Welcome to the RF Elements Unlicensed podcast. I'm Caleb Nowher and we're joined here with Tossos Aliexu. What's going on my man? How's it going Caleb? Happy New Year and Merry Christmas and all the other good stuff since the last podcast that we did. We're back baby! 2022! The year of everything being totally different and cool and okay. You know 2022 is just going to be just like 2021 and just like 2020.  If we got to punch our way through it, we're going to get it done either way. At least we know how, right?  So I'm excited. Honestly, I'm not pessimistic.  Yeah, for sure. So this is the first podcast of the year. This is a cool one. We've got Brandon Hardy from Cobalt Ridge. He's a wisp out of Texas. Really interesting cat and we're going to have a really good conversation and learn a lot about his wisp and stuff he's doing with that. But before we jump into that, Tossos, give the good people their call to action. Yeah, absolutely.  Cool, cool, man. Well, let's go ahead and get to it. I'm excited to talk to Brandon and let's just go ahead and rock on with it, man. Yeah, me too. I'm excited for this one. I like young wisps, right?  So yeah, so I'm excited to hear from Ben and myself. Brandon, what's going on, my man? We greatly appreciate you taking the time to meet with us, talk about us and talk about your wisps. So we're super to happy to have you here. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.  Cool, cool. So for the people out there that, you know, you're very vocal on somebody who was talking some of your forums and stuff, a lot of folks know you, but a lot of folks don't. So if you could just kind of give us an introduction, a little bit about yourself, then feel free to talk about your wisp and sort of the history of how you got into this and whatever possessed you to decide to run a wisp and deal with all these adventures. And not a taco truck, right? Yeah, all of that would be probably easier. Yeah, so my name is Brandon. I own an ISP in Wichita Falls, Texas, not Wichita, Kansas. It is about two and a half hours west of Dallas, out in the middle of nowhere. So yeah, basically the way that I started this is interesting. I used to live in Houston. Internet is like super easy to get. Everybody can get fast internet in Houston. And then when I moved up here for a job, I moved out in the boonies out in the middle of nowhere. And the funny thing was I actually wanted to play World of Warcraft at my house and I couldn't do it. And I got super mad about it. And so I was like using like a T-Mobile hotspot and it was just terrible. And so I was an IT guy, but I knew nothing about RF or anything. But I had this idea. I was like, well, why can't I just basically take a Wi-Fi AP from inside of a house to just, you know, extend it over distance? I'm sure that's possible, right? And I just did a lot of Googling. And then I went to Ubiquiti's website because I used some of their APs before for Unify stuff and was like, well, I mean, there's a radio here, but I don't know how do I amplify it? And I literally just Googled it all until I figured out, oh, you take a rocket and you plug it into this antenna here and bam, it just goes further. So that's how I started. And my original plan was I'm just going to get enough people to pay for the internet connection at my house. And then I can play World of Warcraft. And then people just kept calling and kept calling and kept calling. And we ended up having to make a business out of it. And here we are. So we're, we're above 500 customers now. We have employees now. And also I can play video games that I don't have time to play anymore. So that's awesome.  I should be able to do this, man. Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things that I was worried about when I first started was I was talking to my friend who's now my business partner Matt. And I went, I was like, Hey, we, maybe we could start it with us. Both of us were like, nah, because all we knew about wisps was, yeah, those are the guys that charge like 100 bucks for five meg, like I don't, I don't want to be one of those guys. And then we figured out you don't actually have to do that. You can actually, you know, give usable speeds. And so that's what we do. Yeah, that would be like the first internet connection I had out at my ranch. It was like $90 a month. And it was actually, I think it was like a, a one by half mag. And this is like two years ago. So this is not like, you know, forever ago. This is pretty damn recent. And, you know, I kind of knew the owner. So I'm like, Hey, man, I need at least three mag down, you know, and like one mag up, can you hook me up? And so yeah, 90 bucks a month for a three by one connection. Yeah. So did you bring fiber out to your house? Or what did you do to kind of get this started? No. So I basically had an idea of there's an area that needs internet that has a decent amount of population. So I'm not inside the city limits of Wichita Falls. We're actually just outside. We're servicing some of the small towns outside, because inside Wichita Falls, you've got spectrum and they've got way too much money. And so I didn't want to compete with them. But outside of town, they got nothing. Like they don't even have cell phone signal in most of these places. And so I was like, Well, there's this little town over here and I could probably get them internet. So where's a where's a tower? And I didn't even know how to find towers. I didn't know you could go to, you know, antenna search.com or any of these other places to find towers. And so I literally just got my car drove around until I saw a tower. I was like, that would probably work. And then I just drove towards it until I got to the base of it. And then I just walked around until I found a sign. And then I just called the number on the sign. And that's actually how I got my first tower lease. It's from a local company that does like a two way radio stuff. Okay. So yeah, we're on that tower 450 feet up in the air.  Not when looking for towers, but when going door to door to try to sell my ISP stuff. Yeah, there was a guy that threatened to shoot me about two weeks in. So I was like, yeah, door to door is not it. And then we went to Facebook ads. Yeah, man, you're just lucky that tower wasn't like an American tower or something crazy like that or crown or something. You know, you have three towers. Yeah, we got three towers currently. Our first two are locally owned companies. One's an FM radio station. I don't recommend getting on FM radio stations unless you know what you're doing. Because there's so many so many pain points. The other one was locally owned, but our third one was an American tower. And that was a culture shock when we got on that third one because we did not know what we were up against. We did not realize how much bureaucracy was involved and how much paperwork and all this stuff to get on it. But they've been the best leasing company we've worked with. I mean, their towers are very professional. They're very well maintained. So we've liked it, but the kidding started was a nightmare. Yeah, you hear a lot of that. You know, they do run a tight ship, but once you kind of get going and kind of figure it out and get all the certifications and all that other sort of stuff done, then it makes it easier.  So I'm a certified climber because the first time that I got a bill from a climber, I was like, wow, it's cheaper for me to just do it myself. Yeah, it was like 85 bucks an hour, and I think he was on the tower for like 16 hours. And it was ridiculous. So I ended up flying to Vegas getting certified, coming back, buying like a whole set of petrol gear and all that kind of stuff. And so I do like small things myself, but if there's a big job or we're doing a new tower and putting new APs up, there's a guy in the Fort Worth area that I hire. He's got two climbers, and so all three of us will go do the job if it's a bigger job. Nice. So when did you start all this? Like how long are you? Yeah, we hooked up our first customer in February 2018. Okay. So yeah, and I have done 550 installs myself by myself. So, you know, I've learned a lot of those tips and tricks when you're crawling, you know, army crawling through an attic, and then you're like, dang it, I forgot such and such, and you got to go all the way back down. I've learned a few tips and tricks, but now I have a full-time installer, so he does that and then either bigger jobs or if we need to get more done at a time, then I can go do installs too. That's a lot of installs to do. So, but it's definitely the best way to learn it from the ground up and anyone else you hire, you're like, yeah, I don't want to hear you complain, I've done all of this. Yeah, been there, done that, exactly. And there's a lot of stuff about it. And I'm like, yeah, I like encouraging new people to be whist, but looking back on it, I'm like, I took a huge gamble like doing it the way I did, because I knew nothing about installing internet. And when I started, I basically just did the fake it till you make it thing. That's 100% the MO of like every entrepreneur ever, right? You know, so Yeah, I would show up to a house and it'd be like, you know what you're doing, right? I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. 100%, 100% got like wrenches falling out of your pockets and stuff like that. You know, I didn't have a tool belt for like the first 100 installs. I just like put the stuff in my pockets and my jeans and then just like climbed up on the roof. That's so funny. That's so funny. So, you know, it seems like you learn from a lot of trial and error trial by combat or jumping into fire or whatever sort of euphemism you want to use there. But, you know, other than just straight up Googling, like, where did you find the best resources to help you learn how to do this? You know, was it Wistalk and those sort of boards? Was it WISPA and going to the shows? Kind of, you know, how did you get this sort of specific education and what you're doing? Yeah, so I started, I went to college for IT. It was Enterprise IT. It wasn't ISP kind of stuff.  I did a lot of Azure and AWS kind of stuff, but I didn't do ISP networking. Structure your networks a little bit differently. But when I got started in this, it was a lot of Google. It was a lot of obscure forums. It wasn't like big, like the big forums. It wasn't Wistalk. It wasn't even the ubiquity forums. It was like just like obscure, you know, like DSLreports.com. So, reports, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, that kind of stuff. There's a blast from the past there. Yeah, I learned a lot there. Oh, yeah. And it was like, I got a little bit of information here and a little bit here. And I was like, I think they go together and I just tried it and it worked. But there's no guide on this is what you do step by step. I just kind of figured it out trial and error. I didn't even know Wistalk existed. And I didn't know WISPA existed either. I had heard of WISPA Palooza because that was when a lot of the Unify stuff was announced was WISPA Palooza. And so I would watch the YouTube videos about it with the YouTubers that would go around and reveal the stuff. I did watch some YouTube videos like Crosstalk Solutions and Willie Howe and like ones like that, that it was like, this is how you configure an edge router and like, oh, okay, cool. I've never done that before. And so I got a little basis from that and a lot of it was just trial and error. A lot of it was, well, this radio says it'll do, let's say 500 meg. It'll probably do about 150 in reality. Let's put it up and let's see what happens. You learned that quick, huh? Oh, yeah. Well, I knew. I was like, yeah, they promised that it's just like it's like miles per gallon on a car. You're not actually going to get that. Yeah. So, but that's basically how I learned was a lot of trial and error, a lot of Google and a lot of forums and stuff, but it wasn't like, I didn't even know WISPA existed or WISP talk for about the first year and a half that I was doing this. I was completely solo, completely on my own island doing this for about the first year and a half before somebody's like, hey, you should probably get on WISP talk. Yeah. So did you start with ubiquity and stay with ubiquity or did you try all