The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch.
Craig Corbin:
Last January, the FCC authorized full use of the CBRS band for wireless service provider commercialization without restrictions. Fast forward to August, and after 24 days of bidding, the CBRS Priority Access License Auction concluded with upwards of $4.6 billion in winning bids.
Craig Corbin:
Our guest today is the founder and CEO of one of the winning bidders, Etheric Networks, based in the San Francisco Bay area. With a quarter century of experience in telecommunications, Alex Hagen has been a true technology pioneer, dating back to the ’80s when he developed the first Airline Reservation System Graphical User Interface, and also led the way in leveraging electronic fax, telex, LAN and databases in international trade. Along the way, Alex has authored three patents and for the last 17 years he has been responsible for the strategy, revenue, and customer success of one of most dynamic wireless providers anywhere in the country.
Craig Corbin:
We are excited to be able to visit with you and talk about Etheric Networks. Congratulations on being a winning bidder in the CBRS auction and also congratulations on having the third largest fixed wireless ISP in the country, and according to Broadband Now, the number one fastest fixed wireless provider in all of California. Before we get into the CBRS auction and what that’s going to mean for Etheric Networks, would you give us a bit of an overview from 30,000 feet, about Etheric Networks and what’s been going on for the last 17 years?
Early Fixed Wireless Innovator & Wireless Service Provider
Alex Hagen:
My last job before we started Etheric Networks, I worked at NTT Docomo right when i-mode was coming out. I worked in their research and development unit, which is massive, with over a thousand people, although here in California it was 30. Working at Docomo was my chance to learn the other side of the business, which is the ITU side. Prior to that I’d worked on the IETF and IEEE side, dealing with Gig-E and the TCP/IP protocol stacks. I did a lot of research on doing something that would allow the user to have the power – to allow us to control our own data. I wished I’d gone more in that direction especially now when we look at things like the social dilemma and how serious a problem this has turned out to be.
Alex Hagen:
But be that as it may, the main focus when I worked at Docomo was I wanted to actually see these inventions get into the real world, and with a thousand researchers you sort of chafe at the bit. There’s a lot of politics about what gets commercialized. Around 2003 the technology was coming together to actually compete with DSL and cable by using fixed wireless. It was still very early. The first few years were very difficult using unlicensed spectrum, because in the very beginning there wasn’t even basic error correction. If you had packet loss it was very serious.
Alex Hagen:
We just decided to launch this company, talked to Qwest, very persuasive sales rep there. We started at the Qwest data center in Sunnyvale, and then we put up our first link up to a tower overlooking the Los Altos Hills. There’s a lot of people in the Los Altos Hills that are extremely important in the tech industry and couldn’t get good broadband. We just gradually built out this network, experimenting with technologies, and we always tried to have some special sauce. We run our own code on most of the radio and wireless gear. We have to talk to vendors about permission and things like that, but we create advanced features that they don’t have for failover, for dealing with problems, for adaptive behaviors that will hide any imperfections from the user.
Alex Hagen:
We had some great engineers who’ve come through. People that worked with me at Berkeley Networks, who helped me with our code. We had a lot of interesting graphical tools, so you can put in your address and visualize all of the different network sites that you can connect to and how much capacity they have. We’ve done a lot of work on the software side. I guess the other really interesting part about Etheric was when we got on the tallest tower in the Bay area, Mount Madonna, we put up Cisco equipment, the highest that I think anyone’s ever deployed it. It was just hardened industrial switches 850 feet above ground level.
Alex Hagen:
Previously people would run wave guide up these towers. This was the first time that we were running ethernet based systems up – essentially putting wiring closets all the way up on this tower.
Alex Hagen:
Then the company who owned that tower wanted to tear it down. We got a bunch of our customers to save the tower and buy it. And now we finally bought it from them ourselves. Mount Madonna provides probably the highest number of customers and capacity of virtually any WISP tower in the country. We have about a thousand customers off of that site with about two gigs of traffic flowing through it. We have 60 transmitters on the tower.
Alex Hagen:
We also were fortunate enough to encounter a company that had bought a fiber network out of bankruptcy. They were going to run a submarine trench from Monterey to San Luis Obispo and the cost was too great because of all the environmental protections to the Monterey Bay. A company bought that out, and then we leased a fiber ring around the Bay and going to Monterey. So we have all the tools to be scalable and to not run out of capacity.
