 Hello everyone and welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Lauren Oland and on behalf of the team here at JSA, thank you for tuning into our latest virtual CEO roundtable. Now our first 100 registrants for today's roundtable will have received a fresh lunch delivered right to your door or a gift card to order your own meal. And also new for 2021 JSA virtual roundtable starting next month. We will be expanding to a new platform to include a first in the industry virtual networking experience with a unique opportunity to talk face to face with other event attendees before and after the panel. Check out the demo video that we're going to put in the chat box for you momentarily be sure to register for next month's roundtable you won't want to miss it. Now for a quick reminder for everyone who has joined us today we look forward to your participation during today's event so feel free to ask any questions that you may have right into the chat. And as usual for the last 15 minutes of this hour we will move our conversation over to LinkedIn where you can engage with the participants directly. Simply type in hashtag JSA virtual roundtables, or click on the direct link that will be posted in the chat. And once we're over there, we will answer any questions that you may have not have been answered by the panelists while on camera. If you have any questions about upcoming roundtables whatever it might be such as how to register or even how to participate, reach out to us through our website at jsa.net. Today a reminder to mark your calendars our next virtual roundtable will cover the new normal effectively facilitating online learning at every age. And that'll take place February 18 at 2pm Eastern. So without further delay, let's get started. Our topic today is taking the pulse of 2021, the state of telecommunications around the world to introduce our speakers and to moderate. Please welcome Rob Powell, founder and chief editor of telecom ramblings Rob. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm done talking and the floor is yours. Oh, thank you. Hello everyone, and thank you to JSA for having us all here to chat and a hearty welcome to our panelists and viewers. And today's topic as as Laura said is the the state of telecom and internet infrastructure world in 2021. 2020 was a year that we kind of like to forget on many levels. But if we narrow the focus to this industry alone it wasn't actually that bad right. But where are we now and where are we going and what should we be expecting to deal with what new technologies and tools do we have at our disposal. We'll try to see what everybody thinks. So first let's have each of our panelists quickly introduce themselves and let you know where they're coming from, and then we'll get started. First we have Warren Rayburn from from Comstar, Lauren. Yeah, thank you Rob. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Warren Rayburn I serve as the senior vice president of sales marketing and product development for Comstar technologies. We're based out of Westchester, Pennsylvania, so suburban Philadelphia. Prior to joining Comstar this time last year. That was in the carrier space consulting services as well. So the topics here today are near and dear to my heart and look forward to the conversation to follow Rob. Great. We have Greg Patine of Edge Micro. Great. Hello, everyone is safe and healthy and here's to getting together in person sometime in 2021. That'll be a welcome change. I'm co founder of Edge Micro. We're an early stage company focused on getting data center services deeper into the networks and we can go into more of that model as we move forward. Thanks. We have Rosa White from DR Fortress Rosa. Hi everyone, Laura. Thanks for having us and Rob. Thanks for moderating this. My name is Rosa White. I am the CFO and co founder of DR Fortress. We're a data center located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Serving the top businesses in Hawaii and telecom providers both servicing Hawaii onto the mainland international. I hope to bring up more of the financial perspective to this conversation and welcome any questions. So thanks for having me. Thanks. We have Vickle Kapoor from Seven Train Ventures. Vickle. Hello, Vickle Kapoor. Greetings from wherever you're watching this on the planet in your time zone. I'm the founder of Seven Train Ventures. We basically solve the problem between venture capital and the private and the public markets. We in essence operate as a special situations investment firm. We take innovation and startups and help them rapidly find institutional capital. And we help institutional capital find the innovation in the venture space. So everything from AI to fintech to the platform economy, all of the major shifts that are happening at the startup level. We try to give a good pulse to the corporates so they can keep their innovation moving at an M&A pace. Great. And last but not least, we have Jeremy Villalobos from Gold Connect. Jeremy. Hello everyone. I'm Jeremy Villalobos. I'm the chief operating officer for Gold Connect. We are a Latin American carrier. We support every country in the region along with the Caribbean. So I will be bringing a Latin American point of view into the conversation and I'm happy to be here. Great. All right. Here we go. Let's start off with the elephant in the room. I don't mean the political one. I mean