Digital Divide with David Witkowski of Joint Venture Silicon Valley

In March 2020 when everything shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic the world stopped.   People were sent home from work, students were sent home from school, but if you had connectivity,  you could work, go to class, shop all on-line.  Many areas however don't have that connectivity, and for a number of reasons.   Today we'll explore the digital divide with David Witkowski of Joint Venture Silicon Valley.  David is focused on Civic Initiatives, which includes connectivity.   Join us for an interesting discussion on the problem, and ways to address the gap between those who have connectivity and those who don't.   -TH

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Transcript

Tom Hunt 0:06

Hey everyone. This is Tom hunt of the wireless communications Alliance, and you're listening to the connections podcast, where we provide a deeper dive into all things wireless today. We're talking about the digital divide with David Witkowski of joint venture Silicon valley, and we'll discuss some of the technologies being deployed and hear his thoughts on where connectivity is headed. david. Good to talk to you again.

David Witkowski 0:32

Yeah. Great to see you, Tom.

Tom Hunt 0:34

Many of our members remember David, he's a former president of the WCA. And he's been involved in lots of interesting initiatives. One of course that I really want to dig into a bit today is Silicon valley joint venture. And particularly your efforts, David, within civic technologies. So could you give our listeners an overview of joint venture Silicon?

David Witkowski 0:59

yeah, happy to thanks for the opportunity. So joint venture Silicon valley was a nonprofit organization that was founded in the early nineties. And it was originally created back at the end of the cold war when the Silicon valley was transitioning from what some of us may remember was a very military and defense oriented economy. Stanford, Termed built Stanford's engineering department on DOD contracts and DARPA money. And so if you listen to, some of these historians talk about, what, there's one that's called the secret history of Silicon valley by Steve blank, he, talks about how the Silicon valley was this. Think tank for the government as they were working to try to defeat the Soviets and the communist menace. And so of course the collapse of the Soviet union and the fall of the Berlin wall, suddenly Silicon valley had, question about what are they gonna do? What's our next move. And at the time I remember that a lot of people were saying, that they were gonna leave. Silicon valley had its run. Now it was done joined venture. Silicon valley was formed at the intersection. Local governments private businesses and academia to try to effectively rewrite the business plan of the region. And they did that. And one of the things that they came up with was this concept of initiatives. So today joint venture does three things. It convenes the region's leaders via its board. Which ranges from private corporations meta nonprofits Silicon valley community foundation, Google we have politicians the mayor of San Jose congressmen, et cetera and the heads of universities. So we have a pretty diverse representation on our board. We have a think tank, which is the Silicon valley Institute for regional studies. That is sort of the deep thought group that puts a lot of metrics around. You can go to Silicon valley indicators.org to look at some of their product. And that's a kind of a live update report that they produce. They publish static reports throughout the course of the year, often cited by the media. But then the Silicon valley index is really the big one. And of course we do our state of the valley conference every year and which we roll the index. At that time and that's where we kind of report out on the previous 12 months. But then I think what's really interesting about joint venture is that there's also the initiatives program, which is, so if we have the think tank, then I tend to refer to it as the do tank or the, or sometimes we call it the action tank and that's where we take what the board decides is important. and what the Institute decides is important based upon data. And we actually roll up our sleeves and do things. So instead of just publishing papers about what we think other people should do, we actually go out and take the reins and try to fix problems in which case so I head up at the, in, so I live in the initiative side and I head up the civic technologies program and civic technologies is comprised. Wireless communications, which is primarily focused on making the region cellular networks better as Silicon valley, we should have the best cellular networks in the world. And that's, so that's the mission of that group. We have a community broadband group which is really focused on bringing connectivity, wireless or wired to residents gets involved in digital divide digital equity issue. And then we have done some work in smart cities. Although I would argue that smart cities is kind of an older term at this point. It's somewhat fallen out of favor. It was a very buzzy thing a couple years ago, and now we're seeing less smart cities and there are reasons for that, that I can go into, but may, maybe beyond the scope of this podcast. It's a term of art that was used and is I think no longer being used, although we still hear it occasionally, but coming out of the pandemic connectivity, of course has been really important. We all saw the value of connectivity in our daily lives as we were asked to shelter in place school from home and work from home and connectivity of course made that occur. So I would like to believe that. We're gonna continue to understand the value of connectivity in our lives and use that those lessons from the pandemic to help us do better in terms of providing connectivity for everybody in the region.

