 Welcome, welcome. We're really excited about today. This is JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Spada-Kataya and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our very first JSA virtual roundtable of 2020. It's part of our monthly broadcast. We've been honored to host for several years now, but new for 2020, we are providing the very first 100 registrants with lunch on JSA. And so I'm hoping you guys have received your lunch and you're enjoying it right now. And we're excited to say folks are hungry in our industry. We have nearly 200 registrants tuning in live today. So thanks everyone again for joining. This is exciting. And in true roundtable style, we want to hear from you. We want you to weigh in, have any questions for our panelists. Go ahead and type the question in our chat box. And if we have time at the end, we'll definitely take a question or two. So thanks in advance. And also if you have a speaker suggestion for next time, or to check out our upcoming monthly topics and speakers or to register and score some lunch for next time, please check out our brand new website JSA.net. Let's get started to the topic and hopefully one of our most popular ones is David Center, technology forecast for 2020. And like every January we bring in our predictions King, you haven't checked out his December post on his predictions for the industry. Totally recommend it but of course I'm talking about our all star, Rob Cowell, he's come back to be our guest editor and chief founder and we all know him. We all know him. Our industry loves his top blog. We read it all the time here at JSA for sure. So anyway, Rob, I know we have an all star lineup here from three absolutely innovative companies. The floor is yours, my friends. Thank you, Jamie. Welcome to everyone and thank you Jamie for hosting this ongoing series of roundtables. I always enjoy the chance to moderate one when I can is probably need more than one each year. We are now a few weeks into 2020. There's another 11 months to go. And today's roundtable will explore the trends ahead for the data center all common technology sectors. And with us today we have three distinguished speakers, and I'm going to have them each of them introduce themselves here. Let's start with Frank, Frank McDermott of Karma. Would you introduce yourself please. Hi, I'm Frank McDermott, CEO of and co-founder of Karma. We build a SAS inventory platform that we deliver over Microsoft's cloud of the same name also Karma. And we build all of the outside clean and site biological services so that you can have the entire picture whether it's data center, fiber or say even wireless towers built into one single source of truth. And we have Anish Patel of TBI, Anish. Hi everyone, Anish Patel and VP of emerging technologies. I'm relatively new to TBI about three months but of my background my heritage is kind of in the sales engineering world as a leader architect or an engineer. My role, I have a key role at TBI, and that is to help our, you know, TBI as a master agents to help our 3000 or so agents and partners drive technology solutions to their end customers all the way from telecom to hosting Kolo DR, etc. And so I have an engineering team that really takes a an agnostic approach when when talking to customers. You know, we have a portfolio of 140 different vendors ranging from all the well known telecom providers to security companies, data center companies, managed service providers, etc. And Raul Marcinek of Data Bank. Tell us by yourself. Sure. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Raul Marcinek. I'm the CEO of Data Bank. Data Bank is a US based data center and managed services operator. We own and operate 20 data centers in nine US markets. Our customer base spans from enterprises to network operators to kind of leading cloud and content companies. And we're also part of the digital bridge group of portfolio companies, which includes cell towers, fiber companies, small cell companies and other data center businesses. Thanks. All right, let's just dive right in here and start off with what we're supposed to be talking about right. What what new technology will have the biggest impact you think in 2020 how and where will its effects manifest. Let's start with Frank. Um, you know, I like to weigh in on the technologies that tend to fly under the radar those very infrastructural, you know, change technologies that change how we work and how we operate. And, you know, one of those that I think that's really going to jump out and change the way not just our industry, but everybody in the US and beyond operates is going to be these multi chat platforms that drive video. Just like we're on right now, you know, I think the novelty is ultimately starting to wear off. You've seen Slack. So, I'll hit chats at the platform because Slack beat them out, but then Microsoft teams came in. Those are going, these are the sleeper technologies that are going to come in and drive enormous video bandwidth consumption. And I know with our clients right now, we actually directly interface with most of our clients directly over teams. That's killing email. That's a huge productivity killer. That's the foundation of Slack. If you see, look at that on their webpage. And that in turn is going to drive all sorts of connectivity requirements on, you know, the backhaul fiber connectivity fiber to the home fiber to the business. And it also drives continued densification of for the hyperscalers where all of these cloud resources result. So, you know, I think the big thing that's going to drive there is now video video chat is not going to be a novelty. It's going to be daily requirement a