 Hey everybody, welcome. This is JSA TV and JSA The Newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of Cataya and on behalf of my team here at JSA, thank you for joining us during these very difficult times as we continue to face down COVID-19 by social distancing and by working, learning and networking virtually. As such these JSA TV virtual monthly roundtables have really taken on a new form of relevancy as a timely platform where we can seek advice and information, even answers to our questions from top industry belt leaders as we face these latest challenges of today's new reality together. Also hopefully a little sunshine for you today at your door. We have provided lunch or if you chose to gift card to a local restaurant for the first 100 registrants. So for those of you who received, please enjoy your JSA lunch while we get started here. And a quick reminder, this is a roundtable format. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your voice. We want to help you answer those questions. So please go ahead and type questions you may have for our panelists right into that question box. Depending on time we'll get to as many as possible. And the last 15 minutes of the hour, we're going to take our conversation over to LinkedIn for a chat with many of our speakers. So go ahead and go to LinkedIn, search for hashtag JSA virtual roundtables and our feed will come up. We're also going to put that right in the chat box for you too, so we'll get that as well. But we have a great opportunity there to review any great questions that we might not have had a chance to cover in the next 45 minutes. So go ahead and post those questions and thoughts to our panelists on LinkedIn chat as well. And a note, this is JSA's third in a series of necessary conversations right now on the impact of COVID-19 to our industry and target verticals. Extra note is COVID-19 and its impact on healthcare networks. That roundtable just three weeks away, May 7th, 1 p.m. That's Eastern time. Go ahead and check us out on JSA.net. You can register and let us know if you have any additional speaker suggestions as well. Again, we want to hear from you. So let's get started. Today's topic, smart cities and IoT in the new world of COVID-19. And just to underscore the importance of today's chat, we have over 250 registrants joining us today. Thank you guys. Thank you community for your continued support of these series. We should also note that within a day of announcing this topic, we had each of our All-Star executives set to take their time for us today, which I'm truly grateful for. Thank you, my panelists friends. And to help us introduce them and to guest moderate our panel, please welcome Peter Murray. He's the executive director of Dense Networks. Dense Networks is a social think tank focusing on IoT, mobile bandwidth, cloud, and big data transforming our society, which as it happens makes Peter a perfect guest moderator for our conversation today. Pete, thank you and the floor is yours. Thanks, Jamie. I'm really pleased to be part of this webinar. My background, yeah, as you said, I go way back. I'm an early MCI guy. I was the original general manager of WinStar and I built all sorts of networks all over the United States, brought at Temple University. And now my organization, we focus on how cities are utilizing connectivity and information technology to, as we call it, getting smart, right? Where it's a process and never before have you experienced anything like we're experiencing now. And some of these technologies we've been talking about and focusing on and seeing pilots are never more relevant. This group you've put together here of experts is really particularly relevant because they have a, each has a different expertise within this, within the stack, if you would. So with that, why don't I go ahead and introduce Kyle Hildebrand and have Kyle talk a little bit about himself and his organization. Sure, you bet. Thanks, Peter. I'm Kyle Hildebrand. I'm the vice president of Project Development and Sales for EXSquared Technology. We're a design, build, operate, maintain, and commercialize firm. We specialize in communications, intelligent transportation systems, and smart city infrastructure. I'm hunkered down here today from eastern Nebraska where it's snowing. So I'm jealous of all the other panelists who are in sunnier, warmer places. You know, I've been impacted much like everyone else here on this panel and probably listening into their home. We're following our, you know, social distancing recommendations and we're doing the best we can to be, you know, responsible, you know, amid the crisis. So I'm looking forward to this today. Thanks. Excellent. And Isaac, if you would as well, please introduce yourself to us a little bit about where you are and how you're experiencing this pandemic. Yeah, sure. Thank you, Peter. So it's Akmiya, vice president of sales engineering here at Redline Communications. I'm currently bunkered down in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, just about 40 miles west of Toronto. It's about 37 degrees outside right now. And how coping with it, so basically working from home, it's been sort of the word I'll use, it's strange, it's been a strange experience because I've joined Redline about three months ago. I have yet to meet any of my