the other here? Because I know like when I first got into the industry, I tried just about everything from D-linked all the way up the ladder, right? And kind of at some point you make a decision, but it sounds like you kind of started there and stayed there or what? Yeah. I started with ubiquity because like I said, I had used their unified stuff before and I liked it. I liked the single pane of glass kind of system that they got going on. And so, but also I hadn't been, I hadn't heard all the opinions, let's say, that are in the industry about like, oh, don't use this company because they suck, but I haven't used them in 15 years, but they suck. Don't worry like that kind of stuff. And so yeah, I use ubiquity. I started with Airmax AC Gen2 and now we're using LTU, but we've been with ubiquity. I've looked at some of the other stuff I actually used to work for a telco, a co-op that uses a lot of Cambium, a lot of Medusa stuff. So I have a lot of hands-on knowledge with that. And for my personal Wisp, I decided to stay with ubiquity and it's been great for us. So was it just a purely performance thing that you stayed or price point ecosystem? You know, what was your kind of thought process behind that? Because that's always an interesting conversation that, you know, what was your decision-making process around that? And there's always an interesting debate on that, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's not a right answer because it depends on your situation. For me, it was a combination of I'm a one-man show and technically too, man, because I've got a business partner, but he's just like the finance behind the scene stuff. He's not climbing roots. And so basically one-man show, it's got to be easy to use. It's got to be quick to set up, which ubiquity is, and it's got the mobile app where you can just kind of configure it with your phone. You don't have to pull out your laptop. The UI is easy to understand. You don't have to like Google it or read the manual to figure out what's going on in the UI. And it's cheap. That was the biggest deal, honestly, in the beginning was I was like, oh, I've heard Cambium's kind of like the Cisco of the wireless world. Like it works. It's really high quality, but it's also so expensive. And so I looked at it and we couldn't make the numbers work. And so we started with so little money that I called up Jonathan over at ISP Supplies and I was like, hey, can you send me a light beam? He's like, a light beam? I was like, yeah, just one. That's all I got. I've got 60 bucks. Can you send me a light beam? And so he would send me one light beam, charge me 15 bucks for shipping, and then I would go put it up on a person's house, charge him 100 bucks and then take that $100 and give it back to Jonathan and be like, all right, send me another light beam and pay, charge me 15 bucks for shipping. And so now we're at the point we're spending like, I don't even know like $16,000 a month on new CPEs and stuff. But it wasn't that long ago that we were buying one light beam at a time. And so I couldn't have done that with Cambium just simply because I didn't have any outside funding. I didn't have bank funding. I didn't have grants or anything like that. There's nothing wrong with the performance of Cambium stuff. Like I said, I used to work at a company that used it and it works really, really well. I just couldn't afford it starting out the way that I did. Yeah, no, that's interesting. So the funding question is always a wild one to ask people to, you know, sometimes you roll in with a lot of cash, sometimes you just completely bootstrap it. You know, have you looked at doing things like leasing or trying to get in in some of these, you know, grant programs or are you just going to try to keep it organic? You know, what's your what's your thoughts there? We have looked into basically all of the federal grant programs. We've looked into leasing equipment. There are some companies that show up at the WISPA shows for leasing gear and stuff. And we've talked to all of them. We've gone through the process. And we we ended up finding out that it's not all it's cracked up to be and you'll end up spending a lot more doing it that way. And I just I just couldn't stomach it. I just couldn't do it. Once we got the actual contract and we got a chance to look at it, I was like, now we're not doing this. And so we've we've been trying to get bank funding for a very long time. And the problem that we're running into is actually what you hear a lot of the funding companies say at WISPA and it's not just a talking point is that the banks don't understand our business model. They will look at it and they'll say like what we've gotten from big national banks, Chase Bank, Frost Bank is a huge bank here in Texas. What they've told us is what you don't have any marketable collateral. And we're like, well, we need let's just say 500,000 for easy math. We need $500,000 to buy a whole bunch of equipment, build some towers and all this kind of stuff. And they say, yeah, but that's not marketable collateral because we can't repo it. We can't go to 500 houses and repo antennas. So therefore, we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. And like, well, that's my entire business. And they're like, yeah, well, we can't loan anything to you. So that's what we've been running into over and over and over for years. And we've been in business for what four or five years now. And we haven't gotten a single bank loan because nobody will do business with us because of that reason. So so far, it's been self-funded and just building the snowball. And we're finally at the point now where our snowball is big enough. We're starting to build some towers. We've got four new towers coming online in the next three months. And it's all self-funded. Yeah, you know, I've always been really interested in what the transition point is for a Wisp from going from, you know, utilizing existing towers, water towers, whatever it may be, to building your own towers, right? So is it, you know, a cash flow thing? Is it a sub count thing? At what point does a Wisp kind of have to get to in order to like be able to afford or transition to building your own towers? So for us, sub count doesn't matter as much as cash flow itself because obviously cash flows is what pays the bills. And so we've looked at it and yeah, in the long term, if you if you build a tower, you'll ultimately save money because you're not paying rent perpetually. But the problem is, it takes years sometimes to pay that off and when you're self-funded and you don't have a huge amount of money, you just can't afford it. And so we've been renting towers even though I mean, some of our towers are $1,100 a month and some of them are $600 a month. It just depends on where it is, how high you are, all that kind of stuff and who owns it. But up until this point, we haven't built any of our own towers because even looking at something like our own 25, which I don't recommend because they're too small and a lot of people don't realize you can't put a dish on those or not designed for that because they'll twist. But a lot of people will put up these cheapo towers and then put some gear on it and even that's expensive. I mean, you're looking at $15 grand to do it right. And it's so expensive to do that. So for the moment, we're still renting space but we're finally at the point where we can build some Amorite self-support towers. I mean, it's going to cost like 60 grand a pop but we can put a lot of gear on those. We can use them as hub locations and all that kind of stuff. And so that's where we're going but we're still actively renting and getting new leases for other towers just simply because think about it this way. If a tower is making $15,000 a month and the rent costs 600 bucks, are you really going to complain about that? That's how business works. You pay some money so you can make some more money and that's just how it works. And so that's what we've done the math on it and we just can't afford the upfront cost of building towers at the moment. But you do have those four going in. So what's the sort of selection criteria for determining placement size and stuff and what have you learned the most from doing that? You know, the ground studies and then the engineering behind that sort of what's that process been like for you? Really the number one factor is where is their population density that can support? We have to make sure that there are enough customers in the area potential customers in the area to pay for a tower if we're going to put let's say $60,000 to build a tower. And so basically we got to find an area first. Then when we find an area we got to find somebody who's willing to let us put it on their property. So one of the things we just did is we signed a lease agreement with a city. We're going to be putting it on right next to their city hall and their fire station because it happens to be in a good spot but there's also population density. There's 900 houses within a mile and a half of that tower. And so and they have basically no internet. And so we're going to put a tower there so we can service the whole town and then the home value goes up and the appeal of living there goes up and it's a win-win. Yeah. But then you've also got to consider you know is it in the flight path of a runway and that kind of stuff like yeah you could have a great a great piece of property there but then having to put lights on it and paint it or whatever the requirements are in your particular area could be so expensive that you can't do it. Yeah I've heard that a lot sometimes the and if you're in a town or city they really want you to come but then they come back and hit you with all this honor as permits or they want to you know they think you've got the money backing of your Verizon's and AT&T's so they're like yeah you know we'll let you do this but we want 20 grand a month or we want you know 20% revenue or something like that and it's always a little bit different but if you're in a case where you know you don't have any you know other local options there I feel like they're going to be a little bit more inclined to work with you a little more motivated at least. Yeah what we found was good is getting community involvement from the town because the city council is ultimately the one who decided so I had to go up here in front of the city council multiple times and plead my case basically and then have my attorney argue with their attorney for gosh like four months and so yeah but ultimately it was the people in the town complaining putting on Facebook all this kind of stuff that that they were the ones who convinced the city council to get it done because they were so sick of the internet they they only have spectrum in that entire area and it's so overloaded that their 100 meg package as soon as everybody gets off of work and school goes down to about two and they're still yeah like they they can't even they can't even watch Netflix and that is the only provider in the town and so the city council put out a poll and just said like hey there's this new ISP we would have to build a tower right next to our new fancy fire station that we all just paid to build which I'll be okay with this and it was overwhelming yes and they were like yeah wow like like the city council didn't even realize that it was that big of a deal because all of them had good internet at their house funny how that works out right yeah yeah and so we get it you gotta just find a deal that will work with them in particular like some people money talks some people internet talks and so for us it was a combination of okay y'all wants some money but also your city your city employees can't even do their work like they actually have to go home early at four o'clock because that's when people start using the internet and it tanks and so they actually shut down city hall at four o'clock because of the internet and so I was like hey you want gig internet I mean when I put a when I put a tower in we're going to have like four multi-band links on us we're going to have like 40 gig available at the tower you want a gig for free and they're like yeah sure so that was part of the deal it's like hey we'll give you free internet to all city sites and then