 Welcome to the RFLMS Unlicensed Podcast. I'm Caleb, this is Tossos, and this week we're talking to Sakeed Ahmed from Cambium Networks. Awesome, man. I'm excited for this one. Let's do it. Let's do it. Sakeed, man. It's great to have you here. We're super excited to talk to you on our podcast here. It gets a little bit of your insight into the industry, your particular products and everything, and the things that you guys at Cambium got popping right now, and just generally what's going on, man. For the good people out here who maybe aren't really familiar with you, if you could give us a little bit of history about how you came up in Cambium, your role there, and kind of your general responsibilities and the insight that you've got in the company and what they're doing. Sure, sure. Thanks, Caleb, and Tossos both of you. First and foremost, thanks for having me on this podcast. I like the format and being able to talk casually and all of that, and talking about industry and the trends we're seeing and have a learning session both ways. First and foremost, my name is Sakeed Ahmed. To back on the background a little bit about me, I was formerly at Motorola, as you guys all know, we came out of Motorola Solutions as in Cambium Networks in 2011. I worked for many years, 15, 16 years or so at Motorola, everything from two-way paging to Y-Max. I hope I don't look at them both, but yes, two-way paging was a real thing back in the day. 2006, 2004, I think I moved over from some of our cellular infrastructure stock over to the Canopy organization, which was back then in, you know, Shamburg, Illinois. That's where I kind of got into the core part of Cambium, which was Canopy at the time, and we also had our Orthogon point-to-point organization. Fast forward, you know, 2011, we became Cambium Networks. Fast forward some more, 2019, Cambium became public, et cetera, et cetera. Along the way, I guess where I have played the biggest role at Cambium or for that matter in terms of wireless in the industry is we started the EPMP product line naturally. That was essentially our desire or our answer to building a, what I would call an affordable line of product that can cater to a mass market audience that, you know, Wisps are on the world, Wisps in North America that want to get started, you know, have really good performance synchronization and all of that. So I would say a good chunk of my career at Cambium was spent in not just building that first GPS sync solution based on, you know, Wi-Fi chipsets, but taking it on beyond that first 11N to AC Wave 2, then multi-user MIMO, and now moving towards an AX-based solution. That's kind of where I've been. I would say along with the product side, I've spent quite a bit of time, you know, making friends in the whisper industry. I spend time on social media and things like that, and I love hearing from customers. So, you know, my mantra more or less has been to listen to our customers, understand what the challenges are and try to incorporate that into our product designs and marketing and all of that, right? Obviously, along the way, we became good friends with RF Elements and we did some joint products together, looking to do more in the near future and whatnot, but that's kind of the summary, Caleb. Well, that's great. That's good information. So, you know, even in the industry for a long time, obviously, and really tapped in. So, you know, what do you think the state of the industry is right now? I mean, it's always an industry that's had a lot of changes. You know, we're a very fast-paced industry. There's a lot going on, but the last couple of years, especially, have been somewhat interesting. Definitely not boring time. Definitely not boring. So, you know, from the state of an industry perspective, you know, where do you see things now? Where are they going? You know, what's really exciting for you? You know, you guys with 11x and the 6GIG stuff, I know those are really big, and especially in your product category that you're working with, with the EP&P. So, where are we now? Where are we heading? There'd be great. So, I mean, I wouldn't even call it insight per se. I bet you guys have come to the same conclusion, but let's face the fact here, the pandemic has been the biggest eye-opener for a lot of people in this world in terms of the necessity of broadband, right? No hips and butts about it. So, I think there's one way to describe it is, like, while the pandemic sucked and still does, it changed the way we work. The way we live and we work has changed dramatically, and our reliance on broadband has been never stronger. So, what that tells me is the industry that we're in is in the best place we could have been since the dawn of broadband wireless is the way I see it, right? Whether it's kids, you know, doing e-learning from home and realizing you don't have good bandwidth, whether us trying to do this video conference call and worried whether we're on wireless or fiber, right? I mean, that's the most exciting thing about it. But, you know, along with that excitement, obviously there's, you know, the other plus side of this is now we are getting the attention of, you know, government bodies, right? There's funds becoming available to truly go and expand broadband in a meaningful manner. Now, we all know this initiative and these desires have been around for a long time and there's still lacking of a true understanding of how much broadband has truly penetrated the United States. But hopefully, how hopefully out of all this combination of better maps, combination of local state initiatives, funds, and last but not least the most important aspect of this, the Wisp community that is out there who are actually the most connected to reality. If their voices are heard and plug and tie up all these angles, then we are sitting in potentially one of the most exciting periods and that's from a manufacturer, that's from a consumer, that's from a friend of the Wisp industry, etc., etc. I love that. I love seeing that. I mean, we don't, we see a lot because I'm on social media pretty much the majority of