the medical one. What does the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic mean to telecommunications and infrastructure in 2021? How do you think it will affect or not affect what we do and experience this year? Warren, start with you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. For me, that question boils down to remote work capabilities and enhancing that experience at the edge for our customers in our line of business where communications, integrations, and solutions provider, so the UCAS components of that equation, internet access, as well as the audiovisual side of the equation. So not to mention IT and MSP services. So we pride ourselves on bringing the entire breadth of this consideration, if you will, to the client base. And for me, what I've come to observe and appreciate is that there is a strong desire to continue and to build upon the success. I mean, I've been so impressed by the resiliency of not just the work community, but the carrier community as well and responding to this need. So I think ultimately we're all going to have to answer a question in 2021 as to how we continue to improve the experience, how we provide for more bandwidth at the edge, avoiding data cap considerations, providing for failover and resiliency and so forth, but also making things simple all the while trying to find a balance. So I think there's a large call in the community for enhanced professional services at that. And again, like I said, extending an arm and integrating and keeping people online. Greg, what do you think? Well, the migration, the data migration is still undergoing from the central business districts out into the suburbs. And that's being facilitated primarily by the ISPs, Comcast Charters of the World, of re-architecting their networks to provide more bandwidth out into the homes. So that's, you know, they're almost there in that re-architecture. I don't see that pulling back into the central business district anytime soon. Obviously, I think it's some of it's going to be permanent. And I think obviously you have vertical industries that have been crushed. You have the travel industry, brick and mortar retail has obviously suffered. And then you have other verticals like e-commerce that have done very well. So it's really specific to what vertical industries were talking about and how that digital transformation is taking place. Rosa? Well, I think that we were, the silver lining is we had a lot of the infrastructure in place in 2020 when the pandemic took place so that as one was saying, we could go easily or as easily as possible into remote working. What I think we need to focus on in 2021 related to that is actually not just getting by but figuring out how to improve our customer service, you know, through virtual because I think that we did enough to make sure that our employees and our staff could service our customers and provide the services. But I think the lack of touch and personal feelings between our customers and our employees or their services, that's been lacking. We haven't been able to see one another and have meetings with another other than with Zoom. So I think that we'll need to make sure that we incorporate all businesses where if there were the brick and mortar that were really heavily impacted by the e-commerce Zoom companies that had great success, we need to start improving on how we can better service our customers virtually in 2021 to make sure that that level doesn't break down. Nicole? So I mean, considering the fact that data usage has been doubling in the U.S. every two years, I think this year kind of exposed the choke points or even in our own homes and in our own hands. So if you were running an organization, even if it's a small, medium-sized business and you have 50 employees that are all now working from home, you know, their own network infrastructure at home, their telco setup at home actually is a direct result, directly impacts how your own small, medium-sized business does. Now, if you think of that at scale, if you run Microsoft or an equivalent fortune company, holy cow, like everybody at home is now, you know, on the Zoom calls, the children are on their laptops, phones are now being taxing the entire internet infrastructure and the telco infrastructure. I think 2020 exposed how the U.S. entire, the United States, United States, likely also international markets, really need to accelerate their investments, both from the tower perspective to infrastructure to connectivity. And, you know, Apple's iPhone coming out with 5G, while everybody in Asia kind of laughs that it's late, I think it's basically right on time and I can see that the demands are only going to increase considering the fact that, you know, we now talk about a company called Shopify and nobody really knew them 5 years ago and all shopping is going through there. We look at investments that are happening in that ecosystem, specifically in a platform economy perspective. And anytime you're on a website, that website likely is a Shopify website. If it's not a Shopify website, it's an e-commerce website. It's not an e-commerce website. It's using machine learning. It's using AI and it's definitely taxing a lot of the data usage that previously we did not see. And if you think of Latin America, where Jeremy, for example, is very, you know, he can speak more to it, but if you look at Mercado Libre, which