 the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA radio, the voice for tech and telecom on iHeart radio. I'm Jamie Skado-Kutaya, joining me here today, Mr. Jim Hollis, who's the executive director of FISPA. Jim, thank you for joining us here today at JSA TV. Happy to do it, Jamie. How are you doing today? Great, thanks. So for our viewers who may not already know, can you tell us the latest and greatest about FISPA? Well, two great things about FISPA this year is this is our 20th year of operating as a nonprofit association serving our members. So there's not too many associations out there can say they're in their 20th year. We're also in our 10th year of growth. So a lot of our members want to see new faces because it adds to our knowledge base of expertise that our members share across the membership. So it's a 10 and 20 thing this year. 10 years of growth and 20 years of being a nonprofit. Well, that's amazing. So tell us a little bit about who are your typical members of FISPA? FISPA, its early, early growth days was in the growth of the internet, every state would have an ISP association. FISPA originally was the Florida ISP Association. Other large associations for ISPs were in Texas, the TISPA group, and SISPA, the SISPA group. So you kind of get the acronyms that are used for the different associations. But after two or three years of operation, Florida expanded nationally and became the Federation of Internet Service Providers of the Americas. And back in the late 90s, there were thousands, literally 7,000 plus internet service providers in the US. And they had a very small market niche. Back in the day, a lot of those ISPs were smart and looking that it would be their benefit to become a local exchange carrier. And the focus at that time of becoming a SEALUC was to be able to sell circuits to themselves as a competitive carrier to reduce their cost of GIDS to make their ISP more profitable. And that evolution is still with us today where what's left of the ISP industry and the SEALUC industry and our niches are we work with local and regional providers. These are small telecommunication companies. And typically they grew along the lines of the ILEC LATA. So if you were able to resell services from the local carrier in your area to deliver your own services, that typically came to you in a LATA-based scenario. Some of them would be multiple LATA-based. And LATA's to you and I are like our area code, 704 for Charlotte, 980 now for Charlotte. So we're local and regional. If you're multi-state or have a whole state or national, those are larger type of internet providers in SEALUCs. They tend to belong to the larger association called encompass.org. Our market niche are the independently owned and operated local and or regional internet service providers and competitive local exchange carriers. That's our market niche. And so what are the benefits that you provide to your members? Well, the first thing that our members are gonna say, I hear a lot of I didn't know there were companies like me out there. I thought I was alone is another one. It's so nice to know that I'm not the only one out there having the same problems. So my job as executive directors, I report to a great group of volunteer board of directors is to enable our members to collaborate and share their knowledge base. And believe it or not, the best way to do that right now is our members actually like, this is a good old fashioned email list serve. It's an ability for hundreds of people, hundreds of companies to post issues, questions that are driving their businesses that they want responses to. And usually they're fast responses and they're very varied. The owner operators of these companies are on that list serve. It's an employee base. You got multiple employees from the same company on that list serve. And it ranges anywhere from my office lady, just quit, I need a new compensation plan, a new job description to I'm on a customer site. I'm trying to bond two T ones together. Does anybody have a configuration for a Cisco 2601? So a lot of business questions, a lot of technical questions, and it's not overwhelming. One of the things that these owner operators don't want is not a social media platform. This is something where we allow collaboration and knowledge base. And that's a searchable list serve, email list serve. So if you're looking for old topics, you can collaborate on there. The second largest benefit that our members drive me to, besides making sure that we have collaborative ways of our members coming together. By the way, that would include a portal besides email for collaboration as well. Our vendor solutions. A smaller company doesn't necessarily have the time to shop and put out an RFP and evaluate RFPs and do technical analysis and bring equipment into labs and test the labs. But when they put out a question for I'm looking at this vendor or what vendors have you considered, the knowledge that comes forward on vendor selection is huge. And a lot of these vendors are members of FISPA. If you're a good vendor, it's always hard to get your product out there, it seems like, but if you're a bad member, it's very easy to find out when you're a bad vendor. So an association like FISPA tends to flush out the lesser vendors rather quickly. And the larger vendors that participate in FISPA and take the time to get to know our membership, participate on that email list service when appropriate, attend our meetings, which I'm coming to our meeting platform as well, as another value at FISPA. So you had vendor solutions and bringing vendor solutions to our members is a great benefit of FISPA. And then the third one, that seems very important is we have meetings. We have an annual meeting. We get about 60% of all of our members to participate. They enjoy it, they've known these guys, this industry group for a long time, and it's educational focused. One of the differences of FISPA compared to a lot of other