 The Newsroom for Tech and Telecom Professionals. I'm Dean Perine and welcome to JSATV. With us today we have Mr. Michael Four. Michael is the Vice President of Market and Member Services for NGN. Michael's here to talk to us a little bit about the latest and greatest at NGN, but more importantly he's here to talk to us a little bit about rural broadband development and more importantly what NGN is doing in that space. So Michael, welcome to JSATV. Thank you, Dean. We appreciate it. Outstanding. Outstanding. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started. Why don't you tell our viewers first and foremost a little bit about NGN. What do you do? NGN is a wholesale service provider. We bring the internet out of Atlanta into rural parts of Georgia where we connect with service providers who deliver service to the rural Georgians and the rural businesses out in the area that we serve. Very good. So I know a little bit about you, specifically how the company was formed. So NGN was formed by leveraging the infrastructure and resources of two electric membership cooperatives or EMCs. Can you tell our viewers a little bit or explain how the Habersham EMC and the Blue Ridge EMC were involved in the initial development and launch of NGN? Sure, Dean. As I mentioned, our goal is to bring the internet from the municipality to from Atlanta out to the rural areas. So what we have is we have two EMCs who had some dark fiber and were interested. They had heard their communities and they were interested in serving their communities with broadband. But we worked together to bring them stability into those networks and deliver internet from Atlanta. What they had was they had engineering capabilities. They had trucks. They had dark fiber. They had just a tremendous amount of resources that are useful when you're trying to bring broadband to rural areas. So we coupled those resources that they had with our ability to light a network and manage a network and provide knock support. And through that, you know, in their support, we were able to launch a successful launch of NGN. So let's talk about EMCs a little bit. So I know that you guys have been heavily involved in the EMCs and developed a model of working with the electric co-ops, et cetera, to make sure that you are serving those rural areas there in Georgia. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the highlights of working with the EMC and what you have all been able to accomplish? You know, if you've never been part of an EMC culture, it's just an amazing culture to be part of. The co-op family is a very tight family, and they really care about the rural communities that they serve. The model that we built is for munis and co-ops, really, because both, I think, have that focus of serving their communities. And so you'll have an electric co-op or you'll have a municipality and they have some dark fiber or maybe they're implementing smart grid into their networks to future-proof those networks and to make either the electric delivery or the water delivery more responsive and to be able to put measurements in place. So what we can do is we can connect to those networks so that they're not just islands all over the place. We'll connect those networks, we'll bring the internet, we'll light those networks, we'll manage those networks and use that excess capacity then to bring fiber to the premise, whether it's a small business, a hospital, a home, and we'll deliver gigabit services to each one of those facilities over those, just using the excess capacity that they have on their networks. Very interesting. So you mentioned electricity and we're talking about utilities here a bit too. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you think the role of the utility should be in making sure that those underserved areas are getting broadband? Yeah, I think it can be significant. As we watch the chatter around really the national and state level, here in Georgia there's been a lot of chatter this year about how are we going to serve rural Georgians but you hear it all across the nation really and just again the understanding that the electric co-ops and rural utilities have on the needs of their community and the concentration that they have on delivering services to the communities that they serve, they're vested in those communities, they care about those communities, it's not about a stockholder, it's about the people, those people are their stockholders, they're the ones who invest in that company. So I think that the role of the rural utilities is significant in the future and I think their commitment to seeing it done is significant in the future. Yeah, you know a theme that is coming out during this conversation today is community and it does sound like it is a dedication or a commitment to that community but it's really driving a lot of this. So why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the transformation that you have seen in these rural communities and how it's changing the lives of Georgians? You know Dean when you go again back to the start we were started by communities and the transformation we're seeing in the communities we serve is it's amazing because I think the best way to understand the transformation is to talk to the ones who can't get it. When you talk to the ones who don't get the service then you really understand how valuable the service is to the ones who do get the service and their voice is getting louder in the regions that we can't quite get to yet because they understand hey someone that lives close to me has a gigabit fiber to their home but I'm still struggling with this. My kids are struggling to do their school, my small business as it's struggling I want to work from home so you know sometimes looking at the ones who we haven't quite been able to get yet are the best way to tell the impacts to those we have been able to get. We've got some rural facilities that we've been able to keep here in rural Georgia. We've got wineries who have fiber to the premise. We have granaries that were built in the 1800s that have fiber to the premise and they sell internet they sell their stone ground meal over the internet stores that were built in the 1800s that have fiber to them. So it's amazing to see rural America get that kind of an opportunity and what I really hope to see is that opportunity go into the children because we still have a lot of kids at home who can't get connectivity at home to do their studying. We've got one local university who is reaching out into the rural schools and delivering classes to those rural schools who couldn't get it before and and just two-way interaction with the schools and with the children and so we're starting to see it in education. We've got to get to those kids at home yet. We're seeing it impact the businesses. We're still working on some telehealth solutions. So there's a lot going on and considering we're really only you know about four or five years into having this fiber network available. Yeah that is that is fascinating. The work that you guys are doing over there has implications beyond beyond what you might typically associate with with a telecommunications provider. So Michael thank you very much for joining us today. Very insightful. We appreciate it. We'd love to have you back and thank you viewers for watching JSATV. We'll see you soon.