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.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella and we are at Calyx ConneXions 2022 at the Wind Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. Joining me is Elizabeth Bowles, the CEO of Aristotle Unified Communications. Elizabeth, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Thank you for having me.
Joe Coldebella:
Hey, it’s really great to have you. This is an awesome event. Before we dive into everything that’s happening here, would love it if you could give the folks just a little bit of background about yourself.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Sure. So I actually was trained as an attorney and I practiced law for several years. And my father in the meantime had started an internet company in Little Rock, Arkansas. I joined Aristotle in 2000 with the intention of staying for a couple of years. And before I go back-
Joe Coldebella:
Isn’t that always the story, right?
Elizabeth Bowles:
It’s always the story. But anyway, at the time we were a dial-up company and a web design company. We became a full-service, interactive media agency and over time we dwarfed gradually into the broadband space. And in 2018 I focused specifically on broadband.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay, super. And just out of curiosity, so your father started the company in 1995? So-
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yes.
Joe Coldebella:
He was a true visionary because I-
Elizabeth Bowles:
He was.
Joe Coldebella:
It’s one of those things where… I mean emails like Hotmail and Yahoo didn’t even start till ’96 and ’97, so that’s pretty incredible.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yes. So he was very much so. He was watching some news story and he saw the internet and he turned to me, he’s like, “That’s the future and that’s where we’ve got to go.” And that’s what he did with the last part of his life, was founded this company and moved into that space.
Joe Coldebella:
Wow, that’s incredible. Because it’s funny, I actually saw a video, there was another person in ’95, who said the same exact thing. Steve Jobs.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Exactly.
Joe Coldebella:
So he’s in really good company.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yes.
Joe Coldebella:
So I would love it, if you could just share with us the Aristotle story, just in terms of who you are, where you are, and some of the things that you guys do.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Sure. So Aristotle is a hybrid broadband service provider. So we deliver broadband over both fixed wireless and fiber. We got into that space because I have a particularly keen interest in ensuring that unserved Americans receive broadband. And in the state of Arkansas, which historically has been 50 out of 50, if not on a good year, 48 out of 50 in broadband deployment. I was very focused on making sure that the Delta and Arkansas, which is the poorest of the poor in the United States, could be served on the theory that if you can solve that problem in the Delta and Arkansas, you can solve that problem anywhere in the United States. So I spent a lot of my attention and focus starting in around 2010, specifically on rural unserved areas and redline broadband deserts in urban areas. And so that’s been my mission has been to that… I don’t know, serve the unserved, it sounds corny, but basically, make sure that everybody has equal access to broadband.
And COVID really brought that home, I think because everybody gives mouth service to, “Oh yes, we want to get broadband to everybody.” And having been in this space as long as I have been, I know that people said that a lot to me, legislators at the federal level, the FCC, everybody gave a lot of lip service to the idea that people needed connectivity. But COVID brought home the fact that these communities will die without it. They can’t work from home, the kids won’t get an education. And so we’re not resilient as a government, as a country if we don’t have… Everybody has access to broadband.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s one of those things as well as we’re truly shifting into a truly digital economy. I think it’s also an opportunity for these communities where everyone potentially can be on equal footing and there’s a little bit of an anonymous sort of aspect to it. So it’s a very noble mission, just it’s really important for us to bring the connection to or make everyone connected.
Elizabeth Bowles:
It is, and it is the great equalizer. I mean, a lot of things get called the great equalizer, but if you go all the way back to rural electrification, that was a game changer for rural communities. It changed their lives. And when we got plumbing everywhere, when we got telephone service everywhere, and this is just the next iteration or evolution of how we bring equality and equality is never going… It’s never going to be one-to-one. I mean, if you live in a municipal area… Excuse me, if you live in a municipal area, you’re going to have access to services that you won’t necessarily have in a rural area. So we’re really looking to bring parity so that somebody can choose to live in a rural area without having to give up their access to what I consider basic services.