the time, right? So I see a lot of the negative out there and we had a previous podcast about, you know, the doom and gloom that everybody's talking about. I'm just like, dude, I was like, do you not see the potential that's out there? And like, they're basically just paved a road for us. I mean, if you don't see it, so it's great to see another colleague in the industry see it as brightly and as, you know, inviting as I do as well. And we definitely have to get that message out to more people because it, you know, again, if we don't all see it, then we're not going to really have the intensified force to really take on this industry and take it to a whole new level. So it's awesome. Yeah, and I think, you know, and it's easy to get caught up in the challenges, right? Hey, you know, this is complicated, FCC is doing this that, but there's probably greater good coming out of all of this than we realize, right? I think some people might argue that, you know, hey, wireless is reaching its limits and things like that. But the reality is, it's far from over, right? Have we adjusted our deployment models? Absolutely. You guys are prime example, right? Cell sites are getting smaller using different kind of antennas. So you adjust, right? Is fiber a threat? No, fiber is a complementary solution. Do fiber where it makes sense? Do wireless where it makes sense, right? But at the end of the day, there's money and there's technology that support the broadband industry. And the best thing is there's consumer that are starting to understand, right? What broadband means to their everyday life. And I think as an industry, as a manufacturer, we got to get better at acknowledging the obstacles, understanding how to work around them, and also build our strengths to, you know, going inside the home, ensuring better experience for the home Wi-Fi user, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I can go on forever, but you guys get the gist of it. I think you're in agreement too. Definitely. Yeah, for sure. From a political perspective, in terms of, you know, the FCC, in terms of funding the state level, the municipal level, you know, we've been in a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations, and how much the fixed wireless broadband industry or the WISP industry in general is so much in the forefront of a lot of these efforts that are coming through. So, you know, a lot of that's been a lot of great work from WISPA. Definitely been a big, big factor in that. But a lot of it is, you know, the big manufacturer's perspective as well. So, you know, when you've got somebody your size, a big publicly traded company, well-established, long history, saying these same things, like this is important for the people to get service, and this is how we're doing it. I think it leaves a lot of credence to it as well. And we're absolutely behind it, and there's a lot of initiatives internally to the company. We're watching this space, the funding, and I think we would love to get even more involved to educate our WISP industry, bring them closer to organizations that help with policymaking, help with the intricacies of grant funds and things like that, right? So, that's definitely up our wheelhouse in trying to help the WISP industry in that too. Definitely. I think another thing that, you know, really has opened up our eyes too, like I said, it's not just, you know, where the industry is going and a lot of, you know, manufacturers and, you know, service providers and other things within industry are seeing the potential there, but it also opened up our eyes too to the pitfalls and the Achilles heel, like the supply chain issues that we had, and it's really changing. I know internally for RF elements, we are doing some massive things internally to really try and counter that or stop it from happening again and gaining more control over that. Is that something that Cambium is looking at as well? Oh, absolutely. So, you know, this is a very important topic, right? I mean, on one hand, we're talking about the excitement and the opportunities. On the other hand, you know, we're also facing one of the biggest challenges in our career, right? Pandemic, you know, supply chain shipping costs, chip shortages and all of that, right? What I will say in a nutshell on that front, just like you guys as a manufacturer, right, it's exercising new muscles within the company. I mean, that's what this is, and that goes all the way down to our West friends and customers, right? We're all exercising new muscles, and I would almost say this is a good forcing function to companies to look at designs, look at alternate supply, alternate parts, right, and incorporating all of that. And the key is to do that stuff before it, you know, it catches up with you. And it was a surprise to some extent, but I'm happy to say that we at Cambium have been, you know, embraced the challenge and worked towards it in a very, very aggressive manner. And I think we are going to come around it as the world does and pass the shortages and we should be able to supply, you know, some of this move towards DAX and all of that stuff is part of that strategy as well. So we're just like you guys, you know, we're on that problem aggressively. Yeah, there are definitely some aspects from manufacturing perspective and just a pure product perspective where it's like, oh, pivot, pivot. You've got to make some shifts and jukes and jives on things, but you know, it does, like you said, it does strengthen the product offering and the supply chain in general, as we learned, you know, we all wanted to be more adaptive, you know, this sort of just in time application that's worked for so long, we've now realized some of the pitfalls of it and everything. So I mean, there's that aspect, there's stocking where you do your manufacturing, like you said. So yeah, there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of economists making a lot of money, writing a lot of books about this in the end. So it might be the next side project. So from a technology perspective, you know, we're seeing a lot of really