daily way that we do business culturally. It does seem to be cropping up more and more for me as well. Yeah, I'm going to approach it from a little different angle. I mean, when I'm speaking to customers and partners, you know, cybersecurity is kind of top of mind, right? Everyone is concerned about all the threats and sophistication of those threats are out there. A lot of customers really don't understand from SMB to mid enterprise, surprisingly, even some of the enterprise customers don't understand fully what their risk posture is. Yes, they may have done some risk assessments in the past and they may have some controls in place to mitigate some security attacks but I'll tell you, in terms of the biggest impact as far as new technology is AI in my mind because the bad guys are getting better and better, as far as the level of sophistication of attacks, because they're using AI, right? So yes, you could put a block and you could put a rule in there to, you know, identify a signature, but then they're going to morph that into something else, right? So that AI is going to be prevalent and, you know, not only with men's services providers but, you know, unethical hackers, if you will. Right. Sure. So in our case, you know, obviously as a data center operator, you know, we have a wide range of customers, like I mentioned, and ultimately, you know, they're kind of mission critical applications and data live in our data centers. And one of the things I always look for is, you know, what are going to be the, as I call them, the net new workloads, right? What is going to happen in a data center that isn't happening there today, right? A lot of what happens in the data center today is kind of the, you know, the business applications and social applications that you're kind of familiar with, but, you know, what is something new that we see showing up in our data centers and customers consuming? And for us, what we've started to see over the last call at 18 months is kind of the emergence more kind of installations of high performance computing clusters or platforms, right? So ultimately, a little bit of what the other side of what Anish said, it's like, you know, to leverage machine learning or artificial intelligence, you need to have these, you know, very sophisticated platforms. The leader in that space today is NVIDIA, which a lot of people know about as a graphics company, but they're really leading the charge in terms of machine learning. And these platforms then allow customers to actually do data analytics to get kind of those insights that are new, right? I mean, we've heard the adage that, you know, data is the new gold. It's only gold if you can kind of mine insight out of it. So one of the things that I think you're going to see in 2020 is just more and more adoption of HPC and machine learning. And there's a company that I think everyone's going to hear about in 2020 called GraphCorp. It's a well backed UK based company and they've developed a chip that is optimized for AI as opposed to NVIDIA that their chip was optimized for video rendering, then they kind of refactored it to be more about AI. So they're going to be launching in the US in 2020. And we think that's going to draw the adoption of more of these HPC clusters and more of this kind of next phase of the internet in terms of it being much more data driven. Interesting. I'm going to have to look them up. I haven't heard of that. Yeah, that's a nice wide range of new technologies to look forward for the year. Let's dive into a little more depth. On what front is our cloud based technologies advancing on the most at the moment? Where are people putting their resources and what do they hope to get out of it? Frank? I think the cloud technologies that I'm seeing are all being driven by the interconnection to get to those. Since we focus on arm focuses in that later one through three piece, we're seeing that the ability to rapidly drive interconnects. First, you have to do that as a glare. That's where we focus. And that's where a lot of that data is challenging. And it seems like we've reached a tipping point in the industry. Everybody's acknowledging that as an out piece of operational friction that they need to deal with. So that once you have that physical interconnection in place, then you can start orchestrating and automating after that. That's what drives direct connects, express routes, any flavor of cloud connection. And that connection is required in order for you to make use of those cloud services. So once again, I go back to those foundational layers of the infrastructure. And that's where I'm seeing a lot of attention being paid at the kind of on the download. Interesting. Yeah, I see a large movement in the voice space for businesses that are trying to move away from legacy traditional phone systems, pbx is to a cloud based, you know, you see time environment and I could tell you from a TBI standpoint, UCAS is extremely hot. We've probably seen a three, four or five X fold increase just last year alone on just, you know, unified communications as a service and we're talking about collaboration rich collaboration features, you know, messaging video texting, etc. Conferencing, etc. You know, and there's valid reasons why, you know, customers of all shapes and sizes are doing it kind of started in the SMB space as a cost effective way to, you know, provide, provide and deliver voice services and messaging and collaboration features. A lot of enterprises were seen adopted quite heavily and they're layering in like a contact center as a service as well to drive that customer experience so that is a huge, huge area that we see in 2020 for sure we're