 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Gene Kimmelman. I run a program on human rights and internet policy here at New America. And it's really, I think, exciting to have some business leaders with us here this morning to talk about broadband competition and innovation. And to tell us a little bit about what's going on with their companies, what's happening in the marketplace, how the regulatory environment may be relevant to that, and how they see this market unfolding. We're going to, after an introduction of our panelists, I want to direct some questions to them to get the conversation rolling. And then I'm going to turn to you. So you can be thinking about what you may want to ask later so that we can get a full audience participation and all your thoughts on the table. So as I thought about the panel, broadband competition and innovation, it really drew me back. I'm old. I've been doing this a long time. And I recall after the breakup of the Bell system, when there was just this beginning explosion of competition all around telecommunications, everyone knew Mobile, everyone knew AT&T, and everyone saw the big companies, MCI, Sprint, kind of coming into the marketplace. But there were always a lot of little companies all around jumping into this business, investing, experimenting, innovating, trying new things, poking, pushing those big guys. And if I name those companies now, many of them don't exist, you wouldn't recognize them. And you may not recognize these folks, these business leaders. They're not AT&T. They're not Verizon. But they are today's small business innovators in telecommunications. They are today's companies that use the network, come up with creative ideas, creative services, creative ways of dealing with small business problems that end up offering consumers, users, the marketplace, all kinds of new options. And they're the ones who are poking, pushing, and pulling at the big guys. So I'm really excited to have them here this morning and to hear what they have to tell us. Let me tell you just a little bit about who we've got here. I'm going to start at the end with Larissa. Larissa Herda has been at the helm of TW Telecom, formerly known as Time Warner Telecom, as CEO and president since 1998. She's also the chairman there. With her leadership, TW Telecom has grown from $26 million in revenue, $26 million, to $1.5 billion in the last year, 2012, and expanded its national broadband network footprint from 17 markets to 80. That's pretty big. Now I have Rolla Huff next term. He was chief executive and president of Earthlink. I remember Earthlink as this little company out there just trying to get in as AOL was dominating the market. He's still here. He's got a long history in the telecommunications industry, serving as CEO and president of Earthlink since 2007. And before that, as CEO and in other leadership positions at Mpower Hold Incorporation Frontier and AT&T Wireless. And then we've got Laura Thomas. Laura's been around a bit too. She's got a lot of top leadership positions at XO Communications, leading the company's vision, strategy, and financial positioning as it's transformed from a broadband-focused telecommunications company in today's new emerging market. She's had a long history, more than 30. You sound almost like me, 30 years. Wow. And then finally, last but not least, of course, Jeff Gardner is president and CEO of Winstream. He served since 2005 in that position and has been in the industry more than 25 years, coming up on it, previously with Altel and as head of USTA recently. So you are not the most well-known companies. So I'm going to give you each like five minutes. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and why you matter in the marketplace. And then I'm going to come back and ask you some questions. So Larissa, you want to start off? Thank you, Gene. Hi, everybody. I feel old too, actually. I've been at this for quite a long time, having been in now two competitive companies released since 1988, shortly after everybody started getting into the industry. I'm honored to be here today, along with my esteemed colleagues, and I appreciate you hosting, and having this very timely and important discussion. So a little bit about who we are at TW Telecom, we're a company acutely focused on the evolving needs of the enterprise customer. In the DC environment, we're called a business broadband provider, but we do much more than simply provide broadband services. We invest in and build our own fiber networks, and we design solutions that meet the unique needs of enterprise customers. And we continue to be an industry leader in business Ethernet services, something we've been focused on for over 12 years. We're constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing challenges that enterprise customers face. Business is moving faster and faster, and we have to move along with it. As we all know, there's a lot of chatter about the transition the network in general is going through, and we'll talk about more of that today. But the most important thing about that transition in our business is the increasing opportunity it provides the customer to interact and capitalize on the network's capabilities. That's why we're investing in networks that are flexible, automated, elastic, and able to address the real-time changing needs of our customers. We're doing this with our advanced Ethernet capabilities, our intelligent network services, and our future constellation platform. We evolve and grow as our customers do, which makes us a powerful business partner. Let me tell you what that looks like in real life. We serve all kinds of businesses, big ones and smaller ones. We serve hospitals, universities, public schools, military bases, banks, churches, retailers, manufacturers, you name it, we serve them, and they all have unique needs. One of our retail customers' recent challenges was figuring out how to cost-effectively replicate the customer data at their retail stores and transmit it to their corporate headquarters. Their dilemma was that developing a solution for this would require a substantial increase in the cost of their IT infrastructure, and they just couldn't afford it. So instead of suggesting a costly new infrastructure solution, we helped them find another solution by partnering with a virtual data center provider that specializes in backup and recovery capabilities. By leveraging our partnership, we were able to address our customers' requirements for a virtualized storage solution by combining the power of our Ethernet and our dynamic capacity service, which is a true bandwidth-on-demand service that can automatically double or triple network bandwidth. And I do mean automatically, instantaneously, within seconds, with the data center's recovery as a service cloud capability. This allowed our customer to replicate his data on a daily basis at a fraction of the cost it would have taken to build out a more dedicated IT infrastructure, which they just would not have done. We give businesses the tools that enable them to succeed in the marketplace. The ability to automatically expand bandwidth is a game-changing capability that we developed and introduced. It's the only one of its kind. It's this type of innovation, innovation that's driven by a customer's need to serve, a competitor's need to serve customers with creative solutions that's so important to economic growth in this country. Now to serve these kinds of businesses with these innovative solutions, our customers look to us to be able to deliver a ubiquitous solution, not just where we have our own fiber facilities. We've spent about $4 billion building out fiber facilities. But they need us to provide services where they need it, where they have offices, where they have needs not necessarily always where we are. So while we try to provide as much service on our own facilities as possible, approximately 70% of our revenue rides 100% on our own network. So that's a lot. But we still need to use facilities from others to connect to our customer locations where we don't have fiber. We depend on access from the incumbent providers because they're oftentimes the only provider of service in those business locations and there are many. That is why I'm concerned about the most recent action by AT&T that effectively raises rates on these access services. We depend on to serve our customers. This action raises our cost of providing service to our customers without providing any additional value and puts us in a less competitive position. Ultimately, those price increases will be felt by all businesses, all business customers. Only large companies with significant market power are in a position to raise prices and not worry about losing customers as a result. Good public policy is designed to encourage investment and competition. There are many examples of how competition stimulates innovation, creates market opportunity and delivers a better value for the customer. The winning formula contributes to economic development. Thank you and I look forward to our discussion today. Well, thank you to the New America Foundation and the