interesting things. And then, you know, like right now, your guys big push, I mean, you've got several, you've got several product families. And while they are working to one, you know, main goal of being able to provide broadband solutions for the masses out there, you know, each family sort of focuses on maybe a different way of doing it. So I know with EPNP, you know, the big, the big excitement level was coming down the pipe as the AX platforms, you know, the, the, the platform that the previous platforms are very well established, very mature, everyone's ready for AX. So if you can kind of give us some of your insight, the elevator speech perhaps as to what AX is going to bring to the industry on this platform, not only now and then in the year term, but in the future, you know, things about loading or upgrade paths and stuff like that. Yep. It's a great question, Caleb. So, so let me, let me talk a little bit about what I consider the problem statement, right? It's, it's one thing to keep jumping on the next technology, right? And say, oh, AX is here, we got to do another product. Well, what does it really solve, right? What are the customers asking for? The reality is, you know, you have two big issues in my opinion. We work in a lesson spectrum. So it's the Wild Wild West, right? Whatever we say in terms of synchronization, whist playing with each other, the reality is interference is brutal up there. So you need products that can deal with interference. Now, obviously, there is no one magic button that anybody can push that just makes things work in interference, right? It's a combination of things. It's best practices, antennas, power limits, some noise cancellation, all these things come together and then, then some luck too, in my opinion, right? You can get a nice team channel and be able to work. So that's one. In the middle of all of that, let's face it, people are wanting higher throughput, whether you actually need it or not. You know, we can argue about that all day long, but the reality is, I love that debate. Yeah, I want my gig, right? I mean, what are you going to do? So you've got to play that game if you're always. So as a manufacturer, so that means we have to focus on, hey, what platform do we work on that brings higher throughput? How do we get to that higher throughput? And then what can we do to, you know, help the systems work more efficiently, spectral efficiency, interference mitigation, etc. And then last but not least, I think one of the things I'll touch on a little bit that I personally have been pushing within Cambium and we're going to have a solution here very soon is, you know, at the end of the day, the angle is like, okay, fine, we give you great throughput and all of that, but you know, smart home with all the gaming devices and all the sensors or thermostats and all of that. What is the true experience of that internet feed that you have in your home? And then we start looking at the next generation platform. No secret, right? We were riding the wave of a standards based chipset. Why did we do that? It's pretty simple. Economy is your scale, right? If you're on a proprietary solution, you're building FPGAs or ASICs and things like that, the current chip shortage challenge is that's a challenge you'll have to live with as well. You got to get in line behind some large guys building commodity chipset. So in a way, I feel that we are at a good position because we are on a standard-based path. And on that front, naturally, 11AC brought some good stuff, multi-user MIMO, which you guys know that from a Cambium perspective, it's an anchor that we believe in and we've been demonstrated with our awesome Medusa platform, right? Wi-Fi industry more or less has been evolving and making Wi-Fi standard a bit more appealing and applicable to an outdoor deployment environment, right? So AX starts to bring things that handle some of the things I talked about, higher throughput, better interference mitigation and handling different types of application. So when we go towards AX, right off the bat, right? I'll kind of walk you through this a little bit, Caleb, Vintasa, just to give you an idea. You've got the ability to do OFDMA or multi-user MIMO, right? In OFDMA, you're able to use subcarriers, smaller chunks of radio resources to send small data. So if somebody needs a little bit of data for a WhatsApp call, you can use less radio resource to make it more efficient. Same thing, those radio resources could be used for things like uplink TCP acts and things like that. Where in the past, you'd use up more chunks of bandwidth. So inherently, there's some efficiency coming in because of the concept of OFDMA and radio resource units and being able to allocate smaller chunks. Then obviously, you start seeing the higher modulations coming in. There was a point in time where I'd be like, what are you guys thinking? You're not going to get 10, 24 quam. I mean, that's not going to happen. I've been proven wrong to some extent, but you could also argue I was saying that because I didn't have a higher modulation product. But now that I do, I can talk about it. The radios have gotten better, right? So C's built in radio has gotten really good. So you are able to see links holding 10, 24 quam at a reasonable RSSI and a reasonable SNR. And then when we introduced the 2096 quam on our 6E platform, like the 6 to 7 gig, what you fundamentally see is, hey, look, I can actually do 256 quam or in worse conditions than I did in the previous generation. So overall radio performance is getting better. You're holding higher modulations. You've got that OFDMA play. And fundamentally, there's a lot of overhead reduction in AX and send more data. And have better latency, higher packets per second. So I can handle small packets. All of this stuff kind of comes together and makes AX a very, very compelling solution. That's why I'm personally excited that we move from 11AC Wave 2 to AX 5G stuff with that 8x8 multi-user MIMO platform. We're bringing a wealth of good stuff into the mix. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm totally excited for all the things that you mentioned. And I'm really anxious to see how 4096 quam plays out in the industry because, again, I think the industry is moving forward. It's been part of our message making the sell sites smaller and smaller radius is getting closer to the customer and stuff like that. And when we do some of our calculations, even a 1024 quam, it's like it's basically half the distance of your 256 installation previously. And then 4096 will probably cut it in half again. So it'll be interesting to see how that works out and what kind of hardware on the CPE side it becomes available to accomplish these higher modulation rates. But the speeds are going to be fantastic. But I should also clarify to you, the 4096 quam is on our 6G platform. So in AX, we're going to have two different platforms, an 8x8 5G MIMO and a 4x4 6G. So on 6G, we're going to support 4096 quam plus 160 meg channel. So now you can potentially get really high throughput. The catch being you've got some ERP limits. So yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't expect you're going to go 4096 quam all the way to two, three miles. The paradigm is going to change. But it's already started. We're already shrinking our sell sites, right? And that's how we can get the throughput. I think economic wise, you're still better off and then trenching for fiber in a lot of these cases. So we'll see. All right. Well, those are some really solid points. The AX, the move to AX is going to be massive for the industry. So what's the path for people that are listening to this, are really interested and they're thinking, man, this is some cool stuff. I need to get on top of this. When you're telling new customers that this is what's coming, this is how you should plan to deploy. What are your key points that you're telling them in terms of sell sizes and AP loading? What are some of your hot points there? Let's walk through deployment scenarios and kind of talk about the migration type situation. So if you're an existing customer of ours, and let's categorize them a little bit, Caleb, you've got existing and new customers. If I'm talking about existing customers who've been deploying EMP, as you have seen, one of our most important positions have been the backwards compatibility, right? IE, forest compatibility for that matter. Can you take your radios and keep talking? So that is going to continue on the AX front. When you deploy an AX AP, the expectation is it will speak to a subscriber that you deployed from the previous generation. Having said that, I'm going to clarify something, which is that on day one later on this year, when you're going to start seeing our AX solution, it is going to be a green field if he will talk to an AXSM. Under the hood, we will have backwards compatibility, but we're not going to go commercial with that just yet. And this is to all the customers that went through the whole painful beta period of cooking backwards compatibility, it took a while. And what I'd hate to do is throw this solution of compatibility into existing networks and have people face issues. So we'd rather bake it, cook it with friendly customers, run its course and make it very solid. But initially it'd be sort of a green field, AX to AX. I think people will tell me, Sikita, come on now, without backwards compatibility, I'm out of business. I'm like, okay, I get it, I'm sorry, but I'd rather cook it first. So green field will go out. It's a great approach. And I think, again, this is something that we see a lot. I mean, the industry and the customers out there really appreciate honesty, right? And they really appreciate some sort of forethought on, this is probably the best we're doing. Even though you're not happy with it, there's a reason behind it, right? And you guys being public about that information, it's just fantastic because we really don't see that from many of the other players out there to be quite honest. So you guys are well known for it and good on you for continuing to uphold that kind of principle for the company. I love it. Appreciate it. Thank you. So we'll go on with Greenfield AX to AX. You'll have an 8x8 AP. You'll have a 25 DBI dish product. You'll have a 2x2 AP, which is going to work with RF Elements Horn antennas, which is super popular. And then on the 6th east side, which is obviously a hot topic, right? It's a separate SKU and some clarify that as well. There's obviously desires. Hey, why can't I have a full 2 gig wide product that I can just throw in and have it talk to my 5 gig SM, my 6 gig SM? Well, if I went down that path, my AP is going to cost me like four times that it does today. And I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking about product launches this year at all, because I would still be in development state. So again, talking about honesty, we took the path of saying, you know what? It's going to be better time to market, better for the industry. Yes, it's a little painful. You can't have this one golden AP that does it all. But for 6C, you're going to have to put up a different 6C AP as well as a subscriber module. But that will support all the way from 5.9 to like 7100. So you've got a whole swath of spectrum available. There are customers that are starting to do special temporary authority licenses. We've got some 6C gear starting to get out there. We want field feedback and things like that. Obviously, things like AFC, the automatic frequency coordination stuff, has got to get baked through the FCC. There's people that submitted their solutions. All that's going to take time. But we're marching forward from a product perspective. Kayla, back with compatibility will happen over time. Initially, it will be Greenfield. My recommendation is, hey, if we're in the most opportunistic, exciting time of our industry, then you should have some plans for new towers, new expansion. Go deploy the AAC stuff on those things. Or if you can afford it, replace the problematic, heavily loaded towers through the new technology, reuse some of that stuff, mix and match a little bit. That's sort