 Welcome to the RF Elements Unlicensed Podcast. I'm Caleb, as always, we've got Tossos on the 1s and 2s over here. And this week, we're excited to be joined by Ryan Grohl from SmartWay Communications. Ryan has graciously taken his time out of his busy week during thunderstorm season, which is now 7, 8 months long. We'll have to talk to us today. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll get through this session okay. But, um, it was Ryan. Again, super great to talk to us. Before we hop into this though, Tossos, please give the good people out there their call to action. Yeah, absolutely. Don't forget to like, listen, or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio podcasts like Apple, Google, or Spotify. Alright, alright. So Ryan, um, you know, you've been really, um, vocal on stuff on the West Hawk Chats and a lot. So a lot of people know who you are, but for those that don't, um, you know, just give a quick introduction to who you are, what you do, the areas you serve. Uh, and if you don't mind, give us a little bit of history. Give us some background info as to, uh, why this particular calling in life has found you. And why now that, uh, you can't sleep during thunderstorms and things like that. Yeah, yeah. So first off, thank you guys for inviting me on. Yeah, yeah. So thanks for inviting me on guys. And uh, yeah, so I'm Ryan Grohl. I run SmartWay Communications. It's the neediest girlfriend I've ever created. Um, so it, uh, the Wisp was something I started in, uh, 2014 in Eastern Ohio. Uh, initially it was a joke, um, still sometimes is, but it initially was a joke that we just kind of were like, I think I can do that. Uh, I had a friend that needed internet and it was like 30 miles away. And, uh, I said, let's just, you know, how hard could it be? And, uh, so we started diving in. And before we knew it. Surprise. Oh yeah. Yeah, like never ending. Um, but it was, you know, we started connecting tower to tower, um, just ubiquity Air Max M gear back in the day. And, uh, you know, I bought 900 megahertz gear, not knowing anything about anything was like, oh yeah, this has the best propagation. Of course we're going to use this. And, uh, started using that for distribution and quickly pivoted away. Um, but, uh, we, we started out just to connect some friends. Um, before we knew it, people at, you know, the coffee shops and things, you know, rural Ohio, uh, the gathering places. They started hearing about what we were doing and, uh, churches, schools, hospitals, uh, police departments and, you know, neighboring, you know, towns started asking. Can you do that for me? And I'm like, I guess, you know, you really need that. Do you really want that? I always had good internet. I lived in town. And, uh, so we just, you know, started hooking people up and, uh, you know, what really pivoted it from being just a side project to being my career and all that consumes me is, uh, a woman we had installed. She had like, she was connected with a different Wisp, like old Cambium FSK gear, getting, you know, a couple hundred kilobits and, uh, just poorly connected. We went and switched her over and she came out of the plate of cookies and she like cried on my shoulder. I'm like, lady, it's just Netflix. Like, I don't understand the emotion here. And, uh, she explained that the local school district did away with textbooks, gave everybody Chromebooks, but their internet didn't, wouldn't suffice for it. So they, uh, they were going to McDonald's and, uh, talent 10 miles away for four hours every night to do homework. And, uh, we made it so that they no longer had to travel and could do everything at home. And, uh, it was like, ah, there's something to this. And, uh, we were like, this is just what we want to do. So we've, we've blown up now we're in 12 counties. We're on track to be in roughly 20 counties over the next two years. And we're also working on a bunch of acquisitions. So that's, that's where we are and who I am. Very cool. Yeah. When people don't have access and they finally do, like it's just a shift. Like my parents are living the middle of nowhere, Georgia, and they finally got reliable service versus running Raggedy LTE for years. And mom called me. She's almost in two years. She's like, I can do all this stuff now. We could pay her bill. Like dad can sit up on my watching the storms on the radar on this phone. Like it's just, you know, you almost take it for granted. If you have access and reliable broadband for a long time, you know, realizing just the quality of life shift it is. So, you know, a lot of people joke it's just about Netflix or whatever, but you know, so many things are reliant on having a good stable connection. They haven't necessarily the fastest, you know, they're on a super high speed thing, but like now they can do all the stuff that I've taken for granted over the years. So, you know, upgrade your phones and pay bills without spending 30 minutes getting wound up to it. So, it's definitely, I mean, yeah, it's a little cliche, but it changes your life for sure. For sure. Oh, it really does. It's not. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, it's not cliche. I mean, it's, it's, it's fact, you know, like you said, you know, it's not about speed. It's about reliability and having something that's there when you need it is really what it comes down to. You know, so it is, it is life changing. I mean, you know, I got the places where there was an Internet and like it seems like your life just falls apart. You're like, wait, wait, I can't email. Hold on. I was like, I don't even need a fast connection for email. I don't want to, I don't want to watch Netflix. I want to just email something and you can't even, you can't even do that sometimes. And your whole world stops like, oh, I've got to change what I'm doing right now and come up with an alternate plan of some sort. You know, it's, it's huge. Yeah, it's, you know, it's amazing. I take it for granted because I've always been connected. I've been a very connected person, tech nerd, you know, from the time I was old enough to put my hands on a keyboard, you know, type of thing. And so I've just always been there and didn't realize that five minutes outside of town, I didn't have a lot of friends that were out of town. So five minutes outside of our downtown, you just, it's digital desert. And, you know, once I started connecting people, you start to realize the scope and scale of things. And then I got really into the off-road community, ATVs and stuff like Southern West Virginia, the Hatfield, McCoy trails, all of that. That was like my playground for years. And I'd go down there and then you get to talking because like, that's like salt of the earth, like the most amazing