 and I'm excited to share with you all how we built a decentralized wireless internet service provider in rural Oregon. So this is Plaskini. I've been here for about 13 years. It's a kind of a typical rural community. It has a sparse population, some challenging geography, large double-spurred trees, and kind of these hills and mountains. And some folks that are working class and lower income, and like many rural areas, it also suffers from lots of folks that don't have very good access. And it's very typical for us to see people in our community with a negative per second of internet or no access at all because they have satellite or costless barrier because it's too expensive. But there is actually other internet service providers in this area that have tried to connect people and so these folks have not been very successful. And also, in fact, about five years ago, there was a million dollar USDA rural grant to serve a mix of wireless and fiber infrastructure with some of the outlying areas that also suffered from many things that we see as very typical with granting programs. There wasn't a lot of accountability. We're not really sure if they actually did, in fact, serve those homes that they had promised to do. And one of the big key things is there was no sustainability. So the money was dropped into the community, and then as the wireless infrastructure aged, the internet service provider had no incentive to continue to put money and resources back into that connection. And this also isn't the whole story. It's not just that these folks have no internet access. In fact, along kind of that main corridor through town of the main highway, internet access is very good. You can get some kind of megabits per second as fiber, and it's affordable. But anything beyond that one kind of narrow corridor, there's no ability to get that internet access to those folks in the outlying areas. But there is a better way. Instead of one company owning all of the infrastructure of the network, Althea's software lets us leverage the existing homes and businesses in an efficient way and build an essentialized network where neighbors can pay each other for bandwidth. And this is accomplished by people in the community, you know, people that have their homes or the businesses or farm. They host some hardware that might look like an antenna or some cables, and then they get paid automatically with the software to host us. And here's an example of what that looks like right here. So that top antenna is connected to a high speed fiber backhaul in the community. And then that bottom antenna, the long skinny sector antenna, is connected to his neighbors. And then both of those cables route to the Althea router in his house that provides his internet access, does all the routing, and the building automatically. And this creates, you know, sort of a viral incentive for kind of a network growth that happens automatically. In fact, Matt will like once a week take a bottle of wine to his neighbor's house and see if they want to get connected to the internet. It is pretty effective too. He's done a pretty good job. And this is sort of curated with a kind of local group of folks that help if there's problems or they want to help you install that kind of thing. And in this sort of agile configuration that says like lower the build-out costs, so instead of that one central antenna that if you can only get the take rig or that you can only get the people within that view shed of that central antenna, we're able to sort of configure this network in a really agile and dynamic way. And this also creates more equitable governance. So here is kind of an idea of what the internet looks like today, right? So you have like discrete connections with proprietary hardware from each of the internet service providers in your area. And, you know, legacy internet users pay high prices for slow speeds because the last known networks are siloed by this ownership and have a really long lock-in. But here's the mouth of the internet. It creates like one open network made up of different owners and the network uses all these things available to, you know, dynamically switch between different internet service providers using different altheas and internet service providers and using all the links available using the best speeds and offering to have a better cheaper internet for everyone. So here's a map of the Klotski network so you can kind of see. So Klotski, we set up an althea network and there's about 40 users on there right now and you can see that sort of agile and different ownership, essentialized ownership that we have here. Each of these different colors is a different relay who is forwarding bandwidth to their neighbors and using their own home to put some antenna hardware on. There's another example there to forward bandwidth to their neighbors. And one of the kind of exciting things about althea is that you use a price aware version of a routing protocol. And so what that does is that instead of only selecting the best routes based on the total round-trip time, we're also taking the cost into effect. And so that makes sort of an automatically competitive link. So not only are people incentivized to set up new links and add more capacity as if those get too expensive and people incentivize to set up competitive links. And we can encrypt the whole network with WaterGuard and using what we call the X and L, which is just like a VPN or server at its own center. And that server also, that X and L also verifies all the routes and the prices that are advertised as well. And this is done by the neighbors paying for the bandwidth with gigabyte, per gigabyte, excuse me, with the theory number X guy. So let's meet Linda. So Linda is another one of our relays