 Welcome to the RF elements unlicensed podcast. I'm Caleb. We've got Tossos here with us and today We're talking to Chris Johnson from sky night communications So really looking forward to this conversation. He's got a wealth of experience in the industry and does some really cool stuff But before we get in that Tossos give the good people their call to action or whatever you're supposed to do on a YouTube video Absolutely, don't forget to like listen or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio Podcasts like Google Spotify or Apple Hey, Chris, what's going on man? We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today and tell us all about you your past your history Your wisp and anything else you really want to talk about so again, thanks for taking the time man Yeah, absolutely super excited to be here Obviously Chris Johnson sky night communications I've been doing the wisp thing for I don't know around 24 years now Started back when you know modems were 56k or a little before that and then We tried to figure out a better way to do things back before 802 11 existed and We've kind of worked from there before 802 11 with Symbol and Lucent and all the original guys to I worked for wireless ISP for Actually that was family-owned for for a long time and then about ten years ago or so started my own with some friends and ended up just kind of taking Taking off from there for for my wireless ISP and growing to the point where we have two ISPs now the one in Bozeman and the one in Virginia and then of course beta testing and and doing consulting work around the United States and That's kind of it today That's awesome. Yeah, I mean we've known each other for quite a few years now And I I didn't even realize you went back that far either, right? It wasn't till I think was like a couple weeks ago on Facebook You started to kind of getting into it with some guy talking about LTE and he's like, you know I got more letters in my whatever than you do. He's like I've been doing this longer than you like I don't think so This goes way back bro. I had no idea. I had no idea So we're Caleb and I are not the oldest ones anymore, right? Because we're always like, you know with the old timers is like you're actually an older timer than we are in this game here You know, right? Yeah, absolutely. Nope wireless. I guess it's always just been fascinating. So You know, it's one of those trades that again, it's a trade. There's no college for it or anything else People get into it which is really exciting gives people an avenue to go do something in the technology world and Make pretty good money doing it if you're good at it. Yeah, I actually googled it I mean, that's literally how I got started in this whole thing. You know, I was actually Working in the semiconductor industry And it was during the you know the bust right when everybody, you know, everything was starting to ship off-seas I was actually in China on some lone labor project between one, you know semiconductor factory to another and Yeah, I mean, I'm just walking around like, you know, you know, just pondering stuff You know, you got millions of people around you and I'm like the world is huge I'm like, I wonder what the next big thing is gonna be and I just see all these people with cell phones And at the time it really wasn't wireless data on your internet, right? It was just, you know cell phones was really starting to become popular and I'm like I think wireless is the next the next big thing, you know And and after watching layoff after layoff after layoff at the company I was at and I started seeing, you know You know, they were laying off the good people, you know When the first initial layoffs happening like well that guy was a freaking slacker, you know He wasn't worth being an employee anyway, you know, then you're like, holy shit It's like this that guy was actually good, you know, I knew that there was no allegiance You know, you know, the corporate America is just gonna pull your name out of a hat and say I don't care How good you've been to me. It's your time to go. So yeah So I started googling like wireless and I found this whole wisp kind of thing and Wi-Fi and yeah, exactly I mean, I had zero training and networking zero training and wireless. Just learned everything with the Googles Right Yeah, I was even before the Googles and some of the points A little bit of a similar story here, you know, I was in college 98 I got my first taste of high-speed broadband, you know, we had a hundred meg on campus and the dorms Right, this is amazing. And then we'd go home go, you know Stay at the summer with your parents or between quarters or whatever and you just start getting on jittery You're like, I need some of that that good stuff. So Buddy and I were like, yeah, we're gonna start a wisp and cobble together some equipment quickly realize There are too many trees in central Georgia to get this done at the time. So I started fooling around the equipment Early 2000s started doing some consulting work and stuff like that and then kind of dot dot dot. Here we are So I've been in distribution been a manufacturing back manufacturing now Doing stuff. I mean the stuff now like really good at some of the years raised where customers are building and stuff And if like 20 years ago if I don't know that it had broken my mind for sure Well, what we can do now the technology is available. So kind of been there done that But it's always good to talk to someone especially, you know We've got such a mix of people that we talked to whether it's you know, folks like yourself I've been doing this forever or someone's like, yeah, three years ago. I didn't know what a whips was Yeah So I don't start a whips And then you're like, alright, so a little easier to get the information now There weren't things back then like whisper and you know all these outreach and educational channels and stuff like that But it's always it's always really fun to get someone's story. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely So you're with so tell us a little bit about Skynet communications like what areas of your cover in so you've got two networks Are you focused on business or residential? You know coverage areas things like that like tell us a little bit what you're working with here. Yeah, so When I started Skynet, um, not a lot of money and I think I could start back then with less money than you can today, but I Didn't have a lot of money. So we we targeted where the money was at which is business and So for the first seven years we we ran all business I just know people call in and ask about residential and I'd say well, here's your other your options We just don't do that And so that got us going pretty well We we made a pretty good base off of that and because of that we had a lot of context anyway from All the employees that worked at the business and everything because they employees talk, right? So yeah We then gosh It's been three years ago four years ago now three years ago. We decided we were gonna start doing the residential game We had enough infrastructure built that's that's always the other part too, right is you want to do residential But residential is is everywhere businesses in a in a smaller focused area So it's easier to to hit those people with fewer towers fewer resources things like that Also easier to maintain a a network when it's not sprawled out all over the place. So Business was the logical choice for me Then now we're doing residential. We've got 23 towers. I think In our area that spread out across Multiple cities we I consider the Gallatin Valley just one area, but it is Bozeman Belgrade four corners Gallatin Gateway, and then we now just recently started going about 30 miles away to Livingston, Montana and then on one of my consulting gigs I ran into some folks in Virginia and We ended up hitting it off pretty good and they needed a lot of help to turn things around, right? It's a guy who got into the wireless highest be industry and he didn't know exactly what he was getting into so we We kind of the taco truck. Yeah. Yeah, right, you know, it kind of educated him on on a lot of things You know, I don't like to pick on anything but the Tool from ubiquity is pretty misleading. I've dealt with a lot You don't say It goes over this hilltop by two feet like it should work right and it's like we Yeah Exactly that's that that was the kicker right they drove these big circles everybody does right they get the tool They draw the big circle and it seems like as you can keep expanding and it keeps saying that there's coverage and you're going Anyway, and so in Virginia where there's a lot of hills and trees not so much in fact and it's a different topography than than bozeman, Montana, so That's the one thing you learn as a consultant anything that worked in one place doesn't necessarily work in the next place and Absolutely Demographics are different what people will spend for installs versus a monthly fees different everything's just different about the people in the culture so That was a little bit of a interesting learning for me in Strasburg, Virginia but ultimately it it led to a partnership that's gone really well and That's that's kind of it from first skin at communications Okay, you know, it's funny my wife asked me a while back We're like hey, we're interviewing these with for these podcasts and she's like well You know won't they all end up being the same and I was like no like not even remotely like you could get 20 Wests in a room and there's gonna be 20 types of environments they deal with 20 technology approaches 20 sources of funding ways of doing business Everything like that. So the variety of With operators that are out there. I think is really what makes this interesting and gives us the ability to really try to shed some Light on you know, what are you guys doing? How are you doing it? What have you learned and can share and things like that? So this is why this has been really fun for toss us and I'd be able to do this for sure Yeah, I mean even even here in Texas within the same state I mean the topography of the state, you know, if you go to East Texas You got these huge pine trees and stuff if you come to sexual Texas It's a little a little flatter a little more arid so it's more like desert in and you know, if you go to West Texas I mean, you've got you know, you know larger hills You don't have mountains here like you guys have right but that that changes the way things propagate You know, so it's totally totally different You could have you know, five different types of you know deployments and stuff or deployment scenarios in just one state never mind Across the country. It's crazy. Oh, yeah. Yeah