Revolutionizing Connectivity: The Evolution of Private Wireless Technology, a discussion with William Richmond, GM of Cox Private Networks.

Exploring Private Cellular Networks with William Richmond

In this episode of The Wireless Way, host Chris Whitaker discusses the intricacies of the wireless network industry with William Richmond, GM of Cox Communications' private network team. William shares insights from his 15+ years in wireless technology, touching on the evolution and application of private cellular networks, Wi-Fi, and other wireless solutions in various industries. The discussion covers practical use cases, the benefits of blending different wireless technologies, and the innovation brought by the CBRS spectrum. William emphasizes the importance of understanding the 'why' behind technology choices and the role of enterprise in adopting these solutions to enhance efficiency and connectivity in large areas like warehouses, hospitals, and municipal sites.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:32 William Richman's Background and Expertise
02:26 Journey into Wireless Technology
03:28 Innovations in Wireless Solutions
05:53 Practical Applications and Use Cases
13:28 Private Cellular Networks and Industry Trends
18:06 Customer Engagement and Sales Cycle
22:51 Emerging Business Trends in Wireless Technology
23:10 Defining Private Networks: Beyond 5G
24:03 Innovative Wireless Solutions for Municipalities and Campuses
24:47 Challenges and Solutions in Large Area Connectivity
26:17 Real-World Examples: Warehouses and Retail
27:58 Navigating CBRS and Spectrum Allocation
30:53 Agriculture and IoT: The Future of Farming
31:33 Consultative Approach to Connectivity Solutions
36:22 Public Cellular Service in Modern Facilities
42:03 Final Thoughts and Future Opportunities

Lean more about Cox Private Networks- https://www.coxprivatenetworks.com/

Learn More about William- https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamgrichmond/

Transcript

Chris: 0:00

Hey, welcome to another episode of the Wireless Way. I'm your host, Chris Whitaker. And yes, I am always grateful that you're listening today. And I'm equally grateful to my guest, William Richman. I met him while I was on a panel recently at an industry trade show. And I was just really it's right up my alley, right? Where the wireless way, of course, the wireless way means two different things. Of course, wireless technology. But the wireless part is no strings attached, no judgment, and the ways, the path, the journey, and the venture. And I love it when we could mash both of those together. So that's the goal today. A little bit about William before we bring him on. Thought leader in the wireless network industry with more than 15 years of demonstrated expertise bringing innovative solutions to the market. He currently leads Cox Communications private network team as the GM. That's where I met him, obviously, recently focused on bringing a myriad of public and private cellular network technologies to bear for Cox customers in a turnkey fashion, and boy, that turnkey fashion, we're going to unpack that one here in a moment. Throughout his career, William has been at the forefront of developing and deploying cutting edge wireless network solutions. Getting right up my alley, ranging from Wi Fi to 5G. He's held various leadership roles in engineering, audit management and business development, working with those startups and established companies. He has been a frequent speaker and a panelist at industry events sharing his insights and visions toward the future of wireless. Again, man, what a great marriage here coming together with you, William, on this show. Last little bit of information about William. He holds a BS in finance from the University of Kansas, an MBA in market strategy from DePaul University in Chicago. He's passionate about leveraging wireless technology to improve the lives of people and communities around the world. And boy, man, where have you been all my life, William? And yet this, I'm sitting and reading this going, man, this is, I get this guy. And I've just met you. So how are you doing, man? I'm glad we could get together today.

William: 1:55

Good, good. Thank you for having me.

Chris: 1:57

Finance and engineering are not the top two skill sets you think of when you think about a sales professional, unfortunately. So you are quite the anomaly of the unicorn. I feel like you understand the engineering, you understand the technology, you understand the money behind it, and you can talk about it and sell it. So what a great combination of skills

William: 2:17

yeah, my, my dad was a, was an engineer and we were the, the family that never never took our car to the mechanic. We always fixed it and very hands on. And I started in this space selling wireless and then figured out that the more I knew about it, the better I could sell it and just kept getting more and more in the weeds and really loved it. And

Speaker: 2:37

and so what can you tell us that's not in the bio? So you talked about your father's an engineer. You came, you were, you brought up with, hey, we figure it out on our own. Was there a point in your early adulthood where, whether you were at the university of Kansas or prior to that, we said, Hey, I'm going to go in this direction. I love this technology. I'm going to become a Thought leader with wireless. When did that happen?

