The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Pete Pizzutillo:
This episode of The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software and VETRO FiberMap.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella. We are at Fiber Connect 2023 in Orlando, Florida. Joining me is CEO, Sam Pratt from Render Networks, Josh Collver, Project Manager of Irby Utilities, Randy Everett from Connect2First, and Robby Theodore from Connect2First. Gentlemen, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
Sam Pratt:
Terrific to be here, Joe. It is great to be back on the Bunch.
Joe Coldebella:
Hey, it’s always great to have you, Sam. Before we dive into the topic that you guys discussed today which was awesome. I was in the audience. It was great. Would love it if everyone could introduce themselves and share a little bit about themselves.
Sam Pratt:
I’m happy to kick us off then, Joe. I am Sam Pratt at Render Networks. Render is a network construction management platform. We’re fairly progressed here in the U.S., so we’ve got customers across 15 states. In this context, we’re partnering with Irby and these gentlemen from Connect2First to enable a world-class delivery outcome for Central Arkansas.
Randy Everett:
Thank you, Joe. I am Randy Everett with First Electric and Connect2First Internet. I am the Chief Information Officer for First Electric Cooperative and also the general manager for Connect2First Internet, which is a 100% wholly owned subsidiary of First Electric. So all the fiber infrastructure that we’re building is a direct asset of First Electric Cooperative. Connect2First owns the customer premise equipment and the drop going to the house. So we are in Central Arkansas. We have service in 18 counties in Central and Southeast Arkansas. We serve 102,000 meters and have 10,000 miles of electric line and over 200,000 poles. So we have a very large footprint for electric cooperatives in general.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s massive, incredible stuff.
Josh Collver:
Hey Joe, I am Josh Collver. I’m the director of OSP operations for Irby Utilities. Irby is a turnkey provider helping our customers build these networks through design, engineering, project management, and construction management, as well as the material vendors. We’ve brought all these technologies together between Render, BRE, VETRO, and some of these others to help these rural co-ops change the lives of their members. And this particular project is going well, I think.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome.
Robby Theodore:
Hey Joe, I am Robby Theodore. I’m the outside fiber plant manager for First Electric Cooperative and the subsidiary company, Connect2First. I get to play a role in the overall construction, and CapEx side of the project. But also, we get to turn it over on the operation side and post-sales. I am responsible for post-sales to installation.
Joe Coldebella:
This is an incredible story. It starts with the fact that it’s a cooperative, and it took you 85 years to electrify everybody. But now, it seems as though it’s a little bit of a different sort of speed or pathway. I would love to go from super-fast to ultra-fast speed.
Randy Everett:
Absolutely, Joe. First Electric started in 1937. It was one of the first electric cooperatives in Arkansas. And yes, it took us 85 years to build what we have right now in the infrastructure of what I just mentioned, over 10,000 miles of electric line. So we’re trying to duplicate that process on the fiber side, but we’re compressing that into about a four-year build. So we started with about an eight-year build-out process, but the demand from our customers, members, and then just the need in rural America, just like the need was for electricity in 1937.
It’s very apparent that the need is there for rural broadband. And we’re trying to compress that into a four-to-five-year build. And it’s a very speedy process. Being such, we need applications and integrations and ways to make sure that we’re as efficient and as effective as possible when building that network.
Joe Coldebella:
So what’s the baseline in terms of starting the whole process? Because obviously, this has been something that you’ve started from the beginning. It was really interesting in terms of how things are laid out. Would love to sort of tap into that.
Randy Everett:
Well, as far as how it started, I mean, we started with a fiber network backbone to support the organization, First Electric, and connecting all 46 of our substations, connecting our six offices, and just looking at ways to implement new technologies for automatic meter reading, SCADA, different things on the electric side. However, when we started talking about fiber and fiber being installed on our poles, the membership took notice that fiber was being installed, which drove the local and state government officials. Members started talking to their local state and government officials to actually start pushing for fiber.
The need for broadband was there, so they started talking to them. Our board started taking notice, and then it was just an organic growth almost overnight. This was something that we had to embark on. And that’s when we started with the feasibility studies to look at how we could deploy fiber infrastructure to every First Electric member.
