 Hey there everyone, this is JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of Cataya, and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our February JSA virtual roundtable. Part of our monthly broadcast, we've been honored to host for several years now. But new for 2020, we are providing the first 100 registrants with lunch on JSA. So thank you for joining us and hope you enjoy your lunch. We're also excited to say folks are hungry for quality content. We have nearly 130 registrants tuning in live today. So thank you everyone for joining and in true roundtable style. We want to hear from you. If you have questions for our amazing panelists, please go ahead and type them into our little question box. And if we have time at the end, we'll be sure to post a few, pose a few questions to our panel. Also, if you have a speaker suggestion for next time or to check out our upcoming monthly topics, speakers or to just register for more roundtables coming up down the pipe, please go ahead and check out our brand new site, jsa.net. All right, let's get started today's topic, micro-edge. Where is it and where is it heading? We have an all-star C-level lineup for absolutely innovative companies joining us today. And to help us introduce them and to guest moderate our panel. Please welcome back my friend Jerry Christiansen. He is the founder, CEO and principal of Mind Commerce, one of our industry's top research consulting advisory companies focused exclusively on the TMT. Jerry, the floor is yours, my friend. Thank you, Janie. I appreciate the introduction. And so as part of our research practice and consulting, we cover edge and related areas like 5G. I'm very pleased to have the panelists introduce themselves next and we're going to jump right to that. So, Phillip, why don't we start with you, just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, Janie, for hosting. Again, great to be a part of your series here. Phillip Marangella, the CMO at EdgeConnex. EdgeConnex is a wholesale data setter provider. We kind of span the spectrum, not just for the edge, but everything hyper local to hyper scale is how we like to say it. And we often get asked how do we define the edge? It really isn't us, it's our customers. So wherever our customers need to go, we will build it in terms of the size, in terms of the location, exactly to their parameters so they can best get their deployments as close to their end users and customers as possible. So with that, we have over 40 data centers and over 30 markets in North America, Europe, and South America today. All right, Greg, you're up next. Good afternoon and thanks, Jamie. I went with the Jason's deli option and it arrived about 10 minutes ago. So I'll try to wait till after we're done here to dive into that. Greg Patine, co-founder of Edge Micro, we're an early stage company offering edge services, specifically co-location at the edge. All right, great. Doug, how about you? Yes, Doug Rekker, I'm the founder of Edge Presence. We deploy micro data centers, build and deploy micro data centers throughout the country, strictly for collo-neutral housing of servers, like Greg's doing and probably the majority of the panel. Fantastic. You, last but not least. Cool, thank you. Hugh Karspeck, CEO of Darpoints, micro edge data center owner and operator. We've been operating since 2012. First deployments coming online back in 2013. And we are very excited to be in this space and kind of help grow in it with my co-panelists. All right, fantastic. Well, let's just jump right into it. We've got a list of prepared questions. But again, as Jamie said, we're definitely going to be taking some questions from viewers and participants and we'll get to those too, hopefully quite a few of those. So the first question we're going to go with, this is the question that we hear a lot about, is what are the leading apps for Edge, both on the consumer side and the business side? So apps are services. And I'm hearing you guys say that the deployments are driven by their customers. And there might be what are your customers deploying in terms of applications? All right, so I'll start just to get things rolling. You know, it's funny to say in terms of the Edge and the discussions we're having today, you know, now Edge is so fashionable and in vogue, right? And we've been doing this for many years now, long before Edge was the hot topic, right? And I think the first way for us, for our customers is really about getting the content closer to the eyeballs, right? Serving a market like Phoenix out of a, the one Wilshire building in LA, it just wasn't cost effective, it wasn't performance and latency sensitive, effective either, right? And so that's what drove customers asking us to deploy these Edge data centers and a lot of the tier two, tier two markets across the United States. That's phase one, phase two cloud, right? Same notion, but for the enterprises, putting the workloads in the infrastructure closer to where the enterprises are, serving a market out of Portland locally, rather than asking customers to come up to Seattle or down to Santa Clara was key. And then the next wave obviously of things like IoT, autonomous vehicles, VR, AR and so forth and so on, that are really kind of driving a much more distributed architecture going beyond the current data center deployments throughout the United States and beyond. Yeah, I've got a really good case study that we just deployed really interesting and we're learning a lot as we go to, right? So we're seeing customers asking to do certain things that we didn't think about. So prime example, we just deployed a couple of micro DCs along the railways. And what they're doing with these micro DCs is they built a basically a shelter that these trains fly through about 60 miles an hour and hundreds of cameras and it's analyzing everything on the train from the bolts if there's a loose bolt or if there's somebody actually on the train it analyzes all this. So six miles out before it hits the yard just like in Waycross, Georgia, they have a huge yard there. They know before it hits the yard which train or which device