Broadband Coalition for hosting this event. We're here to talk about the communication markets and how they intersect with DC policymaking and clearly it's an exciting time and the excitement seems to grow with every day that goes by. We at EarthLank have been innovators in the communications and data market for a lot of years. We were the first to come out with unlimited access not because it was in our best interest to try to continue the status quo. In fact, companies like ours, the best thing that we can do is break the status quo. Very different than a large monopoly with market power in fact, their incentive is to keep the status quo. So EarthLank tries very similar to the types of things that Larissa was talking about. We try to provide custom solutions to our small and mid-sized business accounts and we do that by not demanding that they only have access where we have network. We'll work in some cases, we partner with Larissa's company where they have access and we'll use Jeff's company where they have access and the same thing with Laura. But we provide IT services on top of that. And so the idea is to give small and mid-sized business customers better data security, better enterprise level platforms that they can run their business on so that they can innovate and do what they do best. So we sort of see ourselves, we talk about it internally. We wanna be architects of change for small business. We know for sure that if a small business customer is going to one of the people with market power, they it's a one-way program. You can imagine if these big companies don't worry about Larissa or Jeff or myself in terms of some of the things that they're doing, you can just imagine the possibility that a small business customer has in putting together any sort of customized solution that's important for what they're doing as a business. Our companies together have spent billions of dollars on our network. And remember, the last mile access was driven by a rate of return policy and platform that dates back years and years ago. And so it was the consumers and small business that really paid for those last mile facilities. And so we strongly believe that the idea of doing anything to choke off access to those facilities is simply wrong public policy. But we understand that when you have market power, it changes your perspective. And I couldn't help but resist quoting, and I'm gonna just, if you'll bear with me. I wanted to quote AT&T's general counsel, some testimony that he did about 10 years ago. Now you got a, it might have been 12 years ago, but this was a time when AT&T had lots of long line capabilities, but they didn't have the local access. That was in the hands of the R-Box at the time. And so I'll quote. The fundamental question is, what's the best way to accelerate deployment of broadband or indeed any new technology? Keep in mind, this is AT&T talking. The Bells say relieve them of competitive pressures and they will roll out new services faster. We say competition is the better guarantor that new technology will reach all Americans. There's is a trust me approach with all the dangers that entails. The other says to trust market forces and trust competition because time and time again, that has proven to be the correct course. The government trusted competition when it broke up the Bell system in 1984. The result is vibrant competition and dropping prices. C-Lex have been, remember this was when he was a C-Lex. C-Lex have invested heavily to compete in reliance on the law that Congress wrote. All of us are having a tough time getting the monopolies to do what the laws require. Billions have already been wagered and billions have been lost. Simple fairness argues that against changing the rules in the middle of the game and especially now. And so the difference between now and then was they didn't have market power for the last mile, 10 or 12 years ago, today they do. And the perspective is suddenly much different. And so we believe that we've gotta make sure that small businesses are protected out there. I think that we all believe that the future of this economy is gonna be a small business-driven future. And we believe that we're the best people to help these small companies realize their innovative ideas. We try to be the platform for those sorts of folks. So, Gene, we really appreciate all of your help. I can't think of anybody that has been through more of these kinds of wars to make sure the right thing happens. So we look forward to working with everybody and hope for a better outcome. Thanks. Thank you. I too appreciate the opportunity to be here with my colleagues and talk about the regulatory environment but I'm really excited to tell you a little bit about XO because we don't really have an opportunity to really talk about the company as much. XO operates one of the nation's largest broadband networks. It's a company that's exclusively focused on providing services to business customers. We really focus at that mid-size enterprise, large wholesale carrier group of customers. We have a robust, indeed award-winning, product portfolio that spans IP, data, and cloud-based services. The value that we try to add at XO, how we try to differentiate ourselves is through the customer service, the surround that we give the customers. That's paramount, that's different, and that is no different than my colleagues. That's how we compete against the market powers that we do. We've invested over the years $8 billion in our network. We have one of the most advanced Ethernet, IP, optical technology networks out there. Nationwide, long-haul network of 19,000 miles. We have a million miles around the markets that we operate, metro fiber. That's an average of 250 miles around the cities and the markets that we participate in. We've done a lot of investments over the year. We were born out of the 1996 Telcom Act. We are one of the shining examples of what competition can do. We, too, have many firsts. In 2000, we were the first to offer a flat-rate voice data bundled offering. In 2001, we launched our IP network. 2005, we launched an award-winning IP Flex product, again voice and data bundled, that allowed customers more management of dynamic bandwidth for them. By 2006, XO was a company that was selling more IP-based services than the legacy TDM. In 2007, we put electronics on our fiber, which allowed us to get a great low-cost, very efficient network. We were the first out there to offer 10 gigs in 10 days. The norm for turning up 10 gigs back then was 45 to 60 days. So we were providing service faster to our customers. Roll forward to the last year. What have we done? Last year in 2012, we announced 100G network nationwide coast-to-coast, the fastest network out there. What does that do? That provides for our customers the speed that they need. For XO, it was a low-cost efficient way. It was a better, more efficient cost structure for us to operate that. We've also offered 10 megs of Ethernet over copper services to our customers, which allows us to take the embedded copper plant and convert it and have the high-speed broadband that customers need and desire. I think what I'm most proud of is our market position that XO has today. The Gardner Group is an analytical research group that goes out there every 12 to 15 months and they assess the competition. They did a wireline study that was published in March. They ranked XO number three as it relates to our ability to service business customers. And that is behind the likes of the market power of AT&T and Verizon. They ranked us number four as it relates to our product suites, again behind those. Those legacy market powers of AT&T and Verizon just on the business side of their revenue, they're 25 to 35 billion in revenue. XO has a billion and a half in revenue. They have considerable power and yet look at what our investments have done. This is a tough industry for all of us, extremely capital intense. Every dollar that we get back in needs to go forward and to keep our network and products relevant. That's why we take things very seriously when rates are proposed to go up, et cetera. Again, I would tell you we're a shining example of some of the proactive competitive strategies that have been put in place. I have been in the industry pretty long. Thank you very much for pointing that out. I lived through, I went with MCI right at divestiture in 84. I saw the benefits of competition in long distance. And in 1996, I didn't join XO until 2000, but I can tell you there's been incredible innovation and choice that's been offered to customers as a result. So again, I thank you for the opportunity and I look forward to the Q and A. And Laura, I just meant it from the benefits of what you said. It's okay. It's okay. Well, good, it was nice listening to all these great things these companies are doing. Windstream's a bit different. We started out as an I-LAC. We spun off from Altel Corporation in 2005 and really began a transformation that was very much focused on the enterprise. And so for the last six years, we've been totally focused on building an enterprise business. Today, over 67% of our revenues