going to continue seeing a lot of growth. There's the market is definitely flooded with, I'd say tons and tons of vendors out there. I mean there's you got the ring centrals and eight by eights of the world and bondages but, you know, there's 30 to 40 different vendors out there that are just offering a, you know, a UCAS type solution. And I think the key is, but you got to find a vendor that not only has a UCAS solution you got to think about the context center side as well and the CPAS side as well. Yeah, I mean it's seeing people like this is my phone right here. Everybody's going to the soft phone route, especially because we actually office out of coworking space. You rarely see an actual physical like, you know, old desk phone on right anyways, I totally agree with the nation. What direction are you seeing technology events? Yeah, so from our perspective, you know, two in two areas, you know, one obviously, you know, the cloud is software, right? And ultimately, you know, I think there's a lot of interest, a lot of movement towards going towards more of these kind of as they call them serverless architectures, you know, things like containers, Docker and, and kind of Kubernetes. So ultimately, you know, people are looking to be able to kind of scale their application with the infrastructure being abstracted from the application so that way it's more resilient. It's, it's more scalable. So, you know, that also lends itself to kind of, you know, what's happening obviously you got, you know, three major cloud providers out there right on Google, Amazon and Azure. And, you know, as you know, all those platforms are, are in essence proprietary right so these so having these types of kind of orchestration layers and, and, and abstraction layers allows a multi cloud type of environment where people don't feel like their data, or their application is going to be trapped in one cloud and that they can kind of leverage, you know, the the tool sets that are in these other platforms so that's one one big thing we think is on the cloud front side and then the other kind of back to my earlier point is, you know, it's all I think data, you know, an ability to harness data. I actually met yesterday in one of our markets with a, you know, a major pharmaceutical company and they have a, you know, a chief data officer whose job is really to figure out how to kind of take all these silos of data and be able to, you know, make them accessible with analytics tools that will allow them to get insights into kind of their clinical trials and the results and outcome based medicines and things like that. So I think there's going to be a lot of a lot of data tools that are going to be very, you know, much more adopted and then obviously the is this platform architectures away from infrastructure based to kind of serverless. Right. Big data. The, all of you serve cause many customers who are very interested in getting more out of that data, big data from via, you know, technologies like machine learning, AI, etc. What else do you expect for on that front and what do you think that people will actually get out of those those advances in the coming year. So the foot real looks like this when he's on a roll right now. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I think ultimately everyone is kind of trying to use these new tools to, you know, advance their business. Right. I mean, unfortunately, we're all we're all old enough to have been around kind of, you know, with the, you know, 25 years ago, the internet came out. Now, people didn't even know how to leverage just basic web technologies, right? It took a bunch of years for people to figure out how to actually leverage, you know, the worldwide web to remember that term again to date myself significantly. So I think we're in that same category with these new technologies that there's just, there isn't enough, you know, data scientists out there or, you know, now people get degrees in data analytics. So there needs to be a whole learning from kind of, you know, how do how do you now deal with this unprecedented quantity of data. I mean, there's just so much information out there. I mean, I don't know if you saw that there was an article in the in the times where you can you can you can literally buy, you know, the GPS coordinates of, you know, millions of users that have been quote unquote, anonymized, but it's super easy to figure out kind of, you know, who it is, and they were actually able to do that. So all of a sudden you have these just incredible data sets about human behavior around human interactions around use of phones around use of applications and people are starting to figure out, okay, how do we use this to a commercial advantage. Right. Obviously, there's a lot of the various things that can happen as a result of that too, which, you know, we're starting to see as Frank pointed out in the niche. So I think it's I think everyone's going to just try to figure out how to how to leverage these technologies to further their business and it's just going to, you know, accelerate the pace of technology adoption. Yeah, just go ahead. Oh, good. Well, I was going to say, well, if, you know, if he's seeing the, what kind of investment he's seeing and with his clients on private clouds, you know, I've helped deploy a number of them did not grab in as many headlines I don't think. Lately, obviously the hyperscalers are, but you know, there, there are some definite strong use cases around around private clouds as well. I'm wondering if you're seeing those kind of loads come in, especially. Absolutely. Good. Absolutely. We have, you know, we have dedicated kind of private cloud platforms