needs to be taken offline and fixed. Instead of having the 30 people they have now walk up and down and inspect them. It's very dangerous. It's time consuming. So that data needs to compute and needs to cash really at that site there. So you're in the middle of nowhere basically. So they don't have the ability to bring a big pipe to transfer this data back to their data center in Atlanta or even Jacksonville. So what they're doing is they're computing right there and shooting it right back to the yard six miles up. That's a perfect case study of what we're seeing in the industry and also with transportation. We have another customer that's looking at doing the same thing but on site at all their distribution facilities. So we're kind of learning a lot as we go here where it's evolving every day. And I was at a customer yesterday. It's a new case study. So it's really neat and it's cool to see how this is all evolving. That's great Doug. And that seems like an extreme example catching the imaging right there. And is there any real time aspect to that or they just catching it and then maybe back calling it at some point? No, there's real time actually on that. So yeah. And they're using two different technologies right now. And one is they're using 4G. They're using a point-to-point wireless point-to-point. They're also using LAN. So they can build out a small pipe to that site and they can basically pick the data they want to send. They can go through it and analyze which data they want to send and cache and immediately repeat back to the station. Perfect. Would you like to weigh on this question as well? Absolutely. I think Doug is bringing something quite significant to that conversation which is there's a lot of opinions on Edge and who are the users and what are these applications. And we're all very Silicon Valley fixated on our Netflix and things like that and content delivery. That's fantastic. But there are many, many different use cases of this. Doug bringing up the railroad for example that had been out there for many, many years. And it's interesting. I've given this example before but we talk about autonomous driving vehicles but people don't realize that John Deere's been doing this for 12 years, 15 years. And so these are things that are very necessary. We've calculated up to now there's about 40 to 50 new types of industries that are not just using the data consuming the data but actually creating their own data and they're having an influence on this data. So for example, as we engage in some of the rural areas on these new systems that are going out there we've got new customers like the insurance companies that are starting to weigh in on what's being done. And it's so these applications can range from very simple, very telecom access interconnection. That's fine. There's those that are actually we have a site. Well, first of all, one thing that is a little bit unique about dark points relative to the others is that we've deployed in almost all forms of real estate. High rises, green fields, parking lots, garages. We started with trying to believe it or not build units in times of inside of storage facilities which was came to a disastrous end. But there are the reasons for that is because there's the power, there's the telecom and it's to Phillips point, it's pushing out toward where the customers are and where they were acquiring. So one application obviously we're hosting a very large hotel company. We tend to talk to the ecosystem. So each of these users buy it and consume it in very different ways. And other people come in and consume those that are in the data center. So it creates a marketplace and ecosystem. Well, this large hotel came in using the data center. That's fantastic. Then all of a sudden you recognize that all the CDNs were shown up. Why? Because they're all vendors to the hotel. And then at that point some of the cloud operators started coming in because obviously all those services sit on top of those cloud, that cloud infrastructure. So you see a lot of use cases that are not very specific to applications that are in the headlines today. Very good. Greg, how about you? Yeah, I think that, you know, first you have to define where the edge is. I think that certainly edge connects their model, originally to build their edge data centers, you know, the one to two megawatt, really servicing the MSOs, the cable codes. And then, you know, they've certainly gone a slightly larger direction, but also with their eye on getting a little further out than their 38 edge data centers, we are focused on what we would call the far edge. And that is underserved markets, could be NFL cities, but certainly not around the tier one peering cities of New York, Ashburn, Dallas, and the seven other tier one markets. I think with the far edge, when you talk about what use cases are going to drive it, in this case, I think the infrastructure is going to drive the use cases. I think this is about the network effect. And unless we and the other companies on this panel can get scale out there fairly quickly. And by scale, I mean 30, 50 or 100 nodes, this isn't interesting to anyone. It is only interesting when you can get to that. Inflation point where you really, the network effect takes place. So I think once that infrastructure is out there, a lot of smart people will figure out how to utilize it. Right now though, obviously we've got to have people paying the bills so we can close money and start to scale this thing. The initial use cases that we're actually having people pay us for are basically around video delivery. And that could be the CDNs, specifically could be the hyperscalers looking to get some of their applications, whether that's collaboration tools, cloud gaming. I don't know. And they don't know in many cases, they're trying to test this to figure out, you know, how do they rearchitect this third wave of the internet to prevent the tromboning and hairpinning that goes on in these metros and be able to deliver, you know, less than a 10 millisecond consistent performance. And performance obviously is not just based on latency, it's based on jitter, being able to bring that content, you know, closer to that endpoint and provide less packet variability and thus less jitter. It's bandwidth, the ability to bring more volume closer to the user regardless of what the upstream limitation is. It's availability, diversity, security, obviously. So performance applications right now that customers are willing to pay us for are based around just that, better performance and getting this thing at its scale. Those are all great answers and great dialogue. So I'd like to piggyback on what Greg was saying with respect to the network effect. I think Phillip is speaking, sorry. