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:
This episode of The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software and VETRO FiberMap.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella, and we are at Fiber Connect 2023 in Orlando, Florida. Joining me is Gary Bolton, president and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association. Gary, welcome back to The Broadband Bunch.
Gary Bolton:
Joe, just great to be here. I’m so glad that you’re down here in beautiful Orlando with 4,000 of your closest friends.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, this is a phenomenal event. We truly appreciate you guys letting us come here and get so many great stories. It’s an exciting time.
Gary Bolton:
Oh, it’s amazing. I have a long, long, four-decade career, and this has probably been the most fun part of my entire career. Just the energy and the opportunity that we have as an industry right now is historic.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, the event itself is amazing. I think that JJ and Richard Williams and his team complement you and your folks, and you guys do a tremendous job.
Gary Bolton:
Well, JJ, Joseph Jones, the president of OnTrac, he’s our board chairman this year. And anybody who knows JJ knows that he’s been a heavy lifter for two decades at the association. He’s just a phenomenal chair and a passionate guy and just a great guy to learn from.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, awesome. I don’t know if you know this, but the Fiber Broadband Association was the first preview show that we ever did in 2020. So you took over in late 2020. Nothing big was going on at that time in terms of just like the world was just humming along.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah, I was sitting home, and doing my work from home with COVID with everybody else. And yeah, we had a tough run. We had moved to an association model, and we had a new CEO at that time. Anyway, we got to the point where all the revenue was for the association — We had 30% membership and 70% was for the conference. And when you don’t have a conference or try to go virtual, basically all the revenue goes to near zero. And just the engagement, it was just a tough time. I was on the board and very vocal about what we should do, and then the board said, “Well, put up or shut up.” So they handed me the reins and said, “This thing needs a big turnaround.”
Joe Coldebella:
Well, you’re cooking with gasoline because, in that time, you’ve grown the association by over a hundred percent. It must be super gratifying.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah, it’s been fantastic. First and foremost was to get the model right and then to rebuild the team, so I hired all new staff. My philosophy is on delivering work products. And so I tell my staff I don’t want them to ever go and ask people to join. I want them to demonstrate engagement and work product, be able to do best practice be able to do the right advocacy, and be able to deliver. And then people will come flocking. We’ve been fortunate. We’ve added 46 new members just this year. As you said, we’ve over-doubled the size of the association on companies that have joined. 52% are service providers, so we have all the tier ones and tier twos and some amazing rural operators and municipalities, rural electric co-ops.
And we’ve added 24 tribes this year. So we have a new committee that’s focused on tribal broadband where we want to help the industry understand what the tribal broadband needs are, and we need tribal engagement to be able to do that. And so we’ve had Robert Griffin of Choctaw Nation and Sachin Gupta from Centranet that have been able to come together as our co-chairs, and that’s been phenomenal.
And then just on revenue, we were in the dirt. We’ve been able to more than double our revenue every year for the last three years because we’ve been able to focus on creating new revenue streams. Members don’t like paying dues. What they want to do is they want to pay for a return on investment.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure.
Gary Bolton:
And so providing opportunities to get membership value and then be able to drive revenue so you’re not leaning on membership. Then we’re not so dependent on the conference. The first conference we had out of COVID, we set a record. So before that, the largest conference we ever had was 1,700 people. Coming right out of COVID, we had 2,000. We had to do a lot of modeling on looking at herd immunity and things like that and try to thread the needle and decide when we were able to sneak a conference in.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure. Sure.
Gary Bolton:
It was the first big conference people came to after COVID, which was risky for people. But we ended up with 2,000. And last year, we hit another record with 3,000, and this year at 4,000. So we can grow fast, but we don’t want to do that. We want to grow a measured growth because it’s really about the quality of experience. We’ve focused hard this year on elevating the experience, so we doubled our budget on AV. So when you go into the general sessions, you see the epic LED screens and all the AV systems. And we have the live music between sessions and then the food and beverage and just the overall impact.
We also added a C-suite forum to try to make this a real deal zone to make this a comfortable event for CEOs, operators, and companies coming together. We had 125 C-suite members at our C-suite forum yesterday. So just trying to continue to make the quality of experience. Our exhibit show was amazing.
Joe Coldebella:
Phenomenal.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. You walk in and just the branding from the Fiber Broadband Association, our position, but also make that experience amazing for every single exhibitor and sponsor. And as a result, we’ll be sold out for 2024 by tomorrow, I think.