come from the enterprise customers. It's our fastest growing area of business. We're generating about $6.2 billion of revenue and we're in 48 states. Our enterprise business is about $4 billion. So it's very important to us. And just like some of my colleagues up here, when people think about C-Lex and not investing because they wanna use other people's networks, it's a real fallacy. You heard about all the billions that were mentioned by the panel already. Just last year, Windstream invested $1.2 billion in our network. In 2013, we'll invest 875 million. So we're making the investments to really focus on IP and providing solutions that are very unique to our customers. We're aggressively operating in the enterprise space. Our tagline is smart solutions, personalized service. And much like you've heard from others on the panel, there is really a niche out there. People want choices in the enterprise market. And what I hear time and time again, and I heard Larissa talking about this this morning, our customers really appreciate the fact that we're gonna come in and be innovative around providing solutions to them. We just, I was just with a customer in the Midwest who we just won a large contract with. They have 4,000 retail stores across the country. They were doing business with a large incumbent and they really needed a solution that better fit their business. And they are just thrilled to be working with Windstream and us exercising some ability to be flexible, to really listen to them and devise a product that will meet their needs. So I too agree that there's a very important place out there in the market today. I think the best example is when you talk to our customers. And I was just with a bunch of channel partners recently and they're really pulling for these companies up here. They talk about Time Warner Telecom, Earthlink, XO, Windstream, they want us to be successful because they wanna have choice. And so I think it really is best said by our customers and by our partners in the industry. This is very important to us, this last mile access. It really is what allows us to compete in the marketplace every day. Sure, we'd prefer to build our own facilities, but oftentimes we're able to provide solutions to multi-location customers just because of this last mile access. And in many cases, it'd cost us much more to replicate this service. And really customers aren't doing business with us because of the pipe. It's really about the managed services. So I too wanna thank the New America Foundation and the broadband coalition for putting this together. And I look forward to discussing this more, thank you. Great, great, thanks all of you. So Jeff, I wanna come back to you right away on this last mile connection. So what I'm recalling going back to my many years of this, with all this explosion, I'm listening to you talk about thousands and millions of miles of fiber and ethernet at the highest speeds and thinking about these exploding networks. And they're way back even in the 80s, there was talk about all the exploding competition. But then it was still pretty much one wire into the home and one wire into businesses. And I think there's, I'm getting the sense that in some ways the world has changed dramatically, but in other ways, maybe not so much. So I wanna come back to you on this because I think this is always confusing for the public. With all of this investment, with all this explosion, Jeff, for what you described as this last mile and you say you build some, can you just explain a little bit more about why not everywhere? Why shouldn't there be two, three, five, 10 wires going into the home or not necessarily wires, communication paths of adequate capacity, however you wanna define it. Can you just walk through for us a little bit about why that isn't what's happening in the marketplace? Well, it's really about economics and in some cases where you've got a large customer on the end, it makes sense to build your own facilities. But in many cases, you're going in and serving a customer that you're providing services to on a national basis. And you need to get access to a location where you do require that last mile access. And in order to provide that ubiquitous coverage, you're gonna need to do that. If we had to build in every case, the last mile access, it would be bad for our customers, prices would increase. And ultimately, there'd be fewer options. I think what I'm most struck by is, as I hear this being talked about and I was in front of the Senate about a month ago talking about this issue, and often people try to make a comparison between the residential marketplace, which when you read about this issue and people are talking about it, they often go to that. They say, look at all the competition at the home. Well, that's very true. There's a lot of competition. There's a cable company, a phone company, a couple of three or four wireless companies in every market they're offering alternatives. But in the business market, it's very different. There's not as many choices for our customers. And so again, that last mile access is absolutely essential to providing the types of options that customers need. So Laura, maybe you could ask you a little bit about this too. Jeff just said, consumers have wireless. Consumers have more options. Why isn't that good enough for your business customers? Shouldn't that be the same? So I think business customers do use wireless, but not exclusively. So to make the network work, we all really have a hybrid of both the copper plant fiber and cell service. So on that particular side. But for businesses in large measure, remember a cell phone, a cell call goes to a cell tower ultimately carried over a network like we have. The difference is, is the quality of service, the security, customers want managed services. They need that. Cellular today doesn't offer the kind of bandwidth and capacity that our customers need. So it's not an option. It's not an option exclusively. So you're reminding me I have a good friend who I won't name, who we used to talk about the public network and the wonders of the public network and he served business customers. And I said, so why are you guys buying so many private lines? And he just laughed at me. He said, security and redundancy. And that was it. Another point in terms of a huge difference between the business market and the residential market is in the business market you have to have robust wholesale services. We have to be able to access services from basically monopoly players because they are the only ones that have the physical connection into the building. For us to provide service to business customers unlike residential where you had, you had I guess the cable businesses start off as a monopoly. That's slowly changing with more competition for residential customers but not for business customers. And then you had the incumbent carriers that also have a monopoly. And so now you have wireless services. You don't, it's not a building specific type of a service to provide wireless but when we're providing service to a business customer the really key feature in doing that is the physical connection into the building. It's not the building next door. It's the building where the customer resides. And I think the data will show if the FCC can continue on with their plan to get the data on what's actually happening out there in the marketplace in terms of where competition is and who has the connections into the buildings. We know the data will show that the vast majority of the buildings in the United States have one provider and it's a monopoly player. Yeah, so I wanna come back on that Laura said a little bit just to dig in. In your presentation you described all this wonderful activity that Tito the telecom's doing and all the wonderful services and then you said but one wire in. So let's focus on this. And you said one wire that has market power. So that sets off bells in my ears having worked in the justice department. He said market power. And I'm just thinking I heard the chairman of the FCC give his speech the other day where he used this imagery of a seesaw where the higher up you go with competition the less you need regulation on the other side. But on the other hand it may be that the lower you go with competition there's a greater need for regulatory oversight. So in that segment of the market where you're saying you have one wire is that where the competition part of the seesaw goes down? Absolutely. So I talked about earlier that about 70% of our revenues 100% on our fiber network. So let's say that's about a billion we're a billion and a half or so of revenue. So it's a billion dollars of our revenues 100% on our own fiber network. We have over 20,000 buildings connected with fiber. We are one of the large we're probably the largest competitive provider in terms of buildings connected with our own fiber. But we still have about half a billion dollars of our revenue that we have to buy services from another carrier. And as Roller was saying we all buy from one another we buy from the incumbents and we love it when we can buy from companies where