some money and they're like yeah sounds good that does don't look a good deal so you know it's something that Tossos and I have talked about in the podcast before is how important that the involvement in the local community and getting to know the politicians and the bureaucracy at that local level and because there they'll be the first ones to really understand that the the solution that you're providing you know you're you're you know so much of this is obviously you're there to make money otherwise you wouldn't do it but you know a lot of it is providing the community with a valuable resource and getting everybody connected and you really start to get things moving once people buy into this and then of course the other little towns nearby you know they see these other towns as sort of you know maybe an unofficial competition they're like oh well you know Paducaville down the road has got some internet but Podunkville here doesn't so maybe we should sort of buy into this process as well and that and that works oh so often too I mean it's just I mean it's word of mouth you know at every level right so first you know the people like you said in the other town will be like well you know X town had no internet now they do this is great we want that too and at the city level it happens the same way so it's it's incredible how all this stuff starts to steamroll how one thing just turns into multiple opportunities if if done well right so it's awesome and I think the big thing is again you know customers often talk about customer support being more important than the service itself right and liking the local guy versus the big guy everybody hates spectrum they like the the local guy but there's a lot to be said also when you know a wisp comes into a municipality and you know pitches the idea and typically it's it's the owner it's the decision maker for the company so you're able to just say they're on a you know on the fly like hey we'll just give you a gig how's that sound you know that'd be great if it was spectrum or AT&T they'd have to be like well maybe we can give you some sort of free internet they'd have to go get it approved or whatever and then come back next month and pitch it right so so you really add an advantage when you go into these situations rather than being at a disadvantage like a lot of wisps might think and not even try because they just assume I got no money I got no clout you have you know way more money than you think you know and it's basically you that you're selling so there's a lot of value there yeah another really big deal that the whisk community does super well is being local being friendly and actually caring about people like that's a big deal there's so many people that come to my service and get slower speeds just simply because we care about them as people and they're not just a number to us and yet it sounds cliche but at the same time how how in the world can a company like Spectrum care about their customers they got so many of them they don't even know they can only be a number to them and to us I mean I've gone inside every single person's house that I have as a customer they all know my face like we go to church we go to school like all that kind of stuff like we we go to the grocery store together like I run into my customers at the grocery store that kind of stuff and just genuinely liking people helps because I get enjoyment out of seeing people light up when they can use Netflix like that's actually an issue that I've run into multiple times is there kids that can't play video games they can't play video games with their kids with their friends from school or anything like that they can't socialize basically over the internet they can't watch Netflix like their kids can't watch you know Cocoa Mellon or whatever it is they're watching nowadays and then when we install the internet you watch the kids light up you watch the the parents light up they're like oh my goodness I've never had internet this fast so like there's we have an air force base here in town and there's a guy who has been deployed all over the U.S. or all over the world I mean and his big thing is on Saturdays he plays with his friends from all the different bases that he's he's been stationed at and so like he's got a friend in South Korea right now and that's their thing the way that they they they hang out is every Saturday they play video games together and he told me flat out he just simply couldn't do it on my competitor's service and that my service allows him to still hang out with his friends that he used to be stationed with over in South Korea so it's cool stuff like that that that I mean spectrum don't care about that and even if they do they just can't like they're just too big so that's one of the things I really enjoy about the West community definitely definitely and it's fulfilling to you right I mean I could just I can hear it in the way you're talking about it how much that really means to you that you're able to do that for for someone right and like you said spectrum is just it's just a machine you know and all the big guys are just a machine they don't give two craps about anybody or anything you know so yeah that's awesome man and the nickel and diming that they do doesn't help so that's one of the policies that we implemented very early on is the price you see is the price you pay there's no extras your price will never increase because like yeah we could we could get more money if we squeezed you know a router rental here and a connection fee here and an online payment fee here and why you're going to make money anyways just if you want more money get more customers it's not that hard cool yeah that that local touch is such an important thing and you see so many conversations on West Hawk and stuff they're like you know how am I going to compete with these packages from a cable company or let's say Starlink ever turns into a thing you know how are we going to compete with that and it's like look you're a local business and if you just treat people like people and not a number somewhere then you're going to have good success you know I've got I've got spectrum on my house and I've been finding intermission issue for months and it's just like I'm just screwed because there's no way to talk to anybody and troubleshoot this and I'm like well just yeah just the pain I have to deal with is the only option here so or getting anybody to care here at my office right we only have spectrum as well right and you know I posted on social media many times it's like been like six or seven times that you know the tractor trailers have come through and take take it out the the freaking line that goes between the two buildings here you know and and it goes down for a week plus at a time and I'm just like you guys need to fix this it's like yeah they're like all right yeah we'll get somebody out there I'm like the lines are running now of course nobody's going to get electrocuted right because it's data but it's a huge trip hazard too right I mean it's it's running like down the stairs across the driveway up the stairs on but behind the backs of these builds I'm like you know and I'm on I'm like on spectrum support I'm like you realize that somebody will trip and break their freaking neck and sue you guys for I mean of course not more money than you have but I mean yeah they're like the robots are like yeah we'll we'll get to it yes sorry oh thank you thank you very much for your response we'll be there shortly whatever you know and it's like two days later they come by internet's down I'm like I'm losing business here I was like you know my bitcoin miners aren't mining any bitcoin right now I need my internet's you know it's like I mean what are you going to do you're going to sue them and say hey you know loss of revenue they'll you know they have all the fine print in their SLAs and everything else that says you know best effort blah blah blah but you know they market it on tv as we're there in a second it's the fastest speed all the time we care whatever and you know when it comes down to it it's it's never it never adds up to what they say you know so yeah I mean I I wish I wish I had another competitor here that would help obviously a whisk would be great as well you know so somebody somebody local would be fantastic yeah maybe I should start a wisp see maybe you know where to get the antennas I'm just thinking maybe I go out there and visit and accidentally trip and throw myself down the stairs a little bit tripping over the spectrum line and that's at least fun the new smoke I love seeing a page exactly I mean exactly after I posted it it was after I posted I'm like damn it now I can't trip and fall because I already mentioned I don't know this guy he just fell you know but he was supposed to difference the seed funding for your new wisp right that'd be poetic as hell yeah so well cool so in terms of service you know customer service is such an important part of that you know being a two-man show like how do you do things like support how do you streamline or maybe automate things like billing systems or stuff like that you know what have you learned to put a little work up front maybe but to automate that and stream your day to day live so you can actually like you know sleep and important things like that yeah spend time with your family and have a life yeah so one of the things I ran into early on was how do I automate things to take a workload off of me and one of the problems was I was so busy with stuff I knew yes this would make it easier if I could automate it but I don't have time to stop and automate it and so I would just keep going and so yeah getting a good billing system that can automatically invoice is key don't run your ISP off of QuickBooks and like I've talked to a guy he has 20 customers he's like oh yeah use QuickBooks like don't like it even with 20 customers why and I mean there are free options out there but yeah so if you can get the automatic invoicing the automatic bill pay like for instance ubiquity UISP it's a good free option it it's really ideal if you're 100% ubiquity once you have third party stuff in there it's a little bit Harry but it can still work it's free and it does the automatic billing and they have a customer portal you can log into okay so that's that's quick and easy that will take a lot of time off of you so you don't have to answer calls you don't have to deposit you know 80 checks a month by yourself all that kind of stuff and then then another thing is making sure that you know when you have issues in your network so you need to some sort of NMS network monitoring system again ubiquity has one for free UISP cambium has one C and Maestro I know that a bunch of other ones exist a bunch of third party ones a bunch of open source ones exist get something to be able to monitor your network and know when it's down like for instance with UISP we get an email if something's down for 30 seconds or more and so a lot of times we know it's down before the customer knows it's down so one thing we just implemented recently is a status page for our company so if you go to status.cobaltridge.com you'll be able to see the status page it's it's a company called in status it's really good I recommend it because it's cheap and it's easy but it gives a single place for people to go in there and figure out hey is there an outage or is it just me like did did my kids unplug the router or is the tower down right now that way you're not getting your phone system or email system blown up while you're trying to fix the issue they can just go on there and be like oh there's an issue right now okay I'll just wait and they can they can sign up for email notification so when you update the status page then they get an email and so they they feel like they're a part of you fixing the issue rather than calling every 30 minutes to figure out what's going on um that I would say support has been one of the more difficult scaling issues because of so many people calling like that they want to hear somebody say hey we're working on it problem is we're small enough right now that my CSR he's I'm training him to be a network admin so he's a junior network admin and then there's me we're the only two that answer phones and yet we're the only two that work on the network and so when the network goes down I'm over there cussing out my phone because people won't stop calling me and and like I really just want to answer the phone and be like would you like to talk to me on the phone or would you like me to fix the issue and and so like being able to automate that either either getting a dedicated support staff that can always be on the phone or doing doing little tips and tricks like like in status using the status page it'll cut down on your on your workload there various things like that definitely definitely help getting your network stable enough for you don't have to worry about it making sure that you know you're using things like OSPF instead of doing static routes because then OSPF can kind of dynamically do what it needs to do where static routing can be a little clunky and can sometimes cause issues and all that kind of stuff it's it's just it's all about automation and it's all about getting it working where you don't need to always put your hands on it to make it work so you're saying you don't have a bridge network then I used to I yeah it was a big headache when I switched from a bridge network to a router network but it was well worth it what was the customer account roughly I'm sorry like 350? 