Alex Hagen:
We are dedicated to keeping choice available to people and to have an open internet that has a high degree of user privacy. We believe that local engineers in each community ought to be able to contribute to design planning. That’s absolutely impossible, with the large providers and the way they’re constructed currently.
CBRS 2020 Auction – County by County Licenses
Craig Corbin:
It is exciting and I know from your standpoint part of the intrigue with the recent auction had to be the fact that the licenses were issued on a county-by-county basis as opposed to by metropolitan area. Etheric was successful in acquiring 21 licenses, covering 11 counties, in the Monterey peninsula. Is that where the majority of the licenses will be?
Alex Hagen:
It’s the majority of the population, but Monterey County has about 500,000 people in it. We thought the pricing was going to be much higher. We ended up doing very well, about two-and-a-half to three cents per population megahertz, so we didn’t set up to try to bid in some counties which did end up going fairly cheaply. Santa Cruz County went very cheaply. That would’ve been great, but we have a friend who got two licenses in Santa Cruz, so we’re talking to him. Surfnet, I’ll just give a shout out, Mark Mergenthaler and we’ll be sub-licensing and then he’ll do the same. Between Mark and ourselves we’ll have four contiguous counties. We’ll have Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo, and he’s agreed to work on sharing the development costs to get something really world class going.
Alex Hagen:
The other counties that we got, are essentially the northeast borders of the whole state, all the way along the County, Mono Lake area, up to Siskiyou County. One odd county that we got was Colusa. It was very interesting to see the bidding dynamics. Calaveras County sold for three times as much as Santa Cruz County, which makes no sense but the guy bidding on some of these rural counties that went up in cost has a $500,000,000 grant from the feds which is cal.net. That may have had something to do with why they weren’t as opportunistic.
Alex Hagen:
It was very interesting to seeing how people would try to crash in at the last minute in the counties and drive people out. It was slightly addictive, although slightly nightmarish, because we had to bid three times a day, then four times a day for thirty days. This for us, it’s very important but the total cost was $367,000 and the labor was quite something. It was a wild ride.
The CBRS Spectrum Auction Process
Brad Hine:
Alex, I know you’ve written quite a bit about the CBRS auction, it’s benefits and you’ve been immersed in it now for quite a long time and in the middle of a transition yourself with Etheric, but for our audience could you help educate them on really how the CBRS spectrum auction process is in the advent of this new spectrum is really changing the game for wireless internet service providers, or as we call them WISPs?
Alex Hagen:
It’s very interesting what the FCC does. Most of what they do feels like simply facilitating the monopolies, but they have this other side. They opened up this 600 MHz of spectrum in the 5GHz band for experimental use and unlicensed use many years ago.
Alex Hagen:
With the CBRS, this is a very clever system. The case at CBRS, as you know, you have to coordinate everyone, so in the 5GHz economy all of these wireless ISPs have to set up some kind of database if they have severe interference with each other, so that when we light up channels we don’t step on the other guys’ [channels]. We had built this in the Bay area, it’s actually a prior company to us who built a voluntary spectrum coordination system, but this one is mandatory. What that does, it’s going to bring a lot of money into this space because many financial investors will not invest in unlicensed spectrum-based companies because, what are they buying?
Alex Hagen:
At any given time people could open up on those channels and disrupt the service, and even though we could say, hey, we’ve been here 17 years, this is reliable, we have usually four stars as our average review, it does require work, a lot of work to maintain the quality of an unlicensed network. CBRS is this marriage between a central coordinating authority who makes sure that people are transmitting on channels that are non-interfering, and the cell phone companies and the wireless ISPs. What it should do is get some wireless ISPs into mobility, also supporting roaming. It should create some sort of a convergence. It should also create money. There’s also the threat to wireless ISPs that their businesses will get disaggregated.
Alex Hagen:
There are people who are trying to essentially, for example, there’s talk the tower companies may simply deploy the CBRS themselves and then companies will simply lease-to-own licenses that infrastructure. Then you’ll end up with the wireless ISPs simply being installers and sales and marketing, which I don’t like. You shouldn’t run your whole business simply on CBRS, unless you want to do something like this, a nationwide deployment. It should be one very important tool, maybe your primary tool. It will lead to less innovation in the management in the wireless, because that’s now been outsourced to these coordinators.