in about six of our markets, but to give you one, one great data point on, you know, recently it was announced. In one of my, my former partner at Voxel, a hosting business, Zach Smith started a company called packet, which was a premium bare metal product. So bare metal by definition is private, right, because it's your own infrastructure. You decide to put a hyperscalers around there or not, but ultimately they got acquired by Equinex, which is the largest data center company in the world, right. There's a really interesting marriage between co-location where you're kind of agnostic to the workload that's there and now in essence, infrastructure as a service or private cloud, right. So my view is absolutely that, you know, you're going to have a kind of a more heterogeneous adoption of different architectures to solve different types of needs and private cloud is one of the ones where, again, it's being used with all these other monikers, but I think it will become more and more prevalent. But, you know, again, the public cloud continues to, you know, grow dramatically. I mean, this is a, you know, a story of a lot of boats being lifted by this technology trend. And just to add that, I mean, private cloud, in my opinion, is definitely not that. I mean, you certainly have a lot of use cases, i.e., a compliance based workload or a mission critical workload. And a lot of customers think, I'm just going to dump everything into AWS Azure, one of the cloud service providers, and it's going to be cheaper. In fact, in reality, it's not going to, it's not sure. When you get the outs. What's that? No, when you take data out. Exactly. Well, yeah, well, you got, you know, there's tons of issues, even just resource usage, right? You're not optimizing your research, you just do not monitor it. But, you know, at the end of the day, if you got those cyclical workloads and you need a level of agility, then yeah, cloud service providers, great. But if you got a static workload that's relatively consistent throughout the year, a private cloud environment may be the way to go. And, Raul, I just wanted to touch on some of the comments you're making. I think, from a machine learning and AI perspective, the frameworks and the platforms that these big three cloud service providers are building. I think it's getting, you know, I wouldn't say, I think there's a level of ease to adopting it, right? You still need a, you know, big data or data scientists to leverage the platform or someone with somewhat level of knowledge, but you don't have to be a hardcore mathematician or understand the deep algorithms. The platforms that they offer, machine learning as a service, whether it's the Google AI or AWS are pretty good and you can just open the, you know, the FAQs and really start using it. Do you guys think that those machine learning and AI algorithms that people are developing within the industry are at a state where, you know, the various verticals and enterprises are really able to consume them? Or are we still waiting for them to mature? You know, my comment on this would be based on some of the folks that I talked to that are our customers that are installing these systems in our data centers. And what they tell me is that the vast majority of kind of the advanced machine learning that's going on now is still kind of in the development phase. So these companies, you know, it takes, you know, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months to fully develop a production type of, you know, instance of whatever they're trying to do. So, so I think, you know, we're going to, whatever we see today, I think it's just going to be dwarfed by what we see in the future, because it still feels like it's very early in its adoption cycle. Yeah, I would agree. And, you know, on that, we've kind of touched on it a bit on the education and adoption front. I don't know if anybody saw the news that Gal Deny is also based out of Denver here, one of the boot camp educators for, you know, full stack development, including AI stuff was just acquired for $145 million. You know, I think that speaks a lot to where we are kind of future of the industry. I kind of have a, I think, especially if you talk with the data center, the network operators, you know, we're kind of facing a little bit of an Apollo program issue, you know, looking at a lot of retirements, a lot of brain drain, a lot of tribal knowledge and, you know, I think we're going to have to not just keep pace with the, say the software side, like what Gal Deny is taking care of, but we're also going to have to keep pace with the infrastructure and hardware side as well. Interesting. All right, let's let's switch gears here to a different topic. One that everybody is thinking about in the sector. Is 2020 the year 5G breaks out into the wild? Is it the year? If yes, where and in what form? And if not, why not? Let's start with Frank. I think the main thing that we're going to have to see before 5G really takes off is we're going to have to address the fiber infrastructure necessary to survey. I think a lot of people in any kind of major market, they're seeing the precast footers with bulls on top, popping up overnight. And the one thing that I haven't seen as fast as these bulls are going up, I'm not seeing any fiber infrastructure that's going into serve them. And this has been an issue that I've seen in the past during the wireless portion of my career. See people, people are going to be motivated by their metrics. You see people motivated by a metric that says something to the tune of tower construction. And they're not subtly influenced to make sure that that tower is also on air and serving