for sure for sure So being in Montana, which is known to get a little chilly But also, you know, there's a lot of extreme weather that the winds and everything like that So if you can kind of share a little bit about like what are the challenges that you face from environmental perspective getting places? Power I got to imagine power, especially as you start to work in these like slightly remote or areas You know, you've got to have a lot of concerns with maintaining stable power Just things like that. What have you run into that? Maybe a lot of other folks in the industry don't really see on a daily basis Yeah, so obviously Weathers the the big one the temperature swings for us have always been a big deal Which is one of the things that we've learned in the radio testing world that Our weather tends to show some other things that that other weather doesn't so we we can see Negative 10 one day and then the next day it's up to 45 degrees, right? And so you get these huge swings that cause some issues and then of course we get The really wet heavy snow. That's what that's our storm more or less Not so much really heavy rain But the the snow that sticks to everything and that's that's what educates you where You put some things that are a little bit weaker signal or you think it's going to work right up until you find out that it's got You know, two inches of slush sitting on the front side of the antenna and now you're driving there going well That's not strong enough signal for that even though I thought it was So those are our biggest deal solar I know it's great for people in Arizona Obviously probably in Texas and in the lower half I can tell you a solar Not so much here I got educated on that I started out really cheap small solar site and now it's four panels that are 300 watts just so I can Maintain a small access point Yeah, yeah right one access point in a link Yeah, it's interesting you find out where power draw is becomes a lot bigger deal on radios and then it starts limiting what you can and can't do Obviously your your Wi-Fi chipsets don't don't burn a lot of power but a lot of this custom silicone and other stuff is Changing rapidly on on different products LTU or Toronto or even Cambium stuff and you look at the power draw and you're going well I won't be using that here Yeah, so it's it's interesting we We only have the one solar site It really educated me to the point where I will pay the money to drag the power there or I don't do the site We're going to look into some other things obviously wind alternatives but traditionally they haven't been really great for cold weather If you go look at the ratings there usually rated to 30 degrees or 20 degrees they don't go well it's rated to negative You know 20 or negative 40 and so with ice on it and things like that and so the last thing I want to do is be going up the side of the mountain To take care of that so we haven't done a lot of wind. I think that's gonna be We found some companies we want to try out some stuff and maybe that'll help with our solar site, but for now We've stuck to if we can't get power there, or at least I can't afford to drag power there We're not building the site but hours important Yeah, yeah, well absolutely and we switched to pretty much DC everywhere, which of course I preached to everybody I used to do AC for for years and years like everybody else you buy this UPS or you do this because it's got SNMP monitoring and all that Ended up with more electronics failed on the towers let alone my UPS is everything else we switched to DC Our equipment failure from manufacturers went down to I don't know 1% less than 1% Yeah, it's clean. No strategies Right and it told me that's not the manufacturers which is who always gets blamed right all this this stuff sucks Not really well, I mean there could be slight right because it depends on how they build their power supplies as well So they could filter some of that stuff out clean it up a little bit better, but yeah I mean generally it's the the power that's being supplied. That's pretty crappy, right? Yeah, how did the batteries last so I mean I know batteries don't like it when it's really cold either So you running any special kind of batteries out there due to your temperatures or I mean pretty much the standard mill that everybody else uses Yeah, so ultimately again, this is where the environment stuff is a big factor for us The latest thing we started doing a silicon dioxide batteries they come out of Canada They come out of Canada and they're rated all the way down to negative 40 I think is what they're rated to And so and they don't have a huge drop off so for years on the solar sites are sitting on the side of these mountains I ran a GM's and you know and I bought a sun extender a GM's which are I mean there's really nice a GM batteries But again it would get cold and then all of a sudden I would lose 40% of my battery capacity Especially at my solar site. That's where I got educated So we switched to these silicon dioxide batteries and we've seen a significant amount of I guess battery reserve that we wouldn't normally see so I'm not running my generator I do have a hundred generator that sits up there that we can remotely turn on and off Unfortunately the gas runs out and we do have to go there to fill it up But buy some more time at least you know Yeah, yeah exactly buys us buys us some time The other one I wanted to do was lithium titanate but so expensive It's great. It's a dry cell right it's literally you could drill into it and your battery still works It's a cool technology just no more poof Right yeah yeah so those are our two battery technologies Everything else for us has kind of failed unless it's indoor right and then we were like everybody else We go you know what? H&M's just way less cost that's available Absolutely So electricity gets a little weird when you get it 20 and egg 30 Like there's a lot of quirky things that I've seen at least from past experiences dealing with customers Or the one that usually gets people like yeah my radios are rated to neg 40 But are your switches are your batteries? If you do lose a site right and everything shuts down until the power comes back You know will it boot you know there's an operational temperature Thermal starts exactly yeah cold starts right Yeah none of my stuff boots up well it's negative 30 out there if not colder Because now you've got to add a thousand foot of elevation to what the weather thing is actually reporting Now none of your stuff boots up because it's way too cold and yeah wait for the sun to kind of peak over So it's it's challenging you said a lot of customers up in yellow knife And they're like yeah none of this is gonna work the way you think it's gonna work dude I had to get educated a bit on that so Yeah and it's always like you know never the ideal opportunity to go out there now Do you have any cool tips and tricks about like radomes you know with coatings or anything like that To help sort of keep as much of that wet slushy snow you know off your dishes as you can Or is it just kind of you know let it ride what would it be fine? Is there a spray that you can put on the radomes or something? Yeah you know I've seen people talk about it honestly we've never done it We took a little bit different approach we we tried to design everything to a spec Where we know that no matter what we've seen it's gonna run Which limits us a little bit right so we're not We don't stretch the distances as much so I'm not Trying to run something at a negative 70 or even a 65 Most of my stuff runs at negative 60 or below Yeah 40s and we do heat Chris likes it hot we always talk about this Yeah exactly they're like do you really need this size dish at this Well yeah an 838 is fine That's how you keep everything warm so it doesn't freeze in the winter right Right exactly yeah so that's what we've traditionally done Obviously 60 gigahertz you can't do that right that's a Yeah it's not tolerant of anything so radomes have become a big deal LTU or sorry airfiber 60LR big educator for Ubiquity I think a lot of people put it out They go oh this is really great and then the first you know a little bit of snow or whatever And your link doesn't work anymore Look it goes four miles Yeah yeah exactly yep so there's a lot of people I think that have been pretty disappointed In that fact they put these links out and they were Everything's great wonderful right up until the snow hits and then I'm not the one that discovered the problem with the radome I guess you put the radome on the front but then because it's a grid The ice blows through the backside right and it just fills it up I saw somebody talking about that and I thought you know that is that's true It's something that I didn't think about I don't have the problem generally most all of ours are facing in such a way that they don't have that issue But then I'm going yeah okay this isn't really that great of a design So there's a lot of things everybody goes through it and learns at different bases I think with that kind of stuff I mean so that design like that grid sort of set up I mean I think Microtech started with that first before anybody with some of their equipment And even it wasn't even 60 gig I think they started in 5 gig first and then it just kind of evolved And I know everybody was always worried about that saying you know this just doesn't seem like it's a smart mechanical design You know just you would imagine that the ice would just get in there and when it freezes up It would just start breaking all that stuff and you know I never really see a lot of the bad pictures for that stuff I wonder if people are just like well you know whatever let's not post that kind of stuff You know but it seems like Ubiquiti likes to take a lot of those designs that you know aren't great and use them themselves Right so they probably could have done better They could have done better but sometimes it's easier to copy you know Oh yeah no I think it'll change like everything enough complaints enough drop off But you know I have a feeling they'll change some other things that we run into in the snow world really with the ice The conform on top of stuff is you think oh well this has a radome so it's a really good deal But depending on how flat that radome is The snow can then the ice can grab on top and then it literally just starts building further and further down the front till it's over anyway So if you don't have just because you got a radome doesn't mean anything You have to make your I guess antennas a lot sharper edged at the top with not a not a lot of depth to them Otherwise it'll hold the ice and snow there and and it'll stay there