here. She's the flower farmer, and she's got that really long green there on that previous slide, who's kind of out in the valley area. Very difficult to reach area. Otherwise, and this is sort of the areas that have really, really poor access before. And so she has their incentive here. Again, it has an incoming connection at the top. Those two connections double those two attendants route to her neighbors and her route, her althea route inside the house does all the routing and the building also provides her Wi-Fi access at her home or connection automatically. So for her, she just gets her internet and her cost is offset from the, like about six connections that she has on the network that is connected to her. And you can see, this is kind of like an user scan. It's kind of blurry, but you can see the connections going out for her, for her usage and coming in from her connected neighbors. And here's some of Linda's connected neighbors. So this is also a really great case too. This is Clark here and he's up on the hill from Linda. And so he actually does another hop and then serves way out to the very far reaches of the valley there. And it's really hard, very, very difficult to get area that would not be able to get otherwise. And, you know, it's an example of one of the farmers and then this antenna on the top, I don't have a picture of her, but this is an antenna that is on Beatrice's house and this is one of these really exciting stories about how this technology really makes an impact on her communities. Beatrice had no internet for four years prior to this because of cost. And, you know, she's about 16, I think, or something, so her and her four or five siblings were staying made after school or going to the library to use the internet to do their work. And with her, her parents had also worked, you know, they worked a couple jobs and so the family just never saw each other. This was really just impacting their quality of life. So she was able to get connected to her, their name was Linda, told her about it and they got connected and she was able to, you know, pay for what she uses and it's affordable and it's, you know, 40, 50 magnets a second instead of, you know, the only other tall-turned-it-in is like, you know, a megabit per second. So one of me, you know, I would see her the day that we started off, she came out holding her laptop just saying, you know, this is the best day ever. And I think it really is amazing to see those values in place. And another thing that I think is kind of interesting is that when we first got this project up, we sold my neighbors and my community members on faster internet, cheaper internet, those just, you know, really simple value propositions. But as the network has evolved and we added more people, I start to hear people talk about ownership and choice and some of these other ideals that, you know, we envision with decentralized networks. So this is an example of, like, you know, when we have multiple connections and sort of redundancy and resiliency that we get, these networks as well. So both of these antennas are connected to different relays. It's actually as if you kind of down in that bottom right-hand corner there. And this, the routing protocol will select the route on the second-by-second basis based on the round-trip time and the overall cost. So it also, if one of the relays were to go down in this case, everything else would go back through the other relay. So right now, people are using Ethereum to pay for their internet. They buy Ethereum on, like, a Coinbase app right now, or they could buy it with anything, but using the double card. And then they send it to their router while scanning a QR code on their router. And the router dashboard then also gives them their billing and their usage information to keep up to date on that. And then when the balance is really a tax message. So it's really pretty simple onboarding process for folks. Pretty easy to understand the values there. And one of the new things that we just recently introduced, which is pretty exciting, is that people buy Ethereum and they send Ethereum to their router wallet, but we have a bridge. So then it bridges to XI to stabilize out. And that's all just unseen this day in the router. And then the payment settles when, on the blockchain, when the gas is 5% of the total transaction. So you'll see sometimes in high gas times, you know, they won't settle for an hour or two or something. So I did want to just touch briefly as well on the fact that these are actual community members that have no experience with Ethereum or cryptocurrency prior to having to use it to pay for their internet. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. It's a network of senior citizens. So yeah, it's really exciting. A couple of things. One is if we spend a little bit of time during that onboarding process on a one-on-one basis, it goes pretty smoothly. And then after that, just sort of initial maybe even just 10 or 15 minutes of one-on-one time, folks are able to use that on an ongoing way. A couple of other things I've noticed too is that we use the terms digital currency instead of crypto and a payment app instead of an exchange. And even just sort of simplifying up those two key terms has led to, I think, a lot less friction than we normally would have seen. So we do also recognize, though, that at this point networks aren't able to necessarily go totally autonomous of the people to have customer support questions and they might need help with things. So we have what we call organizers and this is just, you know, people within their local community that set up some sort of legal entity. We can feel like an LLC, we have that in one of our networks, sort of non-profit or cooperative in a couple of them. The