 Welcome to the unlicensed podcast. I am Kayla. We've got tosses here as always. Hey, what's up? And this week, very exciting. We have not one, not two, but three guests this week. It is crazy. Oh, so we're joined this week with Jimmy Schaeffler from the Carmel Group, Mike Windy from WISPA, and a return guest, very special badge of honor, I suppose, Matt Larson from Vistabing. So appreciate you guys taking all this time. Right before we get into it, just tosses give the good people out there. They're called to action. Absolutely. Don't forget to like, listen, or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube, or anywhere you download your audio podcast like Apple, Google, or Spotify. All right, guys. So like I said, this is kind of a special episode. We're trying something new here with a multi-guess type of setup. So really what we're doing here is right before WISPA America, we thought we would get together and talk with these guys about a project that they're working on. Carmel Group and WISPA, Matt of course is working together with this project to talk about what they call the headwinds project. So really without me running my mouth too much, let's just kind of hop into it. I guess, Jimmy, if you'd like to go ahead and sort of introduce the concept of what we're working with, what we're doing, then we'll kind of hop around and go from there and just kind of an open, organic kind of conversation. Thanks, Caleb. So the Carmel Group was approached within the last 10 years for a couple of reports and that led recently in the fourth quarter of last year to talk about 10 case studies that we would do of seven WISPA operators and three WISPA vendors. And the idea or the why of that was basically because the US broadband industry is at a critical point and the study addresses the nation's broadband industry's policy concerns as best seen through the lens of its main stakeholders. What this accomplishes is we're trying to get to the truth of these various policy concerns. We're trying to get some education out there. And of course part of that is an understanding, a deeper understanding of all these things. The participants are basically four parties. One is WISPA, two is the eight or seven case study operators. Another one is the three study vendors. And the last is the Carmel Group. The timing is that we wish to get this out before WISPA America, which again, a plug for WISPA is really important annual get-togethers, which I fully support is WISPA America and that starts March 4th in Oklahoma City. And so in other words, this will be unveiled by that time and we will also be doing a session on that on March 6th, Wednesday at eight in the morning. As to a special note here, and this is completely unsolicited by our sponsor of this telecast, but I did wanna make clear that RF Elements has offered to do the graphics for this without charge and we are extremely grateful for that. I think it's another indication of what I've seen over the last 10 years and again, completely unsolicited in that is Tassos and his team stepping up to support the industry. What are the key issues? Well, the importance of funding I think is critically important and I hope Matt can talk to that and I know Mike can talk to that quite a bit. And we cover some other issues, for example, competition, labor, construction, taxation, buy America, build America, state matters, spectrum, pricing, labeling, environmental and serving the impoverished issues. And with that, I will turn it back over to either Caleb or Tassos or maybe Mike has a comment or two. Yeah, let me jump in. I mean, we're facing a lot of change here and in the industry technologically through policy, through the economy, our services now, especially since the pandemic have never been more needed. We're seeing tremendous growth, but there is a tremendous reliance of the government who ensure that telecommunications and broadband communications can be used by all Americans. And so we've seen a flood of money to close the gap. Several millions of Americans still do not have broadband, adequate broadband. And so we're going through the beginning stage of about $42 billion of this money. Getting the street and helping reach about 7 million locations that didn't have broadband before. But this has caused a lot of turmoil. We're in a pivot technologically on top of it and our companies are there serving that last mile but faced with these challenges. We're looking to get, it's a culture of opportunity that we're trying to promote here and Bede in particular, the NTIA's programs, which is sort of the basis of this paper, this study, is a massive program that is going to cause a shift in our industry. Not necessarily a bad shift, but we're hoping to help the NTIA in the States invite our companies in, create a process that allows our companies to serve that last mile and not be overbuilt. And so Jimmy's paper and Matt as one of the human faces of the Bede experiment and this massive deployment experiment by the policymakers, this is what that paper is about. Showing the challenges and then the opportunities and how people are meeting that new landscape that we're seeing. Matt's a perfect example of that, being agile and doing everything it takes to reach that customer. Okay, very good. So, from an operator's perspective, going to Wisp America, kind of reviewing what this is, they have busy schedules, right? And we know that it's a crazy time. So they're like, huh, this report seems kind of interesting, not real sure what it is, oh, it's Wispa talking. Definitely a lot of Wispa conversations going on. So I guess Mike, you know, just kind of a quick sort of bullet point summary. As an operator, what would I expect to learn or take from this information session that you guys are talking about doing at the show? Yeah, so I mean, we're showing how people see Bede, how people are reacting to Bede and