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Phil. And maybe I was going where you were going to start to follow on, Jerry, around the network effect. And I think Greg makes a great point, right? You know, for all of us, what I see us trying to solve, right, is a lot of the elements that Greg was talking about, this rearchitecting the internet because there's so much, the volume of data, the velocity requirements of data in that variety, right? And the different folks, whether, you know, Doug in your use case with the train, right? Hey, the train service, the train company wants it, the cloud company, and it's, you know, historically, the network traffic flows have always been download-centric. But now so much data is being created at the edge. It's creating these bottlenecks at the edge to try to, you know, as you capture this, some of it stays at the edge, goes to other edges, or back to the core to capture and analyze. And so now it's becoming multi-directional. And this is where the peering at the edge and having data centers, you know, whether they're edge or micro-edge, are so important to smartly route that traffic and alleviate the bottlenecks that are rising and being created because there's so much, whether it's the device, whether it's the car, whatever it may be, this is the key role that we as a collective are trying to solve, so that, you know, you don't have any of the impediments to the next generation of technologies that are rolling out. That's great. Philip, actually, I was going to go to you next, but that was a great answer. I would like to add on to that to say, it seems like this whole edge rollout thing is going to be very iterative in the sense of what Philip and Greg just said, that there is going to be a need to focus on what infrastructure is there to determine what we can do. So today, it may be a lot about video, it may be a lot about CDNs and optimization for apps and services that we already have, making them better. So getting into our next question, which has to do with how is this all going to be deployed? I'd love to hear from you guys your thoughts about are there any differences in terms of a carrier deployment and what they might do, what's driving that, what apps and services and what they might use it for versus some of the private networks. And when I say private networks, there could be any type of enterprise or industrial customer or maybe even a government customer. So I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about that. Are you seeing any differences there? Can we characterize that or generalize that? So you, how about we go with you first? Great. There are very different use cases. Now, the good news is that everybody kind of backs it together at a mature site. When we started off, we've made a lot of assumptions and many of those assumptions were wrong. Many of these assumptions are still out there in the marketplace that people will also learn their own lessons on. But as you approach, a lot of people are very fixated depending on which industries you come from as to who your customers are and how you're developing. Going strictly after a carrier mindset, a carrier customer, they're going to have a different deployment process. If you go after disenterprise, you're going to have a different type of process. You also have different types of profitability based on those types of models and you have to balance those. And you also need to understand, we've all seen that paradigm, that cliche picture of the small fish followed by bigger fish and so on and so forth. You need to understand who your customer is within that pecuniary. Your first one. There's a lot of talk about anchor tenants. That's great, but if that anchor tenant can't feed, that anchor tenant is talking to be an anchor tenant for very long. And those are things that are really hard lessons to learn. What's also interesting is how these are deployed and what's starting to come down the pipe. Some of our customers are starting, and this is a cautionary veil to everyone listening, we're seeing technology that is, we'll be deploying some proof of concepts here that are actually changing the way some of these data centers are built. Which is great. It's good for me, lowers my costs. But it also it adjusts how these are being used. And so now what that does is that does open up a totally different avenue of customers to consume the space, whether it's for 5 minutes, 15 minutes or several years. But if say this is a very it's very, this is not just kind of a data center take two or data center take three. This is a new type of evolution if you will. And as I mentioned earlier there's a lot of folks that are an influence in it. Greg, what do you think? Go ahead Doug. Well I, you know everybody on this panel built data centers right. We built brick and mortar data centers. What I see out there right now we go into primary tier three markets. We have deployed some in what I call a type two market. But the real need I think is the type three market and the centers, the micro DC's that you're building right are going to I'm not really worried about the Verizon building the same unit that I'm building because I built my data centers based on carrier neutral and I think you're going to find in these markets as well. I look at the tier three markets you know back when I first built my first one in 2009 I always wanted to build one in the tier three market because they need access there they need connectivity but it doesn't make sense