 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA, and on behalf of our team at JSA and our co-hosts for this roundtable, Connected to Fiber, we thank you for tuning in to this virtual roundtable, transforming the transformers, digitizing the connectivity industry. A couple of housekeeping notes before we begin, our first 100 registrants for today's roundtable have now received lunch delivered directly to their door, easy for me to say, or a gift card. So please enjoy that lunch and that gift card. We have well over 200 registrations for today's roundtable. So if you weren't one of the first 100, hopefully we will get you next time. So make sure to register early for our monthly roundtables at jsa.net. Also, we want to hear from you today during the webinar, so please feel free to add any questions directly into the chat and we will do our best to get to those questions before the end of the hour. If we do not get to those questions, however, we will email you an answer. So all good there. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started to introduce our speakers and moderate the discussion today. Please welcome one of my very favorite tech journalists, Mr. George Lawton. George is an industry journalist for venture beat and tech target and has been covering our industry for over 30 years. George, I cannot believe it's over 30 years for you, but I do believe you. So George from JSA and connected to Fiverr, thank you very much for being here today. We appreciate it and the floor is all yours. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, I have been covering it for 30 years. I mean, back in the day, it was all about telecommunications magazine and cable TV and they were two separate things and they sort of faded into the ether. But I was surprised to discover that even though telecom services might not be as sexy as other technologies you hear about with cloud and AI at the Gartner conference this year, they estimated the industry was on track to spend $1.4 trillion with the T dollars on communication services in 2021. That's more than cloud services, enterprise applications, any other category. I was a little surprised by that, but it makes sense. Enterprises, they're rolling out software to find WAN and IoT applications and work at home and data centers and all that kind of good stuff. But at the other end of the spectrum, 18 to 36 million Americans currently lag broadband. I mean, this is an interesting dilemma, a digital divide, if you will, between the high end and then the folks that wanna work from home or move out to the country or explore these different arrangements. And at the heart of this sort of digital divide and actually just meeting the demands of enterprises is connectivity and how are telcos going to build the infrastructure? How are they going to automate the processes for rolling it out? While these ideas like hyper automation and digital transformation are all the rage in other industries, the telco industry has these unique challenges. They have physical things. They have pipes to build, fibers to lay and they have to secure the permission for the land to run it all on. So in this round table, we're gonna talk to experts from across the field, from vendors to telecom providers to some of the tools for supporting this kind of digital transformation of the telecom industry. And so first up, we've got Ken Kramer and he's the co-founder and the CTO of Data Center Strategy at Involta, which helps organizations plan, manage and execute hybrid IT strategies using a broad range of services, including co-location, cloud computing, managed IT, cybersecurity, fiber and network connectivity. Then we have John Carr who's the VP of Business Development at Newstar, which is developing solutions to meet the growing demand for service providers to provide connectivity to their trading partners and corporate clients more quickly and efficiently. And John's been in the industry doing engineering and operations for 35 years and he recently joined Newstar's Communication Solutions Group as the Vice President of Business Development. Then we have Robert Kenny who's the Chief Revenue Officer at Connected to Fiber and they've built an industry cloud for connectivity buyers and sellers to automate the go-to market processes that ultimately drive growth on both sides. And lastly, we have Phil Oliveiro who's the CTO at LightPath and he's been in the telecom industry for over 30 years. And LightPath owns and operates a dense all fiber network in the New York metropolitan area in Boston. And with new ownership and management is expanding their reach and capabilities to enable more customers to reach their digital destinations. So I thought it would be interesting to just start out with what you all are seeing as some of the biggest challenges facing telecom networks and buyers and sellers this year. Particularly with the whole second phase of COVID and the transition to work from home and the supply chain challenges that are starting to come up. How do you think things might be different this year and what do you see as some of the big challenges facing all across the telecom supply chain, if you will the actual kind of physical equipment, the companies providing it the way they orchestrate it. And I'll just leave it up to you. And maybe I'll jump in there, George, in terms of some of the biggest challenges we at LightPath are facing as a network provider. And that is exactly those supply chain pieces or elements that you talked about. We are really managing through supply chain issues basically