 And we are back and we are today. This is broadband day. Commissioner Tierney is with us and Clay Purvis. And commissioner, I've got you an update, broadband update and radio towers proposal. So I'm going to turn the floor over to you. And we've got you and Clay and the floor is yours. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. I'm pleased to say we're not going to kill your buzz. I think you heard a wonderful presentation a moment ago and I think we have more good news to share with you. I have to say the biggest challenge of the summer was putting together that team that the governor was responsible for. And I don't think you could have had more complimentary appointments on the board. So that was just from my point of view, a small miracle. And I'm so pleased because it's fun to watch that board in action, the degree of experience and competency. And to your point about the labor issues, I think that's really Christine's experience as a utility executive telling on her because our utilities have been dealing with the projected labor shortage for quite some time now. Succession has been a concern of ours in the regulatory space. And so the CEOs of our utilities have really had to try to wrap their arms around that. So that's only the tip of the iceberg of the synergies. I have to, well, I was very pleased with the outcome of the last session and all the good work that this committee did. And here's your proof of Ramat's ahead of the curve and we're doing well. What I'm going to do now. I'm going to interrupt for a minute. Before you tuned on, Christine Halkus couldn't say enough good about the interaction with the department and how well that has worked. So that was another thing we couldn't quite figure out how this was all going to mesh, but it sounds like it's meshing. So thank you and your people. Absolutely. I don't know where that lawyer ended up, but... Well, no, no, it's very, very interesting from my perspective because Christine and I worked together to hire that lawyer for the VCBB. I did put off hiring a little bit because I really wanted the VCBB to have a say in hiring its own lawyer. So it was a bit of a gamble, but it really paid off and stands just a magnificent addition. So I'm very pleased that we've been able to live up to the trust that you invested in the department and placing the board there. I remember at one point sort of saying to you, just give it to me and I'll deal with it. And we did. And it has really worked very nicely, but I have to say all credit goes to Christine and her board and that staff. And my staff could not have worked harder to make that a seamless transition. So this is Vermont at its best. And I think when I look, I follow the developments about connectivity in the nation on a daily basis. I receive two readouts every day from state newswire and another service. And when I look at what's going on in other states, Christine's correct. We are far ahead of the curve. And given the pressing need to be ahead, principally materials and the like, I think we can... It's not that we should pat ourselves on the back, but Vermont just can be very pleased our government's functioning this way. And so much of that is owing to your leadership. So with that, I'm here with Clay who's going to share with you an update on some of the other matters that emerged from CRS spending and the like over the course of the summer, wrapping up some of those programs. And also tell you a little bit about where we've shifted our focus with VCVB working on that last mile build out. It has really put the department in a position to look at the rest of the connectivity world and to say, okay, what else needs to be done that we can do? And that's where our self-service proposal comes from. So without further ado, I give you directed purpose. Thank you, June. Thank you, committee. And thank you, Madam Chair. Nice to be here again this year. As June alluded to me covering a couple of topics today. First and foremost, I'm excited to share with you our proposal for wireless service. Something we've been working hard on over this past summer and fall. Also talk a little bit about our broadband availability statistics show you kind of where we are, where we've come in the last two years and then follow up with some data on the CARES Act programs that you all funded in 2020. So with that, I will have the awkward moment of trying to share my screen. I feel like they've moved buttons around since the last time I was in Zoom. So if someone knows where I can go to share my screen, that would be, I would appreciate that. Bottom of your screen, Clay. Share screen, got it. Big green button. All right, thank you. All right, I'll start with the best stuff first. Talk a little bit about our wireless proposal. Say you all passed Act 71 and that's been moving along. They're taking on broadband and specifically wireline broadband in a big way at the Vermont Community Broadband Board. As you'll recall, we completed the 10-year telecom plan this past June and that certainly addresses other aspects of telecommunications in Vermont other than just wireline broadband. And the big one that we hear about from Vermonters all the time is cell service. Cell service is becoming more and more important and we hear about it from all corners of the state, including in some of our suburban and urban areas. So it's a problem that affects everyone. We also hear about it from tourists and most notably public safety. So this summer, once the telecom plan was done, we sat down and thought about what we could do to address cell service in the state. And I think we've come up with a good plan that will certainly be helped with the federal dollars that the state has received. This is not, in a lot of ways, it's not newer, innovative what we're trying to do. We've really tried to come up with a plan that fits neatly into the way the industry has