Tom Hunt 5:38

Thanks for the overview of. Joint venture as well as the initiatives group and specifically your civic technologies group. When I look at connectivity, there's still this gap, right? And I know you've been involved in some work with the local community here, but there's a gap between those who have connectivity and those who don't. So can you talk to that a little and what specifically you might be working on.

David Witkowski 6:06

Yeah so you're absolutely right. as much as we saw the value of connectivity during the pandemic, it became starkly clear that connectivity is not an equally applied thing in our society. People who were sent home from during the March 20, 20, shutdowns Some of them were able to access connectivity at their homes and others were not. And then that showed really the stark contrast in how connectivity is applied and the value of it. If you had connectivity, you had, you could work, you could go to school, you could shop, you could order groceries so that you could drive there and they would, you'd open your hatchback and throw the they'd throw the groceries in the trunk and you'd have, everyone's wearing masks and staying away from each other. And you could be entertained you, you could access information. Of course, people were obsessively refreshing, lots of websites about the pandemic and reading stories of what was going on and the day to day developments. But those, there were some people who were just stuck at home with nothing and they, they had no connectivity. You think about people. Less affluent areas that tend to not have very good connectivity. And there are places in Silicon valley that have that exact problem. There are, despite the fact that it's called the capital of Silicon valley, there are parts of San Jose that have really nothing. And typically more on the poor side or the older side, which tends to have poor infrastructure. And then of course, people that live up in the mountains, right? You have places within 10 miles of downtown San Jose up in Santa Cruz, mountains that have zero connectivity. And if that happens to be where you live, then when you were told to go home, then that's the connectivity that you did not have at that point. So There are physical challenges. There are engineering challenges. I would say there are economic challenges. And so we have been doing some work in trying to resolve that we were tapped early on in the pandemic to help Santa Clara county office of education. The county board of supervisors reached out to us. We were talking with the school districts talking with the county board of education. County office of education, I should say. And and advising them on what we thought that they could do within the realm of possibility. Hotspots were like as my grandfather would say, he's teeth, right? You couldn't find hotspots anywhere. We recommended the purchase of smartphones that could be turned into hotspots. And so that was, for example, San Jose unified went out and purchased a large number of smartphone. That they then gave out to their students and they were provisioned with unlimited data plans. They were routed through the schools' firewalls and filters to make sure that people weren't using them for accessing. So shall we say salacious material, students were not being exposed to things that they shouldn't be exposed to. But at the end of the day, then that was that was kind of how we started things out. We then turned around and. began using CBRS technology, citizens, broadband radio service not to be confused with CB radio, of course as we, as you and I both well know. Although many people do conflate the two. So we've used CBRS technology at a few schools in the area. To build networks because statistically speaking about 75% of elementary school students live within one mile of their elementary school, which means if you take a school network and you place a CBRS node, the four 90 degree sector antenna on the roof, you can cover. A reasonable number of those students. If you give them equipment that they can put in their windows at their home on the side of the house, facing the school that gives you that gives you a connection into the school's network. Because it's SIM card based, it is not wifi. You can control the connection, which helps you not run afoul of the E-Rate rules that the FCC has about broadband that is given to schools for a lower price. So there's a reason why schools can't have open wifi networks and that's why. And so that has been an area that I think we've seen a lot of growth in CBRS has become in many cities around the Western us kind of the tool of choice. Which we were gratified to see, because early in the pandemic we published a white paper on connectivity options and, we were talking about a variety of technologies and we, so we've seen salt lake city, Tucson, Las Vegas Los Angeles mountain view Westman school district Santa Clara county. They're all now looking at wireless technology as a as a solution to provide connectivity for students that. for either infrastructure or economic reasons do not have access. So,

Tom Hunt 11:08

David you mentioned the restrictions on wifi which moves you into the CBRS realm, but why CBRS versus other potential solutions?