as we upgrade our networks to meet customers growing bandwidth needs. You mentioned the current era where in with COVID and work from home, all of these meetings have now been pushed out of the office and to homes and all of them now have a video component which you didn't have certainly 18 months ago sort of thing, two years ago. Access to data and applications housed in the cloud. All of these things have continued to push bandwidth requirements. And we at LightPath have been really busy investing in and upgrading our networks and service offerings to enable these requirements. And we've seen explosive growth in high bandwidth orders. And so we're meeting those needs but doing this despite semiconductor shortages, supply chain issues which have caused us and our vendors to do longer term planning to meet those needs. I'm looking at ordering right now equipment that I'm gonna need in mid 2022. We talked about just in the not so recent past about just in time ordering, just in time provisioning. I mean, I think that's good sometimes for providing the fiber and all that kind of stuff but you got to have it there to do the just in time. And so we're struggling through some of those supply chain issues to get that capacity in place. And I would say the other challenge and I'll leave it to the rest of the panel too is patience. I think my own patience within our company, patience sometimes with customers is bandwidth needs are growing so fast. We're trying to make changes. We're trying to make upgrades and so on to meet those needs. And it's definitely taking some time. We're absolutely getting through it. But yeah, it's definitely a challenge that we're managing through right now is to see the supply chain issues. Thank you. Excellent. I think the other side, as Phil said, equipment and those but the orders are work at home and remote and the fact that, you know, people realize that it's not a one day everybody's going to be back in those demands in the remote areas or all areas are gonna continue to grow. The adoption of SD-WAN, SDN and SAS now are driving more and more high demand for broadband, DIA circuits. And it's driving a demand in an area of the business that has probably one of the weaker back office in ordering processes, the complete lack of standards for the broadband providers and ordering in between their trading partners, little or no electronic bonding between the partners with broadband and a lot of the players out there. And it's gonna continue to have major impacts on the back office operating. So, you know, those are so many areas we're looking to help with some of the products we have to improve that. But right now it's really just gonna continue to stress the operation organizations until something's done in that realm. Could you say a little more about the sort of issue? Like you mentioned standardization and, you know, of course there's like IEEE and other standards for the actual equipment itself but how do you manage the orders and communicate that? Sure. Traditionally, right, the telecommunications world had some pretty good standards on what we call the ASR and access service request. And certain products over the years, it was very standard how you ordered them, the fields that transferred through with the advent of a lot of the DIA, wireless providers and cable and broadband providers. There was no standard access service request for those. You could have 100 providers that want 100 pieces of different information. So from a standard side, there's bodies like the MEF, the Metro Ethernet form that have been doing a lot of work. They started around Ethernet services, moved into fiber. They're doing a lot of work now to try to bring the industry together. They've created a great scale down 12 reference point type ordering process that if we could get all of these providers to use the same reference points fields for orders, it would lend to cross automation between all of those providers and speed, take the human interaction out of it, right? A lot of these places have done a great job on the customer to business interface of automating it, right? You get a perception of you went on a web interface and you ordered up your service. Behind the scenes though, if inner providers needed to do that ordering to get that completed, then it falls out to paper and it's an annual process in a lot of cases. So again, that's where we focus in being able to kind of help that and work with people like the MEF and other organizations to be out there and kind of evangelize those standards and try to get people to adopt them as quickly as possible. Thank you. What are some of the other challenges you guys see coming up in the industry? So from my perspective, just expanding things a little bit, I mean, I think access, speed and accuracy for network connectivity is an ongoing challenge and both Phil and John spoke to some of the rural aspects of it. But when you think about the access and speed and accuracy for network connectivity, the buyer preference is changing dramatically in front of us. They're looking for more of a consumer-like experience. You know, think Amazon, think Uber in terms of how they want to access information and ultimately order information. I mean, you think about logging into Google Maps and plugging in 123 Main Street, literally any place in the world and having getting a message back that says, we'll update you in five to seven business days. And they come back with one mode of connectivity or one route and one mode. And in many cases, that information can be not 100% accurate. We