people are down there. And you start talking about people and they ask you what you do and you mention it. And then they get like this twinkle in their eye. They're like, how can you help me? And then so I started connecting communities down there just as like side project, like different campgrounds and cabins and stuff. But there were areas down there that just, you had no cell service. You had a landline that only worked sometimes and things like that. I'd start stringing connections along. And the whole thing just really, really grew. Yeah, I, story time I guess. I was doing a lot of work in a past life in West Virginia along the Ohio River. The whole valley, we were coming all the way down and shooting over the big project. But, you know, we were up on mountaintops, you know, in an hour in the middle of nowhere. You know, we're on top of the mountain working at the tower site. And, you know, people would start rolling up in ATVs and trucks. And we're like, man, we're kind of in banjo country down here. Yeah, we're a little bit nervous and stuff until we quickly realized, you know, we were like, what are you guys doing? You know, they're like, oh, we're just, we got to check our email. We got to pay some bills. So they would find like the one spot on the highest part within a 30, 40 minute drive. We're like, you're going to sell service to, you know, try to live their lives and stuff. So we're like, what are you guys doing? We're hooking up internet service. You know, we're putting in some CBRS gear and stuff. And we got, man, we got free sodas. We got free Gatorades, like sandwiches, people are like, yes, yes, anything you need. You get stuck. Give us a call. So it was, you know, yeah, it's, you know, when you're, when you're that far isolated, it's tough for sure. For sure. So primarily what areas do you cover in Ohio? Just generally, you know, generally geographically, I guess. Yeah. So we're considered East Central Ohio. But it's like East Central to Southeast corridor. So big towns that we're in between, like our headquarters is equidistant to Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh. So if you draw a circle on all three to intersect, like we are right here. And so it's like an hour and 45 minutes drive to each of those. And so we serve kind of, we've ballooned out from that. Now we did an acquisition last year of a company and that put us all the way to the Ohio River picked up Jefferson County, Carroll County, Harrison County. So we're Tuscaross County here for those of you familiar with Ohio and it's, you know, we've kind of just continued to spider out and grow further and further beyond that. But our primary locations are that East Central Ohio into Southeast Ohio zone. Our goal because if you look at the broadband maps, Ohio, the Southeast is where it's really lacking here. And that's our goal is just to continue to push into the Southeast. Now, are you doing, are you guys doing a fiber or two? Are you primarily just wireless or what are you doing there? So we are 100% wireless today. We are currently exploring fiber. It's, you know, it's just another tool. Our belief is that fixed wireless has the speed of deployment advantage and the problem is here today. And I always, and I'm not trying to go on a tangent, but I always go with this tail of two third graders. You got the third grader that you can throw up fixed wireless and solve their internet problem today. And then you got the third grader that turns into an eighth grader before they're served by the guy that was building fiber. And that's, you know, yeah. It's just for us. It's one of those where I'm just going to continue pushing into my wireless full tilt. And then my fiber, I'm going to come back through and build to my areas where I know I have the base. And so I haven't, fiber has not been immediate on my radar because for me, it's, I can connect more families with the wireless and make a bigger impact in the communities. I mean, then if I go put fiber on three streets over the course of a year, you know, thank you. That's, I mean, that's, that's beautiful. And that's really what it's about. I wish more people would see it, see it that way. You know, I mean, I, I see a lot of people utilizing, you know, a lot of resources to go after areas that have so many resources being thrown into it already with competition and stuff like that. It's like, why do you need to be the fourth or fifth person in there and fight for that? I was like, there's people who, like you said, are just dying to be able to, you know, communicate via email or just simply browse the internet to make their life easier, you know, and you're trying to give gigabit to people who already have hundreds of megabits. It's just, it's just a waste and waste of money and resources. But, you know, what you do with your money is your business. But I applaud you for going after and upping those who really need it, man. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you. And that's, you know, you just touched on a really big point. There's trying to be the fourth or fifth player in a market that's already saturated with broadband is tough. And our county that I'm in, the central parts of the county always had like maybe one choice, like Spectrum, the cable company. We competed really well in those markets, but now there's some fiber players that have spun up Frontier just overbuilt with Fiber in the same market. And that's the thing that really hurts is, you know, Frontier and then there's a new company that just spun up that is an offshoot of another company. I won't dive into that. But they're putting fiber right next to Frontier's new fiber plant in the same ducts. And you're like, cool, the people in town now have a 12th option. But what about the guy five minutes from downtown? And it just keeps happening over and over again. So I made a mistake and deployed in one of those areas. And then two fiber players came in, you know, a month after I lit up and started running their fiber in the right of ways. And it's one of those where it's hard for me to go and attract customers there because, you know, that magic five letter F word fiber people just are drawn to it. But what's crazy is the quality of experience that we deliver a wireless is at or better than what they're getting from Joe blow fiber that just, you know, doesn't care about the customer in the end of the day. So that's the it's the hard part. And I feel I feel that the quality of install is going down too, because we know that it's just so much more difficult and time-consuming to put in fiber. So I think that a lot of these providers are cutting corners and just doing things willy nilly and fast and furious just to get into ground to say, we're here, stay