they're providing competition quite frankly to the incumbents because then we can get better service and better pricing. But we pay very large checks to the incumbent carriers. And we don't do it because we want to we do it because we have to. I think we're all reasonable business people. And I think that if we had other options we would use them because those other options would probably be providing us better service at more competitive prices. But we don't have other options. And that's where smart public policy comes into play where you when you don't have other options when there's clearly market power the fact that AT&T is out there with a filing to get rid of long-term contracts which effectively will raise all of our costs which means we're gonna have to raise costs to all of our business customers is an example. We could never do that. In our business when we're competing we compete with one another by the way too. We have to provide a competitive service. And but we would have very hard time raising prices because guess what customers would do? They'd go to someone else. So if someone can do something like that and effectively raise prices you have to question how can they do that unless they have monopoly power? Which is certainly if we had another option we would use it. Yeah, sounds like one of the areas you think the FCC ought to look at it. Absolutely. So on that point Rola you had mentioned customized service. I'm listening to this and it sounds both exciting and wonderful and it sounds kind of scary on the other side of one provider you pay what they charge you there's nothing you can do. And you said that part of your game plan almost when serving your customers is breaking the status quo. Now for those who really like competition that sounds wonderful. That's like really shaking up the marketplace and whatnot but how do you do it? I mean in the environment that Larissa just described me well how can you break a status quo if you've got that much control and power on one side of the connection? So what we try to do is we've been talking about is we try to provide customized solutions that fit with the customer's need as opposed to coming in and saying you get it this way at this price and that's your choice. We try to customize the solution. So we may use cable coax in to get access in some ways we might use wireless where it works for the customer's solution. In other times we may build into a customer site where it makes sense. So we try to provide customized solutions for the customer and then on top of that provide this plethora of IT services that the customer has access to whether it's infrastructure as a service. We have common customers where she has the network and I'm providing a cloud based infrastructure as a service product to the customer. So I think the key thing is providing customized solutions for customers. So here's the obvious thing anyone would think of listening to all of you and any of you could jump on this. You do this, this is great. Why doesn't AT&T of Verizon do? I mean they're big but money is money. Anything that would be more business for them? Why don't they do the same thing? Well they're innovating too and with the various different services they have. I don't think that but I will tell you they're slow to innovate unless there's competition. Here's a couple of examples. One from many years ago when I was a general manager in Atlanta for another company called MFS years a long time ago. I remember them. And I remember I had just gotten to the market. MFS had spent something like $15 million building the biggest network they had ever built and but they were still only in a very small part of Atlanta they went as high as those of you who know Atlanta, the perimeter and down to the downtown area but they were not in an area called Cumberland and I was giving a presentation to a bunch of new potential customers and after the presentation half the room came up to me. There was like a line of people saying we have services in Cumberland will you please build there because at the time it was Bell South is so unresponsive they won't provide us any services but guess what, where we did have our fiber they were responsive. They were providing new services and more innovation. So where competition is then they innovate. But you're suggesting they follow you? Well I mean TW Telecom started providing Ethernet we were one of the first and definitely according to one of the largest equipment providers of Ethernet boxes they told me that we dragged them kicking and screaming into Ethernet. We started providing it in 2001. I remember several years later standing in front of a room of 80 customers and saying until we came in to talk to you about Ethernet did any other income provider come in and talk to you about it and no one raised their hand. It wasn't until we showed up with it that then they said okay we'll do it. So competition is what drives innovation and so they will compete when they will innovate but only when there's competition. Okay so let's talk a little bit more about the competition piece this a little bit. A couple of you mentioned cable a little bit. Maybe coming into this market more. I mean I recall I don't know what the numbers are now but I recall for the special access connections you're talking about at least for a long time AT&T and Verizon had 80 plus percent of that market but with cable coming in are they coming in? Is it changing this? Does it change the regulatory calculus if they are starting to come in? I think cable we see cable in the marketplace. Today they're really focused more on the small business customer. Single location customer where they can provide a cheap inexpensive quick solution where we really focus on and that's when I think about all of our companies up here that's not really where we're focused. Sure we have small customers we wanna keep them and we're doing everything we can around providing managed services to differentiate from the cable companies but our sweet spot is really that mid-sized customer and I think if you'd ask any of the CEOs up here a 20,000 to a $50,000 a month customer is huge for us and we will do many things around customized solutions listening to their business problems to solve those for them in a way that others don't and again that's that personalized service that I think our companies offer that really gets that differentiation that Larissa talked about. So yes cable companies there but they're very for a very specific type of customer today they'll get better but that's not where they're at today. So Laura I see you nodding your head on that. The thing that jumps out to me about the cable piece and maybe I'm wrong about this is that the single line virtually of the small business customer is very much like the residential customer that cable does serve and so that's really more a similar business expansion to the business they're already in. It's not. But they're not in the buildings. I mean they're building like we are into the build they're just to see like in the business market they are not a dominant provider they are not an incumbent provider that's residential and that's when it gets back to public policy they need to understand there is a clear difference between competition and residential and competition on business markets and it cannot be confused particularly when they're talking about the cable industry. And I would just throw out that when you talk about a cable company they can provide service where they have footprint but if a customer is in cross has locations that cross cable lines the customer is out of luck and so it cables a solution at the very small end they're not a solution for the mid-size types of accounts that Jeff referred to. They're localized. So you guys really sound very reasonable to me but you know there are some companies out there that I think beg to differ with you on how they view this and I guess I've heard this more and more in the discussion about the IP transition. New technology, new rules or new technology, no rules. That, so I wanna be provocative a little bit again any of you jump in is the kind of FCC oversight you're describing disincent AT&T and Verizon from investing in upgrading their network. Are you holding them back? You're investing but are you holding them back? I think, I just talked about innovation. Competition drives innovation so no. I mean the answer to that is absolutely no but they are saying that that's why. They do say it's a disincentive for them but we all have to invest in technologies. I mean they have the same challenge as we do in keeping networks and products relevant in the marketplace. We have to do it, they need to do it. I think so often they get confused that IP is nothing more than a routing technology. It's not anything more sophisticated than that. I believe the 1996 act was neutral as it relates to technology. The act was there to spur competition which drives choice, innovation, lower prices and better customer services that we've all talked about. That's how we have to differentiate ourselves. It has nothing to do with a routing technology in