Joe Coldebella:
We talk about that all the time. It’s like it really is a utility, now where you have to make sure that you now have just the essentials. And now broadband is one of those essential services.
Elizabeth Bowles:
It is. I think that there was this intractable 12% that has existed ever since broadband was a thing. And they’re like, “I don’t need it. I don’t want it. It’s not necessary.” And whenever you would go into any communities or multiple providers would go in, there was always this 12% of people who said, “I don’t need broadband.” COVID changed that for the first time.
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Elizabeth Bowles:
And there’s nobody today who says, oh, broadband poo. They may not be able to afford it. They may not be able to get enough broadband, or they may not be able to have access to high-speed internet at an affordable rate, which is what I mean by… I guess access is the key there. If you don’t have access to broadband that may exist, but nobody’s running around saying they don’t need it. Everybody understands that broadband moves the needle economically. There’s a great study, you’re probably familiar with it, that came out of Purdue University a few years ago. Yeah. And every dollar spent in rural broadband brings $4 back to the community in economic development and increases. So every investment that we make in broadband and unserved areas brings back an economic benefit that is multifold times what we spend.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s awesome. And it’s also one of those things as well, it’s like people think that they don’t need broadband, and it might be that they don’t need it directly, but it’s also one of those things where as people the age, especially in the rural areas, there’s a real opportunity in regards to telehealth or access to things that normally they wouldn’t have access to that is probably more common in urban areas. And it’s one of those things that I think that we’re hopefully sort of raising everyone’s hand and saying, hey, listen, we need broadband everywhere.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yeah. And I think that’s definitely happening, and I think that everybody’s heart is in the right place to get it done. I think there are some policy concerns that are maybe interfering with getting it done in the most efficient way or most cost-effective way. I think urgency is definitely at play here. And as I like to say, we need high-speed internet in rural America, but we don’t need it six years from now. We need it now, if not a year ago. And so for me, getting it done, not only getting broadband out there but getting it out there quickly is extremely important.
Joe Coldebella:
It’s also an incredible task. I heard someone make the comparison that you’re trying to turn around an aircraft carrier because it’s such a daunting task and it’s a really challenging one as well. One of the themes here is to be the giant in terms of just the size of this in terms of… Actually, last year you were featured in an article for Bloomberg. If you could talk about that, that would be awesome.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Sure. I actually thought that article had a very cute headline talking about tiny telecoms. And I hadn’t really thought of us as a telecom, or I guess we are tiny, but I hadn’t really thought of us as a telecom, but it’s true because I came out of the fixed wireless space. So we deliver broadband or historically delivered broadband over radio waves. And the reason we did that was it’s faster, but because of that, my industry generally didn’t consider itself to be a telecom.
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Elizabeth Bowles:
And so realizing that we have the same mission obligation structure as telecom was sort of revelatory. And I think also coming out of that industry where the players are much smaller even than my company, we tend to sort of discount the impact that we can have. But when we won CARES Act funding, and we deployed 10 counties in less than a year, counties that had access to no broadband at all, which is what that article focused on.
It focused on a particular city, Arkansas city, that had no access to broadband and barely even cell service. If you went down there with Verizon, you couldn’t get a cell signal, you could only get a signal on AT&T. So we went down there and it completely revolutionized the town. And they have gotten a lot of grant money, not necessarily one-to-one, but it has made a huge difference in the ability of that little town of 300 households to compete really on a national scale, in tourism, specifically in tourism.
Joe Coldebella:
Oh really? Okay.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Well, they’re sitting on the river, so they’re trying to bring tourism, and now that works, there’s a bed and breakfast there that is booked nearly every day.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, it’s also, I think that it keeps the communities alive, right? Because it’s one of those things where if you don’t have connectivity and you’re a young person, it’s like, all right, well, there’s nothing really here for me. And so then these communities die. When you bring broadband, you have an opportunity for folks to come in and work remotely, which is now… Because of the pandemic, so one of the silver linings is that now it’s acceptable to not be five minutes away from your work, but you can work remotely.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yeah. And that’s made possible, obviously by broadband. And I like to talk about reverse urbanization. So you have-
Joe Coldebella:
I never heard that word before, I like that.