already developed in the state and see if we can accelerate that development and put some towers in places where people really want them and need them and certainly in places where there are important public safety considerations. So we've called our plan the critical communications infrastructure program at a high level. What we wanna do is spend $50 million and deploy 100 cell towers, macro cell towers around the state. We wanna do cell service that helps people use the phone they already have in their pocket. And so for a lot of people that's Verizon, that's AT&T service. So national carrier input is a big component of this. So we know it kind of goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway. Mobile wireless service is critical for telehealth, public safety, education and the economy. Our focus here isn't broadband, so we're not looking at this from the perspective of someone needing broadband at home. This is really about the mobile features of mobile wireless, about voice calls and about mobile data. We know that 71% of calls to 911 originate from a mobile wireless phone. The vast majority of people who call 911 are doing so on their mobile phone. And that's probably regardless of whether they're at home or at out and about. We know that 67% of Vermont telephone numbers are currently registered to mobile handsets. So the vast majority of phone numbers in the state are mobile wireless and that's growing. And then we know about half of Vermont adults live in a wireless only household. I think the statistic that sticks out the most to me though, and these statistics come from the NIH, is that 12% of Vermonters live in a landline only household. That happens to be the highest in the nation. Every other state, the percentage of adults living in a landline only household is lower. So Vermont stands out in its high number of folks who have not adopted wireless in any way. As you recall, in 2018-19, we set about doing a drive test at the state of Vermont. This is the first time that anyone had actually done actual drive testing of wireless service in the state. And you remember the results of those about 70% of the road miles already have service from either Verizon or AT&T. 65% have service from both. So there's a lot of overlap. We know that 10% of the Vermont road lack any kind of coverage and 62% have poor coverage. So even if there is coverage, that's where you're experiencing dropped calls. You can't hear the person and these are the areas that we really wanna fix. I'll breeze through these, but here are the drive testing results. And you'll notice that the map has grown over time. We've worked with volunteers and other parties at the regional planning commissions and towns to do a lot of additional drive testing. So we've covered a lot of Lemoyle County, Central Vermont and some McAlladonia County as well. And we're very grateful for that work. But in Southern Vermont, as you can see, there's a lot of driving in Southern Vermont. And it's just really underscored that even when you get off state highways that the service is even worse. There are many more gaps once you get off the highway. And then here's Verizon coverage, not much better. We know today there are about 400 facilities. These are unique facilities that were broken down here. So when you think about 100 towers, the goal we're striving for, it's really not that much. I mean, that would end up being 20% of the total build investment in Vermont. So you know what kind of coverage we have today with 400 towers, so you can imagine what an additional 100 will do. So we know new towers can cost upwards of 500,000. And in this day and age when inflation is 7 or 8%, it's probably gonna be more than that. Towers are expensive facilities to deploy. Much of the development we've seen in the state, almost all of it has been private. So this would be the first significant public investment of coverage. And what we're seeing now, while there are new towers going up, they're not going up at the rate, Vermonters I think would appreciate. And as carriers move to 5G, there's gonna be a lot of upgrading of existing facilities. And so our worry is that places with no coverage today will not see that new coverage without some kind of support. So we've come up with a proposal, it's a five-step proposal. I've provided the committee with a longer white paper that outlines the proposal, but it starts with a drive test and we've actually begun the drive test. We have an RFP out right now to purchase software and hire consulting services to assist us with that drive test. This will be a little different than the last drive test we did, we won't have phones in a cardboard box. I think it's gonna be a little more sophisticated. And we'll have newer, better software that I think will take better tests and we'll be doing more testing. So we won't just do one pass. We'll do multiple passes of the same road. We're working with the VTrans to do that testing. So we'll have the help of VTrans employees who are already driving Vermont roads. And then we've also reached out to RPCs and we may have more help from them as well. So once we have the drive testing results, we'll identify target corridors. These are the areas where we wanna see service. We're gonna be working with towns, public safety is a big, important stakeholder in that discussion. RPCs and other interested parties to figure out where we should put these towers. We don't anticipate that a hundred towers will provide universal ubiquitous service across the entire state. So we wanna make sure we prioritize the areas that really do need service and start with those. So we'll undergo a kind of stakeholder engagement process to determine those areas. Once we have the target corridors identified, we'll be hiring a consulting firm to assist with search rings development, search ring development. These are areas where a tower could be