wouldn't stand for that. And I think that's the transition that the network connectivity industry is in the midst of, is getting to that with more consumer-like experience where they can have access to the information in rural or dense areas. Speed of that access and the accuracy information is critical for our continual growth. Now, when you say accuracy, what are the ways that you've seen people drop the ball? I think there's legacy information out there and the data around who has connectivity and what type of connectivity as it evolves and changes in front of us. Phil talked about the build-out that they're doing. It's happening real-time and we need to continue to make sure that that information is current and it's up to date. And data mining and AI and things, technologies like that are really speeding the ability to make sure that that data is current. Thank you. Hey, Robert, I would agree with your comments on that and I think I would also stress that not only the speed, but also the reliability has become much more important. And aside the latency, right? Everybody is looking for that real-time interaction with data and as we help our customers transform their IT solutions, the network side of it always becomes a critical component. Need reliability, need low latency, need real-time access to this data. And that's just pushing more and more of the compute and the collection of that data out into the marketplace or out closer to the user, right? So as we talk today, I think I would encourage people to think also about what's the term of edge data centers or edge compute? What does that really mean and how does that transform the need for network connectivity? There's a lot of challenges around that, right? Yeah. You know, in terms of the reliability, like in the latency issues, you know, like when the network goes down or your Zoom call drops out, what do you think is going to need to happen to kind of bring that, to fix that problem or to mitigate that problem? I can talk to you from a network provider perspective. So it's building in that resiliency, building in those redundant paths and so on and our networks that allow for, you know, the seamless uptime that customers are expecting for some of their critical applications. Well, sometimes the customers will take this into their own hands and say, hey, I'm going to buy from two different providers and I'm going to get different paths and so on. But many of our customers will say, hey, I'm looking for a redundant architecture from one provider. I want, you know, one necktie to pull if there's an issue. We want you to manage all the diversity and survivability issues. And so, you know, that's a big part of us providing those services, not just the bandwidth and providing it where and when they need it, but also providing it reliably as Ken and Robert have talked about. What are the benefits of going to one provider? I mean, you provide like a discount versus getting two because, you know, presumably they're not going to be using the full throughput or how do you make that more attractive for your customers? Yeah, I think your point, George, there's certainly an economic component, but I think there's also a, you know, the reason they're asking for the reliability is because it is such a critical service. I'm going to one provider to say, look, I need you to guarantee and show me all the maps of where your fiber is going. Show me that it's actually redundant and or diverse in the case where they're asking for dual paths and sometimes it's a little tougher when the customer is trying to manage that where they, you know, go to two different providers and they got to count on the two providers to have, to Robert's earlier point, accurate depictions of their routes and show and collaborate and say, hey, here's a crossing point and collaboratively work to figure those things out. Whereas think one with a single provider, certainly there's an economic component where we can offer potentially a better package price, but also that knowledge of the network that again would be all in our network that we can say, yep, this is certifiably diverse and will therefore give you the reliability and redundancy that you're looking for. Thank you. And, you know, just to kind of jump on that one, I think that's where you see a lot more SD-WAN solutions and deployments come into play, right? So as we mix traffic, you know, important traffic or you have things that aren't time sensitive, you have to prioritize. So I think networks in general just getting smarter and smarter to control that traffic flow and prioritize the things that need to, that are really time sensitive. Well, moving on, we sort of started this out with this notion of like transforming the transformers. So like bringing digital transformation to the telecom industry to affect like how do they do their business processes? How do they roll out the physical network? And how do they improve their engagement and the accuracy and the reliability with customers? I mean, how do you see kind of this idea of like, you know, bringing digital transformation into the telecom industry, extending Gartner's notion of hyper automation where they sort of started out in the enterprise with process mining and finding ways, not just to do one off of automating things but using process mining to identify all of the candidates and automate that process. Like how is the telecom industry gonna be able to take advantage of these same kind of concepts? Yeah, I think the world we're living in right now came on us sort of in a very