Joe Coldebella:
Fantastic. And then so from there, is that when you brought in the folks from Irby, or how did the process sort of roll out from there?
Randy Everett:
Yes, we had a couple of different feasibility studies done. We had three feasibility studies that we requested, and then actually did a fourth independent consultant engineering firm to come in and look at those feasibility studies and make sure that we were on target. Because of such a large deployment and there are a lot of dollars on the line, we need to make sure that we’re spending our members’ equity and our members’ money the way that it should be and that we’re getting the best benefit out of what we’re doing.
Joe Coldebella:
So then what was the next step?
Randy Everett:
Right. And I’ll hand this off to Josh here in just a second because the first step was getting the feasibility studies in. And when those numbers came in and we had verified that and it was a go, I said, “Hey, we’re going to do this.” Then we contracted with Irby, who is a turnkey solution provider. Because we knew that we didn’t have the expertise in-house, nor the time to acquire those resources and get them trained up. Irby brought to us a platform of design construction management material, and then the software applications integrations that we needed to manage a process and a project of this size.
Joe Coldebella:
Obviously, you’re an electric co-op, and there is more to that as well.
Randy Everett:
Absolutely.
Joe Coldebella:
And then, what was the process with Irby?
Josh Collver:
Yeah. So once we came on, we had the feasibility level design. We sat down, spent quite a bit of time with Randy and the folks over at First Electric, and determined how they wanted this thing to be deployed. There are different design schemas that we can go through as far as breaking down how many ports per each one of these access terminals, setting rules in place on the design for how long a drop could be on a maximum distance, and setting your network architecture.
Once all of those things were aligned, we came back with a high-level design, sat down with the folks at First Electric, made sure everybody agreed on that, and then kicked out the field validation teams. Those guys went out to every single location where there was going to be an FDH or an access terminal, making sure that those make-ready tasks were assigned out. That was clear back in 2020, I believe. Was it not? So, it was a really quick process. The landscape has changed quite a bit since that initial walkout was done.
So obviously, some things have changed in the field with field engineering as we’ve gone through. Once we validated whether we could or could not place the equipment in those locations, a low-level design was created with all our cut sheets for splicing. From there, it was pushed into a couple of different systems. That was pushed over into Render for our construction management platform, and we spent a lot of time on the front end making sure that everything was lined out for the process within Render. These guys are great. They can customize things to whatever you need. No two projects are the same.
We were taking this to standards of what old-school CAD prints were in a digital platform. There are plenty of other people out there who are on digital platforms right now, but I don’t think anybody’s doing it to the level of what’s being executed today. From that point, we got the contractors on, and we started building, I believe, the first week of February 2021.
Joe Coldebella:
Wow. And in terms of just the prep, is it supercritical? It seems as though just listening to folks in the industry, folks, everyone wants fiber yesterday, but at the front end, the planning is critically important in terms of the mapping and everything that’s laid out.
Sam Pratt:
I can probably jump in there. Certainly, our philosophy begins with the end in mind. When our customers, such as Irby and First Electric in this instance, are moving to plan their network, we collaborate with them to think about the operations and the maintenance use cases from day one, those downstream considerations, as we’re configuring the Render blueprinting process to understand what tasks are required, and then using technology to deploy as efficiently as possible.
Joe Coldebella:
Could you just give a real-life example?
Sam Pratt:
A real-life example? Well, we’re living one right here. So effectively, we’re engaged alongside Biarri and VETRO downstream for fiber management in this instance. And so, Biarri is producing designs on an area-by-area basis. Those designs are being ingested into Render’s Network construction management platform, where hundreds if not thousands of tasks are being created and a work breakdown structure is very efficiently applied to those tasks. That way, Robby and his team can understand and have flexibility throughout the deployment to understand where they want to go and the people in the field, the guys and girls, the construction crews in the field understand where they need to go, what they need to do, what they need on the truck and the data that they need to capture.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, this sounds like sort of an overwhelming endeavor for everybody. How do you guys keep from going crazy?