colleagues, my peers face to face. So it's all virtual. So that's been, you know, it's a unique time that we're all going through. Yeah, certainly is transformative. And some of the cities that I talked to, you know, they range from panic to inspired by this crisis. So we'll talk about that some more. Robert, you certainly have a lot of experience with cities and infrastructure. You want to talk a little bit about Highland and yourself? Sure. That's Jamie. Thank you for having me, Peter. Thank you. I'm Robert DeLeo, the chairman of Highland, been with Highland for 30 plus years, just about my entire career. Highland, most of you don't know Highland is a full turnkey provider, a wireline, wireless, smart city infrastructure, electrical infrastructure projects. We currently today, a lot of you know us from the New York City market. Currently today we were operating under four divisions. Our New York City market is Highland data common electrical still the original base unit, which operates and controls New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Connecticut. We have a company called Down Under Construction that does our Virginia DC Baltimore market in the greater Chicago area, Illinois market company called Western Utility. And out West, we have a rebranded company called Highland West, which does our Northern California market, our Southern California market, Phoenix and Utah and some other areas. Our primary focus is a lot of smart city stuff, a lot of small cell network building, all pretty much on deploying construction for all of these all of these types of units and projects. Excellent. Down here from Jupiter, Florida, been here for a little bit. Eager to get back up north to one to thank the team in person, because we have a lot of people in the, you know, that are essential to our projects and are working and building these and keeping our networks up and going. Yeah. Yeah. Well, fortunately, I guess for you, you're in Jupiter here rather than in New York, hunkered down. Stay safe. And Scott, please, if you would, also Scott Ward is with us. And Scott, if you would introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your organization. Sure. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Scott Ward here. I'm a tech guru at TBI. With ever 3000 partner agents and 150 vendors, TBI is one of the top master agents in the county community. With so many vendors to work with, we take an agnostic approach to solving technical problems for our end customers. And that includes all the verticals. For the past 13 years, I've designed over a thousand solutions covering network and activity, telecom, co-location, but I try to focus and really kind of hone in on the cloud, security, SD-WAN, IoT and disaster recovery space. I'm based out of Houston, Texas. I have a home office here. So I'm used to working remote. And of course, down here we have some hurricanes. So hunkering down is not that all uncommon. We just typically don't do it for this long. But the impact to me, obviously, is not quite as severe as it is to others. Just a lack of travel, I guess, is the biggest difference. We like to see partners and customers. We like to get out in front of them. But for now, we're just doing more video conferencing, phone calls and emails. Okay. Well, let's dive in. We've got a lot to talk about in this very vast field. So my group, as I said, we produced the Connected Cities Tour, which is our fifth year. We were scheduled to do 16 events this year. Most likely we'll do six to eight because of the situation. But we're at www.connectedcitiestour.com. But we research particularly, we look at public safety, transportation, utilities in real estate, and how those come together in the smart city. So with that, a city is made up of these different large ecosystem and different parties. What have you seen in your market or your company seen in some of the cities you serve in terms of where they flat footed? And how have they reacted to this crisis? Let's start with Kyle. Sure. Thanks, Peter. So for me, I live in Nebraska. So we don't have a shelter in place or a mandatory stay at home order. But most people are being socially responsible. They're only leaving home for the essentials. I think it's similar to that in most places where other than emergencies and to get some essential supplies, you're kind of hunkered down. I think everyone was caught off guard. I don't think anybody would have been or could have been prepared for how quickly this happened. And I don't think anyone in a particular metropolitan area can be to blame for how things have worked out. But I think overall, I think the spirit of overcoming the obstacle is out there, and I see it everywhere. I'm used to traveling, but now I'm sitting at home doing conference calls and videos. And it's not that much different. We're still interacting. We're finding a way to overcome things. But I feel pretty fortunate. Frankly, I know no one who has had the virus, and I hope it stays that way. I hope everyone can stay healthy. Well, let me ask Robert then. Robert, you have a large organization in multi-city, but your heritage is New York City and you have a cluster of employees there. Has your company been called on by New York City to help with the emergency? Or what are you seeing? We haven't been called on by New York City. The