Enabling Smaller WISPs to Play
Brad Hine:
From a business opportunity in CBRS, this really opens the door for smaller operators to get into this game, more commerce, and to be more competitive within these, like you said, county border areas. Now they’re allowing this at the county level.
Alex Hagen:
What I would say is that it takes operators who have bought spectrum, certainly they can play the way you’re describing it. The ones without spectrum who are just operating on the general access channels, I think it’s still early to say how that’s going to work out. Obviously in rural areas where there’s not a lot of competition, you should be able to get access to these eight general availability channels. But in an urban area, for example, we cover Santa Clara County, why would we put CBRS systems in Santa Clara County without any licenses? Such a dense county. The area we’re particularly interested in happens to be from Morgan Hill to Gilroy, for this type of technology, the lower part of Santa Clara County.
Alex Hagen:
I think what it does, it moves WISPs into another rung where they are able to do things that previously on the cell companies could do. For example, this CBRS, I think the latest iPhone, the latest Google phones, all already support it, so it’ll allow companies to get into that game. I say it takes you from level one or two to level two or three. At that entry point, it makes it very easy for big money to come in. I’m not sure the overall effect will be to improve small companies forming up.
Alex Hagen:
Then there’s the 6GHz band, it’ll be very interesting because people can set up their own frequency coordination. They don’t have to go to Microsoft and Google, if you have the belly for that fight. But that means that you can develop heuristics in algorithms to optimize the behavior, in other words, special sauce. If you don’t have any control over the radio network, you can’t optimize it. You can optimize it by deciding what equipment you’re using and what ranges, where you’re going to install it. In other words, your topology you have control of, but your frequencies you got to control. The 6G band will be able to set up this frequency coordination even at the operator level, rather than simply these massive multi-nationals like Google and Microsoft.
Full Gigabit Bandwidth on CBRS?
Brad Hine:
This would be mean that Etheric could now provide this type of service, say several hundred megabits capacity per user to the underserved and unserved areas that you are targeting to in those counties?
Alex Hagen:
That is going to be the fun part, is finding out exactly how much capacity we can push through. Let’s say you’re in a rural area and you have licenses. What that means is that you can grab all of that 80 megahertz of unlicensed spectrum and then add to it whatever licenses you’ve got. Then you’re getting into the situation where you might be able to deliver the Holy Grail, which is full gig. At this time, no one’s publicly talking about really delivering full gig on CBRS, but I think it can be done.
Alex Hagen:
CBRS is looking at the lowest cost implementations might be 200 Mbs per panel. So how many subscribers does that really support? If you have a peak load per user of five megabits, which would be reasonable assumption, that’s only about 40 users. If you set peak load at 1 Mb, of course you can have a lot more users. We want to get systems that have peak load capability of 10 Mbs per user. You can also look at Starlink. Starlink’s capacity per satellite is about 10 Gbs, so at 10 Mbs that’s only 1000 users per satellite. A lot of people are overbooking too aggressively, in my opinion.
Virtual Antennas Inside Antennas
Alex Hagen:
There’s some really amazing antenna’s out there, but they cost a fortune. More than $20,000 per antenna, not including everything else. They can create, essentially virtual antennas inside the antenna, so you can end up multiplexing this frequency where you’re basically sending to multiple users simultaneously on the same channel without interfering through using focused beams.
Alex Hagen:
It depends on which vendor you’re talking about, what they describe that as. One vendor describes it as layers, a 16-layer system. I think that these panels, if you have spectrum and you have access to unlicensed spectrum, could push 3 Gbs of capacity per panel aggregate. That would be 300 users at 10 megs peak each.
Alex Hagen:
Remember that’s at 9 p.m. on Friday night, Netflix time. The rest of the time the system should have a lot of extra capacity. The tough time is peak hours. You’ll probably see a full gig on such a panel consistently, except during peak hours.
Facebook & Terragraph – High-speed Connectivity
Brad Hine:
I appreciate that detailed description. In terms of Etheric’s focus right now, I believe you essentially have the CBRS focus, but you are also a hybrid approach. Is that true?