customers. That's going to skew the metrics. I wonder if some of that's happening today. And without that fiber infrastructure, you can't light it and can't start getting revenue on 5G. And that's going to be the big thing that hinders it this year. So I'm going to push, I'm going to punch on 5G and push that out to 21 or 22. Anish. Yeah, I would agree to your comments Frank to a certain extent. I think there are some, you know, interesting use cases where 5G comes into play. And this is just something simple as, you know, you got a customer that's that has a remote locations each location requires, you know, two connections right you got a primary dedicated internet access and maybe a backup right as an example. Backup could be, you know, a 4G LTE or LTE connection where now you could displace that with 5G and you get that high speed and guess what now you could use both connections as active active right and so you could do some pretty cool things with that versus having a secondary circuit idle right. I think about alarm systems, you know, replacing all those pots lines with, you know, 5G back 5G as the primary instead of pots lines. I think about IOT, you know, IOT in my opinion really hasn't taken off. But I think 5G will make make it mainstream and there's lots of cool tech technologies out there like AWS IoT green grass is a platform that essentially, you know, brings AWS to the cloud to the edge devices so you got the software running on your edge devices. That's, you know, running either serverless function lambda, Docker container what now it's collecting data it's monitoring and filtering that data, and it's sending it back to the cloud so there's there's definitely some use cases there where I think, they'll be an immediate impact of 5G. Interesting, bro. Yeah, so I tend to agree with Frank and in my perspective, I mentioned about some of the other digital bridge portfolio companies one of them is vertical bridge which is the largest US tower read in the US and text in that which is the largest private small cell operator in the US. So obviously their their key customers are the four major mobile operators and they're building a lot of the infrastructure that will underpin 5G so you know the state of the play today is obviously that there's more of a same 5G war going on now where everyone's kind of saying that they have 5G but you know even team oval that announced what they did at the end of the year. They're delivering that 5G over their low band 600 megahertz network which means that ultimately just doesn't have a lot of capacity. It doesn't have the latency characteristics that there so one of the big things on the horizon that's coming up in the next months I believe is what's called the C band auction where they're auctioning off a bunch of mid band spectrum this is stuff that's like in the two and a half to three and a half or four and a half megahertz range. Everyone remembers the company Clearwire that's what they tried to do years ago they were just you know too early in that adoption obviously that a lot of that a lot of that spectrum is with T mobile today but they need that spectrum needs to happen and then to Frank's point you just need more of these kind of small cells and that systems because 5G has incredible through when Verizon did their deployment in Minneapolis I mean they were showing devices that were getting 600 megabits to a device but that doesn't scale without more spectrum and without more of this kind of wireless infrastructure to propagate that RF when millions and millions of people are going to be using it so even the carriers if you listen closely on their analyst calls like Verizon or AT&T and they get regularly asked when are you going to start generating revenue meaningful revenue for 5G there's a lot of heaven and hawing and then it ends up being something around 2021 2022 so I think the next couple years. Everyone's going to be here at about 5G but it's not going to it's not going to really be very widespread and it's certainly not going to be kind of delivering the quote unquote promise of 5G in terms of latency and throughput without a lot more infrastructure to Frank's point. And I think the best I think the best argument for 5G at this moment is the IOT when we keep like you both are saying because it's even more so than the bandwidth of the latency I think it's the addressability and how many devices you can serve the density that you can get on on each of those towers. So that's that I think is going to drive it with me for instance even my home security system actually doesn't even come with a wire to this point it goes straight over 4G over LTE right now. And it doesn't be anyone on here right now who uses different for their security system. So that's been, you know, pretty eye-opening even, you know, in a market where you've got fiber to the home, they're not even in a suit. There are a number of companies that don't even assume that you will have a wire in your home anymore. Right, so it sounds like they can do a bunch of things for 5G but they can't scale it yet without a bunch more work right. Yeah, I would agree. I definitely agree with that. All right, looking beyond that to a wider thought, you know, beyond the world of cloud data centers and infrastructure itself that we inhabit here. The rest of the world seems like it's going to be a bit of a turbulent place in 2020. Whether you're talking politics, trade, coronaviruses, et cetera. Do you see any outside events on the horizon that could have a big effect on the industry that as a whole, Frank? I'll circle back to, I think it was Anish's comment earlier, not just on data, but data privacy. I think we'd