 to the Telecom Exchange CEO roundtables. Number two today, welcome for our guests here at Telecom Exchange NYC joining us in the room, and for our viewers joining us on Periscope as well as on JSA TV. We'd also like to thank our Wi-Fi sponsor, Kelly Dry. Our second panel today is Fiber as an investment, addressing North America's fiber deficiency. And we're honored to have my friend, Rob Powell. He's the editor and creator of Telecom Ramblings. For those of you who don't know Telecom Ramblings, it is the blog you should be reading in the morning with your cup of coffee. Rob, one hand coffee and the other, that's how I start my day. Rob's blog, Rob's Ramblings, I'm gonna rename it, is one of our industry's top blog sites. And prior to that, Rob's been writing about Telecom and internet infrastructure on Ramblings since 2008. And of course, the 10 years prior, spanning the dot-com boom and bust, he was a software engineer at Bentley Systems. He also has a master's in chemical engineering from Princeton, little known fact. So Rob, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Jamie. We're here today to talk about the fiber deficiency in North America. And I'd like to briefly ask my panelists to introduce themselves and tell us their bit of the background, Eric. Good morning, everybody. Glad to be here. Eric Contek, I'm the Chief Executive of GlobeNet. We own and operate a large sub-scene network, 23,000 kilometers connecting the United States with Bermuda, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. Glad to be here. John. Hi there, Jonathan Bartone, Director of Data Center Engineering and Network Engineering at CenturyLink. We're responsible for Data Center and Network Engineering for two and a half million square feet of data center space, 60 data centers with over 426 fiber providers, including dark fiber providers. Nice to meet you. Al. I'm Al DeGaber, I'll Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Hibernia Networks. And I have responsibility there for our product suite, our product strategy, and product development. And we are a global sub-sea and fiber optic cable service provider connecting North America, Europe, and Asia. Rob. I'm Rob Barlow, the founder and CEO of a company in Canada called YRE. We are a wholesale provider. We have about 160,000 routable kilometers of network and that is used to augment fiber to extend to the last mile to large enterprise and government. Thanks. What I'd like to first start off with is to talk about what our infrastructure fiber and otherwise in North America is today and what it can and cannot do. To what extent do the new flavors of our existing things like DSL and coax, HFC, wireless, et cetera, to what extent can they continue to keep satisfying customer demand and keep up with the rest of the network, have the economics of fiber to the home getting fiber everywhere. Has that reached critical mass yet? Jonathan, we start with you since CenturyLink. Sure, yeah, so funny, I just read this on Fierce Telecom yesterday. So from a CenturyLink perspective, CenturyLink incorporates about 6 million users of high-speed access. The average throughput's about five megs. Verizon actually leads with 7.67 megs of throughput. AT&T, five megs, they actually serve 12.4 million customers, Windstream, 1.6 million customers, 3.9 megs. As you can see, Frontier, 2.8 megs and 2.4. Throughputs are pretty small, right, relative to what we can do. We have a lot of cable providers out there that are pushing gig speeds. I think from a teleco perspective, there's work to be done. Thanks. Do you think the economics of fiber is becoming more attractive now relative to those or? In the business world, absolutely, CenturyLink has over 250,000 buildings that have fiber capabilities, 100 gig, ULH types of connectivity, and then we're actually mapping to 400 gigs in terabit. I know level three and Xeo are also doing some similar things in the business space. Residential's a little trickier, right? The cost of bringing fiber to homes is very, very expensive. So U-Verse, Verizon Fios, and CenturyLink Prism have some challenges around delivering high speed to definitely rural areas. I know that the feds have a mandate out there where the telcos have to spend money to make the rural telcos and rural infrastructure more robust, but it's still a challenge. And then you have the wireless, the LTE networks that can augment some of that, and then you also have HughesNet, which is really helpful in the rural areas where DSL and high speed are non-existent. Rob, you have to deal with a bunch of the rural stuff up in Canada, right? How does the interplay between fiber and HFC and various other flavors of microwave, et cetera, play up there? Well, it's the same challenges that we have in the United States as you do in Canada, perhaps our problems are a lot bigger. I would say, you could say rural, but I'd say underserved because there's business parks that don't have fiber and that have been there for 10 years. So it really comes down to distance and the economics around distance. There's a sweet spot for fiber builds, and then beyond that you can use alternative technologies that if you think about it from a service perspective, how they should all be able to offer some level of service and performance, but then of course then you've got another issue which is communicating with the end customer and what his expectations are. So I would say economics is really based on density, and it's still a challenge. I think that incentivizing is probably okay to build, but not so good after it's built. Do you think it's getting closer to the point where we can go all fiber in a lot more places? I think that you have to, yeah. I don't think that you're ever gonna say fiber everywhere. I think you're gonna have to say, we're gonna do the best we can with what we have using all different types of