 Welcome to the art film is unlicensed podcast. I'm Caleb. As always, we've got toss us over here. Say hi to us. Hi, Toss us. What's up? What's up? Hey, Toss us. So this week we have Matt Larson from Vista beam Internet. We're super excited to talk to Matt. Matt's got a very long history in the industry been doing this for as long as any of us have for sure. But we're gonna hop into that conversation real quick. But before we do Toss us, my man, give the good people out there. They're called to action. Absolutely. Don't forget to like, listen or subscribe to our channel right here on YouTube or anywhere you download your audio podcast like Apple, Google or Spotify. All right. All right. Well, let's get to it, Matt. Thank you man for taking the time out of your busy day. I know you've got a lot going on. I mean, we all do it, especially just watching all your stuff lately seem even super busy out there lately. So that's been awesome. So everybody's Matt Larson, Vista beam Internet, one of the old hats in the industry. So I've been a part of whisper and everything a really long time. So Matt, if you could just kind of give a quick introduction about yourself. You want to talk about the history kind of where you came from. We find that it gives people a really good sort of idea, you know, what you've seen what you've done and helps people figure out real quick, you know that you probably know what's going on to an extent. So feel free to go ahead and just feel the good people in there with what you've been up to for the last, I don't know, 20, 25 years or so. All right. Well, thanks guys. You know, if I go all the way back, I kind of a funny deal. I used to be a commodities broker. And I wanted to do video production. Because that's that's what I really like to do in college. And so I answered this ad in the back of a magazine. And I said, you know, when that was a thing, right? Yeah, we had a card and you'd serve before the internet, you know, we had a card, you'd circle a number. And then you would send it in and then you would get like, you would get like male propaganda. So I'd answer this one, as I make $10,000 a month with your video production equipment. I'm like, Oh yeah, sure. I'll send that in. So a couple weeks later, I get this letter from this guy and he basically talks about how he made all this. He basically did how to videos. So it's kind of like, you know, if you think about like 19 early 1990s YouTube, it was, you know, you could go buy a video on how to do something. And so I bought that. That was an interesting idea. And I made a video about like how to raise cash from your goats, for example. And but what was interesting is I actually had to make a business trip. This guy happened to be from Nebraska. So I go to visit it. And I call him up, say, Hey, I'm gonna be in town. I want to come visit you and ask you some questions about things like, Oh, I really know that much about all this stuff. I was like, I don't care. I'm in town anyway. So I go out and I meet this guy. And some guy's my age. And he's living in his parent's basement. And he's selling packages. It's like how to make money with your video production equipment, how to raise koi fish, how to do whatever. It's like all these different things. I've talked to him and he's like, Yeah, this video stuff, I don't know anything about video, but what's really cool is this thing called the internet. You should really check that out. This is like, I want to say 92 93, kind of before we even had AOL or anything else. And so I got to check this stuff out. I'm like, All right, you know, and I stayed in touch with this guy for a while. And, you know, just over the next couple of years. And I went down to visit him one time. He'd moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. And he had like one of the first web hosting businesses down there. And it was, it was great because it was like, you know, just college age people. And it's half business, half an excuse to do something. They're basically making drinking money, whatever. Anyway, a couple of years later, he calls me up. He's like, He's like, Hey, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to move to California. Would you like to buy my hosting business? I was like, No, man, I'm broke. I'm trying to make this video thing work. It's not working and stuff. But good luck out there. Anyway, I didn't hear anything back from him. Yeah, I hadn't heard from him for a long time. It's a one day I opened up Wired Magazine. And here's an article. It's this guy. I was like, Oh, wow, this is that guy I met in the in his parent's basement. And he started blogger, like, and has a really interesting story. But he was like living on his, you know, his girlfriend's apartment couch or whatever. And trying to start this and everybody else has left and he kept going and then finally it caught and took off. He made a bunch, bunch of money with blogger. And I thought, Oh, that's cool. That guy ended up being successful. So then a little while later, he started this other deal that had, he basically set it up. It was so the programmers could exchange messages. And you know, you've had this hour announcing this new deal. You know, I was like one of the first people to sign up for it. Oh, it's Twitter. So Evan Williams, look it up, his name's Evan Williams. He's from Nebraska. And that was the guy that originally pointed me at doing internet way, way back in the day. So kind of show that, you know, the creativity comes from all kinds of different places. But that was that was my first kind of introduction to internet. So I was a couple years ahead of the curve. Yeah, I was like 22 at the time. And all that meant is I had like $400 long distance bills, because there was no local internet provider where we were at. I was on a long distance to get to AOL and prodigy and comp you serve and Oracle and all the different things that we used to have back in the day. And I moved my video production to this site. I grew up in Scottsville, Nebraska, which is, you know, pretty much the middle of the country and pretty close to the middle of nowhere, really. It's a wonderful place. But not tons of options if you're looking for exciting technical careers. So anyway, I had moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, start my video production to kind of take it to the next level. And man, that was a that was a failure. You know, there was always somebody better, always somebody cheaper, but I started volunteering with this community internet that was starting up at the time. It was called Fortnet. And they had volunteers from the college and donated servers from Hewlett Packard, and donated 56 K line from Quest. And they had these community meetings, I went into one of the community meetings and all the computer nerds are, you know, Oh, well, you should do gopher is the best tool. FTP is the best tool. Finger is my favorite for whatever. And they're like, Anybody have any questions? I'm like, Yes. What's command to download Netscape? You know, and there's a student, you know, three, three seats away from you. Yeah. And then I downloaded Netscape. And then there was this miraculous world of you could ask the internet, you could ask the internet questions and answers would appear. And it was just incredible. So within about six months, I had spent all this time with these people learning and asking questions of the mass and internet pre Google, and started figuring out how to do things. And I started volunteering with that group. And people like, Hey, I don't need to know you. figuring out how to do things. And I started volunteering with that group and basically learned what I needed, what needed to be done to actually run an internet service. So this is back in, I want to say 95, 96, so pretty early on the video business failed, I moved back to Nebraska, uh, you know, tail between my legs went, drove a, you know, I was like driving a paler to feed lot, driving a car paid $25 for living in a, you know, single wide, you know, practically down by the river territory. And at some point I decided like, you know, I should do something with my life. I'm 27 years old and I'm driving a payloader and I told my dad like, I think I could run an internet business better than the people in town are. So he got some friends together and we got enough money to deposit to get a T one line, uh, 10 dial up lines and started internet service in 97 and, uh, really super low tech. I mean, it was, it was budget everything. You know, I had an old pork master at, you know, one Linux box. It basically ran everything. And, uh, you know, we, we did have a couple of interesting things. Uh, the local I like would let us to use a copper lines to do DSL. So we started out with dial up and then we started doing DSL with the copper lines and at the time, you know, it was like 768 K people love that. So, uh, we ended up getting pretty popular for that. Um, when everybody was switching to 56 K the phone lines here were so bad it actually, they would get slower speeds on the 56 K. So I just bought cheap 33 six stuff and have more lines than the other guys and ended up, uh, you know, being really successful. We got the point. I think we had, uh, I think we were 2500, 3000 customers, a couple of thousand dial up, um, and three, 400 combination of DSL and some wireless. And I got into the wireless, basically the DSL thing. Uh, we had, uh, uh, they had the, the I like, uh, was sprint and there was a change of ownership and then they just said, we're going to disconnect all your DSL lines because that's an illegal use of the tariff and it's like, Oh, well, let me get all the hospitals and doctors, offices and lawyers activated to inform you about what kind of an impact it's going to have on their business. And we managed to hold them off long enough. They forced us to become a C-LAC. Then we tried to order the same loops that used to be $8 a month. Now they're 60 and it costs $400 up front to get them set up. And then they started selling their own DSL for 50, 60 bucks a month. And I'm not good at math, but I can tell if that's not a sustainable business model. So I started looking at alternatives and that's where it came across. Uh, there was an early mailing list that I think it was ISP wireless. And it came across Marlin Schaefer and you guys, do you guys know Marlin? So those are old school, you know, Marlin was taking these indoor electronics 802.11, not even AB nothing original 802.11 and putting outdoor antennas on it. And so I started doing this. I was following his experiments. We bought, you know, some stuff and I started putting, you know, did all the stupid mistakes, every mistake to be made in wireless. I've made them, you know, we had, you know, coax, wasn't weatherproof. They got full of water, stuff that wasn't grounded, that exploded the first time there was, you know, static in the air, amplifiers going across the street, you know, to get the hottest possible signal, you know, just exactly every, every dumb mistake. But started doing the experimenting, you know, and kind of through, through experimentation was able to kind of figure out how to run wireless. Our area was kind of primed. We were one of the few areas that had a working Metricom ricochet. So there were a lot of people that had this, if you guys don't know what that stuff, it was an old 900 megahertz system that ran about dial-up speed. It was portable, you know, I had a hacker buddy that had it, had one, a modem bell crowed on the back of his laptop and he was sitting the bar, sending emails and doing whatever. And so we had a lot of people that were accustomed to wireless here and they were okay with it. So we ended up doing well with the wireless and started building that out. So when I ended 2000, I sold my first company, we had about 2,500 subs, couple thousand dial-up, about 500 DSL and wireless. And worked for this company called Airwave. They had licensed spectrum, LMDS, of course the equipment wasn't quite ready yet. The guy who actually was kind of my boss, and I fell by the name of, well, my boss's boss was Dave Toos from Extreme LTE. You