of the position I would present to you on that. It also makes sense because no matter what, every Wisp is going to put up a new tower and it's going to be a Greenfield install anyway. At least they have the security knowing that, yes, I can't upgrade my existing stuff yet, but hey, I can go into new service areas, offer these higher packages, and they could also, it gives them time to figure out in a new market, how well does it work, what they really can do before they decide to take that step and start rolling up the old stuff. I think it's a solid approach. There's going to be people that are trying to figure out what their new deployment mechanism too. Because what worked when you're getting just a janky 64 or 256th qualm network, those practices are not going to work anymore when you're trying to run 1024 or 4096. You've got things like figuring out what your effective ranges are going to be, your antenna down tilts are going to start playing into a lot more factor than necessarily what they would, trying to limit that cell size as we've talked about, new horn arrays. One common conversation we have where people are like, why don't I want to use a smaller horn with less gain and understanding the core concept of those, you don't always necessarily need all the gain. You can see 10 miles, that's great, but a lot of times, especially on these high density, short range networks, you're wanting to really pull that back so you're not pulling all that noise in. Game works both ways, right? You're picking up interference too, so exactly. That's something we talk about all the time. I think realistically too, I've had this conversation about the split skew thing and we're like, well, what if I want to roll back to five gig? I'm like, realistically, if you're not going to be able to find a clear sped of spectrum in six gig anywhere, you're not realistically rolling back into five because it's just completely hammered. No, I think that's good and it's really exciting. Everyone's going to start picking up and running with this stuff pretty soon. Especially on six, if we can ever get the 6E stuff done, the AFC and everything. This has been the next, the big new thing coming for quite a little bit of time now. Have you guys seen any updates from your side of the conversations you're seeing? There's some EIRP rules, there's some weird things on the STAs where you're experimenting stuff now. Do they think we're going to get a little bit more, I guess, refinement in those rules and stuff like that here saying? To be honest with you, Caleb, I think the rules are in terms of the EIRP limits and all of that, the very low power, the standard power. We feel that that's pretty much defined. The AFC submissions of the proposals on how to handle protected incumbent microwave guys, that's also relatively clear. We've seen some, the Wi-Fi Alliance and another group, the broadband forum, some of these guys are very active and we're on those bodies as well. Watching things, it seems that things are moving along pretty well. Kind of speculate a little bit. My guess is that you've got multiple AFC systems, the FCC has to validate that stuff. Does this stuff really work? Give a certificate that says, yes, your solution is acceptable as a commercial deployment. I think that's what's going to take a little bit of time. The good news is that the AFC stuff in 6GIG is nearly not as complicated as CBRS. So, solution is simpler. You already know your locations. These are all static licensed microwave deployments. So you're just protecting against those or protecting those against the new deployments. I think it's just a matter of time. I think FCC is working towards it. I've seen indication where some blocking issues have been removed, like parties that are saying, hey, don't go forward with that. I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic. I think there's just this overwhelming surge of demand and ask, right? The 6E ban has been promised and it's an exciting opportunity. I think that's going to help us get through this. If not later this year or early next year, I expect that we should be in good shape. Yeah, we're all looking forward to this as everyone else is. So, good deal, good deal. Yeah, I just want to know. It's just killing me all these potentials, maybes, and what's happening. It's coming soon. It's not coming soon. It's just killing me because, again, as a manufacturer on our end, we're really a step behind. The radio manufacturers are really the first ones to get everything going. Then, as an antenna manufacturer, we have to see what you're doing in order to know what's the best thing. I think customers always want, like you said, they want the golden egg. They want the widget that does everything. I think sometimes they don't really understand what some of the design compromises are in order to give them that stuff. For example, on the antenna side of things, making a very wide band antenna. Yeah, it's simple if that's all we're doing. If we don't care about the stability of gain, if we don't care about the different polar plots for every polarity and all these other things, yeah, we can do it. I think it's important to put that stuff out there. Same thing with radios, right? Yeah, sure, you can make a five to seven gig if you want, but it gets really expensive. It's really difficult. All the filters and amps, and they start getting bigger. Yes. All these different things that go into it that really they don't understand. I'm not saying the industry doesn't understand, but some people don't understand. It's really good to put that information out there and paint that picture for them so they have better clarity and I think it helps us evolve. I've seen it already as we go from product generation to product generation. The industry gets smarter and they learn from the old stuff and they bring it over to their new stuff and therefore things start to move a lot faster because there's less tension that way. Like I said, I'm ready for it to come because I want to jump into it. It's frustrating for me for all the things that we have to