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The number of people who need (or even understand) multiple gigs’ worth of broadband speed might be small now, but Matt Daniel lays out the case for why offering such top-end packages makes sense.
StoryConnect features interviews with marketers, communicators, CEOs and other leaders at cooperative and independent broadband companies, electric cooperatives and municipal power providers. The goal of the podcast is to help listeners discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers. It is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources.
Intro:
A production of Pioneer Utility Resources.
StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their
stories and connect with their customers.
Andy Johns:
What is multi-gig internet, and why do you want it?
That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of
StoryConnect: The Podcast.
My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer, and I'm joined on
this episode by Matt Daniel, who is the central office supervisor
for Mountain Telephone in Kentucky.
Thanks for joining me, Matt.
Matt Daniel:
Thank you, Andy. Appreciate your time and asking me to join you.
Andy Johns:
Yeah, so Matt just hopped off the stage here at the Calix
ConneXions conference.
That's why you may hear a little bit of background noise or
smooth jazz over the overhead from the hotel.
And we're recording on a portable microphone, so the sound
quality may not be what it is other times.
But I liked the session that Matt did.
I've been wanting to do a podcast about multi-gig Internet for a
while, and I thought Matt presented it well.
So I guess first let's define the term for folks.
What do we mean when we say "multi-gig internet offerings?"
Matt Daniel:
So for about probably at least a decade, gig offering as
standardized
by the industry was one gig by one gig synchronous, upstream and
downstream.
Most customers use down; they don't use much of the up.
Old DSL technology was using the technology to try to get all
that down, and they were reserving frequencies for the upstream
. So we get into a synchronous world, 100 meg, 500 meg, one gig.
Now we're talking about the possibility of technology available
to deliver two gig synchronous, five gig synchronous, up
to, in the near future, ten gig synchronous to the home.
Andy Johns:
So we're talking about Internet that's really fast to sum it up.
What all, and one of the things here obviously at the Calix
conference there's a lot of talk about technology, but what kind
of things are involved – and again, knowing the audience is
mainly marketing communications folks – what are some of the
basics on what's involved in going from a gigabit as your top
speed into that multi gig world?
Matt Daniel:
If you have a outside plant currently offering one gig services,
the
multi-gig is pretty well handled by the COE, or the central
office equipment in the back end.
It's an evolution from where we are now.
There's active and GPON technologies and XGS-PON, of course is
ten gig PON.
That's what the XG is, is meant to be a standard of.
It operates over the exact same fiber.
It's a bi-directional transmission.
Andy Johns:
And that's an important part is once the fiber is in the ground
or on the poles, we're not talking about having to redo all of t
hat.
Matt Daniel:
That's correct.
As long as you're not pushing your optical budget too much, you
should be able to just keep evolving to the next
generation of COE over the same outside plant fiber, and it
shouldn't be degrading.
Everything that has been put in the ground probably in the last 6
to 8 years, it's been really high quality fiber.
How good people are maintaining their splices, if they're using
core alignment or if they're using the
other alignment process.
The name eludes me right now, I apologize.
But depending on the how well they're maintaining their outside
plant, there's no limit to the transmission rate
of the fiber itself, as long as you have a good quality, and
you're not getting into that link loss budget where you've got so
many splices, and you can't get the transmission end to end.
And it's all typically to the home is bi-di, which means you are
transmitting one direction on one light frequency and receiving
the other direction on a different light frequency.
So you're operating that transmit and receive on one fiber,
which is very efficient in the network.
Andy Johns:
Exactly. Yep.
So when we're looking at the multi-gig XGS like you talked
about, what are some of the reasons why – and I
don't know if you want to get into numbers about subscribers and
how many folks you have on gig and that sort of stuff now – but
what are some of the reasons why a gig is not good enough?
What's the need, and why are some of the reasons why you at
Mountain and then other folks in the rural telecom space are
looking at multi-gig service?
Matt Daniel:
Well, I think the pandemic opened a lot of eyes for us about
working from home, telemedicine and some of the things that have
been buzzwords for the last five years during conferences.
We all knew this was a possibility.
The restrictions about getting out and being with other people
really kind of drove home the need.
Oftentimes, I'm asked, we're our own ISP.
I'm often asked, "Did you see a doubling of your bandwidth?" No,
I didn't see a doubling of my bandwidth.
The actual throughput didn't really – it rose, but it wasn't
anything that I couldn't project for five years from historical
data.