placed to reach the target corridors. And then once we have that, we'll set up a process for bidding these search rings target corridors to the carriers. It begins with an RFP to determine, or a solicitation, I should say to national carriers and regional carriers to determine what rental amount they would pay in each search ring. So how much would you pay a month to be on a tower here? We expect that amount to be well below market for a lot of these areas and to make sure that we get interest in these areas, we provide a subsidy to the carriers to deploy their equipment on these towers. Once we have the rental income determined for all 100 search rings, and we have at least two carriers on each one, then we would put out to bid for construction of the towers in the search rings. These towers would be built and owned by a tower construction company. Generally, any cell towers owned by a company other than 18 team Verizon, they're owned by a separate entity that manages the physical infrastructure on which the solid equipment is attached. So we would then find a firm to build those facilities and operate them. As part of this process, we wanna make sure we open some space on towers to public safety entities for land mobile radio equipment. That's an important aspect of this. So what we've heard from public safety in the past that there's a hesitation to move to say FirstNet or other public safety broadband networks because of the coverage gaps and the uncertainty about the consistency of coverage. So to have LMR available and free rental on these towers would go a long way towards expanding radio service for public safety. Okay, my local public safety group is looking for $5 million for to just update their radio equipment for exactly that reason. They, there's just too many places where, you know, if you've got AT&T and only Verizon covers it or there's no coverage and they can't afford that in a time of crisis. So it'll be helpful to see how much of a debt we put in that. Yes, thank you. That's a good point. You know, we've heard the same and we're trying to respond to it. I think our plan here really gets to their, their kind of operating budget rather than their capital needs. Yeah. Updating the system is one thing, but this would provide the kind of the free rental space on the towers. So if they wanted to expand their network or upgrade or change their network, this would provide new and free opportunities to do that. But we've heard the same and not just the tower equipment is important to them, but the base stations and the actual radio handsets are another very expensive component to their network. Okay, someday we'll have to find out who to talk to about FirstNet in their progress. I'm going to ask because I'm sure our citizen advocate is watching this, when we build these towers, who sets the specifications that, you know, wind, you know, the ability to withstand wind, hurricane, ice, how are those specs set up? Yeah, that's a good question. There are engineering standards that the industry follows, set by an independent group that advises the industry. And we call the standard, the 2G standard, that sets these specifications. There's a heightened standard and that's certainly something we could consider. Other aspects of resiliency that maybe of interest are the power backup, you know, what kind of generators at the facility and certainly that's something that could be addressed through this process. Backhaul, whether there's redundancy in backhaul and certainly backhaul will be an issue, but I don't think a big issue for a lot of these facilities. So that's certainly something, you know, we take a look at, but that would be, I think, you know, best handled by the firm that's established to identify the search rings and kind of set up the RFP, the auction aspect of the process. Okay. May I ask your question, Madam Chair? Yes, Senator Brock. All right, I just wanted to perhaps understand better the bidding process and the carriers that would be on a particular tower. Would there be, in the bidding process, would there be one winner for an individual tower or could there be multiple people who would bid for their connectivity to be on that tower? That's a good question. Thank you for bringing that up because I think I glossed over that aspect. What we want to build here are multi-carrier towers. Ideally, towers that have at least three spaces for three different carriers, we want to get at least two carriers on each tower. So we would ask the tower construction company or require them to accept the two highest bids for space on that tower. The company paying the most, of course, we get the top spot and the company paying the second most, we get the secondary spot. But we want to see two carriers. I think there's some caveats to that, however. And then there's another challenge that I want to address in a minute. One caveat is that some areas we think are going to be either too expensive to deploy a facility using this method or there's not going to be enough interest in that facility is as you know, these facilities are developed to drive subscribership. They're building a tower to get new subscribers. That's how they generate their revenue. So in those cases, we may be looking at a neutral host model for some. That's not our principal strategy. It's not our exclusive strategy, but we want to make sure that we keep this process open to neutral host carriers, specifically for those areas that are going to be so remote that even with all the incentive in the world, AT&T and Verizon or another carrier sprint wouldn't be induced to deploy in those spaces. One challenge that we'll have to work through is cherry picking. If you have a hundred different spaces that the carriers would be encouraged to only go on the ones that make financial sense for them and avoid going on towers that are less lucrative or not lucrative at all. And