to build a $12 million brick and mortar there it doesn't it won't work right. So they still need that facility there that is a neutral facility so I really think just getting back to what they're going to look like the carriers and what we're going to look like is a carrier neutral just just a smaller brick and mortar data center and they're going to need that then you build the ecosystem out you build a peering point out you build all that and hopefully hopefully the carriers will come and they want to co-locate in there to capture the customer there and capture that that market it's easier for them to co-locate now they have an instant presence in that market that's what I was thinking and and I would ask everybody to see if this resonates their body that there's well first of all there's definitely a need for neutral micro DCs I get that but are we saying that that's going to be the predominant role initially or overall or or another way of asking the question is will there be a role for the carriers for deploying a telco closet type of a thing at an enterprise and not being a carrier managed service you know there's facilities still need to be built out they even if they have an existing old shelter there they still need to build those I think everybody on this panel knows that we're more agile we can move quicker than they can I I foresee them taking space in a lot of our facilities because they don't have to put the capex and they don't have to it'll take them a long time that's what I see guys I mean I don't know what you're thinking but that's that's what I see that oh no question though and when you say carriers obviously are you are you there's terrestrial there's wireless both there's ISP what no I'm asking Jerry what specifically we need to find define carrier well you can answer from any the above because I should say communication service provider perhaps that's more all-encompassing but when I say carriers I do think of the Verizon's in the 18th ease of the world though okay that well they're they're too big they're too slow they can't scale this they've proven it in the past and they're trying to do a walled garden approach just like Century Link and I think eventually our customers collectively here are going to put pressure on the telcos those three specifically when we prove we can scale they're going to put pressure on them to start sharing infrastructure potentially even allowing installs in their parking lots of those central offices because trying to convert a nebs compliant central office into a edge data center with the IT kits that the hyperscalers are very customized is very difficult so if we're talking about the terrestrial carriers then you know I think it's going to prove out yes they can build the medium edge sites but when you're starting to talk about far edge and really scaling it I think they're going to struggle all right well that might be a good segue for the next question which is just how distributed and just how small does this all get and we've heard some pretty good examples of how it can get really small maybe it's very use case specific like the train example I need to have it right there where the train goes by so I can capture the optics do we have any other use cases we can talk about about how small it can get or can we generalize you know will there be lots of regional data centers only or are we expecting there to be edge deployed in pretty much every telco closet even in small medium size businesses perhaps who would like to take that first well so I'll start right so look I think it will run the gamut as I kind of alluded to before right and they'll just continue to push out further field bar edge and and beyond and it will adjust in size and scale and so forth but it's not mutually exclusive it doesn't mean the core goes away doesn't mean I live in asperm I drive through the gauntlet of gajunga data centers every day that will continue to to grow as those data lakes are required to capture and analyze all the data that's being created at the edge but at the same time as I saw about those those kind of edge peering data centers that are going to have to capture all that data in a city on a farm in a you know high-rise building we're going to have to be established and they have to interoperate right and so we have to work as a collective not you know laterally to try to solve this problem together with the network service providers with the cloud service providers and the rest of the ecosystem right and I think it's critical that you know the other aspect and I defer to my fellow panelists there's also a lot of misconceptions about hey what it takes to run and operate efficiently and effectively a large data center versus a small data center is an important consideration right they have to be unmanned you have to be able to operate these things remotely you have to understand the security components and all that kind of stuff these are a lot of important considerations the smaller you go the smaller form factor that folks have to understand to deploy these things out at the edge right we also like to weigh on that Doug just back up a little bit too we're deploying these in cities and small towns but you also need the certifications we all know that you're not going to get any banking or healthcare the customers that we're trying to go after the small community banks the local hospital that needs better connectivity and those markets you're not going to be able to get those to co-locate in your facility without your certifications I don't see the major carriers doing that if they do that's a long process we've been working on ours for the last six months just for Jacksonville we're getting close but if you manage to scale like that think about all those locations you're going to have to go through those auditing standards it's not just like Phillip said we're basically deploying them but maintaining them, maintaining certifications the access control there's a lot to it I don't see tons of carriers doing it I think they'd rather take space in a certified facility than deploy and go through that hassle itself that's