my opinion. So I want to dig in a little bit more on that again for any of you to jump in. That is, boy that's not the image that's out there, the IP network, all new technology. This is what brings you the high speeds, not your ethernet connections, excuse me, but this is the way of the future and we can't have all those old rules there. You're suggesting. It's interesting that an incumbents talking about IP as a new technology. I just throw that out, is it? Well, what you're reminding me of is, I don't know how many of you would remember when we moved to accelerated depreciation, that was a big, big fight with federal oversight. And as I recall, that was gonna be the real impetus to spur enormous network investment. And I recall also looking a few years after and not quite seeing those results in the markets that weren't competitive. So there's a bit of a common logic of the arguments made that aren't always followed up by market reality, but explain that again, a routing technology here, how can you keep those same old rules as we move into really an internet communications environment, isn't it totally different? I think our point is not that we don't need to go through an IP transition, but it's really a process and companies are at different points in terms of their need to make that transition. When I look at our capital expenditures this year, our CTO at our company says IP has everything and everything is IP. We haven't bought a TDM switch in years. All of us are investing in technology. And I think we're moving quite quickly. This is the service that we prefer to sell to our customers, but it's not always right. Some of our customers have perfectly good copper solutions that have now been enhanced with Ethernet capability. And so I think if you think about it more as a process and not an event in that we just put some guidelines around this so that we can manage it so it's beneficial to the customer at the end of the day. So it also gets back to, well, there's a few things. This is such an important discussion. I can tell I got you guys down. It does not, moving to IP does not change the fact that it's still about the connection in the physical connection into the building. So if you're gonna provide, whether it's a TDM service into that building or an Ethernet connection into that building, you still need that either copper or fiber connection into that building. So changing the rules doesn't make sense when you don't have used so much of the United States that only has one provider into a lot of those buildings. The same telecom act as Laura said is agnostic to the technology. The issue is not rewriting the telecom act. The issue is enforcing it. And from what we've heard publicly from what this FCC chairman has been talking about the past few weeks, it's all about robust competition. Let's use fax and data. Let's not use anecdotes. Let's not whine about our market position. Let's look at the fax and data that are out there about what's really going on with competition, let's do a scorecard on how well the telecom act has done. We've absolutely benefited from the telecom act, but we need to continue to enforce it. We need to make sure that there's reasonable access into those buildings. And I would also, I think actions speak louder than words. What I don't really understand is when AT&T comes in and says, okay, we're getting rid of long-term contracts which effectively raises all of our prices and we're gonna be all IP by 2020. Six months ago, we just negotiated a new agreement with them where we asked for a transition to IP, to Ethernet. And they penalized us. Instead of encouraging us to move to IP, if we don't meet their numbers for TDM services that we're buying, we pay penalties if we wanna move over to Ethernet. It makes absolutely no sense. If they really, really were true about their view of trying to move us all to IP and to Ethernet, then they would be giving us incentive to move to that technology as opposed to making us pay penalties when we do it. We just shouldn't fool ourselves. This is about market power, but it's not technology, it's market power. That's what this is about. So the example that a number of you have raised is this AT&T desire to eliminate the longer-term contracts. And I believe you've mentioned that the cost would go up 15 to 25% with that move. Now again, to the public, this is opaque. What does that mean to me? How does it change my world? But you seem quite passionate about it. So I wonder if you could walk through a little. I mean, I remember just from the consumer side, whenever we would make a suggestion to some of the carriers that you could offer a service this way, it'd be really helpful to the public, or you ought to be monitoring things and actually compiling information. The common retort was, yeah, we could, but that costs a lot of money. And of course, we just pass all that on to you. Is that what you really want? So I'm thinking of that as I hear you say, there's this cost. Can you kind of explain for us a little bit without telling company secrets? How does that translate? What does that do to your business? So if I can, just generally. So the 15 to 25% is probably across the industry. That's a huge impact on your bottom line, your profitability. This is a capital-intense industry. Every dollar we get in, we need to put back into products and networks keeping them relevant. So that's gonna impact our ability to invest. Here's the market power. In what other industry can somebody raise rates 15 to 25% and not run the risk of us taking our traffic someplace else? We don't have that option. We did a study a couple of years ago of one of the top 10 markets and to what Larissa was saying earlier. We found that less than 1%, less than 1% had anything more than one business wire in. They're holding us. That's the market power. So in other words, you're going to really impact our ability to turn around and to create investments and innovation. We can't pass it on to our customers. We can't and you have to ask why are those prices going up? It's the same legacy infrastructure. It's not like that's where they're investing their dollars. They're doing it for competitive purposes. And if the FCC does nothing, this takes effect. On the ninth. And I think everyone's going to determine what their own strategy will be if this occurs. Ultimately, we're gonna have to pass cost on to customers because there's just not enough in it to be able to not do that. That could make us very non-competitive, which could have negative impacts on our businesses. But ultimately what this does is it increases the cost for business customers. It has a very significant increase. We're moving to IP, we wrote the book on this, right? So, and I know it has to incent us to do it. We would love it if the, we've had to teach at least one of the incumbents how to provide wholesale Ethernet to us, okay? We've also done it for the cable industry because we know how important it is to be able to buy those services from them to serve our customers. You kind of say, really, you're doing that? You compete with them? But yes, there's a greater good here. And the greater good is that as much Ethernet out there as much IP that's out there, the better for everybody. But there's a process you have to go through as Jeff was talking about and let's sit down and talk about it. Let's figure out how to go about doing that. Let's not threaten everybody with price increases. You don't have to incent us to do it. In that regard, what you should do is when you deal with us on a company by company basis give us fair and reasonable terms. The issue is yes, costs are gonna go up as a result of what AT&T is doing. That's just AT&T. You think the moment they get this every other incumbent's gonna do it. That increases everybody's cost that much more. That would be Verizon and Century Lake, right? So now, I mean, talk about impact to the entire business community. It's profound. But what's even more profound is that if their intent is to basically get rid of regulation by 2020 on access, then what happens to those of us that don't have competition as a backstop when we're buying those services to those locations where there are no other options? That's the real issue here, right? That's the issue. How do we make sure, and it gets to the CESA. I love that. I didn't know about that analogy, but it's a perfect analogy. You'd much rather have competition as the floor, so to speak, in the negotiations. But when you don't, you have to have smart public policy to be able to keep competition flourishing, and that's all we're asking for. Right. So one thing that we haven't mentioned here, I was just sitting here from my wireless days thinking of the people that have most of the wireline access, what percentage of the spectrum do you think those same people own? So I recall it's pretty much. Yeah, I think it's like 80%. I think I knew that once. So I'm gonna turn to the audience in a minute, so think about your questions here. I'm gonna end with one more, and I'm gonna jump on what you just said, Larissa. When you describe it, you really almost make it sound like