guys probably know him. He sells LTE equipment now. Great guy, but he looked at all the wireless stuff we were doing and he thought, oh, that's cute. Those are like baby monitors, you know, well, someday he'll grow up and be able to use the real equipment. Well, fast forward a couple of years, those baby monitors really think that was making money. You know, dial-up was falling apart. DSL did exactly what we thought, you know, the business model was falling apart for it. And the wireless was kind of working. I had some run-ins with my local boss and finally got the point where I was like, I don't care if they fire me. And, you know, then eventually they sold the company as somebody else. My non-compete expired and like, you know, I'm going to start over and I'm going to start with just wireless. And I'm not even going to worry about DSL, dial-up, any of the rest of it. And that's when I started this scheme. That was in 2004. It was a rough ride at first because my wife and I, we weren't married yet, but she worked at the same place. So when they sold it, we both ended up, no jobs. It's like, all right, well, now we've got time to, like, we should actually go get married and we'll go figure this stuff out together. You know, and found out we were going to have a kid soon after and, you know, I had a death in the family, lost my dad, like not too long after that in 2004. I like to say it was like pushing the big red button because all these things happen at once. And then, you know, 2004, we started up this scheme. And that's just been like, you know, it's, it's taken some different turns here and there, but it's just been an incredible ride to, you know, look back now. That's, that's where everything kind of started. You know, now I think we have almost 350 tower sites. We're covering parts of three states, a big part, like almost 40,000 square miles. And, you know, I think we're like almost 7,500 customers now. So, I mean, it's, it's grown. And, you know, just been a, just been a tremendous business to be in. You know, looking back, I'm just like super thankful that I've been able to be part of something that was so entrepreneurial and rewarded people that were entrepreneurial and took the right kind of risks. And a lot of reward there for sharing knowledge. I know that, that was huge for me was the only way I, the only way a lot of us old timers got through the first five, six years was by telling each other what not to do and what to do and kind of share that knowledge. And, you know, I really, I really, I try to continue to do that and love seeing what's going on with the industry. You know, you guys doing your podcast, sharing knowledge and everybody else doing that sort of thing is, I think just fantastic. But that's part of why I really like doing this. Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why this industry is so successful. I mean, you've seen some massive growth, obviously, since you started. And I'm sure you still see a lot more growth, you know, an untapped potential that, that you still have even at your size, you know, it's, yeah, all of us getting together and working together is really, I think what, you know, makes, makes all this work. It's funny too, like the, the relative newbies to the industry just don't realize like how sparse information was back then too. So, you know, when they're like, yeah, I heard about some old DSL reports or something. Yeah, you know, it's real ancient stuff. Ha, ha, funny. I'm like, no, dude, like you don't understand. This is where a lot of this came from or at least made contacts. And then, you know, the couple of old lists, the old couple of ISP cons and various things I can't hardly remember anymore. But I'm like, this is, this is where this started. Like the resources that folks have now, you know, from an information perspective, from a training perspective, an equipment perspective. So, you know, I'll never say it's easy. It's always more difficult, right? But it's, you know, at least you've got a lot, a lot less barrier to entry now than that existed back then. Although there's a lot to be said about not knowing what you don't know. So, you're like, I'm going to be a whips and get after it, you know? So, I mean, there was definitely a lot of that that happened mid-2000s, you know? A lot of folks are still out there cranking it too. So, yeah, it's a huge, huge shift from those early days. I mean, we were, you know, we're all working really hard to try and make the equipment that was available do what we wanted to do, right? And now you have this whole shift. A whole industry has come up where now they want to know, hey, what do you guys need as a whist to be successful so we can make our radios and our equipment do that for you, right? So, I mean, that in itself is just really shows, I mean, it's such a large industry. And, you know, starting from such a basic level how we've been able to kind of change, you know, the manufacturing landscape and have them cater to us where in the beginning was kind of like, too bad. You know, it does what it does. You know, like it, go somewhere else, you know? Yeah, I'll say it back in the day. I remember we were building our own CPEs out of like, there was a deal of advice called the Wingsys, or Wingsys, what, 11? Yeah. You guys probably remember those. And 11B. Yeah. And it had all kinds of, you know, we'd buy a little enclosure with a flat panel antenna and put it in and I was making homemade POEs where, you know, you buy the jacks and turn everything out. And yeah, that's where we, you know, weird things like, man, we can't run the cable more in about 25 feet. And then the radio just starts rebooting all the time. Well, I didn't know that, you know, it's a five volt DC power supply runs out of juice after, you know, so far. So then, okay, now we need to get a bigger, a different power supply and, you know, we didn't, we, we had to make so many of our own radios back in the day. And I was big 802.11. I wanted generic stuff. I didn't want to use, you know, canopy came out and then Breezecom. And you have these proprietary platforms, but once you bought it, you were kind of locked into whatever they had. So I was begging to have the generic stuff. I didn't really work well until, you know, I still look at Transio. I know a lot of people like talk about all those terrible things and the evil crap that came down from Transio. But I remember that being kind of the first time it's like, here's a platform I can just plug in and go. And it's not going to freeze up. It's not going to have like random dumb things happen. At least still the later versions of the hardware. But I mean, for a long time, that stuff was pretty solid and well built. And, you know, then other people came along were kind of doing different things. Caleb, I think you were, you were with Deliverant, right? Was that kind of your first foray into the industry? And you guys were kind of building a similar deal. Oh, and then there was, you know, some of those that the old time was, oh, smart bridges, you know. Oh yeah, I remember those. They had randomly filled up with water and have weird, they had some weird at-melt chips that you had to use specialized software to configure it with the machine code. I don't know, it was crazy back in the day. I know that the magic combo for me that finally really worked when we started out was we had a StarOS operating system. I was just gonna say that, yep. And we combined it with the Lucent Wi-Fi card, which they had a really clean signal, low power. And then we put it on with YDI amplifiers. And for a while, YDI had this metal, like triangle profile sector, 180 degree sector. It was a wave guide, horizontal polarity. And we just, we made coin, we made bank with that. Now we were only offering like 380, 4K and 512K speeds. And there was no streaming video at the time to like completely overwhelm it. But I could put a single board PC with three of those cards in it, three amps, put it up on a tower and go out like 15 miles and probably put 60, 70 people on each sector. And they're all happy because they're coming from dial-up. It's like, I don't need a phone line, all my stuff comes up fast, this is great. So early on, man, that was the ticket. And then Star West had those cool, they had these really cool management features. Had this theory about it because those guys were from Canada. And what happened is every winter get cold and they would sit there and they would program. And like in the spring, it was just this beautiful flower would emerge of all the software changes. And it got so much better. Star West was just like awesome. I was so happy with that. And we started using, we use a ton of Micro-Tick now. And I remember Micro-Tick and Star West, Star West would kind of pull out a little ahead on the wireless side in the winter. And then Micro-Tick would catch up eventually, but then the Star West guys moved to Thailand. And it was just like, nope, nope. Latvia, it's like too cold or they had way more smart people at Micro-Tick. And then Micro-Tick just started taking off. But yeah, it was crazy back in the day. You know, all that AO21B based stuff. And then A, when A came out, that was tremendous because we could use it for low-cost back calls. I had so many, you know, you could have a 20 meg back call back in the day when, you know, we only had 25 to 50 meg at our internet site, you know, for our main site. That was a huge jump to be able to do that. And what's crazy about this industry is like you think about the exponential jumps that we've taken. You know, when I started out, you know, like 384, 256K, 512K was like, you know, that was rocking for back in the day. And it was more than enough for most people. That people just love that. You know, now we're putting out Toronto stuff that does 500 meg, we're doing millimeter wave stuff that's doing over a gig. That is just a crazy jump. And the equipment is a little bit more expensive to do that. But I don't, you have a hard time pointing at anything else that's made those kind of exponential technology leaps over that period of time and done it in a way that's made it like really accessible to multiple operators. You know, I know right now the fiber guys talked about this deal about, oh, you know, what was the latest one 25 gig fiber in Chattanooga? That's like, hooray, you know, you got 25 meg to do what with? You know, it's not actually practically any faster. You know, and it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I'm much more interested in seeing, you know, the fact that getting a hundred meg out to like everyone, that should be like the number one priority. Absolutely. And the hurdles it takes, you know, we're starting to do some fiber. We're building our first fiber town right now. And the amount of money we have to put into doing that. It's like, man, I could put up six fully loaded towers of Toronto for the cost of what it's doing to do this small town, this 600 household town worth of fiber. And all the most customers I'll ever get out of this town is 600. If I put up six towers of Toronto, you know, that's 600 customers a tower potentially. So I don't know, there's still, I think there's still a huge role for fixed wireless going forward despite what everybody, you know, we're gonna do some fiber and I think there's gonna be lots of roles for it. But I think fixed wireless still has a huge frontier out there of positive growth. Yeah, the hybrid model is really something that's important. You know, I mean, it's not like fiber isn't good, but I think what's, you know, really missing because it's being driven so hard by the bureaucrats in our government and the big guys out there is this, you know, gig to everybody. It's that's, I mean, that's great. I'm not saying, you know, no, but what we need is we need reliable internet and we need it now, right? And wireless is the only way to deliver that and the technology is far more superior than, you know, what's, you know, what the average person uses. I mean, you're a wisp, right? So you know that you're selling 100, 200, 300 meg packages and you see your customers are only using five, 10, 20 meg, you know, at a time, right? So I think 100 meg is really, I mean, even 50 meg is sufficient, but 100 meg to everybody now is something that can happen via wireless. And then you build, you build fiber as you build it when you can, you know, because we can't wait 10 years, right? They need it now and that's, that's the key there. Yeah. Accessibility and affordability and affordability goes kind of two different directions because not only affordable to the customer, but I think also affordable to get put up and then the time factor, you know, we're fighting with fibers and it just takes years to get fiber built, you know, why should we be forcing people to wait years? I think it's nice about the wireless is like, man, I can, you know, my ROI on wireless, you know, you used to back in the day, you know, when you're building your own TPE and your install is basically you drill one hole and side of the trailer house, pop radio on and we were the next one to do five or six of them a day. We actually do a lot more with our install now to do it professionally, but you know, the time factor being able to get stuff up quickly, just completely dwarfs. I think the supposed future proof advantages of fiber, fiber, I mean, yeah, it's gotten faster over the years, but I don't think it's seen the same kind of exponential increase in capability that fixed wireless has in the last 20. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it really plays down to like the, the eventual density and stuff too. Cause it's one thing to be like, all right, we won't cover the, I don't, I forget what the gimmick number they throw out. There is 20% that are completely unserved or something 30% of the population, whatever it may be. I really don't know, but you know, okay, you're going to hit some pockets and stuff of fiber, you know, but folks like where my folks live, you know, we're, we're, they're only an hour and a half south of Atlanta, right? So, you know, we're not in the absolute middle of BFE, but I mean, it's a rural area where, you know, there's a house, maybe every half mile, you know, every mile down the road or so, like, you know, they're going to be left in the dregs for that last 5% that ever gets covered. Cause realistically it's just, there's no money down there. And there's no, there's not money inside the town that's nearby to really incentivize or anyone to come. There's just not enough density. So, you know, these areas, there's going to be a lot of areas, especially as technology improves on your, your 365, we get access to lower frequency stuff at some point where you can get some better sort of one or non-monocyte coverage through foliage. I think, you know, that's a big part of the next realm of where a fixed wireless is really going to take off. So there's a lot of potential you see, you know, a lot of focus scenario between Medusa from Cambium and the Toronto stuff and 365. Now that we know that the bands are available for bead funding, they're considered, you know, a reliable band, wink, nod, air quote, whatever you want to put up around that. But, you know, there's, you know, there's tons of potential for picking up people in areas that are just probably never going to be covered with fiber or if they do, it's going to take 10, 15 years. You know, who knows how long. So there's still a ton of potential out there for sure. Yeah, I'm curious to see. I actually, I'd heard of, I talked to a company that's actually doing some LTE and TV white space. Oh, wow, geez. There's a, there's a ghost from the past. Yeah, that's, let's just fast forward past that. Well, a big, big part of our, you know, the reason we founded Wisp in the first place was to try and get access to TV white space spectrum. And I'm kind of like, I think I might try some of this stuff out. I'm not a huge fan of LTE, but if there was a place to use it, I think probably a low frequency like that would be the place to try it out. You know, a place like where you're talking about South of Georgia, that's, that's might be the only thing it's going to get through a lot of the trees down there. You know, 365 can do some stuff, but it's, it's not a miracle. You really need some low frequency to do that. So I don't know. I hope, I hope somebody can figure out some way of doing something with it. It's been a giant disappointment so far, but 20 years later, I'm still a sucker for low frequencies. Well, and I don't know that much about it, but I think pretty much the, the broadcasters kind of salted the earth on that. Yeah, it's all bureaucracy and red tape at this point and spectrum availability and trying to jump around those free channels and stuff like that. So I mean, the, the science and the theory and the math behind it, yeah, it works. You know, the attenuation of that low frequency is great for going through objects, you know? So yeah, it will work, but unless that spectrum just opens up, I don't know how successful it's going to be, but we'll see. Hey. Well, life where I'm at, I actually have one entire county, it's up in Colorado surrounded by mountains. There's no broadcast TV, so it's all available. And I've only got two, three channels, the most the rest of my area, the further away I get from Denver, the better I am, but I've got a lot of places where we could potentially try it out. I've just never come across. There hasn't been a platform yet that really shows the kind of ability to scale up in speed and, you know, density to be able to cover it. Although we're at the point where you can kind of mix and match platforms a little bit now, like the town where we're building fiber, we've got kind of a mix of CBRS and 5GIG on Cambium right now. About half the customers have clear line of sight, the other half don't. And we already serve half the town, you know, with, you know, off of one tower in that, you know, just happens to be a grain leg in the corner of town where we can kind of, you know, lay everything out. But, you know, I think mixing and matching a little bit to try and best tool for the job, that's I think the key. There's gonna be places where fiber is the best tool. There's gonna be places where fixed wireless is the best tool. Deep places where satellites probably is the best tool. There's nothing that's good for DSL anymore. The alarms, you know, maybe you can run alarms on the old pairs again or recycle it. That's probably it. We need to just recycle CenturyLink at some point. Yeah, I don't know. That's like the zombie company that keeps, they can rename it and do everything else, but it's like, man. It's like a cockroach. It won't die. Keeping whips in business for 20 plus years now. That's what I realized. I had on my Facebook profile, I guess some drunk knocked over a pole the other night and it was a telephone line. So it wasn't power. I thought it was cable. Didn't really look that close, but they had a bucket truck with a strap on it for three days, holding the lines up. When I finally drove past there the other day, they were out there fixing it was front here. I'm like, oh my God, there's still a thing. You don't really think about the hard line phone companies really existing in a lot of places anymore. So it was definitely a shocker for sure. The outages that we've had, there was a real early on, I remember we had a huge outage. We were down for like two days and I was just going nuts. Well, I found out what it was was some knucklehead drove a dump, forgot to put the back of the dump truck down in Kansas City and drove down the alley where all the fiber came out of the central office for Sprint and took like a third of the Western United States offline for a day and a half. We had a great one. Back in the day, we had a fiber feed from Charter and they did not put their stuffing con to it. They just did direct burial, armored fiber because it's strong enough. Gophers love it. And I still have a screen cap somewhere. The local news, the radio station did it. The news web page had a picture of Bill Murray from Caddyshack with the hose going after the Gopher as they're lead in for the article about the Gophers chewing through the internet feed for Western Nebraska. So yeah, there's lots of mistakes have been made. Only way you learn sometimes, I guess. So you had mentioned earlier, so WISPA coming together to get the TV white space. And we had the interview with David Zumwalt last time the president CEO of WISPA. You've been involved with this since the beginning. If you can tell us a little bit about the history, what your involvement was with that, how did it come together beyond the movement from some random boards and forums and stuff online? There were several iterations of or trade organizations that tried to start up and then kind of dropped off before WISPA really took off. So if you can kind of give us a sepia-toned rundown memory lane on that, I think it'd be interesting for folks out there to get a little bit more background info. Sure, let me put on the rose-colored glasses to make sure that... All back in my time. So the first time I really had involvement with anybody else in the industry was at the very first WISTCON, which was, I believe, 2001. Kind of around that timeframe, 2001, maybe 2002. I think it was 2001. We'll call it 2001 for now. Anyway, people from the ISP wireless mailing list, I think, decided, oh, somebody said, hey, let's get together and do a convention and have this one in Chicago. Michael Anderson, his nickname was Bullet, he had put together that first WISTCON. And then the show, I think, he was only expecting maybe 100 people to show up, like 500 people showed up. And it was very random and weird, but really cool in a way because all these people that talk to each other online finally get to meet each other in person. And that's always a fascinating thing to me because I had a couple of people that I argued with vehemently online, and then I met them in person, and it was like, we go on great. And they were just passionate in one way. And then there were other people that online had this huge presence, and then you met them, and it's like after spending 15 minutes with them in person, like, yeah, okay, doesn't really, this guy's a little sketchy, so there's a lot of that going on when you kind of build up a community. And so the first WISTCON was pretty successful. I went to like second, third, we're in Chicago, and then they have another one in Dallas. And so I think there was about five of them were successful, and then they kind of tailed off. But Mike Anderson started this organization called Park 15. And he was calling it a trade association. And a bunch of us really wanted to kind of do things, push for, try and get some more lobbying, try and get more spectrum. The TV white space deal was the big one, trying to figure out how to get access to pre-365, that was something else we were looking at, getting more access in five gig. Those were all really critical items that all of us were concerned about. And we had, there was this discussion about what to do. There was this discussion about what to do. Do we support part 15 or do we do something else? And there were multiple things going on. I think the wireless WIA and WCA, there was kind of a faction of the cellular guys kind of had their own licensed only spectrum type deal. And there was a couple of us and unlicensed that were looking at stuff. And we thought we could support part 15, but it turned out that it was wholly owned by Mike Anderson. And he wanted to do things his way. It wasn't really gonna be something owned by everyone that we'd be able to kind of do as a proper nonprofit. So a few of us made a decision and I saw Michael one night and he was at a conference in Denver and we talked about it in great detail. And he just said, I think it needs to be this way. So, well, I'm gonna support you, but I'm also gonna work on trying to figure out how to support this other one. Because I think it's important we have something that's driven by the industry and not by an individual person. So we got together and we had an original group. There was like six or seven of us. There was myself, John