just my opinion I don't want to give Doug a big headache because I'm going to agree with him again but Doug you're obviously right when DartPoint started we were very fixated on what to build and how to build it we learned very quickly that that was exactly the wrong thing to do so we started fixating on how to operate and how to go about what is a way to get SSA-18 today's SSA-18 certified HIPAA, PCI, SAC-T things specifically on the security access and physical access these are extremely important it's a challenge for example these auditing firms are not used to what we do so there's a lot of communication I think of myself less as a micro-edge data center company and actually more of a digital logistics company the questions I get from my customers are more about Q, how do I get my servers out to that location does not have an address? that's a huge issue and we've been working on that for many years with regards to how do you get your customers in a compliant way to ship hardware to locations that are in areas that are not necessarily addressable or with addresses and how do you do this in a way that they feel secure about you certainly can't have boxes show up on the outside of a modular building sitting in the snow with good business proposition it certainly happens but these are things that need to be understood a lot of people talk about automation so people are saying hey we're going to get this we jumped a little bit ahead here but in terms of how distributed if you make a mistake in your architecture or your process and then you hit scale you've scaled that mistake and unwinding that mistake and if you apply compliance to it you've made a bigger issue and those are the things that we are looking to avoid as we go out and build and having being able to address there are some very large hyperscalers that need their fit out especially as it gets distributed so they talk about I'm going to throw out numbers that are very hyperbolic but these numbers are out there there's a thousand, two thousand, three thousand sites that some of these folks are looking at covering here in the United States over time, eight, ten years but they want a single pane of glass so they want that rack to be the same number rack in the same location across the hundreds of places that you've got that is a logistical issue and those are things that you're trying to address and make sure that hey that hyperscaler who doesn't really like that hyperscaler you have to kind of negotiate across the two anyone that has tried to negotiate power between the two internet players those are serious challenges that as more distributed you get and these will get more distributed but to Phillip's point it will depend on the use case and just because you can place a box somewhere it doesn't mean you should I agree I think anyone any of our guests that are tuned in that may be considering getting into providing edge co-location services are starting to of second guests themselves because as Hugh as stated this is not for the faint of heart this has never been done before scaling these types of services with velocity that is required the all the learning aspects that Doug talked about about permitting and compliance every state has different requirements for the actual prefabricated module so you have to identify where that specific module is going because the fabricator has to make certain customizations whether it's a door in Florida has to be flood proof or what have you and it goes on and on and Hugh just listed the beginning when you start talking about as Philip said remote monitoring these have to be lights out facilities and the logistics that Doug talked about it is this is this is tough stuff I think we're all figuring it out through you know you got to fail fast you got to try a lot of different things and you got to fail fast and keep pushing you have to have customers we have to and when you start talking about what size are these deployments you have to start looking when you start getting below X amount of racks it's really difficult to show any kind of internal rate of return on that so to get investment when you start talking about well I'm going to start go deploy a single rack in these facilities for this specific use case it's tough to make a business out of that if you're talking less than 6 or 8 racks driving monthly recurring revenue somewhere in the $10,000 to $15,000 a month where a third of that is your operating expense and power regardless of what somebody might be wanting to do it may not make sense given our sequence right Greg down right so I think perhaps a good follow-up to that question then would have to do with managed services and more specifically managed computing data and application services but before we even get to that that would be an operational system I'm hearing that there's a lot of issues that have to do with logistics whether that's engineering and planning issues and of course the actual execution of that so when I ask the question about managed services think about it not only about getting something stood up and ready to go but also the ongoing carrying and feeding of it so the question is what is the role for managed services and edge computing and how do you guys see your respective companies playing in that who would like to go first I'll go last I'll go first for us it's offering some a semblance of remote hands but pretty fairly simple you know we're not going to manage any of the IT stack it's going to be reboot we can do most of that remotely all of us there's technology to do that UPS replacement obviously you have to have somebody on site but most of the customers we're talking to in prospects these are not mission critical applications that they're putting out at the far edge these SLAs at least for our prospects are not nearly as tight as they would be in some of Phillip's you know edge data centers so that's just the way it is these are you know being able to manage and monitor these at scale you can only do so much so it's different model than a normal regional co-location center for us we had to there wasn't anything off the shelf right so