David Witkowski 11:19

Well to be honest our analysis kinda showed that we wrote a white paper on this topic which I'm happy to share with you and your listen. We looked at all those options and there was a reason why CBRS was chosen. We talk about things like, okay, cellular right Cellular's infrastructure, the carriers have to put up sites. Yes. Cellular was a great tool early in the pandemic county office of education. At Santa Clara county created 16,000 connections for students that were sent into a school from home in March of 20. 14,200 of those connections were done with either hotspots or smartphones. As I mentioned that we recommended. So the vast majority of those connections were accomplished with 4g technology. Now, as you probably well know connectivity into neighborhoods is. Less robust than it is, and to say commercial areas. And there are a variety of reasons for that, that we can talk about if you'd like, but the bottom line is, is that your cell connection at your house is typically, and I'm sure your listeners experience this all the time. Your cell connection at your house is typically less robust than you would get. If you were say. In up in the Northern what they call the triangle of San Jose or down along the 1 0 1 corridor where there was a lot, there's a lot of business, the sub coverage in those areas is pretty robust. So, 4g has limitations, right? 4g has a problem where it can only support a certain number of radios and there's a certain number of resource blocks and it. Support a lot of simultaneous users, 5g mitigates that and gets around it by enhancing the technology that is used. But of course, 5g is still rolling out. So cellular was. A solution, but it was not, I think the solution things like TV, white space, they're so it's so constrained the rules around using TV white space really? Cause it to have problems. It doesn't, it's not allowed a lot of power. There's not a lot of equipment out there. The equipment that's out there frankly is repurposed equipment. That's been recoded for TV, white space. So it was never really designed to be optimized for that. And there's just, I just don't think there's enough of a market there to really make it proper right. To make it useful. Point to multi-point is fine. Although, it tends to be somewhat more of an engineered. Where you have to climb up on somebody's roof. And especially if you're using like 11 gigahertz, those technologies, that's more of an installed solution, as opposed to a hand somebody a device and say, put this in the window and put, plug it into power, wifi doesn't penetrate buildings very well. And of course, wifi has all kinds of authentication issues. You can't attach wifi to a school network and paint it on the neighborhood without violating. E-Rate. And then of course you've got, it's an, it's a Mac, it's a connectionless Mac ergo, right? You have issues with authentication and exclusion. The device controls the connection as opposed to three GPP type networks or CBRS where the network controls the connection and that causes cha that causes problems. So I don't think wifi is. Is really a very good solution for for creating wide area of broadband networks. So outside of that, I, suppose there might be some niche technologies, for example, Toronto recently has had some pretty good success with some of their point to point gear. County office of education is experimenting with that right now. And we know we know that that's going fairly well. So as new technologies come online I think we'll take a look at them, but there's no one solution in these things. They have to be engineered. And that's always been our position with local governments and schools. Is that, I can't just say wifi is the solution. I can't say CBRS is the solution. I could say it is a. But it's not gonna work in all cases. And there's, then you have to figure out what you're gonna do next.

Tom Hunt 15:29

There's lots of interesting things about CBRS, but as it relates to the school systems and some of your civic initiatives who administer the CBRS network, who onboards the users and off boards, the student.

David Witkowski 15:43

That is a great challenge. That's a great question. And you've touched on a challenge that has been facing every user of CBRS. You know what? I can build a CBRS network that, that can pass traffic in a, you know what I would call a, so I say a hand radio fashion, right? I can build a, I can build a network. How do I scale that network to large numbers of users? How do I manage the network over time? How do I keep it on the air for 10 years? That is really where it comes into a lot, some of the issues, because I can do a demo and show, we can have a little ribbon coat, cutting ceremony and we get out there and we issue a press release and everybody kisses babies, and we all congratulate each other on a job well done. And then six months later, the network's in dis. because we don't have a scaled, we don't have a scaling system for it. So we actually brought in and other, other jurisdictions other cities or, and and school districts have brought in companies that do network operators, right? These are people that do network operation for a living. They have. Network operations centers. And so people go into the knock and they watch the metrics and they keep an eye on. And when alarms go off and flags get kicked out and say, connectivity just went really bad on this one link. Then they, they know to look at that and they can respond. Supporting users is a challenge, right? So when the green light isn't green. At three o'clock in the morning on Christmas day, who are you gonna call? Are you gonna call the school district? Probably not. Schools are not really school districts. Aren't really set up to be tech support for large numbers of users. So you need someone to answer the phone. You typically are dealing with people that English is not their first language. So how do you answer the phone in, whatever array of languages you choose to? Spanish is the obvious one, but Mandarin Vietnamese tolog right. There's a ton of languages out there that cities typically want to support their residents in. And we have a highly immigrant population here with the people coming in for work in the Silicon valley. So we have to support a wide array of languages and that really gets to building those partnerships with those companies that can. What I would refer to as kind of a full stack deployment of CBRS. It's not just put a radio on a pole and power it up and call it good. You need to look at the full solution. And that is a more of an economics and a political. Thing than it is just an engineering thing. And that's, I think one of the things that joint venture does well, we synthesize the engineering with the political and the economic, and we can look at that full stack and say, there are things here that we need to address before we can take this network live

Tom Hunt 18:44

We talked about administration, but then the next piece is, logistical administration who handles how the students get the equipment. And if they're no longer students who takes the antenna off their house, who puts it on their house, how does that work?