wait on in order to have them. Chip set shortage. What's that look like from your end on the chips availability to even get this? Let's say it gets ratified tomorrow, 60s ago. How does that look from the manufacturing side from radio platforms? I touched on that a little bit earlier. Let's just say that the indications of when the problem showed up, that's obviously not today. It's months, years ago almost. Any manufacturer that acknowledged the challenge and corrective actions are the ones that are going to hopefully come out on the other side. I'm happy to say we're one of those companies. That's why we are talking about 6C and AX because that's the next generation, more efficient chipsets that are being manufactured out there. You'll see the massive industry push. We've already seen the big enterprise guys starting to talk about 6C-type stuff or AX based chipset. I think we're on that same path and we should be able to leverage the new technologies to make those chipsets and get past the supply chain challenges. Obviously, it's not here today, meaning the products aren't there today. If you're a customer, you're going to go through summer months, you're going to have to deploy, you're going to have to make some decisions. You're going to have to go deploy some of the stuff that we're shipping today, like 3000 and this and that, and spread yourself a little bit until the next step comes in. That's just a challenge that we navigate on the manufacturing side and our customers, the Wisps have to navigate. Same thing for you. Caleb, you guys make a new antenna, you've got an earlier generation, this one's delayed. What do you do? You've got to balance all of that. That's part of the reality. Yeah, that combination of filling your current needs and also trying to plan forward. A lot of people just don't see that. They're just going to magic antenna factory, the magic chipset factory, where we hit a big button and now it's for themselves. I typically find that that's the newer Wisps that haven't gone through it. Obviously, the older veteran Wisps have been through it and they have a better understanding of, yeah, well, do you want to provide service today to this potential customer? If the answer is yes, you deploy what you have. When the new stuff comes out, then you're quick to jump on it. Yeah, we've had so many shifts in our industry as well. Those of us that have been doing 15, 20 years, we saw it from pre-B to G to N to AC, not to AX and the FPGA systems, back when a really hardcore high-end system was like four megs. It's like, oh, this is amazing. The ones that with experience have seen it and know what it takes to roll into the new, but I think it's important to the newer Wisps out there to say, look, you're just not going to get an off-the-shelf solution that's new to just go balls out immediately. This is just not how technology growth moves. You might hear a lot of promises and fancy verbiage and physics breaking and stuff like that out there from some random source, but in the real world, that's not really how things work. You fill that Cadillac all day long. As we were talking about a wide band radio and the amount of stuff that goes into it, but economics come into play no matter how much we say it doesn't really matter how much an AP cost, it does matter at the end of the day. You still have to run a business. There's lots of claims that are being made and it will always happen. We've seen it over the years, cycles of, hey, we, SexyZ, but the real world deployment model, the applicability of these unique cases and the economics of it is what drives the adoption at the end of the day. We've seen things come and go and there's people that are still standing with core technology that works. It's always interesting. It keeps things exciting, but we always fall back to what works and what makes sense for the industry, pollution-wise. Yeah. I like the, let's just wide band everything. I mean, how hard could it be? Do you have any idea what a 2.5 gig wide LNA or LNA and PA is going to cost? 160 megahertz channels for everybody. Good times. So we see a lot of growth obviously in the U.S. is primarily where we work and we're focused, but we're both global companies as well. We're seeing a lot of growth in a lot of regions and wanted to see, and a lot of times our growths are tied. Where you guys are growing, we're growing as well because so many of our solutions work together hand in hand. So what are some more interesting regions that you're seeing or globally things like we're doing? We're doing a ton of stuff in Africa. We're seeing some of the mainline operators really pick up and run with things. So that's exciting. Latin America is big, getting deep in the APAC, starting with that rollout. So globally, are you seeing similar to the growth or the shifts different or kind of what's your perspective on the wider global market for anyone out there listening? Right, right, right, right. So globally, first and foremost, your statement that where you guys see growth is where we see growth and vice versa. It's very, very true. So let's kind of talk about the regions and growth and then I'll talk a little bit more specifically how that growth is playing out. So at a high level, Africa, definitely an exciting part. We're seeing more wisps coming over to Cambium in places like South Africa, Nigeria and other places. We're also seeing an interesting trend where some of the, like you said, the higher tier operators, right? In some cases, larger players that are not traditional whispers are saying, hey, I want to do enterprise broadband and I need something economical. I've never tried, you know, 5 gig unlicensed, but hey, it looks like I can give 10 meg bandwidth packages to this bank, right? So they're starting to come over and that's where Cambium obviously has a very strong sales team and whatnot and partners in distribution that we can engage with those types of accounts. So there's like an adoption from players that we wouldn't typically see in fixed wireless. That's the positive side in the rest of the world. While at the same