Sam Pratt:
Great question. Robby, I think that one’s for you.
Robby Theodore:
Well, thankfully, we’ve got our great staff. And I’m fortunate to be part of an awesome team, but we realized quickly we have a lot of great tools and as Sam talked about earlier, it’s kind of, we’ve got Azotel, Render, VETRO, and Biarri. It’s such a great package there. But with that, we had to establish some great processes, make sure that those things flowed from one to the next, and there was accountability involved. So, are we getting it done as a team? Are we all traveling toward the same mission statement? And once we got the ball rolling, we made a few tweaks, and the rest is history. We are moving fast as a result.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. Just in terms of 4,000 miles of fiber, 15,000 homes. What are some of the challenges that you guys have sort of encountered in this process?
Robby Theodore:
Well, one of the things that we’ve recently been struggling with is the location. So normally on a project this size, it’s permitting. We were able to get way out in front of the permitting process. Those have not been very much trouble at all, but with so many underground fiber projects going on, whether it’s a city or whoever, there’s been limited resources to put paint on the ground for locates.
So one of the things we did to offset that, was we went out and hired some additional locators. We’re paying for those out of pocket, but we have them dedicated to our construction crews. They don’t leave those crews. They meet weekly, lay out their plans, and walk out an area together and lay it out so that we can build methodically throughout that area. So that’s helped alleviate it. But that is, right now, probably our biggest project risk.
Joe Coldebella:
And so, obviously supply chain is an issue. But from your talk, it doesn’t seem as though talent has been a big problem. You’ve been pulling talent from the folks in the area.
Robby Theodore:
Yeah, we’re very fortunate even though we’re kind of known as a rural cooperative. We’re based out of Central Arkansas, and there’s been a lot of outward growth from the Little Rock area going in each direction. There are also several other telecoms in the area, and we’ve attracted some of that talent. Very fortunate for us, we’ve hired some outstanding people with industry experience. And from there, they bought into our mission and our culture. And we’re all, again, we’re in line to achieve the same goal, which is improving quality of life.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, it sounds like you guys are doing a phenomenal job there. So what has the reaction been from the members of the co-op? Do they get excited when they see you deploying the area?
Randy Everett:
Absolutely. It’s invigorating to see the difference that you’re making in people’s lives every day. And to tap into what Robby said about acquiring new and qualified talent, people want to be part of that. They want to be part of a team knowing that they’re making a difference in people’s lives every day. And in some of these areas, they have been void of service for years. Some of them don’t even have dial-up access, not even DSL.
So bringing fiber to their home and being able to deliver high-speed internet to their home and have their children be able to do homeschool or to be able to work from home, do telehealth, those types of things are life-changing. As we mentioned earlier, in 1937 when the rural electric cooperatives brought power to these areas, I think this is a lot in the same way that the internet right now is becoming a critical piece of infrastructure that is needed across our entire nation.
So just having the opportunity to serve people, like the cooperatives have for the last 85 years, and to come in and just have a reboot and do this on the fiber side and affordable, reliable, high-speed internet to these areas that have been historically left behind has been a great, great opportunity for us as a cooperative and just to be able to continue to serve our members.
Joe Coldebella:
And is it giving you an opportunity for an economic case as well? There may be areas that were depressed and by bringing in the internet, there’s an opportunity there.
Randy Everett:
Absolutely. We are leveraging the ACP, which is the Affordable Connectivity Program, to help educate some of these areas and how the internet can improve their quality of life. And then, the subsidy that goes along with that to make it more affordable for them has been tremendous. We have outreach programs that we do advertisement and local events in some areas, and then just try to help people understand that those subsidies are there and those things are available. Help is there for them to be able to acquire internet service at an affordable rate.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s great. So once the connection is made, how fast are you connecting folks?
Sam Pratt:
I’ll also just commend these gentlemen on what they’re doing and what they’re achieving for their community in that respect. Sales-to-customer connection time is an outlier for all the right reasons. Robby, do you want to just elaborate on that for us?
Robby Theodore:
Yeah. From the time of sales to the time of installation, we’re looking at anywhere from six to 10 days.