technologies. I think there's really an ecosystem that looks at the service that we wanna deliver first instead of the technology first. To the extent that we're talking about fiber to the business, vertical systems groups that keeps the tabs on how much of the penetration we have, and this year it looks like it'll pass 50%. Do you think that all that represents the attractive projects? Have we cherry picked everything? Is the last 50%, the second 50% gonna be a lot harder? From my perspective, there's still a lot of opportunities to extend fiber to business. It just depends on the number of businesses and targeted bandwidth that's required in the performance. I think that other access technologies like point-to-point microwave, point-to-multipoint, wireless, I mean they all come with their challenges but they can all be engineered and they should be part of the solution. DSL, bonded DSL, there's solutions there. I think it's really just about making sure that the end customer understands what they can get, making sure that we have innovative solutions and being agile and nimble. I think when Jamie made her big announcement about the future, it's really about us being more agile and having the ability to communicate effectively to manage expectations. Because one thing we can't control is return on investment and economics. It's still a major factor in how things are built. Jonathan, how does the fiber to the business side look for central link in that sense? Yeah, it's very attractive. I mean we have a very, again we have over 150,000 on-net buildings with fiber in them and then places that are kind of more expensive to build into, we're using copper and we can either use 10 megs via that technology and then technically you can do gigabit over copper and that's something else we're working on to roll out for customers where fiber isn't available is the gigabit over copper process. So I think there's some good alternatives and I know Verizon and AT&T and Winstream and Frontier have all done a really good job and popping more buildings. I know level three in Xeo and some of these other national carriers are doing a good job bringing fiber into multi-tenant buildings. And then of course, data center expansion also helps augment that, a lot of that stuff, that content is cash locally and you can actually get around some distance issues with just getting local loops, either fiber or copper to specific content in those specific cities. Alan, Eric, you guys both have a fair industry, enterprise footprint to the extent that you need to reach these customers. Is the fiber to the business, is it doing what you need it to do in the US? Does it reaching the places you need to go in the financial industry and et cetera? Well, let me answer that question from two points of view. The first one is from a Latin America perspective, I think the same issues that you see here you're gonna have down there except the fact that the revenue per user or the ARPU that you're gonna get is gonna be much slower. So you have to deal with the change rates, you gotta deal with different technologies and whatever. So what you're gonna see there is more construction of, let's say, fiber to the curb and then you use different access technologies to be able to reach, let's say, those businesses, right? I think if you look at the other part of the connection where people wanna go to, let's say, certain exchanges, let's say for high frequency trading or so and I think HiBurner can talk a lot more about that, you will find that we see a combination of solutions, right? In some cases, they just don't exist. So they have to be built and then you're gonna see some people accessing some exchange, let's say, with microwave because it's the shortest distance but then you're gonna back it up with fiber. So it's a combination of things that we're looking at. I think the large multinationals are trying to solve that problem because they wanna interconnect all their businesses and ideally they would like to use the same type of solution no matter where they are around the world and that doesn't really work that well. So you have to have a combination of technologies to be able to satisfy the same problem. Yeah, from a financial exchange perspective, your question of, hey, is it providing what we need to get to the business? It's like anything else in terms of density perspective, and where these key markets are and these key exchanges are, there's a number of options that enable us to connect our customers onto our backbone and our network and we don't see that as a tremendous challenge in what I'll call the markets where there's a lot more opportunity, density, there's tier one markets. Where we're finding, it's still, there's alternative solutions that are required is really when you get into some of the more evolving and developing and tier two type markets where, yeah, to Eric's point, there are gonna be multiple technologies or requirements or ways to get in, primarily to provide redundancy and backup because it's not reliable enough in terms of the fiber connectivity into those businesses. So I'm hearing from, go ahead. Just to compliment what Al said, and I think one of the mistakes that a lot of, let's say US companies do when they try to go international is that they assume that whatever they get here, you can get on the other side of the pipe and that's not really the case. I mean, it's a technology issue. It's whether something has been built or not, and in some cases even a regulatory issue. And so some of the time that we spend with our customers is educating them as to what it is that they can get so that they don't come in with the wrong expectation. Otherwise you're gonna be, hey, but that is easily solved. No, it's not. I mean, it's actually very complicated. If you gotta go through the jungle, for example, to provide a service for, let's