time, there were wisps that have, through the pandemic, seen the same challenges. Like I'm exhausted what I've done with what I have. I got to look at something else, right? So they're coming and talking to Cambium. So that's what we see. So Africa is a big one. India is a place where we're seeing some good traction in APAC region. Indonesia continues to be a strong opportunity for us where we are playing a big role. Eastern Europe, right? I mean, our fellowmen's home turf are on that whole area. There's still lots of whispers that are trying us and kind of seeing what capabilities we bring to the table compared to what they're used to. So that's also a hot bit. Kala is also certainly an interesting place. Although Kala, in some cases, I'm seeing government type initiatives that are driving our growth. The traditional whispers per se in some parts of Kala is actually not as hot anymore, right? Because we do see aerial fiber being an economic option out of Kala in some cases and that puts a pressure on us. But there's more complimentary projects that are helping us get there. So I'm excited at what I see in the rest of the world. And I think I strongly believe that the financial incentives put forward by the U.S. government, whether it's the infrastructure bill, the art off and all of that, the similar packages are just a matter of time away. I think we're already hearing from European Union about 300 megabits per second requirement for EU funding and you're going to start seeing more of that globally because everybody realizes that broadband is the same necessity as electricity and running water in every corner of the earth. And I think that's why this excitement is not just a North America thing for me. I think it's a global excitement. So we'll see a lot more the rest of the world, I'm sure. For sure. And I think the technology has matured enough and is reliable enough for a lot of these sort of, even the level two, level three tier operators that may have tried it five or 10 years ago with no experience, no knowledge base or anything are now re-approaching and saying, you know, we know this works. We can see how much money the government's putting into. These are valid solutions. Maybe we just, you know, let's try this again, but do a little more legwork and homework into it. And I think this is where we're starting to see a lot of this takeoff. And you guys are especially like entrenched in a lot of industrial areas and stuff with other platforms in these regions where the broadband side hadn't hit quite as much. And I think that pulls that up and not market because we've been here working these solutions for years and years. So absolutely. No, it's good things, you know, global, global supply chain, add some global adventures, but, you know, so yeah, doing business in certain parts, you know, a little different than what everyone's interested in. Yes. Yes. Keeps it interesting. So, well, cool. So the other thing I wanted to talk about is tool sets. So, you know, one of the things that Cambium has done really well is not just focusing on a radio or a particular solution or even a branch. You guys got a lot of different tool sets, whether it's radio perspective, you know, you've got TerraGraph, you've got five gigs, six gig, you've got LTE solutions, you've got CBRS and a lot of things. And, you know, I think a lot of folks are familiar with that, but I kind of want to talk about maybe some of the other tool sets that we think are really interesting or I think it's really interesting, but maybe it doesn't get as much conversation. So things like seeing heat, like seeing heat is a solution to like answer the question of what is my coverage, what is my coverage? Like what can I actually do? I think it's going to be a lot more important as we start building more and more of these smaller microcells and focusing on density pockets and stuff instead of going, well, you know, my average radius for a site was five miles, seven miles, eight miles in these rural areas. Now we're talking about cutting them down really small to maintain these higher order modulation rates. There's a lot more planning in advance that needs to happen to go, no, go many sites and many pops. So I just, I like to bring this up because we get these mapping questions and stuff all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, Kayla, I'm glad. I mean, this is a brilliant question because it's a topic that is, it doesn't, and it's not just about, it's not about can be an hour off, right? It's about, it's about manufacturers thinking beyond the radio, thinking beyond the speed on the feet and the wireless wasp thinking beyond the speeds and the beats, right? It's, it's kind of, I touched on a little bit, right? Tossers, maybe a question that you asked about quality of experience and I'll come on that, touch on that in a minute. But it's, it's, I, I am amazed at the power of C and heat. And I say this in a proud way that, look, the most challenging thing is to send that installer and have them walk around for four hours pointing, listening and doing all of that. If you can cut that down, if you can get there and know that you can do this installation, be successful in the exact, I mean, that has to be super valuable, right? And we just, you know, we haven't talked about it enough, probably. And our friends don't understand it well enough, but C and heat, he telling from that perspective, right? So whether it's C and heat, whether it's link planner, which has been around for a while, which is getting integrated and going to have a roadmap of its own. I think C and Maestro is growing every day. And we're starting to think more in terms of not just, you know, dumping stats to you, but actually telling a story, right? Preemptively telling you, Hey, there's a problem about to happen. Here are your recommendations of what you can do about it. You know, I think about this as cambium as a company needs to think about automation, automation for your network, allowing your operators to sleep better at night, because a network should learn and take care of things sort