Elizabeth Bowles:
So yeah, that’s how I think about it, because you have this community, and maybe it used to be a vibrant farming community in the fifties, but over the last 40, 50, 60 years, it’s gradually been shrinking and aging. There are young people who would like to live in that environment who’d like to live in a small town, but as you said, they’re not going to… There are no jobs there for them, perhaps. And perhaps they don’t really want to give up access to the internet in the schools, or they don’t want to give up the medical or whatever the reason may be. They don’t feel that they can live in those areas. And the internet turns that around. So the son of that farmer or the daughter of that farmer who would like to go back and practice farming, their spouse is willing to move into that community because there’s broadband.
And then the spouse opens a coffee shop because they need something to do. And then now you’ve got a coffee shop in that town and that brings more people. And you can stop this atrophying of these rural towns and sort of turn them around into great fun places to live and visit. And that’s what I call reverse urbanization because the drive-in opens back up, the coffee shop opens back up, the five-and-dime opens back up because you now have people to sell to and jobs that exist in that market because they can be done remotely.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s great because it’s all about creating opportunity, and with broadband, that’s exactly what you do. So that’s great. So you did qualify for CAF funding. I was wondering if you could just dive into that as well.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Sure. So in 2018, we won &12.2 million in CAF to serve 25 counties, mostly in Arkansas, but also in Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma. Then in 2020, we won $31 million in CARES Act funding, which enabled us to deploy the nine counties in the Arkansas Delta. And then we also won 62 million in RDOF in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. So we’re very engaged with federal funding streams. And every federal funding stream has its pros and its cons. So in the CAF situation, it was a marvelous catalyst for us because it wasn’t a whole lot of money, but it was enough. And that’s a wireless network. And I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on speeds and all, but it basically was 25 megs down, three megs up, which is at the time was considered broadband. And so it was a relatively easy bite, but it enabled us to start engaging with those communities in the Delta and start deploying broadband.
And then the CARES Act money allowed us to accelerate deployment into not just the communities where we had CAF, but in other communities as well. And so for us, it’s been a really… I consider it to be more like a stair step where you get your first funding and then that covers certain specific areas like the CAF money covers certain specific locations. It doesn’t cover the whole county. It covers these 10 locations, very specifically. So what about the rest of the county? What about the hundred locations that aren’t covered by that CAF funding? That’s where CARES Act came in and it picked up the locations that weren’t covered by CAF.
And then RDOF is a fiber, we’re doing gigabit fiber and it’s a whole another kettle of fish, I started to say a bowl of fish, it’s a kettle fish, and it does the same thing as CAF, which is hand select locations. So now we have to look towards Middle Mile grants or BEAD grants or reconnect money or other federal funds to fill in the areas that are not going to be served by RDF. So it’s kind of like a puzzle where you take all of these various financial pieces and you fit them together.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, it also sounds like you guys are going about it the right way, just in terms of the steps that you’re taking because these are underserved areas or under or unserved. And so it’s like you’re basically sort of introducing them slowly. So it’s like, Hey, listen, I get a little bit of it and it’s like, all right, now I want more. And then you get a little bit of word of mouth and then all of a sudden it’s like then the community gets behind it. So that must be really exciting and gratifying.