we want to protect against that. So we're thinking of different ways of structuring it. One could be marrying the good sites with the poor sites. Winner takes all is one, but I think that's a high risk. But I think there are ways to overcome that challenge and we're certainly thinking about that. Well, I guess one of the questions that would come to mind immediately is for particular towers or group of towers, if you wound up with Joe's cell service and Harry's bargain cell service on the tower, the people who have AT&T and Verizon going from point A to point B would still probably not have any coverage unless there were, in effect, airline agreements. Is that a risk? We are going to avoid that risk by requiring that national carrier coverage be provided. So we're not interested in Joe's bargain cell service. This has to be Verizon and AT&T and we've spoken with all the national carriers and I believe all of the regional carriers about this proposal as well. So we've worked through those concerns, I believe, but we're not interested in developing a site with cell service that you don't buy and you've never heard of before. We want two out of the three carriers to be national carriers. Well, I remember the issue that we had with Coverage Co., for example, in that we had these cell service set up throughout a lot of rural Vermont, but one particular carrier in this case, AT&T, declined to participate in an interline in any type of interline capacity. And as a result, it limited the ability of the driver who we were concerned about for E911 connectivity to be able to use those towers. Is that going to be a problem here as well? Or otherwise, is there a way in which we could ensure as a minimum that E911 service is available from any carrier who uses one of these towers? No, that is certainly a concern that we've thought about and are trying to overcome. When dialing 911, even if you are a Verizon customer in many cases, in most cases, you should be able to reach 911 through an AT&T facility in vice versa. And that is certainly going to be an important aspect of this. This is primarily to ensure public safety along state highways. That's why we want to do this. We want to make sure that these calls can be made. Was it that problem though that you had with Coverage Co? Is that the AT&T customer or at least some set of customers couldn't get 911 with Coverage Co radios? I don't remember the specifics of why that was the case, but my understanding was that in a lot of instances they could, the Coverage Co radios were at the time that they were being deployed already antiquated technology and they ran over the top on DSL, which was problematic even if you were a Verizon customer. So I take your point. It's certainly something we want to avoid, but unlike Coverage Co, these are going to be real cell towers with national carriers on them. This is not going to be like the Coverage Co network in any way. Let me just ask one final question. Has there been contemplated any requirement on these towers that they'd be available, much like in a NUCRO host situation by whoever the winning bidder is, but to allow some control so that they can profit from adding additional service upon request? We haven't. Well, I think there's a couple of ways to answer that question. When I think of neutral hosts in the macro cell context, I really think of the pole being the neutral host. The tower construction company and owner is the neutral host and certainly they would be able to monetize the facility and add additional carriers as feasible. They can enlarge and expand at a later point. When it comes to requiring, say, AT&T and Verizon to open up their facilities, they certainly have roaming agreements with other carriers. For instance, VTEL will carry Sprint and AT&T service on their network. So those opportunities are there at the same time. We want to make sure that we get as wide participation, excuse me, in the program as possible. So to the extent that expands participation, I think we're open to it. If it contracts and scares carriers away from participation, I don't think that's something we want to look at. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Madam Chair? Yes. I have a couple of questions. Thank you, Clay. I'm trying to understand the ownership structure you're laying out. So we're paying, we're the state taxpayers are funding construction of the poles and then doing the organizing to get carriers ready to lease space. Is that how that works? To the pole owner and then seeking bids for people to do the construction, right? Is that the relationships you've laid out? Yes. And then in exchange for that, we get the pole in place and we get some bandwidth for 911. But why would we give the pole away? Why not put out, use our money to pay somebody to erect the pole. And these are not, you've described market competitive in that sense, but there will be some revenue generated otherwise nobody would ever want to own them. So why wouldn't the state maintain ownership and stick that money in a revolving fund for our future telecom needs? That's a good question, Senator Pearson. I think the answer and certainly reasonable minds can disagree on this point, but I think it's important to consider where these towers are going to go. If there was business case to put these facilities in these areas, I think there would already be cell service there. If you could make money developing these areas, they would be developed. I think the business case at best is going to be marginal and this certainly helps to have a subsidy of this magnitude, but $500,000 a tower, we don't anticipate that this is going to be 100% of the cost of those towers. We're estimating that that is the subsidy that would be needed to develop this many towers, but there's going to be private investment, I think that goes into them. I think ownership comes at a price and if you own the