Joe Coldebella:
I was talking to Evan who’s going to be the chair next year. And I said, “You guys are going to need a bigger boat because you’re just growing and growing, which is just so awesome.”
Gary Bolton:
Well, that is a challenge because this year, we had to move our conference from our regular date of June. We had it all booked here in Orlando, but we realized we were too big. We didn’t have the whole hotel, and so the only time we could get the entire hotel, the Gaylord whole resort property here was this date, the end of August. So we sold out the hotel two months ago, and we sold out another Marriott. Now our people are spread across Orlando to get here. So we have outgrown Orlando, and so we’ll be back in Nashville, which is the largest Gaylord property. We don’t want people having to Uber all over town to get here.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure.
Gary Bolton:
We want them to have convenient rooms and just, again, quality of experience.
Joe Coldebella:
You know what? I have to echo that; I’ve gone to dinner with a few folks. The food has been great. The service here is top-notch. It’s a great run event.
Gary Bolton:
Well, we’ve had a great partnership with the Gaylord, and we are just trying to elevate that experience. Again, we want this to be not just another trade show. I don’t know how many conferences I’ve been to in the last several weeks, but we want this to set the mark as far as experience, and so the quality of our speakers, the quality of the experience. So it’s not only that we have good comfortable conference rooms but great AV, great sound systems, great food, and just great networking opportunities so that we can connect people. And I saw that. I had dinner with the chief operating officer of one of the larger companies, and he was in the C-suite forum. He heard about a new technology during that discussion. By dinnertime, they already had a trial set up for it.
Joe Coldebella:
Oh, wow.
Gary Bolton:
And so that’s what I love seeing, is the fact that a CEO of a small innovative supplier can come in and meet up with the COO of a large operator and have a trial within hours of meeting them.
Joe Coldebella:
I love that. That’s one of the great things about conferences. You see someone in the hall or go on the expo floor, and all of a sudden, something clicks for somebody. And then it opens up a bunch of doors.
Gary Bolton:
Well, the other thing, I just came out of our public policy committee meeting. We have 15 different committees, which were trying to drive advocacy or best practices and so forth. And so it was standing room only, so that was just great to see the people. We have to meet on Zoom, so now we can be here in person. It was great to see just all the great ideas of what we need to do to drive our advocacy.
Joe Coldebella:
I was talking to Kevin Morgan yesterday and one of the things that he said that I thought just blew my mind away was about permitting. And I’ve only been in the industry a short time. But as all this money was getting rolled out, if you said to me a few years ago that permitting was going to be a major issue, I would’ve been like, “Are you crazy?” But it’s massive.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. So we had Eric Beightel here. He’s the czar of permitting, the federal permitting. So he’s the chair of all the permitting agencies for the federal government. And so he spoke in several different places. I don’t know if you saw my remarks yesterday, but one of my top five initiatives is the acceleration of deployment. Speed is our friend, and anything that’s going to slow down deployment is going to drive up costs and drive up inefficiencies. And we can’t afford that. So we’ve been working on the Hill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has about 28 bills that we’ve been working on.
Joe Coldebella:
Wow.
Gary Bolton:
And want to streamline permitting and locates and just be able to have speed deployment.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. There’s the Parkinson’s Law. However much time you have, that is how long it’ll take you to do it. So if you say that we need to do it in three years, you’ll do it in three years. If you say that we need to do it in 10 years, you’ll do it in 10 years. So I think that’s important. The states had to develop broadband plans, five-year plans. Usually, I’m not a fan of bureaucracy; I’m usually not a fan of layering. But I think that was a phenomenal idea.
Gary Bolton:
Well, we’ve been impressed with NTIA and the leadership at NTIA. And we worked hard to get our broadband infrastructure playbook out right after Biden signed the infrastructure bill into law so that we can get the states up and going. So by the time NTIA’s notice of funding opportunity came out later in May the following year, the states were already ready to go. These things are always hard to get right, and NTIA has got it largely right. And they are very good listeners on all the things that aren’t quite right. We have a lot of the NTIA leadership here at the event. So tomorrow morning at our State Broadband Summit, they’ll be kicked off, NTIA. And there are just some exciting things that are just coming up.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. I think that this 50-state broadband office is almost the idea that we’ve got 50 experiments going on. And so what I hope is that there’s a lot of collaboration down the line. So if someone does something great in Michigan, then they can pick it up in Arizona or Florida or wherever. That’s my hope. I’m optimistic.