Scrivener, Rick Harnish. I believe Tom Dereggi was part of that group, Mac Gehrman, Marlon Schaefer. For brief time, Brett Glass. And that was, I think that was, and then there was the guy named Gary Hoffman who had been at the Wisconsin show. And really he had helped found the Fire Wire Trade Association. So he was like this one guy that knew what needed to be done to get nonprofits started. And so we worked with him and we followed through and we started writing the bylaws to get everything put together. That's about the time Brett Glass dropped off. He didn't agree with some of the things we were doing and really wanted to try and control the process. And so we kind of had to make an executive decision and be like, all right, there's a lot divisiveness. And it's really hard to talk about the divisiveness part of it now because in a lot of ways, WISPA feels like it's really together right now. But when you're early on, it's very dependent on the cult of personality of the people that are there. And you guys know that there are a lot of very single-minded people that are very sure that their way is the right way and that other people are idiots in our business. You kind of have to have that strength to be an entrepreneur, this belief in your convictions. When you get a bunch of people that have strong belief in their convictions together in the same room, if their convictions don't line up, turns into a lot of infighting. And I went back, I've been, I started writing a book about 10 years ago and I went back through the threads of some of those discussions. And it was just crazy how much back and forth, I'm out, I'm not gonna deal with this. This is wrong, just people vanishing off the list just left and right, this is terrible. And we had to like really hold it together. So really early on, it was very important that we have a core of people that could really stick together and kind of have each other's backs and get through the original survival of the organization. And of the people that I mentioned on there, we were very fortunate to have multiple board members that came on at different times through the first like six or seven years of WISPA. You know, guys like Bob Maldachel, you know, George Regato was on there too for a while. And you know, there's people that just like, they kind of put the industry above their own interests to try and kind of make things work. And so we stumbled around and we did it on just an absolute shoestring of a budget. We couldn't put our own show on but we kind of did some stuff with ISPcon. They would have like a room for us. And so we'd be like, oh, the WISPA event room, you know, they would like, they would give us the room as long as we encouraged all of our members to go to the ISPcon show. And that was great. I've got some great pictures from some of the early ones where we kind of gave out our first like operator of the year and person of the year awards and that sort of thing. And so we were just the sideline at the ISPcon shows. Well, it got to a point where I went to an ISPcon show and was like, the only thing the WISPA room was the only thing that had anything going on, the rest of it was dead. And so we started looking at, well, maybe we should look at doing our own trade show. And so I think 2010 we kind of partnered with another outfit to do a trade show. And it kind of worked, kind of didn't, it wasn't quite successful enough for them, I think to want to support it. And then we did a regional show in St. Louis and that was really the first event that WISPA really put on of that nature. And I think we had 500 people show up, something like that. It was fairly successful, super low budget, it was like a holiday in or some kind of a deal like that. There's some boost out in the hall and an auditorium. And we got, I think Julie Knapp from the FCC actually came out to it, which was great. And that was in 2010. And then we finally like, we had to like push all in. I mean, as an organization, I think we maybe brought in 70 or $80,000 a year in dues. I don't know, we didn't bring that much into dues. I think that was everything we had in the bank that it accumulated over the previous eight years. We had about a, we had somewhere between 80 and 100,000 to work with. And we basically went to Vegas and pushed it all in to do that first WISPA Palooza back in fall of 2011. And that was probably one of the proudest moments of my life was to go to that, the first WISPA Palooza in Vegas and to see, I think we had 700 or 800 people show up. And it was like, you know, I was just like looking around and it's like, we're back. You know, it's like all the WISCOM people, the old timers were still around, a bunch of them showed up. We held these new people. There was all this great technology that was there. I had just done a white paper about the role of fixed wireless and fixing the digital divide that we presented for the first time there. And it was just like tremendous to see that energy. And then it was successful. We made pretty good money on the show. Like I think way more than we expected. So then as we went and started developing the shows, you know, that turned into like, that was the critical math. That was like the engine we needed to get going to like really take it to the next level. Because man, we were scraping for a long time to try and come up with the money to pay, you know, credit to Steve Karan, man. He was there from the start and gave us some big discounts and always pointed us in the right direction on what to do. But we had to scrape to get him paid. And now we have the shows like, oh, now we can actually do some things the right way. We can get a lobbyist. We can get a staff to actually put these shows on. We can sell it. We can do all these things. And it's like, it's just been awesome to watch that develop. You know, I think I've been off the board for quite a while, but I think I served for eight or 10 years. And it was a long eight or 10 years. You know, I feel like I put my time in. And a lot of people that jumped in were doing this as volunteers to really get that thing going was tremendous. But I'm so happy to see where we're going now. And, you know, just the improvement in professionalism. I think that WISMA has helped a lot of other WISPs. The idea of sharing knowledge and like really kind of helping each other out for the most part still feels like that pervades a lot of the industry. You know, there's little screw-ups here and there, stuff that, you know, you wish would go better. But I think we're just going in a great direction. I'm super happy with David Dumbwald. You know, he's one of the few people I probably haven't met in person yet because I've been to a lot of shows. I've been to visit a lot of operators and he's somebody I haven't met. But I listened to your guys podcast with him. I'm like, yes, that is the kind of attitude I want WISMA to have. You know, we're the first responders, man. We're the guys fixing this stuff. That's right. That's what it should be. You know, I'm just 100% done taking any crap off of people that want to talk down fixed wireless. You know, I usually roll for everything. Fiber does great things. But if you want a hot take, you want to fix a digital divide, every resource that every resource should be committed towards the use of fixed wireless and unlicensed spectrum at supporting those solutions to resolve the unserved people in America right now. If we commit any resources to direct fiber of the home or anything that doesn't support that, it's a waste. Yep. That's my hot take is we want to fix a digital divide, WISPs, unlicensed spectrum, fix wireless as a way to do it, get them inexpensive middle mile so that they can build out their networks and then take the next 10, 15 years and build out fiber under that wireless. That's the way to solve a digital divide, not to dump an unending supply of money onto the fiber gasoline fire. I mean, there's a hot take for you, but that's I think how we fix the problem. And I'm super excited about hybrid fiber wireless. I'm glad WISP is doing some fiber. I went to a fiber broadband conference and anybody says anything about wireless, they're gonna take you out back and shank you or something because they are threatened. Yep. I mean, we are all living, the fixed wireless guys are all living rent free in the fiber guy's minds. They are scared because we are this huge threat to their business model. Their business model takes too much money, takes too long to deploy. Fix wireless guys were nimble, we can get around all of these roadblocks. From day one, all the way back to SEALAC days, having to deal with the DSL loops, regulatory hurdles that they put in to try and prevent competition. Fix wireless, regulatory bypass. It's like the guy from Leafa Weapon, what was it at the end? Diplomatic immunity, regulatory bypass. We don't have a permit to get across this railroad deal. Immunity, I'm gonna shoot over the top of it. We can't get pull attachment rights to go underground. I'll put in wireless. It's just like that there's so many, it rewards creativity and all these different angles get opened up that you can't do with fiber. It's like this whole thing about fiber, it's great for certain things, but it's very two dimensional. Wireless is three dimensional thinking. It's like playing 3D chess as opposed to playing this other one. So I'm super excited about the future. I'm really excited about David and the leadership at WISPA and what they're doing now and all the resources we've built up, having two awesome trade shows. I mean, think about that guy. You guys have been around long enough to know. It was few and far between to go meet other operators in person and having two awesome trade shows like that. It's incredible. It's, I'm super happy with where the organization has gone. It's my favorite time of the year. Trade show, I mean, it's as hard of a job as it is and it's tiring to put in all that time and effort to prep, deliver, and then wrap up. It's so worth it, man. It's so worth it. I love it. Yeah. Well, and just exchange that energy exchange, like being able to talk to other people and I was come back from the show fired up, you know, even if, you know, there's tons of great sessions, but I always run into people and see ideas or see some tool that's like, oh, wow, this is gonna make, I'm gonna take this back. It's gonna make my business easier. It's gonna improve service for our customers. I'm gonna learn some technique. I'm gonna talk to somebody who's like, oh, wow, I can't believe I didn't think of that. You know, it's fantastic to be able to, I think the energy exchange and the therapy that takes place as we all kind of commiserate all the dumb things that we've done and deal with on a daily basis. You know, that's powerful. Yes. The hanging around the bar, drinking and commiserating with everybody is, it really helps. It's good therapy too. Yeah. I was talking to somebody who's been a buddy of mine. It's in the industry and we're talking about the show coming up and it's always like, here we go. You do all your stuff up to it, the flight out there, you're like, all right, whatever, let's get this going. But then you start bumping into people in the lobby and after an hour, you're like, all right, yeah, yeah, let's do this. So it's a long week, but it's a good week. And what you're saying about people getting out there and meet people, especially the new folks, it can be a little intimidating. And especially, we're talking about this long history and stuff like that. I think it's really important that the new folks out there that are just kind of getting their feet wet and stuff, like it's not an old boys club by any stretch of the imagination. Like it's wild how much people are willing to share with you because you've been there, you've done it. And you're not gonna, they're not coming in there to stomp on your yard. So it's not a competition thing or anything like that. So everyone was just very, hey, let's work together. And even if it could be a potential competition thing one day, like if you're doing stuff right, it makes it a lot easier to work up and get someone that's doing things right. And you'll figure things out versus some absolute whack job that doesn't understand how things like, I don't know, channels work or using the wrong antennas and barfing up the spectrum and everything like that. So even if you are a little bit worried about competition, like an educated competitor, at least from a mechanical RF perspective, at least in our opinion, it is a good thing for sure. So you remind me of funny stories. So John Scriven and I went to, there was an ISP con, I want to say in 2003, 2004, somewhere in that timeframe, probably 2005 in Baltimore. And it was right at the height of the member earth link was doing the media networks like in Philadelphia. And so the architect of their network was a keynote speaker. And he got up and John and I were in the back of the room and he started talking about, they were doing the whole thing, it was the mesh network. Yeah, so close. 