the deployment dollars that are coming down for the government. They're tactics of seeing the opportunity and using that to grow. And that's what these panels and this story is about this paper that Jimmy put together. And again, what we're using stories like Matt, Elizabeth Bowles, others that are showing the financial, where to get the financial wherewithal, how to minimize some of the burdens in process, how to deal with the fiber priority that is in Bede. And we're seeing that through more and more policy too. Technologically, what it costs to build these things. A person that comes to our panel at Wisp America will see others who are similarly situated and go, look, I think I can do this too. And that's kind of what I hope we get out of this. We want our members to participate. We want them to believe they can participate and then actually do so. It'll be on the state level, but these are Matt and others are the human face of that success story, of seeing the challenge and seeing the opportunity and taking it. Okay, very cool. Kay, let me add this real quick from an article I just wrote for a publication called Wisp Magazine. As a whole, these 10 headwinds case studies have revealed a unified team for 2024. Revision of the national telecommunications and information agencies May 2022 broadband equity access and deployment before Bede program notice of funding opportunity to include broadband service delivered entirely using unlicensed spectrum in its definition of quote unquote, reliable broadband service. And let me just repeat those last few words. To include broadband service delivered entirely using unlicensed spectrum in its definition of reliable broadband service. That's the point of the paper. Yeah, and I think that's a very important part. I've been very vocal about it and I know a lot of Wisp's have really put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into their networks, but I always talk about COVID, right? And there was that point where the industry, our industry really stepped up and put all their hard earned dollars out to build these networks, to get internet to the underserved. And it was all done with unlicensed. And like I said, if anything proves, if anything's gonna prove that unlicense is reliable, I think a case study white paper really needs to be done on the industry as well on how that was achieved. Not only without government funding, but also with, again, unlicensed and it was really small Wisp's, for the most part, really picking it up and doing their part. I mean, they're the true patriots of this industry. And small Wisp taking the risk. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, unlicensed needs to be a big part of this and a story needs to be told about this. Very interesting. So I guess, Matt, as they've said, you're the human face of this project, I suppose. So very handsome face that is, of course. This is a topic, you've spoken that length about in the past for sure. You've spoken about it on our podcast. So I guess from your perspective, as the message has changed, like there's so much has changed over the last year, year and a half or since we talked to you last, but from your perspective, where have you seen the challenges evolve? Where have you seen sort of the responses evolve from the operator space, from the education, the local government space, and something you're very passionate about and so on. So where do you see these changes in the near distant term, but also where do you think it's going in the future term? Well, I'm not quite as excited about Bede, I think as a lot of people are. I think it's important not just to kind of figure out where the money's gonna go to help resolve the problems, but also how to keep money from going to the parties that are not gonna solve the problems. And that's what we've run into in most of these bigger government subsidy projects so far is we've seen lots and lots of money poured into companies that haven't really delivered on what they were supposed to. I give you an example, we were looking at, so Nebraska has its own universal service fund, like a little tiny version of the national one. And we did some research into it and found that $750 million has come out of the state USF fund since I think 2004. And with that kind of money, you would think that there would be fiber almost everywhere in Nebraska. And there's lots of opportunities for companies like mine to go out and be successful because that money didn't go towards that. And the problem I see is Bede is kind of more of the same, especially with the way it's currently set up, the requirements for the letter of credit, which has been relieved somewhat, but that's still a fairly big concern for smaller operators. But the combination of the requirement for the letter of credit, the preference towards fiber and then the preference force towards the use of licensed spectrum wireless is that pretty much says big player all over it. Amen. Now, there are a few wisps out there that have scaled to the size where they have access to a lot of funding, go out and do that. And that's great. But I think for the majority of the wireless ISP operators out there, it's kind of unobtainium to get there. So I think it's important to both, try and figure out how to open it up so we can participate in the areas where we can make the most difference. David Zumwalt referred to wisps as like the first responders of the digital divide, the guys that rush in to put the fire out. And then, you know, but it's almost like there's the expectation where the guys are gonna put the fire out and then somebody else is gonna come in and rebuild the actual infrastructure, which I think is kind of BS, because companies like mine, I've been in business for 20 years and at a certain point, I thought I'll probably run it for five years and then sell out. And then things just kept getting better and