say, live video event, it takes months of planning and construction and what have you for massive amounts of capacity that perhaps are gonna be used once. So there's an economic play also there. Yeah. And from what I'm hearing from all of you is that we're not really ever talking about a pure fiber future. We're always talking about a mix of technologies. Is that, would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. I agree. I think fiber definitely in the back, though. Yeah. I mean, there's no substitute for that, right? But when it comes to access, yeah, that's when you're gonna have the different technologies. And is the reason for that mainly that the asset is there or that those technologies really are going to be better in some places and some scenarios economically forever? Yeah, I'd say, you know, if you look at it from a service and performance reliability perspective first, you know, that's what you're trying to solve. A lot of times they're gonna stay there. Like if you, you know, you're looking at density in your business case for fiber. Cities have plans. The economy is what it is. And so, you know, you look at the base and then you build out. And if somebody puts an enterprise outside of a city by, you know, 10 kilometers, all of a sudden now you could have a microwave shot. That's probably gonna be there for a while until somebody just, until the rest of the, rest of the environment builds out around it. So, yeah, I think it just grows through time as, you know, it's like when we built cellular networks, percentage of population is really the driving metric. It's the same for fiber. So for fiber in the backbone, as you alluded to, much of our long haul and subsea infrastructure was all in North America built 15, 20 years ago at this point. How ready is that infrastructure to handle the coming traffic from in and out of things from terabit connections to the home, whatever else? Is it, do we need new builds at this point? Or is it another 10 years life on this infrastructure? Yeah, the beauty of the fiber that's in place via Southern Pacific Railroad is the infrastructure's in place and all you need to do is to upgrade the electronics. So from a CenturyLink perspective, we've already brawled at 100 gig backbone and we're planning on 400 gig in terabit upgrades to that backbone to augment all the traffic use. So from that perspective, it's pretty solid. Where you run into trouble is providing metro, 100 gig in specific NFL cities and typically you have to, you can't just use the LEC, quote unquote, sometimes you need to use another carrier and we're also seeing a lot of dark fiber requests in the metro, which is interesting. The proliferation of dark fiber and CenturyLink embraces dark fiber providers to augment the customer's network. It's definitely a hybrid approach and we partner with multiple carriers to provide that. Customers are looking for multiple carriers that mitigate single points of failure within the data center, within their customer location, et cetera, so to answer your question, yes, we're prepared. We're prepared. But do you think that there's gonna be a, you're mentioning that you need to run into problems in the metro, is that because they would need more fiber, more diverse routes, more on that parts of the city? What's missing there? Yeah, I'd say diversity is the biggest challenge. It's the beauty of a data center. When you colo your infrastructure in a neutral data center, you have access to multiple carriers at that point that have those assets that are built in. What about under the waves, shall we say? How is the Atlantic looking today? I would say from a subsea perspective, there's no doubt when you look at any bandwidth demand report in terms of the growth, in terms of international capacity and international bandwidth, it's just tremendous. It's growing strong double digits year over year. You look at a lot of the infrastructure that's in place and many of these systems are now 10, 12, 15, 20 years old when expected life expectancy of these systems design life is typically around 25 years. What I would say is I think it really varies by route. So it's hard to compare and say, hey, subsea infrastructure in general is at a point where it's at exhaust or it can't handle the growing demand. When you look in the Atlantic, there's obviously renewed demand in terms of or renewed investment in the transatlantic market. But prior to hibernic express coming online in September of 2015, it had been almost 13 years since another cable had been built. So that's an example of us taking an opportunistic approach to solving a real market demand in the Atlantic and deploying a new state of the art privately funded cable. So I think my observation is we've absolutely rationalized our approach to investment in subsea infrastructure and cables. I was fortunate or unfortunate to live through the period 15, 20 years ago when in the late 90s and the 2000s when everything looked like a great investment. And we certainly built to a point where there was oversupply, but that demand and supply is starting to rationalize and becoming a lot more economically sound. And in Ford Latin America. Well, let me add a couple of things there. Number one is all the cables that were built back, let's say 10, 12, 15 years ago, they're reaching almost half life. And we've been having conversations with the vendors and amongst ourselves in the subsea world that in reality, many of these cables, despite the fact that they were designed for 25 years, you can extend the life of those maybe for another five years. So then it becomes an issue of economics, right? How expensive is it to maintain them? What's the cost of upgrade? They were designed a certain way. And if you look at what's happening now, and in particular on the US Brazil route, for example, we're gonna have three new cables. And they're