Alex Hagen:
Yes. The other up and coming technology is being driven by Facebook, which is Terragraph. Another good thing about CBRS, this 5G standard that inter-operates with CBRS allows us to buy one vendor’s equipment on the tower, and use another vendor’s equipment at the customer premises, which means that you have an upgrade path. This is obvious to people who use cell phones. If you have a Samsung cell phone and maybe it’s a Nokia access point. In the 5GHz unlicensed business there is no in-operability, unless you want really poor performing equipment. Although that is changing. The carriers are putting together something called LAA, which I haven’t decided whether it’s better than what we have now but this capability to have this in-operability is also going to be in the millimeter wave. In the 60 gigahertz band, the vendors are being forced by Facebook to inter-operate with each other.
Gigabits of Optical Networking using GPON
Alex Hagen:
That’s no more than a kilometer, 2/3 of a mile. But it’ll be very important because it will have virtually infinite capacity, but a lot of issues with propagation. We use the 60 GHz, we use millimeter for backbone lengths and they can get up to 10 Gbs. We use licensed microwave for backbone length. We use fiber. We deploy fiber to the premises where it’s appropriate and might use a licensed back haul so you have an apartment building, the fiber is not in the street there, you bring in the bandwidth using fixed wireless and then you distribute it in the building using something like GPON, gigabits of optical networking.
Alex Hagen:
Yes, we use a hybrid approach. We try to have standard tool sets, so we don’t create so many scenarios that we have to pull out a reference manual every time a customer calls. We try to have these modular approaches with about six different solutions that you can combine.
Interoperability and Standards
Brad Hine:
You hit upon something that I hear a lot from the people that we speak to, both on the podcast and then when Craig and I are actually traveling and attending other events. You mentioned standards, let me piece this together. You mentioned inter-operability can push more openness through this market and CBRS has that benefit to where now standards are going to be hopefully pushed more which helps that inter-operability. Is that essentially what you’re trying to say?
Alex Hagen:
Yes. It’s going to take a while for some of the people that aren’t with as much background in the TCIP to get their heads around this, but definitely. The inter-operability is extremely important and standards are extremely important because you can architect all kinds of solutions as long as you know that the guy to your right will talk to you consistently on a protocol, and the guy to your left in the world of software, above and below you, meaning in the going from the physical layer to the network layer, so inter-operability is critical for the internet to flourish.
Craig Corbin:
When we talk about what Etheric has accomplished, we’ve seen the accolades, I know a big part of it is the symmetric service that is provided, but also your customized solutions and I know that is certainly something that has been a big part of your success over the years in serving, I think it’s upwards of 8,000 square miles in the Bay area. Talk about some of those customized solutions and your approach to those opportunities.
Solving Network Bandwidth Issues
Alex Hagen:
One of my mentors when I started, he said basically, what’s your strategy? The strategy for most wireless ISPs is a customer intimacy strategy. We’ll answer the phone quicker, we’ll show up quicker, we’ll resolve your problem quicker, and you will deal with real people. Obviously, price is important, but it might not be the first issue. A lot of what we do is respond to people in crisis. We get calls from huge companies in Silicon Valley who’ve rented out huge spaces and find out there’s inadequate bandwidth. Because of our network of tours around the Bay area, we can get them up with licensed gigabit in a couple of weeks, maybe even the next day.
Alex Hagen:
There are some issues about filing FCC licensing and lighting it up too quickly. That can be a little bit of a problem. You’ve got to wait a few days to get that license in, but there’s unlicensed stuff. A lot of it is helping people out whose plans have fallen apart. A lot of it has been simply providing bandwidth to people in rural areas where the rural providers offer just atrocious service. They just don’t know how to stop taking orders and they end up over-booked. They don’t know how to manage the interference so that when it hits, it takes them awhile to get through.
Responsive & Flexible Network Installation
Alex Hagen:
Providing higher quality in the rural area because we’re Silicon Valley engineers, but we have a lot of formal background. Our hope is to probably partner up with about five or six of the other providers around here over the next year. The other area is, we were the number one provider for the construction industry. I think fast install has been the real driver of our success, just being able to respond. I’ll give you an example. We’ve done most of Cirque du Soleil in the Bay area over the last three or four years, and they kind of cheated on us. They went with AT&T in San Francisco, and I’m kidding about that, we didn’t have any formal agreement, but AT&T couldn’t do it. Even the one time they got away from us, we came back into the picture.