they should want you to be out there. You've been kind of pushing them and prodding them and they benefit from having that out there. But let's assume for a minute that they don't really like that so much. And just I wanna push you guys on the real nuclear option here. They don't like it at all. And 15 to 25% is just the beginning. And you've described a set of ideas they have going to 2020. Let's say they can run right through with that. And they have market power or they're big, however you wanna describe it. What if you didn't exist? I mean, what if this just kept going this way and you really can't make a profit? What does that mean to the market? Why should your customers care? Why should the general public care? You can only imagine how few options would be available. We've already talked about, you're talking about an environment where there's a cable incumbent and the local telephone incumbent. And so the choice, we've already said that the cable companies aren't really well suited for multi-location customers. It greatly limits the choice. It would, as Larissa said earlier, greatly limit innovation. All the things that we're working on, the incentive to innovate would be gone. So I think you'd be looking at a very different world, higher prices for small and medium sized businesses, government entities and not good for the economy. No, I agree with what Jeff said. It's really hard because our business customers really rely on our solutions. And what we hear time and time again is from the legacy incumbents, we come in there. Look, this is a complex industry today. It's not like it was in the 80s or 90s. We have a lot of complex products. They're innovative. Customers need this to keep them competitive. If they lose this choice and they don't have, because we spend a lot of time educating our customers on how to use these cloud-based services to make them more efficient, to make them more competitive, if they lose these choices and we drop that, you could go back to, oh, you have one choice in the color of your phone, black. Remember that? We don't want to go back. That's going backwards. I'm afraid you and I remember, I'm not sure how many of these guys are tired of me. Thank you again. Okay, we've got some questions. I don't know if I have another mic out here. I'm looking around, maybe I don't. I will just share mine. And I've got to, you know, I'd be inclined to start with a guy who was in Congress because they don't really say much, you know. But I'm going to start with you because you actually are the press. Hello, Brooks Bullock, Politico. One really quick, short question. Does the 96 Act need to be redone? Just yes or no? Let's go right down the line. No. Enforced. It needs to be enforced. No, enforced. I don't agree with that. The FCC has everything it needs to, you know, ensure competition in the Act. Its technology, agnostic technology, shouldn't be a factor here. It wasn't a factor when we, you know, went from, you know, 5E switches to, you know, to IP switches. So I think a lot is being made about that, that absolutely, and you're hearing from some of the bigger competitors out there. It's all about ensuring competition, and that's the key. The only other thing I'll add is, is technologies in this industry, one thing's for sure, it will continue to change. You can't have a policy that's written around technology. You have to have one that promotes the competitive environment. Right. Earl Comstock, I just wanted to follow up a little bit on the last sort of line of thought here. It's been very interesting. You all pointed out very strongly that you're in the business market. But what's fascinating to me, you talk about the market power of the incumbents, and you all sort of danced around cable and left them off to the side, largely because they're not in the business market, to a degree. But if you think about market power, in Congress, what matters is consumers. Not just small business consumers, not just medium-sized business consumers, it's all consumers. Yet when you went over that, you all sort of said, they got competition, they got wireless, they got cable, they got, they made it sound like there's a very competitive market over there. And so in a way, you've thrown away your greatest ally, which is what MCI and AT&T, old AT&T used to have. And I guess I would just toss out there, why is it that you understandably focus on the small business market, but what the other side says is, oh, they're taking the most lucrative market, and they're not doing anything then for the rural guys and the consumers. I think if they... Why not ally with them? I think if innovation slows down because small business formation slows down, it will absolutely impact the consumers. So many of the things that are helping the consumers today are coming not from the big mega companies, they're coming from small businesses that are innovating and finding different, better solutions. So we've got, I think Jeff does too, we've got well over a million consumers. So EarthLynx's legacy is all built around the consumer model, but there is no doubt in our mind that these small and mid-sized businesses have a profound effect on consumers and bringing prices down and having better solutions being offered. You guys wanna flip coin? Thank you very much. I'm Rajendra Singh from Warrior Bank. Okay, my question is, in fact there are three parts in this question. Focusing on physical infrastructure and particularly optical fiber. You know the way technology has developed in optical fiber. There is a tremendous capacity in one pair of fiber. And they are the logic of introducing competition that there are multiple optical fiber cable going to the single building by different operators. Doesn't hold good because every asset is grossly underutilized. Why can't there be a regulatory intervention that really the competition is not putting this physical, this thing. There is no innovation there. There are other people who are taking care of that technology. Why companies like you should invest in putting your own fiber when there is already fiber. That's one part. The second thing, have you thought about, let's say if you are compelled to put your own optical fiber, have you thought about developing partnership with electricity, gas and water utilities because they already have infrastructure how to do that. And my third part was, I'm going to outside U.S. to developing world. You know there is a lot of gap like in broadband market in developing world. Do you, I mean, I know you are focusing on business consumers and he already raised a point about what do you think if at all like you have some thoughts. How can we bridge this gap that is still world has only about two billion broadband customers and there is a huge gap in the broadband connectivity to all consumers. What do you think could be innovative ideas because this is where our focus is from the World Bank side that how can we bridge this gap. Thank you. So if I can on the fiber side. So we have an extensive fiber network but it doesn't go everywhere. So what we do is we don't go necessarily out there and build but what we will do is we will swap with people who have excess capacity so that we don't have to build and we can share the fiber plant. And that is something that's gone on for years and we don't necessarily talk about it, et cetera. But there is that logic and that business control. So I would offer that we do a lot of swaps. Absolutely and a substantial part of our fiber has actually been built in partnership with public utilities and railroads and so on and so forth. So we're not out digging up the streets to put fiber down. We all do that. I think we like having our own, when we can having for us having our own fiber into a building allows us to control the service experience and the product offerings and our margins. It is what drives the margins in our business. So it's a critical part of our strategy but we use everything. I mean everyone's using all sorts of partnerships and I mean that's just the nature of the industry. So are you in essence suggesting, I believe this was the point in a more stark way that to just double up and triple up would be wasted investment. That it would be excess capacity that isn't worth the money to put in. Which is in essence to say that there are parts of this network that are and can be competitive but there may be parts where it doesn't make economic sense. You need to share. Right, there'll be buildings that will even they can be right next to one another. One building may never make financial sense to go in. In some markets, it doesn't make financial sense to even go up to the fifth floor. If you go to New York, the cost of just going up the building is so it's more expensive than it is to punch a hole in a building in another market. So it's very market specific but it's very expensive to add the buildings onto the network. It gets to Jeff's comment that it's an economic decision, right? I mean, you have to get a return on your investment. We were not funded by the rate payers. We were funded by private investment and that's a big difference. Remember when