better. And, you know, I feel like I've kind of got the point where I figured out what I'm doing. If I've lasted 20 years, probably nobody's gonna kill me. So I'm not the only one. There's a lot of operators out there and one of the things that really favor wisps, unlicensed spectrum has a low hurdle to get into. So you don't have that blockage where like the fixed wireless guys are the only ones have access to licensed spectrum for the most part. I'm talking about, you know, like license by rule and that sort of thing. We obviously have some new options that are available to us now that we can do a lot with, but their wisps are kind of like a regulatory bypass. So we've started building fiber and we have quite a bit of fiber out there, but it has, it's so different. You know, you're talking about long ROI's, you're talking about having to commit a lot of cash to go out and do that. You're talking about a long time to deploy. You know, we can put advanced wireless up, they'll serve 500 meg, you know, it takes us about three to four days to put that up on a tower. For us to build, we built a small town and it took us about almost a year from start to finish. When we actually got into the construction, it took about four or five months. If you're talking about rural areas, that just stretches out on and on and on and on. So I think the biggest difference is, you know, fixed wireless using unlicensed spectrum can bypass all these hurdles to go out and act quickly and get people's service. And that's what I think is really important to consider when we're looking at trying to resolve these digital divide issues. Let's put out the fire and then also have it set up so that those of us that went out and put out the fire could be part of the process for, you know, building that infrastructure. And I know that's the target I'm trying to get to is to be at the point where, you know, we can continue to build on this customer base that we built over the last 20 years and go out and continue to succeed and prosper in our area. 100%. I mean, I think we're all right there with you and the majority of operators are definitely in agreement, you know? And it brings up a point which I don't think really gets covered that much, but is definitely a potential future issue is sort of the sustainability of a lot of these news sort of upstart, you know, fiber-based companies and stuff, you know, built when you're spending OPM and you're, you know, really getting out there shuffling and trying to get stuff done in a hurry. There's a lot of slapdash construction, mismanagement, so on and so forth. You know, I think this has been covered a bit, but then you're going to be standing up these companies that, you know, these are all very sort of short vision viewpoint kind of perspectives, right? That's not outfits that are like, we're going to be here for the next 20 some odd years. I don't know, what are your thoughts on the turnover and the sustainability of these news sort of upstarts and then what happens when they put all these millions into the ground and then two to three years from now, you know, it's all gone, everyone's left town, the carnies are gone and now these people are effectively left unserved again. And that smells like opportunity to me. And I know I've done my share of, we've done acquisitions of lots of small providers. So we have a little bit of experience kind of doing rehab work. So somebody goes in and builds fiber and they can't figure out how to cash flow it. I'll be happy to figure out how to make that work at, you know, 10 or 15 cents on the dollar for what it costs to build. And if somebody thinks I'm crazy, that's how Zeo got into this business. Zeo went around, they were in existence, but the first round of stimulus projects, there were a lot of fibers that went out and fiber networks were constructed. Didn't work out and Zeo came in and picked them up for pennies. Equivalently speaking, we have places where we're on, in Colorado is a network called EagleNet that was federally subsidized and construction started and stalled out about a third of the way through. They just built the easy parts, they didn't build the hard parts and Zeo came in and bought it for a fraction of what was spent on the construction. So I think there's gonna be lots of examples of that. You know, and it's gonna be a shame that so much government money, you know, taxpayer money is gonna be wasted on projects that aren't economically sustainable. So that's, I know the one thing we look at, any of the projects that we take on any of these programs, they have to make sense for us. Is there a certain things, some of these programs have a certain amount of hooks or requirements into them that just make them, it's like a poison pill. You don't wanna have it. One of the things I really value, you know, I have our core values is we adapt and change and that we value the ability to be nimble. You know, that's the thing that unlicensed fixed wireless really lets you do is you don't have to follow this path. If there's customers, if there's demand somewhere and you can figure out how to get there, you go and you get to customers. Whereas so much of this stuff is chasing policy goals or chasing something that a bunch of lobbyists basically put together and not the real problems of the customer. So I would much rather, you know, turn away from certain government programs no matter what the money is in order to keep that flexibility because if somebody does take it, they're setting themselves up for a lot of potential failure there. No, 100%. No, I just wanted to add there. I mean, part of the problem with BED and the NTIA and the whole progeny of these massive deployment programs is that they've made a process that is so airtight to prevent the BETOP failure that happened at the Obama era, 2009. Can you name one BETOP program? Can you name one success? And so they've