unexpected kind of way and the demands have been tremendous on providers of all types. And I think the industry has stepped up and met the challenge of this new world, you know, through brute force at the end of the day. You know, they've done a lot of building, they've spent a lot of money, they've enabled a lot of things on their networks. And again, they've met the challenge to date. I think the next phase of this is really around, you know, introducing technology to drive, you know, a better user experience, you know, speed and ultimately, you know, better profitability into really starting to leverage these assets that have been put in place. And you know, there's all kinds of, you know, government programs pushing things out into rural areas and so forth. But at the end of the day, we've put a lot of money into the game now. Now we can introduce technology as phase two and really start to improve the experience and ultimately profitability of that investment that's been made. Thank you. And George, I'd add to that too, that again, from a life path perspective, you know, we've got some, you know, very physical things that we do, and you mentioned it earlier, right? Like we go out in the relay fiber in the ground or put it on, you know, utility poles and so on. And so, you know, establishing that high capacity flexible network platform is job one. But then building automated processes and systems to provision, monitor and adjust services is really, you know, a big part of the automation process for us. So it's not just about investing in our networks, but you know, we also have to make and are making major investments to upgrade our back office and provisioning systems so that orders can flow through our systems with less manual intervention. As Robert said, that's good for us because it'll be, you know, more profitable to do that but also good for customers because, you know, they'll get a much better experience and much quicker turnaround time, a much more resilient and flexible network that they'll be provisioned on. So it brings benefits to all, but that's the tech automation that we're seeing as a provider that we need to implement in our. You know, speaking of fiber, I heard that like Facebook was starting to experiment with fiber robots. I believe it was Africa or some place like that where they would go along on the power lines and reduce the cost like a thousand fold from humans like having to manually do it. I mean, it sounds sort of far-fetched and that it was in Africa. I mean, it's like, okay, well there's probably less regulations and safety considerations, but is that something that you could see, you know, here in the US anytime soon or you've considered? I don't know about that specific innovation, but absolutely. I mean, we're looking at better ways to put our fiber either in the ground or, but you know, we're talking about Manhattan. In my case, the Manhattan or the Burroughs and so on. There are some restrictions that I have to deal with, but yeah, I mean, you know, so we're definitely looking at ways to do that more efficiently, but there's some, you know, some physics involved in getting through the ECS conduit system in the greater New York area. Thank you. John, you were gonna say something? Yeah, I think, you know, to pick up where Phil kind of ended there, you know, as he said, you know, if all the physical networking challenges that they have to meet and then there's that, how do you, you know, revamp the whole of the OSS, DSS service delivery model. And, you know, when we talk about transforming the transformers, I mean, traditionally in the telecom environment, we haven't cooperated internally in our own departments. Finance didn't want anybody telling them what they needed to do in their systems. Ops guys are constantly kind of on the defensive trying to plug holes and adapt systems. So until we, as an organization, start to, you know, look at a holistic view, you know, you use Google or Apple or anyone else that, you know, you're buying those types of devices from start to finish, you know, it's an end-to-end automated and we've never really looked at that in telecom. We're starting to focus on that C2B interface and then it falls off again on the back. So until we change the nature of how these organizations internally have to be able to work together and, you know, stop the separate decision-makings, it's going to be hard to change that process. You know, I think we, you know, we talked yesterday about, you know, we're coming up on a generation that not only, you know, are the consumers today and they buy things on their phones and they buy things, they'll buy a house, slight unseen. But these are, you know, these are people and until we in telecom start to give the same type of service, right? I've joked yesterday about my son, he won't buy something if he has to talk to somebody. Well, those are the same people that are going to be the purchasing managers. They're going to be in our vendor ecosystem coming along here somewhere. They're going to be the buyers and, you know, we better start to get on this transformation and adapt to that. Yeah, John, I couldn't agree more. I mean, we're talking about this in our company and we're talking about how do we optimize the customer experience? And to your point, more and more of these customers are expecting a, you know, either single touch resolution if they talk to somebody and or I want a full digital experience. I want, you know, my customer experience to be completely digital. So, you know, trying to adapt our systems to enable