all pretty much express routes, right? And a lot of that is driven, not necessarily by the traditional use of telco where you wanted to have one service going to multiple points. Now you wanna go straight into market because what you ultimately want is to connect. As you had mentioned, Jonathan, data centers to data centers, right? And so the architecture is actually different. And so what's key there is not only the availability of capacity, because all of them can be upgraded, but actually to have a diverse route. And that's why sometimes, or in some cases, these systems are being built. So it's a combination of demand, a combination of actually who's gonna be using the cables, right? And one of the things that we're seeing, not only in our space, but around the world, is you have the very large scale web-centric companies and the OTTs that are driving that demand. I think I had shared with you, I was in a meeting about two years ago talking to one of these very large OTTs and they said, well, into Brazil we need 500 gigs of capacity. I'm just like saying, wow, 500 gigs, I mean, that is huge. Maybe across the Atlantic it is, or maybe terrestrial it's not, but internationally it's a big chunk. And I said, let me put this into context. We happen to have the largest broadband provider in Brazil with about seven and a half million broadband subscribers. And it took them 10 years to build up a demand of about a terabit. And now you, Mr. Web Scale Company, are coming in and you're gonna say that you need on day one 500 gigs. Wow, that doesn't seem reasonable. So we need it. We have our economists have looked at it, we need 500 gigs. Right, two weeks later I go back and I said, well, we did a mistake in the calculation. And I was assuming that they would go back to, let's say 200 gigs or something in that neighborhood. And I said, no, I think we're gonna need a terabit of capacity. And a lot of that has to do with how they expect the end user to be using technology. And everything is driven by video. If the applications that they have, whether it's on your cell phone, on your tablet, on your desktop, if there's a video component, the demand just goes straight up. And what's very difficult for these guys to do is to forecast what the demand is going to be. And what they really want is they want the end user to have a phenomenal end user experience on their device. So it is better for them to overestimate that demand than to fall short. Because if a user feels that the service sucks, they're just not gonna use it anymore. But if the experience is very, very good, then they're gonna continue to use it and it's gonna become sticky and they're gonna continue to demand more and more bandwidth. And a lot of the builds that we see in backbone networks as well as in subsea networks are all driven by what the OTTs and the website companies think they're gonna need, let's say, three, five, seven years from now. And since it takes a long time to build these infrastructures, they're planning for, let's say, that timeframe. What about the rest of you for those web-scale companies? Are they looming large in your decisions on what to build and what not to build? Is that a trend you expect to continue? Well, from my perspective, it's not too much of an issue, but I think that if you look, you can look at it from a macro perspective, from a service demand and requirement. Video is the way of the future. There's no, it's like a big crush is gonna happen. Then if you look at it below the layer of that, the three issues we see is really just interconnection standards. We see issues with real estate and how the process is around permitting to make that happen and also access to capital funding. So that's even at, those issues are, I mean, although they're kind of a micro level, they're the ones that actually make things take forever. So if you can imagine the whole, we've got the demand, but then you have the whole, we're not really ready for the demand discussion. So I think that, I know in Canada, I think one of the big web-codes has been trying to buy dark fiber across Canada for a long time and it's just not there. Do you think they'll ever build it themselves? Yeah, absolutely. Probably they have 10 more times the dark fiber available to them than any other telco in Canada. So it's really about population though. So I, you know, from, because my business is really about serving the large enterprise and government, it's more about, it's a different model, right? But my partners, who are all the Canadian telcos, definitely have a challenge on their hands. And it's just because of the explosion of video. And it's not just, you know, consumer to the home. It's wireless in your car. It's the whole connecting the car. It's everything. Well, we have actual major computers on our laptops. Or we have our smartphones. Our biggest issue is the battery, but the real issue is the fact that video kills the battery. So, true. Yeah, for us and the, you know, the OTTs and the large web scale companies, you know, they've changed the paradigm in the subsea investment for sure, right? So, you know, long gone or not long gone, but you know, gone are the traditional carrier models and the consortium models. And, you know, what we're seeing is, you know, these big OTTs and web-centric companies really serving as the anchor tenants in terms of, you know, the new cables and the new systems that are being deployed globally. And it really is to satisfy the demand that they have. It's an interesting model. They'll tend to partner with the service providers or the operators. They want to be, they want the owner economics, but you know, from a management and ongoing maintenance perspective, they'll partner with the service provider who has an expertise in that area. But it's, you know, hands down, they're a critical component to continue and expand the