only thing we do for the city, we do some critical traffic signal maintenance projects for them, which currently we have to stay deployed at those projects. We are still working a lot of essential projects. We have probably about 80% of the workforce working. We have to adapt a lot. Because a lot of our projects are team projects where you have multiple guys on the same projects, or multiple guys in the same trucks. So we've had to adapt and go by the CDC compliance, being six feet apart, and masks. So we are trying to stick to all the essential projects that need to get built and stay away from the ones that don't need to. Certain projects have stopped because they're not essential and there's no need to put guys in harm's way. Let me jump in for a second on that because you said you work on traffic systems and we're looking at this crisis, but let's go to the bigger topic. What is smart? When you guys say you work on smart city, what's the difference? We know physical connectivity, but what is that? What does it make smart when you guys go to work? So for example, for us, we're building kiosks in New York City, which today you'll see them. They replace the old phone boots. So they have fiber connectivity. They have free Wi-Fi on the units for the pedestrians. We build smart street lights, which traffic signals also as well, which have communication back to a central office, knowing whether signal's out or not functioning properly. Obviously, we put small cells on our street light poles, which we bring fiber to. Thousands of those in the New York City have been deployed. We do information boards on highways, which all have fiber connectivity. I know we'll talk a little bit about ITS, but we do security cameras throughout the cities. Some for private networks just for security for the city themselves or for people can view the cams as well. And in fact, your company does a lot of work. I'd classify as smart. You want to spend on what smart means from the perspective of your organization? Yeah, sure. So smart, if we take a step back, look at it at a high level. It's all about the need is situational awareness of every asset out there in real time. That's what you want. You want to be aware of the status of every asset out there. And when I say asset, if I look at industries like utilities or mining, oil and gas, mining truck out there, transformer out there, you want to be aware of their state in real time. Now, how do you do that? That's a lot of data that you collect and they use the term big data for it. You cannot expect a human being to be at the end of that big data pipe and receiving and analyzing data in real time. So AI comes into play. And AI and big data, if you don't add connectivity to the infrastructure out there, then it's just something you do in a lab. So from our perspective, without connectivity, smart, I say it doesn't mean much. It's connectivity that actually enables it. So that's what we focus on. And our focus then is wireless connectivity for industrial environments. So that's the high end, the environments where you need high reliability, you need very low latency, you need high security. So for example, let's say I lose connectivity right now at my home internet. What's the economic cost of this versus you know, an autonomous vehicle in a mine loses connectivity. You know, that's like, because one truck stops, every truck behind it stops. That's a million dollars an hour economic cost to the business. So that's what smart means to us. It's having that operation, you know, in real time constant, you know, 24, 7, 365 days a year. Yeah. And I think that you hit on a number of key issues. One of them is situational awareness. I was recently in an autonomous vehicle trial here in Orlando and the law though requires the shuttle not go above 12 miles per hour. So it has to go on a live road. So they had to build cut ins to the live road so that the shuttle could pull over and let traffic go by it because of this mixture of environments, right? The trial environment, the pilot environment versus the live environment. But part of you mentioned also was pulling all the data together in security. Scott, your company is really focused on the cloud and cybersecurity. And much of what is smart is either going to reside in the cloud or at the edge, right? So what are the trends and how does your company approach smart? So yeah, so smart to TBI means for us an opportunity to help customers imagine, innovate and create cutting edge solutions to current future problems. But it also means, you know, to usher in a new age of technology to help customers strategically grow their business or improve their community. And it also is to help them just simply do things better, faster, more secure and more efficiently. Now, for, you know, the city of Houston in particular, you know, it means a future, right? The ability to make quicker decisions or to mitigate problems or eliminate problems where self-driving cars are going to be mainstream. It means innovation. So, you know, all the different projects that are going to go on like intuitive and automated traffic control systems or parking guidance. So folks can find out exactly where parking is available and not have to drive all over town endlessly looking for a space, right? But it also means notoriety. They want to track