for days right The unfortunate part so Yeah it's like the crystals just grow a little bit little just encapsulates it no matter what So it's not it's not about it sticking to it like you know because of the wind or whatever it just kind of grows on it Yep yep exactly and that and that was another thing we learned in the 60 gigahertz world Really the 60 gig is the educator on a lot of things is our access points the wave access points have a very flat top to them And so we did get a really good storm and the ice was built over the top and and it was hanging on there for probably a couple days before it disappeared And lucky enough again we don't try to push the envelope on things We have certain metrics we stay in and we just know that unless it's just really really terrible most clients are going to stay running So we try to stick below like Nate 48 on our signal levels on a 60 gigahertz on channels four five and six if it's three two and one Well then it has to be even stronger than that to survive things but I give out that metric and then some other guy goes Oh man we we don't have to do that but you know they're in Utah or wherever to go Yeah absolutely you can get away with more or something like that but Yeah yeah and the wave AP is that like PA speaker looking thing right that's the multi point access point right Yep yeah yeah so and that thing has done really really well for us point to multi point in the in the 60 gigahertz world I haven't seen anything else from anybody else like it if you want to do long straight Um multitude of short range stuff because there's a lot of qualcom out there but uh at the long range You know we're we're one mile out for clients point to multi point um and running 20 24 7365 through the storms things like that Um but again I could push it to a mile and a half maybe a mile and three quarters I just know that anytime a storm rolled through a bad one um we'd have a problem so yeah so it's been um Everything's in education 60 gigahertz is definitely a big deal for people we can push a lot of data But it's so new that uh we're all still learning I think in that world So have you tested the other ones I mean micro tech 60 gig ignite net I mean is is pretty much did you just roll with ubiquity and kind of Stay there because it did but you want it or did you go some other routes Yeah so ignite net alright I was I was pretty big in ignite net um for a while uh that was kind of the first big intro I think for the wireless ISP industry for point to multi point 60 gigahertz and Anna have to hand it to them They really they're the ones that like you guys with the twist port um they're the guys that really started the point to multi point 60 gigahertz revolution for the wireless ISP industry now that in my opinion they've died off you know quite a bit But um that's where a lot of education was done as well they've they've got a ray dome thing where it's long and flat These mohawks built up the the center of them with snow and then it didn't work anymore and you know how does being forming work And they did only being forming on the AP and not on the CPE which in some ways actually made things easier And in other ways made it not as nice so my installer hated the fact that on the ignite net It was really fine tune adjustment on the CPE I mean just a little bit left to right and all of a sudden you've you've lost signal Because there's no beam forming so you got this tiny little beam but um it it gave us a good education on on 60 gigahertz And what to expect in channels one through four four and a half and then from there we did micro tick when they came out with their 60 gigahertz stuff We put that out um that's where I learned that the qualcomm stuff was really a lot lower power lot a lot lower gain on on stuff and so I thought okay well it works for micro pops in in these really small areas we have warehouse districts like a lot of people where everybody kind of like lives in their office or whatever Um great opportunities there because they they try to cram everything a lot of people into a small area and so so it works well there the micro tick Just like the ignite net had a lot of issues in the beginning right we had a lot of disconnects there's some of them that said you know you'd come back and look at them after a month or something That's like 2700 disconnects or some ridiculous number right and yeah and it got better and better and the disconnects were so quick and you know people didn't notice on certain things But yeah then they came out with 180 degree sector that thing is well I'm not It takes five years for it to scan through all of the different things and if anything changes it's rescanning and it just it was a great concept Sounded cool that you could have this 180 degree thing I think they're 60 degree sectors are way better than the 180 But but micro ticks learned you know they've got the the new little dish I can't even remember Enray I think that's the new one And it's got a cover on it and in their new little sector I just got that thing in I mean it fits in the palm of your hand The little little box looking thing yeah it looks like it's a camera right without a lens yeah So so that's very cool you know I don't we try it all if it's in the five gigahertz world Right we've tried I haven't tried the the Cambium 60 gigahertz stuff that's one I just stayed away from I originally thought I was going to do it And then what what's the company that came along and they're not even doing a tacky on right you see this That name in a while yeah yeah tacky on networks right there oh we're gonna be out last year in June or July and here we are this year They still haven't launched a product at this point I don't know if it's a company that makes it Chips at chips at markets gotten a little tough for new upstarts really get dug in so Yeah you know how the quantity you don't have the muscle behind you or the money it's just like okay yeah we'll have your parts for you in you know 2025 Yeah yeah way way down the list yeah super tough for everybody I think you know the big guys are going to survive right now and and the little guys it's just it's pretty tough So yeah I was really hoping I was really pulling for it based off of what they advertised but So what were they supposed to do different that the other people aren't what what were you hoping for Well first off the AP and the CPE are the same antenna right so it's 250 bucks for an AP 250 bucks for a CPE about a 900 meter range It did do channels one through six half channels and even quarter channels Asymmetric splits right so instead of 50 50 that's 75 25 all that kind of stuff 30 clients per AP That's that's a high number that's pretty good yeah yeah 120 degrees spread for that 900 meters that's part of the reason that the distance isn't as far as it could be All based off of a two and a half gigabit POE chipset right so there's no there was no SFP which I was fine with because multi gigabit exists now And so you could literally for you know a low few thousand dollars put up a poll in a subdivision and you could feed gigabit speeds in a 360 degrees You know I mean you got three of them times 249 95 Yeah it's not a lot of money No so you're you're looking at that going well hey I can I can do gigabit stuff especially when you got a gigabit chips two and a half gigabit chipset And you can do asymmetric splits you can now offer one and a half or two gigabits total on the downside and on the upside maybe you're only doing 500 because most of us in the home world I probably only see I don't know 20% of my upload used on on my connection and so it's it's really that's not the important side as much as it's advertised by fiber people You know I'll get this symmetric speed you know look at this their upload sucks and you're going yeah but most people don't utilize it so what's it matter And it's like most people don't utilize the gigabit anyway I mean on average you're using you know 15 to 20 meg or something like that and people are selling you know all these They're just trying to make it difficult for the smaller guys to match them and meet them and meet a spec that's useless you know pretty much so Right yep that's but that is the name of the game right if you want to be sure speed is the thing how how good is your ISP will hold on let me see what the speedometer says Yeah it must be great yeah Yeah I mean it's a really interesting point too is you know you talk a lot about high speed and density and stuff in the in the public forum your whiffs talks and stuff like that and Being a big proponent for that not only because to hit you know special magic government numbers and this that and the other especially when you start looking for funding and stuff you know those are so deeply intertwined But just in general from a competitive landscape from perspective the ability to deliver set speed now and later especially is really where a lot of the industry I think is going so I mean would you agree with that and you know it's so like what are what do you think the biggest misconceptions that people have are about what it takes to build a high density high speed network that may not necessarily be true Yeah you know I don't know the the funding parts interesting this is a big argument and I think with a lot of people how how are you going to fund your products is it possible to survive By not having government money or you have to have government money I think it really there's there's all these different ways that everybody wants to design their network with a different hardware with a different Network layouts what what hard the hardware they're going to use how they're going to do it so the the funding thing Torana for example use that one I just I just posted a review a couple days ago and some people were talking about well the only way you can really do this and I and I did put in there I believe wholeheartedly that if you really want to make a go of Torana and put it everywhere government funding is the only way you're going to get that product However people made the point that I am self funded I got no government money right now and I do have a radio and I've got CPEs and I could make it work in my environment and again I always use my environment I'm pretty clear about that we're in a different world than than my guys in Virginia People will pay an upfront fee a larger upfront fee in my world than they will in Virginia and Virginia they're used to it because they only had satellite and that was never cheap to get started up right Yeah yeah so it's interesting you know Bozeman Montana is like the it's a huge I don't know I guess ski resort place right so because of this guy and all that We know we watch