David Witkowski 18:59

Right. Exactly. And that's one of the reasons why I have shied away from solutions that require installation. I don't want to have to climb on somebody's. Nor do I want the liability of climbing on somebody's roof? My, my first business which I started after I got out of the us military was sea band received dishes for television and telephony. So I cut my teeth in the business world on being in people's houses. And I can tell you that is a major challenge, right? You don't want to be drilling through people's walls. You don't want to be crawling under people's houses. You don't want to be in people's attics. I have a ton of stories that would make you laugh but I don't want to go into those but the point is that some of the weirdest things I ever saw was when I was out there in people's houses, installing equipment and you don't want to ne you don't wanna be there. During the pandemic, we couldn't do that. We weren't entering people's homes. And so they, we, what happened was, is that we would, pre-provision a CBRS a C a CPE customer. Equipment. And we would hand that CPE on would put it on a table. It was already ready to go. There was a set of instructions. It said, basically put it on the window, put it in a window inside facing the school and plug it and it would attach to the CBRS. It would begin broadcasting wifi inside the house. And then the Chromebooks were already provisioned to work with that. So it was literally plug and play. It was literally a plug and play solution. And we would require the families to come to the school and the school would hand out the the equipment at the school. And there's another reason why, by the way, Tom, that you don't want to do this at people's homes is the district doesn't want you to know where their students live. There's a personally identifiable information problem. If I were to enter somebody's home. Then I know where they live and they don't want the average person to know where their students live for privacy reasons. If I drill through a wall and I drill into a water pipe and now I've caused a problem, guess what I now have, I have to mitigate around that. I have an insurance claim. If I get COVID in their house, they get code from me or we get, something happens. I get bit by their dog. You don't want that, right? You don't want to be in those situations. And so what you want is a solution that you can hand to people literally shrink, wrapped and say, plug it in. And there are few technologies that can do that. CBRS happens to be one of them that, that has proven itself to be reliable in that, in that way. Yeah. Do we, if the student leaves the school, do we get all the equipment back? No. Right. I can tell you when the San Jose unified school district handed out smartphones with with SIM cards in it, to all their students, they knew they did. So knowing full well, they were likely to not get many of those devices back. Many of the Chromebooks that were handed out during the pandemic to students never came back. Right. And they get damaged people move their siblings take'em and use'em for other reasons. The return rate of equipment in these sorts of things is low. And I'm not gonna put metrics around it but let's just say that it's not as high as you would think it.

Tom Hunt 22:28

And yeah. So I could imagine that would be the case. You put something in somebody's hands it's now theirs

David Witkowski 22:33

As I say, possession is nine tenths of the law, right? You can think about how these students thought, despite the fact that the pandemic was going. March of 20, 20 must have seemed like Christmas to them. Because first of all they didn't have to go to school anymore. They could lay in bed all day in their pajamas, in their room and they were given a smartphone and a Chromebook. That's like gen Z heaven, right? right. These, these kids were, they were, they were, they were ECST. It's like, wow, I don't have to go to school anymore. And you're giving me an iPhone. Oh my God, this is, what else, what else could, and it was, and of course the parents are going well. Yeah, this isn't all. That's cracked up to me.

Tom Hunt 23:13

I wanna wrap up on schools here quickly, but I think one of the things you think about when you're deploying equipment are schools equipped budget wise to support an infrastructure

David Witkowski 23:26

Schools are really not districts are typically it support for schools. So in the case where you have large districts San Jose unified being one of the largest districts in the region certainly they have an ex, they have an it department they're reasonably well set up for that. The county office of education has an it team with the CTO. Thinking more about the question of managing or if you will supporting districts. So schools would typically operate under the control or advisement of their districts. But you know, let's be realistic. There are literally one school districts in the Silicon valley. there are districts that have exactly what their there's their district and their school are the same thing effect. So they don't have it departments. And we worked with one of those and that, that was probably the more challenging of the systems that we built because they had nothing. So they required the county office of education to really come in and be that. And then of course, that's why that's one of the reasons why joint venture was contracted to do this. And we were paid by by the county office and by the county of Santa CLA. To be the engineering resource for this, because we knew that school was not going to be able to support they, they literally have a superintendent and an, a chief operating officer and an admin. And I think their staff is like three people. Right. Wow. Yeah. So I can imagine so no, it, no, no tech support. They require the, the support of the higher level entity to come in and.