away. And then you get crappy. Do you know where when you when you have a technology like wireless to fix wireless, which naturally deploys quickly, you don't have time to waste, let's say, or spend a little bit on making sure you do it the right way. You know, and it's I don't know. That's a huge point for sure. The quality of install is one where you see these sub contractors coming in for the big guys and they'll go in and just, I mean, I drive around town and it just makes my skin crawl because you see all the fiber. Yeah. And like our super power. Oh, yeah, exactly. And our superpower as wireless provider is our customer service. Everybody knows customer service is a big win for wisps, but like we take a white glove approach where our installers like my installers going to take a bunch of extra time to make the customer happy. I applaud them. I don't reprimand them for it. It's one of those where they're making it go. Whereas you see like the subcontractor that rolls in punches a two inch hole to put a single strand of fiber into the house, doesn't even seal it up, has, you know, giant loops all over the place on the side of the house. And I'm like, I don't understand what they're doing. And our town's just looking trashy and trashy because there's more stuff being strewn all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's crazy. I remember when, you know, you used to see, you can see the fiber runs going through towns and down main streets and stuff like that. It's like, now you drive around. It's like five and six strands on the same pole. You know, I'm just like, holy cow. It's like, you know, you need more roughage. You need more fiber in your diet. I guess, I don't know. You know, it's a little too much, maybe. That's it. That's it. Yeah. When they started, they started moving poles and stuff around here doing some highway expansion stuff. And it's a complete show because you've got to wait for all the different carriers to move everything over. And I don't think it's going to get any better. I mean, you know, so much as government funding's pumping in. So there's just all these pop-up companies that are just looking to add a ton of subscriber count as fast as they can, ball it up with a bunch of little providers and sell it off. And exactly like you said, like the end install part is not done well. You know, okay. So the plant's probably good 20, 30 years, whatever it may be, right? But, you know, eventually all this stuff is going to be, you know, all the electronics are sketched. The cabinet slides are sketched. There's just so much of that stuff out there. And that's even mentioned, like the poor quality of service, like not the actual data service, but the customer service part two, right? Because everyone's like, oh, I hate spectrum. We got Joe Bob's fiber company, you know, as part of some huge mega court balled up. And they're all quickly realized that, hey, guess what? Their service sucks too. So, you know. Or they're owned by spectrum now. So in fact, you like leave spectrum to go to this new guy that comes to the town just to get bought out by spectrum and be back on like, what the fuck is this? It's like all those ghost kids. They're ghost ISPs, kind of like the ghost kitchens that popped up during COVID. We're like, oh, I'm just going to order from Wingshack local place. And you're like, oh shit, this place is actually chilly. So. Yeah, yeah. We'll see a lot of that. Tomorrow down the street. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's, so you bring up a point in my thought of this whole thing is now the government grants are coming in all these federal dollars, state dollars that are coming in and these guys are building fiber out in areas where there's two or three passings per mile. We have houses. We have areas where there's one house per mile in our county. And, you know, that's desolate stuff. And so they're paying to run these. But, and that's all great. The government money went to it. My children's children's children will pay for the, you know, the grants that have been given out, but it's one of those where whenever somebody, a drunk's going down the road and hits a pool, somebody's got to operate that. So like the long, the carrier. Yeah, sure. Your plant was paid for and you got to pocket probably 50% of what you were received but because we know that game, but it's one of those where, how are they going to support it long term? They're not going to, you know, somebody's going to have a cut and then in six days they'll get somebody out. I mean, there was a windstorm here. Straight line, straight line tornado, the Dure Show or whatnot that took down a thousand trees in one of our communities that took down power lines, the high voltage lines and stuff. Frontier in the rural areas had 18 days of outage on their DSL plant because they just, they didn't have anybody to go fix it and it's like, you think it's going to get better now that you've got fiber out there? It's just as difficult. You still have the problem with the man hours. Whereas, you know, little Joe Wiss, we were out there rebuilding stuff next day and had customers online inside 24 hours. Yeah. But in the end, you know, it's all about providing, you know, a local touch, quality of service of the data quality of customer service, you know, and there's going to be some tough times when the customers sort of hop around, but eventually, you know, in the long term, they're going to settle where the service and the value is. So, you know, it's just going to be a little, little janky and a little sketchy in the process for sure. But, um, yeah, I guess I'll go back to sort of the detail side of thing or the, the Wiss specific size of things. So you guys are running, you know, you run a lot of ubiquity stuff you have in the past, but you know, for the last, what, two years now I've done that. So, you know, how's that experience been with the Toronto stuff? It's the new, the new hot buzz, right? I think most of the ubiquity stuff, you know, is a known, known sort of element. Yeah. It's getting all worked up about the Toronto Conversations sometimes too, but. Is this the part of, is this the part of the podcast where we talk about that stuff? Yeah. Let's get it out of the way. So, so yeah, we've been, we deployed Toronto in October of 21. I bought it because I didn't believe anything that was said at all. You're lying to me. Let me go throw my money at you. Yeah. Yeah. George Chalmouth at Toronto will tell you, like he and I met in Vegas and I was just like, before you sit down, I want you to know that I don't believe anything you say because I can't put my hands on the gear. And I was like, and if I get to put my hands on the gear and I like it, I'll tell people, but