400? wow okay it took you a while it took me a while mainly because I had heard the terms like on Wistachot people were like oh don't do a bridge network do a router network and I was like does anybody care to explain what that is like I couldn't figure out what that meant I was like okay I get it a bridge network is bad what is a bridge network and then I was like oh it's my network that's great it's what I it's what I did oops and yeah so yeah what I ended up finding out was having one router over here and like two or three towers in a chain but your DHCP server and everything is all the way back here and it has to filter through here and bridge VLANs across all the towers is a bad way of doing it and so when we finally gutted everything and started over it it took a while and there were a lot of unhappy customers about it because we waited way too long to do it but now that we have it the right way latency is better performance is better and reliability is better as well yeah definitely cool yeah that seems to be one of those lessons that everyone sort of learns the hard way in the beginning no matter how they shout and it's the same thing they're like well I don't know what a bridge network is I'm oh shit it's this ah it's my network entire network wow okay they'll do that or not have any redundancy because they're not used to you know you can you can do all the enterprise routing and stuff but you're not doing BGP and OSPF and all these other things a lot of time so they're like oh I I should have some redundancy and maybe some some pass or loops and not loops but yeah yeah yeah painful lessons learned for sure yeah so advertising and trying to determine sort of like what your take rates are and advertising you mentioned earlier about doing Facebook ads you know has that been the most effective for you was it word of mouth I'm sure word of mouth plays a lot into it have you learned any sort of tips and tricks like yard signs or door hangers or anything like that so yeah our number one source of customers is word of mouth and a very close second is Facebook ads we tried at billboard and it cost a lot of money for an entire year and we got four customers off it really because we tracked that in our billing system we tagged them with where they came from so we know what what form of advertising is working billboards was complete waste of money and it was it was a good billboard and a good location good good graphics on it everything was good just nobody the problem is people read the billboard but they can't remember the name or the phone number or anything like that and by the time they get home it's gone I was just going to say that I was just going to say that makes total sense yeah and so we've also figured out flyers like mailing flyers and door hangers and yard signs people at least in our area despise them we've gotten people saying hey get this trash out of my out of my yard or like somebody will get a flyer and it's junk mail and they'll just throw it and like yeah if they're the ones littering now it looks bad on you because your name is the one flying across the street and so we very quickly stopped doing those kinds of things because people hate junk mail and they would actually just throw it out their window and then people would see our trash going through the street and it didn't look good so we don't do yard signs we don't do door hangers or flyers or anything like that we do all digital and it works great we get way more way more bang for our buck off of Facebook ads and and like search engine optimization and stuff like that so what we do for word of mouth that makes it so good first of all if you're cool people will want to sell for you which is nice like if you provide a product that's so good then people will be passionate about it and tell their friends so that's step one but step two is we from day one we've offered a deal that if you refer somebody we will take the value of their first month's bill and apply it to your account so it's contingent your credit is contingent on what your friend signs up for so it convinces them to want to convince their friend to get the hundred dollar package because you know if you've got the 45 dollar package and your friend gets a hundred dollar package you get two and a half months for free just for telling your friend about it and that has worked phenomenally I mean I've got a couple of realtors that they haven't paid for internet like two and a half years because every time somebody buys a house they're like hey call Cobalt Ridge and then they get a free month or two brilliant man so yeah and it's cheaper than paying Facebook for ads that people may or may not school past that's interesting so do you see like in your area are people picking the highest packages or mid tier you know what are you know what are people making their decision making process on for the demographics and stuff for your area it's a big a big smattering of differences it depends you would think that like just going into it not knowing I would think what the lower income would probably choose cheaper packages higher income would choose higher packages and that is not how it is at all and we've got people that have literally holes in their walls and water coming through their windows and they're on our hundred dollar package and then we've got people that are in you know 5,000 square foot mansions and they're on our 45 dollar package because they're penny pinchers it's just it's all about what they do on the internet and what they need one of the problems we've actually run into is that people like we as with snow people don't need as much speed as they think they do and the problem with that is our bottom package is 25 meg it's actually fine for basically everybody and the problem is that we have found that whatever package they start on is the package they stay on for ever because it works no matter what package they're on and then so now I'm in a in a weird place where I don't want to sell on something they don't need but at the same time I can't run my business off of everybody getting the 45 dollar package so basically what I do to sell a package is I'll I'll say okay so how much streaming do you do because that's that's the biggest usage of internet it's not gaming unless you're downloading video games the actual active gaming doesn't use much it's not browsing Facebook it's streaming so at any given moment how many people in your house are watching Netflix Hulu, Amazon anything like that at the same time and they'll be like oh three probably and then I'm like okay next question are they 4k TVs or are they 1080p TVs and if you just use the numbers on Netflix's website last I checked it was eight megabits per second per device running 1080p or it's like 25 to 30 for a 4k if you just use that and then multiply it by the number of people watching at the same time they will pick the package that fits that because they're not going to sacrifice their streaming they would rather pay more money to make sure they can stream as much as they want to and now the secret is that it would probably still work on 25 meg but they want to make sure that it's not going to have bottlenecks if they've got you know a Super Bowl party over and their kid wants to play Call of Duty at the same time and so they will get enough to make sure that they have enough space so what we we ended up doing with our packages is we have three packages and and I went with with the Goldilocks method this one's too hot this one's too cold this one's just right so our top package is kind of it's expensive it's a hundred bucks some people are okay with paying it some people are like I would never pay a hundred bucks for internet so there's the top package it's it's it's a little bit too hot basically and then the bottom package is 25 meg for 45 bucks it's a little bit too cold generally a lot of people seem to find their way to the middle which is what I wanted and so most people are on our $75 package for 45 sorry sorry yeah $75 package for 45 meg and what's the upload 45 by what 10 so our our packages are 5 10 and 15 on the upload we're actually about to change those but we haven't released the new packages yet but we're going to be incorporating some millimeter wave stuff in there and it's going to be really fast and we're going to start doing symmetricals but currently it's it's those three packages so the the desire to start doing symmetrical packages is that from demand or just that from an advertising perspective or sort of what's here what's your angle there it's marketing because unfortunately we have to play the game to a certain degree that spectrum and AT&T have created the game that everybody needs gig everybody needs symmetrical all this kind of stuff like they don't but at the same time good luck convincing somebody that on the internet in 30 seconds they I mean you know these gamers think that they know everything about the internet and so they're like well I'm a gamer I need 100 meg well just because you said that phrase shows you don't actually know what you're talking about but you can't convince them of that so give them what they want I mean if they want 100 meg you can have 100 meg as long as you're willing to pay for it and so what the reason we're doing symmetrical is purely because it's not even because of business packages or anything it's purely because spectrum can't do it so it's something that we can give that spectrum can't compete with like physically can't compete with and so it just gives us a leg up it's just pure marketing honestly like they'll still get the speeds but it's going to be one of those deals like you got let's say three asymmetrical packages where you get five or 10 that upload but then there's this one that costs you know $40 more than the others and it's symmetrical and so we're probably going to get some money out some some good money off of that just simply because it's something spectrum can't do yeah it just it feels fancy you're like well this is let's see the best one right sir now are you guys doing businesses mixed with residential mainly residential or what's your mix there the areas that our towers are don't really have that many businesses and the businesses that are there are so small that they're really stingy with the money they spend on on internet so companies like AT&T fiber for example they have this this idea that well if you're a business you're going to pay you know $400 a month for internet like the mom and pop you know dog groomer is not going to pay $400 for internet they're going to pay just as much as or less than a residential customer it's because they've got to manage their expenses too so we have like maybe five percent of our customer basis business at the moment just mainly because of the areas that we're in don't really have that many businesses but also also like spectrum if spectrum can do you know 400 bag to a business for what 60 bucks 70 bucks something like that there's no way we're competing with that on