these access networks got built, the way the incumbents got compensated is they got to return on every dollar they spent. Right, that's right. Right, there wasn't a, they had to go out and get customers to get their return. They got a return by just being able to raise prices with government support. Guaranteed rate of return. Guaranteed rate of return. There's no such thing. Yeah, for us. For us. And so where we can do it, we have built those networks. We've utilized the incumbents as little as economically possible. But the idea of replicating something that was built over 75 years by a system of rate payers, it's just never worth it. I think that would be relevant to the developing world too because you don't have that environment. You don't have the capital there and you don't have the opportunity. But one of the interesting things that the gentleman made me think of in terms of developing countries, even in some of the poorest parts of the world across Africa, you have an explosion in wireless devices. Now this is not with an enormous sophisticated infrastructure, but it's with whatever infrastructure is there, it's a shared infrastructure that is allowing competitive carriers to offer a whole variety of services. So to me, it's fascinating that even in countries with very low income, very limited technological opportunities, you can see some of that percolating up just by putting simple, not too expensive devices in people's hands with some competitive options available. No, I would just like to reiterate that it's a mistake of people are assuming that we're not investing heavily in fiber, all of our companies. In the last two years, Winstream has built out 5,000 fiber connections to cell towers, invested over $400 million in those projects. And so we're putting fiber in every chance we get. And when we spend every, we allocate about $100 million out of our $800 million capital plan where we sit down and do just what Larissa said. You really wanna find a way to economically build it because you're the master of your own destiny. You provide a better customer service. So a big part of our process is looking at these opportunities. If we can justify the investment to put fiber in directly to a customer with a payback over a long-term contract, we'll do it. And I think all of us are doing that every day, absolutely. I think we have another question. Yeah, my name's Tom Sites. So you've acknowledged, and I think the numbers bear out that at the low end, cable's becoming more and more competitive. And then I think if you walk down the street here, there'd probably be several competitive providers in every tall building, reasonably tall building. So can you help us define where the problem is? Is it in suburban parks? Is it, you know, where exactly are there issues with not enough access? And you know, back to the point Gene was just making, is the incumbent response that it only makes sense to have one incumbent out in those areas? And then I have a second question. You know, Jeff, as an incumbent and a competitive player, how do you treat competitive players differently? Just are there best practices that you can use to share? So you've asked great questions. I just need to know where you're from so I can get them. I'm an ex-Wall Street analyst on my own. So it's everywhere. I mean, the downtown urban areas of most major cities, probably most of the buildings have at least two competitors in them, not all of them though. I mean, there are buildings that, like I said earlier, that may never have enough revenue in them to justify somebody building into it. Suburban areas are not well covered. Rural areas are really not well covered at all. So they would really be hurt by, you know, by any changes in the policy. So that it's really, if we have somebody who wants to go to, you know, Fargo, North Dakota, and we're not there, we have to buy that access from someone. And generally, there's probably only one provider, although I really don't know about Fargo specifically, but it just seems very far away. I always use Fargo as the example. I sometimes use Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and then I found out, oh, we're there. But it's really all over the place. And it's very building specific. I mean, that's one of the issues was the way some of the policy has been dealt with in the past, like how they were dealing with unbundled network elements, and they were doing it by central office. And that really doesn't make any sense. And they were decommissioning basically, or were making them non-competitive. And that whole policy made absolutely no sense whatsoever. You have to look at it on a building-by-building basis, and that's really, you know, that's really... But you just said that there were instances where, for you guys to build a wire into the building because... That's why, you know, when we talked about earlier, a lot of those buildings were built with a guaranteed rate of return, right? And so, you know... But you could say that about every building, right? We should be taking advantage of the fact that it's really a public, almost a public, you know, publicly funded network, right? And so, those are just buildings that we will never have enough revenue in to serve, but we still have to serve them because our customers, these multi-location customers, they very often, more often now than ever before, they want an integrated managed solution. They don't want to say, I'm gonna give half my network to you and half my network to you. It has to all play together. So if you can't do even that one location to that distant location, you don't win the business. So, and I will tell you, with Ethernet, you know, we had to really work hard with the incumbents to try to get them to sell wholesale Ethernet because it's been deregulated, which is extraordinary to me because Ethernet is really just special access, right? It's all it is. So special access, it doesn't have, you know, has monopoly market, well then, so does Ethernet, right? So we have to sometimes buy Ethernet and it costs us on a wholesale basis twice as much than the retail, the incumbents selling it to on a retail basis and competing against us. So how can we, how can, and that, those few circuits can hurt us from getting a 50 site, you know, network in place. You did get that point twice as much as the retail price. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that exists to the hay and that's because there's no competition to act as a backstop, you know, on pricing and there is also no regulation on Ethernet or excuse me, smart public policy on Ethernet to, you know, address that issue either. So it's a fundamental problem. So I'm listening to your numbers twice the retail price and I've got in mind that I've seen some of the arguments that whether you're for regulation or not here, a lot of things can just get worked out in the marketplace. There are negotiations that go on. You, business people resolve these things. That doesn't sound like a very good resolution. So it's not every incumbent that's doing it but there is, there is, I mean, I was just talking to my sales organization, they were telling me about a deal they were working on. They're like, how do we, you know, we just got this pricing from the incumbent on a wholesale basis. The customer told us what the retail rate was. So we, that's how we find out, right? So it doesn't work. It needs to be more reasonable. We need reasonable wholesale. You know, as I said earlier, the business market is very dependent upon wholesale inputs. We have to have access to wholesale inputs to be able to compete. So that we can just negotiate this out, government stay out of it, that doesn't seem to work well. Well, if there's competition, then you can negotiate it but if you don't have competition, if those locations, there's no competitors, they can charge whatever they want. All right, got it. In our case today, we do, in most cases, get last mile access. I think what we're talking about is we just want that continue to be the case as we think about this IP transition. And Tom, it's good to see you by the way. I didn't notice you back there. But also at WinStream, we're kind of unique in that we are an eye lack. We have competition in our markets today. We do have to provide last mile access as well. So we see both sides of it and it's competitive. And we just step up to it in our eye lack markets. We have overbuilders there. We have many, many people in the sea lack industry coming into our markets. And it's just part of the world's competition. So we've got to raise our game up to compete. Chip. Thank you. My question is, as we think through where we are today in terms of telecom policy, we had the announcement yesterday that Chairman Upton and Congressman Walden planned to prepare to rewrite the 1996 act by 2015. We have Chairman Wheeler that has come on board with a great new energy for the FCC with very clear competitive principles and many issues before the commission from the IP transition to the special access proceeding to other competitive issues. As we go forward in that context, is it possible to bring your