one in the classic and I is a member of cooperative. And so these local people help us all support their network but they're also incentivized as well. So they're incentivized with a monthly, poor-rated subscription fee which is also automatically debited from the router seamlessly for the end user. So they can partner with other people to set up the relays and the gateways and the other pieces of hardware in the network but still we see the suffer incentive. So beyond Oregon, beyond the rural environment, we're really excited to see some of these new networks coming on board here very soon. This is the co-operative network there in an urban area south of Seattle, Washington. And they should be launching here within the next 60 days. We took them through what we call our Althea Hits program. So that's basically a pre-registration site and if any of you are familiar with the broadband community, there's a thing called Fiberhood, Google did it where you kind of go into an area and get people to pre-register and kind of front-load that user acquisition. This worked really well. So they started out in about June with their pre-registration site, some marketing materials in support from us. And they have about 80 people now pre-registered and they're ready to go any close to their 100 threshold by the time they actually build out. And we have a couple more networks as well, one in the Napa area of California and in Abuja, Nigeria that will be starting as well. And more people that are now getting on board to be getting part of this process. We find a taste about, especially since it takes a while to get that whole cell fiber connection, it takes people between like four and six months to go from their pre-registration site to shovel in the dirt. So just to kind of surmise, Althea networks are owned and run by the community they serve, which is another sort of, I think, really exciting value proposition is that the revenue and the economic potential of the network is capped in that community instead of someone coming to the area and instructing that economic benefit, it stays there local and the community that is shared amongst the community members. It has that built-in competition, it's the price we're around in protocol, it's going to always incentivize people to set up automatic competition. It creates that automatic sustainability. So as the class of my network continues to expand, there will always be the incentive to add for more bandwidth because it is paid for usage. People use more, right, and added more economic benefit. And it's like a very true peer-to-peer statement that you and neighbors pay neighbors for bandwidth. Althea enables communities to set up decentralized networks, creating faster and cheaper internet for everyone. Thank you. And I thought if you want, we could do some questions if there's time. If there's anybody who wants to do questions. I don't have a, you just have to, you know, just talk it. How do you convince the people in the first place to join your network? So in the end, because in the end it's like a new room, it's also an investment for them, you know? Or don't they have any initial costs when they need to install the antennas? So the question was, how do you convince people to invest in hardware? So if you're talking about in the case of these relays, you saw with the antennas, they're, there's a very easy ROI. So like Linda's making a hundred bucks every couple of months. So it was pretty easy to compete with six users. So as she has more users, you can look at what that is per month. And I think she has about, you know, six or seven hundred dollars worth of antenna equipment on her site. So we're going to just kind of help interface with relays and let them know about what they can expect in terms of costs for the equipment and what they can expect for revenue. Is that your question? The router is a one-time fee. The router hardware is a one-time fee. Yes, so different networks set this up differently. So like the old film network, it's a higher income area, so they pay upfront for the equipment and the installation. Whereas in like the network in the Tacoma cooperative network, it's lower income areas, the organizers are subsidizing some of that cost as well. And I have a router here too, if anybody wants to bite you later, you can focus on the dashboard a little bit. I think you've been asking for a while, yeah. Sorry if you don't already said it, I didn't quite catch it. Like legal issues with the ISPs, is this basically like one contract for one consumer and then they're sharing it? How are you communicating with the backbone older and would there be any potential like a friction there? Yeah, that's a really good question. So when we set these networks up, we bring in a whole sub-connection, that's the resellable connection and we call it the gateway, right? So someone in the network is actually behind resellable backhaul, direct-in and mid-access or transit or something that's resellable, right? And then from that anchor point and then of course all the relays can resell that in the problem moment of the LTA networks that I ask about that. As far as legal issues in the United States, it's very, very simple for ISPs, which they've indicated to us that we do because whoever is in the exit node will have that responsibility. You mean someone, do you mean one of the neighbors has that subscription? So that can be a neighbor, but it's what we call the gateway location and so it basically works like a relay. They get the wholesale fiber backhaul and they broadcast that out because that wholesale connection is very expensive though and it's sold on a contract. So that is typically a business person that comes in and does that because it's a little bit longer ROI, a little bit