Andy Johns:
Interesting.
Matt Daniel:
But what I saw was the full load demand started earlier in the
day.
Andy Johns:
Okay.
Matt Daniel:
So instead of seeing a full load demand at 4:00 when school's out
.
Everybody comes home, and they're streaming their TV.
And it lasts about midnight and drops off.
It came in at 9:00 in the morning and stayed sustained for the
day.
So the amount of traffic we put through was greater, but the
peaking wasn't doubled.
So to that end, we learned that, I guess, if you build it,
they will come, you know, to use a term from the movie.
Andy Johns:
Great movie, by the way. One of my favorites.
Matt Daniel:
That's a great movie. So I think that VR is probably going to
become a reality for social media before anything else.
And so...
Andy Johns:
Virtual reality.
Matt Daniel:
Virtual reality. That's right. Like the Oculus headset and that
sort of thing.
I think the Meta company, a.k.a.
Facebook and those groups, I think they're going to try to move
people to that as their social media standard.
I really do. And you're talking about something that's going to
be using the better part of probably 500 meg or more
synchronous. You're going to be receiving data for you to see
and take your input and do something with it.
So I think that that's a huge need.
Andy Johns:
And that doesn't even count what else is going on in the home at
the same time that you're needing that 500.
Matt Daniel:
That is precisely, and that's what I was going to say, Andy, is
that in summary, our customers don't need a gig.
But there are so many things going on inside of a home now at the
same time, you do need more than ten meg Internet.
You need more than 50 meg Internet.
Because your thermostat, your wireless cameras you bought on
Amazon, your fire stick, your
Amazon cube, the five cell phones in the house, a laptop, all
these things are constantly using traffic.
I had a good friend of mine who upgraded to our gig service, and
they have our IPTV, and they have two teenage sons.
And I got a call after they upgraded our gig service, and she
said – it wasn't a gig, it was 100 meg, I'm sorry.
They upgraded to 100 meg.
She's like, "We can't watch a movie on our Netflix." I was like,
"What are you talking about?
You got 100 meg." So I get in and look around the network a
little bit, go, "Well, there's something in your house that's
pulling about 90 meg." What are you talking about?
Everything's off.
Well, let's just go see through the house, so I'll walk them
through it.
And it turns out their two teenage sons, each of them have an
Xbox.
Andy Johns:
Oh, two Xboxes.
Matt Daniel:
Two Xboxes.
And they had the screen, they had the TV in the room turned off,
all go watch a movie together as a family.
But what were they doing in the background?
They were downloading the new Call of Duty.
They were downloading them. So these two Xboxes were just
hogging all of the Internet traffic.
And of course, the customer didn't realize that.
It's like, no, you got to turn that off because it's constantly
drawing bandwidth.
Andy Johns:
Or get a higher package.
Matt Daniel:
Or get a higher package.
That's right.
Andy Johns:
So the best way that I've heard it described as somebody way
back, I heard him compare a gigabit service to a HEMI
that, you know, in your truck.
You don't have to know what a HEMI does.
It's, you know, the shape of the valve is hemispherical instead
of conical.
So but all, all people need to know about a HEMI is that you
want it because it's good.
So and that's some of what you guys are doing in terms of being
a leader against potential competition or any of that.
Some of that with the multi gig service, some of that approach
is kind of what y'all are after by offering that.
Is that fair?
Matt Daniel:
That's fair. I've been with Mountain Telephone for better than 20
years.
When I started we had about 600 dial-up customers.
So ever since about 2001, we have always strived to have the
best network that we
can possibly have.
And whether or not our customers get the full, whether or not
they take advantage of the full benefits, we need to be able to
offer the benefits, especially as a cooperative.
Our customer-owner base depends on us to make sure that first of
all, it's dependable.
It's redundant. It's resilient.
But secondly, it needs to perform as expected.
And our customer demands, although they may not be the high
percentage of them, our customer demands are demanding a little
more and a little more, a little more always.
So this is trying to stay ahead of that curve.
Andy Johns:
We talked about some of the cases already, but who are the gig
customers right now, and who do you think are going to be the
multi-gig customers either now or in the next couple of years?
Matt Daniel:
So everybody always wants to say that the gamers are the gig
customers.
Our network is low latency anyway, so even at 100 meg, gaming is
still improved because especially if you're
playing point of view games, that latency is very important.
But a lot of our one gig customers are gamers.
That's not the majority of them.