you kind of remotely lights out data center you know to be able to manage these things cost-effectively to kind of piecemeal the various you know decent platforms and security and this that and the other so we had to build our own so we built one that's called Edge OS it's a camera you know throughout the entire data center so you know you can see at any one time you know your rack your row the entire facility you can see your environmentals it's important from a compliance perspective you can put ticketing and all that kind of stuff so that goes to my earlier point around once you shrink that form factor down and it's not obviously cost-effective to man these things but to be able to give the customer the piece of mind that their workload is safe secure and operating effectively is critical right so that's why we built that from a managed service perspective in the traditional sense you know this is where we partner we stay true to our meeting where a data center operator and so forth so we partner with rec space hey if you need help and others in terms of determining what cloud you want to connect to and how to connect and hybrid and so forth we we partner with them or a mega port if they're deployed throughout many of our facilities and other partners like them like packet fabric and others you want the multi-cloud then we can connect to that but we focus on our strength and then have best of breed providers to give the customer you know bringing the cloud local to them through these uh these partners that that know it far better than we do so and I know that you and uh the other or both are going to talk about the resiliency is really in the network and that's where this you know having 50 to 100 nodes where you can fail over on the network is so critical yeah yeah and just like Greg hit before um you know when you build these facilities you can't get crazy because you have to have the revenue to support the you know get the payback right so some customers are they just want to end they so one line in we're good but then you get some customers that want n plus one on everything so when you start building your facility after that now you're a half million dollars and you're like how am I going to do that with $15,000 a month of max capacity revenue so it's all about what type of customer is going to take space there and then and then the other thing is you have to keep competitive with the local data center that's in say Atlanta or whatever so it's not like you can charge more at the edge right now it's a it's all evolving very good yeah absolutely I think this has been addressed by the other panelists pretty well manage services we we we go up the stack is required by our customers we don't to stick to Phillips well well known knitting skills we we try to stick to what we do very well and but you know it's it's funny a little known facts we had one of the first NFE networks here in the US back 2016 and not because we were trying to do that but because our customers had asked for it and you it's amazing what you could do in these small environments because you you're not relegated to a much larger ubiquitous type of network but in terms of managing services obviously making making sure that that environment is very secure again I we stick to the co-location we do have remote hands I will say that a lot of your operations if you're 30 cents on the dollar that's got to get improved it's that's a traditional telecom model there's things that in your design in your deployment thing manage services are great but my highest walk through on the site is the first three months of my customers move in after that you don't want to be going in there unless you're doing maintenance and maintenance typically we start thinking about maintenance and having those expenses occur usually around year two and a half to three where you start doing some mild upgrades and those are things that are important and but obviously you will have people who want you to go in and touch some of their stuff some people don't my enterprises they're kind of 50-50 the hyperscalers you don't touch telecom you don't touch but we do make sure that we have escorts we do we've got in all of our remote sites we're able to get folks out there on a short notice be able to walk through again to maintain full compliance and again the real compliance SSAE 18 which is very important all right very good so follow on to that question next question has to do with operational challenges now we talked a little bit already about things like getting things ready to go citing issues and things like that we also said that a lot of these sites need to be in a relative Maytag repairman mode where it just sits there and you need to have it be able to operate without any carrying and feeding but is it really like that aren't there instances in which one needs to do stuff for these edge computing nodes what are some of the operational challenges now that could be from a computer perspective the computing equipment itself where it could be from the operators perspective I'd like to hear what are the operational issues that happen once you deploy it who's going to take care of it and what do you do to make sure it's operating properly Greg we'll let you go start you just signed your big deal with your maintenance company so you can you talk to me I think we covered it pretty good with the last question I think one thing that needs to be touched on is connectivity and obviously these sites are irrelevant if you don't have good connectivity and that's that's a challenge because to get a tello in the street to build a lateral into our MDC that's not their general way of doing business right those sales guys need some kind of order to build a business case to go to their outside plant people to to approve that lateral build we are seeing some let's say entrepreneurship by some of the regional providers that are talking about building in on spec but for us and I think the majority of the companies here the king makers in this are the cable codes no question about it the ISPs own the eyeballs on the terrestrial networks and unless you