is their equivalent of Amazon, and Mercado Libre is now going to have to figure out how they can have their own network infrastructure to support their own websites that are coming online. So everything from 3G to 4G to 5G, I think is just basically now accelerated its pace and the gaps in network infrastructure and telecom infrastructure investments has been exposed. Hopefully now I expect that to accelerate, especially since money being free in the public markets, they can take CapEx investments and start to accelerate that pace. That leads into Jeremy. What do you have? I always say that 2020 was the unexpected year. I see 2021 has the year of change. If you're looking at your organization and you are approaching the year just like you did in 2020, you're starting completely wrong towards the whole experience of 2020. In particular, Latin America was very... It's been a challenge because obviously it's a very unstable region. It's a difficult region to operate. We don't have the same level of technologies that you see in the US. So the challenge for us US operators with infrastructure in Latin America is higher. Also has a small organization. We don't have thousands of employees, but we were forced to put ourselves into a dynamic, flexible approach into the industry in order to satisfy all the remote working. We were having multiple requests into having internet access, point-to-point connectivity with centralized servers, data centers, central offices. It was very challenging in 2020 when out of nowhere you had a plan A and you had to go into a plan Z from one day to the other one. So I believe 2021 is the year of change. You have to embrace the situation. You have to look at the eyes of what we're facing, not only in terms of the COVID-19, but also in terms of what the customers are learning and through the experience that we're all going through. So we are embracing a lot of automation into the customer experience, adding to what Rosa was saying. I believe we have to see different how the customers are expecting to experience our services, how we can facilitate the acquiring services, improving the experience. And we as organizations, we have to change the way we do business. We have to transform our business process more into customer-centric oriented. And I think that's for at least our company, at the end of 2020 we completely changed how we were looking into this and we are looking into 2021 has a change, the year of change and embracing everything, trying to put ourselves into our customers position. We support many carriers throughout the world and it is our responsibility to help them enable their customers in such a difficult region as it is Latin America. But we're positive. We were excited of the challenge and we strongly believe that 2021 is going to be an important year in every single aspect with all the different things happening, not only with COVID but also new things coming up to improve cloud, to improve communication, e-commerce and everything that is involved with connectivity, which we were a little bit underrated and now people are realizing how crucial we are for the world with everything going on. Definitely. Seems like the other thing that everybody dealt with in some form, whether waiting for it or preparing for it or building for it is 5G. So let's deal with that elephant in the room next. Is this the year, is 2021 the year that 5G goes mainstream? Is the infrastructure at the edge and everywhere else ready? Are the customers or is anything ready? Or is it something that's still 2022 or beyond? Warren? I think we're seeing continued momentum in this space, Rob. For me there's a quick parallel to the fiber deployment if you will in this country and the infrastructure and internationally for that matter as well to Jeremy's point and the expansion that we're seeing globally. I think there's a ready analogy there with 5G for that matter. So we've seen a big run on the spectrum auctions, proliferation in my opinion and a low in the mid-band spectrums, dealing better with environmental sensitivities and otherwise in high band areas, the fit that's there for the major metros. I think for myself in 2021 the challenge really resides with more of the OEM side of the equation. So the equipment manufacturers, you're seeing the responses now from Apple, Samsung, Cradlepoint for that matter with the new release of the 5G platform there as well. So is that acceptability at the edge increases? Obviously it's going to translate to a more ready and available customer experience and ultimately getting back to what a lot of the panel has already touched on. Interaction with the IoT environments that are available, massive data consumer considerations at the edge, mobile broadband. In our space in particular we deal with a lot of DAS environments, so distributed antenna systems and eventually replacing those to bring better wireless connectivity into hospital environments to take care of our frontline workers. And then finally for me, the omnipresent challenge of what we've talked about and broadband at large and access to as much being a rural area or some of the inner city considerations, I think as a father, the two boys in elementary school, the education environment. So being able to bring ultimately these resources out to the edge and into the home for our own business purposes selfishly the home office, if it's a failover