 JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine, and welcome to JSA TV. We've got a fun one for you today, folks. We're speaking with NGN and some friends. NGN is a member-owned, cooperative, operating 1,600 miles of fiber optic infrastructure from its headquarters in Clarksville, Georgia. NGN's low-latency optical network serves carriers, service providers, and technology reliant businesses across the southeast. Now then, NGN recently held its first Georgia Gigabit Communities Summit that brought together national industry experts and Georgia leaders to discuss how local communities with gigabit capacity can market their infrastructure assets and further develop potential as gigabit communities. Today, we're continuing that discussion with Mr. Paul Belk. Paul is the president and CEO of NGN. Mr. Charlie Alderman. Charlie is the executive director of Dawson County Development Authority and Mr. Tim Martin. Tim is the executive director of Stevens County Development Authority. Gentlemen, welcome to JSA TV. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Paul, I'm gonna kick the first question over to you. Why don't you tell our viewers about the gigabit community? What is it? Well, you know, NGN and its partners, our economic development partners, have worked very hard to distinguish our communities, you know, quite frankly from others because we've done a lot to build capacity that is in place to accommodate some serious industries that are IT driven. We know as communities adjacent to a very large metropolitan area that the likelihood of us landing large manufacturing is probably low. But what we want to do is we want to offer those technologies to softwares, to service companies, to other technology companies that can come and locate and have a quality of service in their communities as well. The other thing is that Georgia in particular has a film industry and that film industry is in a lot of ways connected to our communities where they like to shoot. That capacity has to be available to all emerging, you know, verticals that Georgia's really looking to promote. And so we're working with our communities to make sure that that capacity's there. Outstanding, Paul. Thank you and very cool regarding the film industry. I didn't know that. So the gigabit community summit, tell us a little bit about that. Well, the summit was, again, we continue to stay into a perpetual partnership with our economic development professionals. These folks are out there every day trying to bring value back into their communities. And in some cases, trying to avoid attrition. What we want to do is provide them with a brand and with a perspective to those companies or their existing industries to promote what type of capacity is there. One of the largest or one of the biggest issues that we see sometimes is just simply communication. The word getting out to the right people. Because despite all the technology and how that we're wired and our estimations on, we're being provided all the information, we're not always getting it. So we always have to continue to work with our partners to make sure they are equipped. Understood, okay, very good. So there has definitely been some headway made concerning North Georgia broadband. What is the next step in that regard? Charlie, I'm gonna kick this one over to you. Well, I think one of the important things is to try to spread the network out to as many customers as many opportunities as we can. It's been very successful. NGN has been successful far more than I think even we realized when we put it together. So there's a lot of people that wanna be on the system now and trying to get to those folks is a challenge. The other part of it though, I think that's really important as far as I'm concerned and the people that I deal with is how do you use the network? And that's sort of where the gigabit community really can help. By helping people understand what you can do with it, assessing their needs and showing them different things that you can do. A lot of people here, especially in manufacturing, have some very sophisticated equipment and it operates hooked to the internet, hooked to the worldwide web. But they've had to have that part of the equipment turned off for a long time because they just, until NGN came, there was no ability to use it. Now they can use it, so we're having to go back and show them, yeah, this works now and you can do this and you can have lights out, manufacturing where the equipment runs all night. So a lot of it is just education and then trying to expand the network. Fantastic. Tim, how about you? What are your thoughts? Let me add more and more. We're seeing economic development activity from international sources. And so recently we recruited a Japanese-German joint venture, NIFCO KTVW. They'll be providing plastic injection parts to the automotive industry, BMW, Mercedes. And they want to be able to see real-time, live, what's going on in their plant. And this connectivity now affords that. We recruited a company from Istanbul, Turkey. Again, they have an operation up in New York State, now an operation here in Georgia. They can connect all three venues via this network. Excellent, so lots of improvements with that network. And obviously it's affecting a great number of different users. But let's talk about the regional communities, Tim. How is the improvements in the network really affecting those super regional and local communities? One of the things that we've learned through the years that there are certain knockout factors for economic development. You know, a project looking at a community is going to list some things that are just non-negotiable, things they have to have. And high-speed broadband connectivity entered that list of things a few years ago. And we were not even being considered. I and my colleagues in this Northeast Georgia region, we looked across a couple of counties to our west, and the North Georgia network was making some big strides. And we wanted to play in that same pool. So we affiliated ourselves with our friends and now partners with this project. It has been terrific for us. It's still aspirational in many