William: 3:01

Yeah, I actually came out of school. I actually went and worked for an M and a firm. And I was valuing companies and providing third party opinions of evaluations for companies to be bought and sold. It, the challenge was there was just not a lot of creativity in that, right? The math is the math. And there was really no innovation and no way to build a better mousetrap. And so I decided to make a change and try something new and wireless had all the hallmarks of a stable industry moving forward. I think everybody could collectively agree that more things were going to be wireless than wired moving forward, and everything. That was, when Wi Fi really had just started taking off and hotels had started putting it in and as a common sort of amenity for their guests. And just loved it. So I, I joined a startup in the Wi Fi space and. Started selling it, started teaching myself everything I could find about the technology and just moved into selling and designing and then selling and designing and configuring and then selling and designing and supporting, and then create new technologies, new use cases, new vertical applications, and just been doing it ever since. It's very interesting to me. There's so many avenues to, to work on and so many different things it's so pervasive and it's, it. It is constantly evolving, which is the really fun part, right? There is, by the time a generation of the technology rolls out, everybody's already looking at the next one. And and one of the things that I've really enjoyed is taking sort of a practical and pragmatic approach to how we deploy these kinds of solutions, everybody sort of talks about the art of the possible with the, 5g. And my sort of passion is. Let's figure out what the problem is, right? And then let's go get the tools out of the toolbox that are specific to that problem versus running around with a single tool. And that's been the hallmark of every organization that I've worked with is really developing, very tailored solutions in a scalable way for our customers.

Chris: 4:55

That's spot on. I love it. I'm definitely loving the idea of identifying a problem and then trying to find the technology that would fix that problem. And to your point, you rephrase what you said, what I heard you're a technology advisor, trust advisor today, don't get so caught up on knowing how everything works. Be more aware of what problems it can solve your customers, right? So I like to say, understand their current state. And then, as you can do good discovery questions, and of course, understanding the technology to some degree helps you ask right questions, what, where are they trying to get? What's the desired state? So once you know the gap, then you can worry about the technology because not, especially as you were talking, I was also thinking, When you say wireless, when you say mobility, that brings up different thoughts for different people. Most people, when you say wireless mobility, think about a cell phone. And yeah, that's a big part of it, but there's so much more, there's so much more to it. Now I'm talking even microwave and satellite and of course, 4G and 5G, wireless backup and multi carrier SIMs, multi NZ and, of course, what I really want to hear more about is the private wireless and private cellular networks that are definitely becoming more popular, and, So anything else on, how you got here, you liked the technology. What was your first official capacity, where you're making money in wireless?

William: 6:19

It was in sales. I was selling wifi for hotels and that was very involved in the early brand standards for the Marriott's and Hyatt's and Hilton's of the world. And what a repeatable, reliable, good customer experience should look like across all of their properties. They don't consistently own all of them. So they have, a big matrix of decision makers and that sort of stuff in the management companies and so spend a lot of time with them understanding the use cases, understanding the things that they were trying to do and really helping them think through, how do we go about this? This is. Very early innings where, captive portals were really just getting their legs, where PMS integration and charging for guest wifi and advertisements on splash pages and private local lands within the guest room so that you could stream from your device to your TV. And have it be on the same network, which is fundamentally different than the way most hotels and traditionally been deployed. And then even getting into software defined networking student housing was a real big sort of eye opener for me, where realized It is just not feasible or practical for, Cox or Comcast or Charter or anybody really to roll a truck on move in day and install 300 Wi Fi access points and set top boxes in students dorms and get them all set up. And it just, it wasn't feasible. So it had to be done ahead of time, right? But you also, You need to be able to connect printers, and you need to be able to connect your TV, and you need to have your own personal sort of area network inside of the facility, and the traditional solution was to basically isolate everybody all the way out to the internet which broke all of those use cases. And so me and some of my early colleagues developed a an innovative technology with Ruckus using what's called DPSK and dynamic pre shared keys where you would come in and you would set up an account and you would create a password for your account. And when you joined any device you joined the network with on a common SSID By putting in that password, we could recognize what account you were in and keep all of your devices in their own private virtual ecosystem anywhere on the property, right? Which, which fundamentally changed the way that, and I'm like hey, hang on this works in casinos, this works in hospitals, this works all over the place, right? And just really, that was like the aha moment. You're like, this isn't done, right? It's not, Wi Fi is the last. Technology, right? It's now, how do we use it better and how do we deploy it better? And how do we modify it and make it tailored and all of these different things. And so I've just been really doing that ever since. It's just really fun.

Chris: 9:01

I agree with you. And that's a great statement that, you know, as a, and by the way, I just recently had this conversation with another friend of mine, Greg Plum, about being a tech, a technologist versus a tech enthusiast. So I would say you're more of a technologist. You're, you have that engineering certification. I'm a tech enthusiast, cause I don't have that background, but I love technology. So I'll call myself the enthusiast, but back to your statement it's always evolving, you, I'll get there one day. No, you won't. Not with technology there keeps moving, just when you think, Oh wifi. Yeah. Wifi. Man, Wi Fi has evolved so much just in the last three to five years, especially around collecting analytics. The data you can get from your Wi Fi network on the users. What examples have you seen there where that's a beneficial, because it's not just providing a connection to the network now for the users, but whoever owns that network. What kind of information can they glean from that?

