, yeah. Yeah, you're able to do that. And TV as well. The triple play. Yeah. And they always talk about the quad play with the video and that type of thing. So yeah. So coax is certainly a great thing. And I think when Charter, the last one Charter, when they bought Spectrum, that was a game changer in Hawaii. What we saw before was maybe for $300 you might get 50 down and 10 up. All of a sudden, they came to town and they brought mainland pricing. That was one good thing about that. When they brought that mainland pricing here, you get like 300 down, 20 up. Those types of, which is a very, very fast connection, you know, for $300. Where before, that would have been incredible. And I think over coax, today, they don't have what's, you know, that symmetric service where the download matches the upload. It's always an asymmetric where is a download faster than what you upload. So what, why is asymmetric okay for most businesses? I'd say most businesses aren't in the business of pushing data out. So a lot of businesses need to gather information. And there's a small handshake in the data connection that requires a little bit of data to go up. But unless you're a company that's, you know, doing some kind of hosting, then you don't need a whole lot of data leaving your organization. And now it's even more interesting with cloud computing. You just have a small fin pipe going to say like a co-location or your cloud computing central location. And then from there, you can use internet connections that you have available there. And, and absolutely, because what you see when you're, when you're working with a cloud computer, you're just seeing a picture of what's happening. So if you're downloading a 10 gigabyte file, that's not coming down your computer, that's coming to the cloud. And all you're seeing is that picture. And likewise, just, you know, when you're watching the YouTube video, all you send up to the internet is the click that says show me that video. That's real, yeah. The high depth stream coming down. That's why we need the more download. But if you're, let's say like a think tech here, they have a live feed going out to, out to the internet people to watch. That's when you would might need a long, a lot of upload. Telemedicine's big like that. I mean, you've got some folks incorporating telemedicine and they're not understanding the impact on their data requirements. Absolutely. I mean, because when a doctor wants to see, you know, 45 x-rays and the x-rays were taken at St. Francis West, Queens West, is that what it's called? Or, yeah, out there, but they're downtown. That's a lot of data to pull out there. Okay. So cable is certainly an option there. In addition, we have Hawaii tell, you know, and they are soon to be Cincinnati Belle. I doubt they'll be, they will change their name, but again, another kind of consolidation, I hope, what Spectrum did on the cable side, they'll do that on the Hawaii tell side. And we are seeing parts of that. You know, I work from home, excuse me, and I have a Hawaii tell fiber and I have oceanic F4, oceanic, excuse me, I have spectrum, I have spectrum as well. And for redundancy. And it's gotten to the point now where before, if you didn't buy at least two of the services from either company, if you only wanted internet, it was very expensive, where they wanted to add on and layer things on, but now it kind of peeled those back. So, tell us about fiber with Hawaii tell. Is fiber the best, the only way you should be going into your home or your business? I think fiber's been really growing a lot throughout the country. We saw different things happen with the quality of fiber, being able to manage the fiber. There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to get built out when you're implementing fiber, the cost of the equipment, the training for the technicians. So, getting fiber to the curb, it's been moving from say the east coast and the Midwest, west. And when you do that, you're able to jump from gig, 10 gig, to possibly 100 gig. And when you lay out those cables, it's so costly to do that, you've got a future profit and that's where fiber really matters. Yeah. And in Kailua, we're not worried about fiber to the curb. We want our power to come to the curb. I mean, and, because like the power is overhead, everything's overhead there, right? So, in the newer communities, I mean Millani's a little bit older for that, but I hope in Kapolei and all those new developments there, they're taking fiber all the way through the condo, all the way to the home. And, you know, I know the power's underground. So, yeah, HawaiianTel is very competitive with their fiber. But again, there's a lot more cable. Cable is almost to every house. Yeah, the infrastructure's already there. Every business. Yep. HawaiianTel, fiber is in particular area. If they're in your area, then it's, it's great, great news. So definitely, you know, I would definitely talk to both of those, whether you're home to go ahead and do those. And then, the kind of more on the fringe, the off, you know, on the big on, they talk about, you know, underserved, underdeveloped, you know, multi-million dollar homes, because they have no internet, they have no power, they have no water, you know, but they're beautiful homes, you know, out at Keck, Captain Cook and all those areas. And they have to go through wireless. And about ten years ago, Clearwire was kind of making a foothold. And I think they had a three meg down service and 768 up or, you know, very, very, very, by today's standards, very, very slow. But it was mobile. And I know you, for a fact, how often do you work off tethering so your mobile phone becomes a hotspot and your laptop connects to your, your phone through Wi-Fi and then you use your mobile data. How I mean, and that works that well for you? Yeah, I mean, I use CDMA and and GSMA. CDMA? Yeah. Is that like soup? That's a, so you have Verizon and Sprint CDMA and you've got T-Mobile and AT&T that's using their network. So, what I'm hearing is that the networks are starting to use very similar technology. But I carry two phones because I need to be able to hop on one network versus the other depending on the coverage in the area. So, speeds are great. I mean, get 20, 30 megs down from my phone. That's fantastic. And you want to do a per byte kind of plan or are you? All you can eat. All you can eat. Fantastic. So, and with Revision 5, LTE, the Generation 5 coming out and they're starting to roll that out and I don't know why Europe always kind of seems they seem to be a little ahead of us. But yeah, so I think in the end run, whether you just want to go off-net and do mobile because you can buy routers and just put a SIM card in there and do that and if you want cable, if you want fiber, definitely call around and do some research because, you know, there are times we'll have promos where you can easily get 10 times the speed for half the cost. Oh, that's a very important point. You got to call and ask. And now there's no, don't sign a contract for internet service. I don't know anyone unless they have to trench and like you mentioned build to your business. If you're downtown or in any kind of established building, there's no reason for you to sign a contract. I totally agree. Everything should be month to month and if you see someone on the news, you know, and you're commercial for something and they'll tell you sometimes, oh, well, you've got to be a new customer to get this. Well, okay. Well, maybe next time I buy internet, you know, I'll be a new customer because I'm going to switch to this provider and he'll give it to me and guess what? Chances are you're going to get that. So, thank you so much, Greg for having coming on the show. Pleasure having you. Again, my name is Matt Darnell with the Hawaii Tech Today. Hope you enjoy what you're saying. Feel free to leave those in the comments and Greg and I will be watching that and we'd love to get back to you. We'd love both to have a passion for helping small business and that type of thing. So, thank you so much and hope you have a wonderful day. Hello.