Tom Hunt 25:10

I wanna raise this up just a level. So we went all the way down to the student. Let's think about the community now. What's going on in the community that you can discuss to help improve that kind of activity. That's so crucial for our people.

David Witkowski 25:27

Yeah. I think, well with all the money that's coming online right now with, so there was the cares act, which had some money for which could be used for projects that included broadband. There was the mayor, there was the American recovery act, which included money that was used for broadband, although notably was they specifically stated that CBRS was not considered a candidate technology for American recovery. We filed comments with the FCC in conjunction with the with the districts and the county office of education. And we were summarily told by the FCC that, that our perspective was not what they were envisioning. They wanted fiber. Fiber was the solution didn't matter how expensive or hard to do it was. They wanted fiber. Okay, fine. So the American recovery is not really a thing, although we do still have some projects that do use fiber. But then it's really been the infrastructure. It's really been the infrastructure and jobs act. And the California Senate bill 1 56 that have created the framework by which several things will be done going in the future. And, and that was, infrastructure was$65 billion. Although some of that was used for the some of that was diverted to the affordable connectivity plan. So. It wasn't entirely. And some of it of course is administrative to beef up the NT. I so that they could administer the program. But that being said, it's a fairly, it's an extensive amount of money. And we are seeing, so what are we seeing? Several things occurring? One is a lot of people that I consider to be really leaders in broadband are being called up to the NT. Susan Walters from California emerging technology fund, where I serve on their board of expert advisors, Susan was called up to to head up a program at NT I a Samantha Charman from Marconey society big proponent of broadband. She is just recently accepted the position with NT I a so there's so NT I a is really beefing up their ability to speak relevantly to. To the question of deployment of broadband. They tapped the former, I wanna say it was CIO or CTO of Chatanooga Tennessee. And of course Chatanooga, Tennessee was one of the areas where local governments have tried to build broadband networks. And so I think it's notable that the NTA has called up the person who basically headed up the project to build broadband in Chattanooga. It's clear when you look at the middle mile grant, the what's called the bead, which is the last mile program that they are looking at community broadband as a solution, as opposed to just sort of funding incumbents. I incumbent ISPs, right? The big players that you would imagine in this they're far more focused on. Creating a competitive environment. They want to see the competitive ISPs, the little mom and pops, I think doing this kind of work, as opposed to just writing big checks to large corporations. And we could debate for a long time, whether or not that is a good or bad idea but that is what is happening right now. And we are working. Some many of these instances and we are waiting for the federal government to issue their broadband maps, which is a gateway to the release of the bead, the last mile connectivity, which will show up in CBRS, wifi, fiber, everything. Every, a point to point, point to point to multi. All these things are gonna be funded by this massive influx, this just generational financial opportunity that we're gonna have to build networks over the next five to 10 years. And we're, we're expecting to be extremely busy. We saw this coming. We are not seeing any reduction. In fact, every day we get calls, Hey, we, here we are eligible for last mile funding. What is that? How do we get access to that?

Tom Hunt 29:41

What's the timing David, on, the feds issuing a map. What, what is that looking like?

David Witkowski 29:47

So Jessica Rosen, Russel commissioner of the FCC has said that she is committed to getting the maps done and, and I'm quoting in the fall. So that, that means anywhere from the 21st of September to the 21st of December, sometime in the. three months and three weeks we will have, if she is able to meet her commitment, we will see maps. And at that point, the NTA can then open up the last mile program, the bead program I think it's gonna help people because it is a massive amount of money to be used to deploy networks. California, I think is getting 5 billion in bead, right. So that's just California. And that's a massive amount of money and you can imagine all of the possibilities that you could do. What could you do with$5 billion? But of course, incumbent upon that is the existence of connectivity. So you have the middle mile grant in NTIA, which is already open, and that is building a statewide network in California, which has to be open access. Meaning that if a community is S P a community broadband group, a little association of neighbors and HOA. Community anchor institutions. Anyone who really has a need to build a network will be able to go to the middle mile and say, I need access to this. And they're, and they'll get it for a reasonable price that enables you to then do all kinds of things and technology choices. Well, that's up to the individual group and to see what they're gonna do it might be wifi. It might be CBRS. It, it might be point to multipoint. It might be more fiber. But you need the middle mile backbone on which to, to build this, right? You don't build a house on sand. You build a house on a solid foundation. Middle mile will be the foundation that we build the networks on over the course of the next five to 10 years.