have gone, as a whole, the general population has been pretty complacent because I don't think anybody's really felt a true impact. And to Rell's, I think it was Rell's point on the AI, mix the politics with the data aggregation, breaking down silos and then putting bad actors in. I think this year, particularly this summer is going to be the time where hostile state and non-state actors get really aggressive and let loose all of their plans from the last four years. And that could be perhaps economically or politically or socially crippling. So I'd be very much on the lookout for what's going to happen, data privacy, data breach-wise, and if we see anything in the US as a response similar to GDPR or the California regulations. Interesting. Anish? I think about Brexit and the impact it's going to have in the data center market in the UK, right? I mean it's, you know, I think the date of January 31st where the UK is going to break. Yeah, exactly, right? So yeah, that's right. But they're going to break apart until the end of the year, right? To fully break apart. But, you know, I see kind of two concerns. One, from a data center perspective, is making sure you have affordable electricity. So I'm not sure if you guys know, but some of the electricity that UK buys is from the EU. So with, you know, with changing exchange rates between, you know, the pound and the Euro, that could be a problematic. And then you also got to look at, and Frank touched on this a little bit, is the whole data privacy, data flow side of things as well. I think customers will have to rethink their DR strategy, you know, if they have a multi data center environment, UK and some data centers in Europe as well. So, you know, how do you, how does that DR strategy change? And then how do you get the data back from, you know, the EU data centers into UK as well. So there's still a lot of complexity involved. And I don't think, you know, even if you take the rest of the year, it's still going to be challenging. Well, so in my view, you know, we're, what, 10 years into the longest expansion in US history, or I think, or, you know, we're certainly in recent history. You know, along with that, we obviously know, you know, this is unprecedented time from interest rates perspective and kind of access to capital, right. So everything we've been talking about today, you know, to kind of 5G or the cloud. I mean, this requires just billions and billions of dollars, right. So, in my view, anything that, you know, if we do, you know, there was some recession fears earlier, earlier last year and now it seems to be abated a bit. But ultimately, you know, access to capital is the lifeblood of this industry because, you know, these investments aren't short term investments are very long term investments. I think anything that could kind of derail that could could slow down the pace of some of these options because again, just, you know, going back to 2008. I remember in 2008, I was working for a private equity fund, and we had a term sheet from a soft layer, which at the time people remember was one of the emerging companies that got bought by IBM and became their cloud. But this is a great, great company and, you know, as my boss said at the time, you know, the price of money is infinite so there was no deals going on. So I think that, you know, the continued kind of rosy outlook that we have here from a economic perspective. If that gets real because of some of the events that you mentioned Rob, that would have an impact. Interesting. All right, so it's time to put you all in the spot. Can you give us one concrete prediction of something you will think that will happen in the data center telecom and tech space in 2020. Anything goes, but you know, what do you got Frank. This has been a trend that I've seen started seeing a couple years ago. And I'm seeing it accelerate I think this is the year where interconnectivity and fiber access and inside data centers becomes the main driver of valuations and deals. You know, typically space and power is has driven the economics on, you know, where to look located data center. But that's fundamentally at odds with latency. So we're going to see connectivity I think drive a lot more the equation. And I think you see this as part of, you know, every, every data center operator out there that is interconnecting their data centers. They're doing everything that they can to get as close to their clients as possible and take on as much of their internal networking as possible. So that's, that's my prediction. Interesting. On this. Yeah, kind of tagging along with with Frank said I totally agree I'm seeing a lot of customers move. First of all, colocation markets going to continue to be hot right we're going to have customers are moving away from internal data centers and dealing with all the headaches and managing that those data centers moving to a cold environment. A public private cloud strategies what I see so that hyperactive strategy. I see a lot of customers as they're transforming their networks and, you know, incorporating SD when into their networks are rethinking how, how and where the data with the applications live and you know what I see a lot kind of a trend with at least our customer bases are creating these regional hubs so let's create a data center stack in Chicago where I live right so let's create a stack here where it's closer to all the I have now I have access to all my cloud providers, the big three Azure AWS Google and others, and that way, you know, low latency my application performed better. I have a single cross connect or you know cloud connect into any one of those providers because you know a lot of