overcompensated creating all these other hurdles, all these other policy sort of ancillary policy initiatives that's not really in the statutes themselves but have been imposed by the administrators to ensure success. But just the framework itself is going to guarantee that people are going to not be covered, especially the prioritization of fiber. It doesn't have to be. That's not in the initial guiding legislation. It's something that was imposed in BED by NTIA. Fiber is a great thing. Matt uses it more and more of our members use it. It's part of the toolbox, but that wasn't part of the law. It was tech neutrality. But the NTIA and it's, I guess, surged to be perfect and to hermetically seal itself from failure has created the very instances that they will fail unless they allow the states the flexibility to choose what's right for the job on licensed wireless, any types of wireless. Some states have even tried to ban all wireless. So, you know, this is a problem. I call it an unforced error, something that we didn't have to have. And now in the search for perfection, they're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Ultimately, these programs are designed to do one thing, to get people online, be unserved. It's not about future proof. It's not about subsidizing any certain technology. Those, you know, technology neutrality has served us well for 75 years. So, why stop now? The program is, again, a lot of these are these unforced errors that for Matt, it might prove some opportunity in others when these programs go by the wayside, but when you're talking about the very beginning, there's this fiber in the ground that all of a sudden the corny goes and, you know, who's there to pick it up? Who's there to serve? No, those are all great points and I think it really points to the poison pill or the golden handcuffs or whatever you want to refer to it as. And we've seen them in so many other projects as well, right? I mean, how many art off, you know, calf projects are still sort of hung up because of honors requirements and everything else. So, you know, in the space out there, there's what's fair, what should happen and really what is, right? So, if you decide that you're gonna play in the space, you must be known that you're potentially losing a lot of your flexibility. If you choose not to, you have to know that there will be other players in this space and you have to think about, you know, what are your strategies, backup plans and stuff like that? I think, as Matt said, there's gonna be a lot of failures. There's gonna be a lot of opportunities. Now, what those opportunities look like, are they good, bad, sketchy? I mean, who really knows, right? And like, you think about the deployment timelines, we're talking years and years, right? Five years ago, this wasn't a thing. Four years ago, almost to the day, we're like, hey man, somebody's got a snowfall, everything's cool. And then six months later, the world isn't. So, you know, it's kind of hard when you're dealing with this much government help on these sort of long-term timelines when traditionally this space says to be really flexible. So, it'll be interesting. I think really keeping your eyes open for opportunities, I think is gonna be super important to stay relative in this space and compete and survive. Caleb, just one more point, building on what Mike said, we as a society, we as a people, our history does not support the idea of monopolies. And essentially what the current program favors is so much fiber and so little of the other competitors. And what we're finding here through this report is that the best combination is a more open marketplace, where not just fiber, but fixed wireless and even other forms of delivery are open to the marketplace to see which one ends up standing the best and which one ends up serving a particular audience in a particular situation. Because fiber will not serve everyone and it will not serve as many people as they want it to serve well. Sure, I mean, we're all of the same mindset here. And I think any rational sane person would listen to these points and come to the same conclusion, right? Maybe I don't know who would be best to answer this, but so why is it so difficult to get this point across to those decision makers if it seems so like duh to us that the hybrid approach, unlicensed, clearly has worked in the past and is stable. All these points, why is it so difficult to get these people to understand that and change things? So I think part of that, you have to go back and look at the money and where that is. So there's something I like to call the vortex. And there's this vortex of, there's like politicians and consultants and vendors and they just kind of go around in a circle sucking money out of different things. So one of a couple of the things that I brought up, the three things I brought up, the letter of credit, license spectrum and fiber. And it all has to do with money. Letter of credit is basically to block out small operators from causing disruption. And it's also a joint giveaway to the financial institutions because if you look at the cost of maintaining a letter of credit, they're basically getting 10% of your project for doing that. So you take 10% right off the top there as the handout to the big banks or to the financial industry to help make this happen. So license spectrum is very dependent on exclusivity. And the amount of exclusivity of that spectrum is the value is inversely proportional. So the more exclusive spectrum is, the more valuable it is. So you have to have that exclusivity and be able to do something of higher use that's gonna generate more revenue for that spectrum to maintain its value. Unlicensed is kind of like throwing a grenade in the middle of that because we now have unlicensed platforms that will outperform licensed spectrum platforms on the fixed wireless side. So that's