Gary Bolton:
Well, that’s happening. It’s 56 because it’s all the states and territories. So we have some states like Louisiana. They’re out front, and Vermont is out front. I was at a broadband leadership summit in Tahoe a couple of weeks ago with a lot of the state broadband directors. I’ve been in a number of those types of sessions for the past year. And all the state broadband offices are sharing best practices. We’re doing our best to be able to identify the best practices with the workforce development playbook, our guidebook, and our broadband infrastructure playbook where we identify when we see a best practice in a state. We want to make sure that every state knows about it.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s great. That’s the great thing about this industry. In a lot of ways, there’s competition, but there’s a lot of collaboration as well.
Gary Bolton:
Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we’re trying to make happen at this conference and in our association. Every member of our association is a competitor whether they’re ISP competitors or supplier competitors. But we’re all coming together for the common good. This is a big pie, and we’re growing this pie. And that’s what this conference is about. How do we collaborate? This is bigger than any company or any of us. I think someone put it great this morning when they said that we’re the ancestors of the future.
Joe Coldebella:
I like that.
Gary Bolton:
And so when you think about it in that context, it’s not about the goals or the needs of any individual company. It’s about collectively how we can have a generational impact.
Joe Coldebella:
It’s so true though. It’s ironic. After Mountain Connect, I went up to South Dakota. And I went and saw Mount Rushmore, and I was just walking around. There was an article about a gentleman who said, “We are just working on faces.”
And it’s funny that we’re all doing just what we’re doing to get done. But ultimately at the end of the day, 10 or 15 years from now, we can look back and say, “We did some good.”
Gary Bolton:
Well, I don’t even think it’s 10 or 15 years. I think for decades and decades. We look back to the 1930s. Can you imagine if FDR hadn’t been able to set the path to have every community have electricity and clean water? Anybody who saw Joseph Jones’ presentation this morning, it was truly inspiring when he talked about starting with electricity and then moving to transportation and the moonshot and to the opportunity we have today. So it’s really on that JFK man-in-the-moon moonshot level.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure. I think it is the electrification of America 2.0. I spoke with some folks yesterday from Arkansas, and it took them decades to get it done for their area. And they’re trying to do it in four years. We have our feet on the gas pedal.
Gary Bolton:
Well, so today. We had five operator light talks over the last couple of days, which were all phenomenal. We had the president of AT&T and the CEO of Google Fiber, but Jim Ingraham from EPB, his talk about quantum networking —
Joe Coldebella:
Crazy.
Gary Bolton:
When you think about Chattanooga, this little tiny town in the hills of East Tennessee. They set the world mark as the first-gigabit city over a decade ago, and then they’re the first 10 gig cities. Then they were the first 25-gig city and now have launched the first commercial quantum network. So how is that possible? Well, when you put the infrastructure in, it’s easy because upgrading from one gig to 10 gigs to 25 gigs is just changing out the endpoints.
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Gary Bolton:
And once you have that fiber, then all of a sudden, you can start enabling all these amazing things.
Joe Coldebella:
The incredible thing about Chattanooga, at least from my point of view, is that it’s not private. It’s the government. You just get blown away. You would think that all the advancement needs to come from private, but they’re cooking. They’re moving, and it’s incredible what they’re doing.
Gary Bolton:
Well, what is super great about that is not only do they have 70% market share and that fiber deployment created 9,500 direct jobs, but it also delivered $2.7 billion of economic impact. And even better yet, the revenue from broadband is subsidizing electric businesses so that they don’t have to have rate increases.
Joe Coldebella:
It’s amazing. One of my favorite stories about Chattanooga is that a company from Miami, a shipping company, moved part of its operations to Chattanooga. You just laugh because it’s like you’re landlocked, but they just need the speed. So it’s just a great phenomenal story all around.
Gary Bolton:
Well, my favorite part is if it can happen in Chattanooga, it can happen anywhere. So it’s really about having the foresight and taking the initiative to make sure that your community is connected with fiber. And then great things will happen.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s a phenomenal point because it’s a true North Star. It’s like, oh, we can’t do it. We can’t do it. No, they did it. If they can do it, you can do it.