infrastructure globally. And what we're seeing, for example, even on the threshold side, is that if they cannot get, let's say, as Rob mentioned, the access to the dark fiber, they will definitely build it. But they're not just gonna go with a traditional build. They're gonna sit down, they're gonna say, hmm, can we use, for example, subsea fiber in a terrestrial network so you can have a larger cross-section and put a lot more bits into that same pipe. And actually, there's a network that is rumored to be built somewhere between the West Coast and the East Coast that it's supposed to link major interconnect sites. And they're redesigning the infrastructure so that they have, let's say, almost unlimited growth. So it's not only about the number of fiber pairs that you're gonna put in, but it's the type of fiber that you're gonna use so that they can support a lot more, let's say, video traffic and things like that that today are not, let's say, in the equation. So they're really forward-looking, the way they approach these things, they're thinking about what is it that they're gonna need and because they're very cash-rich, they can make decisions that may not have a return in the short-term. And I think that's also where you're gonna see a difference in the sense that there is available capital in the markets to go out and build things. But the fact is, what's the payback and over how much time and what's the exit? And so the economic is something that needs to be looked at very, very carefully, but there is a need, I believe, for neutral fiber backbone to be built, to be able to support, let's say, the demand that is expected to happen in particular in the United States. And I just wanted to make a comment about, we talked about video and it's wreaking havoc on networks, not from a fiber perspective, but from a peering perspective. So, CenturyLink and AT&T and Verizon, a level three, and Xeo are constantly upgrading their interconnectivity in these peering points to satisfy everybody that are accessing Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Video, and it's a huge challenge for the carriers to provide that content. So, a couple of workarounds is for these video providers to actually cache via CDN in local data centers and then use local metro fiber, local connectivity, local DSL to kind of bypass that, but that's probably the biggest pain point we have from a network operating perspective is the peering congestion caused by video providers. Is that, my next question here was what the biggest problems that service providers face when it comes to building out infrastructure or making these decisions is, for CenturyLink, that peering level? Is that where it sits? Or is it more on the financial justifying things? It's a good question. It'd probably be, the peering would be part of the, probably one of the biggest challenges and then also expanding the network to provide fiber connectivity to other customers that are outside the NFL cities. A lot of cities get kind of left behind if they're not part of that big NFL network from a ultra long-haul perspective, so picking out those, but then we do have the federal subsidies, the CAF money that the feds give, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink to subsidize fiber augments, but yeah, peering is probably our biggest pain point. I would offer from a global service provider perspective, for me it really falls into three buckets in terms of some of the challenges. Obviously one is overall the business justification. We've moved out of, particularly from a service provider space, moved out of that build it and they will come phase. Two is really the funding, the source of funding, securing customer commitments, securing private investment, whatever it may be, but that's obviously a big hurdle in terms of getting systems built internationally. And third one, Rob touched on as well, which is just the regulatory piece. Particularly when we talk about international systems and landing rights, there's permitting, there's rights of ways, there's a lot of issues that you have to navigate through that are very regional, country specific. What can be done better on the regulatory front? Is there other things that the government shouldn't be doing or should be doing better or should be doing at all? Rob? Well, that's been a hot topic, I think, for the last 10 years, you get, you know, it, when you're influencing voters and stuff like that, you can say a lot of things, specifically when you're trying to influence a device that's on every voter's hip. So, but it's really difficult to do because, you know, that do you say it's a right for everybody to have connectivity? Yeah. You should, but who pays for it? The economic development returns are there, but that's a broader business case. It's not something that organizations that have borders are really, you know, gonna think too big about. I think the world of the internet and video and our world is an international world. I think that, you know, there's been some, there's been a lot of municipalities trying to drive building networks and have done it, but then it comes back to, okay, my money's gone five years from now, so I need someone to take it over. I think, you know, there's always going to be some kind of digital strategy at government levels and it's going to maybe not meet the needs of where we need to be. I know in Canada they've had consumer type incentives, but the limit is five meg, right? And five meg doesn't go very far. So it's really painting a broad picture across all consumers and constituents and if you have some money, where does it go and stuff like that. So it's not a, it's, I think the United States, if FCC's way, it's farther ahead than EVE in Canada is, you know, pole attachments. In Canada we have to pay for every pole attachment with it and it has to be certified by a civil engineer, right? So there could be things changed in that regard. So it's really kind of a growth thing, I think we're still behind the digital economy from a regulatory perspective. You know, it's governments are probably the last kind of individuals that you really want to manage and operate a network. So yeah, there's a lot of work to be had. I think us as telcos though, have a great spot at the table. I mean, they have to listen to us because we're the ones that actually have built the network. So. Let's look ahead 10 years ahead now. Envision traffic demand from internet of things and all these other things. Where do you think the bottlenecks will be? I mean, in the past we've had bottlenecks in the last mile, we have maybe bottlenecks right now in the internet exchange area perhaps. 