on a pure price to to speed ratio but with with our new expansions and our new packages that we're going to be coming out with we do plan on on hitting business pretty hard because at this point with some of the millimeter wave tear graph and ubiquity has some offerings microtek has offerings for 60 gig stuff we can hit fiber speeds on wireless and so we're going to start taking it to the businesses very soon okay very cool very cool now talking about you know the sort of higher speeds and stuff to you know you've had a lot of good good progress or good luck I'd say or using the LTU for the higher packages and you know you're sort of kind of known for that on the boards and stuff kind of figuring out what the special sauce was where it works where it doesn't work and you know knowing the limitations so but if you want to talk about that a little bit I think folks would find that really useful or you know kind of what you're wanting to do with the the 60 gig or multi band and stuff like that how do you back call all this too I think that's always a really popular question is you know if you can drop a gig to the end user that's great but at some point you've got to get that traffic there so what are you looking at for that sort of thing yeah so for the back calls we've been we've been basically putting two companies next to each other Siklu and Aviat and both of them have really good offerings we've chosen to go with Aviat and their Aviat multi band the WTM 4800s they can do 11 gig and 80 gig or 18 gig and 80 gig so you've got kind of something that'll that'll survive in the rain but it's lower throughput although it's still pretty high throughput and then you've got the millimeter wave that'll do 10 gig but it may drop in the rain and so you've got both of them combined so that they can work together and you won't really notice any issues in a heavy rainstorm Siklu also has an offering they have a multi band offering they partnered with Dragonwave for it I haven't used it so I can't say anything about it I just know that it exists but we've been comparing those two and we're going to go with Aviat the problem is Aviats their multi band it works and they know it and so it's expensive but I mean if you can get 10 gig reliably to your tower without having to spend a million bucks to trench fiber out there I mean $18,000 or whatever their cost is now is worth it and so we have an Aviat link in our network right now it's an 11 gig and it has been the most stable piece of equipment we have in the network even more stable than our core routers like I literally forgot that it was in my network because it just works and it always gets the modulations you want it always gets the speeds you want because it's a licensed frequency it's not unlicensed you're not dealing with you know your competitors pointing antennas at you and stuff and it just works so that's that's how we're getting the bandwidth to the towers you know when we first started we couldn't afford like a ubiquity 11 gigahertz or anything like that and so we put a 5x HD up and then we'd get 300 meg out of it and then when when we'd run out of 300 meg we're like well we don't have enough customers to afford the 11 gigahertz still so what do we do we just put another 5x HD next to it and a few years ago I sent Toss us a picture I have one of the ubiquity monster dishes that's like freaking huge dishes that weigh more than I do it's like 39 decibels I have one of those right next to an ultra horn yes like the ultra horns like this big and the monster dishes this big is because I had two 5x HD links and there was so much noise that I had to isolate one of them to make it work and so we lagged them together which is kind of a janky way to do it but hey if you can't afford a licensed link what else can you do and so we put those two together and we were able to get about 700 meg out of it and then by that time we were finally able to afford a licensed link so but yeah that's that's kind of how how everything progressed but I love the stories man it's your original question the like how did we how do we get that much data to a tower or some of the things we've learned over time is distance distance does not do well with wireless that that back in the early days of wireless you could shoot a link 12 miles and all you needed was you know half a meg or a meg or something like that and it would work but now with higher modulation rates with the you know 1024 and 4096 kilometers coming out you gotta shrink things up you gotta you gotta make the towers closer so my competitors I've I've gone to my competitors towers I've you know taken binoculars and looked up there to see what they got I figured out how their networks are built this is how I kind of started I was like well what are they doing the problem is that that they've kind of gotten themselves into a spot where I think a lot of wisps are where they've got customers at seven or eight miles and I've got a lot of them and now that all these higher modulation rates are coming out it doesn't benefit them at all because they're they've got you know 50 or 60 customers on this one area of the tower that are seven miles away and they're only going to get the 4x modulation on ubiquity or 6x or something like that and they they're never going to benefit from 8x or 10x and so what we're doing is we're trying to shorten all those links so that's why we're we're strategically putting towers to augment our current towers so that we can cut the distance to everybody if we can cut the distance to everybody then we can get higher modulation rates awesome yeah so Caleb you're asking about LTU we've there are a lot of opinions about LTU airmax has been around for a long time it's very stable it works arguably better in noise it depends on how you use it but the problem is it stops at 8x modulation it doesn't do 10x so it stops at what is that 256 qualm it doesn't do 10 1024 and so LTU has the 10x modulation and I have found that to be an absolute game changer I've got a 30 megahertz wide LTU that is using an RF elements 30 degree asymmetrical horn and it has it has 52 customers on it and it's pushing 200 meg at night on 30 megahertz it's a 2x2 radio like it's crazy but it's because 40 something of those customers are 10x modulation you just wouldn't be able to make it happen with 8x or 6x and so what we've found with LTU is it works great in short range because what people will do is they'll have you know seven or eight mile customers and they'll be like well I got air max let's just stick LTU up there what LTU doesn't do any different what and it's because everything is getting 4x or 6x modulation what do you expect is going to happen it's not going to work so the secret sauce of LTU is their extra modulation scheme that the other companies don't have and so now you've got to engineer your link to figure out how to use 10x modulation I've seen a lot of people that say well 10x might as well not exist because you can't get it no it's not true you just have to engineer your links differently you're not going to get it on you know seven miles unless you have a like an air fiber dish out there at the customer's house but and how that monster dish and how that monster dish yeah it's actually so big that once we decommissioned that Psyx we're on the the roof of a church for that oh geez have any use for it anymore so it's still sitting up on the roof of the church just like I took it off the pole I just set it on the roof and I was like I don't know what to do with this I can't put it on the tower it's going to knock the tower over so yeah we've been we've talked about that many times on the show about modulation rate and a lot of people come to a rude awakening in an awakening and you know the jump from 256 qualms to 1024 qualms is pretty shocking right as far as distance and all the other stuff and again you could always go that longer distance but you're going to change out all your subs to a four-foot dish from a two-foot dish you know it's probably not going to happen right but really when you go from 1024 to 4096 you better be ready I mean honestly and it's a little early to say it but you know you're talking almost distances of 60 gigahertz at that point like sub one mile right so it's like almost do I even bother I don't know so 1024 qualms for me in wireless I'm really I'm a huge fan of 256 qualms because it's the perfect match of speed and distance reliability all the other things 1024 qualm for me is like and I don't want to sell everybody short or sell myself short or look you know narrow minded but really you know that's that's about the trade off for distance because there are other technologies at that point unless you start doing some magical stuff right you know they're talking about with you know eight or two 11 B E you know running 320 megahertz wide channels and stuff like that right but yeah 496 qualms is going to be a rude awakening for a lot of people especially again if you run wider channels right so you know 20 megahertz at 4096 is going to be like a mile or so but people are going to want run 40 and 80 megahertz channels which even drop that even more because it's like another 3db of s and r you need for every 20 megahertz wide you go into channel or something like that so it's it's going to be some great crazy numbers to see how that that all pans out when it when it happens yeah and and that way you just mentioned about like the wider the channel with the better s and r you need that was something I didn't know when I when I started I just figured oh you need more bandwidth crank it up like just make it wider and then I was like why isn't this working it's like 40 is you lose 3db remember than 30 it should work better right no that's not how it works and so yeah a lot of people don't realize that that the the wider the channels the the harder it is to get the required s and r and that was something that if anybody out there hasn't read the pre-seem statistics that they release every year about how many subscribers are on their stuff and what what radios they're using and throughputs and stuff like that you'll see that when you go from 30 megahertz to 40 megahertz there's a decrease in throughput not an increase in throughput and and it's because now when you add that extra 10 megahertz that's more noise that your radio is listening to and now it's gotta it's gotta deal with that and so what we have found is the tight beam widths with the 30 30 degree asymmetrical horns or even ultra horns in a few cases super tight beam widths so you're not you basically you got blinders on you're not listening to all the stuff to the sides and you could just hear what's in front of you we even do some of our towers where like my competitor is let's say at 100 degrees well we can do a 60 degree over here but then I do a narrow one pointing straight at my competitors tower and then a wide one over here so that this wide one like let's say if it's 60 degrees and 10 degrees of it is taken up by my competitor well it's ruining all 60 degrees of that horn and so you can utilize those those small horns to kind of isolate that one area and you can get better modulation rates from doing that that's beautiful that's beautiful to hear that and that's all stuff that I learned myself because I didn't know where to find all this information when I first started so but yeah that basically the secret sauce to LTU is short distances and isolation on your antennas it would be it would be great if you be equity had you know a wave guide for LTU that we've been wanting for four years but they don't so best you can do is put a this spot I have like three of them and they're they're highly coveted but like you got to use the the horn on the on the tower in order to isolate as much as possible because that's what's going to get you as much throughput as possible yeah I'd say that conversation I mean that's the bulk majority of the conversations we have people you know they're like man we hear your stuff's magic and but I don't understand it whatever else I'm like it's not really magic it's a couple of simple principles you know isolate get rid as much noise as you can focus on only there you want to serve and try to keep your distances reasonable I mean that's that's a bulk of you know what these high