William: 9:55

Yeah. There, there's so many different things that you can do now. And then I was one of the early adopters of a company called mist, and I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they integrated wifi and Bluetooth together. And so what that allowed you to do is you could seamlessly connect and do all the normal things you could do with Wi Fi. But Bluetooth is an always on sort of technology. And so we could communicate with devices in people's pockets without having to interface with them at all in a very sort of agnostic sort of manner, whereby people would walk into a building and we could tell where they were in that building. And so we started, combining concepts like wayfinding. With the Wi Fi networks, we were deploying to be able to guide people through casinos in Las Vegas and hospitals and convention centers, right? All of those sorts of things. And so it really took on another layer of. Of now we have multiple streams of data coming in. And can we take this data and use it to come up with insights that are actionable and create tangible value for our customers? Started using some stuff in stadiums where we would deploy wifi in stadiums and we would turn on things like passpoints. And so Passpoint is a technology that allows you to use the SIM credentials in your phone to automatically Wi Fi versus a captive portal. So it's a very seamless experience. And so people would come in, they would automatically connect, they would have a good sort of user experience because they would have the capacity and the reliability of the local network versus relying on towers and, in a crowd, those things get overloaded. And so being able to get their data off quickly and and then being able to use that insight for, okay, can we build this into an NFL app? Can we see how many times a season ticket holder uses their ticket? How many times or somebody wants a season ticket holder wants to order food, right? What section are they in? Let me find them. Let's see. Just really cool stuff. And the data just continues to get more and more robust. And one of the things that I think is really interesting that's going on right now is that I think there's a fundamental sort of shift in the landscape of wireless whereby. It's not just one network connection anymore it's really you need to make use of all of the networks, right? And one network is not sufficient to carry the kind of capacity that, that modern users are demanding. And you have to split the applications up, right? And you have to say, okay this application is voice traffic, and it's very latency sensitive. So we're going to send it out this one. Okay. This medium, right? Maybe it's cellular. And this is just an email with a really big attachment and it's not latency sensitive. So let's send that over the Wi Fi, right? And this is a location based service. So we need something that's very accurate. And so let's do this over Bluetooth. And so that's really the interesting part that's coming up now is this blend of heterogeneous networks versus, just this sort of one trick pony that, that used to be around.

Speaker: 12:49

a special guest just dropped in my grand dog, Laney. She was adamant she was going to get in my lap and you can tell she's trying to figure out what's going on. She's giving me kisses. She comes over once a month or so. I get to spend a little time with her. But so yeah, sorry for that distraction. William, that was a brilliant piece of information you were sharing with us. So that kind of leads me into, okay, so we've talked a lot about, we've talked a lot about some good use cases. You dropped some fantastic use cases. So tied it back into what you're doing with Cox private networks and the overall state of the

Speaker 2: 13:19

industry.

Speaker: 13:20

What's the state of the industry? How's it going in the adoption rate? You feel like it's coming along? Are there still work to be done?