Elizabeth Bowles:
No, it is. Once people understand what high-speed internet can do for them, then they want more. And you see that obviously in urban areas where you have MULTICOM competitors and everybody wants gig speeds, and they do fixate on speed, which is important, but it’s not the end all of the broadband services. But in the rural areas, it’s right, that they’ve never had it, and then they get it in and 25, 3 is like, wow, this is amazing. But then they want to start streaming Netflix while they want to be doing a Zoom call where their kid is streaming Netflix while junior’s on the Xbox, and then they realize, well, this is really not quite enough for me. And so then they want more internet and more speeds. So for me, this is always going to be a work in progress. I think it’s like, well, it’s like electrification or it’s like the sewage system or the highways.
Joe Coldebella:
Absolutely.
Elizabeth Bowles:
You don’t just build a highway and say, okay, good luck to you because in 30 years there’s going to be potholes, it’s going to have to be fixed. And I think the Internet’s the same thing. All of this money coming in, is going to build these networks and people are going to realize how much they need it just like they need the interstates, but eventually, it’s not going to be enough or it’s going to have to be replaced or it’s going to need to be upgraded or fixed or repaired. So I don’t think this ends, I don’t think we reach a point where we say, okay, we’ve done it. We get to wipe our hands off and we’re finished. I think it’s always going to be an iterative process.
Joe Coldebella:
Right, exactly, yeah. It’s one of those things where there’s an avalanche of money coming our way, but it’s not going to be a light switch where all of a sudden it’s everything switched on. All right, hey, good, we’re all set. Because I know that to your point, the highway system, started in 1952 and then it was officially finished in 1996. But we obviously know that it’s always changing. It always needs to be repaired, needs to be updated. So it’s a process that it’s never-ending.
Elizabeth Bowles:
If you drive through the state of Tennessee on any given day, there will be highway construction. That’s the longest state, the longest stretch, and the continuous stretch. And if you drive from one end of Tennessee to the other, there is always going to be highway construction somewhere because, by the time they get to the end of that road, they got to start at the beginning of that road. And so yes, it is. And it is a huge avalanche of money coming in. And it’s a little bit like when you have a rain-parched area and the soil is dry and you dump all this water, is a huge wrench, what you get is a flood and it doesn’t necessarily soak into the earth, a lot of it can’t all be soaked up. And I want to be sure that we’re being responsible about how we’re doing this because the builds take time, but at the same time, people need it sooner. It’s a lot of money, but it can’t be the end. We can’t just walk away, and say, okay, we just dropped 42 billion. See ya. It’s just…
Joe Coldebella:
Right. Well, and then also it comes down to there could be supply chain issues.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Oh yeah.
Joe Coldebella:
Workforce issues. So it’s one of those things where it’s inch by inch, is it’s how we got to do it.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Well, you alleviate one problem, which is, I’m going to put it in the category of sustainability. When you look at these communities where you have less than a hundred people per square mile and you want provider, any provider, to go in there and serve them… The reason that the fixed wireless industry serves those communities is that it is less expensive to deploy wireless architecture. So they can make a business case for going into these smaller communities, but in some of these places, even a fixed wireless provider can’t make a business case to serve them. And so you have this problem where once you build the network, it has to be sustained. You have to make sure that the maintenance and upkeep of that network are going to continue.
And so that’s a piece of it is the building of the network itself. But the supply chain is another huge piece of it. And labor is… Those two things, supply chain, and labor are going to increase costs. And I’m not really sure that the government programs are taking into account, they’re asking the providers to give a fixed number for what it’s going to cost to do a project, and then they’re not taking into account and there’s no way to take into account, an increase of 10% in the cost of goods or the fact that you don’t have trained labor or…
Joe Coldebella:
Well, it’s so true. It’s as you said that I was thinking back and I think it might have been a year and a half ago, I was at a conference and they were talking about in terms of all the funding that’s going to be coming our way. And the gentleman on the stage was like, “Hey, listen, you didn’t hear it from me, but you folks need to pad because there’s a lot of inflation coming.” And boy was he, right.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yeah.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s one of those things where it’s not an easy process because infrastructure is not an easy thing.