if I get to put my hands on the gear and I don't like it, I'm really going to tell people. And so I, I wired him money the next day and had the gear up before the end of October. And we were pretty impressed. It does, you know, they've still got the laws of physics to worry about. So they're not, you know, shooting through a mile of brick walls and, you know, all these crazy things that you sometimes see stuff reported. But I will say that, you know, what expectations they set with us. They've met. There's not been any fantasy land. And when we stretch the technology too far that they make sure to tell us they're not like, oh, yeah, you could push it 50% further. You know, things like that. Good. We went through a lot of pain points in the beginning. They're a young company. I mean, we've seen that over and over and over again in this industry from everybody. So it's, is it a magic bullet? I don't necessarily know if there's a magic bullet with anybody. It's another tool in our toolbox. It is expensive for for capital cost. So it's, it's one of those where we're still going to be billed now. I mean, you know, I talk to you all the time to us about our horns. We, we still have to build out with other technologies just to make our model financially viable. But there are areas where the five-year-old's noise floor is just unbearable and their product seems to work better than anything we've had. There are areas that, you know, we get customers connected that we couldn't before. You know, the, the, you can soak a few hundred thousand dollars in inventory really quick with that product though. So it's, it is one of those things that, you know, you've got to have the backing or the stomach for debt to make it happen. And it's been working really well for us. From a technical standpoint, you know, there's a lot of things that it doesn't necessarily do as far standards go. So we've had to work around that with our network and in, in deployments. So that those would be some of the annoyances. Those are some of the annoyances, but it's as far as, you know, the pros go, it's just one of those that we have, we have very good success on, on the equipment. Now I will say, I'm kind of over the place a little bit, I will say one of the things that bed us is we thought it was such a unicorn when we first got it that we wanted to exploit it, but that was wintertime. And then springtime, we were truck roller fix our terrible, terrible deployments. So, you know, it's, it is, you know, that's rope this back into orbit where we're back in reality now. And it's just another tool in the toolbox. Yeah, no, that's good. I mean, it's good that it's doing a lot of the stuff they said, right? I mean, you know, everybody gives me a hard time like I'm anti it and it's not. It's it's really, you know, I look at it from a big picture, right? Everything, not just what it does, but how the company acts, how they support you and all the other things that I think are important to look for when you're judging on whether you should go with that particular equipment. And one of the things early on that bothered me, right, was, you know, people postings like, Hey, look at this thing. I have it posting backwards 180 degrees away from the tower. And I was like, I know it was you. You were one of them, right? I was like, Hey, I'm getting 500 mega and what bothered me about that is like, it's cool that that worked. And I was just like, you gotta teach people, people gonna think like, Hey, that's, that's acceptable and it's not, right? As you found out, right, leaves came and you had to turn things and readjust things. And it just, for me, the way it was being marketed at first, because it does incredible things hands down, right? And it seems like it defies laws of physics sometimes, you know, that, you know, it was making people think that that was acceptable. I was like, you're going to build out your network like that, and then you're going to spend so much time going back to correct it when, you know, things come back in physics by chewing the ass, you know, so, but it's no, it's, it's definitely, it's definitely proven itself and being able to do a lot of things that people claimed it would do. There's still a lot of things that people say that I haven't seen it do yet, you know, but time will tell. Well, that's, and that's capacity. I haven't seen, I haven't seen a 200, you know, a BN with 200 RNs on it pushing gig to everybody like they said it would, you know, I mean, it's just like, it's just never going to happen. That's really tough. Yeah, I've got a BN. So I have a site where all the subscribers have pretty good view to one AP, but there's three APs up there. And I've shut two of the APs off to roam a little over a hundred glance to it and it held up pretty well. But I didn't do any long-term testing because it just, you know, the BNs are up there they're paid for and might as well just turn them on and let them roll. But the one thing that, that I will say is every time we put a piece of gear out there, we grew forward, but we also say that we had to grow, but how much of that do we have to grow backward? So how much do we have to support every time we put something out there? And Toronto has been a product that, you know, in the beginning I didn't see as much benefit on the not having to grow as much backward because we were doing some poor installs. We also just didn't know the capability as without all platforms. When we did LT, we did the same thing. We overextended ourselves and created a nightmare. Well, now it's one of those we've, you've got some products out there that we don't have to grow backward as much. So I'm going to shout out to you guys because the horns have made it to where we don't have to grow backward as far whenever we go and put our cambium and our ubiquity stuff out there. We use the horns and generally we don't have to touch things as often because they're just, they're zoned in and focused in. We've got our pre-seam stuff, pre-seam set it and figure it out. I don't have to ever worry about growing backwards there. Our aviag gear, aviag stuff we put it up there. We don't have to grow backwards. And now our Toronto stuff, now that we've got it dialed in, we go and we deploy and we put that stuff out but we generally don't have to come back and touch it unless somebody pushes their own button internally, which has happened. So it's one of those where it's sort of a black magic box that sits in the corner that you just don't want to touch but as we get further and further experienced with it we're learning more about its limitations and what not to do and what to do. So when you're looking at deploy a new pop or someone a new tower slide or something like that, I mean when you're