folks to the city and make it a desirable place to live through technology. But it also means, you know, I mentioned hurricanes earlier, it also means the ability to recover quickly and fully in case of a natural disaster like a storm or flooding or a pandemic or something man-made like a terrorism act, shooter situations or something like an industrial oil and gas explosion. Yeah. I mean, that continuity is essential, particularly during these crisis periods. I remember after the series of hurricanes, one of our colleagues, he was a commander, Kurt Jacobs, in the Navy, he was assigned a FEMA. And the biggest issue with communications crashing was fuel to the towers, right? To keep the power on, to keep the network up. This was something that could have been monitored with a simple IoT sensor. Instead, they were flying in Puerto Rico, they're flying helicopter and dropping people down by rope, right? To keep the networks running so that they keep literally the lights on. Kyle, when we talk about smart, your company dabbles, I shouldn't use dabble, your company's experts in the ITS area. Talk about that from a smart, because that's certainly one of the areas that I think it's got the most impact that people will feel at the outcome. Sure. Sure. So smart, I think, means a little bit different thing to every different person. And so when it comes to smart, the one core thing that brings it all together and makes everything smart is that connectivity. And we've kind of touched on that. But when it comes to things like intelligent transportation systems, they are only as good as the backbone of connectivity that you have. So whether that's a fiber network or a wireless network, you take all those different types of sensors and you bring them together. People can make real-time decisions on how things are happening. And some of those decisions can be automated for efficiency. So when you apply that communications backbone to those sensors, it creates a better traveling experience or better experience for society in general. I'll give you an example. One of the intelligent transportation systems that we've deployed is a statewide truck parking information management system across the state of Iowa. So in pretty much real time, any type of driver or professional driver or dispatcher will be able to tell somebody in real time through that intelligent transportation system, either by a web app, a third-party app, a state 511, and in some places some states have signs to tell them where they can park and it makes their life a little bit better as they plan their day. And so intelligent transportation is really inherently smart, but the backbone of that is the communications infrastructure. Do you guys work in the V2I space? Is that something that's coming up yet? Not really. So we're more focused on putting the communications infrastructure into place and the applications and the physical devices and sensors, the data collection sensors that sit on top of that. And we process or we hand that information off the process. On the ConnectedCitiesTour.com, our site, there's four tabs on the homepage and one of them is transportation. And if you click on it, we've profiled four cities and one of those cities is New York City. The reason we profiled them is they all got federal grants to experiment with connected vehicles and autonomy and New York was one of those. So we profiled, we actually had Cordell Schachter, who is the CTO of New York City's Department of Transportation, keynote our New York event last year. And he related a lot about that, but Robert, you guys are playing in that space. Are you familiar with V2I? Is that something that's coming up now in the connected car and any of that? Are you being asked to do that type of work? No, but we have laid a lot of infrastructure along these highways for it. So we built a lot of backbone fiber. And as Kyle mentioned, any of these networks are only as good as their connectivity. And the more we can push fiber deeper into all these devices and these highways and streets, a lot of these things will perform a lot better. Yeah. And you're going to see the movement of the data capability out to the edge, basically because of the latency that's required and the massive amount of bandwidth. Intel said the average vehicle, autonomous vehicle will generate four terabytes of data per day, right? So imagine for the connectivity industry, now all that won't go out. Some will say at the edge, some will be vehicle to vehicle. So I've been using a term called V2I. That means vehicle to infrastructure. So once we have all this connectivity in place, your Audi using one system can communicate to the stop sign. And the Volkswagen coming in, Germans have done a bit more in this space. And the Volkswagen coming in the other direction is communicating to the stop sign. And if one of the drivers is drunk and is falling asleep, the stop sign communications will tell the vehicle to come to a stop. It will anticipate the speed of that vehicle and know that it's running too fast and the system will take over. Sort of Tesla with communicating to stop sign like Tesla. So we'll talk about that a little bit more. But these advanced technologies are what is shaping and transforming the cities. There's not a lot of firms that really have a full grasp on how to do all