consideration or a better primary option than perhaps the coax that's servicing your environment. But again, like I said, thinking of students and others that are at the edge that can stand to benefit from the technology. I think it's going to continue to evolve obviously and in my opinion at least the, much of the ball resides in the court with the OEMs. Greg, is the edge ready? Well, let's put it this way. 5G needs the edge. The edge does not need 5G. And I believe 5G is overhyped. I think it's several years away. We've got 1.4 million 4G radios out there that have to be replaced. Excuse me. I don't know what I said. 1.4 million. I don't know if that's what I said, but think about that. 1.4 million radios that have to be replaced. And that's on the macro towers. Now you have to do densification because you're at much higher frequency which obviously doesn't propagate from a macro tower. You've got to densify with small sales with companies like Warren. And that's very difficult. You've got to go into the municipalities, get the zoning, put up the small sales. And then even more difficult is getting fiber out to each one of these to do the front hall back into the aggregation points. So there is a, I'm not that concerned with the OEMs. I'm more concerned with the overall infrastructure to be able to propagate these high frequency, high bandwidth. And obviously you've got to move the workloads closer to the aggregation points of the towers. It doesn't do any good. Here in Denver, I'm on Verizon and everything I do on my phone on 4G back calls to Dallas on layer two. It doesn't hit the internet till Dallas. That's the same with AT&T here. The mobile networks are architected completely different than the wire line or terrestrial networks. And they weren't architected for data. So they've got to be able to move those drains, those internet drains, which they call the evolved packet core serving gateways out into, you know, the communities to get those workloads much closer because it doesn't do any good to eliminate, you know, I'm basically 10 to 20 milliseconds between my phone and the tower. But if it's 50 to 80 to 120 milliseconds back on and hairpinning and tromboning back to Dallas, you can't deliver any meaningful monetized applications that way. A lot of work to be done with 5G. Rosa, what's your perspective? Absolutely. I agree with Greg on a micro level of bringing it back into Hawaii. We're still with the companies that we're working with. We're still in RFP stages, helping them with equipment that needs to be brought into the data center to support the 5G network. So we are in the middle of helping our customers in the planning and deployment of equipment. And I see tons of infrastructure improvement projects being planned, you know, new fiber initiatives on the islands and around the islands. And of course for us, the major initiatives of increasing the capacity out of the island to hit Asia Pacific, the South Pacific and the US mainland. So I see a lot of work going into all of the pieces that Greg mentioned, the zoning, the requirements working with the city and county and the state for rules. But it's making progress. I see it moving even for one of the smaller states in the United States. But it is not there yet. And the thought of is this the year that companies can start developing, monetize applications or monetize, the gaming companies being able to rely on that for enhanced virtual reality games. I don't see that honestly happening quite yet. Though I see us working with all of the telecoms in every single region going towards that in the goal. So I think we are going in the right direction. I don't think 2020 and the pandemic slowed us down. But we're far away from what is the ideal and what everyone is expecting from Viage G. To answer your question though, are the customers ready? Of course. I mean, everyone, no matter what part of the globe you're sitting on, as soon as they have additional capacity, additional bandwidth that they can get a hold of and use, it will be eaten up, consumed, monetized and further developed. So the faster we can get to that, the faster that each of the regions that are developed can kind of escalate. And we were talking about it before, have a better quality of life. Everything that's developed, the new applications, the new learning mechanics, the new gaming mechanics, everything will improve the quality of life by improving our infrastructure. So I believe in it. I want to support it. I just don't see it realistically taking off in 2021. Nicole, what do you see? I think companies that build out their own private wireless networks are going to win. The John Deers, the UPSes, the FedExes, they're going to win. And those who are late to the game are going to lose because from an internal operative perspective with the robotic processing that's happening with the taxation on corporate servers and the demand from end customers, whether they're B2B or B2C, you don't want to be in a high-latency game. You want to be the ability to tap high-speed latency sensitive. And I think if you look at where you are in the country, companies that are set up probably by the coasts in the United States or in the major cities globally, they're the ones who are going to make that initial investment because they're the ones who are seeing that instant demand. So if you think of like 5G becoming a standard