Yellowstone so we know what it's all about Yeah it's interesting we have a huge influx of money that comes into our valley and a lot of technology companies a lot of people that want to live here but work somewhere else right So we've seen a huge in our valley huge amount of growth in the demand for internet and what people will are expecting and what they'll pay for that expectation and so for my company it's helped me out but again I can't use that logic for my guys in Virginia So Tarana with their CPE cost of a thousand dollars I use a thousand dollars because it's a round number it might be a little bit lower than that but by the time you add in all the little add-ins right they The recurring fee the annual fee and all that stuff speed key Yep the speed key and and everything's apart which is which is kind of the cambium way or it used to be where well here's your antenna well you didn't buy a power supply well you need to buy the power supply all your brackets not included buy a Hold on so hold on go back so that stuff is not included when you buy the CPE it's just literally the radio part and not all the little accessories that go with it so there's all these little adders Right exactly so so then you can be like well the CPE cost is only six hundred dollars sounds really cool right up to you got to add the three hundred dollars on for the other stuff and That's not how I advertise it right so when I tell somebody it's a thousand dollar CPE that's because I just said well here's all the rest of the stuff you got to buy so really this is what it costs So that's that's an education on on you know that kind of stuff when you're when you're looking at it and you're going oh well this is really only cost six hundred dollars and then you find out there's all these other things that you got to add in there It changes your perspective on what you can afford to do and all that if they were truly at the let's say six hundred dollar mark yeah I think it's a lot more survivable It is But that thousand dollar CPE's what kills you I don't DAP's you know whatever they cost thirteen grand or something like that it's expensive but your cost is in your clients right you got seventy five clients at a thousand dollars seventy five thousand dollars or you know hundred thousand dollars which is where I think you need Well if and if and if you look at the the the apparent you know like number of subscribers that's the maximum for that is like a couple hundred like two hundred plus it's like two hundred thousand dollars you know of CPE costs versus the fourteen thousand of that one AP right so it's huge numbers huge numbers Yeah yeah and that's where I've traditionally um you know on the ubiquity side I could argue um well because of its low cost you could build more sites and you can and you can do more right maybe for the cost of the plan aside I could build four ubiquity sites now I've got the coverage of those four sites but again then you got to maintain it and you got to make sure that it has redundancy and I mean you don't have to do redundancy obviously but we try to do redundancy in everything that we do so everything's got a back up link or some other way to get there and we will only sprawl out so far you may see guys that that have six links in line you know and each one of those is feeding another tower that's repeated off another and so forth and I get it it really is your environment and how you can maintain and run your network so in my world I choose not to do that I'll go as deep as two and off of off of two links deep I may have a micropop that'll shoot off of one but not another main tower or something but that's a that's just a personal philosophy for my network doesn't make it right wrong or otherwise some of these other guys yeah they'll string links for days you may see six or seven of them all in line we found out a lot of issues with that but again yeah it's I don't know it's interesting with the with the with the Toronto stuff and and how you can make that work in power draw and you know how does that change everything and so that's where you get into all these fights have not your solar site that's for sure yeah yeah right yeah you could you can barely power the CPE never mind the AP right you know we're in panel calls and you would AP calls exactly to be almost almost equal so so what are your you know I think a lot of you know what you can and cannot do you know based on CPE cost AP costs really has to do with what you can charge right so like you know when I always go back to like the property have the ranch I have the first internet I had out there was like you know a two like three by one mag or something like that and I was paying like $90 a month right or three by one you know and I mean the guy could get away with it because it was really nothing else right and it was it was highly reliable right so that was awesome and but anyway so what kind of plans you offering you know what are you charging for the different rates and stuff like that because that makes a difference to the guy who's you know can't charge more than you know 30 bucks a month if you're charging if you have $99 you know how our plans you know the Toronto thing might work out right it could it could work yeah so that's the the interesting part so we're we're typically the lowest cost in our in our environment right so we do right now traditionally off of our LTU will do a $69.95 for 100 by 15 and $195 for $200 by 30 that's off of the LTU 60 gigahertz we do you know like a 250 by 30 for $49.95 and a $500 by 30 for like $69.95 or something like that so we take into account the technology what it takes to get it out there and things like that Toronto specifically we front load our costs so this and again some people can get away with it and some people can't we're going to charge 100% of of our CPE cost right up front so what's the cost what's the install costs but on the flip side we're month to month and then we will have right now we'll continue our 100 and our 200 but we'll probably move the 250 plan in there or something like that and we may end up being 250 meg for 49.95 so if you look at that you go okay the it's front loaded but if I look at this over time as a customer I pay less money right if you if you're a customer for a year or two years you pay less money with me then if you go to somebody who says well I'll charge you $100 a month for 25 meg your install cost is free or $100 you're going oh man you know it's easy to afford up front but later on you've actually paid more money than you would with me to get more speeds so that's something that that we do but again I think that's my environment might are around here people will pay that yeah I mean if you can if your customer is willing to pay basically the CPE costs up front there's there's almost no reason why you couldn't make that model work I mean it's basically like government funding it's the people paying for it right at some point not you right so I mean whether it's whether it's my tax dollars going to some wisp you know to help offset those costs or the people are paying it up front I mean that's what it's all about right so then you're just looking at amortizing the AP and at that point I mean if it handles you know 100 200 plus customers I mean it's just it makes total sense right so that's awesome right yeah so that so that works for us doing that in Virginia we're we're long we're waiting for the three gigahertz to run a little bit different right we're going to have to lower that that upfront cost because that environment will not pay the same amount now they will pay more this was an educator and I think this is important for everybody and I've said this a million times everybody goes nobody will pay anything over $100 install fee or you know I hear this my guys in Virginia were like oh people won't they just if I tell them there's an install fee they won't sign up or if we tell them it's $100 they balk at it then here comes Elon Musk you know $600 for your antenna and people are you know fighting each other to get it right because they're sheep man they're sheep so yeah so it's so that I use that as a as an example and I go so obviously people are willing to pay $500 or $600 to get their net so it changes it I think for for wireless people to look at that and go you know what there's absolutely a market these people will pay yeah I get it there are some people that tell you unless you offer what cable does you know the free install or $100 install we're not going to sign up with you you may lose those customers but there's a lot of customers willing to pay a larger upfront cost so now you can offset your your your hardware costs and buy a little bit more expensive hardware if you need to buy something better free for where you're at yeah yeah and it's it's it's so dependent right I mean yeah if you're in town and you have you know three different hardwired options you know you have you know fiber you have cable and it's all basically free it's pretty hard to separate you know $500 from me right to go with your wireless internet now if I've been burnt you know if the customer support sucks you know then yeah you have a chance to win but those numbers are way way lower right so yeah it really depends on the environment and the same thing as far as like I said you know if you have no option I mean pretty much you can ask what you want right I mean people have to have internet so you know I'd pay you know again out at my ranch if there was no other option I'd pay a thousand dollar install fee I mean I actually because I knew his packages were low I'm like dude I'll just let me buy the equipment and let's just rent on your tower I want to like a point to point for myself right because I wanted more bandwidth and he's like no we can't do that whatever so I'm like I fine I'll just you know pay a lot of money for your crappy internet and but yeah I mean I would I would have paid a lot I would have paid a ton to get you know whatever they can give me so I mean my parents place in Middle Georgia beautiful property dude and they're like come down here move down here build a house on this property I'm like great there's no options right like there's no data down there yeah it's that or like you know half of our raggedy LTE that you know doesn't work during the day so I would pay an obscene amount of money you know just to have access down there but you know I can't I can't work I can't do that so I mean yeah you know especially when you start looking at CBRS solutions and you know the drama solution works as well as is talented to I think it's going to open up a lot of potential avenues for people so if it's magic which is you know that's