this. Isak, your firm actually deploys and is familiar with intelligent video, LiDAR, thermal. Can you talk about that space and how that's transforming in public safety and other areas? Yeah, sure. So Redline has been deploying video surveillance networks for our customers for almost two decades now. So historically, they were more based on nomadic technologies. Now it's more, we're looking at 4G, 5G for that. What we are seeing though, and since the topic today is also COVID-19, what we have seen in the past couple of months, not as much in Europe and North America because privacy is a bit of a concern here I get. But cities, governments requesting that kind of network infrastructure capabilities in other parts of the world. That, I'd say in the past couple of months, we've seen a significant increase there. We've seen what China, Taiwan, or Singapore, Hong Kong, these cities and countries have done with the connectivity technology in their response to COVID-19. So from that perspective, our expectation is that this is going to grow significantly. And the chances are that with that, the other piece, especially in the 5G world, that will take preference over others is this whole working from home that we're doing right now. High bandwidth, every part of the country that is required. And speed of deployment is critical in this. Fiber to the home takes time. So yes, it is an option where cities already, densities have that fiber infrastructure. So it's doable easily. But as you go towards the edge, having that kind of connectivity infrastructure is much easier to deploy wireless connectivity. So hence, we see the growth in that perspective. We see one of the smartest guys that I know who's been speaking on our tour is Mark Jules. He's the vice president of a group called Smart Spaces Video Intelligence at Hitachi. And what they do is they create, instead of Smart City, they create smart spaces. And they blend a series of technologies that help with what you call situational awareness, which allows law enforcement and city government, utility others to really real time monitor situations. And there are technologies today like thermal imaging that could literally, I don't know if you're following Governor Cuomo's daily briefs, but a couple of days ago, he just suddenly explained, every business owner is going to want to know the temperature of everybody who walks through his door. How do you do that? You say, you're just like that. And I said, God, I love this guy. That's a commercial right there for thermal imaging. I mean, my goodness, it's a pretty off the shelf type of technology when married to our analytics now that could, without being too intrusive, help identify people during this time. So there are other technologies. And again, we can get into civil liberties, but another one that's cropping up quite a bit. Intelligent transportation is LiDAR. Kyle, do you see any of that type of application yet? Or the city's data? I don't see many cities. Most of the car companies are experimenting with that now. You're muted. I apologize. I had to unmute it. So that seems to be more of a private sector activity right now than specifically the cities. But as they have to develop it and integrate it, you have to get those cities and departments of transportation and state agencies on board to fully vet those technologies out. And so it's happening and it's happening at an accelerated pace. And I don't know that technologies are going to keep innovating. So I don't know that any type of pandemic will really slow that down. Technology is going to evolve how it does. I think we're going to just find new applications now that our concerns are shifting. What is, after 9-11, our concerns and how we modified our security. I think we're going to add these health care concerns to our security concerns. But on the practical side, Robert, you guys are deploying cameras and other gear and building these networks along the roadways and other parts of the city. Is this a major growth curve? What type of applications do you see growing? It's been growing for us for the past couple of years. We don't see it slowing down because of COVID-19. I actually think when we come out of this, we'll probably see more growth for more wireless connectivity, for more dense networks, as mentioned before. I happen to have a fiber connection. It's been really good at my house. But I know a lot of parts of the U.S. that just don't have fiber to homes yet. So as we come out of this and grow, that we've all learned how we can work from home now. Do we need bigger dense fiber networks to our homes, to our businesses? So we're going to have all these different edge technologies like LiDAR. You're going to see some more radar and video, etc. But ultimately, it's all collecting big, fat amounts of data. It's going back into the cloud, it goes through the pipes, and we're mastering the building of the pipe part. But then it gets back to silos, and it goes through the cloud. Cities are gathering this data, but almost every single city that speaks says, we got the data, we don't have the funds or the expertise to properly use it to get the outcomes that promise smart. So Scott, you guys are experts in the cloud and security. Talk a little bit about what you see there in the trends, and perhaps if cities are working with you to build