respects. We have a long ways to go. But it's not the knockout factor that it was, even just two or three years ago. Outstanding. Charlie, what's your take? Well, you have to understand that as part of the new economy that's coming out of the recession, there is a lot of regional-type expansion, especially in health care, where we had a little rural doctor, rural clinic type of thing. Those have been replaced by clinics that are part of large systems and large networks of hospital systems. Here in Dawson County with NGN, we have the capability of those clinics, those regional clinics, having MRI equipment and scanners and X-ray equipment right here in town so that people used to have to drive 20, 30 miles to have those types of, in some cases, rather significant exams and reviews. Now they just go a few blocks down the street. They have the same equipment. And all that is streamed to the larger hospitals. It's a very convenient and actually a very comforting thing that those big hospitals can be intimidating. When you go in there and there's hundreds of people and places to go there. So that is a very important thing. And like Tim sort of mentioned, many of our manufacturing firms here that used to be family-owned kind of local manufacturing are now part of bigger manufacturing organizations and corporations that are based in Illinois and Ohio and other states around us. And they need to communicate, move drawings and data packages. And NGN affords that. And so we really are in a regional sense a much closer community just from the formation of NGN but also from the Gigabit community effort. Fantastic. Thank you, Charlie. Charlie, let's just stick with you on this one for starters. Let's look at another crystal ball. What does the future hold for Georgia's Gigabit communities? Well, it's something that I spend quite a bit of time looking at as to where we need to be five years, 10 years down the road. There's a tremendous increase in interest in people moving out of urban areas, retiring if you want to say that. But we have a lot of people that are moving their businesses out of the congestion, out of the high tax areas that are in typical urban settings and locating them out where maybe the owner doesn't have to spend as much time in the office anymore because he's approaching retirement. So he wants to spend the afternoon on Lake Lanier or something like that. And also we're finding a lot of the businesses that are moving out of urban areas, most of their employees, not just the owners, but the employees actually live out here in the first place. So we're cutting down on these 45-minute-hour-one-way commutes every morning and these thousands and thousands of cars and people that you see trying to commute every morning. So there's, I think, a tremendous opportunity here to realize a very good sweet spot for many, many people that by having the capabilities out here, you have the companies out here, it reduces their commutes, it improves their lifestyle. The education systems out here have improved immensely because of this connectivity. The educational exchange allows teachers to interact live like we're doing today. So students benefit, schools benefit, their parents benefit, and the businesses benefit. So the economy, the true caring economic community that is trying to provide a complete package for everyone so that it's not just bring in more jobs. There's a lot of things that are associated with jobs because jobs mean people, jobs mean families, and how do you improve their livelihood, their ability to enjoy their lives and have a good education? It's a very dynamic situation. I'm extremely positive about where the rural economic development trend is going over the next 10 years. It's going to be quite fascinating. Excellent. I've actually been to Lake Lanier, and I wouldn't mind moving there myself. But Tim, what are your thoughts on this? Well, Lake Lanier was just one of our beautiful Northeast Georgia lakes. Come back and we'll show you some others. One thing, it's maybe a bit of a tangent, but the state of Georgia, as a general assembly, of course, and the Senate and the House of Representatives are right now, have they appointed a study committee for broadband. And they're traveling around the state, asking communities what they need to continue to see advancements in specifically broadband connectivity. Our state senator from our region is one of the five senators on the task force, and we hosted one of the task force meetings in our community. And I think moving forward, what we'll see is some tweaking of some policy considerations, perhaps even some ways. We've got a good, solid skeleton up through the North Georgia network. And these last mile build-outs, perhaps there will be some programs through the state that will encourage or allow companies that would need this connectivity to get an incentive or a stipend to help that cost. A $20,000 mile, if you have to run something three or four miles, that gets a little pricey for a company, a smaller company, certainly. So I think we'll see some more consideration in our state general assembly. Very good. And Paul, we'll go ahead and let you close out the question. Wow, it seems like these committee meetings, as Tim Martin was referring to, they seem to be actually, in a way, a product of what we have done in our community for Georgia. Our economic development professionals in our region have set the precedent for all the others that are asking to get what we've got. And the reason why I feel like the product of that is we could use that as an accomplishment of what NGN has set out to do is because we have never wavered from our core mission of economic development, period. The network is just blinking lights. It's a means to an end. It's good for nothing if it doesn't bring jobs and bring communities opportunities. So we are extremely positive about what's happening in our gigabit communities. Awesome. Paul, Tim, Charlie, an outstanding conversation. I hope to continue it again at a later date. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. You got it. You got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSATB. We'll see you soon.