always the big sort of question is is this stuff magic and it's like no it's it's engineering so but it's a lot of people have a I think a really hard time just accepting that everything's not completely black and white or you know you can run a wisp with different technology so I was like I can't make my wisp run with this whether it be it's whether it be Toronto or LTE or you know the CBRS came in solutions and a lot of people just don't realize well you know you can use different tools for different areas and you don't have to be absolutely one single thing and you know people they get lost they lose sight of the forest for all the trees I think yeah but and the market has gone through so many of those changes right like it's it's weird like you know we started everything was super expensive right we talk about a $600 CPE you're like you know but when you first started those you know CB3 type solutions back then I mean you know the the the wrap boards and stuff with radio cards in them they were like $300 $400 back in the days what we started at and then you know the market was used to that and then ubiquity came and it was the race to the bottom and I was like if I can't get a CPE for less than $100 I ain't buying it and now we're going back to the expensive side of things right people are realizing that cheap isn't better you know good value is a good value but cheap is not where you want to go and things are starting to get get expensive again on the equipment side and I mean the technology is just you know incredible especially like the Toronto boxes I mean that's just art what's in there you know these huge high end DSPs doing these you know massive calculations from multi path and it's it's it's amazing stuff you know but just like anything you know if the environment isn't exactly the way it needs to be because you got an equation is set you know so if it's not if you don't have the right structures out there to create the amount of multi path in the direction that you need it to happen right then you're not going to see the same thing and I think that's where where people kind of get lost they they see some of this magic happen a lot of that testing like even yourself right it's just a single CPE right so loaded up is what I'm starting to say right it's just like I want to see that 200 plus you know I want to see what that data is like and like I said I mean it's still going to do magic obviously like I said and you're paying for it so it's you know who knows who knows where this you know this might become the new thing you know $1,000 CPEs and $15-20,000 APs you know might might be the future of the Wisp industry I hope not this stuff should get cheaper or a bit more inexpensive let's say but yeah it costs money to make that stuff happen. Yeah it's it's interesting I think so many wireless ISPs are talking about well you know I think wireless is really declining and I'm going to fiber you see that a lot and the truth is I am my personal opinion I don't think one lives without the other right I think wireless is always going to be around fibers obviously as far as a technology standpoint it's it's it's always going to go faster it's always going to be more reliable and in a lot of aspects right interference or whether things like that but you got problems where people dig it up and and it has reliability issues there or whatever everything's got its problem but because of the cost of fiber I think it also introduces the ability for these higher cost wireless products to come in and go hey yeah we're not as low cost as you know mimosa or ubiquity or whatever but we're still you know 5 or 10 times less cost than if you try to deploy fiber so why not bring fiber to where this is at with these radios and then distribute with the radios and that's kind of where yep my belief is in a hybrid right like I think you should get as much fiber to your towers as possible but then for distribution you know wireless can do it faster and lower cost than than any other technology doesn't mean you can't rebuild it later right if if you build a subdivision with let's say you go into a subdivision and this is a plan that we have is you put up a couple of poles and you and you distribute 60 gigahertz through there as time goes on plow and trench in fiber and bring it in there but you're you're now subsidizing your build you not only got those customers and in theory you're keeping them happy and you're offering a 200 500 whatever then as time goes on they can also help subsidize your your build out for fiber and and kind of help you scale from there if that's something that you're interested in doing fiber some people still stick into purely wireless some people are you know going on the fiber wagon but it's it's ever changing and the opinions are always ever changing so you know there's there's going to be this new fiber thing that comes out and I may look at it go well hey that makes fiber more attractive now or whatever in my area Yellowstone fiber which bozeman fiber was kind of a start up a nonprofit and then it's an open network right as an ISP you can deliver bandwidth on top of their fiber but they handle the fiber network they just recently got more funding and they're working with a company called utopia out of salt out of Utah and that company you know how things work is is different right it's it's not the same technology on the fiber back end and so we're looking at one gig 10 gig and you know and of course they say you can do up to 100 gig but but you're not doing that on a pond right so they're they're doing things different and I don't want to say exactly what it is they're doing because I don't want to be in trouble that's fine yeah right so I'm not going to share any of that any of that but it's interesting that they're taking a different approach to fiber than than a lot of the other guys that are going I'll just deploy this pond and and that's the end all be all I think even in the fiber world there's all sorts of different mixes of of how you do that but technology is ever changing Toronto's a obviously proving that in the wireless industry what I what I hope they do is prove that five gigahertz does have a lot of potential to it the manufacturers just got to do something different right the traditional I bought a chip and I slapped it in there and I and that's you know being a little simplistic about it but I slapped it in here and I put a couple of connectors on it and and I'm not changing much right L to use kind of a you know something right it's it's their own custom silicon and they're they were trying to do something different and they can achieve some results that nobody else achieves versus a Wi-Fi but I think Toronto's proving five gigahertz can do a lot of a lot of things that it people previously thought wasn't capable of and now we get six gigahertz in there right we're hopefully getting that in there so that expands our industry a little bit more and so a lot of that stuff's really exciting I'm excited to see what my most it comes out with we're not strictly a one manufacturer company right so from the most it comes out with something great that works man I'll buy it and we'll use it so far if I haven't seen that effect from that company but Cambium's no different right they've got a ex coming out excited to see what that does that's I think that's end of this year so it's a little ways out but those those are all up and coming things that I think everybody's looking forward to lot lower costs in Toronto right so people are more excited about that $2,500 CPE or $2,500 APE AP and then whatever for CPE 200 bucks or 300 bucks lot lot easier to swallow so I don't know I'm just as excited as everybody else to see those products definitely we love seeing that stuff and I think a lot of the doomers you know Toss and I did a whole episode about all the doom you know whether it be a doom whether it be I mean you know and it's been that way since the wireless industry started in the industry right so you know whether it's Starlink or government you know funding crushing you know the fiber bills or you know whatever it may be and people just can't really seem to wrap my heads around like if you're just planning on doing the same thing forever yes you are doomed because the world moves and world moves fast right so I mean the same way carbs aren't you know cars aren't running out there with carburetors and 150 horsepower on big V8s like the technology improved the market improved and you know you've got to be able to do that as well at the same time understanding the market that you're in and what makes sense and consumer changes right you know what what you need and what the requirements are greatly different today than they were back then you know so I mean some some things are will never change like you know reliability is a thing isn't how fast you are or you know how big of a package or how you know how cost effective you are if it's not reliable you're out you know I mean and so so there are some things that stay constant but yeah I mean it's constantly changing constantly evolving and and you know the the method of these kind of you know there's two type of hybrid networks now so Caleb and I love the the fiber wireless hybrid network which we think all with should go into but there was a point where like literally it wasn't hybrid with the manufacturers like you're all cambium or you're all ubiquity or you're all mimosa right and then they like they do nice NMS you know it's like everything talked everything I could have everything in my management software and it was all cohesive and now like I said where we're shifting away from that where you know not only are you mixing manufacturers are mixed mixing technologies now on your network which is the most exciting for me I love when all that shit comes together because we we talked about having standards it would be great you know I mean this proprietary mentality that all the manufacturers are in there it's kind of cool I guess right but man we could just achieve so much more if we could have you know some way to make this stuff just work you know together better you know man oh that's all you want a piece of cake like we can't even agree on one type of USB cable so you just you just keep on pulling that hope you know pipe rather so yeah you'll have one day one day one day I think they did make a standard like that it was called LTE you see how far that's gotten in this space oh yeah yeah all LTE works together if you buy it it's you know right in which yeah it just is it's a pipe dream that everybody's gonna want to make everything work with each other I mean 60 gigahertz is that way right tera graph oh it's a standard