portals, what do you see the next direction there? Yeah, so for all the bad things that hurricanes caused down here, I do remember back a couple years ago, right after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and that was a third consecutive year to have a 500-year flood in this area. So you can imagine the amount of water that passed through here and all the disruptions to the economy and so forth. But Houston Mayor talked about rebuilding as a smart city at that point, and he had a really clear idea. He had a vision. He wanted to move and migrate all the computers and data to the cloud. He wanted to strengthen the partnership with Microsoft and go to Azure. He wanted to modernize all the technologies that the city was using. He wanted to adapt and grow the economy with the technology. And so what he did was he went and created a smart city advisory council. He went out and spent, I think, a little over $34 million on new smart traffic signals, wireless communications, digital message signs, and essentially he wanted to create a connected infrastructure as a smart city. And of course, one of the biggest things, one of the biggest challenges that you're going to face when doing that is getting all the people needed to say yes to those kinds of decisions. So the policy makers, the industry business leaders, all the neighborhoods, and just every other stakeholder to try to help cut through the red tape. And so at the end of the day, that can help expedite the process of Houston becoming a world-class and smart city. Without their buy-in, that process is going to take a lot longer. So that's it from the city. And so we're seeing that, of course, a lot from our customers as well as more and more data is being gathered and tried to assemble and analyze and produce the sort of information that they really need to make those right decisions. We're seeing that a little bit more and more. Well, you hit on something there that I didn't prepare to talk about, but I do want to mention the journey to becoming a smart city is a collaborative event, a series of events, and it requires this ecosystem of collaborators with different skill sets. And the response to this crisis shows that, you know, we have different, General Motors is making ventilators suddenly, right? Civic duty. Well, we see that a lot in building the smart city where local talent, sometimes major companies, other small companies, innovate around the very specific need of that city, but it's a translatable need to another city. So that that starts to move along. But what most importantly that I've seen to have an organized smart city is that there is a group, like you said, that Houston group. Dallas has the Dallas Innovation Alliance, and that was so successful. They just started the North Texas Innovation Alliance, same leadership, but it helped rally around and organize those efforts. Other places at North the Raleigh area has Riot, Raleigh Internet of Things, very, very strong. They work with all the universities, and they help build collaboration, and they've won some like 20 million in grants to develop 5G and drone technology, right? So these groups to the audience in your local market seek these out because it's both opportunity to sell, but it's also a great opportunity to be civically minded and contribute to the thought leadership of your city. And every voice is kind of important, particularly the technical folks who can talk about what's possible and what it costs, because some of these things are just out of reach for cities and others can be built like collaboratively. We talk about network densification. Robert, are any of your clients like the Crown Castles and that new wave of common infrastructure provider beyond the carriers? Who's looking to build new dense networks in the major cities? Most of the carriers are, right? So they need denser networks. Pretty much every carrier that I can think of today needs more fiber to deploy to small cells. I mean, we will bring two to six fibers per street light pole just for one small cell. So when you think about the amount of fibers that is needed to deploy small cell in 5G, it's a pretty dense network. So we see a lot of them, actually, most of them deploying bigger networks, which brings to another issue. Our infrastructure in a lot of these cities is old. It's outdated. It needs to be upgraded. It needs to be overbuilt. I mean, we kind of, what I call put band-aids on it all the time, and they're always just adding just for what's needed at the time. But that's where we need these cities to collaborate together with their agencies and all put one group together and cut through all the red tape. Because that's, you know, the carriers are out there wanting to build. We have the cities and the agencies that are, I wouldn't say stopping it, but there's too many roadblocks and too many, too much red tape to get through to get these projects deployed. Oh, yeah. And you know, there's all the litigation that went around a small cell in the FCC and all of that noise. We're actually doing an event in San Jose. They're another one with a great group. It's called Silicon Valley Joint Venture. And they help bring the good, all those resources in San Jose. And one of the other conclusions we came up with is what you just touched on, Robert, to become a smart city. If