making the choice as to which gear that you're using, I mean you're looking at terrain, you're looking at your Arpoos for the areas and stuff but what are some other factors that you sort of evaluate when you're like, you know how much do I want to spend on this pop? How am I going to backhaul it and things like that? Yeah, so we do a lot of deep dives. We'll simulate and it's like Google Network Planner or even CNHE, like I've paid for CNHE license for a place I know I'm going to deploy just don't know what and then I'll tinker with a bunch of different coverage maps just to see what's going on in the next work from there. Generally what we've been doing is, so Toronto has been kind of a de facto it gets deployed. But then what we do is we stick a Toronto RN out and then like why about grouping of 15 houses for let's say. So the model becomes do I spend, let's just say 1250 bucks by the time you buy an RN you pay for the truck roll you know all these supplies, do I pay for a Toronto RN for each of those or do I put one RN in that 15 homes and I put a few horns up and I put light beams at those end users and I ended up spending less money and yes they're fed with that but if I get all 15 homes and everyone wants a 100 meg package and I say okay well I need more bandwidth I just go stick another RN up there I'm still out two RNs a few horns and things like that so by the time I'm done it's like I had four installs cost to go do 15 subscribers. So Toronto is kind of our de facto on their macro deployments but as far as behind the macro deployments we've got to use other technologies to make it work for our model because I'm not we're in Appalachia Appalachia it's one of those where I can't go and spend that kind of dollar for everyone and then charge market acceptable rates you know we're at $65 for a 100 meg plan and if I went and tried to charge you know even that I'm the premium price point for not the most speed in a lot of these markets but my rural stuff I am the most speed but I'm also not cheap so if I wanted to go in and do you know if I had to go Toronto to every one of those subscribers and didn't have the other tools in the toolkit if I limited myself I'd have to be $130 a month $120 a month and then I would be limiting the number of subscribers so that's that's kind of the price point and also the terrain which we know about but the big thing is that's how we decide where we can lay stuff because the the days of you know well going down to you know California or Texas or whatever and you get these like housing developments where 130 houses will be sitting there like we have those in town but like town has the 12 other for providers when we go out it's like oh there's we call them compounds because it's like there's a family that'll have six houses that are on the homestead there'll be six more houses and it's like you've got to figure out how you can serve those guys without spending $1500 because if you're going to spend $1500 passing there's other technologies that you can do for sure yeah it definitely makes us deployment methods I mean there's a lot more paper to pencil that you've got to figure out and the mechanics behind it you know and it just goes to there's so many different layouts out there and it's something like Florida versus Texas Oklahoma California Valley Land you know Agland you know rural versus semi like there's so many options and this is why that you know the tool in the toolbox approach is not only the best approach to trade but I mean realistically it's got to be the only you know and this is where we're seeing a lot of success even those that are doing fiber the hybrid networks and stuff like that because there's there are so many different types of options too right like with fiber it's just fiber you know it's like you got faster fiber and slower fiber you got more strands and less strands but you know longer distance and shorter distance but at the end you still got a trench the same thing it's like this you know there's more than one way to get there with wireless you know and it really it really helps it helps yeah that's been a big thing that we stress $70 a dollar OPM as we call it other people's money we get to show them a good better best setup we'll go to them and show them hey if you want this you know covered but you just this your budget is here down at the floor this is what you can get and then we just walk through you know as we augment coverage and at the end of the day we get these really complex quotes together and builds and they're always there okay so you mentioned using Aviat you know Aviat's a great vendor you know very very popular in this sort of market space are you are you able to you know use that to feed most of your tower back calls are you mixing with like fiber fees or what does that look just dependent look or location dependent yeah so it's a couple different things it's location dependent but also cost pretty robust backbone our primary sites and we'll fiber to there and we usually do a 2 gig 5 gig or 10 gig just depending on the demand and what the price point was and we've got geodiverse carriers and then we'll ring them together with an Aviat so like if we have two sites where we have fiber we'll throw between those and Aviat and then we'll go and we'll start stringing you know all of the smaller in string off to them but the Aviat stuff you know is part we consider it just like fiber so for us it's one of those fiber nearby as long as I'm not more than three or four hops away it's been rock solid for us and the way I look at it is you know by the time I'm done with licensing and everything I'm let's say 15 grand in or whatever the ROI on that is so short whenever you've got fiber carriers you can really look at it and go okay well in three years that Aviat link is just gold and so we've been we've been doing that augment in between the two I've got fiber dropped into 10 spots right now in the network I have roughly 50 macro sites across the network and so we've got we've got a decent bit of Aviat gear not as much as I'd like but we're slowly but surely you know rolling that out further and further into the network how long have you been using those and kind of what's your your feedback like is the the QOE aspect of it or I guess you know the traffic flattening and stuff like that you guys are a lot of conversational Matt you seem to find it working for you really well yeah so I can't I don't know that I can claim first but I was one of the first customers that reached out I worked with Garrett directly it was like so early in their business I had virtualized Pre-Sera back in 2017 2016 I think we started with that and pre-seem rolled out and I called and this was before they even did the QOE at all