10 years from now, when traffic has gone up what, 50, 100% each year, how will that affect where the bottlenecks are in infrastructure in North America and globally? Anybody want to take that? Well, from my perspective, it's not going to be in the data center because it'll all be local. I think it's still going to be local loops. I think it's going to be from the user to that content whether it's local or national. Yeah, at that level will be a terabit and 10 terabit local loops and that might get cost prohibitive and then the wireless, the LTE networks, the AT&T, the Verizon's are going to have to really, really work on upgrading their backbones to support the internet of things and people using their devices to access the internet. So I think just domestically these guys are much better on the international side but I think it'll be traditional local loops and wireless for bottlenecks. The last mile, the last few miles. The last access piece is really going to be the problem. It always has and I think it always will be. I mean, I would agree. To me it's really about scale and density and that's always going to be the long pole in the tent and that's the last mile connection. From a long haul, from a subsea perspective, from a gear perspective, no issues there. It's really that last mile piece that will continue to be the long pole in the tent. And I think in Latin America, I would add to that list power. Power is a major issue and the other thing is that you don't have the density. So and since typically the utilities don't talk to each other, perhaps the way they're looking at their particular region is different from, let's say the way we as a telco provider would look at the region. So you're starting to see conversations but you're also starting to see governments get into action, right? 30 years ago DARPA funded the backbone of the internet. Now in Latin America you have different countries funding huge national backbones and because they know that there's no economic justification for a telco provider to take those services, let's say all the way out to the rural area. So they're saying, well, in that case, then let's put some money in there to make sure that we can create a better playing field and that even the people that are way out in the outskirts have access to the internet and telemedicine and education and all these things. So they're putting money into some very large national backbone projects that eventually some companies are gonna have to operate. Because again, I think I agree with Rob, you don't want the government operating those networks but they're willing to put money in. So we've seen, for example, in Colombia some very interesting projects, like Plan B with Digital, which they funded $200 million for a company to build a backbone network and then they came up with kiosks and they came up with other type of solutions going all the way out to the end user. I think some of those projects are gonna be successful and others probably not. But at least the money is there to go out, let's say, and build some of that infrastructure. But it needs to be a coordinated effort. If you just build the, let's say, the fiber and you cannot get to it or you don't have the power for even a smaller data center or taking content to the edge, it's gonna be difficult. So I think we're gonna go through some bumps in the road but eventually we will have some infrastructure in that area. By coordinated effort, who's being coordinated? Is it you guys in the government only or data center providers or everybody? It's a combination of things. And it varies by country. For example, in the case of Peru, they came up with this project called Red Dorsal which means the dorsal backbone of the country. And then the government said, look, in order to make it easy, we're gonna dictate price. So there's not gonna be a price variation and make it very, very cheap but a cost plus model, some people can come in and use it and then they outsourced the operation to be a bid process for an operator to run the network. So they put the money up or part of the money up and then they want somebody that knows how to do this to run it. So they signed, let's say, 20 year contracts or something like that. So we'll see, five years down the road when it's built and it's operational then you're gonna go through those, let's say those tweets. But I think in most cases they've realized, the governments have realized that they have no business in running anything. So they can promote, they can incent, let's say, provide some access to capital but they want somebody that knows how to do it to run it. So I think one thing we should talk about too is, I mean, there's a lot of innovative things that are going on, like network function virtualization where you can throttle bandwidth and stuff like that and you can push that to the edge and there's things that are being done with radio spectrum, you know, there's standards bodies driven by the United Nations that everybody's part of. So I think that you're gonna see, I mean, there is a coordinated effort