Joe Coldebella:
That is incredible.
Robby Theodore:
I think it’s pretty incredible. We’ve had some awesome crews. We’ve got Critical Edge and ITG helping us get drops in. They also have installers. We have some local installers or internal installers. But between the software and the processes that we’ve created, that’s enabled us to connect anywhere from 850 to 900 customers per month.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s incredible.
Robby Theodore:
Yeah. Our team, I think they’ve been doing it now, what, Randy, for six, seven months consistently?
Randy Everett:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we did start off a little slow. When I say that we started off slow, it was 200 to 300 customers per month. And we just kept pushing that envelope to see where we could go because the need and demand was there. This is a cadence that we have found that is sustainable where we’re not outrunning our headlights. We’re not getting ahead of construction. We can continue to connect customers at this rate.
And Irby has done a good job of material procurement and keeping material for us, so that we’re not running out and that we can connect at that rate. But right now, we feel like this is our sweet spot. I think that we could run out there and connect more for a couple of months, but I think the issues that it causes would be detrimental to what we’re trying to achieve in providing that best-in-class service.
Joe Coldebella:
And then, how many do you have right now? And then ultimately, what’s the goal?
Randy Everett:
We’ll probably hit 15,000 active customers by the end of this month. At the end of the project, we’re looking at between 30,000 and 35,000 customers in Central and Southeast Arkansas.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s awesome. It must be just so great that you’re basically connecting your folks to the world.
Randy Everett:
Absolutely. And we are somewhere in that 40% take rate range of those areas that have been in full service for over six months, so that is a very good take rate. Some of those are getting closer to 65- and 70% in some areas. And those are the very rural areas. Now, again, some of those pop locations may only have 250 or 300 customers in them, but we’re taking 70 or 80%, just because so many of them have no service whatsoever.
Joe Coldebella:
And just out of curiosity, is word-of-mouth your best advertising?
Randy Everett:
It is. Word-of-mouth is what drives things. Now, we do have a very large social media presence. We do flyers, we do events, opening events, but word-of-mouth is there. And that’s again, what we hang our hats on at the end of the day. We sell electricity, but really what we sell is service. And that’s kind of our motto on the Connect2First side. Robby and our entire team make sure that we take care of our customers, and they’ll in turn take care of us.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. What I would like to do is ask each one of the panelists here if you could have one lesson that you have learned that you could share with the audience, in terms of a “watch-out” or something that you didn’t think would happen, but it was great.
Robby Theodore:
Hey Joe, I’ll kick it off. Randy hired me early in the project, and we were able to kick construction off. He tasked me to start building. What’s our staff going to look like, and how many connections are we going to make in a month? Starting with nothing and not having any data to go off of, was my biggest challenge. And so, being a little bit conservative with a new business, we didn’t want to cause any layoffs later or overshoot anything.
We probably hired a little too few, and that’s okay. We were able to adjust and adapt, but it was really hard to forecast that with no data to go off of. And we knew it was going to be a good product, but we also didn’t understand how fast we were going to build our plant and how quickly those services would become available, which also turned into sales.
So every piece compounded the next piece, and we were having to grow our staff with that kind of unplanned for maybe a little bit unbudgeted. But that was probably my biggest challenge, trying to predict that and figure out what we need.
Sam Pratt:
If I can just build on that, I think what I’ve learned just from our work together and our interactions these last couple of days, sharing this story, is that folks who are considering building a network, especially in a rural area just do not underestimate demand and do not underestimate what is possible in terms of take rates and outcomes. Also, the ambition around speed and the approach to being open to innovation and open to putting together technology that is supported by process and backing it up with a robust process is a lesson learned in this context, for sure.
Josh Collver:
Yeah, that’s actually where I was going to go with that, Sam. Coming from the construction world, doing this with paper prints for most of my life to this point, and then into this now digital world, where we’re building this, I was very hesitant. I had touched on it with another organization, and it didn’t go nearly as smoothly as I had been told it would. But all of the processes we have in place and all of the software partners that we’ve put together for this turnkey solution, it flows so seamlessly.