it was just for the you know just the graphing the telemetry so I reached out I wanted that I ran it alongside of my Pre-Sera and Garrett reached out one day he's like hey I got this new shaping FQ Cottle I want you to try it and I was kind of just ignored it I was like yeah right that sounds like a pipe dream just sounds too good to be true and finally he called me one day he's like hey he's like try it for a month and see how it is just turn your stuff off just please give me a shot and I'm like alright I already had the appliance in play I did it we turned off our Pre-Sera box we routed traffic through the Pre-Seme appliance fully and just said we turned on shaping and he's like it's on and I'm like is it really on like I didn't notice and our call volume like we we were data nerds like we analytics on every front so from call center to Facebook messenger or whatever however customers get into us we track that so our call volume took like a sharp nose dive on the support line and I'm like well that's I don't know if we did something cool in the network or if the Pre-Semes really doing that so we let it run for the month like Garrett asked and then at the end of the month Pre-Sera while I went talked to Garrett and turned off his QoE and our call volume made this sharp climb back up and I was like well that's you know that that right there is hard evidence for me so I dove in had first and we've stuck with them the entire time we just went through a recent core upgrade we use IP architects and just did a huge core upgrade to the data center and it's just been a bulletproof product for us how many subscribers you guys have a few thousand so organically and then we have so there's a lot to this but we're on the acquisition train we expect to be just about triple our size over the next year and which is through acquisitions organic growth we're ramping up pretty hard we have a steep project that we launched with another operator it's jobs initiative through the state of Ohio they've put up the funds to go after these sites there's about 205 sites so far that'll be mapped out and then we're a wholesale carrier of that we're the exclusive in this region so right now we've got we have five sites there's live we have three new sites that went live this morning the first 50 are all Toronto the next 50 we're going to make do them in chunks of 50 but on those they're going into real bandwidth hungry markets multi-gig backhaul they're usually going on Crown Castle American Tower sites you know big macro sites and I don't have to pay any of the construction cost or any of that so it really gets us ramped up and so we're we're we're staffed up we're over staffed for our current size but we've staffed up in anticipation of these going live because we're wow huge very cool what sort of staff count do you have roughly kind of to support all that right now like you mentioned yes including me we have 12 so in that we have our network operations manager we have sales manager and accounts like customer attention accounts manager and then we have the outside shop foreman so he manages the tower climbers and field staff so you know we have the we also use product from turnkey isp so we have one remote employee just to catch overflow so when network blows up or we have some you know like we sent 27,000 postcards out last week and those 27,000 postcards generated a couple hundred leads so and they're still generating leads today so just it overruns the small staff that I have for inside of the house including me though no it's pretty clean and efficient you know one of the things at least I like asking you know any sort of things what are your biggest hurdles or challenges and a lot of the times it's labor some people you know they've gotten luckier they've built it from something where they already had kind of an existing labor force but a lot of time people's the biggest hurdle is finding quality labor and you know here what's that look like or do you have much other sort of looming challenges that you're much more concerned about at the moment yeah so I've been very fortunate on the labor front so we're part of a larger private equity group and I hate the word private equity because they're more like family office just with private equity pockets so they've been very it sounds so dark and like scary and evil too you know private equity you're like no like good folks with money yeah that's it and they're I mean their CEO started out as a customer and just wanted to invest and you know it's been wonderful they've really helped us with the labor side because I mean they've given us a name a backing and you know so we're able to offer just benefits that are unheard of in this space and pay packages that are also you know I have no shortage of applicants whenever we go and put a job out there we're able to and we keep our people so that's the best part is like we put our people in there and then you know as long as they stick with our core values I mean we will work with whatever struggles come up in their lives and make it happen you know looming challenges are the things that the hurdles that we face you know it's it's deployment sometimes that gets sticky you know we've got a lot of park shortage impact that's affected us you know we were deploying faster than we can buy for a long time you know we'd go buy out you know there would be a specific microtik skew that we'd want and we'd go buy every distributor we'd just buy their inventory and then shipping containers show up at the warehouse and then you deploy all of that and you're thinking in the back of your mind I've got all these parts and then you've deployed all of them and deployed you know you've got deployments waiting so that's been the marketing side we've been we're known in our home turf so we have a name here but we've branched out now we're like yesterday at an hour 25 minute drive and that wasn't even to the far side of my network and when you get into that these people have no idea who we are and they've been burnt by all these flyby nights and the satellite players that resell he's net and stuff so they're looking at us like we're just you know foreign and there's no there's no insight for them to know who we are they look at the web and they're like they don't know what to believe and everybody ignores your marketing so that's been you know we've we hired a real big hitter on the marketing front we've been working on that for the last two months but that's been our thing is you build it and you figure you built the watering trough they're gonna come drink and then you're like they're choosing to have no internet in some of these markets that you've dropped of six figure investment into and it's now they're starting to trickle