get a collaboration with them and being able to get point to point out to those aggregation routers to serve those eyeballs these applications are not going to form the way that our customers are hoping and so developing those conversations between the cable codes and the hyperscalers is critical believe it or not those conversations have not taken place they're just beginning to talk and you know us and I'm sure Hugh and Doug and Philip obviously his company has been financed by the cable codes so that relationship is pretty strong with edge connects but for us it's been a challenge but we're started to get some traction there yeah that's a good point getting connectivity is one of our challenges you talk about the employment challenges you know just for example we have two sites that we've been waiting on Fiber for almost six months so it's you know they've got to build out they've got you know like Greg said they got to have a revenue model that buys the build out right so you're taking a gamble because you've got to build that fiber first where the customer will come so you have to commit to the fiber and then hope the customer comes so I mean the customers are coming but you know it's still a gamble so you got to build the network out first you know talking about connectivity I'm just going to scoot right in here and bringing it up to the level of caring we have an all star audience here William B. Norton you guys know him as the co-founder be connects and also peering power house he wrote the book the internet peering playbook of course but he writes in and he asks a peering question that I think is a nice transition right here as we as we start to wrap this up but his question can carry a neutral edge data centers small and size by definition of course provide enough of a peering population to attract a critical mass of peering to justify the build in the peering well I'll start right so I think it first off it's great to hear from that doctor parents listening in I try to do an answer he's the best one to answer that question right but at the end of the day you know I think again I revert back to act you know I was at equinex for a number of years as well and I live in aspirin and you see what has resulted as a result of east and may west right and now you're seeing that and a lot of tier two markets like you go back ten years and the volume of traffic flows that are occurring in those markets are growing at a rapid pace right and so it's just you know number of years behind but this is where that distributed architecture that we've all been talking about and all that we're trying to enable so it will definitely go beyond the tier two tier three markets I think but ultimately as Greg was just talking about the networks are so critical because otherwise they're islands and you have to be able to you're at the edge and you have to enable these traffic flows at the edge and we're kind of in this flux because the carriers are looking at their central offices as being the destination to enable this stuff but it's not carrier neutral so we're in this kind of chicken in the egg timeline we've got to get over that mindset and the carriers have to get over the mindset to go to a carrier neutral facility the micro edge facilities and that's where the peering should occur and I do think because of the if you look at all the trends as a collective that volume of data will be adequate and sufficient to justify peering at the far edge yeah cheer cheer is that I absolutely this will take a little bit of time to grow not all peering platforms are equal not all have the same strategy we are very ultra localized I won't call them remote because some of them are not as remote as you think they do really want to stick to a local platform but again let's it's if a site is not generating the eyeballs then obviously peering is kind of pointless and eyeballs can be anything it's not just wireless subscribers I mean there can be many different types of eyeballs that are out there you'd be amazed at how a very large enterprise will attract attention but yes absolutely growing these making sure that you're using the right partners making sure that these are not just completely exclusive and making sure you're also into the local flavor that's a huge issue if you come in and you bring in a very large international IX into rural America and I do at this point mean rural it yes it might have thousands of ASNs and that's fantastic but it's not really going to get done what you need to get done and get actually in some ways overwhelming but we are seeing that and this is something that is it's got to be a must in your strategy or you're not actually playing all right we are tight on time there's so many other great questions too which I'll send around by email maybe we'll get some answers about panelists post roundtable here but really I just wanted to say huge thank you guys such great insight really such a great panel you guys have taught us so much I want to say a huge thank you to our roundtable and the amazing gentlemen who have voiced their thoughts on getting to the edge Greg you taught me far edge Phillip how you're protecting the internet Hugh your digital logistics and Doug I loved your use case of transportation industry right out of the get go so much great content coming from this and I appreciate you guys all jumping in and providing that for us also of course huge thank you to our moderator who Jerry Christiansen dear friend who also has a white paper coming out soon we're going to tee that up so on edge and where it's at and where it's heading so thank you audience for tuning in it's been a wonderful JSA TV JSA podcast go ahead and the recording of it will be available on iTunes Spotify YouTube you name it and please go ahead and check out JSA net for upcoming webinars we definitely want you to keep feeding the hunger for content with our lunches with the punch if you will go ahead and check out jsa.net for more topics and ask if you have a speaker that would be perfect for some upcoming topics we want to hear from you thank you everyone huge appreciation and happy networking