Gary Bolton:
Absolutely. This quantum networking is phenomenal, with the potential for cloud-based quantum computing, quantum sensors, and secure communications. Think about how difficult it is to have secure communications, and we can have these encrypted, ultra secure, quantum secure communications. It is going to protect our nation’s network.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, it’s incredible at the rate of speed we are moving at, and it’s so subtle. It’s like these little incremental changes where all of a sudden, you’re asking, “How did that happen?” Well, it’s because of the back of the house, which is broadband, which is what drives everything. But it’s behind the scenes. I would love it if there were an opportunity where we bring in folks that are the John Deeres, the Metas, all those folks that are front and center to bring them in and say, “Hey, listen, this is all happening because of broadband, so pay attention.”
Gary Bolton:
Well, one of my favorite sayings is, “Change appears incremental until it’s too late.”
Joe Coldebella:
I love it. I’m going to steal that. But this conference has been amazing just in terms of talking to folks in the halls and interviewing folks. One of the areas I would love to just touch on briefly is the Women in Fiber. We just actually interviewed someone who went to the luncheon today. I’ve spoken with Holly and Alexa, they’re so awesome. Their event today, it seems like you could have scalped the tickets. They had 300 people and it was sold out. And apparently, it was the place to be. Great stuff.
Gary Bolton:
I always feel a little weird because they always invite me to come to kick off the meeting and so forth, being the guy in a room of 300 women. But it is just phenomenal, the momentum. So this committee is very active. They have a big steering committee and a lot of subcommittees, and one of the key things they’ve been working on is mentorship.
And so yesterday, they brought several at-risk youths from Tech-Savvy that came in. These are young girls who are mentoring other girls on being able to get more tech-savvy. And so they got to walk the trade show floor and see all the technology and so forth. So just creating mentorships and making sure that we can encourage young women to become more, not only tech-savvy but more confident and to come into our industry and to feel not only welcome but be able to fulfill their potential.
And so I’m excited about our Women in Fiber efforts. They do a spotlight on a Women in Fiber leader at all levels of the organization every month. And it’s just a great group of ladies.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, it is. I did see the young ladies walking around, and it was great because hopefully, it shows them that there are different ways. There’s a whole world out there. When you’re super young and you live in your neighborhood, it’s just your neighborhood. But when you see an event like this, you realize that I can go and do this. I can do that. I’ve got an opportunity. All I need to do is talk to the right people. I’m super excited to see what they do in the future because I think it’s a very forward-thinking organization.
Gary Bolton:
So I was on the board for Teach for America for about five or six years. And I went to a Title IX school. The guidance council there had a lawn mower, and they had a little patch of grass out by the school. And he would teach these young boys how to mow the lawn because one day, they would have a lawn. And it’s just those little things to plant a seed I guess in their mind that they’re not going to grow up in subsidized living, but they’re going to have their own home. They’re going to be mowing their lawn. So I think it’s really important to make sure that young people can see what is available to them and what they can aspire to.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, that’s a perfect segue to the workforce. You guys and Deborah Kish are doing a phenomenal job. So how is it rolling out in terms of workforce? Are we getting a hold of it, or is it one of those things where it’s going to be a tough sled because it’s tough all over?
Gary Bolton:
Well, yeah. I guess when I came on, we started realizing that if we’re going to be able to get everybody connected with fiber, we need to have the workforce. That’s going to be the long pole. And so we spent a year putting together the OpTIC Path on fiber optic technician training, and we’ve got Department of Labor accreditation and started rolling that out. And so that’s been rolled out to about 68 community colleges and training institutes across the nation. But our goal is to get it into every state, all 56 states and territories. And so we brought on Todd Jackson. He was a market president for lit market, Lit Communities, and so he’s come on workforce development to team up with Debbie.
We’re working on a model right now that we’re working with about five states right now to do a statewide program. And so that would be licensed of course to all the community colleges in that state and be able to do the program statewide, working with the state broadband office because workforce development is a BEAD-eligible expense. And so the challenge is how do we get this to every community college across all 56 states and territories and do this in a very quick fashion?
Joe Coldebella:
This is one of the great things I love about the podcast. I get to talk to folks like you. When I was at Mountain Connect, I was talking to some folks. The topic of the workforce came up, and one of the guys said that this company would go to the local high school team. And they would ask the coach, “Hey, listen, obviously not everyone is going to college. Are there some of the guys that don’t know what they’re going to do? We can guide them to a way to not only get a job out of high school but to get a career.” And I just thought it was a phenomenal idea.