William: 13:27

Yeah. It's coming along specific to private cellular. Private cellular is not a new concept. The way that we now do it in the United States is a new concept, but private cellular has been around in minds and different things for a very long time. But what makes it unique now is that the FCC released 150 megahertz, which is a lot of spectrum in the mid band spectrum, which is a very high performing, very, propagating. piece of spectrum. And they, it's called CBRS or Citizens Broadband Radio Service. And what's really interesting about this model is that it's very democratic. Basically there's a central brain that's operated by the FCC and everybody that Stands up a radio in the United States registers that radio with that central brain and that central brain hands out channels and things like that, make sure that people aren't interfering with each other. And so in the traditional license spectrum world in the cellular world you either spend billions of dollars to get spectrum to be able to do it, or you spend millions of dollars leasing spectrum from the people that spent billions of dollars. This is free. This is completely free. It in many ways works better than licensed spectrum because of the centralized brain and the coordination. And it is made private cellular adoptable for modern enterprise. And. The other sort of thing that's come about with this is the advent of sort of new players in the space, right? So it's no longer the Nokia's, the JMA's the Comscopes of the world is the only sort of providers of that equipment. In those sorts of radios, there's all sorts of innovation that's gone on that, that has really taken these very complex cellular networks and brought them down to a level that really makes them adoptable for modern enterprise that looks and feels like Wi Fi that deploys over cat six cable. Ethernet cable, right? That runs over P. O. E. They hang on a ceiling like a wifi access point and office environment. And so it's really becoming adoptable and super intuitive to use for modern enterprise. And so it's become less scary, right? It's no longer the go build a private cellular core with 5000 levers and hope to God that you know how to operate it. Day two, right? These groups have done a very good job of taking these technologies and boiling them down to be an enterprise. Grade technology that is adoptable, right? And moves the ball and the price points are really coming down and very closely in line with Wi Fi in a lot of these scenarios. And so now, these enterprises have an opportunity to look at some of the use cases that they've traditionally tried to solve with this Wi Fi hammer. Be for lack of another option, right? And they're starting to rethink how they go about their technology stacks in. And it's no longer a this or that it's some of this and some of that, right? And it's a blend relative to the specific use cases. And that blend will change over time is the use cases of all right. And so one of the things that we do right at the outset of every discussion we have with any of our partners or customers is we sit down. We explain the wireless spectrum in a very simple, in a very simple way, right? And help people understand what it is we're talking about and why we're talking about this versus that. And taking these nebulous, very complex technologies and bringing them down to a level that it is. Is really focused on the why. Why would you use this here versus that there, right? And as soon as people start to understand the why, the light bulb just clicks. And they're like I didn't know we, what have we been doing? Like, why have we been doing this? So we should have been doing this all up. And it just, it makes so much sense. And that's the really exciting part. We're getting to the part where people are starting to understand the why. And being able to act on it, right? Like you could explain the why back then, but until the equipment and ecosystem was there until the devices were there, it just wasn't feasible. And so we're at that spot now where the ecosystem is robust and the use cases are practical and economical, right? Yeah.

Speaker: 17:36

And also, thinking, like you mentioned a little bit of that, a little bit of this. The solutions are not cookie cutter. It could vary from customer to customer, which kind of adds to the complexity for technologists and trusted advisors because this isn't, give me your bill, I'll save you 30 percent and get you a faster internet connection. It's just not a, it's not a traditional telecom transactional sell. This is a complex advanced solution. It requires. Good discovery question session. You really need the information. You talk to the right key holders. What has been a, I don't know if this is a fair question William, but, from the time you get the first phone call to the time, contract signing, you're starting the deployment. Is there like an average window of time you see these deals assuming the customer's engaged and responding? Sometimes you're like your idea, but the customer's like on vacation for two weeks. That slows things down but is this what's the typical sell cycle look like for a average customer

William: 18:32

Yeah, I mean I would say it's typically somewhere between one and three months our goal as a the way that we've built our organization is You we leverage some pretty advanced tools. That allow us to do an iterative design process, right? So I can take a piece of, I can take a CAD floor plan or I can take a PDF floor plan, right? And I can plug it into a tool that we have that uses AI to build the walls up and create a 3D digital twin. Of the facility, right? And then I can place radios inside of that I have reprogrammed profiles for and actually produce a predictive heat map of the facility and a channel plan and all of these different things that allow me to get to an 80 percent accurate design very quickly and efficiently. And our goal is to work with customers and keep the conversation. Dynamic and moving right and get to a sort of an understanding of what this is, what it costs, how it works, how it interfaces very quickly, right? Instead of, spending 6 months and asking for, 50, 000 to go do these detailed designs, right? We stepped through it with the customer. And our goal is to bring the customer along. During that journey and make them an advocate for what we're doing, because they now understand it, they understand the decisions, the recommendations that we're making, and we will often give them multiple recommendations, right? We'll say, here's a 4G system, here's a 5G system, here's an indoor system, here's an outdoor system, right? And here's this OEM, here's that OEM, here's this core and that core. And talk them through the differences. And the best consumer for us is an informed consumer. And so we find that the more we explain along the way versus just saying, Trust us. This is what you need, right? The more we explain along the way, and the more they understand the why, the bigger the advocate they become, and they're really the best adopters, right? They make use of it. They champion it inside of their organizations. I would say for the advisors the advisors that are most successful in this space. And these are, this is, these are big deals, right? This is a fundamental shift in the landscape of enterprise architectures, IT stacks, right? For the advisors that do really well are the ones that get the reps in. That, that bring a deal forward, even if it's. Just hypothetical, right? Where our team always loves to talk about it. Everybody on my team is a wireless engineer, even the sales team and, by, intentionally, right? Because I want people that are passionate about this technology. I want people are passionate about this space and people that love talking about it and explaining the why. And so the reps that engage with our team and bring an opportunity forward, even if that 1st opportunity doesn't work out, right? They know so much more from that point forward about the why, and they, the light bulbs just start going on all around them. And so the, the vast majority of our funnel volume comes from, a few reps that, that engaged very early. And they keep us. Busier than we can keep going after

Speaker: 21:38

the masses. You'd rather it's about quality, right? That to your point that sometimes if you have partners or trusted advisors that, maybe they manage a a franchise owner of a Marriott chain or someone that's in that space of needing managed wifi If they could get you to the table, your team can take over from there and do the sales cycle, essentially. You just, the hard part is getting to the decision maker sometimes.