not only flow through provisioning for us, but for our customers is really a big part of making sure we can meet customer needs going into the future. Yeah, great. I think just real quick to add there, we had talked a little bit about process mining and the importance of it. Believer in process mining is a lot, but it's got to change. It's got to be a comprehensive across. But I think a lot of Phil and anybody in his experience would probably say you could, you spend a lot of time on process mining of the systems right now, but I can tell you what you're going to find is you can't improve the process on the system that you have and the way it's interfacing. So I think folks are going to find a lot of that. So... Well, like in the telecom industry, what are the unique sort of process mining challenges? I mean, here, you know, you're not just like ERP and CRM. You've got these OSS systems and, you know, your kind of MEF standards that you've got to, you know, affect processes out to partners. How do you see that sort of showing up and what's going on to sort of bring a comprehensive view of process to the table? Yeah, I mean, I can speak to the network provider piece and that is that, you know, so a big part of what we're trying to do as well is access and use data across all kinds of different systems and do that with the help of data warehousing. You know, because we may have systems that will talk to each other and we're upgrading our systems to allow us to do that even better. But there are some systems that are suited, you know, really well for the OSS, part of the order management equation and others that are better for the customer resource management part of the equations here, I'm part of the equation, but making sure that we can harness all of that data in those very systems and, you know, very systems for billing and so on, harness all that data and all those systems to make good business decisions is really a big part of what we're trying to modify and change towards is be able to harness all that data in those very systems through data warehouses. Thank you. So there's a lot of different trends that are coming down the pike in terms of, you know, digital transformation, you know, ranging from like we mentioned, process mining to accurate location insights and ecosystem engagement and edge data centers. I mean, what do you think are the top trends for folks to keep an eye out over the next couple of years in the telecom industry? Robert, John? We'll pass that one to Phil first. Sure, I mean, for me, there's a reason I went to and got out of the telecom sector. We got a lot of the heavy lifting. No, I think it makes sense in the sense that, you know, I think it all starts being able to do some of this digital transformation and allow somebody's digitization and digital experiences to happen with the customers. It starts with that next generation network, right? I mean, you know, we're implementing an upgraded network, an optical network that will allow, you know, 800 gigabits per second per wave and up to 48 of those waves on the single pair of fiber. So, you know, it starts with, hey, we got to have the capability that they were going to be offering, you know, these high bandwidth services that I talked about earlier that were, you know, selling a ton of this year, you know, so it starts with having those next generation bandwidth capabilities. And then as I mentioned, it's really that automated and flow through provisioning from our CRM systems to the network, I think is a, you know, an important trend. We're seeing more and more capabilities and integrated systems and platforms that allow us to take that great amount of bandwidth though and provision and handle orders from customers efficiently. And I think the exciting part, John touched on this already is the exciting part of that is not only that's going to be to the benefit of light path that we can, you know, more efficiently manage those orders and provision those orders and so on, but ultimately we want to hand some of that control to our customers, you know, in the form of services, maybe initially like bandwidth on demand, where, you know, people get that sort of app like response in terms of being able to dial up and down bandwidth or turn up and down circuits and so on. But ultimately, you know, doing the full ordering process, but those are the kinds of things, I think the trends that we're seeing that's really making some of what we talked about real and applicable for customers. George, you mentioned ecosystems and that's core to what we're all about and the adoption and the participation in ecosystems I think is, you know, not only in our industry, but across industries is a pretty excellent development. And you think back to, you know, when we all use LinkedIn every single day, it's an ecosystem, we find information there, we buy things there now, we do all kinds of things on LinkedIn and our daily business lives were on LinkedIn, you know, at least I am multiple times a day. So that ecosystem, you know, the adoption, the participation, I think there is an evolving, you know, fear of missing out right now, you know, if you're not in the ecosystems, you know, are you missing opportunities? Are you missing opportunities to see quotes and action quotes? I think it's a really interesting evolution of the way people are going to share information, you know, and ultimately get to good data by sharing that information. And with that good data and that sharing of information, you know, speaks to, you know, location intelligence and, you