everybody should work together go take a cambium and try to make it work with some other tera graph it's not going to right it just is the way it is in our industry so yeah everybody all the manufacturers definitely push for themselves and well it's our job to figure out how we can make it work in our network with multiple vendors I guess really yeah yeah well you've done a great job thanks so how many how many subs do you have or something you can talk about oh yeah no it's not a big deal everybody always asked me right now right around 600 subs okay so and that's and that's the breakup between residential and business as well right yeah yeah so most you know and funny enough we're probably we're starting to shift more towards more residential than business right in the beginning it was more business and now now it's a lot more residential so it it was the evolution our right people used to ask me oh you know but what's your average sub right now I used to be able to say oh my average subs like 180 bucks well you're like oh man business plans business plans then you add in residential and that's gradually gone down further and further I think the last time looked where it you know like $92 or somewhere around in that area so it's it dramatically changes it when you bring those kinds of things on right we hope to change that with some other things TV right IPTV and managed routers I didn't do managed routers for years I couldn't find a I guess what I thought was an affordable solution right there's there's a lot of them out there but they want to $2 a month for your you know per sub or you know about 50 whatever and you're going that's a it's a it's a chunk of change yeah it adds up right so you know we ended up getting on the on the TP link stuff and works well people are happy with it they like the feature set so it comes in at a great price point and it works well enough I'm not going to say it's great but so you know you you look in you got to learn from cable and they may be the big evil empire but they're not stupid right they're good at marketing they're good at getting people and they're good at figuring out how to make money some of those things are managed routers things in there you know it's $5 for your router or you want the X router it's you know an X 15 bucks a month or whatever and obviously people have the ability with us to go get their own router if they choose to but a lot of people decide hey you know I don't want to deal with that I just want to call and talk to the guy who says yeah this is the reason why you're having the problem I don't I don't want to have to know what is a negative 76 signal on strength on on my device or whatever so a lot of that I think a lot of wireless ISPs are shifting towards figuring out alternative ways to also bring in money as well phones in the business world big deal in the business world residential everybody's got a cell phone not a big deal anymore yeah so those those are just different different areas I think that it helped bring our ability is as smaller companies you know back in more profit I guess right so how how is you know the the TP link offering because you know for for a while it was obviously you know whatever you can find and then micro tech really you know for for the longest time there I mean they had that the best lowest cost most you know basic manageable you know home routing devices and stuff like that for people to use and then you know TP link kind of came to the scene so I mean is that kind of the same same thing is happening are they still pretty strong as far as like you're the the wisp that you've talked to and stuff like that or is there a much wider variety of you know home APs and routers that people are using on in their wisps yeah so I guess the people that I talked to it's pretty varied right I think we're all in the same boat we're all just paddling around trying to find the best thing for us right I mean I'd love to say oh my you know TP link is you know it's it and and everybody knows it and it's just done incredible things but for us I think it works well I know some people that run the Cambium stuff right the their routers and I know some people that use use what is the other company start starts with an M and they use micro tick they'll load a script on it but they charge a per sub fee I know some people that use those and I can't even think of their name memo yeah memo yeah sorry that one took me a second to I'm like it's in there somewhere come on yeah yeah and super nice people you know they were easy to on board with as far as a company I think it's a great company I just I looked at the monthly cost and I couldn't justify it for what I was getting and that's me personally other people I know use it and they go yeah but I can I can script this I can do this I can do whatever I love it it's a great product so I think in that in that whole router world where it's just like the wireless ISP world every wireless ISP is going to have their different preference and what they do why they like it why they don't like it you know for us we just took off with the TP link and for me I have knock on wood and this is anytime you say anything of course it always bites you in the butt but I have zero people that complain about the TP link stuff that we put it so for me that's a win right if people are following me absolutely yeah I'm going well hey this is great we put in three of these or four of these or you know I have one guy that's got this large house we put six of them in and we try to hardwire them if we can right not repeat them but yeah you know they pull up the app we give full control and again that's an ISP thing I talk to other people and they go oh man don't give them full control because they can screw it up absolutely they can but I got some people that go yeah but check this out look at this I just turned off my kids Xbox you know he's not doing that anymore or we've got antivirus intrusion prevention and filtering right that was a big deal for a mom she wanted to filter out pornography right so she checks a couple of boxes on there and it does an okay job it's not going to catch everything but it does an okay job so people have been really they're easy for us to deploy my technician has a box of them right he's got like 20 of them in his van and then he just goes oh you want one of these yeah I can let me whip that up for you and away it goes so yeah it's it's a it's a good upsell for us but again tipi link it's it's not the end all be all there's there's a lot of good products out there and everybody has mixed results with it yeah so I hate I hate the the monthly recurring costs of things you know I mean that's something I think that's change in industry as well I mean everything used to be so manual we used to do everything and you know now to you know manage your network it's you know $2 per sub right and if you want to use this this routing solution it's another $1.25 that's just taking away out of that monthly fee and it's like oh you know having having our call center is expensive well you can outsource that for another $3 per sub per month and before you know it's like you're charging 60 bucks a month but like $15 of that it's going to like all these things to manage your network you know and and so so the point is like the tipi link and stuff like that it's kind of cool when it's like all built in the box it's pretty simplified and they can just turn things on and off and you know have these things without you know it being managed externally you know I mean then you have pre-sem and these other things to manage your your you know quality of your experience and stuff like that it all starts to add up and I think that's a huge disconnect from how things work to how they are now you know oh yeah yeah I mean that's the I will say that is the one thing that I guess tipi link for us I talk about that that price and everything so tipi links like 25 cents a sub right oh so there is okay I didn't catch that part yeah yeah yeah so there's a there is a cost but you know you're talking 25 cents that's a lot more manageable give me like three things or four things at 25 cents I can afford that yeah yeah well I mean it depends on your cost basis but also like what are you paying for in a monthly reoccurring versus what it would take to staff out and build your own solution right so that is that measure when you've got to take an account is the value there from a business perspective or you know do I just do everything you know I don't need a call center I don't need the management when I can do all of my own but you know then you've got a staff of 30 people you got to pay and you know you've got to take that consideration to account so some of us gimmicky some of it makes a lot of sense and you know who decides to what paper what makes a whole lot of difference from one you know one outfit to the other so you're running lean and small and trying to do a lot with a handful of folks because you can't find staff then maybe it makes a lot of sense but you know if you've got 100,000 customers then at that point well yeah let's in house a lot of it's a charge more to write so you can make up for it I guess yeah yeah that's always the that's always the thing is a balancing all of it and all of our equations are different so you know it's hard to say what's what's right for one company versus another consulting that I guess that's was really educated me on that right I'm like everybody else when I start out years ago I'm like here's the way you do it this is the way it works this is the equation right and then you show up at the different state or different place and you're like oh man that my equation doesn't do squat for this guy in fact it does not work at all yeah right so yeah it's it's interesting I mean the things that we do and try and we try a lot of it right I tried the cambium routers you know back to the routers thing and then the TP Lincoln we tried Vilo is the the new one coming in that's lower cost and it lacks a whole bunch of features set and I don't even know DDWRT and trying to script our own and you know and all this stuff but yeah so that that equation is just what we figured out for us for what works and you know maybe other people listen to it and they go okay well I'm gonna try TP Lincoln works for this guy great but then again they may come back and be like oh Chris Johnson is an idiot idiot that guy doesn't know what he's talking about yeah another thing that I've heard in the market you know people or wisps and it's typically like the younger wisps and neuro ones are like hey you know how do we raise our prices or you know have have you done it yet because you know everybody's