Alex Hagen:
A lot of it has to do with being first to market. The other aspect is we can do custom, as you say. An example of custom was hooking up a client so that his development team in China were in the same LAN as his office in San Mateo and we got a cross-connect with China Telecom. What we did for him was pretty inexpensive compared with trying to do this with AT&T. It’s a cost-plus approach, generally we’re looking for 10 or 20% margin for our business, and we don’t really gouge people. Hopefully never.
Alex Hagen:
That flexibility creates complicated networking solutions that involve the whole wide area network have appeal to people. We also have a pretty complex way of peering. We peer with just about everybody. We’re trying to get our latency to be four milliseconds end-to-end. That’s our engineering goal to be able to get from you to Google in four milliseconds which is about a third to a fifth of the usual time. That can be helpful for a lot of companies.
Global Humanistic WISP
Craig Corbin:
You touched on a couple of things that to me have always been the hallmark of good wireless providers. You talk about the speed to be able to respond, and I felt that being agile is something that a wireless provider brings to the table that so many others just don’t have. It’s obvious too that you have a passion for what you do and being able to serve those who are in need of connectivity. That’s obviously guided a big part of Etheric Networks over the 17 years of existence. As you take that crystal ball and look at the next 5, 10 years, how do you see development, both the footprint there in the Bay area, and where it goes beyond.
Alex Hagen:
I’ve made a commitment to the guys and ladies in our company that we want to be a global service provider within five to 10 years, and we want to be a humanistic service provider. What that means is taking seriously things like addiction, privacy, and issues like that to make sure that the internet is helping people and not damaging them. Obviously, we have very little control over some things, but we do have control over other things. Our aspiration is to become a global humanistic service provider.
Alex Hagen:
The other area is when you look at AT&T, you look at Comcast, these companies really don’t do much innovation. Almost all the innovation is done on the manufacturer’s side. We also hope to have more innovation than our counterparts. These are massive companies. I don’t want to underestimate what they’re doing. They do occasionally come out with some pretty cool stuff, but AT&T is clearly taking a drubbing right now, deeply in debt and unable to bid in these auctions even to some extent.
Partnering with the Local ISP
Brad Hine:
Alex, you mentioned something a little bit earlier that’s interesting to me. I want to delve into a little more, you mentioned partnering. I know some parts of your terrain are rural and remote and mountainous, how much of a priority is it for you to partner with the local ISPs to extend that service and make sure you’re truly serving the underserved in those communities?
Alex Hagen:
The question is really, what is the price and how many parties are going to participate? In trying to figure out how to model those things, let’s say that the average price per customer, forgetting about business for now, let’s say it was $65 a month. Does a third of that go to the guy who built the back haul, and a third go to the guy who built the tower, and a third go to the guy who attracted the client and maintains the client? It’s a question of, how do you do revenue division? If we for example, were the senior partner in a relationship, we might be willing to take a smaller slice so the local operator can pay their employees and bills. Then our goal would be to have five or 10 or 20 of these local operators.
Alex Hagen:
It’s a work in production, but this is also an aspect where CBRS will be interesting and license spectrum in general, it’s not in the hands of the monopoly. If we keep allowing T-Mobile and Verizon to buy all the spectrum, it really asphyxiates any kind of bottom-up development. But if you get companies like ours with spectrum, we’re willing to talk to people and give them those tools. When you have spectrum or you have fiber back haul, when you have resources that can help the operator… Obviously we have a really advanced five gigahertz interference management system. I don’t know how much that would help them. We also have provisioning tools.
Alex Hagen:
At this point, we’re talking to peer companies that are slightly smaller than us about coming up with something like a consortium or possibly even merging. We know there’s small operators in our region, where we bought the licenses, Siskiyou County, Plumas, Colusa. We have to find out who’s out there, and then make the decision. Do we capitalize and build solely, or do we find a local party to partner with? We’re open to both.
Mission to Connect the Underserved
Brad Hine:
In this process, as you’re growing, and you’re growing into these underserved areas with this new CBRS spectrum, clearly this year with the advent of the pandemic, we’re starting to see the capacity from the workplace now start to shift to back home, which means in this case it could be shifting more towards the rural markets. Are you seeing a big change in your processes currently, as you transition to CBRS? What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing?