bandwidth systems and 5 gig the unlicensed bands you know are based on for sure yeah and at Wisps Wisps are are getting a rude awakening right now a lot of the guys that have been in this industry way longer than I have are used to those long distances and that's just it's just not how it's going to work I mean unless you get stuff like Toronto but who can afford that I mean like people like me can't afford it obviously there is a business case for it but like I I can't so so we have to work with what we got and it just it just won't work and people people would really gripe about it then change their networks but if you want to stay ahead and you want to get the faster speeds you want to compete with Starlink or or Spectrum you got to start shortening up your ranges and that just add means add more towers and get closer to the get closer to the customers yeah and and I mean honestly that's what they're doing right I mean with all these microcells everywhere so it's not like you know they they don't know it and they're not doing it right so the writings on the wall definitely you know shortening the distances is is the the biggest advantage that you can have and yeah I mean it's unfortunate to find out the hard way but people are coming around to it and they're they're realizing that and it usually takes to take that technology changing for it to really affect them and for them to really do it and it's it's happening now so we're seeing it like I said Caleb and I constantly work with wisps and designing their networks and planning out their upgrades and stuff like that and you know it used to be where we would have to tell them shorten it shorten it shorten it now they're coming to us it's like yeah I only want to cover a mile or two because and they they explain to us why they want to do it or like yeah we know you know that's really that's that's why you know a lot of the horns that we offer are so important right because also you know when you cover these shorter distances well you don't need as much receive gain on your antennas as well and this is where some of these lower gain horns that this right we were already looking so to speak into the future of where things were going people didn't understand why are you using these horns they have such low gain it makes no sense right because they're all fixated on these longer distances now it's starting to resonate people are like oh I get it now I mean we have a lot of people you know using our symmetrical 90 degree at 10 dbi of gain you know on their network for these short distances now of course it's not you know yeah sometimes you do need more gain especially the higher modulation rates and stuff like this but it's they're starting those those horns that were totally misunderstood are making their way into people's networks now because they're starting to see the benefits of having less received gain therefore hearing less noise you put that with a more narrow antenna I mean it's just it's just golden it's a good solution yeah and we're finding that out in in real life that exactly what you said it works it works well because when I first started with horns I was comparing it to the the very first sector that I started with was that three in one ubiquity HD sector and tenazilla Oh yeah it was like what 23 decibels or 23 decibels and yeah and then you had three rockets right next to each other that were physically like the the actual what do you call it the patch arrays were touching each other it's like yeah anyways so we don't have those anymore but the horns I would look at that I was like well I'm going from 23 dB to you know 10 or 18 or whatever like how is this going to work well one of the things that I didn't realize at the time is that that is received sensitivity or received gain on the tower side which equates to upload speed and upload connection that's how I phrase things because it's just upload or download because that's what the customer cares about so that is the upload speed basically it's the size of the customer that matters for the download speed and so you want the customer to be isolated you want don't want the customer to have a lot of noise and if you can't achieve that if you've got just an antenna like a light beam that just hears everything around it then you gotta have one that's higher gain to kind of punch through it and it's kind of irresponsible to do that but what what do we do if we don't have a wave guide we can't put a horn on it and so basically you got to get the customer larger in order to get better download speeds but also with what you're saying about a 10 10 dbi if you've got a tower that's facing the entire city you've got let's say a hundred thousand people in in this this range if you've got a 23 dbi horn or antenna it's going to hear everything for miles whereas you could get a wider one let's say a 90 degree that's what 10 dbi on the symmetricals and it's only going to hear maybe a mile or two and so yeah it's wider but it's not going to hear as much so one of our new towers that we're putting up is is in a neighborhood that every we've got like 800 houses within a mile and so we're actually putting a couple of those 90 degree symmetricals on there just simply because we want wider but we don't want longer for noise very cool very cool so we know you've got an interesting story about your tower slight mishap that you may have I don't have a clever sort of segway into this but I know it's something I wanted to ask you about that too I know it's going to be an interesting thing folks want to hear about so if you kind of want to cover that a bit I think it would be really interesting for folks out there for all the crazy 5g tinfoil hat type people out there oh yeah that was the point where I was actually like I get this whole taco truck joke is going around like I get it so all right so a little bit of history so December 18th 2020 I for a couple of days before that I had been having power issues at my core tower and so things would just like go down like our battery backups weren't working as well as I would hope as well as I had hoped and and our power company kept losing power and so our our tower site kept dying for a few days prior to that so I woke up on December 18th 2020 to my phone blowing up and everything offline at like 7am so I get in the car and I drive out there at the time I lived 45 minutes away from my tower and so I live four minutes away from my tower now but I drove out there and as I'm pulling up I'm like I don't something looks weird see a tower in the horizon like what and my heart sank I was just like oh no I started panicking running around like what what is going on the power company was already there and so the gate was already open and when I went in there the entire tower was lying on the ground it was our core tower our very first tower 450 feet tall and the whole thing was lying on the ground it was it was built in the 1960s it had been up for that long I mean it had this much paint on it it had been repainted so many times but yeah it was a custom welding job like like some local company back in the 60s it just welded it all together and that thing was a tank and it had been standing for for however long it is 60 whatever this is the 60s and so we get out there and everything is just destroyed 450 foot tower laying on the ground just a crumpled heap of mess luckily when it had fallen it had missed our shed but there are some big satellites like those huge satellites for a satellite head end luckily not in use and it had just landed on those and smashed all those but it landed on the power lines and all that kind of stuff we actually had a one of the af-60 lr's from ubiquity it was still in beta it was like one of the few beta units and we got one and it was smashed under the under the tower and everything and so I started panicking because at the time we had three towers in our network two of them were connected to each other and one of them was off by itself with its own fiber connection this was the core tower that fed the other towers so two-thirds of our customer base was offline at that moment and I was like what am I supposed to do the tower doesn't exist anymore I don't have money for rebuilding a tower immediately I didn't own the tower I was leasing leasing it from a local company and I was like I don't have a cow or a sell on wheels one of the towers on a trailer I didn't have one of those like what am I supposed to do I don't have all this equipment and I don't have the manpower it was just me and we had just hired my junior network admin so he didn't really know anything he was very green and I started panicking and so I put it out on on Wistalk that's kind of a story it was more like well like one of those ways you cope with tragedies is you just kind of joke about it and so I started joking about it like I don't think this is supposed to be here and took a picture of the the tower and I think I made some joke about the ultra horn because the ultra homers just smashed like a pancake yeah you said this is aramaeable you said can we send this to Aramae do you think this was covered on warranty like Todd so this was damaged when I got it like can you take this back yeah and then I started getting an outpouring of support from a lot of Texas Wisps but a lot of people outside the state too and we ended up having we ended up having Adair and he Adair Winter if you all know him he he came from Amarillo Wireless he brought some guys from Amarillo there's a guy Jonathan Farley from out in the Lubbock area Abilene I can't remember one of those two out in west Texas he brought some guys Richard Stripmonter from from the Dallas Fort Worth area he came out and he brought some guys he also brought a cow the trailer the cell on wheels Ken from Aviott he got us he got us a licensed link like that a super good deal on it because we were we were panicking like we were I picked it up for you remember I drove to Austin it's awesome together for you you and Richard without me asking just like sent me a picture like hey we're on the way with this I was like you're what I just wanted you to get it from the warehouse I was going to drive down there and then they brought it RF elements helped out we got some some replacement equipment ISP supplies opened their warehouse on a Saturday Sunday whatever sometime in the weekend they opened their warehouse and next link even helped out like they're one of our competitors and they even helped out Cameron Kilton over there he was just like hey come by our warehouse pick what you need and we'll square up later and so we we had I think I counted it we had 12 people there helping us for I think it was four or five days that they were like we sent out crews to go to customers houses and turn the antennas luckily the company that that owns the tower that fell had another 650 foot tower 0.8 miles away and so we were able to get our stuff put back there at the same elevation on that other tower and Richard I mean he climbed the tower with me at one in the morning like that night to put up some replacement equipment and we managed to get the other tower oh yeah we were able to get the other tower online that night I think they were down for like 24 hours maybe and then we had we had like 250 customers on this one tower that had collapsed and we had to go to every single house and turn their antennas and and reprogram their radios to talk to the new tower and it was it was a process it took us a solid week of like 16 hour days we finally turned our last customer my network admin and I on Christmas day at like noon and so we were we were coming into people's houses while they were opening presents and stuff and we're like hey we're here to fix your internet but you were like the biggest present they had they got their internet fast they're probably all like psyched you know you should have came in you should have came in with a ribbon you should have came in with a ribbon on and make them like unwrapped a ribbon before you go fix it I considered putting a Santa hat on and I didn't think about it until after yeah no we got a lot of Christmas cookies and brownies out of it which was nice but yeah it was like I mean we started our work day at like 5 a.m finished at like 1 a.m for six or seven days straight and finally