We’ve got some great contracting partners who are out there building this stuff with Connect2First. And one of my bigger surprises was understanding that it doesn’t matter what contractor it is. These guys are all out here capable of building this at a million, million-and-a-half feet a month. The processes and software that are in place are enabling that to continue pretty consistently across the board.
And that’s with this particular project and with every project across Irby’s portfolio. The driving force is how fast the customer wants to go. If they want to go out and push that one-and-a-half, two million feet a month, it’s possible to do it with all of these technologies. If they only want it to be a half million feet a month, we can reign the contractor back in and slow that down too.
Randy Everett:
And I’ll tag onto something Robby mentioned earlier. One of the unforeseen things that we saw was locates. But it is not just the locates from your state 811. It’s the stress that we have placed on our communities, our small rural water systems, our small towns that do their locating themselves, and even the other telecom agencies that may have additional or different locating contractors.
So you’re having to coordinate that between all of those entities. Sometimes, when you have a rural water system that has two employees and they must manually read all the water meters every single month, there are two weeks of the month that they cannot do anything but read meters. Then we’re asking them to locate at times miles and miles of underground facilities. And then if those facilities happen to get damaged, they must stop what they’re doing and fix those types of things.
So there’s just been a lot of that type of thing. We knew locates would be kind of an issue, but we didn’t understand how it would affect our communities. And I think we have done a good job of reaching out to those entities, having pre-con meetings, and developing plans for deployment. We work around their schedule and cannot place a burden on them, so we’re a community partner.
That’s helped us out a lot. If I had a word to the wise, I would start early with talking with your community utilities and finding out how this is going to affect their workload and find a way that you can work together, because that has since been a really big win for us, and they’re an advocate for you when you reach out and you’re taking that initial step to try and help them keep damage to a minimum.
Joe Coldebella:
So are the communities that you’re building next to now jealous? Do they want to do what you’re doing?
Randy Everett:
Yes. With First Electric Cooperative, we intend to build to all of our membership, but our service territory is not contiguous. So we serve a lot of different areas. And some of those areas, we don’t supply electric service for, and they are void or very lacking underserved areas for broadband. And just about every week, I’m approached by a different community or a different area that asks, “Can you please just extend your lines another two miles to our city? We need it in a very bad way.”
So we get that all the time about serving additional locations. And we’re not against or not opposed to doing that, but we need to finish our build. And then if there are government subsidies or programs that will help offset those costs, we would consider that at a later date.
Joe Coldebella:
And then one last question for you. I thought it was really interesting that people aren’t taking the 250 symmetrical speeds that you assumed they would take.
Randy Everett:
Right. We have three residential service tier plans, and they’re all symmetrical. So a 200 by 200, a 500 by 500, and one gig by one gig. And we thought going into this that probably since most of our membership, or customer base are pretty void of any type of speed that is anywhere close to the 200 by 200, we figured that that would be probably our top taker. It’s been just the reverse. Our mid-tier, the 500 by 500 package has over 55% of our takers take that particular package. And then almost 28%, I think, take the one gig by one gig. So really, the 200 meg, our lowest-tiered package, is the smallest percentage take-wise on our offerings.
Joe Coldebella:
That is amazing how we think that people won’t need more data or speed, and they just gobble it up.
This was a phenomenal visit. What you guys are doing in Arkansas with Render, Irby, and Connect2First, you guys are doing an amazing job. If folks want to get ahold of you, where can they go to find out more information?
Sam Pratt:
On our side, you can just hit up our website, rendernetworks.com. And I think it’s the same with folks around the table. Thanks, Joe.
Josh Collver:
Yeah, for Irby, irbyutilities.com, there’s an area there to reach out to us. We’re at most of the trade shows, so come by and say hello to anyone that you stop at.
Randy Everett:
Yeah. We have a connect2first.net. There’s also a hyperlink on First Electric Cooperative’s webpage. We have phone numbers and how to get in touch with us from either one of those sites.
Joe Coldebella:
Thanks so much for your time. That’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time, we’ll see you guys later.