you don't have some sort of carrier or cable co-partner and the utility in a triangle with the city collaborating on that dense infrastructure, which includes energy as well as communications, then you just can't get there. It's just, it's that big a heavy lift. But many cities have implemented smart poles. I walk around New York and you see a uniform look in New York now with the small cells. I do deploy a lot of like shrouds onto existing light poles. Is that how you meet the aesthetic requirement? I mean, how does, you know, do you have to drop new poles? How is that working? In the New York City market, it's pretty much existing poles. They don't want to see new poles go up in the New York market. So they're going on existing traffic signal poles. They go on standard street light poles. We also put them on wood utility poles. It's all a standard shroud that's out there for our New York market. Yeah. My wife thinks I'm a little strange. But every city I go to, I walk around and take pictures of the light poles and the small cells. But that's another story. And you can see pictures of those on the website as well. But that said, yeah, so that's a major direction with the small cells. But let's come back to ITS and some more of these smart city type services. Kyle, you need to discuss a little bit about how you design these. But talk about the different technologies that go into building the solution that you'll deploy to create ITS. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When you think about ITS, you have to first figure out what it is you're trying to accomplish. And then you can approach from that. But you also need to be smart enough to try future proof that core infrastructure. You have a lot of different groups, a lot of different competing interests. And so you have to try to put in place a plan that meets all those. I'll give you an example. In Herndon, Virginia, we deployed a city project in a particular part of the city. There was fiber. There's wireless aspect. There's public Wi-Fi. There's joint use 5G poles. So all of the carriers in that could come to that area, can work off the same pole. And that's a little bit of a paradigm shift in itself. Smart lighting, pedestrian counting, electric vehicle charging systems. So you figure out each one of those things that we're trying to accomplish. And every jurisdiction is different. But we take that into account and work backwards from there. And then figure out what resources you have. But it's really key, going back to what you and Robert were talking about, of having a group or a champion that really understands what you're trying to accomplish and can help bridge that gap between the technology, the end user, the municipality, and the ever important budget. Has the term a curb management been cropping up in your world at all? That has. It's recently become something that we've been started to talk about and we're developing a solution right now for a particular city, a large city that's worried about loading zones and unloading zones and parking during different times and different events and to help maintain, you know, just a good traffic flow but also handle emergency events. So yeah, it sure is. It's become a huge capability, a huge need because of Uber and Lyft and all of the different, all of the gig economy that's now happening that wants that curb. So, you know, anyway, so that's a concept anyway in the smart city space. It's very important. Another one, I mean, we talked about smart lighting, but probably the genesis of smart cities where cities could find funding was the smart grid applications, right? They built these smart grids for the utilities. Isac, your company has a lot of experience in that space. Talk about the network and the different components that you have to put together to build the smart grid and what's the next generation of smart grid? So, yeah, I can write a book on that. Before that, let me, let me provide a couple of comments on points that were discussed. You know, one is collaboration, you know, especially in this highly bureaucratic environment. It's, you know, one thing that COVID-19 is going to do, I firmly believe in that is that it is going to trigger and it's going to force different stakeholders to collaborate with each other. We've already, especially for, if societies want to deal with this effectively and minimize the impact on economy, we've already seen that, you know, in the province of Hubei, how Alibaba and everyone else stepped up and how they collaborated with the cities. And, you know, for us here in Canada or in the US, that's the only way to do it. So it will have to be done. Cities will be forced to collaborate, you know, companies like ours will be forced to collaborate with our peers in the industry who may even be competitive. So that is one thing that is going to change. The other is, you know, we talked about all these different components of technologies coming into play. That's where interoperability is going to, you know, play a big role. You know, that's the next step of that collaboration. And that's where standard based, you know, and say, in the connectivity world nowadays, 3GPP compliance for all the different components, that becomes very important. And that is, you know, when we talk about smart grid, you know, smart grid, in the