Elizabeth Bowles:
No, it’s not. And it’s not really linear. You think you’ve… Oh, I’ve got this worked out, I’ve got my fiber routes planned, I’ve got everything engineered, and you run into some rocks and it’s a whole different world. It’s not like you know exactly what’s going to happen. You’re not tailoring a suit and even that has some variation, but you’re not tailoring a suit. Everything changes unless you have done it before in that specific environment, it could change significantly from one thing to the next. There are wisps, this goes back years ago, he would put up fixed radios in the fall and they would get fantastic signals and all these places. And then the trees would leaf out and all of a sudden the signal wasn’t as good because they didn’t take into account leaves. And so there are things that every single technology has to take into account and those contingencies are really not taken into account with the way the programs are structured because you get a certain set amount of money and then you got to work within that budget.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. No, it’s one of those things where everyone has the same problem, but it’s all completely different just because the country is crazy, just in terms of its size, population, and terrain. It really is a daunting task.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yeah, it is. It is definitely. And I used to think of it in terms of a reverse sifter maybe, where you sift out all of these… Years ago, I made this analogy, you sift out all of these rocks, you’ve got rocks of different sizes, and the big rocks obviously get sifted out first, and those get picked off by the large companies. These would be the cities, the tier one cities, the tier two cities, all the way down to what I would call the fairly large towns, which are maybe 10,000, 15,000 people. Those get served because there’s an economic case. Then you have that next set where there is a bit of an economic case and a little bit of funding would be helpful and you can make this economic case.
But down at the bottom of that, the things that come out the bottom of that funnel, those little tiny grains of sand, we have to be very creative about how to serve those people because there is no private party economic case any more than there was in rural electrification. And I point out that rural electrification took like a hundred years.
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Elizabeth Bowles:
It wasn’t overnight. And we don’t have a hundred years and obviously, timelines truncate in the modern era, but we’re not talking about something that every single person’s going to be solved in three to five years. But we need to move as quickly as we can to get as many people served so that we can identify what’s left over after if you serve this group of folk.
Joe Coldebella:
And then that’s going to have to be some government involvement in it. And I know that you’re passionate about that as well. And I know that you did serve on an FCC committee. I was wondering, just touch on that a little bit.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Yeah. So I was appointed by Chairman Pai to the FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, which is called the BDAC. And that committee was tasked with making policy recommendations for alleviating the digital divide. And I was, in addition to being the chair, I was on the committee that did the state model code. And one of the things we recommended in the state model code was how to form a broadband fund in your state and if you have access to USF funds, how to convert a high-cost fund or USF fund into a broadband fund or how to fund a broadband fund if you don’t have access to USF. And then I took that to the governor in the state of Arkansas and I said, “Governor Hutchinson, this is something that I’d like the state to consider.” The state did in fact implement the Arkansas Rural Connect program. So when CARES Act money came in, we already had a broadband program sitting there ready to accept the funding.
I was very keenly focused on the rural areas and on the need and how you address that. So the expense in serving rural areas, the lack of density, the poverty in general, I mean, I would say that of the 10 counties we serve, eight are persistent poverty counties. You have SVCs, which are socially vulnerable communities within those counties. And it’s hard to look at that in Arkansas and Mississippi and question whether there’s been redlining involved. And so there’s a lot of challenges that exist in rural America that don’t exist in broadband deserts, in urban broadband deserts. In the urban broadband desert, which I also care deeply about, generally, that is a function of redlining or the economic status of that area. And a provider has made the determination those people can’t afford broadband, so I’m not going to bring it there. That’s how you end up with an urban broadband desert, but it’s not a density problem. You have the people.