sophisticated enterprises they're building their application stack half of it could be an AWS and the back end could be Google for whatever reason. And that's, that's not unheard of so now I got low latency between those two cloud providers, you know, leveraging my, my IT stack, if you will, so I see a lot of that going on those regional hubs, versus kind of a decentralized, you know, or centralized location and you know last thing you want to do is backhaul circuit from AWS all the way to your corporate headquarters. So, I follow obviously the wireless world quite a bit. And one thing that is out there is dish, believe it or not, is has is building a wireless network, right. They have multiple RFPs out there for data center fiber for the core network. And that's is all part of the sprint TMO merger what one of the main kind of arguments why it's not going to reduce competition is because they're going to spin off a bunch of the assets from those two businesses give it the dish and allow dish to become a competitor along with the other three. But I, you know, I think that will what we'll see in in 2020 is the cable guys finally get into the wireless game. You know, they, they all have offerings you obviously seen the commercials on TV but those are all MVNOs, aka resale of the other carriers but I think 2020 is the year that they do something with dish probably and become an actual wireless to the big three. Do you think sprint TMO will go through first before that happens or what it's 50 50. So if it doesn't go through then you anticipate that you can flip a coin and and that's probably how best to, you know, lay the odds on that. Right. Well, yeah, I don't know either. But wait to find out. All right, well that that's all the prepared questions that we have here but we might have some from the audience possibly. Anybody. We do we have a question in. It's on 5G you guys started the boards up when you start talking 5G here. And one of our one of our viewers to render genetic asks how do you think the politics national security concerns will affect 5G in particular. Yeah, I mean in the US, I don't think it's going to make much of an impact because obviously for a while now Hawaii has has been banned from the big carriers obviously now they're trying to ban them from all the network so we continue to supply the equipment for 5G networks. So I don't think it has any impact here in the US. I mean there's a broader impact in terms of, obviously, if this bifurcates technology and we end up with kind of, you know, a Chinese version of 5G and Western version of 5G and what that does for standards and handsets and, you know, lowering the cost of production and things like that but I think the, you know, the practical impact in the US will be muted. Frank or an issue on a way in. I was going to see me go there all did so you covered it well. And any other questions go ahead and type them into that question box guys but we are wrapping it up it is been an insightful 40 minutes here as Oh, sorry, no mean just came in. You are a very diverse group, I agree. Where do you see the revenue increases in the next 24 months mobile data AI AR or still in carrier spaces. Well, I mean a lot of those are somewhat mutually or different categories right, you know, in the wireless, obviously, you know, one of the big challenges for the big three or four is that you know, revenues just aren't really growing that much for an 18 team Verizon has been doing very well in terms of getting new subscribers so that's why I think you know they're they're anxious to try to figure out how to monetize and drive a harpoon higher for for 5G. You know, on the, you know, the cloud side it's it's it's just obvious that, you know, those those platforms are going to grow significantly and continue to grow significantly in the foreseeable future Microsoft announced yesterday I mean they're, they're growth actually increased a little bit on the cloud side from, you know, 63% year over year to 64% year over year which is staggering for, you know, businesses that are billions of dollars of revenue so so I think those two silos are you know, very in very different states. And then to the other the other areas that don't really have a strong opinion over. I'm going to weigh in and say that the fiber operators are continuing to drive revenue, they're constantly building the fibers going to have to happen first before 5G is a reality. But every other part of our life is just touching more and more fiber every every place all the way back to the home. I think the business spend on on fiber is going to continue to is going to continue to accelerate especially in metro markets. And Rick Talbot also has question, do you see low latency applications drive data centers to the edge of the network. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, we have a the actual first production deployment of that for one of the big cloud guys if you guys probably saw a couple months ago. And they announced on announced what they call local zones and they announced that in LA and ultimately what that is is a stripped down availability zone that has been physically placed in a quote unquote edge market. I mean most people don't think of LA as an edge market but it is from the perspective of all the major cloud providers don't have infrastructure anywhere near the LA market. And so the one Microsoft what AWS said is they deployed this there because there's a big gaming community big gaming kind of production and they wanted to have that infrastructure local to that type of community and with that, they did. They also launched a product called Wavelengths which is a way for them to integrate