more money, that kind of thing. You were, sorry, you were citing protocol or some law in the U.S., I'm not familiar with what it is, so what does it mean? Actually, this means that the person writing the exit node is responsible for the content or the communications of the community. So how are the legal issues like, have they been in the episodes or somebody that will do something in it, somebody getting a telephone call? Not yet, I'm sure there will be, but yeah, that's the responsibility and this, for the network we have here, Alfie is writing the exit node for that and the vision is the user will to have maybe different exit nodes that they could choose from. But yeah, and that's the point in the internet service provider where your dad is carrying out to the rest of the internet. So that's always going to be the one who is responsible for that and you know what the current telecoms are doing there. What does the FCC think I mean, obviously, not just law, but I bear in mind the FCC regulates sort of an airplane, setting a microtransmitters direction by the site, right? So I was just wondering if you have any problems with that? Yeah, I mean it's a little bit of jurisdiction but I don't care, but it's a larger city you might have some. So we operate in the unlicensed spectrum of 5 gigahertz so we're compliant there and there's a chroma cooperative network we'll be using on mixture of 5 gigahertz unlicensed spectrum in 60 gigahertz which is the milliliter e-band so we'll be able to push up even higher speeds, but that's also unlicensed, so the antennas are already configured in that way. So in remote areas the incentives are kind of clear because you don't have much options but for example in Hilfow what's the incentives that people have to go to the troubles to join the network? Yeah, well Hilfow is urban I think there's about 12,000 people in the neighborhood, just in a few blocks and it's faster than the current offerings, it's going to be less expensive and it's community run instead of the income of providers we've already got 80 people to sign up to start. So do you like find the neighborhoods that make sense and approach them? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So we do guys and folks, people who should just come to us and say they don't want to run an alfina network in my neighborhood, great, let's look at what we do find is that everybody's angry with big telecom but that anger isn't enough to get people to switch it's like you have maybe one to three percent take rate based just on people's income and anger but yeah, in really order to be viable we do also work with people and look at their market fit and say hey, are you going to be able to have traction here but you know what I was saying, we go into these neighborhoods and I've been to the hilltop neighborhood and worked with the organizers there everyone wants to be a relay they want to know how they can make money with their, you know, by running out of space on the road I don't remember who's first thanks society I missed the talk so many maybe one said but how do you adhere yourself, how do you provide for yourself, do you charge this, are you going to be working with or do you have to rely on benevolent donors that help you grow and my question is, if we are able to allocate money and you know we want to help you keep start because we see the interest so having me work together in a way that you know we can drive some of the wealth we control towards you might at the same time be able to see what you're doing, it's a practical debate yeah, that's a great question so without having to go into an ICO type or any token that's all yeah, so we are not doing a public scale so like I said we always want our end users to be able to use something easy to get like Ethereum and something stable like Die so we don't want people that are subscribing to have any kind of with yourself yeah, so the eventual plan what we're working on now is that right now as these transactions take place by person that goes to Ethereum miners right, so our plan is that we are going to bridge to an Althea Die and then an Althea token that is built on Cosmos and then the Althea token holders will be able to collect 5% of the of the transaction fees in the network so as the network grows then we get the 5% you guys have a reserve of Althea so your business model is the collaboration of the token with the network correct yes is there a maximum number of relays I think connected one gateway to have performance issues or is there a maximum distance to it yeah that's a really good question too so yes, but Althea itself runs on that consumer router in the people's house so whatever antenna you connect to that it's agnostic to it so you saw a lot of ubiquity gear here the Tacoma Community Cooperative Network is going to be like micro tech, 60 gigahertz that kind of thing and so the TANIS has limitations based on the antenna hardware so the hardware they saw there, the big sectors you know they can take about 30 people without performance and the smaller ones the little skinny guy, you know less than 10 so it but it's agnostic so whatever you want to use with it you can use TV rice faces and those antennas you could you can spice and spice all the equipment so it doesn't matter you can put fiber between you and then Althea that way do people like software yeah so I have since it's a consumer router available online our software is open WRT based it's open source and you just flash it onto the router itself does that answer your question? yeah is it still on Raspberry Pi? we do we do still best effort support but this is by the time you get the case and you get to where this is 70 bucks on Amazon so yeah alright well thank you very very much this has been fun, thank you