Alex Hagen:
That’s a great point about the whole pandemic and how difficult it is for our business salespeople to operate right now in some ways, because these buildings are empty. You’re certainly not going to go door-to-door right now for the health issues, and the fact that no one’s there. It’s all done on the phone. All the bandwidths shifted. Huge drops in commercial bandwidth. Huge increases in residential bandwidth. In the first couple of months we had some very upset customers, not a lot, but some, because the bandwidth utilization doubled in some quadrants and halved in others. The school people are all tearing their hair out. There are awful things going on in our education system right now, I just know about it anecdotally. This could be very helpful for rapid deployment for distance learning, for learning from home. It also helps with the local county and state officials, that they know that you’re not just sailing on the seat of your pants, meaning purely an unlicensed solution.
Alex Hagen:
It makes the sell a lot easier when you have some assurance over the control of the channel, which you don’t have with unlicensed other than active management. Obviously, that’s hard to explain to people that may not even be in your field. If you meet IT managers, a lot of them have been burnt by people doing fixed wireless improperly. It eliminates the whole discussion about reliability and especially with the kind of manufacturers that are coming out with solutions, such as Samsung. I’m not saying that that’s the best solution, but it’s a good solution as to look at as a reference case, like a benchmark.
Alex Hagen:
This is going to be very helpful, but it’s a lot of chaos and inertia about the various funding. We haven’t yet gotten a dime and we’ve spent several months trying to get kids in these rural areas service, because government doesn’t always churn instantly. They have this terrible, urgent problem of kids that don’t have adequate connectivity, but getting the funding in place has been very difficult. A lot of districts say we have no money, and the money they do get from the CARES Act, they don’t use it on distance learning because they need it for other purposes. A lot of school districts are starving for money before this happened. To me the big question is, why can’t we get these kids hooked up right away? Where is the money?
Brad Hine:
I love that your mission is to connect the underserved, especially for the benefit of the people that have to homeschool. We thought it was so easy before the pandemic to drive into work, or drive into school, get bused there, be educated, go to work, have world news right at our fingertips, and now since that playing field is starting to change, like I said, I love that you’re focusing on those areas, trying to get those folks the connectivity they need so they can do what they need to do from home and not miss out. It’s such a huge benefit to what you’re trying to accomplish in your area.
Alex Hagen:
Well, it also makes business sense, it’s a win-win. We don’t want to simply bring Coal to Newcastle. If you have an area that’s already got 100 mg connectivity to the homes or the businesses, that’s not the first place you need it. We’re where people need you. You can’t really go wrong if you’re actually filling real needs. Just duplicating, and some of our competitors are essentially duplicating Comcast in areas where you can get Comcast as their business. To me, it’s a little bit of a waste of time. It’s fine, you might beat them, but it’s just not an interesting problem.
Betting on Ethernet Connectivity
Brad Hine:
I have to ask, with the passion that I hear coming from you and all the focus that you’ve given this company since you helped found it, what lit your fire? What started you to go down this path, to connect folks? Even as a young man, where did that happen and how did it happen?
Alex Hagen:
When I was growing up, I saw the world as an unjust place and that it needed to be changed. I always sympathized with the little guy. In the travel business, my first business, I found a way to get people to go around the world for half of the official airline price by importing tickets from other countries and other currencies.
Alex Hagen:
Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough business acumen. I went out of business and this could have been the biggest travel company in the world, because we were doing all this automation and fare analysis, not published fare but net fare currency analysis. Hopefully I learned from my mistakes in the second company. The travel business, we were like travelers that had broken into this travel agency, and said, how do we work this thing? We looked at it from the traveler’s point of view.
Alex Hagen:
In the same way with the internet, you look at it from the user’s point of view. In the beginning we had this terrible DSL encapsulation that made doing VPNs impossible. There are these bureaucratic telecom protocols that mess up the internet. That’s why we called it Etheric Networks, betting on the ethernet protocol, which has certainly stood us in good stead. The ethernet protocol has definitely dominated. I don’t think anyone can disagree with that, compared to all of the systems like ISDN and T1s and T3s the old telecom systems, PRI, BRI.
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