but it's not like, not unless you're in the industry, you kind of might not know that it's coordinated but it's really trying to bridge that access medium for the exponential growth that we're gonna see and there is a lot of innovation being done and I think that when challenges are posed to us, we actually end up delivering. We're just harder on ourselves than we really think, like, because we think things are bad but really 25 years ago, we had a cell phone was what? We didn't know what it was. So now we're making phone calls fishing in the middle of a lake. So I think it's going to take some time but it's a slow moving thing and radio spectrum, efficiencies, network virtualization or all the kinds of things that are gonna happen to actually help us. Do we have any questions from the audience or from the audience? So I wanna, I have a unique perspective as a Brazilian Canadian or Canadian Brazilian, I guess, a citizen of the universe. We have a great digital divide in both countries. So I'm thinking of Canada, if I go 100 miles away from the border with the West, I mean Nurengbu or some places like that or you don't even need to go that far, you think of water areas even in rural border, et cetera. You don't have connectivity. Similarly in Brazil, you think of the northeastern part, the northeast, you know, we don't have this and I keep thinking about the economics of fiber and from service providers to spend that money and in some of these areas, there are the people whose possible income is in that grade. We need a solution outside the box. Is there any possibility where you think that perhaps, you know, some futuristic technology could either be something that's maybe now that will be sort of advanced, like we talked a lot about G-Pons and G-Pons bringing sort of the fiber closer and closer but you still have the last piece in copper or maybe something futuristic like Google Balloons or something like that. So I want to know from Eric and Rob, what do you think will help us address that challenge of the digital divide in Canada and Brazil? So from my perspective, a lot of the infrastructure is driven by government assets being there. You know, if you have a community, you're gonna have to have a police station. So there's a lot of, that investment goes in. It's how do we now leverage that investment and it's a, so there's local guys who can supply unlicensed spectrum and make it happen. But a lot of the consumers don't like it, right? Cause they want what they have in downtown Toronto, for say, and when they go home 45 minutes north, they're not, they don't really like 5M, you know, they can only use Netflix on one iPod, not five. So there's a, there's technology there but it doesn't really serve the purpose. So I think you get things like, I don't know if you've heard of low or orbit satellite networks that are happening, they're probably driven by another big business, maybe cars, I don't know. There's some other means behind it. Consumers and people, you know, they're not the best kind of customer to have if you're gonna put a lot of investment in unless you have a lot of them, right? So there's all those kinds of economic decisions and behavior that we see today that actually is creating kind of the slowness, we think, of the process. You know, cellular companies really only go off of the roads. You know, you're not gonna go too far off the road unless you've got somebody paying 100%, a large mining company will pay if it means that he's not gonna get production up and running. So it's just a whole, it's not an easy model. It's not a model that's gonna, anyone's gonna really just like wave their magic wand and solve overnight, but I think through time it will be solved. Also, you know, I think the entrepreneurial individuals out there are, you know, if they're supported correctly with the right longer term vision from financially and there's more attention given to kind of the social need of how important this is. It may speed up. From a technology perspective, I know every operator, if someone came to them with a technology that was gonna make it easier for them to deploy to their end customer, they would buy it, right? Because everybody walks around trying to please the end customer from a service perspective. So it's really about our investment community changing their limited partnership models for investment. It may be different types of investment. It may be more joint venture capital and government investment. Those kinds of things actually are helpful and make change. Canada and Brazil probably are pretty close to the same thing. From they're both resource-based economies. They both have remote and rural citizens. And it's just trying to leverage what we know we can do today for tomorrow. I think that these very cash-rich web-scale companies are testing new technologies very, very cool. It's not always gonna work. I mean, Google has balloons, Facebook has drones, Microsoft is testing, for example, underwater data centers. I mean, they have money that they can use to play with at the end of the day for different reasons. And I think that that is super cool. And if they can partner with an operator to deploy some of these things, I think some of them will work, but they know that they're taking high risks. So we looked at, for example, you take a country like Nigeria, right? I mean, I didn't know that they had 200 million people. They're about the size of Brazil, right? And it was like, wow, it's a wake-up call. I didn't think of Nigeria as being that big, right? And they're not really well-served. And so the thought was, well, you build a subsea cable, or you use one of the existing ones and you can reach that country. And then you can blanket the country, let's say with 4G networks, or with balloons, or with drones, or with what have you, then the question becomes, what about the device? I