wireless technology over the next decade, I think COVID basically woke us up to say, hey, it might happen in the next couple of years, whether it's this year, don't hold my feet to the fire on that. But I think over the next decade, or at least the next few years, it's going to be defined by faster speed, lower latency, lag time. Small cells are likely to become vital in these cities, especially with the massive growth in consumer wireless data usage over the last several years. We've restrained all a lot of these provider networks. And if carriers don't have additional spectrum to deploy, what's their alternative to improve their networks by densifying them, locating towers closer together. And in cities, that often means small cells, where antennas are located on fixtures like light poles instead of the high tower structures. So I think it's funny if you look at Zillow, you look at WalkScore sometimes. I think it's possible that we might look at like 5G scores. We might be like, hey, you know, where is the wireless network the best? And where do I set up my next company? Do I want to have headquarters where my employees don't have good network setup? I think that kind of those questions will arise in the chief data officers' minds, those chief technology officers' minds, where right now we're still not really looking at that. And I think people are underestimating the demand for high-speed latency-sensitive services like manufacturing operations and robots and the John Deers of the world are going to be the winners, those who really move to edge sites, you know, to understand the importance of edge sites, because it's only an increase with 5G deployments. Jeremy, what are you seeing? Yeah, in terms of Latin America, obviously, you always expect everything that you see happening in Latin America, Europe, then you see it in Latin America probably three or four years later. You don't see any planning right now of 5G in Latin America. However, OS has a carrier with fiber optic network infrastructure. We need to have a strategic network planning for these type of technologies, because it's just a matter of time when they come. You know, even though Latin America is behind in terms of technology, they love to embrace technology. So, just adding to what Bickel was saying, you have to be one step ahead of the game. You know, you cannot expect the wave to just come and then you jump into the wave. You have to be ready. You have to be one step in terms of preparing yourself. I mean, speaking has a network infrastructure owner. Also, I expect to see a lot of an increment of competition between the ISPs and the carriers when 5Gs arrive, because now you're talking about broadband connectivity being much better than... not much better, but at least competing with the traditional dedicated connectivity when now you're going to have a better latency, you're going to have a much better connectivity in difficult areas where fiber optic is not an option. 5G is definitely going to be the option to go. And also, you know, the IoT, the smart cities, that's something that I see happening in Latin America. It's just a matter of seeing what happened in North America in the U.S. and Europe, Asia, and take, you know, success stories, you know, learn from those cases and bring it to Latin America. That's a good thing that you always take, you know, what worked best in those regions. You take it to Latin America, so it's much easier to implement. You know, just to give you an idea, you still see SDH technology in Latin America, you know, STM-1s, STM-16s, you know, you still see those in Latin America. So that's just to give you a perspective of how Latin America is still a little bit back in terms of embracing technology. But I believe we don't have to follow the same pattern. I think we have to force ourselves a step out of our conference zone and, you know, embrace the new technology that is just a matter of time to receive it in the region. So what other technologies and projects other than 5G should we be thinking about right now? What else is going to be looking for some oxygen, shall we say? Warren? Yeah, from my perspective, I think we'll, I believe we'll continue to see strong growth trends in the UCAS space. You know, just last week, for example, Zoom phone announced, you know, arriving at 1 million users in less than a calendar year, which is incredible. You know, I touched on my, you know, experience personally and, you know, that and just observing the resiliency in the marketplace for that matter. So again, the carrier community has responded to the need. It's accelerated adoption, you know, in the UCAS space in a big way, I would say, obviously. And, yeah, you look at the earnings considerations and the data available from some of the big hitters in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, you know, be it 8x8, Ring Central, Vonage for that matter, continuing to succeed, to see double digit growth over three years running. And again, we're looking to take advantage of that ourselves at ComStar. So the adoption rates increase, the capabilities of the platforms and so on, continue to improve, getting back to what Rosa said earlier and giving us an opportunity, despite the circumstances, to still interact with one another. And I think a major focal point has to be finding a way to increase that capability for our employees. And again, employees with