in but you want that initial impact where you get a hundred sign ups the day you announce that it's live and sometimes you just don't get that and that that hurts I would think also at some point I mean I don't I don't know how the financial model works for that right but you know like you said when you have to drive two hours to get to one end of your network or you start growing it seems like at some point it's time to open up some local offices over there because all you need is you know the one person who answers the phone in that office that's a local that all of a sudden now you have root stare right now all of a sudden you're not just some outside you know entity that's coming in and it's gonna burn everybody right exactly and that's part of what we're that's a really good point and that's what we've explored and that's part of what we're doing one of these acquisitions we're working on is when we buy someone it's not to go in gut it and do our thing with it it's to buy it and then you know we have offices and people to play and bring those people up to stuff with what we're doing and take and there's a lot of times we'll go in there's something we acquired and we'll learn a bunch of things that you know we just oh they do this better than us and we'll adopt that across the entire company but then we also have the local office at that point but some of these markets you know through the state project we're dropping in where we just have you know the logistics it is something that we need to explore further and that's a really good point yeah that's a tough note of the crack when you're like oh you're from an hour and a half away unless like a whole another land right we haven't known your family's family from you know four generations back kind of deal but um you know it's just tough but uh okay um what's the other oh the being part of the group so every time you post something where you've got pictures from in the warehouse you're like hey I got this new tower I got hey I got this cool new thing and no one cares about that they're only concerned about this massive warehouse you guy I always just laugh it's just so funny yeah man it's hunter and ISP supplies bust my balls about that all the time um but it's that warehouse is a treat um so part of the the private equity side they have a bunch of different spots and in that one we have a couple hundred thousand square foot they also have a half million square foot building the rubber manufacturing um so but it's it's crazy like we kind of we get we get access to things that we probably don't deserve you know what I mean just through this connection and we take it for granted but that was the first I never realized how like special that truly was until the first time I'd ever posted a picture in there they got like 200 comments of everybody just like I drive my duly in there and with a 30 foot trailer and full turnarounds in there and I'm not even using 100 donuts just nothing at all of the space and so it is it is really nice um it was a just you know with that much space it became a disorganized mess for us in one spot so we recently took two days and just I mean whipped it into shape and we've you know actually we pre-built all of our towers in there we break them down so that they're semi-loadable and we haul them out that way and that's a you know that's like a super power being able to build something like that indoors and it's an old grocer um it was like a grocery warehouse so I think the entire facility is 325,000 square foot it's it's crazy yeah it's and you know you don't realize just how much of an efficiency booster it is like you said projects right yeah yeah I visit a lot of um or just a lot of companies in general that are related to this and you know you spend half your time trying to find where oh this is for this project and it's two months down the road or excess inventory and it's buried under 80 pallets of other stuff right so being able to kind of spread out and organize is super awesome so I'm also like oh man I can put like a cooker in there and work in the warehouse actually have like a black stone grill that sits in the corner and they're always using it so you go over there some days and it smells real good smart people yeah that's it that's it hey man you keep phones fed they tend to stick around for sure oh it works so I mean this house stayed married this long right so so you know Ron we've asked you a lot of questions we've just kind of been remembering you know with questions and stuff like that you know as we sort of tail off this little bit you know is there anything specifically you will really bring up talk about a sew box or anything like that yeah I think something that I'd like to talk about is politics and I know I hate politics but I don't know if you guys have fallen or heard what yeah if you guys have fallen or heard House Bill 33 so it's coming coming to a state near you this just happened to Ohio where the state budget a Senator McCauley proposed this verbiage or legislation into the state budget and we fought like hell every day to try and get it removed and it didn't happen this House Bill 33 got a provision that says that no wireless carrier can get state provided funds so where you've got locked out of and so what happened is Searchlight Capital which is a GPIs group he he slid that to McCauley but rumor has it there's about eight or nine other states that they're proposing that to it right now as well and so it's just one of those things where I kind of just always had my blinders on and ignored what was happening in the capital and now I actually signed the papers today and submitted them gonna be state coordinator here in Ohio with WISPA oh right now yeah it's I've always just kind of ignored it because to me it just didn't affect me like nobody ever had their eye on this area like we're not Cleveland Columbus Pittsburgh you know one of those areas but now you know there's there's serious impact for that so it's gonna force this into fiber I think a little bit but there's also gonna be some workarounds but you know but we learned that we weren't quick enough to act and we weren't in the ear of the right people to get it you know removed so I think the other states that are gonna face this we've got you know we got a little bit of experience fighting with them we haven't won one yet but I'd like to see WISPA fight you know to get that removed elsewhere so that's just something I'd bring up so do you know what these other states are I think last week off and a week out of town has killed me on connectivity with the folks that I was meeting with so Steve Schwerble at WISPA I'll defer to him and I can give you if you have his email maybe put it in the description of