utility industry, I'd say when it comes to digital transformation, it is one of the first industries in mission critical infrastructure that went after the smarts, adding intelligence to the grid. And, you know, if I remember correctly, department of energy, you know, via the smart grid investment grant program under Obama administration, you know, they funded about $8 billion worth of projects, you know, they were close to 100 projects. And there's a whole bucket of lessons that we've learned from that. And, you know, I always go around, you know, telling my peers in these other industries that, guys, it's one thing to create a solution theoretically, it's another thing to deploy. And I think the biggest lesson from that program is, you know, if we go and review the report and everything is, you know, when it comes to interoperability, so system integration, think about that, think about piloting and properly, you know, testing your equipment with all this new technology, making sure the different technology components work together with each other, you know, what are the cyber security risks associated with adding this new connectivity to it? You know, there's significant new processes that need to be built within these organizations. Yes, it's complex, but it's doable. And we've already done a lot here in North America. And, you know, now in Asia in response to COVID-19, countries there are adding their own perspective to how projects like these can be done. So, you know, that's where collaboration comes into play again. It's not just for smart cities, but it's across these industries, especially the mission-critical infrastructure industry on which these economies depend. Well, you mentioned, Jemma, did you want to jump in? If you don't mind, gentlemen, I know we're tight for time, but watching these questions on the question board and they're fabulous, I was going to try to squeeze one last question and if that works, I'm grouping a few together just to get a couple of folks in here. Dr. A. B. Muneer and Liliana Rochia, you know, their questions really center around what's the human factor? How in your organizations with the impact of COVID-19, how have people been impacted? And I don't know if a couple of you guys wanted to just start to end in those closing notes. Rob, maybe? Yeah, so it's at home here in our company. You know, we have a few cases of COVID-19. Thankfully, everyone's recovering from that. You know, we are an essential workforce, so we do need to deploy our crews to keep this infrastructure up and going, but we have adapted a lot to make it a safe work environment for all of our personnel. I've seen on your LinkedIn feeds too your pictures of your workers out there, and some heroes for sure. Kyle, you probably have a similar scenario. Yeah, we have crews in the similar fashion as Robert's out there working every day, keeping the infrastructure maintained and new infrastructure going in to support all these new initiatives. But we're focused as a remote workforce, so we're pretty well adapted, and we had very little learning curve to get us going, but we're up and moving, and our crews are all out getting stuck on. And of course, funding is a major issue for smart cities, so all of these shipping and all these dollars moving is going to probably have an effect on how cities approach these technologies and fund them. Exactly. Thank you, everyone, for your insights on smart cities, IoT, and this new world of COVID-19 that we find ourselves in. Again, our all-star panelists, Scott Ward, Emerging Technology Principal at TBI, Rob D'Leo, Cheryman of Highland, Kyle Hildebrand, Vice President of EX-Squared Technology, Alisa Koumian, Vice President at Redline Communications, and a big thank you of course to our guest moderator, Peter Murray, Executive Director of Dense Networks for keeping us on point today. And a quick reminder, many of our speakers have agreed to stay on for the remaining lunch hour to answer any more of your questions on LinkedIn. So if you go right into our chat, we have a direct link, but you can also just search on hashtag JSA virtual roundtable, all one word to also get to us. But we'd love to continue the chat and get to so many other unanswered questions. Peter was so fabulous to have like 12 prepared for us. And of course the chat box has been going great too. And so we do want to get to you guys, let's bring this over to LinkedIn, maybe get to several more imminently. And viewers, if you're one of the very first 100 registrants, again, we had 250. So sadly, that's less than half, sorry. But if you were one of our first 100 registrants, we hope you enjoyed your lunch here on JSA. And go ahead and visit us at jsa.net to register for upcoming JSA virtual roundtables, including of course, our new series on exploring the impact of COVID-19 on our industry and climate protocols. Next one up, May 7, three weeks from now, we talk through the pandemics in practice healthcare networks. That's a wrap from our end. We look out for the playback of today's roundtable coming soon Tuesday, actually, it will be dropping on JSA TV and JSA podcast that's on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, and more everywhere you look in, you'll find it. Meantime, see you around LinkedIn. Happy virtual networking, and stay safe, my friends. Thank you.