2.4. Yeah, single radio. And the guy is like, you know what? Most people don't realize, there's actually three channels in 2.4, not just one. We're going to use these other channels to be able to distribute that. And John and I were in the back and we just broke out laughing. We were just like cracking up. And it was like, who gave these guys hundreds of millions of dollars to go do stuff? It was just like complete garbage. But, you know, sometimes the chat spot, somebody would be like, you know, well, there's actually an extra two channels that people don't think they know about. You know, it was just like, wow, these are the people we're dealing with. All we got to do is wait them out. They'll run out of money. And sure enough, they did. Well, the bad thing with that is, and we've seen a lot of it, and I've seen a lot of this trying to work verticals and stuff and other lifetimes I've lived, like in the cable companies and stuff is, you know, so many people got burned out on a lot of that big money wireless stuff way back in the day. Like that example that you gave where somebody lit, who knows, how many hundreds of million dollars on fire being stupid, right? We've seen it. The ricochet thing. Like, it was amazing for what it was, but it was a giant money burn. You know, how many times the cable companies try to do their own wireless and then, you know, especially those small to regional ones that are like, oh, you guys are, you guys are trying, I'm gonna try that too. Like Happy Gilmore where the shooter was trying to figure out the whole like run and putt thing. So, but you know, I think a lot of people got a bad taste in their mouth for wireless because of money burns or old tech, you know, and everyone still thinks it's still 2012, not realizing that the equipment's there to do stuff. Like, you know, it blows their minds that we've got millimeter wave. It blows their minds that we can work at a distance and capacity at the same time. And, you know, some of the new tech is coming up there's really wild. So, you know, while it's one thing, we're definitely living rent free and a lot of these folks had a lot of them. We're also got a lot of false bravado because you can't do anything with wireless. I was like, well, actually you can. You can do a lot. So, you know, I've seen a lot of that fought a lot of that over the years in different roles and stuff, too. And I'm like, dude, it's not 10 years ago. Like, it's fascinating where things are right now. Yeah, I listened to a lot of podcasts and there's a couple of them that if you turned on the echo filtering, they would be silent because they're all busy telling each other about how smart they are and how fibers and solution and everything else is just garbage, you know, over and over and over. And, you know, there are so many other factors that go along with running a good broadband business that can weigh more importantly towards the success of that operation and the customer experience. And I think it's really heartening to see if you look around on Google, you can see some of the better fixed wireless operators have way higher customer satisfaction ratings than a lot of big fiber carriers. You know, like where we're at, we've actually had Gigabit Fiber and Scott's Bluffs since like 2005. So we've been competing with Fiber, you know, pretty much the entire time we've been here. Now, our biggest customer base is outside of town. We focus on that, that's all right, but we also didn't have the tools to compete, you know, like we do now. So, you know, there's a town that, you know, we looked at doing fiber there and the poles were a mess and it was going to be this giant, you know, snowball fight with the permitting and the cable guys and CenturyLink to try and get stuff put up. So we didn't do anything with it. We decided to kind of wait it out while another outfit went in and put it in and multi-million dollars put fiber into this town. We put in some CN wave in Toronto and just like, you know what, I don't need 60% market share to make this work. I can survive off 10, 15, 20% market share. If I take care of my customers and their applications work, they're not going to leave. Yeah. And that's kind of the attitude I'm starting to take with a lot of this stuff is I'm going to go continue. We've been overbuilding ourselves constantly. It seemed like every five to seven years we have to start the rip and replace process, takes about the same amount of time. And after you get done where you finally get the last few of the old stuff torn out, well, that's time to start put more of the new stuff in and the more dense area isn't. The cycle just kind of keeps going. And, you know, I'm pretty confident we're going to be able to survive for a long time, you know? Eventually, yeah, fiber probably does get to the point where that probably is the final goal. But even so, there are all kinds of uses for the infrastructure we put up that actually go beyond broadband. You know, if you really want to look out like five, 10, 15 years into the future, you know, having a tower with good connectivity is going to have value one way or another. You know, maybe it's not for broadband, it might be for IoT type applications, you know, or some kind of temporary setup or even, you know, the next generation of mobile networks that goes beyond whatever five year, whatever crap they're pushing nowadays being the cutting edge. Okay, Mr. Lee. Yeah, but I mean, there's all kinds of other applications for the infrastructure that we can do. You know, we did an acquisition last fall. We bought out, you know, the guys that bought out my original company. They're doing two way and they couldn't, they had to pick one or the other and they're still doing a ton of two way business and commercial business band. And they have towers, their business is great. They spun off the broadband because, you know, it made more sense for them to focus on that. There's not a lot of difference. So I think, you know, there's going to be lots of opportunity to continue to use fixed wireless and microwave infrastructure way out into the future. It may not necessarily be broadband related, but I think there's a chance to evolve it into some really interesting different directions. And I think it's important for people too that it realize about over like, oh, we're going to get overbuilt in this end of the world. Like, it's not like, okay, it'll be tough. Yeah, things are going to get a little tougher for you. Maybe, or maybe, you know, it's like Starlake, you know, a lot of people lost people to Starlake. They came back because it was a better end user deal in the end. I mean, what's kind of terrifying is, I mean, part of my French here, but how many dog shit networks exist that are built on fiber or cable or whatever that were built and they suck that they spent their own money on, right? Now, how many of these pop-up companies are spending beaucoup amounts of OPM, you know, trying to get this network done in two years? Like, how many of these networks are still going to be viable, feasible two, three, five years down the road? Yeah, the fiber will last. You know, it's not going to rot or not within 20, 30 years or whatever, right? But how many jacked up hand holes? How many non-permanent installs? How many just terrible, terrible things are about to go down right now to just have absolutely poor networks? And then on the flip side of that, what does that mean for the continued sort of monetary investment? You know, you know, a lot of folks are very against government spending. I get it, a lot of folks are for it, whatever. That's not really the discussion, but, you know, we spend the next five or eight years building out garbage networks for 40, 50, 60 billion dollars or whatever it is. Like, those taps are going to dry up eventually because there's just, you know, it's just going to be too much garbage. There's too much of that already. I'm going to have to admit, before I start calling people to take government money, any names, I have to stand up front and center and say, I have taken some. Cancelled. We were, yep, I'm, you know. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. You've been a great guest. See you next time. I'm out. No, but let me, let me explain, you know. You know, this is where I get up, you know, and give the statement to try and explain after I'm canceled. But we tried to focus on programs that we felt like we could make a difference and work within the parameters of the programs. So we've done a lot of small deals with like economic development groups and we've got money for job creation. Like, I think we've gotten over half a million just from our local towns. Nebraska has this deal where they can set aside like a little bit of, you know, sales tax money towards the economic development. So every time we create a job, you know, we'll go in if we know we're going to hire five people, we can get, you know, $50,000 grant for creating five jobs. And we can get low interest loans. So we've done a lot of that locally that's helped us build our business. It's been good for them because they have this money set aside to do something and we take it and we successful with it. Some of them are revolving loan funds. We pay it back and then we go back and borrow from it again. And I love that concept. I think we should have like an infrastructure bank where you could borrow money to go out and build infrastructure and you pay it back. So that the next time you need to build more infrastructure, you can go back and do it again. They do that in North Dakota. North Dakota has fiber all across the state because they took a lot of their natural resources money and created an infrastructure bank. We should have a national infrastructure bank for doing this sort of thing. They kind of say the USDA programs or RUS are supposed to be that way, but they aren't. It's like the restriction on that is insane. We've looked at borrowing RUS money. We couldn't borrow it because they would only loan to companies that were already part of the program. Well, that ain't gonna work. So, we've participated in CAF II and CAF II, the phase two of it was kind of the first time I think that WISPs were actually able to participate in any big federal programs. Before that was always kind of a crap shoot. And I think we kind of blew away some people's expectations, you know? With NextLink and Whisper doing so well in that, I think that just like shocked a hell of people like Jonathan Chambers. Jonathan Chambers was going around all the rural electric saying, oh, we've got this money sewed up. You're gonna get all this money. And then NextLink and Whisper and a bunch of other WISPs took a bunch of it and the area that they got in space. So, they turned on the regulatory lobbying machine to power into Ardolf to try and prevent that from happening again, you know? And then it kind of blew up. Although now we're seeing Ardolf kind of turn into a little bit of a mess. We've got, obviously we've seen Starlink and LTT getting thrown out. And we've got three more big bidders that are still sitting out there that haven't heard anything back yet. So, Ardolf's kind of a mess, but the