on Christmas day we got the last one hooked up we're like there's still some weird network issues but I don't care we're leaving and we went out of town for Christmas to our family about three hours away and then came back and that was we were this close to bankruptcy if we we were doing great until that tower fell and if it wasn't for the other wisps here in in Texas and some of the companies that helped us out we would have just had to stop just close our doors and start over or maybe just go do something else like we were so close to bankruptcy and it's crazy how that how that how that changes so what we figured out later after the police got there and we started looking it over it very quickly quickly became a federal investigation because the tower had been vandalized at first it was freaky about it as the previous day at 6 p.m. my climbers and I were on that tower we were tidying things up we were taking cables down that weren't needed anymore we took down like like like rolls and rolls of cables from old equipment we didn't need we tidied everything up fixed all the zip ties and tape and and anchors and all that kind of stuff and then the next morning my tower's on the ground and we were like we're freaking out because we thought we did stuff at the tower we're like and I was like I told you not to touch that bolt or cut that wire damn it I was like has anybody ever heard of a tower falling down from having less weight on it like I don't maybe you cut that one zip tie that was holding it up you know I know that structural cap as we were looking around I picked up one of the guy wires and I noticed it had heat marks on it I was like oh wait a second and I picked up like three or four more guy wires and they all had grinder marks on them so they had been cut with a grinder somebody had vandalized our tower later we figured out so the FBI and Homeland Security actually took over the investigation pretty rapidly and we figured out there was some nut job who attacked our tower and the thousand foot TV station that night the thousand foot TV station was a couple miles away they only managed to cut two guy wires because I guess they ran out of battery power or grinder wheels or something they didn't schedule very well because they didn't have enough time I mean those guy wires are this big around they didn't have time to cut those and so they got through like two of them and then just left but that tower you could actually see it leaning slightly off in the horizon until they finally got a crew in there to retension it it was freaky because if that had fallen that would have been bad so the last year we've been in recovery process for the last year it was pretty tough we went from installing as a small company with like two or three employees we went from installing 35 customers a month to our peak was like 38 customers a month to installing zero a month and our company has stagnated for the last year that we're about 20 customers higher now than we were a year ago today because we had to just stop everything while we were on a temporary system while we waited for them to rebuild our tower we couldn't load it down with more customers and so we just had to basically sit on our hands for the last year but I mean WISPA and the WISPA members all over the place a lot of companies helped us out and they really I mean you wouldn't find that to help the industry like a co-op industry or something like that you wouldn't find that like if something like that happened to Spectrum let's just say they didn't have enough money to fix it on their own Comcast isn't going to come help them no like it's not how it works no but in the WISPA community it does and and that that is that is one of the things I love about this community and I didn't even know this community existed when I started so I know Tossos you've talked about this kind of response team yeah and it's a lot of those guys a lot of the people that attended Titan Fest a lot of the people that are active on WISP Talk they're the ones that are kind of on this makeshift response team so a lot of those guys will respond to hurricanes or tornadoes and stuff like that and and basically I'll save my butt because if I didn't have people like that we would have lost two-thirds of our customers yeah yeah we're definitely stronger together so yeah no that's awesome I know everybody really helps you know again they have really nothing to gain let's say right so I mean they're really doing it from you know it comes from the heart when they they help out and it's who they are at their core and stuff like that so yeah a great bunch of people in our industry specifically in our little group of WISPs here and the Southern Gulf Coast area of the US but I mean just WISPs in general are pretty pretty helpful and stuff like that so yeah so how many how many customers did you lose or did you or whatever like how many like left I mean of course some you couldn't service or you couldn't get back up but I mean did any of them get like mad like you suck and we're leaving or something like that or oh yeah there was there surprisingly not very many like most of them were very understanding because I after we figured out what happened I sent out a mass email I stopped what I was doing I sat down I pulled out my laptop and I sent out a mass email and I I didn't really hide anything I didn't sugarcoat anything I said our tower has been vandalized it has been destroyed it is going to be a while before we get this back up but we're working on it and I'd say we lost about 40 customers which at the time we had 500 so losing 40 is a big deal and we lost roughly 40 customers out of the deal and that was either they couldn't see the new tower because of a tree or a building or they just flat up left there were some people that that literally were begging us like please do something to get a service we don't want to go back to your competitors like I can't do anything I'm sorry and so we've now gotten above the point we were at after that tower collapsed but we did have some people that the second I sent out that email they just said yeah just go ahead and cancel my account we've already got services somebody else like wow that was fast how'd you get spectrum out that quick but generally most people were kind of banded together and supported us which was nice right on cool that's good to hear that's good to hear it's a it's incredible how you know a user base or a customer base that has trust and you know feels if they know you how much they're willing to do for you as well right so it's it's good to see that kind of stuff so did they ever find out who did it nope crazy thing about that was I had ordered a bunch of cameras for that tower site a week prior and the postal service our wonderful postal service lost the package I was supposed to have those security cameras three days before the tower fell and I was going to put them up and everything and I even had like like infrared spotlights and stuff to blanket the whole area I was going to have cameras pointing directly at the guy wires that were cut and the postal service lost it so it took two weeks for the package to get from college station to here which is like a four-hour drive yeah it's usually next next day yeah if I if it had gone UPS or FedEx we would have gotten it the next day but postal service decided to take two weeks to send it all over the country before it got there and so we didn't there was no video footage of who did it nobody they they even subpoenaed sell companies and pulled records and stuff and they whoever it was apparently didn't even have a cell phone with them like nobody knows who it was it was just towers vandalized the guy just disappeared into the night and they haven't been able to find them crazy well good thing nobody got hurt that's the most important nobody died nobody got hurt because of that real real dumb thing for somebody to do but you know there's crazy people out there what are you gonna do yeah and our security is very beefed up now at our towers yeah we've we've learned a lot about resiliency versus redundancy and how those work in the network and so we're we've gotten a second fiber connection from a different location so we can kind of you know complete our ring and that way if this tower falls again then we can still have internet to all these other people that kind of stuff which I'd always wanted to do it but the thing is it's it's so expensive to do that I mean let's say you get another fiber connection for 1400 bucks a month and then you've got to put you know a $18,000 backhaul link between them like it's it's not chump change but it's better than losing two-thirds of your customers definitely and that was the same network guy that is working with you now right so congrats for him sticking them out and not being like this is dumb I'm out of here it's kind of a it's kind of a painful break-in it's like is this what you guys do all the time yeah he's like is it gonna be this crazy all the time because yeah so yeah it was it was a big learning experience but we're definitely stronger for it and now I know a lot more about real life redundancy and resiliency in the network and network design and it did allow us a chance to fix our bridge network which was nice so I mean if everything was smashed we might as well start might as well start yeah exactly at this point yeah the crazy thing about that tower those huge feed lines those heliac cables that are that were feeding all the two-way radio stuff and there were some old tv tv antennas up there that were not operational but they still had the cables when that tower fell that the cables didn't break they actually jerked the racks all the way across the building and just smashed everything in the shed it looked like a tornado had gone had come through that shed yeah I remember those pictures because the cables had just jerked everything and destroyed it so yeah all the the stories on Wisp Talk if anybody can find it it's from December 18th 2020 yeah yeah that's wild well that kind of wraps up most of the questions and stuff I had other than you know asking you know what are you looking forward to this year this is January everyone's like hey you know 2022 we're gonna make all these big plans that's what we're looking forward to now granted making plans anymore is a little maybe an exercise in futility depending on how things are going anymore but kind of how are you what are you looking forward to the most this year and what are you looking forward to doing so we were able to get well I say where we don't have the money yet but the the EIDL the idle stuff from SBA the emergency disaster recovery loans disaster recovery loans that and we're working on an SBA loan so we we are hopefully getting funding soon we've got some big projects laid out we're going to be tripling the size of our company in two years if all that pans out I'm looking forward to the AX here that's coming out the Mimosa stuff is the first one that's going to be coming out we'll see how that works if it actually matches up to what they say it's going to be but if it's anything close to what they say it's going to be it's going to be it's going to be a really big game changer and that would be enough to get me away from the ubiquity side of things unless ubiquity comes out with something you know Cambium is coming out with their version of EPP 4000 probably towards the end of the year I think or maybe early next year that's going to be definitely good for the industry a lot of the push in a millimeter wave is huge TerraGraph we're looking at doing a CN wave deployment we haven't pulled the trigger on it yet we're working with some of the wave AP stuff it's still in beta for ubiquity and it's been working well so that's promising there's a lot to look forward to as far as speeds and reliability and capacities for Wisp technology and I think 2022 is going to be a big year for the Wisp industry just with technology in general yeah if they can get that supply chain figured out the chipsets can keep shipping then yeah it should be interesting otherwise and more like 2023 probably but yeah I'll keep I'll keep my fingers crossed that at least they're going to airship some of it in so they can they can feed our addiction for a little bit all right