William: 21:59

A hundred percent. And, sometimes, it's the customer's not ready to buy, and sometimes they're just, it's just an opportunity for the advisor to, to be able to show value with their. With their customers and say, look, this is stuff that's coming right? This is going to be applicable to you guys in the future. Maybe you're not ready for it now, but I want to bring these guys in and let them talk to you about it so that you at least understand what this is so that as your business evolves and your needs evolve, right? You know that there are solutions out there that we can look at. You tell me when you're ready. But,

Speaker: 22:31

And I do agree with the trusted advisors. The biggest part of their role really is to be that again, a tech ambassador, at least make sure their clients are aware that there, there's a better way. A lot of people just do things the old fashioned way because they don't know there's a better way. I don't want to miss this because I'm thinking, obviously there's a, for the advisors that are listening and they're, they're like, yeah, I get it. This is definitely an emerging area of business. Thinking of wireless again, in general, it's not a new concept, it's evolving so fast, getting so much more advanced. Is it possible to give us, your top three use cases? Are there? Certain verticals or industries that you see more of, or is it just a mixed bag?

William: 23:10

So one of the, so we do So when we think about private networks, I would say that we define the term private networks Fundamentally different than most people in the space. Most people use the term private networks and private 5g Synonymously, we don't think that's correct. 5g is a tool in the toolbox. 4g is a tool in the toolbox Wi Fi is a tool, LoRa, Bluetooth, Wi Fi, every single one of these 10, right? You All tools in the toolbox. Our job, my team's job is to curate a toolbox of all of those tools brought together as a single pane of glass. Pre integrated solutions, right? And make all of these technologies that exist outside of the traditional Wi Fi adoptable, right? For the modern enterprise and different pieces or different tools out of that toolbox have more traction in different industries than others. So one of the technologies we deploy is something called 60 gigahertz teragraph. This is a multi gigabit wireless mesh technology that is basically a wireless replacement of a wire, right? And where that's most applicable, think about every municipality on earth, right? Every municipality on earth is slapping up cameras on every intersection and every park and every fence line, right? But how do you get the wires out there? You can't, you're not going to trench up the streets every time. You're not going to put an enclosure with a switch and all of that sort of stuff. So those sorts of technologies, we see a lot more municipals and higher ed on college campuses and corporate campuses where they're trying to create private connections between buildings for different office suites and all sorts of different stuff like that. In the private cellular space, I would say number one is just large areas. There are so many customers out there today that have traditionally tried to use Wi Fi to solve connectivity challenges in large areas with mobile users. So think about a warehouse, right? A distribution facility. Every single person in that facility is on the move, right? They're very high ceilings. There's metal racking that causes signal reflection and refraction. Wi Fi was designed for people sitting in carpeted office environments that, that are not moving. So in Wi Fi, we have something called the sticky client problem, where you won't move from one Wi Fi access point to the next. It won't let go. And so you have a poor user experience. Cellular was designed to go 70 miles an hour down a highway, seamlessly handoff from one tower to the next. Cellular was designed for urban environments with glass and taxi cabs and streetlights And also it's a different things, right? So cellular actually uses the signal reflection refraction to create multiple paths to the end user. And, wifi is an unlicensed technology. So the only way to mitigate interference and wifi is to limit the output power. So wifi has a range of about 100 feet. Cellular has that central brain, the SAS, right? That we talked about. So we don't have to limit the output power because we have something controlling the interference. So in cellular, we started four times the output power of wifi, and we can go up to a half a mile. So when you think about the different use cases, right? Think marshaling yards. Think we just did a huge project with a railroad manufacturer or a rail car manufacturer, right? Think. Distribution centers think really building supply companies, right? You got a big yard of drywall and sheetrock and concrete and all these different things, right? How do you take inventory, right? And people are still doing that on paper, right? And it's not real time. It's inaccurate. They can't check people out outside that they go inside and they're on the wifi and then they come out and then they switch over to the public cellular and that'll break the point of sale because it's two different IP addresses because it's a Public and a private IP address, like all sorts of just really simple stuff. There's a better way to do it, right?