know, the accessibility of that location intelligent, it's sort of a self-fulfilling kind of mechanism that the flywheel starts to run. And the more demand you bring into the ecosystem, the more supply comes into the ecosystem and everybody benefits from that intelligence, it just gets better with every transaction that takes place. So ecosystems in our industry are really exciting and evolving quickly. How does the ecosystem in the telecom world work? I mean, you know, in LinkedIn, you've got your likes and your posts, but how do you improve the speed of engagement and cooperation and, you know, drive benefit for everyone through these kind of ecosystems? Well, from my perspective, it's driven by buyer density as we would refer to it. The more demand that comes into ecosystem, the more suppliers want to be in the ecosystem. And when the suppliers come in, they bring, you know, building lists and the intelligence about their network. And then that, you know, the buy side demand, creating that, the supply side coming in and bringing really, you know, good current intelligence to the accuracy equation is what feeds the machine. I think we're ultimately going to get to a place where it has things like, you know, I like this, I don't like that kind of thing. There's going to be some preference-based things that evolve into ecosystems. We're not there yet, but I think that will continue to evolve that way and that buy side demand is going to enable it. And whether you're a buyer or seller, you're kind of doing both at the end of the day for type two networking opportunities and so forth. So it feeds the machine and with each feed, the industry information gets better. How do you see that buy side piece changing? You know, particularly with like the aggregation and the community effect, you get to sort of like the MVNO, but for these more hardwired services where maybe you go to a Best Buy or something like that and do your, buy your telecom equipment. Like how do you kind of see that piece kind of evolving and growing and in concert with the folks that are actually providing the services? That's a good one. I mean, I'm not sure I have a crisp answer to that one. That's a little bit down the road for us right now, but when you think about the buy side of the equation, we're back to my original point and the Google example, it's around giving them access to what kind of connectivity exists to every particular location and how they can access and ultimately purchase that in a very sort of frictionless or seamless kind of manner. You know, we connected to FIBO, we're serving the buyers and the sellers of network connectivity. We're not speaking to the enterprise or your example, the retail kind of establishment at this point in time. We're providing this buyer-seller ecosystem at this stage. Thank you. Yeah, I would probably agree in there, you know, as when you look at who and what is that ecosystem, you know, what Robert described there, like we're a complementary to the telecom providers as being part of that vendor ecosystem. So, you know, as connected to FIBO can provide all that location in those accuracies and you know, I think Best Buy is what took Robert out of his thought train there because it took me out there when you got there. We got bigger problems to deal with before we get down that road, but that would be nice. But Jazz, so when you talk about then, how do you continue that speed to delivery when you found your information accuracy, your location and where are things and those buyers and sellers getting information to make a decision? Like that's where we then try to help to go towards, you know, the fills and other people of the world is with the way to speed it up is get everybody talking same language, right? If you can't get everybody to adopt an MEF API methodology of bonding and everybody up on the same, it's not real, it's realistic in that it's a simple standard but not necessarily simple to implement for every type of organization. So we looked at creating things of, we're not the de facto standard for ordering all services, but we've created a standard way for everyone to talk to each other in the same way and we'll handle it on the backside. So you can have your cake and eat it too, you can tell your customers, you have to bond with me this way, but the customer doesn't, they can enter through our portal and we'll give you the information the way you want it. So that's again, evolving that ecosystem into intelligent ways to bring automation to where there wasn't and bring automation to everybody in one type of gateway that really hasn't existed before. Well, I would say, John, if that can speed up the ordering and delivery process, that's from at least from more of a consumer side of things and an enabler for some of these new technologies. Today, when we go out and try to find a connectivity solution, you have to go into the market, find out who the player is, find out who has infrastructure. It's a very time consuming and tedious process. And I think when we talk about the innovation needed to stay up with just the quickly growing transformation of applications and data, it's quick to markets, right? It's quick to provision something and you can go out to these hyperscalers and buy a server and have it stood up in hours. In connectivity, it takes weeks, if not months, to get something installed. So I think if some of those newer capabilities shrinks the provisioning time down, that's gonna be key to meeting the needs, right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And so you're