that satisfaction level and otherwise pass that along to our customers. For me, other technologies of note, I'm keeping an eye on Contact Center as a service, Platform as a service, for example, increasing the interconnectedness between our clients, ourselves, the user communities, giving you that overlay at the end of the day to incorporate CRM considerations, tie-in chat functionality, continuity between an email with a care representative, for example, in the back office and so on. So again, you could pick up that interaction, follow with a tier two technician or a higher level member of staff. So for me, it's a lot about the experience at the end of the day. And one area in particular, audio visual, is a big one for me as well, as we bring people back into the offices, hopefully, if it's Q3 or later, but giving people in the office an opportunity to interact with those that are remote and try to do the best we can to continue to provide avenues to interact, to conduct our business and otherwise, but going back to higher education, K through 12, and trying to find ways to simplify the audio visual experience while also providing for agnostic considerations. So you walk into a room, you should have the ability of Zoom or Teams or any collaboration engine, for that matter, to be able to interact and create a positive experience for those in the room and for those on the other side at home. Great. What do you see coming? Hopefully we'll start seeing a little more edge adoption. It really got stalled with COVID. The stakeholders that we saw were looking to try to monetize workloads deeper into the networks, whether that be 4K type video, gaming, either console-less or gaming with VR, with Facebook's new announcements, with Oculus and their new cloud gaming product. These organizations, Microsoft, they were starting to look and build business cases to go deeper into the edge were all stalled. All the resources were redeployed to build bigger deployments around Office 365 and Teams. So they had to beef up their core network to meet the demand. Teams went from 40 to 120 million subscribers in the last year. Microsoft is absolutely putting all the resources to try to crush Zoom and WebEx and some of the others. So edge is largely on hold right now, but certainly the business cases are starting to be developed now that they're a little more stabilized at the core. Rosa, what do you see coming? Again, on a Hawaii or smaller community perspective, I see 2021 as investing and developing in the infrastructure technologies. So again, for data centers, telecoms, system integrators, focusing on being able to continue to provide the customers just the basic infrastructure of what they need. Personally for DR Fortress, where a lot of businesses in Hawaii relying on tourism and hospitality suffered a great deal from what happened. We had to kind of keep on trucking. We stayed on target with our data center expansion because the customers that needed that, they're not changing their delivery dates and they needed us to be ready for service. So we continue to focus on that. And I think most of the businesses in the telecom industry and the IT industry need to kind of just stay focused and be able to be ready for those developments. So I think very large opportunities in infrastructure development. For Vickal, I see that you're probably having a lot of opportunities in that the infrastructure funding, new businesses being able to kind of lead and support the bandwidth infrastructure that's needed. And then the second thing is I see a lot of companies investing in, you know, continuing to invest in cloud technology. Remote working has kind of accelerated the need for VDI, DRAS, BAS, those types of services. So we're personally focusing on partners that could provide those services if we can't, being able to provide them the infrastructure that they need so that the remote working can continue to be stronger and can get more and more efficient. So I'm seeing that here. I'm seeing that in smaller communities. I'm seeing that with partners. And I bet that in most locations, making sure that the employees have all of the tools that they need on kind of the basic levels is just needs to be invested and strengthened. Vickal? I think cybersecurity is going to be critical actually on the edge. Everything from like endpoint device management and businesses really looking at like the SISO position being a more senior important position. Previously, SISO is kind of reported to the Chief Digital Officer. And I think that's actually going to flip, which is going to be kind of fun, kind of, you know, funny. But the requirements on the edge for security and network security, information security is increasingly not only one, not only a requirement for larger enterprises, but I actually also see it for smaller enterprises and smaller enterprises are adopting AI-driven cybersecurity solutions. And that's only going to tax overall requirements on data and low latency requirements. So any kind of technology or infrastructure investments that are supporting that on the remote workforces I think is only going to be an important type of investment around technology or all things around the security side of the business. Jeremy? From my end, I think, you know, improving the level of services to, in order to support media, high complex mission critical applications from Latin America, the