Speaker: 27:05

Yeah. I'm actually thinking back to, I was at home Depot a couple of years ago. I think they've since fixed the problem, but of course they have this great home Depot app now, of course it's been around forever. First have it all, but you can just type in what you're looking for. It tells you exactly where it is. So I'm in there and of course, my cell phone had no cover, no signal. And their Wi Fi was like on one bar and I'm like, how is it? This is your Wi Fi. I'm in your store using your app and I can't get connection. What's going on here? What? Yeah, it's triggering going. Someone did not think this through. It was not engineered properly or something. 100%.

William: 27:40

Yeah. The Wi Fi is 60 feet up on the ceiling of this massive building, right? Wi Fi is supposed to be deployed at 12 to 15 feet.

Speaker: 27:48

So it has gotten better. Yeah. So if you're at home, Home Depot corporate, we're both in the Atlanta area. It's working great now, but this was a couple of years ago. So maybe something else I want to go back to, you were talking about back with CBRS. I remember reading some articles around doesn't like the department of defense and the Navy have like first dibs on it, if you're like a hospital near a Naval, I was actually talking to someone in Jacksonville, And they were having a hard time getting, permission to use CBRS because they were near a naval facility. Is that accurate?

William: 28:22

Yes the spectrum that is used for CBRS was a spectrum that was used by the Navy for naval radars for a very long time. I think there's only two ships left in the fleet that actually use the radar it will be going away eventually. Okay. The FCC has also decreased the zone previously it was between 10 and 15 miles from the coast, you were in a DPA zone where basically if a ship came by using the radar, the SAS's job was to move the channels on your radios out of The way of the channels that radar was using those inter coastal zones, those DPA zones have been shrunk substantially, right? So you have to be right up against it. And the SAS has gotten really good. So it's not that you are kicked off. It's just that your channels are moved, right? The system will continue to function.

Speaker: 29:13

Would that be like a temporary scenario, just as they're using it, when they're not using it anymore, it goes back to normal, or?

William: 29:17

Yeah, so every five minutes it's looking, right? And, so the radios have what's called a heartbeat to that SAS. And so if a ship comes by, the SAS is going to know that ship is there. And it's going to see the naval radar and it's going to say, okay, I'm going to clear these two channels. And so I'm going to take the people on these two channels and I'm going to move them over right to a different open channel

Speaker: 29:39

that your point, this is really going to become less of, it's not a big issue today. It's going to eventually go away probably as those two shifts. I've retired sometime in the future.

William: 29:48

But, you think about the 99 percent of the United States, that's not on a coast. And typically, the large enterprises are not on a coast because the real estate's terribly cheap on that.

Speaker: 30:01

That's a great point. So it's hindrance. Not, I didn't bring it up to. Being a naysayer is just more of a little factoid that's floating around my brain. Now, I think that's the benefit of being a tech enthusiast. I get to grab a lot of different data points and try to figure out how to put it in layman's terms.

William: 30:16

U. S. is the first country in the world to do a tiered sharing model like this where we have a dynamic allocation spectrum, this is the only one in the world that does this. And so it was super innovative. It was called the innovation man. When it came out because of this, right? And now Mexico is going to do it. Canada is going to do it. Europe, Asia, like everybody's looking at this because this is now, this is a much more efficient way to use Spectrum, right? And Spectrum is a finite resource. We can't just have it sitting idle, right? And The FCC is really been a game changer here around the world, the way they've gone about this.

Speaker: 30:53

Pivoting just a little bit, but staying on the, on this topic in a sense, I remember talking to an engineer at John Deere tractors. And he was saying they don't even call them tractors anymore. They're data collection devices because these massive commercial tractors have so many IOT sensors and they're all connected. And so going into agriculture, I can imagine for especially corporate farming, the big money farms is that a potential customer they needed managed Wi Fi or private networking for, to, all the soil humidity sensors and, all the different cameras and all the different things on the tractors. How do they stay connected? Are they staying connected just regular SIM or do they set their own network usually?

William: 31:32

Yeah. It, this is where this is where the advisory sort of approach comes in. And we are not in the business of selling hammers to sell hammers. And I actually had a customer the other day. They wanted to connect wastewater treatment sites, right around a big municipality. And they're like, we have sensors that are measuring chlorine levels and all of these different things. And we want to connect all of them. So we want to put. A private cellular radio on a tower, right? To connect all of these sites. And the answer was, Okay, like we can do that, right? Technically, that's it's relatively easy. Do the economics make sense, right? Do you really need private cellular connection when you're talking about kilobits per second, right? That's those IOT devices are really very light on data. The economics are, you can go get a public cellular sim card with a data only sim at a cradle point for, a couple hundred bucks, right? And that's going to make a lot more sense, right? But if you're running an autonomous forklift in a factory or in a warehouse, or you have, People doing inventory scanning that's real time and different things like that. It really comes down to the device density, right? There are a lot of use cases where I think we'll get to some of the, like the agriculture and stuff like that, but the device density in those environments haven't really hit that curve for the economics to make sense, right? But

Speaker: 33:00

is it fair to say that your clients, this is where the internet connectivity is it? revenue generation. It's, and it's generally going to be big data and it's a part of the revenue flow when it's down, they're losing money. So you have factories and again, big major warehouses, not so much for a marina that's trying to get wifi to all the docks, maybe a campground.