absolutely right, like the Cloud guys, yeah, you can literally go on, depending on what you're doing, if you're just looking for a simple storage, hours is too long, you can spin that kind of stuff up pretty quickly. Robert can provide a lot of information quickly. We can enable a carrier to get an order quicker than they have before and for actually running. Like a lot of the problems with those off net was just error after error of people not knowing what the carrier really wanted. So we saw things like that, but you're absolutely right. If we got that order to somebody 10 days quicker than it used to be, if it's then stopping at a manual process because the technology of systems and how to go beyond manual process or provisioning and people dispatching, other than maybe that very last mile at some point. Yeah, we just got an order to somebody to hold it up quicker, so, but... Yeah, great point, John. The other side of this ecosystem conversation is the partnerships that we can establish within our industry, like the one between Connected to Fiber and Newstar. At the end of the day, we can take it through the CPQ or the Configure Price Quote element and with our partnership with Newstar, we can get right to ordering, all in the same interface, seamless and really allowing people to drive efficiency into the way they operate. So those partnerships, and it's just not the two of us, there's a myriad of opportunities for those partnerships to improve the user experience, drive efficiency into the process, drive errors out of the process and sort of do it in one interface. So it's a pretty exciting opportunity. I agree, and I won't hold up too much longer. We're not only looking at it as creating that ordering process, what we're also allowing you to do is close the multitude of loops that are manual process behind it. So if you got that order, we can... And anybody doing this, they need to provide the partner, the ability to take that information and close out their financial systems or say this is ready for invoicing, improve the accuracy of inventory systems by pushing that information of the circuits that turns the cost into them, interfacing with the Salesforce so they don't even have the CR systems, they could do it all from the internal CRM systems and just interface with this. So we're not tied to, you have to CR interface, we're providing you an interface that you can use in many fashions and flexible and close the loop to your monitoring systems, your assurance systems, all of those things. So when you talk about that hyper automation side, C2F and folks like us and others, we're not just trying to focus on our app, we're trying to give you an avenue out of those systems to close many manual loops and remove those manual processes. And George, as both Robert and John are mentioning, I can testify to the benefits of both their systems because I talked about some of the investments and upgrades we're making within like that, but of course, customers will buy service from us and we'll have to maybe work with another carrier to deliver a full service and whether it be Robert, in fact, that a fiber and now knowing that we can go to one place and either show our wares in terms of where we have on the buildings and services and so on and or look to Robert's tool to help us figure out which carriers have services in those locations to help fulfill an order. And then John's group can help us with not only the Robert on the buying process, John on the fulfillment process. So the automation that we're doing within like path can certainly be a benefit for services, not just on like path, but as we work with other carriers and ultimately fulfill orders that require a couple of carriers, this automation now won't be just a silo like path things would be an automation that would go across the multiple carriers that are required to sometimes fulfill orders. When you're working with other carriers on projects, how do you simplify the semantics, like the way that you kind of describe the orders and the elements? Like what are the kind of problems that you've run into and how are those becoming easier to address using tools like C2F and Newstar to help kind of harmonize the way you make sure everyone's describing things in the same way. Yeah. Well, part of it is just the existence of these tools, C2F and Newstar as that kind of broker between so that they're forcing us to basically use that standard, right? So I don't mean forcing the bad way. I mean, let's put it this way, before a C2F or other services like that, I mean, we would literally have to go to every carrier and say, okay, here's our on-net building list, here's the services we offer there and give it to them in their specific way that they want to ingest that data, here's the pricing, here's the term info and blah, blah, blah. And now, we at least have that ability to go to one source and say, hey, we want to be able to say, here's our building list, here's our offerings and so on and know that in fact, the fiber is being exposed to multiple carriers. So on the actual buying process, buying and selling process, that's kind of by de facto great standard. And then similarly with, once we start turning into orders and the fact that Robert and John are talking together and having their systems talk as well, but when we get to orders now, again, using a Newstar is that ASR Clearinghouse, essentially is that creating that de facto standard to allow. What does ASR stand for? Access service request. So as we request a service from another carrier, it goes in a very