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:
Hello, and welcome again to another episode of the Broadband Bunch. This is Pete Pizzutillo, and I am joined by two gentlemen from MidSouth Fiber, William Graves, who’s the fiber network operations manager. William, thanks for joining us.
William Graves:
Thank you for having us.
Pete Pizzutillo:
And his colleague Luke Hofferber. He’s the technical project coordinator. Luke, thanks for joining.
Luke Hofferber:
Thank you, sir.
Pete Pizzutillo:
I know you guys are both first-time Calix attendees. What’s your reaction?
William Graves:
Yeah, it’s been a great week. A lot of sessions, and learned a lot. Got a lot from the opening sessions from Michael and stuff, so it’s been good. Networking with a lot of people I didn’t know, me, personally. Got to meet a lot of people from Texas.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Oh, is that right?
William Graves:
In such a big state, you don’t get a chance to interact with a lot of people, so that’s been a big plus.
Pete Pizzutillo:
How about you, Luke?
Luke Hofferber:
This is the event. I mean, we’re two guys from rural Texas, and this is the event to be at. It’s awesome.
Pete Pizzutillo:
You guys behave yourself at least?
Luke Hofferber:
No, sir.
William Graves:
Yeah, absolutely not.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Okay. You guys have a pretty amazing story. I know you’re part of the MidSouth Electric Co-op, and then in pre-pandemic, somebody lit the fuse and you guys had to get going and stood up, what? 10,000 subscribers in two years?
William Graves:
Yep.
Pete Pizzutillo:
What are you, nuts?
William Graves:
Yeah, man, it’s crazy. Crazy growth. When I took this job two and a half years ago, I had no idea that it was going to be this big and we were going to grow this fast, but we kind of just put our heads down and just worked, just ground, and got us to where we need to be.
Pete Pizzutillo:
So Luke, what are some of the keys to success? Why were you guys able to pull that off?
Luke Hofferber:
The big thing was our partners. We came in with a small team with the electric co-op experience. Will brought in the network experience, but for the rest of the team, we hadn’t done a fiber broadband company before. We didn’t know what to expect. We just brought our co-op values into the equation. So our partners, like Calix and GLDS, were huge in setting us down the right path for success in our billing and our managed service.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, so that was a big theme here at Calix, they were rolling out a bunch of managed services. What are you guys using right now?
Luke Hofferber:
We’re using their whole suite. We’ve got Support Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Operations Cloud, full Revenue EDGE, ProtectIQ, and ExperienceIQ. We give our customers, our members, the best we can.
Pete Pizzutillo:
And William, what would you say, as an electric co-op, and there’s a lot of benefits to, I mean it’s a difficult decision to invest your members’ money to solve this broadband problem, but there’s a lot of payback too, once you figure it out. So what are some of the meaningful impacts that you see on both the membership and the community?
William Graves:
Yeah, the biggest thing is just one, going out and stopping and getting gas and someone comes up to you and say, hey, man. I used to watch Netflix with my family and it will take forever for us to sit down and watch a movie. Now we can sit down, watch a movie, or I can work from home and my kids can play Xbox while I’m working and then we can get together in the backyard or whatever and watch a movie or have family over, watch the game, Livestream, and we can do it with fiber. And we can have all of our family over for Thanksgiving and everybody is connected and their devices connected. So, I mean, it’s been a big, big help in just talking to people, moving them over and them telling us about the service that they’re getting because they’re still getting the same co-op service, even though it’s broadband. So you’re getting people who live in the community, who are local, who care about you and what you’re doing, so service is number one for us.
Pete Pizzutillo:
And Luke, what about a small business? Do you see any impact on the small business folks?
Luke Hofferber:
We’ve got a big impact on small business folks anywhere from the business owners to the employees. We were out at a restaurant having lunch the other day. A waiter came up to us and said, “Hey, I wanted to let you know we have your service and you have made a big impact on how we do business nowadays.” A lot of good stories that we have in our area.
Pete Pizzutillo:
What about the auction house story? I thought that was pretty interesting.
Luke Hofferber:
Auction house story.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah.
Luke Hofferber:
It was amazing. Going into Covid, you’ve got a rural auction house selling cattle on the weekends. They did not have the internet capacity to live stream their auctions. Covid came through. They’re not able to do business the same way that they were able to in the past. They can’t bring people into their auction house and pack it out as much as they used to. Their streaming service allowed them to expand outside of our rural community and touch the rest of Texas with their business, on a scale that they hadn’t usually been able to perform before.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, it’s amazing that’s something so simple, and other folks in other more densely popular areas take for granted, but that simple ability to have reliable bandwidth, to be able to take a local business to a state and maybe a national level. That’s pretty impressive. What about the utility side? I mean, how is fiber impacting the electric co-op itself?
William Graves:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the biggest thing for us is we run fiber to our electrical reclosures. We are also running fiber into all of our substations, so we’re getting our SCADA network off of the old microwave and the radio, and moving that on the fiber, so we’re getting those analytics at a real-time, not in five-minute intervals or three-minute intervals. That’s real-time data that our guys, our engineers can look at the grid and make decisions that need to be made, and up to the second. And that’s improving our electricity, supplying electricity to all of our members, and just giving our guys the tools that they need to make the proper decisions to keep the grid, our local grid, running and everybody getting great customer service, great electrical service.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, it’s good. It’s one of the underlooked advantages of making that investment, is how does it payback? So, Luke, if you could go back to the pre-pandemic timeframe and take a lesson learned, what would you tell yourself? What would you do earlier?