a scary proposition but it's also an important weapon that we have as unlicensed operators. And the third thing is fiber. So this is something really interesting because we're right in the middle of kind of laying out our plans for the year. And we're gonna be spending some money building fiber but we're gonna spend almost the equivalent amount on upgrading a lot of our facilities to advanced wireless. It's gonna be capable of 500 meg or gigabit speeds to end users. And we're gonna spend about the same amount of money on both. But the fiber projects are probably gonna be able to hit a maximum of, I don't know, probably 1200 customers. And the same amount of money spent upgrading our fixed wireless infrastructure is gonna be able to hit 12,000 potential customers. So there's a fairly big difference there in the amount of coverage that we can build and the amount of area we can cover with that. So that's huge. And then the other side is fiber networks typically have this super high valuation. So, right now the valuation is like, if you're running, say unlicensed wireless network that can maybe hit 100 meg typically to customers, that's probably gonna be five to seven times EBITDA is the valuation. If you're talking about a fiber network, that's somewhere between 20 and 30 times EBITDA, just because it's fiber. So that's why the big push for fiber because if you can get paid to put in, put the stuff in the ground, then when you go to sell it, you have a much higher valuation. And right now there is this flood of private equity is trying to go out and buy broadband providers. And the goal of private equity, I heard this at a conference a couple of weeks ago is they want to triple their money within five years. That involves building a bunch of fiber and putting a bunch of people on it, and hopefully building the fiber with government subsidy and then flipping it to make the money on it. In doing so, a lot of times creating a monopolistic environment, but the thing is great is fixed wireless breaks that monopolistic environment. And the part that I'm really encouraged by is the fact that if you go back and look over the last two years, fixed wireless is the dominant new growth in broadband. Go back and look at Comcast and Charters numbers for the fourth quarter. They're losing broadband subs. And the fiber guys can claim, oh, they're getting overbuilt by fiber. No, the majority of the customer loss they're having is going to the fixed wireless guys, even though a lot of that is Verizon and T-Mobile. That shows that customers don't care where it comes from. And here's the other thing we found out that I thought was kind of interesting. We basically unified our pricing. So we have the same prices. We've got three residential prices for our end users and they don't change. The speeds change if they're on basic, up to 100 meg unlicensed. If we have our advanced stuff, it's up to 500. If they're on fiber, then it's up to gig, but it's all the same pricing. So what's interesting about that is basically now the customer's cash flow the same, whether it's fiber or wireless. There's basically no difference in the cash flow side. So actually running the business, doesn't matter whether you got fiber or fixed wireless, they all operate the same. It's all about valuation. So that was a very long way to getting back to money is what's behind it. And it's fiber having much more perceived value, but it turns out fixed wireless actually has much more operational value than monthly cash flow. So that's where that's I think part of the driving factor of why you keep seeing this push towards more fiber and even the use of licensed spectrum. I think also to jump on Mad here, I think it's an issue of control. And that control is built into the 1934 act. I mean, we have almost a hundred years of regulation. Matt talks about regulatory bypass and the success that wisps have had facing very little regulation until the past five or so years. Now companies are getting hooked on subsidies control. We see the open internet rules, the common carrier proposals that will probably go into effect at the end of this year, more control in common carrier regulation. There are 50 plus shouts. Companies shall do something directed by the government. And if you do not, you do not get the privilege of operating your territory. We see this with digital discrimination order, again, control the security stuff, CP and I issues that they're trying to impose and new obligations, the mapping costs. And I think this present administration and what we see regulatory among many states are sort of repealing or coming back on the six decades that deregulatory arc that created and allowed for the internet to explode. And I think companies like Matt and others, they see as either are you with us or are you again us? And if you're with us, then we need to control you. If you're again us, then we don't need you because you're important. And you can just put any kind of in parentheses what that importance is. I believe fundamentally it's an act of control is what we're seeing here with all this money coming through with all the new regulation. And I think that there is a belief that they've given up on the mindset of that deregulatory arc, the innate innovative spirit of companies like Matt and what's happening in San Jose and Silicon Valley here in America, which birthed the internet, that happened because of this. And now they're turning that back. They don't like a lot of players that they can't control. Caleb, one thing that this study has pointed out over and over again, and it gets to the core of who we are as a people and who we are as a country. We are a country of innovation. And innovation supports the idea of big picture, lots of players, lots of ideas in the mix. And long ago, the Carmel Group, as we began working with the WISPA industry, we focused in the beginning on wireless. But we realized early on, there was another phrase that was critically important that built in the real future of the industry and this idea of innovation. And that was the idea of hybrid fiber wireless. And the idea that you bring in more than just one technology and you invite a better long-term solution with a broader marketplace of ideas and technology and participants. And when you focus so much emphasis in money and legislation into just fiber, you take away that American ideal. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, in the end, it boils down to it. I mean, we're dealing with politicians. I mean, there's a lot of things that a motivated politician and most of us power money, so on and so forth. I mean, there's a lot of people, I mean, most of them are people, most of them, right? Some are monsters, but I personally believe there's an entire generation of young politicians that look at this whole digital divide, closure and so on and so forth as the main stepping stool to start building your long-term careers, right? Because infrastructure projects are sexy to pitch, but in the grand scheme of things, we fixed 18,000 miles a road. It's not a sexy pitch, right? It's not, you know, we fixed some bridges. We're like, well, yeah, you should fix the bridges. That's your jobs, idiots. So you end up in a situation where they're like, hey, if we can build this whole thing when we did this to help the people bridge the digital divide, blah, blah, blah, and got them on the internet, poverty, even rural areas, so on and so forth. Like that makes a really good pitch, right? So, all right, so how do I make this be successful? What's the current state of the art? You have a lot of big money legislators saying, hey, you have, you need a tool. This tool is fiber and it looks like this hammer and now you have one tool to fix everything. And they're like, cool, because I don't understand anything else because I'm just a politician trying to do my thing. And that's how you end up with a very sort of myopic view as to what fixes the future. I mean, it kind of boils down to the same like in the corporate world, you know, no one gets fired for using, you know, for buying Cisco, right? Because you're like, hey, even if the project's failed, you're like, well, I relied on the state of the art to get this done. This was not my fault as a politician. It was individual failure down. And that takes away the desire to try something wild and risky for a large bunch of worthy of them. So I think, you know, there's a lot of money and there's a lot of control, this, that, and the other. But it's also the human nature of someone that's like, hey, I need this to be successful because 10 years from now, I'm gonna run for Senate, the governor, president, whatever else, you know, and I'm gonna go with the one tool that I know of. So, you know, it's ignorance, whether it's willful or not could be debated, but I think it's just a big part of it. But they're gonna fail with this model. Who, I mean, a model that actually is doomed to one choice, one choice. When has that ever worked? So they can choose to not do that model. And I mean, the state's already saying, we don't have, it's just money. There's just not enough money to do what the NTIA and other of these programs want to do with the framework of choosing one technology to do it. And I mean, ultimately, we believe that states are gonna come to their senses. Many already are saying, you don't have enough money to do this. And that's not the goal. The goal is to get all online, not to impose a single technology. All two, I mean, whoever heard of saying that you're gonna get a better system by eliminating it to only one choice. We hope that policymakers will see that. They've already caused a distortion in the market. You can see people are holding back on purchases. AT&T the other day said, oh, well, you know, we're waiting for this beat money to come because, you know, we were gonna go in there organically anyway, that these are the markets we're gonna go to first. So they've already caused a year and a half of stall. And then we have five years of building with money that's finite, with a framework that limits to essentially one choice and then the exception for unlicense where there's extreme high cost threshold. It's not a system that can work. We believe ultimately most policymakers will come over and say, what's the right tool for the job? And, you know, use the Matt Larson model to grow. I work with, I've been a member of a group called Bytag. It's a broadband infrastructure technology advisory group. And that is a group that puts together white papers and guidance on complicated technical issues. And we just released a paper about broadband technologies a couple of weeks ago. It's available at the website is bytagbitag.org. And the conclusion right there is that right tool for the right job. It advocates a technology neutral. Now that is not a paper written by a fiber lobbyist or one of the big companies that is deploying fiber. That Bytag is put together of multiple industry members from all different sizes, all different types of companies. And I think the paper is a fantastic piece of work. It's a powerful weapon. Mike, you guys have a job to do. You need to put that paper in the hands of every staffer on the hill and make sure they have it and, you know, attach a candy bar or something to it to get the attention to get them to read it. Some skills. A whispin' bar, a whispin' bar. A lot of these politicians, they may not understand it but they've got staffers to do. And from the limited time I spent watching DC, we need to get them on board. So the best thing we could possibly do is put that paper out there and start to work on this. I think there is a non-zero chance that Bede completely falls apart if we end up with a Republican administration next year. As soon as the Democrats