raising their prices right now the cost of hardware is going up supply chain issues all these other things what's kind of your take and what do you see as far as raising the price is that something that's going to happen for your service because again things are going up I just recently saw that one manufacturer was starting to charge more for the like the firmware upgrades or something for the radios or something like that and it's like well that's software software doesn't the cost doesn't go up you know it's materials raw materials but you know these things you know shouldn't go up are you seeing that are you thinking about that is that an option for you a possibility yeah so I think for us it's possible I don't I think like all businesses we can only absorb so much right for us it's a little tougher than others we've always traditionally been the the lower cost so we've trimmed as much fat as we could right so we're we're trying to compete with cable and we're trying to compete with the fiber guys and so we've cut a lot of our margins out so now of course in order to absorb extra costs we're going to have to raise up our costs that never goes well ever I can tell you that I probably get in fact we just laughed about this yesterday guy calls in you know I'm with spectrum we're looking at changing our service they just raised our rates and I'm thinking well first off you know what is this the end of your six months that you knew about like you signed up at 49 95 knowing full well that in six months it was going to change but even when you tell people that and they're getting they just totally forget about the fact that for the last six months they got something for really low cost you've now increased the price and it's a negative no matter what you do people take it very negatively we have some people that you know I've talked to and I said yeah we may have to change our costs or something depending on you know how fuel goes and you know and all these other things and some people go oh yeah you know we understand and you know we own a business and it makes sense and then you get the other side that goes we better not change because or else and you're going okay well or else I don't know what to tell you we've got to be here tomorrow so yeah I think that's a super touchy subject for all ISPs if you're in an area that's highly competitive right we've got four other wireless ISPs and we got multiple fiber vendors and cable and all that if you're out in the middle of nowhere hey I get it I mean what were they going to do not have internet Elon I guess right a captive market is a captive market you know yeah yeah so so again different for different different people right even if you're a place that only has a another competitor right there's only one other competitor still fairly easy for you to make some adjustments so I think for us guys that are in the competitive market it'll be tough traditionally like I said we've always been lower cost and we try to maintain that but cable makes that tough tough on us because they are the big gorilla and so so we'll see I think ultimately we may end up having to change Torana is definitely going to make that so that's one of the things that we looked at right they we got that monthly fee with them we're basically just I think end up passing it on I'm not going to you know jack up the price by $15 a month or something but I'm going to pass on the price of of the you know what I got to pay for that the fear there is of course once you're locked into a platform that you can't leave those costs could ultimately rise more and more right I mean there's nothing saying later on they don't go well it's $15 a month for our back end you either pay it or all of your stuff is useless that is a fear right so I don't know like the rest of us I don't have the equation solved I can go off of my best guesses and right now we're sticking to our guns we haven't changed anything we can run pretty low cost in comparison to the larger guys but Torana will cause us to maybe do something different and we'll have to market that different right so if you're in this area we have this other product this is the pricing for that product I realize that over in this other market it's a little bit different cost but that's because we're we're using different gear so because we're not going to stack one of everything on the tower so yeah so ultimately we'll see where that leads I don't know yeah it'll be interesting to see how well it plays speaking of Torana again you know how well it plays with all your other stuff right and I mean it it almost seems like it's got to be like you said it's own little service area because once you start firing that stuff up and because it's just a huge noise generator running 80 mega channels and you got four of these things and it's just ah man I don't know it's gonna whisper we'll start hating each other again you know we just started we just started you know unifying with horns bringing everybody together we can kind of manage networks and coordinate stuff and now it's gonna be like fire burn them down you know so yeah we'll say be interesting to see how that goes yeah I'm curious to see the reuse of one that's a big game changer I think I mean that's hugely spectral efficient efficiency right there yeah absolutely absolutely right so we'll we'll see how that works right it's hard to do with one access point obviously getting a hold of the equipment is extremely hard right now which is another factor the factor in right so needless to say we don't put all of our eggs in you know in one basket more or less just like everybody else you're going well most of the next month is coming out with this AX what happens if you know Trana doesn't work out right now it's just kind of a small investment I mean smaller yeah it's R&D cost man R&D cost on your side it's just cost of doing business you know that's and that's the thing you know it's they're very few that I've seen that are actually really in production with it right to most of them most of the things you see popping up on social media is just a hey I got my first AP and it's works great you know I can aim it backwards and I get 600 Meg you know it's just one client you know it's like great get all the other ones fired up and let's see what happens you know so yeah yeah we'll we'll circle back you know after after the new year or something like that and see how things are going you know yeah yeah I mean ultimately that's what we're gonna have to do is just load it up see what happens and we we're testing right I'm not going all in right I don't want anybody think oh my god he decided Trana is the thing and if he decided that maybe we should look at work we're in the testing phase we're gonna see how it works over the next few months we'll add on a few sectors and then if it doesn't work out yeah it's a loss that I have to absorb and and like all of us we've absorbed costs losses somewhere I did it in IPTV was a huge loss mine with some other people is that sorry I didn't mean to cut you up but is that the recent thing because I remember I did see you start on Facebook like another group for IPTV stuff so is that not happening anymore so that one's happening that one actually is out of the the three right this is the most promising one and we did kind of partner with them they are a small company absolutely but the reliability that the scaling that they've done the back end for the delivery of the TV and all that's really worked out and the product is just I mean for the most part it's a really good looking product I tried some others rodeo TV right that was a huge investment for us I got a whole bunch of it in my basement if anybody wants to buy some of those endorsements right yeah it didn't it didn't work out and that's really where I'm gonna leave that one I I know some other places that tried to rodeo it didn't work out we looked at real choice in my area again this is my area the cost for getting the bandwidth and backhauling it and doing everything to one of their locations was cost prohibitive right I had this I think when it was all said and done I was going to be $3,800 a month or something like that just in pure you know reoccurring costs and I'm going man I I don't know I just can't afford that had I been in downtown Denver something like that yeah it's a different story so yeah watch it TV we're super excited about it it's it's a growing product we're adding a few people on it's not an astronomical amount in fact it's only a few every so many months because it people don't realize what it takes to actually on board TV it's a lot more in depth and it does take a lot of time to get everything functioning to the point where I would think you'd want to sell it to a customer right this isn't buy a box you put it in there you give it an IP address and in a way it goes right you got to have dedicated point to point to at least the data center that we're in or back to the head end then you got to pull your local channels off air so you got to set up antennas and string that and then you got to import that into the server and you got to get it integrated and and depending on the network topology and how things work out we are doing unicast so it does make things a lot easier multicast is an option but typically nobody should be multicast because it's a pain to make work in in the wireless IS the way we're structured most places but yeah so it's that that's kind of it but again that's you know it's an it's an upsell you can make 15 at the low end you can make 15 bucks a sub pure profit on the upper end you can make $65 a sub right and it's it's pretty easy to go head to head with satellite it's harder against cable or your hulu's but even those are getting easier because those guys are raising their prices right you know netflix and all this netflix was five bucks when it started now what are we $19 you know and hulu was $49.95 when it started for hulu live and now the base price is $69 and then you want a few things and then pretty soon you're $100 and something dollars so they're making it so IPTV if you can get in it at the right price can be profitable and there are other guys that have been doing it for years with different products like Moby TV and some of these others so it's yeah again just happens to be part of my equation to do watch it yeah I mean I we we had a Spencer poose on on our show a couple months ago or something like that and he's he does a lot of MSP stuff and streaming TV is one of those things that he does as well so yeah it's interesting to see how all that stuff is coming in like you know for a while voice you know was was a thing you know and it kind of went away and it