 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott-Oktayo, JSA, coming to you from Virtual Metro Connect 2021. Joining me today is my good friend, Tony Vacker, the Great Plains Communications CTO. Tony, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you. We are excited to have you here. So for our viewers who might not already know, tell us a little bit about Great Plains. Sure. Yeah, Great Plains is a Midwest fiber provider. We're headquarters in Nebraska. Our network covers 11 states as far west as Colorado and as far as east as Indiana. We have over 13,500 rock miles of fiber. So we offer both dark and lit type services. We provide internet, wave, internet type services, voice, unified communication, video and IP TV services. Yeah, we also have a seven by 24 operations and what that really means is, you know, we have a center that's provide ongoing support for our customers. Oh, I love that 24 seven customer support. Awesome. Definitely something that folks are seeking, particularly with network security. Also, recently, we noticed you launched an intelligent whole home Wi-Fi service. Tell us a little bit how that may benefit your customers. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, the whole Wi-Fi service. I mean, you know, as you know, most folks are hard, you know, through the pandemic has been working from home. And so this really, you know, really helps with coverage around the home, you know, especially with families who are, you know, working someone in the study, you know, someone is in the basement, someone is on the kitchen table, you know, kids are, you know, they may be down in the basement, you know, doing classes from home, you may be in the kitchen table doing, you know, doing your work remotely. Really, this provides, this service provides, you know, coverage throughout the home. And, you know, it has some kind of interesting capabilities in that you could, you know, monitor usage, you know, you could, you could allocate bandwidth, you know, so for example, if during the day, you know, you're in the study and you're doing working from home, you want all the bandwidth, you know, more bandwidth in that area. And then in the evenings, you're in the living room, you want to stream some videos, you know, you could, you know, use the bandwidth and shift the bandwidth to the living rooms. And it has some features like, you know, parental control, just to kind of control what the kids see. I love that, love that. And as you mentioned during this crazy pandemic, especially right now, folks are working, learning, playing from home. Rural broadband has really become a critical initiative. How is Great Plains helping with this effort? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I mean, rural broadband has become more and more popular, you know, especially most recently with the, you know, the RDOF bids. But Great Plains have been in the forefront of rural broadband for a number of years. We've participated, you know, with some of the federal and state programs like ACAM. You know, most recently, we deployed, you know, capability in fiber and markets in Nebraska, a program called the DED. And then there was another program called the Next Level Grant Out in Indiana, where we participated in. We really, you know, Great Plains has been a company that's been around for, you know, over 110 years and kind of grew up, you know, in a lot of our rural communities. If you've ever driven through in Nebraska, you'll appreciate the vastness of Nebraska. And there's lots of rural communities there. So, you know, basically what we're really doing is continuing what we have done in the past, you know, continue to add more and more fiber, I mean, to the network and to those communities. And, you know, adding technologies to increase bandwidth. And as bandwidth becomes, you know, consumption becomes, you know, more and more on the internet, more and more increase in daily, more and more on the internet. 110 years, that was a jaw-dropping, mic-dropping moment. That's incredible. So, what's next for the next two years for Great Plains? Yeah, I mean, as we kind of look at, you know, the market and, you know, look at the overall, you know, industry, you know, customers and opportunity, you know, the first thing that we're looking at is, you know, continue our market expansions. We're looking at adding, you know, newer markets, you know, within our footprint. And then we're also investing in existing markets. So, in some markets, we're, you know, we don't touch, you know, all the overall customer base. We're adding more fiber and expanding in those markets. Like, for example, in Omaha, you know, we're building out in different areas, adding more and more fiber. You know, so that's, you know, one area. You know, the second area is adding more, you know, products and capability, you know, to the network and the company. So, adding things, you know, products like, you know, CloudConnect and SD-WAN and managed services are things that we're working on. As we kind of look at, you know, what's coming down over the next, you know, a couple of years, you know, there's more and more demand for cloud-based solutions, right? And the pandemic really exposed some of this, right? To some degree, the pandemic sped up some of the technologies that we're using today, that is remote working, you know, remote learning, you know, streaming from wherever, whichever part of the home you're in, you know, the pandemic has really, you know, sped up some of the technologies. Then the thing, the third area is around, you know, leveraging, you know, new software and capabilities for automation. You know, I think as you, you know, as you grow the company, as you scale, you want to be as efficient. And so software and automation really becomes key, I think over the next couple of years. Gross, cloud, automation, so many great things on the horizon for great planes in the next year or two. What do you see as the single biggest trend on the horizon when it comes to fiber-based tech solutions? Yeah, that's kind of an interesting question, you know, as I kind of think about that, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, technology solutions out there. But I think I could probably narrate down to a few things. One is, you know, fiber-based technologies, you know, deploying more fiber in the rural and metro areas is kind of foundation for any kind of fiber, you know, kind of technologies. But I think, you know, if you think about the metro networks, you know, bandwidth, increase in bandwidth and leveraging, you know, optical solutions, you know, it just seems like not too long ago, one gig was, you know, was the main bandwidth was discussed. Now we're talking about 100 gig, right, in the metro, right? And now, you know, we've talked with terabytes and petabytes, you know. So I think leveraging optical technologies, you know, really, you know, grow more and more bandwidth. Another area that, you know, we've been participating on is really the leveraging fiber technologies for the last mile, right? So, you know, that access network is some call it. So one of the technologies that's been, you know, deployed is PON or passive optical network. And so there's a newer version of that called XGS PON. And we're looking at, you know, leveraging that to deliver higher and higher speed to, you know, to our customers. You know, initially folks, you know, had like 10 mag and, you know, 100 mag and now they're asking for, you know, in the whole up to a gig, right? So we have to deploy these types of technologies on and XGS PON to deliver those types of bandwidth. Well, I'll tell you, being able to scale in this crazy broadband boom that we're experiencing right now, absolutely on the mind of many of our viewers. Tell us, where can our viewers go to learn more? Yeah, I think, you know, our website is really a pretty good source of what we're doing, right? So, you know, www.gpcom.com is our website. And, you know, on our website, you know, we cover, you know, enterprise, wholesale, residential businesses. We also have, you know, our network coverages there. And, you know, our products and solutions are on the website. So that's usually a pretty good source of information on as far as Great Plains go. I mean, outside of Great Plains, there's lots of technology for them. We're at one right now, where you could, you know, learn more. There's lots of webinars in the industry where you can learn more and more about what's going on in the industry. Yeah, absolutely. Metro Connect is definitely a featured theme, for sure. And one you're a continued thought leader on, which we appreciate, Tony. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, in the special Virtual Metro Connect 2021 edition. Happy networking.