most successful program we did with any federal was during the CARES Act. So, why I'm bringing Nebraska set aside some money for broadband. And they had some interesting parameters on it. It was, you know, they basically was like, how much, what would you do if you had money? And how much can you get done like within six months to a year? And that was tremendously, you wanna talk about focus, boom, there it is. What can I do in a year? And fortunately, we had like this three, four year plan to get all of our network up to 120 up spec. And when they said, what would you do if you had money? I was like, here, this is what we would do. They're like, okay, can you do that in nine to 12 months? Yes. And then, you know, we had to go hire a bunch of people, but we got it done. And that was tremendous for us. And I think that's the way the government program should be. It was very focused. It's like, well, that's something you can do now. It's gonna make a difference. I got 2,000 customers on those networks that we upgraded because of CARES Act. And actually it affects more people. We also built, we had $1 billion middle mile fiber project that was part of it and now feeds a whole bunch of people there and it's gonna eventually tie into, you know, a second internet drain for our area. And that was, it was very focused. It wasn't a huge amount of money and the impact was outsized. Like we just nailed it on that one. Multiple other people that had access to CARES Act I think did a tremendous job. That's what I think the government program should be like. What's going on with this bead and all this, all the billions that they're talking about, this is screwing everything up. And like I said, I've taken government money under the conditions where I felt like it was gonna make a difference and that we could meet the parameters of the program. Some of the restrictions that are coming along with bead are so obviously designed with bigger companies in mind. You know, the letter of credit requirement and the regulatory reporting is like, kind of borderline insane. If you're a big company and you have an entire floor full of people to take care of that, yeah, you can do it. But me, I've got one guy that just spent two weeks full time trying to get our stuff just for the BDC program. You know, having help, you know, somebody that's out trying to run a business and has to fix stuff that doesn't have time to take four straight days and try and clean up their data to submit into BDC and answer every stupid error that comes through it. You know, that thing just sits there and rejects your data until everything's perfect. So I know they're trying to get something figured out but that deal is gonna be a mess. But putting all this money into it, it's driving up the cost because we've already had supply chain issues. Well, now we've got all these companies that are just loading up on fiber. So we've got an even bigger supply chain issues because they can't, that there's always some little thing you can't get. You can't get splice cases or you can't get handholds or the resin for doing conduits is only available for one factory in Texas that was affected by the flood is running at 50% capacity. And they have rules you can't buy anything from China. So the cheap stuff coming out of China you can't even use as any of the projects or just there's all these different things. It's, we've got supply chain issue. Manpower issues. Yeah, we've got a labor force issue. So we don't have enough people to go put this stuff in. And to your point, you were talking about these badly put in fiber networks and what kind of mess that's gonna make over the next few years. We're gonna have the greenest workforce ever. And I don't mean green in that they are low energy. I mean, green is in they are low in experience and don't know what they're doing. We're gonna have a lot of green people that were putting in sprinklers last week and now they're running a boring machine going under all your city's utilities to try and put fiber in. I mean, it's gonna be a mess. So, and then everything's getting stretched out. The funniest part, last night I spent three hours filing challenges against companies that were proposing fiber projects in my service area. And I'm the bad guy, I'm listening to these fiber podcasts, so what are we gonna do about these risks that come in and challenge every deal? The tragedy of this whole BEED program is we're gonna spend two years doing paperwork to try and defend our Gallant fiber project from getting funded because these ninnies out here think that we shouldn't have fiber for everyone. They want everyone to suffer. Well, not the case. I built a business out here. I'm already providing 100 down 20 up. So I don't see why I should get built over. If anything, I wanna build the fiber, but I don't necessarily need the government money to do it. If I can get a grant or whatever, follow something like the CARES Act deal and do it and follow a set of parameters, great. Let's go figure out how to do it. But we're gonna have these challenges and it's all gonna delay. How long are people gonna have to suffer? Oh, we need perfect fiber broadband. Well, that's great. Do you want it in 10 years or 20? Because that's at the rate it's going. It's gonna take a long time to get these things done. It just feels like all the money it's gone out there. It just like took all the wind out of the sails. Now, there are some private equity people are jumping in. They're just like, go, build, do whatever. I see, there's a couple of towns I've seen. There's three crews going throughout the entire town building out fiber. It's like over top of each other. Why, you know? And then it's just, I don't, there are things about capitalism that are mysterious. But, you know, I don't see why we need to put so much money towards this. I would much rather have more focused projects that deal with the actual problem instead of trying to deal with the bureaucracy problem or the politically correct problem or who has the best lobbyist problem. So, let me go, I'll go load up on my horse. Go tilt it some windmills here. Yeah, it's, it's gonna be an affair, you know? And if you look at, you know, giving an area a billion dollars, I mean, there's obviously a lot of money. But for, you know, faceless mega corpus, not. How much of that money is just gonna get smoked with lawyers of environmental meetings, making sure their labor things, file this right paperwork and stuff like that. But if you take the effectiveness of a billion dollars there versus giving 100 established businesses 10 million dollars each, you know, the returns will certainly be exponential. So, and I think that's where a lot of the problems with government spending, you know, it's a results thing, right? We're gonna see all this money and it's not gonna be a result where, you know, I think, you know, and maybe this makes me a dirty slut too, but, you know, this can play into an effect where it can work, but it has to be very heavily managed and it has to be at the small local sort of scale because otherwise there's just too much room for bureaucracy and there's too much room for grift, you know? You just know there's some questionable folks that are like, all right, time to start up a broadband office and Podunk stayed out here because they've never had one or something. There's a lot of people with great intentions too, right? You know, a lot of folks that are really trying to help, but yeah, just you start throwing money at places, you know, in half the states before they've all applied for funding, but maybe I think only half of them had broadband offices. Yeah, yeah, what is that gonna turn into? So, I don't know. Well, from one point of view, I'm actually kind of encouraged that they're moving it down to the state level because doing stuff at the state level to a degree kind of makes it harder to game at the federal level. So it's like every step you get closer to local probably starts to favor the local provider as opposed to, you know, Megacorp. But you are exactly right. You know, the three states we're in, Wyoming's had a broadband office the longest, Colorado has one that's doing okay, Nebraska has nothing. And it kind of goes through the Public Service Commission and stuff gets decided by the local attorneys and the lobbyists for the big companies. We don't really have much of a presence. I mean, in Nebraska, there's probably four or five Ds in size with that we, you know, basically we don't have, it's hard for me to have a presence. For one, the capital is 400 miles away. So I'm not gonna go hanging out there for Public Service Commission meetings on a regular basis. I struggled just to find an attorney that would represent us because the first eight or nine attorneys that I called all had conflicts of interest. So when I've had to file stuff, I just had to use my local attorney. They send this in because no way down there represent us. I think I've got that fixed now, but that's rough. And Nebraska is one of the states that's probably gonna have a pretty fair amount of money coming to it unless they fumble this or don't send it the right direction. And yeah, the talent divide is huge. There were two people I've worked with that had tremendous experience, were fantastic state broadband directors. One was a fellow by the name of Russ Elliott. He was in Wyoming, did a fantastic job, went to Washington State, did the same thing there. And then now I think he works for a small private telephone company because they offered him more pay than the state broadband office. The other guy Chad Roof up in Montana was doing a fantastic job up there. Now he's working for a private enterprise. And I don't think these state governments realize you need to put together an office of people with some talent and ability and you need to pay them appropriately because I think what they end up doing is kind of putting in, I can't say this for anywhere else. And I, the people that we have worked with are very well-meaning and are doing good, but they need more support. It's stupid to go put together a program and not know what your target is. Everybody's, oh, we need maps. Well, finally, finally, we have the FCC data. We had to put in for all the counties but I have the locations of every single serviceable location in the counties that we serve, at least as far as the FCC is concerned. Now we're gonna go back and fix the errors in it over the next two, three years, I'm sure, because there's gonna be some errors but we've at least got something. I've been asking for that from the states for 10 years. It's like, how do you resolve your digital divide program problem? You don't know where the answer people are. And you aren't sharing that information with everybody so everybody knows what the target is. So we've at least got that part of the puzzle. We can look at the location data and say, all right, I didn't realize there were 20 serviceable locations out here on the other side of this hill. So now we can build a plan to get to them rather than just this random move. We have 10,000 unserved locations in this state. Here's $20 million to figure out how to get to them all with fiber based on these rough assumptions that look complicated but are fifth grade math level to try and figure the program out. So it's a complicated thing. I hope that the states that do well, I'm pretty sure the states that do well are the ones that are gonna commit a decent amount of financial and human resources to resolve the problem. Well, and I hope that a lot of these places are gonna take this as an opportunity as an investment not up here just money burn, but hey, we're coming deep into the 21st century because that's what social with COVID and people realizing the importance of work from home and things like that. I think there's a lot of states that have a lot of rural area that are having a hard time attracting, tech talent and stuff like that because they haven't had availability. So if they're taking this seriously and they're smart about it, I mean, for them, it's an opportunity to bring a lot of additional economic benefits