that availability zone that local zone with in this case Verizon's 5G network and kind of claim that all right now you'll be able to kind of keep packets in that same region. So, you know this is I think something that you know we'll start 2020 from Amazon, which has indicated that they're going to deploy those local zones and other major metropolitan areas and then I think once they do the other cloud providers will follow them because you know obviously it's a it's a competition and you know it's a keeping up with the Joneses type of investment. And I think essentially what we're talking about here is edge computing right which is going to enable some of those low latency applications and I think once we addressed the 5G infrastructure issues and fiber issues that break and you know you guys are pointing out, you know when 5G becomes ready for prime time, what you're going to see is a lot of these micro data centers pop up under the cell towers right so you got an optimized stack of compute where now you know think about autonomous vehicles I mean each car produces like I think it's like five terabytes of data per hour. There is no way you're going to send that to transmit that data to a centralized or regional data center for processing back latency is just crazy right I mean, you could think probably 50 to 80 milliseconds or more versus if you have a micro data center under that cell tower. Now you're looking at less than five millisecond latency so you're processing that data faster locally and then transmitting whatever is necessary to. And I have one more question can squeeze it in. There's a too much, but a good friend Curtis reason of data center dynamics asking how much involvement will or should the US government have in adding to the extra infrastructure of fiber required for 5G implementation, sort of going back again to to our 5G chat that Frank picked up. Well, let me. I mean, you know, obviously I look at your look at your mobile bill and there's a charge in there or your or your landline bill if you have one. But you know you'll see a USF charge right universal service fund right so that obviously was it's a tax right it's billions and billions of dollars a year, and it goes to your life line support which is you know people having access to communication they're obviously in the process to deploy that for delivery of Internet access and ultimately this participation. It's happening it's called calf now, I think it's a $40 billion over 10 years or something like that. And it's mainly for rural areas. I saw one award recently where when I did when I did the math it looked like it was $3,000 per home to get fiver to those locations so I think there is a role for the government to, you know, step in where there isn't enough private incentives in other areas in specific areas like rural areas. That will obviously you know make it so that you know we don't have a digital divide and things like that but I think it's it's politics at the end of the day so and it's our tax dollars. You can rest assured it won't be done completely logically and it won't be done completely efficiently. I think it will be done this year probably. I mean, I think you nailed, I think you nailed the point. I mean, because it's not just the technical issues of the digital, but it's the social issues, and all of the social issues that come with the digital divide. And, you know, it's, I think there's a lot. So, you know, doing these types of things that we've talked about, such as, you know, video chatting, screen sharing, all of the things over slack and teams like we just talked about that that breaks down the physical barriers of geographically separated teams. We can bring a lot of prosperity out to, you know, the, to the rural areas of the country and I think, you know, coupling that with a good way to couple that will be with a lot of renewable energy development, because when you've got those rights rights away from our utility lines, you know, power transmission, radio transmission, etc. or distributed wind turbines and solar arrays. That's a good way to write all that and those systems still need their control circuits as well for scatter and such. I'm just standing really sitting round table and so sorry there's so many questions on the board. We will capture them and and and send you back some written responses. But thank you everyone for your participation here on our data center, telecom and technology. Thank you so much for taking the time to give them our first 20, our all star panelists. Thank you, Raul Matinec, CEO of Data Bank, Anish Patel, VP of emerging tech, TBI, Frank McDermott, CEO of Karma. Thank you guys. And of course, a big thank you also to Rob Powell, founder of telecom rambling, for keeping us on point today and viewers. Thank you so much for tuning in. You know, the numbers have been blockbuster for us are our best round table yet to date. And if you were one of our first 100 registrants, we're hoping you enjoyed your lunch on us today, and go ahead and visit us. We're going to register for upcoming JSA virtual round tables we're rolling them out every month is here next one February 20 for talking micro edge where is it and where is it heading. We've got to see level round up there from edge connects, start points, edge micro and edge presence. So another round table not to be missed. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for tuning in to JSA virtual round table. The play back of today's predictions will be available soon on JSA TV and JSA podcast that's on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, wherever you're going, we're there. All right, until next time, happy networking.