tower, then you have to maintain it. And so the question is what kind of staff and technical resources do you need to develop either in state government or out of state government? What does that cost and what does management of 100 towers looks like? The state currently has about 19 telecommunications facilities that it owns or owns the underlying land for. And so we have a management aspect to those facilities, but I don't know that owning 100 towers would be something that would prove to be a revenue generator when you factor in the costs. A lot of these tower construction companies, they own towers all over the country or at least they own them regionally, they would be folding these facilities into their existing portfolio that runs all across New England, that runs across the Northeast. So what we really want is the coverage and this gets us the coverage and then it gets us space to deploy our own equipment for state government and municipal government needs without the headache of owning and managing 100 new state government facilities. Okay, Clay is part of what's going on. Are you using ARPA funds or one-time funds to build these? But then if we own them and are responsible for them, we have to do the ongoing, not one-time funds of staffing and equipping and we're gonna have to be the ones that go out there and report when there's an outage to E911 within, I forget how many hours we put up there and I gather these are probably more remote areas so it will take us longer. Is that what one of the driving forces here is the one-time investment versus the ongoing expense? Yes, I think that that's an important aspect of this. You know, we've owned telecom facilities in the past so we know what that's like. What we're trying to do is really get the maximum benefit without the ongoing cost, as you pointed out. I think it's still incumbent on AT&T and Verizon to report outages as the poll owner doesn't do that but making sure there's diesel in the generator. If there's a backhaul and there's a fiber cut to the backhaul, you know, getting that repaired, things like that that, you know, would take resources and financing to. So what we're really talking about doing is using the one-time money we have to subsidize and we can live out the details, the how we subsidize but subsidize the building of towers in areas where there just aren't enough customers to make it cost-effective for carriers to do it on their own. That's the problem we're working on, right? Correct, yes. Okay. Okay. Any more questions that I hear voice? I'm flying blind here. Okay, so let's keep moving. All right. Well, I think that wraps up our discussion of the tower proposal. Just one last thing about the drive test. We will be testing all the facilities-based carriers as well as FirstNet and we're gonna be starting that this winter working on that into the summer with our own budget. So it won't depend on the appropriation but we're hoping to have kind of the first statewide picture of what FirstNet looks like now that it's substantially deployed. Okay. Can you do route two going into Marshfield? I have a constituent who says there's no cell service and everybody parks in his business to answer their phone. I wasn't driving. I was riding and I have Verizon. I showed a bar going out there, not a big one but actually as much as I get in Montpelier. So I'm thinking maybe it is some, maybe AT&T doesn't cover out there. That is certainly a target corridor high on my mind. Yes. The drive between Montpelier and St. Jay's, it's a difficult one with a lot of gaps and it certainly needs to be solved. Hopefully without bringing the service to Groton State Forest, I do enjoy not having cell service there but I think we all have our places where we wanna see the coverage and I also think there are places where we don't want coverage and I think we need to be careful when we select our target corridors and create your search rings that we're not, that we're being thoughtful about where people do and do not want cell service. So I'm hopeful that this process will help bring that conversation around. Okay, I think, yeah, if you take your slide down, slide down, we are close to the end of time for this but we will definitely have Clay back. So Clay, what you're proposing to do is you're going to contract with a cell tower owner to build, you're gonna pay them and you're gonna pay them and they will build according to engineering standards and I assume we will set standards for backhaul and other things but we will use state money to build the tower or subsidize building the tower, whatever deal you can get. And then the owner is responsible for leasing out space on that tower and the carriers will bid on how much they feel they can pay to have space on that tower based on the fact that if they thought they could make money on it, they would have done it by now. These are rural roads. Yeah. Yes, what the carrier is gonna get is a below market because we subsidize the tower. So the tower owner can afford to take a below market rental fee from the carrier and then the carrier is going to get a subsidy for its equipment up to say $150,000 for the equipment and a below market rental fee which we're anticipating will be enough to induce them to wanna be on the tower. Okay, so that gives us something to think about. I'm sure we will have you back for more discussion. Commissioner Tierney, do you have anything you wanna add at the end? I've got the next discussions, two discussions up folks are already lining up here. So. And I think a number of those folks are my crew talking to you about energy supply. Madam Chair, I just wanted to note that we didn't advertise to the committee that Clay had a short update on CRF funding and the like and maybe the thing to do is to have him back to present the balance of his slides or unless you wanna take three minutes to do that real quick. Can you do