 This is JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals I'm Dean Perine coming at you on location in beautiful Miami, Florida at Metro Connect 2020 and with me right now is mr. Jim Murazi Jim is the president and CEO of DQE Communications Jim welcome to JSA TV. Thanks for having us here today. You bet you bet So Jim for our viewers that don't already know why don't you tell them a little bit about DQE? Sure. So DQE Communications is a Metro Optic Fiber Network headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania We've got about 3,700 miles of fiber in Western Pennsylvania serve businesses of all sizes primarily focused on enterprise business hospitals schools government things of that nature So let's let's talk a little bit about your near your network. I understand that there is some expansion In Harrisburg and so why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that expansion? Sure So again, you know, we're based in Pittsburgh, but we have seen a lot of opportunity in the Harrisburg area Which is the state capital of Pennsylvania a number of our customers in the Pittsburgh area have operations there So we're following our customers as they continue to move and grow and so everything there man with needs there Let's talk about your customers a little bit then I mean I understand that there is there is probably not a one-size-fits-all or a one solution for every customer and and you Kind of have run with that. So a lot of your solutions are custom fit or designed for your your your customers Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the benefit of that that custom fit solution? Yeah, that's exactly right and we do think about it like that It is truly a custom design for each and every customers some are looking for dark fiber solutions with high redundancy and unique routes some are looking for Metro Ethernet services that have one gig 10 gig kinds of services and are looking for certain kind of delivery factors So when we think about how we can serve a customer It's always with a white sheet of paper and thinking about it from their perspective their needs and what is important to them So we truly do build something that's unique for each and every customer as opposed to just off the shelf or cookie cutter Kind of a thing and that really has done really really well for us over the years Because the larger hospital systems state government, you know city government They look for those kinds of solutions and you have to be a provider who can offer those kinds of things to the customers I love that I love that which is a great segue into kind of our next topic of discussion that we hear a lot about IOT and AI and And all of these very very buzzy tech words, but ultimately, you know How how it plays out is is largely dependent on some of the work that you do Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about how what it is that you do is ultimately Advancing those newer technologies sure so fiber really is the critical link here And you know that may sound like it's a little bit of homeschool kind of thing here But it's the true plumbing behind all of these things with regard to 5g technology Internet of things if you don't have a robust communication platform that can move all that Tremendous amount of data. It doesn't work So the the critical link at least in our judgment in our view is building that infrastructure to support the growth of these kinds of Technologies whether it's autonomous driver vehicles 5g small cells Internet of things all that is really important based upon the robustness of the network Fiber is the king. No, it absolutely makes sense I I don't understand how these technologies do anything without the fiber enabler and enabling them to actually work so So let's talk 2020 a little bit and beyond maybe if we can Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what they might be able to expect from DQE over the next year? And how about maybe even the next five years? Yeah, so a couple things number one is just continued further penetration of our existing market You know, we are a market leader in the Pittsburgh area, you know, clearly We have a tremendous and robust fiber network and we have a tremendous Market share there, but there's always room to continue to grow and we'll continue to grow with our customers Second thing is geographic expansion, you know We're moving to where our customers need us to be and we'll do that in a in a thoughtful engineered way and lastly, it's the new services that customers look for as well things like Distributed Nile Service kind of mitigation services SD WAN services those kinds of things that add another layer of platform to the customer and Gives them the ability to manage their networks the way they want to manage their network So those are the kinds of things we'll be doing in 2020 and beyond Excellent Jim. Thank you very much for being with us today. We appreciate it. It's my pleasure Thanks for having me. You got it. You got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV and listening to JSA podcast That's it for us right now. So we'll see you soon and happy networking