well tosses you got anything else no that's it man awesome I appreciate you coming on the show was a great conversation I said a lot of interesting things I mean I've known you now for a few years now and like I said I learned some new stuff about you as well so it's awesome thanks for coming on the show thanks for sharing your experiences and what you do man it's been great yeah thanks for having me on yeah if anyone wants to reach out to you where can they find you or or not you don't have to throw anything out there what's your cell phone number what's your cell phone number podcast we're gonna put it on the screen in big numbers but they know they can stalk you on Wisp talk that's easy to find there Facebook is probably the best place right yeah Facebook I'm on Wisp talk you can message me on Facebook my company is Cobalt Ridge if you want to you know whatever you're probably not in my coverage area but you know I'll take your money so yeah I also did if you want to if you were an attendee at Wisp of Palooza I presented it at two of the sessions about how to start a Wisp and so slides are available there I'm sure I'm sure you can find that information there so yeah basically just Facebook is where I hang out most of the time so you can message me or find me on Wisp talk you going to New Orleans probably not I'm actually going on a cruise it's like my first vacation in like a year and a half and it's during New Orleans so good for you man good for you I probably won't be there at Wisp America so awesome awesome no I love hearing that stuff too it's so many Wisps I mean being an entrepreneur being a Wisp whatever it is I mean we work so hard and sometimes people just don't take that little time that they need to get themselves healthy you know in the head as well right so good for you congratulations you earned it man you earned it definitely thank you for sure for sure so if you want to want to reach out to us Caleb at RFelements.com Tysos at RFelements.com we're on the Facebook groups RFelements pages Wisp talk just kind of everywhere so those out there I hope you enjoy this conversation until we talk to y'all next time y'all be good yeah it keeps slinging those bits people


Good morning, John. A little over a year ago, we observed the first-ever object that wasn't from here. A hunk of something that had traveled from another star system, maybe thrown out as the system formed, maybe flung out much later. But now we know, officially, while we cannot visit other star systems, pieces of them can visit us. And Oumuamua is not what we expected. Let's start with what we know. An object came into our solar system, going around 25 kilometers per second, which is pretty fast. It was varying in brightness, so we'd look at it one day, and it would be ten times brighter than on another day. A huge surprise, which is where we got the cigar hypothesis. It was, they supposed, long and skinny, so when it was like this, it reflected more light than when it was like this. It was tumbling end over end, changing in brightness. There are no objects in our solar system shaped like this. Oumuamua has a length to width ratio of ten to one. There are barely any objects in our solar system with a ratio of five to one. How would an object like this form? We don't know. What would it be made of? Probably something very sturdy, or else it couldn't maintain this strange shape. It brushed surprisingly close to Earth, right into the habitable zone of our sun, and then, maybe the weirdest bit of all, its velocity changed in ways that could not be explained by gravitation alone. There are, as far as we can tell, only two ways this could have happened. One, Oumuamua is a comet, and it off-gassed 10% of its mass as the sun heated it up, and this is what comets do. It's what gives them their big, beautiful tails. Or two, instead of being a big rock, it's a 50 meter square of shiny foil less than a millimeter thick, which fans of space travel and or science fiction will recognize as the description of a solar sail. See, weirdly enough, photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum, and when they hit something, they give it a tiny push. A big sheet of something very reflective but very lightweight can take advantage of that fact and use it for propulsion, something we humans have actually experimented with. But look, that can't be right, right? Obviously, a comet is a much more likely thing to have floating through interstellar space. But until we noticed the velocity change, we were pretty sure that Oumuamua wasn't a comet. For one thing, it was long and skinny, and that is a shape that is very difficult to have occur naturally at all, but even more difficult if it's not something that's rigid.  The idea is that would definitely break apart, especially as it approached a gravitational well like our sun. It's certainly possible that the change in brightness isn't caused by its unique shape. It could be that it's just much darker on one side than the other, like Saturn's moon Iopitas. So maybe we've just learned that it isn't such a weird shape. Also, we didn't think it was a comet because there was no tail. As it off-gassed that theoretical 10% of its mass, we probably would have seen some of that mass. But maybe there are comet-like things from other solar systems that out-gas differently from our comets. Different compounds, different sized dust particles that would make it more difficult for us to detect. Finally, scientists think the off-gassing would have changed the rotation of the object, which it appears to not have. Now, adding to the solar sail hypothesis, the Spitzer Space Telescope pointed at the place where Oumuamua was, and it did not receive any thermal readings back. No infrared radiation, meaning that it was very dim in the infrared, so probably it had reflected away most of the heat received from the sun. This is maybe the weirdest thing. It means that the object has an upper limit on how dark it can be. And that limit is shinier than either asteroids or comets from our solar system. Which, like, thank you, Spitzer Space Telescope. This was not what you were designed for, but that is very helpful and weird piece of data. And then there's this. This shouldn't have happened. The telescope that spotted Oumuamua does a whole sky survey and is not designed to catch things like this. In fact, it didn't spot the object until it was well past its peak brightness.  But according to our computer models of how solar systems form and how much stuff they throw out, it should not be common. And this discovery, if it's natural and common, means that we were off by, like, orders of magnitude. And it's actually wonderful news that it did occur, because if it means it's more likely, then we will have more chances to study objects like this in the future. Because we definitely do not understand what this thing was. I don't know, maybe there's a natural way for a solar sail-like object to form in the galaxy. Who knows? In general, jumping from this is confusing and weird, and I don't understand it, to its aliens has tended to be a bad way to answer questions in the past. And as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which we, as Oumuamua, speeds off away from us, do not have and will never have. Now, of course, arguing against the extraterrestrials created a light sail hypothesis are two main things. One, why would it be tumbling end over end? If you wanted to create a space probe to study a planet, you probably would want to keep everything relatively stable so that you could point stuff at the planet to study it. Two, why is it going so slow? 25 kilometers per second is very fast to us, but very slow in terms of interstellar travel. It would take about 12,000 years if you were going straight at Alpha Centauri to get there from here at that speed. This leads to alternate hypotheses like, hey, there are more shipwrecks under the ocean than ships currently floating on the sea, so maybe this is the piece of something that broke down or ripped apart through age or accident or attack. It's artificially created, but it's 100% dead just floating through space. Because if we're gonna start hypothesizing, we might as well start hypothesizing about interstellar war. But unless this is an extremely uncommon occurrence, debris from an event like that would have to be way too common. Like, I would just be very sad if there was that much detritus floating around in the galaxy. A theory I haven't heard from anyone except my own brain is that maybe this thing is tumbling end over end and not going very fast because whoever sent it wanted us to see it. Maybe they thought if there was some group of intelligences significantly advanced, they could chase such an object down. Maybe it's nothing more than an interstellar greeting card, blinking off into the distance, unreceived, this time at least. I shouldn't have said that. That was pure conjecture. And I probably shouldn't even be making this video at all. As a person who hosts a science show, has a master's degree, and looks like this, I am credible and I want to hold on to that credibility and also use it wisely. Observing an interstellar object on its own is huge news. It means that these objects are more common and more weird than we thought. But the story that would truly captivate all humanity is if we found out for sure that this thing came from somewhere else, someone else. How captivating an idea is, for our minds, should not have an effect on how scientists consider that hypothesis. But it does have an effect on how it is perceived by us. It has an effect on how we're gonna write that headline, make that video, and whether we're gonna click that link. As a science communicator, I'm aware that people are gonna see the sentence this is probably not a spaceship, and see more of the probably part of the sentence than the is-not part. So I'm aware that bringing up the possibility that there is explanatory power behind the hypothesis that Oumuamua was constructed by an intelligence outside of our solar system is going to inevitably lead people to looking much more at that part of the story than the parts where there might also be lots of other explanations. This is, for example, true of me, because I want it to be a spaceship. I want to know a new story. I want to have an event like that, where we all remember where we were when we heard the news, not the bad news, just the big news. So ultimately, I know that I'm not gonna be able to trust myself with this one, you know? I'm trying to look at more things that way, knowing that there are certain things I can't really trust myself with because I want things to be a certain way. And it's especially easy to see in this case where the event was ephemeral, the data had been collected and analyzed, and now all that we have left to do is speculate. Or maybe that isn't true. Right now, we have only one telescope that could have spotted Oumuamua. Another is going online in just a few years, and it will be orders of magnitude better. If, when we get that telescope online, we see objects like this flitting through the solar system all the time, we may be able to determine that they are a new class of object to understand them, study them, even visit them. Or we could find that Oumuamua-like objects are rare. And well then, we'll know that we saw something special. And that will be a big deal. But maybe the best argument against the alien hypothesis is simply that the universe is weird. Many times we've seen things in the night sky and had no way to explain it and thought, oh, this is it. Now we find the others. And then science caught up to observation. This is an object unlike any we have ever encountered before. So maybe the fact that it's weird isn't actually that weird. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Weekend, you guys! So if you're thinking about making a video promoting your charity of choice, please do that. Get it ready because we will, as a community, next weekend be voting on which of the charities promoted in those videos will be getting grants from the Foundation to Degrees World Suck. So, action! Do it! Boom! Excited! We're Project for Awesome's coming! Thanks to the educational video exemption for allowing me to just ramble on for a while. John, I already did that.