to their area as well. And we've talked about this, David, we've talked about this several times is the importance of working with your state level folks as a WESP and getting to know them, getting to learn how they work and advising them. They're gonna listen to you once you get to know them more than they're gonna listen to the big baddie at Verizon at that sort of county and state level sort of thing because again, it's not this big faceless DC monster and stuff like that. So I think there's a lot of potential there. And I think a lot of people are seeing a lot of this potential as they're moving from the anger side to the next step. So grieving, anger, whatever that whole process is, everyone's like, Pete sucks, government sucks, we're all screwed. But I think now, just even in the last few, couple months or like, all right, well, this is a thing it is, right? And we can figure out what doesn't make sense to put money into, but it does. Where efforts make a lot of sense. And I think plenty of potential out there and opportunity to still be successful and even more so than could have been before. It's just gonna involve a little bit of pivot. So, or start manufacturing hand holes for fiber companies. I don't know, I'm kind of looking, I'm kind of thinking in the background, I'm like, how hard could this be? Hold on, let me make some phone calls. Yeah, I'll tell you, one of the things that I'm really proud of is the fact that we've been able to, at least with my camera, we've built a reputation. When we've done these programs, we've always met the terms. There are a lot of companies out there that haven't done that. Or maybe they're making progress, but there's still a long ways to go. But like all the different programs we've participated in, if we created five jobs and we needed to keep those five jobs for five years done, fulfill the terms, we pay off our loans. We haven't gone back saying, oh, we can't pay it. I used to be in economic development. The number of companies that get economic development money and then bail halfway through is extremely high. We're doing the CAF thing. We're reporting on that. The states that we're in, we have one state done. We've got the other two states, we're already at the 60% and going beyond that. So we're on target to finish early. We even did RDOF and from a financial point of view, it was just stupid. We got like a tiny amount of money. We probably spent more on the engineering than we're gonna get over the 10 years. But I did it just to be like, you know what? We followed the rules. You put it out there, we followed the rules, we did what was supposed to, we qualified, we got approved, we're reporting on it. Yes, there's a giant pain in the ass, but we did what was expected of us. And I think that that's what's gonna really set the difference because companies that can execute and do what they say they're gonna do are the ones that will ultimately be long-term successful, you know? A big part of our culture here is that we take care of our team and we take care of our customers and respect our customers. And that's the thing I think that really got lost by, we reason we talk about Megacorp and ISPs being the lowest rated business of all time is because they took local support and outsourced it to other places, the call centers. You had some poorly paid college student following a script in a call center trying to resolve your problem. You can't turn your assignment in or you can't get your work done because something's wrong with the internet and you've got a college kid with a script that's trying to fix the problem for you. That's not respecting your customer. That's not taking care of your customer. So I think the companies that take care of their customers and do what they say they're gonna do are gonna be successful. I've noticed an interesting thing that kind of relates to the fiber deal. One of the things I've always tried to do is make sure we get our distributors paid when we buy product. You guys, probably both have some experience. You guys have both sold equipment at one point or another. How many times did you have to deal with people that acted like paying you was gonna- Do your problem. Was gonna cause them to like die or something that just goes to you. You call them, what's going on? Are you gonna pay me? And one of the things I've always tried to do, we had a fail buyout in 2008 where a company tried to buy us out. It didn't work and they left me with like 100, well over 100 grand worth of vendors that were unpaid. They had been stretching out terms and then just bailed. I caught all the vendors up. And we've always, even when I've had issues, I've had a few contractors have done a terrible job and we still paid them. Just made sure that we weren't ever gonna use them again. But we always stuck to our agreement and paid them. And I always communicate with companies. We were doing CARES Act. We stretched a couple of our distributors out a little further, I think that they really wanted to be. But we communicated with them. So look, we're gonna get a payment on this. I'm gonna send you what I can and then we're gonna get you, we communicate with them. We let them know and everybody got paid. So I keep hearing all this stuff about fiber shortages and oh, you can't get this, you can't get that. Well, a big part of that is because these big companies with money think that they can throw around and throw out big orders and boss people around. We ordered all the stuff to do our town bid and we had all the stuff within 45 days. That's because my guides went out and we have vendors that we do business with when they check our references, we pay our bills, we do what we say we're gonna do. And I think that's gonna be an important part because I think a lot of this stuff, there's a lot of fluff out there but it's going after the big government money. And with that stuff, when the money's gone or the business model starts to fail, those people, it's gonna be like cockroaches is running away when somebody turns the light on. And then there's gonna be a bunch of stuff left and then it's gonna be guys like us that have been doing the hard work and keeping our nose clean and taking care of our customers. Hopefully we'll have an opportunity to come in and pick up some of it at that point. But it's gonna be a while, the next five, 10 years are gonna be pretty well-wild. Yeah, there's definitely gonna be some networks that are gonna be for sale for real cheap. Yep. Yeah, but they're gonna be very expensive to fix. To fix, yeah, yeah. I've already seen stuff like that. Well, Ben, you're talking about back to the labor thing, look at what the state of the tower climbing business is, towering, whatever that business is. It's rough out there because your Verizon, AT&T, two mobile dish have more work than just infinite amount of work basically, right? So these crews are getting thin, the subcontractor crews, ton of good guys out there. But I mean, there's a ton of super shady operations, fly-by-night, fold one, pop up a new one the next day. We're gonna see so much of this like you're saying, but they're gonna be digging under the streets. They're gonna be shredding power lines, like it's very nervous. At an old office park where they were coming in and laying on a second or third fiber run in there and they kept hitting the power line. So take out one phase out of the three phase. Well, guess what? A place doesn't run well good that way. So it's, I don't know, it's kind of terrifying. So you start seeing the brand new machines running up and down the road, the shiny new fiber, trenchers or D-Boar machines or something. You just go ahead and get a little extra fuel for the generators and just get ready just in case I guess, I don't know. Yeah. Well, I know one of the things we're trying to do is we're trying to kind of grow our own army. So we've been getting a bunch of young people that are either just out of high school or community college. And I got a guy that a year and a half ago, he was tearing down boxes from shipments and now he's one of our network engineers, just constantly, we kind of try and look for learned alls as opposed to know-it-alls. And so we get these kids that are like really hungry for some guidance and for something to do and for a purpose and to try and take them and kind of train them. And we've also looked for some different opportunities. You talk about the infinite amount of work that Verizon and T-Mobile and all of these companies have. And they are literally working people to death. You know, the amount of burnout that takes place, the drug use in like a lot of these crews that have to travel around all the time is like super high. It's just this terrible quality of life. It does have pretty good paycheck attached to it. But, you know, at a certain point where we've actually had a lot of success getting people to come and work for us for a lot less money than their previous job. But it's because we kind of emphasize the fact that, you know, money is one thing, but the most valuable thing you have is your time. Do you want to have time with your family? So we've had really good success, hiring people that used to work for irrigation pivot companies, for example. I think we've got three guys that used to do that. It's like really hard physical work. And when the weather's good, they work these awful hours. And so we've got a bunch of guys that make climbing towers is easy compared to the stuff that they've had to do. And, you know, we send guys to travel, but it's like, yeah, you might get to spend, you know, I have some guys that they just spent a week in Walden, Colorado, you know, rebuilding a couple of towers up there, but they're home with their family and they're going to get a couple of days off this week to go do more stuff with their family. We try to treat people right, don't overwork with, overwork them, treat them, you know, treat them fair, give them quality work to do, give them time with their families and pay them as fair as we can. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to match if somebody wants to go hit the road for Verizon and T-Mobile and work like a maniac. Yeah, you can make it, but you're going to be, you might be a shell of a person when you come back from it, or you might have anything to come back to if you've got a family and you're gone. So I think that's one thing, trying to keep stuff local and keep people in our area and make it so we can have, you know, I've got multiple people. I've got four tower guys that all have families and they get to spend quality time with their families. And we had a wife came by one day and talked to our safety guys, like thank you for making sure that my husband gets home safe every day, you know, that sort of thing. I hear, you know, there's all kinds of check box requirements. They make sure that the OSHA stuff gets checked that, you know, some of these subcontractor deals, but they're not watching them and taking care of their people like my company does and a lot of other, you know, WISP operators do, you know, there's, I think there's a lot of good in that to kind of build local resiliency by continuing to develop our local workforce and building it internally rather than trying to go out and hire mercenaries. And we found out when we hired mercenaries, our guys are actually, our guys, my local guys are better climbers than every group that we've brought in to try and do the work. And they're mine and they're not for anybody else. Yeah. We have some jobs are all farm out, so. So, but no, that's great, you know, and it just gives to really show you that, you know, a local company, I mean, even though, you know, your local company is 40,000 square miles or whatever, you know, when you drive the edge of the network, you know, it's kind of hard to define local, but it's always going to be a local company, right? It's not going to be some, you know, some faceless dark empire. So I think that just goes to a really long ways towards building a quality workforce for sure, for sure. Yeah, we're trying to get within 90 minutes. So the furthest drive, any of