 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott, CEO and founder of JSA and coming to you live from virtual Metro Connect 2021. Joining me today is Mark Murphy, CEO of Greenlight Networks. Mark, welcome to JSA TV. Jamie, thank you for inviting me to come up. We're honored and many of our viewers probably already know, but for those who might not, can you tell us a little bit about Greenlight Networks? Sure, happy to. Greenlight Networks was founded about 10 years ago. We are a pure play fiber to the home provider serving western New York, specifically the greater Rochester area and very soon the city of Buffalo as well. And we are an internet only service provider and we've got the fastest internet service for residential customers in New York state. And what drove you to launch Greenlight back in 2011? Admittedly, some of it was survival. I had worked for what are now a number of our competitors at Time Warner and Frontier and our family really wanted to stay in the Rochester area and raise our family there and at the same time, Google had been launching their fiber internet service in Kansas City. And, you know, similar to Kansas City, Rochester was a smaller market that didn't have a whole lot of competition or a lot of choices for broadband. Verizon hadn't launched its file service in the area and so an opportunity presented itself to get started in an MDU community in the Rochester area and took the leap and 10 years later it seemed to work out pretty well for us. Yeah, for you and for Rochester. As a matter of fact, Rochester business journal article just came out and stated that Greenlight offers the fastest internet service in the state at a price at as much as 33% less than some other providers, which is awesome. And on top of that Greenlight has an impressive customer satisfaction rating of more than 70% almost unheard of really in our industry. How are you able to achieve this? Rochester is actually a great market for telecommunications talent. And over the years we've been fortunate to bring some of the best of that to our company to help us continue to grow. So from companies like Time Warner Cable, like Windstream, like Frontier that all have significant presence there, we've been able to grab what I think are the best of the best of those employees to really lead those areas to help differentiate, provide a very differentiated service, a better experience than what others may be providing because it is fiber to the home. The economics of being able to give our customers a whole lot of bandwidth are easier for us to do. And our customer are I should say our employees are just very, very proud to be able to wear their Greenlight logos when they go around town. And and all people want to ask them is when when they're going to get service in their neighborhood. People power really makes all the difference. Also, you guys just announced the deployment of high speed fiber internet in Buffalo, New York, and we've read about some other expansion plans. Can you give us a little bit insider info there? So, yes, we do plan on having our first customer up in Buffalo in the second quarter of this year, which we're really excited about. It'll be our first batch of customers in the city of Buffalo. And our team's been working on that for quite a while now, obviously, working through the pandemic and the circumstances around that made some of that a little more challenging and caused a little bit of a delay, but we got ourselves back on track. And and so that deployment is on track for the second quarter of this year. And then right now we're in about 13 municipalities in the greater Rochester area and continue to to expand and grow there with great guns. And you know, recently, we had a big announcement that our Wi Fi service was coming available in the in the in the airport in Rochester, which we think is the fastest in the in the US, if not in the world. I'll tell you, you've got expansion, growth, people power. And we should note, too, that you're quite a leader in our industry. You've been for more than 25 years holding leadership positions at places like you've mentioned frontier, Time War and Cable, XO, communications, many more. What do you see as the biggest trends that you've witnessed over the past 25 years? Certainly over the last three to five years, there's been a whole lot more attention given to the fiber of the home space. Certainly here at Metro Connect now are the virtual presentations this week. And I've been fortunate to attend this conference for several years now. There's never been this much attention on the fiber of the home space. I think the pandemic and everyone certainly having to do everything from home now, working, learning and being entertained has put the spotlight on the need for broadband, the need for high quality broadband. And I think with that to the digital divide is also an issue that everybody is trying to solve and trying to find effective ways to solve. So I would say those two trends, the need for speed at the home and finding ways to do that in as equitable a way as possible. For sure, lessons of 2020 and we're seeing green light on the battlefield, they are really pushing forward and closing that digital divide, especially in your region. So thank you for that. Where can our viewers go to learn more? Our website is greenlightnetworks.com and we're at Greenlight Fiber on Twitter and Greenlight Networks on Facebook. Thank you so much, Mark, for your time and your insight. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the special Virtual Metro Connect 2021 edition. Happy networking.