Some customers have it just because they want the HEMI.
I mean that's just all there is to it.
They want the HEMI.
Andy Johns:
Give me the best.
Matt Daniel:
Give me the best. Another aspect we've seen, we've seen several
businesses.
So we have some local doctor or nurse practitioner offices that
have subscribed to our one gig services as
well.
And that's going very well.
They're providing their own firewall.
Things like that. We're just providing a broadband connection
for a gig, but also two, we just have some general
customers who work from home, or they are just high users.
I mean, they've got a camera system.
Maybe they've moved into the area, and they're homesteaders, and
they've got a camera and everything because they come from an
area where they don't feel safe as they would be in our
territory.
And they want to be able to see that from their phone when
they're not at home.
And people have home monitors, of course, with children and
things like that.
Sometimes those newer ones are, of course, are video.
You get a little more higher throughput there.
And if they're not home, they're wanting to keep up with what
the babysitter is doing.
They don't want to delay. They want to see everything going on.
So generally speaking, it's probably about 30% gamers.
And the other 70% is people that just want the HEMI, or they
think they need the gig for their
homework, their work from home, business – I said homework, but
work from home.
And just to get the best performance out of their network.
Andy Johns:
Exactly. Now, one of the last things, two more questions for you.
You talked about gamers, and I know we had Lisa Fanin on an
episode in March to talk about the gaming tournament you did.
So while we got you, you mentioned in your presentation, but part
of that for anybody who didn't hear that episode, it was one of
the ones we recorded live at StoryConnect.
You guys did a Madden tournament.
You had folks come in and play Madden, and then the folks that
participated got an upgrade to the gigabit speed for a
while. And now that it's been a few months, you said that has
been pretty good results, pretty good return in terms of how many
of those folks kept that gigabit service once they once they
tried it.
Matt Daniel:
Yeah, I would have to ask Lisa and Ricky to get the exact stat,
but I think we had right around a 40 to 50% take
rate of keeping that gig.
So, I mean, that's really good.
I mean, you give ten people the chance and five of them keep it.
You know, it just really shows that I guess they saw the benefit
of it, and weigh that against the cost of it
and felt like it was was right for them.
Andy Johns:
Got it. Last last question for you.
What advice would you have because it is an investment certainly
to be able to offer a gigabit, but then to go multi-gig.
It's certainly an investment.
So if there are some folks that are an organization that may or
may not be skeptical about, do we need to do this, what advice do
you have to somebody who's kind of considering going down the
road where you guys are about offering that multi-gigabit
service.
Matt Daniel:
Do your research.
I know you can do a lot of polling and just surveys with your
customer base.
I think you're going to realize that you're going to have a
percentage who really, really want the service.
And then you're also going to find a large number of people who
don't think they need it.
We found out we're actually changing our fiber lineup to begin
at 100 meg.
So our base Internet offering on our website is 100 meg
synchronous.
Andy Johns:
That's awesome.
Matt Daniel:
And then goes up from there.
Because we run our own help desk, and we found out that a good
percentage of our truck rolls are because customers are just
consuming their bandwidth.
And we fought this battle for a long time to try to convince
them that they need to have something higher.
They need to have something higher.
And so we kind of met in the middle.
You know, we've said, "Hey, we're going to we're going to raise
what this base rate is." We still have some legacy plans that
were confusing.
And I think that's something else, too.
If you're going to go into the multi-gig, you need to get rid of
those legacies that look like your DSL or your WISP offering or
whatever you had, get rid of those and move up with your
technology as well.
And that's what we've been doing for the last year, trying to do
that.
So look for federal funding.
You know, there's tons of federal funding going on right now
with broadband, state and federal funding.
So if you're looking at doing multi-gig, talk to your in-state
rep for BEAD money and those sort of things because it's
available. And then I would also encourage you to join industry
associations
because there's a lot of good information coming from those
industry associations where we all talk and share and do
things like this podcast to talk about, you know, how to do this
better, how to do it well, and how to reach our customers and
provide the best service we can.
Andy Johns:
You've tied that up nice with the bow right there at the end,
just like a professional.
So, Matt, I appreciate the time.
Matt Daniel:
Thank you, Andy. I appreciate you.
Andy Johns:
So he is Matt Daniel.
He is [the] central office supervisor at Mountain Telephone.
I'm your host, Andy Johns.
Until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Intro:
StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a
communications cooperative that is built to share your story.
StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.