customers into this debate? Whether it is the small, medium-sized business person whether it is the local hospital, the university, the community college, the anchor institutions, the federal agencies, the military bases, the key institutions and infrastructure around the country that you serve, how can we bring them into this debate so that it's not just one business sector arguing against another business sector? Absolutely, but I will tell you the ones that are there are actually customers out there who are afraid if they're currently locked into using an incumbent carrier. I've had discussions with customers who have told me that if they're afraid to come forth publicly because they have no other choice but to use an incumbent carrier in a lot of their especially rural locations or distant locations from the cities and that if they're afraid of making them mad because they are worried about what that will do to their service and their ability to get reasonable service from them. So we absolutely believe we need to bring business customers in. There are a lot of business customers who are very, very willing to do that. They do understand that this impacts them. We're fighting their battle. Right. We've been talking about it just alive today about the need for us to find those customers that are willing to come forward and make the case and we will do that. I strongly think we will. What's the difference in the solutions? I think they'll be able to talk about that pretty well. Absolutely. You have any more questions out here? Correct. You always do. You always do. I don't even need a mic. What do you guys fear about a test, a wire center test, trials that AT&T wants? I don't know why we would test something that's already been known to work for a long time. A lot of us are already interconnected on an IP basis with other carriers and each other. So the technology test is an interesting idea but it's been done. So I think the issue is more around making sure that certain value principles are in place. And one of the key ones, and I found it very refreshing to hear the chairman talk about the importance of robust competition. And that was the whole point of the act. And when it comes to IP transition, I think we have to be agnostic to the fact that technology may be changing. Laura said it well. 10 years from now, five years from now, technology's gonna change again. So the key is to make sure that the responsibilities that carriers have had in a TDM world flow through with any technology change. So why do you think a dominant carrier like AT&T is even asking for the test if there's nothing to be tested? Not sure. Well, it's certainly a diversion of resources onto things like gathering data on what's actually out there in the market. My view is facts and data, let's work with facts and data. Let everybody provide all the data on who's providing what services into what buildings across the country. There have been consultants who have done it so we already know the result and that might be part of the issue with the incumbents because they know the result too. And the result is that a good portion of the United States has one carrier in most of the buildings. And so the telecom act's been great. It's helped us all build our businesses but we need to continue to enforce it. We need to continue to have rules around as technology changes. So I go back to what my friend who represented business customers for years drilled in my head, security and redundancy. And the redundancy part we haven't really talked about but it comes in many forms. But the one that comes to mind to most of us is a natural disaster, a huge storm. Something totally unpredictable. Now, how do you do that in a test? I mean, how do you test for the unpredictable or the unlikely? We have those tests all the time and we're dealing with, we have national footprints. We have disasters, whether they're tornadoes, whether they're hurricanes, fires, you know. All sorts of things. And so, and by the way. Aren't we finding some of the technology doesn't work that well? Well, and that's true, but the carriers all work together to help one another during those times. And whether they're an incumbent or not, I mean, it's all for one and one for all to help the community. And I think that, I think when IP technology actually was great during a number of the disasters where people could just pick up their phone and go to another town and plug it in and suddenly they had voice services. So there's a lot of advantages to new technology. Which is exactly the product that we're trying to bring to the market for small businesses so that they can replicate their data because they're on a network, whether they're in Fargo or Oshkosh or New York and replicate their data in the cloud. That is the service that we're bringing to these customers. I don't think we're at Winstream, we're not against a test that's just difficult. When you think about the issue we're trying to deal with, we're trying to roll forward. As we said, it's a process from like 2013 where we are today to 2020 as we get closer to where some are talking about their IP transition. And so it'll be difficult to get a robust enough test to really fully inform you as to how this is gonna work everywhere. So there's no fear, I think, of a test. We just want it clearly defined. I think from that perspective, we want a timeline set on it so it doesn't go on forever. And we want FCC oversight so that it moves quickly. I think that's our position. Not that, there's no fear, I think, from our perspective. We've, XO has had an IP network since 2001. Okay, Earl. Yeah, I wanna come back to a point you've made a couple of times about their networks being built on rate of return. And I think implicit in that is the assertion and to Larissa's point that there's a lot of buildings that only have one connection. That because of the nature of the way these networks were built, that there's some kind of fairness in continuing to require access to those networks. But the counter argument that the other side is gonna make is that, yes, that's true for the old copper network, but not for the new fiber network. And so why should we have to share our fiber? Why single us out? You know, you might say because of market power and other things, but using your rate of return analogy, that would truly apply to the copper network. What about the fiber? And how do you have a policy going forward? Because you're now making their argument is that we are not gonna build fiber if it doesn't make economic sense and we're not guaranteed a rate of return. So how would you respond to that? Can you make do with the old network? Is that sufficient? I think the old, that there are many places where the legacy copper network will be in place for decades and I don't see that changing. Now clearly in the tier one markets where there's a lot of capacity, they'll put fiber there. But I think the copper network is a huge investment and an asset that I think we'll use for decades. And we're using it today with Ethernet capability to provide broadband services. So I think it's gonna be around for a while. And that is what I think about when I'm talking about this because so many of these business locations are on copper. They just are, they're not big enough to have fiber built into their location. So... And the incumbents are providing Ethernet over copper. AT&T is providing U-verse over copper. I think when people say, oh, we need to move away from copper, why? There's a lot of infrastructure out there. It's been bought and paid for. And so in that regard, why shouldn't everybody be able to continue to use that? And they are, technology's changing. It's probably, you're probably gonna get more and more over copper as well. So we've been going for... But fiber, I just to finish the point. The rate of return, when I think of it, I think of copper. And frankly, I think of it, that's a little bit different than the conversation we've been having. But the ability for some of these players to have a mass, the spectrum on the wireless side all came from the rate of return on the copper. It pays for it, right? So to that degree, and their ability to deploy fiber is because of the infrastructure they've put out there on the copper side and all the cash flow that they're getting off of it. So again, it's, you know, we want that they should be able to make money too, right? And it's not like that, that's obviously it's, we want reasonable business terms, right? And in fact, if the incumbents would just give us the same terms that they demanded of us when they buy from us, both from a cost stamp, a pricing standpoint and a service level agreement standpoint, I think we would all sign up for that tomorrow. Yeah, sounds like a good deal. Well, we've been going for an hour and a half. We've been very patient. So I appreciate the audience input. I want to end where I think we started. You have excellent panel, some veterans. I think what I just heard is old is not necessarily bad in some instances. New is great, but old is okay in terms of the network. So let's give them a hand for giving us this morning.