 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you from virtual PTC 21. Joining me today is Greg Elliott, VP of Business Development for 1623 Farnham. Greg, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks for having me. So, you know, I think you're no rookie to these sort of talks with us and we certainly know you well. But for our viewers who may not know about 1623 Farnham, can you give us just a little background of who you are? Sure, you bet. So, 1623 Farnham is the Carrier Hotel Edge Data Center. We're located in the U.S. Midwest. We're located in Omaha, which is a great spot to be from a location standpoint, right in the middle of the U.S., middle of North America, sitting on North, South, East, West and everything in between fiber outs. So, we're seeing lots of new fiber and existing fibers. So, yeah, it's a good place to be. Right, and so another thing you're not new to is PTC, obviously this year is a little bit different than any in the past. But what is it that makes you want to attend PTC year after year and to be supporting it again this year in its new format? Yeah, I mean, listen, we all would love to be in Honolulu right now, face-to-face, but it is what it is. Hopefully next year we'll be able to be there. But even virtually, we want to support PTC. It's been, you look at conferences on a yearly basis and it's the top one, top three, must attend. And it's obviously a global conference. So, that's great for us, just being a single location right in the middle of the U.S. So, any exposure we can get to international conferences, but just the community and the attendees that go to PTC it's just a must attend event. So, that's why 1623 Farnham supports and attends for years, so. Yeah, yeah. And so, it's here we sit in its January of a new year, 2021, obviously last year was a big year for many and I know a lot has happened with you at 1623 Farnham, but can you tell us sort of what is the latest with you, sort of what's ahead and some of your big milestones? Sure, it's really exciting. Actually, it's hard to know where to begin because there's so much going on. I joined the team about eight months ago. So, I'll just run you through some of the really interesting things going on at 1623 Farnham. We're nearing the end of a almost two year, $40 million infrastructure upgrade. So, brand new cooling infrastructure power, new fiber vaults, and so, we're in the middle of level five commissioning as we speak. So, here in the next month, month to two months as we cut things over, we're gonna have a virtually brand new facility with all of the de facto carrier hotel ingredients like, you know, 45 carriers plus adding to that and then all the other data center and co-location activity. So, it's a really exciting place to be. When we're done, we'll have eight, six megawatt usable, eight megawatts in capacity. So, plenty of runway for years to come and it's an exciting place to be. So, you know, there's all kinds of things going on which I'll drill into more here in a second. Yeah, I mean, on that note, right? There's so many things already in the works. I mean, if you could just, I don't know, sort of put your finger on what are the most, the things you're most excited about for 2021, you know, would you be able to narrow that down? What do those things look like? Yeah, so, you know, the lifeblood of a carrier hotel or an Edge Interconnect facility like ours is fiber. And so, you know, as I mentioned before, it's, you know, we sit right in the middle. So, there's been fiber routes being built North Southeast West and the U.S. and they've come through our building for years. But the really encouraging thing is that we're seeing new fiber builds. So, our friends tell ya, had just completed a brand new fiber build from Chicago through Des Moines, through Omaha through our building and then on to Denver. So, that's a brand new route and that's exciting. We have a lot of hyperscalar activity in the Nebraska, Iowa area. So, Google Cloud has their main North American, one of their main North American data centers nine miles away from us, a millisecond away. So, that's creating a lot of new activity both at our building and fiber activity. Facebook has a couple of massive data centers in the area, down the road, Amazon and Apple and the Des Moines area have a big data center. So, there's just, you know, on top of all the carrier activity, there's the hyperscalar activity and then layer on 5G, we have some carriers that have 5G CRANs at our facility. So, that's, you know, building a high count fiber to service 5G customers. So, lots of layers and levels and it's fun to be right in the middle of it. So, I also understand that you have some special initiatives underway such as the 5G lab and the AR challenge. Would you mind telling us a little bit about those? Sure, yeah, that is, you know, on top of everything else we've been working on to roll out in 2021 carrier neutral 5G lab. And so, I mentioned, we do have some carriers that have 5G CRANs at our facility. And so, we've been working with them as well as other potential 5G parties that we were going to create a space where if a developer's working on a software platform or hardware, they could come to this 5G lab and take space with us and have access to different 5G carriers to test out their software and hardware. So, that's really interesting. It's a cool thing since we're, you know, carrying neutral and we can do things like that. So, that's gonna be fun. And then we're involved with an augmented reality challenge and it's a community challenge ideation and hackathon around augmented reality. It's a US Ignite National Science Foundation and Facebook labs, reality labs initiative. And so, between Omaha and Kansas City, the community comes up with problems to solve and then solves them with augmented reality locally. So, I'm very excited about that project as well and looking forward to seeing what happens with that challenge. Yeah, I mean, there's so much happening with you guys, certainly a lot for people to stay up to date on. And I think a lot of people, a lot of our viewers will be interested in sort of following along with this journey with you. Where can we direct people to find more information? Oh, sure. So, our website, of course, 1623farnum.com And then, you know, you can always reach out to me directly that way or on any of the socials and we'll get back to you right away. We love to have conversations, exchange information on developing technologies from 5G to IoT to VR to on down the list and how that affects network connectivity. I've been in the business in the Midwest US from Kansas City at 1102 grand to now 1623. And so if anybody has questions about fiber routes or data centers in the Midwest, we have so many connections and contacts that we can make. We're happy to be a resource that way too. Yeah, great. So 1623farnum.com and then of course people can reach out to you directly, Greg, thank you for that. And thank you for your time here today. We really appreciate that you took the time to talk to us and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking. Thank you.