took over, Ardolf kind of became a giant mess and I could see the same thing happening with Bede which turns into chaos. And you know what the guy from Game of Thrones said about chaos? Chaos is a ladder to climb out and do things, especially if you're nimble and have the ability to work around some of the restrictions. But I think we really need to be pushing that paper, get it out there, make sure its staffers know that, you know, hey, like I said, the bits flow, whether they come in on fiber, whether they come in on wireless, they come into the house. I know personally, I moved into a new house and we had gig fiber here. And one day I put up one of our wireless radios, not even a new one, one of our old ones that only does up to 100 meg and flip the gateway to see if anybody noticed. Nobody knows the difference. Yeah, exactly. I'm talking to you on it right now. I say right before it probably drops out because somebody's hanging up. In it, in it, in it. Jinx, jinx. Yeah, really. But I mean, I've been using this, this is my fifth year living at this house with the same radio up here and I've been, everything works fine. You know, the bits flow fine from a business point of view, the same money flows through it. So why would we waste the money on this? I think it makes a lot more sense. We should have had an infrastructure bank set up. We should have had usable loan guarantee programs that North Dakota has had. North Dakota has a state infrastructure bank and telephone companies and broadband providers were able to borrow from the infrastructure bank, the state infrastructure bank. Consequently, North Dakota has the highest percentage of gig fiber. That's not because it's, it's because the investment facility was made available. I mean, I'm having a hell of a time trying to go out and borrow, you know, couple of million dollars to do fiber construction with local banks. Yep. And if there was a loan guarantee program that they knew that they would, they would not be completely out if I go under then I would have been doing this stuff 10 years ago. So that's, that's a, that's the sort of thing we should have. And it needs to be less complicated with fewer triggers on it and set up to deal with smaller amounts. Like if you go to use ReConnect or any of these RUS programs, if you aren't doing a $10 million project, you might as well not even bother because the paperwork burden's so heavy. And then when you get done, it puts so many restrictions on what you can do and how you can run your company. And if you look to sell or anything, you've got all those encumbrances. That's the poison pill in there. But we need something that, that, you know, promotes solutions that can be implemented in a shorter period of time and cover people and resolve the problem. You know, let's fix the people that are unserved first then work on the underserved people. And then at some point they're gonna change the standard that everybody's gonna be underserved again and then they're gonna have to throw more money at it. This deal about this being a generational thing needs to be future-proof. Oh, what BS. The only thing that's future-proof is that companies are gonna continue to ask the government for money. Yeah, that's future-proof. And the government loves spending it, so yeah. It'll be time to reshuffle the deck and reclassify what's the hottest new thing, right? And you know, that's the thing about doing infrastructure bank type stuff. Government can potentially make money on it. You put the money out there and even if you put it out of low interest rate, it goes to build infrastructure. And that's an idea that should go way beyond, that should go beyond just broadband. We've got all kinds of situations where we should be looking at that and we just are. So we need to get some more economists that actually understand, you know, the real world out there instead of, we've got, I'm gonna throw my bias out there. We've got too many Ivy League economists that have been studying this stuff at a policy level that have never run a damn business. And don't understand how this stuff works out in the real world, that we've got to figure out how to break that cycle there. I'm off the soapbox now. To my own, to my own support and representation. I am not an Ivy leaguer. I went to the University of California, Berkeley and proud of it. But one thing I wanted to make a point and a follow up on Matt's point, and that is future proof. We have found over and over again and it's not just the participants talking, it's the follow up study and the research. Fiber is not as it's presented right now by this administration, future proof. The closest thing to future proof is hybrid fiber wireless. But ideally it even goes beyond that. There are other technologies that will come into this mix and really make it future proof. So what I'm getting to future proof is innovation. It is not locking yourself into one square that says fiber and fiber only. Yeah, definitely. So I have a question for you, Matt. I mean, so we talked about or Mike mentioned kind of the stall that happened because people were thinking about going into areas, building it out. Then they said, well, the government might give me money for the same area. So let me not do it now and wait. And we hear this from a lot of operators out there and it's not just about the bead money but it's the technology that's changing. There's a lot of stall in the buildouts right now because technology is changing. They don't know what technology they're gonna use. And then on top of that, they're worried if they use, let's say a new technology that somehow not being protected, they're gonna get overbuilt, right? What is your kind of guidance and what would you tell, let's say, smaller or younger operators what to do if they're stuck in this? Well, I don't wanna build it because I'll get either overbuilt or technology might