 This is JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Carl Sketchley, and with me here today is Todd Tweedy, Director of Carrier Services for Blackfoot Carrier Services. Todd, thank you for joining us today. Good morning, Carl. Good to be with you again. Awesome. Tell us about Blackfoot Carrier Services, if you could. Blackfoot corporate has been around since 1954. So when did the focus on carrier services become a priority? Yeah, we've been around for a while, and we're pretty proud of our heritage, actually. In 1954, we got started by providing voice services to rural Montana communities and ranchers. And on more than one occasion, I've seen our CEO, Jason, pump his fist in the air and say, cooperatives are cool. So obviously, again, we're pretty proud of our heritage. But you fast forward to today. And wow, has the landscape of the organization changed over the last six or so decades. Current focuses include managed services, cloud architecture, and carrier services. So around 2016 is when we landed a noteworthy contract with one of the big four mobile providers. And in 2018, the business unit Blackfoot Carrier Services was actually formed. So the last four or so years, there's been an enhanced focus on carrier services in wholesale. And what are the top pain points or challenges that you saw for carriers operating in rural America? Sure, so the needs vary depending upon our customer. But certainly one of the things that we strive to address is by leveraging our experience. Just a second ago, I talked about our six decades of experience. So our longevity certainly is a way to meet their requirements. More specific to carriers or mobile providers is the fact that our biggest customer we've actually deployed about 260 towers across Montana and Wyoming. So there's some very specific cell backhaul experience. In terms of connectivity, we actually have three options, copper, fixed wireless, and of course, fiber. That mix of connectivity can be advantageous depending upon the exact application or depending upon the deployment timeline. And then probably last in terms of meeting customers' expectations or solving pain points would be our customer-centric culture. This is something that our CEO and our executive team talks about a lot with the employee group. And our CEO challenges us to constantly ask, what's best for our customer? What's in the best interest of our customer? So to meet those requirements and try to solve that rhetorical question of what's in the best interest of our customer, we strive to be responsive, creative, and flexible in all that we do. Amazing. Now, the telecom environment in rural America is arguably quite different from that of the metro areas. With all the recent media buzz around 5G, what is the untold story of the future of network services in the markets you serve? So 5G is really exciting and brings with it the promise of high speed and robust capabilities. A 5G network, it's very bandwidth intensive, requires greater density and lower latency. But one of the challenges, especially for rural America, is a 5G network will pass literally hundreds of gigs of more data versus a 4G network. Today, it's very commonplace to have a 1G, maybe even a 10G, backhaul to a cell site. There's talk that in a couple of years, there could be 100 gig backhaul required. And the quandary is that in a lot of rural America, small town America, those bandwidth requirements, they actually exceed the core network capacity of small rural providers. So it's a quandary and I don't see how parts of rural America, how small town America, because of those capacity constraints, are going to see 5G in the next year or two. Compare and contrast that to metro area. The NFL cities, major metropolitan areas, they have lots of capacity, lots of fiber providers. And probably for a mobile provider, they've got choices of who they could go to to get their connectivity. So yeah, it's a bit of a quandary. And I'm not sure exactly how it's going to get solved in the next year or two. Understood. Now, in addition to offering carrier services, you recently unveiled a managed services platform for your business customers. Can you tell us a bit about what you offer and how this benefits both your end users as well as your carrier services division? Sure. So the solution lineup, it's pretty diverse. And it ranges from a simplistic LTE failover that perhaps could be used as a point of sale backup to a highly robust and configurable SD-WAN solution, where we're incorporating things like traffic prioritization and management of applications and we're leveraging underlying commodity circuits for redundancy purposes. So the benefit of partnering with Blackfoot on a wholesale basis is you get to leverage our expertise. Perhaps for about a year prior to launching our offerings, we went through some R&D, some due diligence with vendors, building a business case. And we're thinking that that experience might be of value to somebody else that's contemplating getting into the managed services game. And perhaps you've got a network operator that's got an opportunity that needs to be quoted and installed in the next couple of months. Well, obviously, you don't have time to go through that six months, 12 months, what have you of due diligence and get a solution in line. So with the Blackfoot wholesale offering, you can actually represent the solution as your own, meaning it's a white-label offering, and hopefully leverage that relationship you've got with that end user today. So specific to end user benefits, there's numerous benefits, improved uptime, enhanced security, faster deployment times, more flexible network management, and potentially significant cost savings. And the cost savings would come into play when you're comparing the cost of an SD-WAN network versus an MPLS network. Though I have to say that, in many cases, it's not an either or, meaning we've seen some hybrid applications where there is a core MPLS network still being utilized and augmented, if you will, with an SD-WAN solution. So then user benefits, frankly, are numerous and will vary depending upon the actual business drivers and applications. I see. Now, you were the feature presenters on a recent channel vision webinar from October that examined your managed services offerings. Can you tell us a bit about who should watch it and what they will learn? Sure. So it just touched on a couple of things when we were talking about our managed service offering. A network operator that's contemplating going to the market with a managed service offering, they may want to entertain what Blackfoot is doing. Again, simply to leverage our expertise, understand how we've gone to the market with our solutions, the messaging, the technical checklist, if you will. And they can leverage our expertise and get to the market faster. So I guess in summary, I would say anybody that's entertaining getting into the managed services marketplace might want to take a look at that 40-minute or so webinar. Sounds good. And if our viewers want to learn more about Blackfoot Carrier Services, where can they go? Sure. Really simple URL, blackfootcarrierservices.com. Sounds good. Thank you, Todd. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.