better the transparency on the network, the better. Staying away from, you know, the MPLS, the traditional services, you know, we build our network on layer one in order to provide that level of transparency so people can embrace these different applications and services that everybody is mentioning. You know, I'm more talking about how you prepare the network so customers can utilize those solutions from Latin America. So we are working, rent apologies, layer one build out in the network. The better the transparency on the network, the better the applications are going to work. And also I think in the customer experience, I think a lot of carriers are embracing automation to support their clients. This is more in the wholesale business. You know, when you think about Latin America, you know, I hear some clients that say three weeks to get pricing, 120 days to install service. You know, those are crazy delivery times or SLAs, you know, you have to change completely, you know. So carriers embracing more technology, automation to provide pricing in a matter of hours, you know, delivering in less than 30 days in Latin America does a definitely a game changer in Latin America, you know, improving the customer experience, the level of services. So all these applications that you guys are talking about can work in Latin America. So it's more about improving the level of Latin America and getting ready the region for, you know, things like 5G. I think cybersecurity is very important because it's a very vulnerable region. So they're more exposed to cyber attacks. I believe cybersecurity has a huge potential in the Latin American region. Everything that you see succeeding in every other region is definitely will succeed in Latin America as well. So very interesting times. Yeah. We're running a little long time, but we'll try to get through this next one quick here. What headwinds are ahead? What challenges and dangers lie ahead that we should be paying attention to in 2021? Warren? Yeah, just given the time considerations, Rob, I think, you know, everybody's done a wonderful job of hitting thematically on three points, right? And, you know, it's the ever-shifting impact on business, you know, particularly, I think it was Greg that touched on some of those verticals, you know, the brick-and-mortar considerations that are out there. And, you know, we're not seeing, in our case, what we are seeing is, you know, reduction in seat counts and spend considerations otherwise. So, you know, I think it's incumbent upon us to be creative where we can. You know, there's platform overlays. You know, maybe not a forklift of a premise-based PBX, for example, but perhaps a cloud-based layer that allows them to better interact with their clients and allow staff to better communicate. So, again, budget and staff, you know, in the retail marketplace is a particular concern. We touched on the capacity constraints in traditional networks, you know, the infrastructure component for me is towards the top of the list. And then, you know, for Vicko and Jeremy touching on the cybersecurity component, you know, obviously it goes without saying, but the more that we put in touch, you know, with the interconnected nature of if it's physical security and camera integrations with your local area networks and otherwise, UCAS and IT and the interplay there for another example, all of that creates different points of potential intrusion. So, you know, we have to be on the ready and vigilant and making sure that we're preparing our customers accordingly. Great. I don't... I see a lot of tailwinds. I think COVID is really driven digital transformation and I think it will continue to do that. So I'm pretty optimistic that we're in the right business. All right? Yeah. Rosa? Yeah, as we've discussed, I think the biggest challenge is as we rely more on the networks, we need to really stay focused on the network security. We're spending a lot of time and assistance with customers wanting to improve, add applications, add additional security, you know, here in Hawaii, that is very reliant on military and government. The network attack, I'm seeing kind of impacts now or repercussions of what had been announced. Some of the folks that I'm talking to are, you know, taking five minutes to get into their Excel sheet that's sitting on the network. I mean, that's ridiculous, but it's something that's very important and needs to solve for and it's just an ever example that, you know, you could wake up any morning and see a major headline on something where someone's or a major corporation or a major entity's network has been compromised and just takes and has repercussions for most of that channels, most of the channel and relationships and partners in that industry. So focusing and making sure that the network security and cyber security is absolutely kind of a key component to everyone's plan as they are upgrading or improving their network. Vickal? I think this is a great, as Greg was saying, this is like a boom time. This is like what the 1950s were in the United States for laying down highways across the United States. This is where the next 10 years from an infrastructure fiber perspective, tower perspective, this is where it'll set the American empire for global dominance for the next 100 years. What we do in the next five years, everything from towers to cell towers to usage to