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Right. The density problem is in rural America. And I had a map put together when I was on the BDAC that showed the population density across the United States, and it’s remarkable how much of the country has a hundred people or less per square mile. And it is very difficult when you start looking at serving that with fiber to the home, those costs become astronomical.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. It’s crazy. As we begin to wind down, Elizabeth, this has been a great visit. I really appreciate your time. One thing that we like to do is we like to ask all our guests two questions. One sort of a reflective question, one sort of looking forward. The first one is our back-to-the-future questions. So I’m going to give you the keys to the DeLorean. You get to hop in and go back to the beginning of when you became the CEO of your company. If there was something you could whisper in your ear to make the journey a little bit easier, what would you tell yourself?
Elizabeth Bowles:
And so that’s really an interesting question. I think I would tell myself two… Well, two things. I would tell myself to invest in fiber earlier.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay.
Elizabeth Bowles:
And I would have told myself to focus on specific areas so that I had an infrastructure in place for when all of this money was coming down. I mean, we were very located in central Arkansas. I would’ve deployed the Delta sooner had I understood sort of the whole landscape retrospectively. I mean, we serve part of the Delta, but I would’ve moved further east.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay, awesome. And then if I could give you the crystal ball if you look into the future in three to five years, what do you see?
Elizabeth Bowles:
I see… And this may be helpful, but I see policymakers waking up to the fact that we need to be focused on not a single technology and not trying to buy everybody a Cadillac on day one. And that we need to realize that there are smaller cars that are perfectly serviceable that will get you where you need to go, but that you can buy a lot faster. And that’s a kind of convoluted analogy, but what I’m trying to say is, we have this very fiber first, fiber forward sort of approach, and $42 billion fiber to the home, you’re going to run out of money before you serve everybody. And the way I feel about it is, it’s more important to serve everybody with something than it is to give a few people a Cadillac. And so in my opinion, we need to be, from a policy perspective, focused on whether does it what it needs to do.
Can it deliver a hundred megs down and 20 megs up? Can it do that? And if the technology can do that, that is what we should be funding. This idea of gigabit fiber to the home all over the United States for 42 billion is kind of a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. So in three to five years, I would hope that we’ve had a lesson learned to where we can sit there and say, there are radios that can do that. We need to be deploying hybrid networks. We need to be deploying fiber to the node. We need to be looking at areas where fixed wireless the last mile is a better choice. Where fiber’s the best choice, it should be deployed. It is in most cases going to be more robust.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. But to your car analogy, we’re not in a one size fits all world. And so it’s one of those things where let’s make sure that everyone gets served and then slowly raise everyone.
Elizabeth Bowles:
It’s much easier to do that once you have the infrastructure in place. Well, so for example, our network, we have fixed wireless backhaul in our network. We’re underlying it with fiber. Our network is going to be redundant. If that fiber gets cut, the radios will take over. If the radios go down because of the lightning strike, the fiber will be there. So we’re going to have a completely redundant network. That’s what we need to be building in this country. We need to be building resiliency. We have networks that when they go down, people are out and they go down at the worst times.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure.
Elizabeth Bowles:
And the first networks back up after the hurricane are the fixed wireless networks. So we need to be not just focusing on getting speed to people, we need to be focused on getting a resilient broadband network. Because you can always upgrade, you can always change the equipment, you can always increase the infrastructure. So it’s important to get it in there first.
Joe Coldebella:
No, that’s a great point because it’s one of those things where technology’s not stopping. So it’s one of those things where things are going to change. So it’s a really great point. Elizabeth, if folks want to learn more about you and your company, where can they go?
Elizabeth Bowles:
So we have a website, obviously, they can go to aristotle.net, www aristotle.net for my company and they can… My contact information is there and I welcome people to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter. My Twitter is bowleel, B-O-W-L-E-E-L 13, bowleel13. There’s a story behind that, but I won’t waste your listener’s time, anyway. But yeah, they can reach to me out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn and our company website and we look forward to hearing anybody. I am very passionate about this subject and I welcome communication.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the Broadband Bunch.
Elizabeth Bowles:
Thank you for having me.
Joe Coldebella:
Me. All right, that’s going to wrap up this episode. Until next time, we’ll see you later.