William: 33:22

Yeah. Like one of the big, there, there's going to be a 10 million Workers shortage right in the next 3 to 5 years, right? And enterprises are starting to understand that and they're trying to automate some of the more manual processes within their ecosystems and. They're challenged with doing so on the sort of traditional infrastructure, right? 1 of our early customers was they had a 1, 000, 000 square foot warehouse and they had these brand new Bosch forklifts, right? And. At t and T-Mobile and Verizon and Nokia and all these guys came in and pitched them this art of the possible, we're gonna make the entire place 5G and you're gonna use 5G and we'll put all your laptops on 5G and all these things that weren't practical or feasible. And then we came in and we talked to'em and we said what are you actually trying to do? They said our forklifts keep losing connectivity to the wifi. Because, this sticky client problem, and so we have a Wi Fi access point every 25 feet on the ceiling in this million square foot facility, right? And we still can't stay connected. We said, okay, that's because Wi Fi wasn't designed to do that, right? And but what are the robots doing, right? They're, they just need a heartbeat back to the network once a second that says I'm alive. And they need to be able to get a couple kilobits worth of a job order that says, here's the things you have to go pick, right? It's not a DaVinci robot doing surgery. It's not like this wild idea. So we sat down and said, okay, look, we cellular is going to solve your sticky client problem, right? And it's going to maintain the connectivity in this highly reflected environment. Very easily. We took out over 300 wifi access points, put in 10 private cellular radios, plug them into the customer switch. Solve the entire problem, right? In a way that was about a third of the total cost of ownership of the wifi that actually worked in was fundamental in unlocking the value that they were trying to create in this automation, because what was happening on the wifi is these robots would lose connection and they would shut down and then somebody has to go get this. Forklift with a pallet 60 feet up in the air over their head and walking back out. And so the automation was a pipe dream because you still had to have all these people fixing the robots. And now they've been able to automate the entire facility. And there is basically nobody that walks in that facility day in and day out, because they're able to maintain that connectivity because they pick the right medium, right? And so that's where this highly consultative sort of approach comes in.

Speaker: 36:02

Yeah. So yeah. That really illustrates, yeah, this is not going to be for every trusted advisor. Especially if you're only folks are an S and B, probably this ain't going to come up, I imagine. But if you're out there and you're working enterprise deals you have those clientele that, have these needs. So that's,

William: 36:20

that's the private cellular side. So what's cool about this is, so after my time in the wifi space, I went and worked for a big third party DAS integrator operators. So we built distributed antenna systems for public cellular service and NFL stadiums, casinos, convention centers, hospitals, right? You name it. And I learned along the way that model is broken. In that more and more people are connecting to more and more things and more and more people are more reliant on their devices every single day for all sorts of things, tick tocking and instagram and face time and teams calls. And it's not an amenity anymore. It's a prerequisite in modern facilities, right? The challenge is that the public cellular operators basically have saturated their market. They, everybody has a cell phone, right? And so it's a red ocean strategy for them. They can't charge anymore, right? And the revenue that they have coming in has to pay for the infrastructure that they have in place today. So they can't continue to fund the infrastructure closer to the end user. To make up that capacity gap, right? And so 98 percent of buildings in the United States have no dedicated indoor public cellular service and public cellular is getting worse. AT& T, Verizon, T Mobile have all come out and said that. And basically it's because the only way to add capacity to public cellular from the outside is to add high band spectrum, millimeter wave spectrum. millimeter wave spectrum that doesn't go through trees. It doesn't go through windows. It doesn't go through walls. So the minute you walk into the building, you're back, right? And so you have no way to fix that. And my time working on these DAS projects, the DAS is crazy expensive and you have to build this multi million dollar infrastructure and then hope the carriers are going to come participate in it. And that they're going to give you their radios to use And it takes years to get it on boarded and functional and it just didn't make any sense. So what we did is we came up with a way to do the same thing, same outcome. But effectively what we do is we plug a private cellular radio in a customer's environment. It looks like a Wi Fi access point. That private cellular radio creates an IPSec tunnel. So all the traffic is encrypted and anonymized, right? And it creates an IPSec tunnel out the customer's vanilla internet connection behind their firewall. And it goes back to what we call a Mockin gateway in the cloud. Mockin stands for multi operative core network. And that gateway. Creates a connection, a pre established connection to all of the carriers, AT& T Mobile, Verizon. And so every radio that we deploy from that point forward, points back, and that radio is immediately an access point for AT& T, Verizon, T Mobile in, in a deployment model that looks more like Wi Fi, in an economic price point that looks more like Wi Fi, in a timeline that looks more like Wi Fi. But now, They have this private cellular radio and whether they're using it just for private or for public service, or if they want to turn on additional PLMNs, which is like an SSID and Wi Fi, or in cellular, they can have private and public running over the same radio, so they can run their operational use cases and the public cellular operations over the same radio, so we see a lot of people where, you know, hey, I have dreams Of doing private cellular and automation in my warehouse, but I'm not there yet I just need public cellular service because I had two people that had a heart attack on the floor and couldn't call 9 1 1 because we're in a big metal box Can you solve that? Yes, we can solve it and we can solve the public cellular side And oh, by the way, now you have an infrastructure. They can do the private when you're ready for it, right? That's where