standardized format. So we get orders flowing to us from those carriers and vice versa. How do you think the role of edge data centers is gonna change this whole conversation? Not that anyone knows exactly what it is. I mean, I've heard of everything from a giant shipping container that gets moved around to like a little thing that sits up on a pole or in a factory like how, how do you see the way people are characterizing these impacting the way people provision roll out and communicate about services today? And how might that need to change to really support the mass rollout of edge data centers and 5G and whatnot? You know, I think that's something that in Volta we're looking at that whole ecosystem. And I think each industry that's trying to identify the edge market or the edge data center usage is a little bit different, right? So you take automated vehicles, they have a different use case than like factory automation. And each one of them, I mean, I look at it like this is it's all about data and getting the data to the right place and back to the system or the user that needs to utilize it, right? So if you take a look at smart cities and the deployment of pens and, you know, 5G integration I think there's a tremendous amount of data that's gonna be received and it has to go somewhere. And something has to make decisions based on data and first of it has to parse it out to say what's important to the decisions that have to be made and then get it to the right location. So as you think about it, it's really a distribution of a lot of the compute out to where the data is coming in that can be parsed through and made use of. So as you think about that from a network connectivity and you go from an end to end solution it's everywhere, you know, from 5G to, you know the cellular bandwidth, whether it's fiber, you know connecting to those cellular towers and then how does it get back to some of the very large, you know, hyperscalers that are gonna retain and do a lot of AI or how do you get it back into automated vehicles or back into the manufacturing components that are making on the fly adjustments. I mean, if you think about it it's all over the board, right? And each industry is gonna figure out how to commoditize that if you will or utilize it and they're each gonna need it but there's no doubt that the bandwidth that's transferring that information around is gonna have to be fast. It's gonna have to be reliable because you can't stop manufacturing because you have an outage, right? I mean, you have to keep that manufacturing up all the time and some of that data that's going back and forth is gonna be life health, you know, type of data, life safety, I should say where it has to get to the end user or the system that's making those choices. So I think the speed, the bandwidth as well as the reliability all come into play. Thanks. Georgia, you know, I'll add in just to real quick. I mean, you know, I think, as you mentioned this is kind of early stages for edge data centers and you know, it's kind of people are kind of figuring out how to what applications require it and so on and we'll take advantage of that and Ken talked about some of the requirements. One of the things that we're seeing is that certainly the wireless carriers as they're now starting to deploy centralized radio access nodes. I mean, this has become a real tangible driver that says, hey, you know, because of latency needs as I try to centralize the intelligence that's otherwise sitting at a tower and I wanna centralize, say 10 or so towers of processing power into one location. That can only be 10 kilometers and maybe a little bit more away from those towers and I need an edge data center whether they say it as that as such. So give me fiber connectivity and can I put on my centralized, you know processing power in that? Now that's, you know, one key application that's tangible real that I think will help drive edge data centers but there are many more that Ken talked about too that can start taking advantage of those areas that are now a little closer to in this case wireless inscribers closer to the actual end users and the consumers of the data and so obviously lower latency. So I think that'll open up the floodgates for a whole bunch of applications that can now start using these locations. Just as I do apologize for jumping in here George the conversation I feel like we could go all afternoon. Unfortunately, we are essentially out of time. So with that, I'm going to get things wrapped up a little bit here. George, again, thank you so much for being with us today and panelists, thank you very much. And to our viewers, thank you very much for being here as well. Those first 100 registrants we hope you enjoyed your lunch. Make sure to visit us at jsa.net to register for more upcoming JSA virtual roundtables including our next one, which takes place November 18th where some industry leaders will talk about positioning our industry for the next days of digital transformation something that we're all talking about right now. And so that is a wrap. So look out for the playback for today's roundtable coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcast on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify and more maybe even in the metaverse, right? We didn't get to talk about the metaverse today but I think we'd all love to talk about that again at a future roundtable. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, happy networking and we will see you soon. Thanks everyone for being here today, we appreciate it. Thanks guys.