Tom Hunt 31:49

Speaking of the federal government and some of the initiatives the federal infrastructure. Is the government trying to become an ISP what's going on here?

David Witkowski 31:58

Yeah, so I did mention that I saw the I saw the NTA as taking a stance that appears to bias itself towards enabling local governments to become ISPs. And I think that they do see that is potentially a direction that it go. I think the question of whether or not local governments should be ISPs is this topic of an entire podcast, because really governments are graded a variety of things. Building broadband networks and sustaining broadband networks is probably not one of them. That's just simply not in their DNA. Frankly they can't afford to hire on a full-time basis. People. Like you and me who can run these networks and build them. and that becomes a, I think that becomes a huge challenge for them. So like I talked about a school doing a CBRS network and then like doing a ribbon cutting on it. That's and you accurately caught on to the question of how do you sustain that? How does this, how does the city sustain a broadband network? I think it's well recognized that these will be public private partnerships. It's unlikely that these are going to be purely municipal owned. Maybe bigger cities can do this. You can imagine the city of New York, for example, having the ability to potentially do a broadband network across the city city of Los Angeles even San Jose could potentially could do this. I. They've got a very large staff and they have the ability to, I think, organize and hire around, but, but the right, the town of, and I'm not picking on them for any reason, other than they're small the town of Los Gatos is not going to run a broadband network. Right. It's you know, some of these smaller towns in the Silicon valley have like staffs of six people. They contract all their it out already. They're not gonna bring on broadband counties have it departments. So maybe in the, in unincorporated areas I think it's arguable that cities should not try to become ISPs just simply because that's not really their mission. That being said, they may feel like they have to do. Wow. In order to incentivize the industry to step in. And we've seen this, we've seen cases where communities were ignored until the community said, okay, we're gonna build a network. And now all of a sudden, like everyone's all. Nope, Nope. The incumbents are like, Nope, we wanna come in and build a network. Okay, great. Well then build the network. Right. And so sometimes you have to. Sort of wake people up to the idea that they need to focus on, on a community. And, and I think this money is going to wake a lot of people up to, okay. We, we, we need to get into these communities. We, we need to do this.

Tom Hunt 35:07

So David wave your magic wand. What does the community of tomorrow look like from an infrastructure? Just at a 30,000 foot view?