Speaker: 40:05

how many partner calls i've gotten over the years for that problem right there Yeah I got this big law firm on the 40th floor of this high rise and none of their cell phones are working and and there's other solutions out there, but no, this, that's great to know. So everything you just described, that's something you and your team can do today for clients to have those needs, whether it be private, cellular or private network. Yeah, that's fantastic. So like property management companies could

William: 40:28

be a potential property management companies. One of the easiest ones that I use as a use case to explain to people just to get the wheels turning is think about a hospital, right? Most hospitals don't have a dash because the carriers wouldn't fund it and the hospital couldn't afford it. It's scary that you can go into a hospital and not have cell service and be able to call 911. But at the same time, most hospitals today, basically all of the patients and the doctors are sharing the same Wi Fi infrastructure, the same Wi Fi resources, right? And there is no way in Wi Fi to say, okay, Ms. Physician who's pulling a mission critical scan for her patient. Is more important than Lisa sitting in bed streaming Bravo, right? There's no way to do that. And on top of that, almost everybody in a hospital that is working in a hospital is on the move. And so why would you put them on a technology that is inherently flawed with mobility? So in this sort of solution, we can say, okay, we can solve the public cellular problem in your facility, but we can also solve the private cellular problem. Let's put those mission critical use cases on a private cellular connection where we can control things like application steering and quality of service, where we can say, hey, This use case is more important than that use case. And if it's available, let them have it. But if they need it, they get it first, right? All those sorts of nuances that we just couldn't do before, but we now are able to with some of these new technologies,

Speaker: 42:03

Any other advice or tips for trusted advisors that may want to know more about this are Maybe have an opportunity. How should they start that engagement off?

William: 42:13

Yeah, again, our team is, specifically built as a team of subject matter experts in this space. And one of the things I think we're really proud of is that our team has. Comes, everybody started in a different area of wireless and we've all converged in this middle. And so we have a very deep and broad expertise across the team. And the more it goes back to getting the reps in, the more engagement you have with this is big today. It's going to continue to get bigger in the future. We love talking about it. And. Whether or not it's a, an opportunity that moves forward it's worth the time to, to understand how, the how and the why of the solutions available. Even if you don't have an opportunity, but somebody else, a partner or somebody else within your firm or a friend has an opportunity, sit in on it just listen in. It's educated. The more you can hear about it and the more you can hear about it specifically in context. I think it makes a really big difference. It

Speaker: 43:11

goes from being mysterious to being more normal. That, that's the thing. I think a lot of people was saying earlier, you say mobility or wireless or private networks, everybody kinds of different. What does that mean? And it's usually based off their individual experiences..We've talked about a lot, I feel like in the last 40 minutes or something, you've covered a lot. So we're just scratching the surface. So yeah, if you're listening, you want to learn more, definitely check the show notes, I'll have a link. William and his team and more information there as well. This has been great. William, is there any last words or anything else, anything we haven't talked about you want to share with us?

William: 43:42

Fox private networks team happy to help. We're nationwide business across all sorts of different verticals and, happy to have a conversation and just talk through this stuff. It's what we love. We're obviously passionate about it. Happy to engage.

Speaker: 43:56

This has been a great conversation. I tell you, if you've been listening, definitely check the show notes. I'll have the transcript on there. You got to really check this out. A lot. There's a lot to unpack here. If you're a trusted advisor and you're looking to expand into another part of the business, this is not going away. William, thanks so much, man. We appreciate you making time for us today. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, yeah, there you go folks another episode of the wireless way And boy, did we hit on the wireless part and the journey today? So definitely check the show notes and i'm grateful for you stopping by and checking this episode out and i'll see you next time On the wireless way