trade shows, a kind of nibble around the edges of this telecommunications industry are you go to a trade show and everybody wants to try to find out ways of delivering content over an IP-based internet system. And you'll find a company that's a keynote speaker or a panelist on a speaker panel and they'll talk about how he's delivering 20, 20 channels. And of course, somebody of one of the audience will say, hey, how'd you do that? And the answer typically is, well, I can't tell you that I'm under non-disclosure or let me get back to you. And it's good to know that companies are able to start getting content that they can put out on an IP network. But what FISPA is about is, we want to know how to. We want to know exactly how you did it. Did you go to the NCTC? Did you get a contract? Are you part of a buying group? What's the name of the person you worked with? Was there a deposit required? How big is the legal agreement? What are your restrictions? And when you go to a FISPA meeting or in our listserv, we're all about the how to. And that's another huge value add. And that how to also, besides adding to our knowledge base, it really reduces or even eliminates the need for a lot of high-end consultancy fees that you might pay otherwise. So for our modest membership dues, you're getting a lot of free consulting, I'll say. Yeah, you've got free consulting. You've got that vetting of those vendors, that information sharing, that collaboration, and those events that are, again, empowering more education, correct information out to the marketplace. So, loving the FISPA model, been a fan of it for years and of you, Jim, for years. So we appreciate you spending some time. One last question for you. I know it's just such an evolving marketplace as you discussed. Where do you see FISPA heading in a year or two out? Well, I'm gonna answer it in two parts. The first part kind of takes us back to our engagement with vendors. An internet service provider couldn't have existed back in 1994, 95, 96, as they started out as dial-up providers because somebody had to provide the dial tone. So very early, our industry learned that I need access to the incumbent local carriers network to be able to provide my services. And I think everybody remembers the screeching modem yell that came from the local carrier. You may have been dealing with Jim's internet service or Billy Bob's internet service, but it was running on one of the incumbent local carriers. Early in that process, besides bringing vendors to the table, FISPA also engages the ILX and the cable codes. And a lot of times we're told we're crazy to do that, but we're not crazy. When you have a group of young telecommunication companies that are very early to adopt new technologies, they need that last mile access to deliver their services, and they do things better. They're either quicker to deploy, they're cheaper to deploy, and then there's the infamous, they just simply answer their telephones, which is sometimes a huge advantage to anybody that wants help when they have a problem with their internet. But in the last 10 years, we've seen a huge boom in our buying programs, primarily with AT&T and their fiber network. They have Metro Ethernet is a product name. They have OptiMan, OptiWan, and most recently AT&T switched to Ethernet. And we see that growth in fiber connections. 80% of the invoices that go out of FISPA are business. So we're primarily a business to business. We do have some members that do a great job of doing consumer. So over the years, the last couple of years particularly, many of our members have started to deploy their own fiber network. This is where they're doing layer one, owning their own fiber. They're trenching, they're digging holes, they're pulling fiber, they're putting in conduit. Some of it's on telephone poles or power poles, a lot of it's most of it's under the ground. Right now what we see is a continued need in the US for growth of fiber. The wireless technologies are doing great. 5G's on the horizon. And that's gonna solve a lot of connectivity to last mile issues, but you're always gonna need fiber between those connections. So last time we did a little audit, we had 43 members that had deployed fiber networks or are in the process deploying fiber networks or actually have committed projects. So I expect that to be 60, probably during in the next 12 months, that's a 50% growth. So the answer to question is really, it's fiber. And right on, we're seeing it's the same exceeding growth on our end. And yeah, couldn't agree with you more, Jim. Well, thank you so much for your time. And for our viewers who want to know more, where can they go? Well, FISPA, F-I-S-P-A, which really that is our name right now. There is no acronym to go with that. It's just FISPA.org is our website. Our meeting website is FISPALive.com. And the value of looking at our meeting website is you get a feel for the topics into discussion points that are industry. So if you go to FISPALive.com and go to the agenda, that is the most recent topics that are hot. My job as executive director is to respond to the discussion threads on our email lists or the phone calls that I get. And I try to accumulate all that into our last meeting. So FISPA.org, and there's also a pin map on there. You can go to where we are to show you everybody by our stage. It'll show you a kind of a pin map representation of our membership. We are national. And then FISPALive.com to kind of get a feel for our meetings. And I will add that as a nonprofit association, we put all the money right back into our members. So there's nobody getting fat in all these programs, except for me, I guess. But that's where you can find us. And thank you very much for this opportunity to work with you, Jamie, and a great job so far. Thank you, Jim. It's an honor to bring us here today and to learn more about all the great work this is doing for us. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Radio.