change tomorrow and I don't wanna take that risk right now or something like that. One of the things I think we get, if you're gonna go out and build your own broadband network, you're inherently a technologist at heart. What did you guys get into it for? You love the technology, right? Toss us Caleb? I know you guys. You guys are just like heaks at heart. So that's great. But I think it's also one of our detriment. Sometimes we get so focused on, oh, we wanna be the best, we wanna do this, we wanna do that. And I think there's some benefit to be said. There's some value in the idea of building something that's good enough. And taking some of that focus, fiber is like the geek dream. It's like, man, I got unlimited bandwidth. I can do anything I want here. But there's such a high cost to get there. And there are other ways to innovate. I think one of the big ones is, somebody that's out there in business right now is probably in business because there was a demand. I didn't go out, my initial plan when I started my business was not to go out and cover 50,000 square miles, parts of three states. It was, I wanna get some better internet service out to people out there. And there's a demand. And as we built out, we went to the places where there was demand. There's very few places that we ever went to where we didn't have pretty strong demand. And a lot of times it was, because of an acquisition or whatever, we picked up some customers and markets that maybe already had been overbuilt or whatever. But what makes the difference is respecting the customer. And that's something I think is really important because if you have a customer right now and you're taking care of that customer, for the most part, they're probably not gonna leave. And I'm looking at that right now. We have a half a percent churn rate. Industry average is like, I believe 1.5 to 2% a month worth of churn with the cable operators and DSL and even the cellular fixed wireless. They have high churn rates. And so if you can keep your churn rate low and take care of your customers, you can survive. And fixed wireless or hybrid fiber fixed wireless doesn't have the same kind of pressure to succeed financially as, if a company puts a few million dollars into a town to build that town, they're gonna wanna see 50, 60, 70, 80% of the market by overbuilding it with fiber. And fixed wireless guy can get by with one or 2% and still be wildly profitable because you don't have the carrying costs. You don't have the initial construction costs. So throw out an idea. There's a podcast, The Broadband Bunch. I think that's a fairly popular one in broadband circles. They recently had on a guy from England that was talking about how England now has full fiber to a high percentage of the houses or the households and their penetration rates are very low. And so if you watch the fiber industry guys, everybody's, they're trying to educate people. Oh, people need to know how good fiber is. People know all the wonderful things you can do. If you have gig fiber to your house, it just enables so many different things. And it's complete BS. All they're doing is trying to pump up the value of the perceived value of fiber. When it turns out fixed wireless, even delivering even with unlicensed spectrum can cover 95% of customers needs. Yep. And the advanced that can do up to 500 mega gigabit probably covers 99% of customers. So what are the fiber guys doing? They're trying to build a network for the 1%. Yep. I think we, this is, with we are like the people's network. We are building to the 99%. Yeah. Getting them what they need and not trying to tell the customer, oh, you need fiber because this and this and this. How well does it work for companies that tell a customer what they need? If you want to be successful, you need to listen to what the customer wants and give them the best possible service you can at a price that's fair for them and fair for you. And to do that, if you can do that, you will at least maintain a certain amount of success and survivability. No, very well said. And I think that's a viewpoint that a lot of operators already have or should have for sure. So guys, this has been a very fruitful and interesting conversation. I think we could all probably get up here in soapbox until we ran out of electrons to send back and forth. But I think this is a good opportunity to sort of tie things up here. So again, real quick, WISPA America, Oklahoma City, March 4th. If you don't know where that is, Mike, where can they find information about that? Cause I don't remember the website. Yeah. WISPAevents.org. And that gives you all the information, the agenda, the exhibitors, registration. So go on to that, WISPAevents.org. Thank you. I was just gonna say, let me just make a point too, that Mike did make. The whole website for WISPA has been redesigned. I haven't spent a lot of time on it, but what I've seen already really makes it a much more pleasant experience. So I want to pat Matt on the back, or pat Matt on the back, and especially, Pat Mike on the back for putting the effort into that, cause it really is a much easier read. Very cool, very cool. All right, well, like I said, we always say it before the shows, drink lots of water, wear comfortable shoes, get out and meet people, talk to other operators. I don't know, I feel like we've done this like 20 times for conversations. So I won't get to you in the details, but on that note, unless anyone has anything else to say, I think we'll wrap this up. We'll throw the email addresses for you guys up here, somewhere, I don't know. Our guys will take care of it, cause they know what they're doing and I don't. So on that note, I think we're going to call it. So until we talk to you guys next time, see you at Whisper America and we'll talk to you soon. Awesome, thanks everybody, big guys. Thanks again, thanks. Bet your star if Elements.