our guys have to go about 90 minutes to get to somebody. So we need to add, we're going to try and add a couple of subcontractors in some areas. We're real picky about our subcontractors, but I think that's one of the keys is to kind of at least maintain some, you know, relatively local to be able to take care of, take care of people. And, you know, we're not big on fancy buildings or anything. Well, Tassos was out. You've been out to visit us. Yeah. And yeah, we actually moved out of the main building we were in, but we were in like an old grocery store. It was three buildings we bought for like, I think $60,000 and fixed them up. They were boarded up and abandoned before we moved in. It brought a lot of life to that town. So. It works. So why not? Yeah. Dude, I want to office with a walk-in fridge or walk-in fridge when I come out and personally is down. Like, oh, that sounds like a great idea. Put my desk in there, right? Oh, yeah, exactly. So sorry. Started thinking about meeting. I don't know, being a fat, sweaty hot boy. So I get distracted like I was getting late, but well, cool, man. So I guess, you know, to kind of tidy up here. So what was from Palooza is a month from now. Basically, yeah, it's a month. So yeah, yeah. So, you know, the folks that are out there that are unsure where things are going, I think it's really important to talk to people in the real world. You know, when a lot of your exchanges are kind of in this tunnel vision online community, for instance, or something, or you know, you get used to hearing the same sort of echo chamber and stuff, you know, whether it's good or bad or not. You know, it's really important to get some sort of external exposure, you know, some different viewpoints and stuff. And I think especially now in this time of turmoil that we're in, I think it would be really beneficial for folks to get out there and, you know, even if you don't necessarily feel better, I don't know, finding a bunch of like-minded compatriots that do some late night bitching and drinking will probably help a lot too, get it out of your system and stuff. But, you know, especially the new folks, what, you know, what are your biggest words of advice for someone that's new? Maybe this is our first show or their second show or maybe they've done the smaller one, this will be their first big WISPA show and stuff, you know. If you had to throw some advice out there for these folks, what would you say? So we're taking nine people out. Wow. This is a huge number for us. You know, we're a little over 50 employees now, but we're taking nine people out and I want them to go follow what looks interesting to them. That's what I've done from the start is to just go and look for stuff that looks interesting and to try and, you know, just be open-minded, try and pick up as much as you can. Don't be afraid to go up out. If you're in a session, there's a really good speaker there, hang out. I've learned so much by hanging out after a session and just asking somebody a question and getting a better explanation for something. Every once in a while, there'll be somebody in the audience that asks really good questions. Maybe go find them. I've seen that too, where it was pretty obvious the guy in the audience knew more than the speaker. So I'll go talk to that guy. Orley, we actually have some incredible women in our industry that I'm really happy to see that the numbers are going up on that, but to go out and just, you know, be a learn-it-all. Just ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask questions. And question your own assumptions sometimes. Like you said, if you're in an echo chamber and nobody questions anything, you start thinking you're really smart and you know everything. And I learn a lot. I know what I'm speaking. My favorite part of, if I'm on a panel or doing any talking, my favorite part is the Q and A. Because I tend to learn about as much from that part of the discussion as anything that I do. And I don't mind when somebody, you know, asks me to explain something further or questions whether what I'm doing is the right thing. I really like to have that discussion. So I'd say go to the show, ask questions, you know, go talk to vendors, get whatever kind of randomly obscene t-shirt that Atosos is gonna have at his booth. We have a good one this year. Yeah, so, you know, and just go, just have fun, man. That is the best, the best thing to do is to, I think sometimes we get so wound up and working. And I like to think that somebody's taking the time to go to a Wisp of a Loser show, you know, half the battle is just getting there in the first place. Because so many people are so focused on, oh, it's too expensive. I gotta take a week off or whatever. The first part is just get there. And then the second part is have fun. And don't worry about whatever's going on back at home. Go and learn and just talk to as many people as you can and be open-minded. And I think come to things with a spirit of good intention. You know, I think that's, that is probably the best thing I could say is just go out there and, you know, just soak up everything you can and then come home and, you know, make a list of like five or 10 things that you learned at the show that you wanna try and implement it and share that knowledge with your crew at home. You know, I'm hoping that my nine people that go come back and they're gonna be energized and they're gonna start sending that energy off to the other 40 people to try and do things better, come up with ideas to make it better for our customers. Yeah, and I think it really points to the investment. You mean, you're spending a non-trivial amount of money to bring all these folks out there. You know, and it's not like a paid party vacation by any stretch of the imagination. Not that it's not fun, but, you know, it's you're getting that investment back. And I think that's where, you know, over the years we've seen where, you know, they'll bring, you know, the main guy or, you know, the couple will come out, you know, whoever runs the place. So the next year they brought, well, another guy. And the next year, you know, now they've got a whole parcel of folks running around because they realize for them that it is, you know, it's a time and money investment, but it does have return. And, you know, I think it's a great opportunity. Yeah, it was rough last year. It was just me last year. And I really wanted to bring some other people but we kind of had, I don't know, travel was still pretty jacked up. Travel was bad last year. It's not any better. Yeah, the timing was terrible because in October of 2020, like, we had a 5,000 customer, we had a pizza party and then over the next month, everybody had COVID. And it wasn't just our party. Everybody in Western Nebraska got COVID all at the same time. So I think we had a similar deal going on last fall and we didn't really want a chance that we were gonna have some kind of an issue there. So I figured I'll go and take my chances. I grew up on a feedlot. So whatever crap, COVID sees my system and gives up because I've already got worse crap in my system than COVID. But everybody else, you know, I didn't want to risk it, but this year it seems like everything's close enough. We're gonna take our shot and, you know, see how it goes. But I'm looking forward to it. It's always great to be out there. You know, my career part's hooking up with, you know, John Scrivener and I always have a good time. And the story is just a bound. I wish I could repeat most of the funny stuff or good stuff that's happened. Still a lot of statute of limitation issues on some of that, I'm sure. So. Yeah, yeah. Although the, the, the Microtik. The mums? No, the, the, the whole, the whole chicken story. I'll have to share that with you sometime, but it's pretty funny, but probably not. I probably shouldn't repeat it on the, on the podcast, but oh man, there's some good, there's not a lot of good time for these Lewis Macho's. It's fun. That's good. That's good. I always tell people, drink more, way more water than you think you need and bring comfortable shoes. And two pairs of comfortable shoes, one to wear and rotate out of cause you're oddly on, like we're used to being on our, on the floor, the exhibit hall floor and on our feet all the whole time. But even then, like everything is way further than you think it actually should be. So be prepared to do a lot of walking. So here's pro tip. There's a CVS just outside the door. The day you get there, go to the CVS and grab a 24 pack of bottled water and just take it to your room and drink one in the morning and drink two at night before you go to bed and throw a couple in your backpack when you go walking around because yeah, you get dehydrated and amen to the comfortable shoes. That's the, yeah, wearing, wearing wing tips would be a death on, death on feet. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody always does it. You see somebody hobbling around by like Wednesday afternoon. So let's see, PD light powder packs. That's my pro tip. The real pro tip, the real pro tip is you follow the Jim patient method. Yeah, I was going to say. And you're a scooter. Yep. Yes. And then also do not follow Jim patient on that scooter because you're going to have, you'll have a good time the next day, maybe not so much, but you will have a good time. But one of my partners is Dave Giles. I think you guys probably know Dave. He's on the whisper board and he said he was, he was leaving the whisper show and he saw Jim was over. There was like the pole for like the taxi stop that he spent over the pole. And Dave goes over to him. He's like, Jim, what's going on? He's like, my scooter battery went dead. I had to call the scooter guys to come unscrew everything, you know, just basically and sure enough, his scooter was like sitting over there. I think on its side, you know, it's a dead battery because he'd been running around. But if you keep your scooter charged, man, that's a pro tip right there. You can cover a lot of ground, you know, if we'll rebel out and, you know, or mug one from a Walmart or something. Right. It's too late now, but next year, Toss, our shirts are going to be called just keep your scooter charged. Keep your scooter charged. All right. Well, Matt, we really appreciate you taking the time to get in the talk today. And, you know, we can sit here and talk for forever, I'm sure, but we'll let you get back to conquering things out there. So for anybody that's looking for you, you know, wants to reach out and get in touch, you know, where can they find you? Where can they find the information about VISTA beam? Stuff like that. Yeah, we're at VISTAbeam.com. I'm on LinkedIn. That's probably the most popular way it seems like for people to try and get a hold of you for, you know, non-random friending purposes like the other social media. Matt Lawlarson at Twitter, M-A-T-T-E-L-A-R-S-C-N. And, you know, I'm tracking you down at the show. And, you know, always happy to visit and talk about the crazy stuff that we've seen and done and hopefully it will happen in the future. Very cool, very cool. Tasa is working folks, find us. Yeah, they can find us all over on social media, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn as well or just pop into our website, rfelements.com and you can contact us via that. All right, all right. Real quick, I forgot to mention, I do have, it's a lot of date, but I've got a blog at wirelesscowboys.com and I have some partial chapters in my book I've published there. One of these days I'll actually finish the book, but wirelesscowboys.com at some point when I have enough time to actually sit down and write things, that's where I will be putting things. Right on. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, man, that's been around for a while. I was thinking about that the other day, thinking about the podcast and completely forgot about it. So I'm glad you brought it up. Get info there. So, all right, all right. Well, Matt, we will see you soon. Everyone else until we talk to you next time, keep your scooter charged. Keep your scooter charged.