Luke Hofferber:
I brought it up in one of our circles of success this week, and the thing that I would go back and change is, although we came out of this with incredible success, 10,000 subscribers in two years, I would have wanted to slow down a little bit. Take some time to think, take some time to process, because there were weeks. We were making decisions that were best for the time being, but we’re going back and reassessing those decisions that we made and developing a better product moving forward. But slowing down, taking our time, and making sure that we were making decisions that were scalable.
Pete Pizzutillo:
William, would you add anything to that?
William Graves:
Man, the biggest thing for me is the great partnership we have with Calix, because I kind of came out, and you’re working one thing and you’re thinking, okay, this is working great for me, right? And then you hit that issue. And if you guys are on the operation side, you have them all the time. One thing I struggled with to begin with was understanding the level of support Calix did offer. And that’s something that, coming from a previous job that I didn’t understand and being able to reach out to my SE, and for him to be able to help me right there, drop everything he’s doing, and help, is something that at first I didn’t understand. And that’s something that I will say that Calix has stepped up and been able to help us with figuring out issues. If it’s not them if they can point us to the tack or whoever it needs to be, they do a good job of helping you solve them and they’re partnering with you. They want the equipment that you purchased to work, they want your customers to be happy.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, there’s a big emphasis from them on customer engagement, right? And I think it’s an untapped source of aid and insight, right? I mean, did you guys consult any other electric co-ops out there?
William Graves:
Yeah, we did. They went out and before I got there, they went out and they were able to see a lot of co-ops in Texas. I think they went up to United, which is in the Dallas area. I know they went up to Oklahoma to see a couple of the co-ops out there. So there was some input. Now, we all do things a little differently, and there were some things that me coming in, I wanted to do a little differently. But what I do like is, because of the co-op mentality, everybody’s here to help each other.
So there might be something I might do differently that maybe they might do in Oklahoma, but then there’s something in Oklahoma that I can take. And I’ll say about the Oklahoma guys, man, for us Texas guys and there was a little bit of a rivalry, but those guys get together at least quarterly to meet and they’ve been gracious enough to allow me to come out there and just share best practices, get to know those guys, reach out to the engineers, we still talk to this day, and kind of talk through issues. So that co-op mentality is 100% true. Everybody’s here to help everybody.
Pete Pizzutillo:
So, Luke, anybody can reach out and ask you for some insight from a fellow co-op?
Luke Hofferber:
Oh, of course. I was handing out my business card at the last conference, the GLDS event, and had other co-ops and municipalities reach out to us and we helped them out the best we could. The co-op mentality is huge in the Calix and GLDS environment. We’re all here to help each other. There is no competition between us. If we do something that you like to pick up, feel free to have it. We’re not developing groundbreaking ideas here. We’re developing ideas that work and have success to back them up.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, that’s great. And so what’s next? Another 10,000 subscribers by Christmas?
William Graves:
Yeah. That will make our general manager really happy. I mean, from the engineering side, I mean it’s XGS-PON, an 18-gig PON. Higher speeds. I know people talk about the quality, which Calix offers a great quality, but we want to compete. We want to give our customers, if you wanted 2-gig, we want to offer that to you. Small business, 2-gig, 5-gig, 10-gig. We’re just trying to up the ante of that and offer faster speeds. Another thing from an engineering perspective is we’re looking at IPv6 really hard, looking at what that could do for our network to save us some money. I mean, everybody out there knows that IP addresses are quite expensive right now, 48 to $50 in IP. IPv6 could save us some money. We’re looking at some appliances to help with that. So that’s something for sure in ’23 and we’ll work with Calix and the rest of our partners on that. So that’s something I’m looking forward to.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Hey, Luke. Do you want to add anything to that?
Luke Hofferber:
Yeah, yeah. So 2023 for me, I’m calling it the year of the API integration. I think that what I’ve seen at this conference has alluded to a lot of things that Calix and our partner on the billing side, GLDS, is getting ready to move into for 2023. So I’m very excited to see our products and services linked together in a way that we haven’t seen before. So that is what I’m excited for, for 2023.
Pete Pizzutillo:
That’s great. So you guys can be on stage next year is what?
William Graves:
That sounds good. If they want to fly us back out here, me and Luke, we like to talk, so we’ll do it.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Luke doesn’t look so sure.
William Graves:
He’s done it before, actually.
Luke Hofferber:
Oh, yeah.
William Graves:
So he’s the vet. I’m the rookie.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Okay. Well, we won’t sign you up just yet. So hey, I appreciate sharing your story and I encourage anybody who is kind of going down this journey to reach out to these guys. They’ve been there, they’ve done it, hair on fire, and got a lot of lessons learned scars, and at least some great feedback from your community. So congratulations on that, and thank you for sharing your story with us.
William Graves:
Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Luke Hofferber:
Thank you.