it in three minutes rather than haul you all back? I can try. We won't ask questions. Don't ask questions. Yeah, and then let's see if I can. Okay, I thought we got to apologize. Yeah, I apologize. I'm happy to come back if that would be better. I'll give you this in five minutes. Sure. Only five minutes behind, we're ahead. Good, thank you. So we've published updated broadband statistics and I just wanna share those with you quickly because I think they're important for the committee to see. Here are our speed tiers. I think you're well acquainted with what speed tiers are now. 100 to 100 is fiber, 100 slash 20, that's cable TV. That's your Comcast charter, stead cable in the lake. And 25.3 is cable and some other carriers that some areas have really good DSL. I said good DSL is not good, but it's at least 25.3. And then some of the wireless that we funded and then four one, you know what that is. But the big takeaway here is fiber to the home went from 17.5% of the state to 29.2. So pretty much almost 30%. So that's an incredible leap on fiber to the premises in the last two years. Significant investment from Consolidated, Waitsfield, Champlain Valley and some of the other incumbent telephone companies have really pushed that number up. So progress is being made. Okay, that's good to know. This is something new we've added that may be of interest to you as you think about changes to Act 71. We've done a road miles analysis. These are the number of miles of road that have each type of service fiber cable. And it will be of interest to you as the new cable. So over 7,000 road miles with no cable service, that's where your CUDs are targeting. So this is where the 20% of the locations that don't have good broadband, that's where they live in the takeaways. So they have no cable and they don't have good broadband. Okay. And they live on a lot of roads. That's the takeaway. Few locations, a lot of roads. And Christine Halquist told you that was $55,000 a mile so you can multiply. I think she did that in her presentation. Ardof, as you know, that is the bidding process for the Ardof program is over and we know where those are. You see CCI has about half of the target locations. It's about 8,000 locations in the state. So, all in all, Ardof is gonna take care of 14,000 locations that lack 25-3 today. That's a significant investment. Okay, but they may only be bringing that up to 25-3. Nope, they are all gonna do, they're all gonna do 100-100 here. Okay, that's good news then, all right. This is all fiber. The FCC has to authorize the application. So, they bid on all of these companies bid and then once they win the bid, the FCC is a process for approving their application and authorizing the money, the support. Currently, CCI is the only one that's been authorized. So, we're still waiting a final determination for the others. But CCI is definitely the largest, okay. Yes, and they are good to go. They're receiving support already. So, this is our 2020 connectivity initiative. All in all, just under 10,000 locations, you can see different types of technology that we deployed. Lee Cap, all in all, about almost those 600 applications. We have a lot of applications that they couldn't get to before the Expiration of CARES Act. So, not everyone who wanted Lee Cap could get it. This is a function of time, not money. Okay. Fortunately, but you can see the breakdown of Lee Cap applications and... This was, okay, this was, it comes to the end of my road or it comes to the bottom of the hill and it's gonna cost me $5,000 to bring it up. It's that line extension, right? That's correct. We did drops, you know, that was an issue. It goes by my road, but it doesn't come up my driveway and I can't afford it unless I've helped. So, we did a lot of driveways. We did a lot of dirt roads and private road kind of installations and we had good success, especially towards the end. We did a really great project, for instance, in Bolton with Weitzfield, Champlain Valley Telecom. Franklin Telephone did a lot of applications towards the end that really helped those customers. They told us they have a 10-mile stretch with one customer left. That's right. We're not sure how they're gonna get there, but they did sound good. Okay. And then the last is our TBS program. Goes to Senator Sorokin's question about broadband equity and affordability. So, we had this broadband subsidy program. The first year, we had almost 3,000 applications. In the second year, we had just over 2,000. By the year two, we were competing with the FCC's program. So, we let the FCC take priority and if you applied for both programs, we let the FCC pay $50 towards your bill and we got the remainder. So, we ended up giving away less money because there was this other program, but we still helped a lot of people and a lot of people were grateful for it. So, that was certainly a program that we're counting as a success. And with the infrastructure bill, there's a lot of money for broadband equity and affordability programs. These will again be state block grants. So, the state will have to come up with an equity plan. If I recall, there's $65 billion for that. There's a lot of money for the states for that. So, we'll have to work on that. Yes, there's gonna be a lot to do and the NTI writing rules for that. So, there's a lot of opportunity there and it goes beyond affordability. It goes to devices, to digital literacy and other issues of equity. Can you get us a copy of that section of the bill? Sure. Okay, send it to Faith and she can get it to us. So, we know that's becoming the challenge knowing what we have to work with and what the rules are. So, that would be good. And we can, you know, assuming you're starting working on plans and we can start working with you. I'm gonna have to wrap this up because I think we are over five minutes. Yeah, we're eight minutes over. So, we're gonna have to go on.