mean, this thing right here is, in Brazil, about $2,000, right? So not an awful lot of people can afford a $2,000 device. But their thought is that eventually the Chinese will produce a smartphone probably in the neighborhood of $50. Now there, the economy then just changes, because I mean, maybe you can afford a $50 device, right? And if somebody is subsidizing, let's say, that infrastructure, whatever that is, to be able to reach a $50 device, then things start to make sense. In this particular case, that project actually was, I think they slowed down, not that they killed it, but they slowed down, because they realized that it's very difficult to do business in the country tied to regulatory reasons, and other stuff, so well, if it doesn't work there, then let's try somewhere else. So they're looking, let's say, at Paraguay, they're looking at Colombia, they're looking at a place like that, right? Because they do believe that it's part of their mission to take the internet, let's say, to those consumers. So I do believe that the combination of technology innovation, in some cases, business model innovation, is gonna allow you to close a digital divide. It's gonna take time. There's no one recipe for everything, right? So each country's different, culturally speaking, they're different, and just having a cell phone or a smartphone does not solve necessarily their problem. So you need to have the right apps, the right sticky apps. So the youth market, of course, is all about playing, watching videos, and whatever. But if you have, for example, right distance learning tools, right? Or if you go to a farmer and they have the price of, let's say, coffee at the port versus how much they produce inland, and they can figure out, okay, I can charge this much, and those type of tools, then they're gonna start using the devices and be productive. So I do believe we're gonna see in some geographies' tests. I think in some cases they're gonna be phenomenal. I think in other cases they may fail. And as long as the company is making the investment, is aware that they're probably gonna lose their money and they're okay with that, then you're gonna continue to see some of those innovative ideas throughout the world. All right, one more, and then we gotta break for lunch here. It's interesting, I've heard several comments. I think that Tardia's point of mention needs to be various technologies, especially on the last mile topic, right? That's always the choke ball, whether we have a facility, if you own it, if not, type two, and then you're at the mercy of the type two, it affects the quality of service, parts of control, and the economics, you gotta leverage your agreement, you gotta take that equation out of the agreement so you don't get hurt financially, right? And say, listen, Mr. Customer, there's what we can do, there's what we can deliver, but this is the limitation we have, right? In certain ways, but if you own the last mile, you own your channel, and you can claim the five lines and say, we glorify our network, and this is what we can do, right? So as, I read an article, Cisco, as a white page, where they said, if by the year 1920, the demand is gonna be a set of it. U.S. CEOs, how do you see that crystal ball within your organization, whether you're in control, you penetrate and fire that? First in is the guy that gets all the glory in terms of finance, right? So that's what we all see. And companies do grow, whether it be if you build it, or through acquisition, central interest known for that, and you guys grow by, and then you, whether it be the culture, you implement it, you take certain segments out, and then you may be grown. So for the other companies here, how do you see that in your future, looking at that crystal ball? I think the more demand, like so on, on some of the costs we have, the more demand the cheaper it is. Sometimes I see bandwidth pricing, and I'm like, wow, how does that guy even make money? Right? He's in a competitive marketplace. But the cost of spectrum fees, and the costs of rooftop leasing, and access rights, and labor aren't going down, they're going up. But the consumer and enterprise expectation is that it should be cheaper. So I think the whole over-the-top business model actually is very disruptive for growth and for what we all really want to achieve as society. But what it does do, that kind of growth is gonna happen, and at some point there will be a tipping point. I mean, there's just has to be. It's just a matter of when. I see Facebook and Google and all those guys actually, they're gonna have to become more involved because it will start to affect their end customer. And so I don't know when. But one thing is it actually instills change. So when they show up, I've been in places where I've showed up and I've said, well, I'm gonna put 50 meg to that school and then the incumbent all of a sudden can fork out all the money for fiber to it. Right? So it's that kind of thing will help build and get us to where we need to be. I think though there is gonna have to be some kind of like, hey, well, you know what, we have to work with the big operators. And one thing to note is that when you're in a big webco, you can try a lot of projects and fail, and that's okay. When you're an operator and you've got to close out the end of day for a central bank, there's no failing there. So people need to realize, I think that operators are gonna focus on where our needs are because I mean, in the end, they're actually providing a service that if there was any kind of disaster that would be, it's key, and that's first. So these things saying, I know there's gonna be lots of growth in 2020. Consumers are gonna probably drive that, but they're also gonna hit the refresh button. Anybody else or are we all ready for lunch? All right then, thank you for our panel and thank you all for coming.