infrastructure. Any country around the world that gets ahead of this curve, I see tailwinds. I don't see any headwinds here. You know, consumer perspective, they're Oculus and looking at the evolution of like virtual reality, augmented reality, the demands of consumers, the digital transformation is no longer at an enterprise. It's actually in your home and we have consumer digital enterprise and everything that was physical before is now becoming digital, right? Everything from retail to e-commerce. So I think this is like the bull time. This is the gold rush into Telco in my opinion over the next five years. Jeremy, you see any headwinds? I'm going to go short on my answer, but I agree with Greg and Vico. However, I see that we're going to see some consequence from 2020-2021. We deal with a lot of global businesses in Latin America. So I mean, we have a lot of subsidiaries in Latin America from companies that are headquarters in Europe, Asia, in other regions. So we may see some changes, consequences from the closing in their headquarters and the way they do business. I believe we are in the right business, in the right space. But we have to minimize the impact from 2020 from the different direction that they may come with the different approach that we embrace in 2021. So I see a little bit of challenge, but I believe we are in the right space. But with a lot of opportunity that will make the next five years, we'll define your success in the next five years just like Vico as well. All right, last question, and we'll try to make it quick because I know Laura is trying to move things along here. I'm going to put you each on the spot really quick here. Make a specific prediction of something that you think is going to happen this year. I remember reminding you that last year, nobody predicted COVID. So we have, you can't do worse. Orin? Yeah, I'm just excited to see, I think there's going to be a flurry of activity in the M&A space from the hardware environments and the OEMs to master agencies across the country and then in the carrier world as well. As everybody here has indicated in terms of that tailwind and trying to do everything we can to get ahead of these opportunities and the rewards to follow, you have to accelerate the adoption rate and obviously an inorganic approach to that is one fast path to do so. So that's what I'm interested to see. I think there's going to be a lot of that type of activity to follow and it's going to be exciting. All right, great. Well, let's see, a big move from public to hybrid cloud. I think there are certain workloads that are GPU dependent that are really what better served in the private cloud or hybrid cloud. So I think you're going to see a pretty big migration from some of the big hyperscalers into hybrid environments. All right. I predict that there will be, as I've indicated before, a large investment in infrastructure. And I think from that huge improvements in telehealth, in teleeducation, that type of improvements stemming from 2020, companies that are ready to kind of be able to go to the next stage or capable, have the resources, financial and technical, being able to service what's important, just the basics, healthcare, education, communication, those types of businesses and innovations will be successful. And I see a lot of investment into those types of infrastructures. All right, Bickle, what do you see? I think Netflix, Apple or Disney will buy a wireless carrier or start to build out their own. That's bold. Jeremy? I expect a big global change, positive change in terms of economic and politics. I think it's going to be a change in the way things... I see a big change. I see 2021 as a year of change and it's not only in the way we do business, but in the way we're used to see the world. I want to be optimistic and I believe something good is coming. All right, on that note, thank you everybody for coming and helping out with this webinar. And I'll turn it back over to Laura. Laura. Thank you, Rob. Thank you so much. Our guest moderator, Rob Powell, founder and chief editor of telecom ramblings, keeping us on point today. Thank you so much and thank you panelists again. Just a quick reminder, our speakers are staying on for the remainder of the lunch hour to answer any more of your questions on LinkedIn. And I did see some questions come through in our chat about open access last mile fiber, IOT and a few other things. So thank you so much for your questions. We'll continue that chat over on LinkedIn. We'll also share our hashtag JSA virtual roundtables or click the direct link in the chat box to continue the Q&A. And viewers, if you are one of our first 100 registrants, we hope you enjoy your lunch. Make sure you visit us at jsa.net to register for more upcoming JSA virtual roundtables, including our next one. It's happening February 18th, where our leaders in the industry will talk about the new normal, effectively facilitating online learning at every age. And don't forget to check out the demo video in the chat to view the expanded networking opportunities included in each JSA virtual roundtable that is starting next month. That is a wrap. Make sure you look out for the playback of today's roundtable coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcasts on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify and more. In the meantime, see you over on LinkedIn. Happy networking.