David Witkowski 35:17

Well, one of the things that we've seen over the years has been a convergence of technologies, right? So it's no longer the case that. Voice is on one system and our TV's on another system. And of course there was no broadband, but then you started to see DSL cable, but now those systems are now starting to carry telephony. So voice is now a data thing as opposed to a kind of an analog thing. As, as we begin using things like Voice apps, for example, you and I are talking right now over, over a broadband connection using, using this this tool. How many zoom calls have you been on this week? It's all. So the difference between connectivity, it's all based upon connectivity and how you get that connectivity is increasingly variable. I'm not naive enough to think that one solution is going to be the one that rules them all. We will see communities where for example, 5g will be a connectivity technology for homes. We're seeing this in Fremont, California. Right now we worked with the city of Fremont on their master release agreement. Right. I, I sat at the dais with the director of public works and told the council. That that this was, this was how this was gonna move forward and that they should say yes to this master lease agreement and they did. So now Verizon has a has a millimeter wave, fixed wireless network in Fremont. It gives Fremont residents a third option for broadband. They can get DSL, they can get cable, they can get 5g fixed. I think 5g fixed has a lot of. I think 5g C band mil, the mid band has a lot of potential. I think there is likely in the future to be a lot more cellular based broadband. And now I'm not saying that everyone will have that. I'm saying that will be an option for many people going forward. We will see more fiber. I believe that we will see more fiber, but fiber is expensive. It is a tough install. I can anecdotally tell you that at my home we got fiber, it took the tech five hours to, to install it. He had to go up on a pole. You had to splice, he had to bring the wire over. He had to crawl into my. He didn't have enough fiber. He had to go and get more fiber. It was, he was there so long. My wife felt bad for him and made him lunch at my office at at my not joint venture, but at OCU solutions, it took two days for them to get the fiber in. They had to send a tier two tech back because the first. He just couldn't get it done. Joint venture's new offices in downtown San Jose. We ordered fiber for that. We were told that it would be installed in early September. I just got told the other day. Nope. It's January earliest, January 20, 23. And by the way we're directly across the street from the gold building in downtown San Jose which many of people know is what they used to call Mae west or jokingly may west. We're not that far from may west, and yet I can't get fiber in my building for a year. So I don't know that fiber is going to be. As much of a solution as the CPC and the federal government would like it to be just because it's very hard. I've been work. I worked in fiber in the late eighties doing optical loop carriers, sonnet O C three networks for for curb pedestals and remote terminals. Fiber was expensive back then. I don't know that it's really gotten any cheaper, to be honest with you. It's just digging in the ground is an expensive thing. I can see a lot more point to multi-point wireless at being a thing. I think we will begin to see increasingly the degradation of the copper plant the twisted pair as those wires get older and older they're failing and I don't, nobody's gonna make the investment to fix it. So that copper that we've been using for so many decades is just gonna go away. Comcast and charters seem to be doing a pretty good job of beefing up their coaxial network. We're seeing improvements there. I hear rumors about higher levels of DOIs going forward, but co but coaxial plant is is also something that has to be maintained and that's expensive. What's the future gonna look like? It's gonna be very variable. And so I can't predict exactly what it's gonna look like. I can tell you that there's gonna be a lot of technologies that are gonna enable a lot of services that we don't have today. Now I appreciate you giving your best estimate as to where things are heading. One question I like to ask everybody, David, as we wrap up today is what are the three trends or three technologies as you're looking into the future that will have the greatest impact on the work you're doing at joint. well, certainly, I think I see CBRS as a huge opportunity just simply because of the fact that it's spectrum that can be used by the average, you, require a CPI to sign off on it, but that's not that hard to get. CBRS is probably a technology that I think would be pretty. And so I see more people taking advantage of it will it become very crowded and, and less functional probably. I think we're gonna see a point at which CBRS will become kind of like 2.4 gigahertz wifi, where it's hard to get performance because everyone's on that network. Will there be more techno more spectrum for CBRS? Probably. I see a lot of interest in point to multipoint. Wifi six E is really coming online. We're starting to see that six figure technology coming out. I think there's a lot of potential there. I'm seeing a convergence of cellular and wifi right now with with open roaming and hotspot 2.0, that's now finally starting to come online after many, many years of it being a promise. And so we are, I think, we're already deploying open roaming network. We have an open roaming network on our wifi network at joint venture's headquarters. If you are on at and T T mobile, GoogleFi you walk into our office. If you've got a Samsung phone, even, and you've enabled hotspot 2.0, and you're logged into your Samsung account, you will attach to our wifi network without having to take any action. It behaves like a cellular network, but it's wifi based. And I think that's really compelling. You, you now have the ability to create a cellular, like experience where you don't have to ask somebody for the wifi password. You don't have to scan a QR code. You don't have to manage your list of networks on your phone. Just happens and it's happens securely. So it's over a, an 8 0 2 0.1 X encrypted connection, which means you don't have to worry about the fact that it's public because you're in a. You're in a swim lane. If you will, you've got your own, you've got your own encrypted connection. And I think that's, I think that's really compelling. I see a lot more wifi, I see a lot more open roaming in the future. And I think as this becomes easier to implement more people will do it. I can even potentially begin to see that home routers. Your wifi router at your home may at some point have open rowing on it. So you don't have to tell your guests when they come over for Thanksgiving that, oh yeah. Well, what's the wifi password. It'll just happen. It'll just happen automatically. And I, and I think that's, I think that's really functional. Let's face it, appreciated keys and, and SS IDs and, and captive portals are, are they're ho. I wrote the municipal wifi blueprint for global city teams challenge, which was in this project. And, and one of the first things I said in that document was captive portal suck. And I didn't say suck, but I, that was effectively what I said was captive portal suck. And so it's I think wifi open roaming is really interesting and I think we're gonna see a lot of it going in the, over the next few.

Tom Hunt 43:47

Well, David, thank you for taking the time today. We appreciate you being here with connections. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Tom. I really appreciate being here and a chance. Share what we're doing with you. Thank you for joining us today on connections. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please subscribe at the WCA website or wherever you get your podcast. See you next week for a new episode.