the video but Steve would be someone good to talk to at WISPA he has his ear to the ground really well on this there's another piece to this that I guess I should have mentioned some of the things that some of the states are doing and I think it was Montana and don't quote me 100% on that but I think Montana where they were setting like the excessive cost was so you couldn't use money on wireless unless it was like an excessive cost to do fiber or some other player but they set their dollar amount to some like six figure you know per passing it was just like you're just always one house per mile it's going to be under the $150,000 threshold and so that's another thing that I just I feel like as WISPs you know we don't have the big bag of money to run around and hand the politicians whereas the cable guys do and the fiber guys do and it just it leaves us in the dust but I think us being you know J.J. McGrath is somebody that I would I would give huge props to because he's in general I've not been and I know a lot of WISP operators haven't been so you know if we were more vocal and more in the the spotlight and you know showing what we do because you go ask 50 politicians none of them would pick our market segment is my guess it's one of those they just don't know what we do and they don't know the impact that we've had so the target is specifically the WISP space but it is your Verizon and your T-Mobile and stuff like that sure but a lot of your WISP space is a casualty of that yeah right because I can get to you 99% of politicians out there don't know what a a true WISP is right they're just like oh wireless is must be AT&T and Verizon and they're bad yeah so we're going to go with this other mega-corp that is like 1% less bad I guess I don't know so I think that's a lot of it and like we just got caught up in the frag part of that grenade too yeah that's probably a very fair assumption to make yeah I think it's extremely accurate actually but that's that's just the way we are we're scrappy we you know we like to fight and do things like we are with the big boys too because we are fighting against them as well so it's one one big kind of wireless family they're just you know they suck but anyway that yeah maybe Steve should be a good guy to get on the show maybe our next podcast will be with him and we can discuss it because I think you know I mean it's always the terrible news to hear that it's actually happening I mean we what we've been hearing is you know everything went from fiber only now they're starting to talk about other technologies to bring it in so as going backwards again I think we need to bring some some light to this find out that they need to you know start talking to the right people there and fight this so it doesn't happen yeah the sounds like a good one the thing on us so Steve brought that to my attention initially and then we assembled a group of lobbyists and government affairs folks from I mean we had dish network on the call three calls a week on average is what we were doing we had dish network on the call we had Cincinnati Bell Toronto's government affairs people we had metalink I don't know if you know them they're amazing they had their folks on there Phil Mag was on there it just I mean we had like 30 people on each call each week and like three calls and then the lobbyists would go in and do things we brought in a political consultant here at Smartway and had that person in the years of like lieutenant governor and things but it just there wasn't enough need they felt that it wasn't a big enough thing to spend political capital on other things that were sucking all the air out of the room and that's why where we landed so it's one of those where if you can spend up a similar effort in other states and make a bigger stink earlier I think you might get further along yeah and this the something we've actually talked to you know in previous podcasts about is the the political side of things and you know isn't yeah the the national level is really unapproachable for most folks out there but there's so much work to level the the county even the state you know and I think a lot of your state politicians are used to be a sort of head hunted and poached by the bigger companies but there's you know there's a number of folks out there that understand what a you know a local business can provide and there's been so much of a push for like local local has got a lot of weight to it I think a lot more weight than it has in a long time right so it's been nasty but you know it's really a part of the game so especially with so much of this new funding you know it's all state controlled you know there's a lot of benefits to that there's some pain points as well but I mean there's a lot of benefits to each state kind of determining how they're going to do it on their own and you know there's a lot of places and still a lot of flexibility so you know what you're saying is get out and get involved I mean no that's it it's been a great great conversation I appreciate you coming on I like your little things you've got going up that a license plate 100 megabit you know I'm a big proponent of that you know the gig to the home thing is a waste of money and resources and I like your little 3D pattern you have out there looks familiar yeah actually you know what's funny is I got a Facebook memory I want to say it might have been yesterday so it was weird that like that that popped up with this show coming up but yeah it's I always try to have some trinkets that are they're you know the people that don't know what wireless is that walk in and see that RF pattern print ask what in the hell is up there but so that's always a fun like I let them guess first they'd never want to say what they're guessing but it's it's a lot of fun but I appreciate you guys having me on for sure it's been fun talking yep anyone looking to you know reach out to or find you what's the best way for they to find you yeah so you can go on our website thinksmartway.com that's T H I N K smartway.com and then I am I good to share my email cause I'm an open book I always have been so yeah sure so I'll you can even put it in the description if you like it's R G R E so I'm an open book if there's anything if you're new with starting up I'll tell you where to go for the best taco trucks if you are a an experience with that just wants to to van or connect please still hesitate to reach out and go from there awesome awesome we really appreciate it man thank you so much so Tossos folks looking for us of course our website rfelements.com where you could always email Tossos at rfelements.com or Kaleb at rfelements.com alright alright well until next time everyone y'all be good out there bye take care see ya