of on its own. I mean, yes, it's a very grand and ambitious statement, but that's possible. It's possible possible. You know, I mean, that's why I'm, you know, this is truly a plug. So go for it. It's okay. But we are launching this quality of experience solution, right? And like, you know, we've got some great companies out there and Prasim. So I say in all of these, the cambium is going to come up with the QE solution. March 15th is going to be a public launch, but it's unique, unique. We're going to be the one company that can do things like TCP optimization, traffic shaping, application shaping, rate limiting, all of that stuff. But so are the same company that has access to our access points or schedulers and statistics and things like that. Marry those two up. Now I can have a dynamic relationship between my access points and my optimizer or my QE solution. All of a sudden, AP is congested, I can send information back to that, says, Hey, I'm going to enforce some automatic shaping rules, bring the congestion of the AP or the frame utilization done, right? So we're starting to say, let's not just worry about the access point and the speeds and feet. Is there an intelligence that I can, because you don't want to push so much to an embedded wireless device that it starts falling apart, because it's got to worry about so many things. Do your job, pass the bits and bytes. But if there's intelligence I can learn from you and apply, that QE solution becomes truly, truly very, very interesting. So there will be a lot more on that. And maybe we can do another one of these podcasts, just talk about how to improve experience, all the different elements of it. But Caleb, do your question, the tool sets, this becomes another tool in the arsenal that we offer to slowly bring the conversation beyond just, Hey, throw another radio, throw another package on there. But how do you ensure that every application inside the home is working seamlessly, using the right amount of bandwidth, focusing on latency when it matters, focusing on jitter when it matters, et cetera, et cetera. That's fantastic. It's great. I mean, I think there's a reason why our companies just work well together, Cambium and RF elements, because we share, I think a lot of the same kind of values and foresight out there. It's great to see you going beyond the radio. I mean, again, there's a lot of, I call them imitators out there versus the innovators out there. And there are a lot of industry firsts, I believe in this space that Cambium brought to the table, right? I mean, GPS sync, you guys pioneer that stuff, seeing heat, right? I mean, I think, tell me if I'm wrong, but you guys were the first ones to really take that LiDAR data and bring it down into it, right? So again, there are a lot of, again, other people in this space that kind of have things, but they don't explain it well. They don't bring it together. They don't marry those products together and teach the user base how to use it properly and share their points of view on things like that. So it's great, again, to see Cambium really pushing forward with that kind of vision beyond the radio. And it's just great to see, man. Thank you. Yeah, we want to keep doing that. And with you guys' support and collaboration, I think our goal is simple, right? We just want this industry to succeed. We want to be leaders in a way that we can chart the courses and help people do what they need, what they do. Our WISP provides broadband connectivity. We, as manufacturers, come up with the best products and leave the charge, essentially, right? Listen to the customer base and come up with new solutions. I think that's what we can do. All right, Sakita. Well, man, this is, we've covered a lot of area, but this is a really good conversation. I'm glad we had it. I'm glad you were able to take the time and talk to us and know you're super busy. So this has been great. What are you looking forward to over the next real short term here? Not big grand scales and projects and stuff, but things on the calendar, which you got coming up. Entosos, thank you for the opportunity. It was really fun talking, right? The format was great, and it was just nice. It was just nice to chat about the industry and all of that. Obviously, the big thing now is the WISP America around the corner, right? March 15th in New Orleans. Super excited. We're going to be there. Cambium, I'm going to be there myself. We're going to have a lot of cool things. And a few things that are going to be the highlights is we're going to be talking and launching our quality of experience solution, which you can come by the booth, learn and ask questions, learn all about it. And equally important and exciting is we'll have some demo of our 6GIG product. You can actually come check out the performance. We'll have an AP and a few SMs up in the air, doing some high throughput. The delusive 496 quam Caleb granted inside the conference room. Anyway, the WISP America is going to be the place, right? So, you know, some cool stuff happening. And please, if you're going, come on by. And if you are not going, hit me up. Hit us up on the community post. You can send me an email at sekid.amere.candynetworks.com at any time. Love hearing from the customer base and whoever's listening to this podcast. Again, thank you both for the opportunity to present. Thank you. Thank you. Tasa, if anyone looking to reach out to find us, where can they find us? They can find us all over social media on our Facebook groups, RFE English, RFelements.com, obviously on Instagram, Twitter. I mean, basically, if you just put RF elements in Google, you will find us. We'll be at WISP America too. Booth 509, something like that. 509. We'll stick out. We'll stick out. So, Kim, Kimmium's booth, go check it out. It's always super awesome. I get envious of that booth every time I look at it until I see them setting it up. And I'm like, nah, we're good. That's, that's cool. So a little bit of an affair, but we're cool. All right, you guys. Well, until we talk to you next time, y'all be good. Awesome. Thanks. See you.