seems like it's coming back now right to try and sell you know home you know phone service basically over VoIP over your network so okay um those are pretty much all the major points I have I guess other than one sort of wrap-up point is if you if you had the ability to just completely start a new year you know you sold out and then you started another one you know down the road or wherever it may be you're not compete we're off and everything yeah you're not compete we're off or you know all those things are you Thanos snap to out of existence whatever right I have a medical education oh we're gonna have a graphics guy do that just make him disappear from the screen yeah we might be asking for a lot but they're like stop committing this to this but anyways if you were to start all over a new what do you think you would approach differently from the you know the life lesson perspective or you know conversely like the new guy that comes up to is like hey I want to start a whiff what main areas should I focus on you know what's not not all the details what's the right path I guess would be how I would you know sort of frame that yeah I mean so the the the thing about starting all over which this is the cool part is if you're if you're starting today you get all the technology of today and all the wireless ISPs that exist they're having to forklift everything right to get to that so you know I mean ultimately I think it's always if you're if you're getting to start today and you got the money or whatever you're you're further ahead than your competitor is um but for me in the the lessons are always going to be you know power right power for me I believe 90% of my issues that I saw at all my sites always came back to power you know equipment failure or um ethernet ports that don't seem to work right anymore or something like that and you go oh yeah well it's a man fact it's net on ex's fault well it's not necessarily net on ex's fault right um which I've seen a lot of that you know they got this what's burnt up or that's burnt up they didn't ground and and so when I say power it's the whole thing right grounding is a big part of that so those those are the lessons I think that the new people can take from us that have burnt up all the equipment and we've done all of that right like when I tell you magic smoke out many times yeah yeah right I tell you don't go to staples and buy that APC UPS and plug it in and use that as yeah but I just don't have any money and I get that you don't have money but you're going to spend more money trying to fix what you just broke by burning everything up and and that's where a lot of people have learned that lesson even though I told them up front right and that's the hard part about telling people something is a lot of people got to learn it for themselves no matter what you tell them like hey here's the secret sauce do it this way they do it the other way just to see if you were correct or not right and um you know power I would say power is probably the biggest thing that I've learned doing DC rectifiers and AC isolation right we run a AC isolator at every at every site and then that goes into the rectifier and then we also um you know the other thing we did that gave us the flexibility now that we have more money right in the beginning we started out doing that the EPS 16 switches and the and the net on it switches right because it powers your radio and and that's just cheaper to do and now we're on a packet flux with a switch and the packet flux allows me to use any switching mechanism or any router mechanism behind it and power our equipment and it works with any variation of equipment um so a lot of it comes down to money right how much money do you have to start with and then that's going to determine how I build the site but if I got a lot of money yeah sure I'm going to show up with you know whatever packet flux and rectifiers and AC isolators and all the grounding and all that done and then from there um you know the equipment's just a that's a preference thing you know how do you want to design it what do you use with we're big help to you and symmetrical horn right I'm a huge asymmetrical horn guy it's just it's been our preference on on that hardware for for years that doesn't make that right and that's not a secret it's not like a I wish I would have told myself you know hey doing a solar site was a dumb thing I don't know how much so I don't know how much money I got invested in that I mean if you take into the fact that I've got a side by side four wheeler with tracks and you know in this generator and all this stuff in this one little site that was supposed to be really easy and cheap to do I don't know I don't know 65 $70,000 right you're like well yeah that didn't really turn out the way I wanted it because every time I turned around I was learning something new batteries right yeah oh my batteries are freezing get these kind of batteries well those batteries didn't do any better and when you got 24 batteries in there it costs a lot right I think the AGM's the last AGM's we bought were $360 a pop you know and you got 24 of them yeah you know and then you're you start out with one kind of solar panel and then you learn that oh well this other so you know you know mono crystalline is better than this one and and then you know this manufacturers this efficient and and you got to look at efficiencies right and solar panels aren't efficient I think my my most efficient solar panels 20 and a half percent or something like that efficient yeah and how to combine that well now I just changed my amperage now I got to change my solar controller and so I've morphed this what was supposed to be cheap solar site into this big expensive thing and after you hike up the side of a hill enough times pretty soon you're buying the vehicle to get up there right I mean so that's for me personally solar was was one of those educators that I don't yeah I wish I knew all the stuff back then about that and I wouldn't have had to go through all those pains of learning that in my environment we get way less sun so what one guy goes what one guy goes oh I only got two panels down here in Arizona and everything works great I got to have like six or you know something like that to have the equivalent because of our our area. So those are I would say that's you know for me those are my biggest things at least in the networking side of or not in the network but in the hardware side of things for for power delivery. The rest of it is is hard to say because everything's changed so much as far as that's concerned you know micro tick routers have become such a big part of wireless ISPs now you know it's the low cost go to for routing your network depending on your designs and things like that. Whether we would do all of that in our core again probably not we've pulled all of our micro tick stuff out of our core right I tried Juniper right and Juniper works I put it in there and my MX 480 never had a problem. We didn't license it because quite honestly I can't afford to license a MX 480 and a hundred and some thousand dollars that they want for it and so we found an alternative which is Danos it gives me. All the ability to do all the netting and the routing and the things that we want to do into a box. And so for me it works really well for for what we're doing. But again I went through this education right I bought the twenty five thousand dollar Juniper used from somebody else and yeah you know knowing what I know now I'd rather bought the sixteen hundred dollar or twenty six hundred dollar server put some cards in it and loaded this free operating system so that would have saved me a lot of money. You know those are the educational things I guess that that you learn over time is how to cut costs where to cut them. But again my solution isn't going to be for everybody. Everybody's got a different preference on what routers and what switching and how to run the network. I don't think there's one right way to route a network or or design your network or. So all of that stuff is still you know just kind of up in the air. But that's that's it. I think for us you know as far as education and in things that I would do differently the rest of it I think is all still just a big learning process for the rest of us you know what what's the new hardware how does it fit all that stuff's ever changing. Yeah I think that's those are some excellent points everyone when they get when they're new the industry they want to look at all the sexy stuff so it's the radios right because they're like I can put a gig in the sky make it go everywhere and. Do they get past that and they're like a t-shirts and trucks and vinyl wraps and stuff but like the grounding the power distribution side is definitely more the more boring aspects of it perhaps but. At the same time if that don't go your network don't go so you know it's building building a strong foundation and get bones and then the rest of it just will kind of come naturally I think so those are those are really really good points for anybody new out there listen or anyone who's been doing it a while I've been kind of cobbling up some of that things like that that'll be the stuff that bust you so yeah well toss you get anything else you want to cover we we think we're gonna wrap this one up. Yeah no I mean that was really in depth I think we went over a lot of great topics I mean obviously Chris you bring a lot of knowledge to the table I mean you're pretty well known in social media as well so I think it'll be great for. You know your peers to see you and hear you and stuff like that you know it's hard it's hard to judge a person sometimes obviously from what they type right you can't. You can't sense that stuff and you know just to you know putting you out there like that I think it really really helps the industry I know you like to help people so yeah I thank you for all your time today and all the knowledge that you dropped in everybody was really good stuff. Yeah it's fantastic content so anyone looking for you know where can they find you you post on Wistalk a lot I think this is where a lot of folks know from you so on Facebook and the Wistalk groups. Your website is skitskynet.com I believe. I was like I looked at it like an hour and a half ago but I'm like again short term memory issues too so I can't be throwing a lot of stones there so. Okay Tassos folks looking for us where can they find us. Yeah find us all over on social media Facebook is a great place Instagram our YouTube channel and of course our website RFelements.com. Alright alright well everybody until we talk to you again next time y'all be good. Take care everybody see ya.