Gary Bolton:
Well, we’re certainly spending a lot of time looking at underemployed areas of the population. So one area we’ve been working with several states is people coming out of corrections.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay.
Gary Bolton:
For example, in Ohio, they have 16,000 people coming out of corrections every year. And so those that have the aptitude and the right profile to be able to become a fiber optic technician, that’s a great opportunity to —
Joe Coldebella:
Break the cycle.
Gary Bolton:
Exactly. And again, several populations have been just underemployed. And we just try to find those populations that we can be able to put into this workforce and provide career opportunities.
Joe Coldebella:
And it’s great. I love how we’re going after the young folks. One of the things that I spoke with Kevin about yesterday, which I just wanted to call out, was the senior council committee. Obviously, in the next few years, a lot of folks are going to be stepping away from the industry. We can’t have this brain drain. So I just wanted to give you kudos for that. It’s a great idea.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. The whole concept behind that is that as people roll off our board, people like Mike Hill, who was chairman three times, and Kevin Morgan, and when JJ rolls off and so forth, it’s to be able to have access to these amazing leaders that have some historical context of the association and the industry and to not let them just disappear on us. And so they serve three years after they’ve rolled off the board. And it’s just, for me, just a great place to take big hairy issues and have them vet it. It’s a great opportunity to be able to leverage these folks as leaders who have a lot of history with the association, and then I have access to them. That’s my selfish motivation to keep access.
Joe Coldebella:
But it’s also super strong bench strength. When you have that bench strength, you can be like, “Hey, call in the lefty.” It always helps.
Gary Bolton:
So we do a premier member meeting. We did one down in Florida last December. We’re going to be in Palm Springs this December, and it is just a really quality meeting. And then we have a great process that we put in place to be able to continue to have great board members.
Joe Coldebella:
So if we could switch channels a little bit, I would love it if we could discuss the original tagline, “If it’s not fiber, it’s not broadband.” I have been a marketing and advertising guy for 20 years. That’s a phenomenal job by you in terms of setting the stage. Basically, you’re selling the category. And I think that it set the table for setting forth the funding. What was the inspiration behind that? I would love to know.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. So we have a government officials roundtable. It’s about 150 government public officials, and elected officials from about 45 states right now. And so one of the first roundtable discussions, the public officials were saying, “Hey, I go to my town council or city council meeting, and I’m trying to explain we need fiber.”
And they’re like, “Well, why do we need fiber? We’re going to have 5G.” And it’s just very difficult for them to get in there and try to explain the difference between 25/3 and 100/20 and all this stuff. And so I came away with this saying for a public official, this is too complex. Let’s just make it super simple and say, “If it’s not fiber, it’s not broadband.” Simple.
So that was a very powerful message, and people were accusing me of being a little bit aggressive, but that is the message because what we are talking about is having digital equity. We want to make sure that every person is connected and has the same opportunity. And if you give someone a lesser service, that’s not going to be able to evolve as we go from gigabits to 10 gigabits to terabits and be able to do the low latency and do all the things that we can get to quantum networks and so forth. You’re doing people a disservice. So if they’re not fiber, they’re not getting the service they need.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, as someone new to the industry in terms of just all the different players trying to plant their flag, you own the field. And just from a personal point of view, I think that it was the right thing to do. Ultimately, you want to make sure that everyone gets served as soon as possible, and sometimes it’s going to take a little bit longer. But you’ve got to think “future-proof”. You have to think that we need to be future-ready. Unfortunately, at least right now, a lot of the technologies say they can do it, but only one can get there.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. Fortunately, that fight is over. So when the NTIA BEAD NOFO came out last year and said these projects must be fiber, that set the tone. I think Dinni Jain, the CEO of Google Fiber says, “It’s great that we don’t have to defend gigabit anymore.”
So everybody gets it. And so now we’ve moved on. People get it and know that it has to be fiber. So what we’ve evolved to is now once you have fiber, what are you able to enable? And so the new tagline we’ve gone to is, “When fiber leads, the future follows.”
And that to me just so accurately encapsulates what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to enable the metaverse. We’re trying to enable a quantum network. And we’re trying to enable artificial intelligence, and all these things that are going to be coming, all this innovation that we can’t even imagine right now. And so once you get fiber in, all this innovation then can be able to enable this amazing future.
Joe Coldebella:
So I’m a big fan of VR. I think the adoption is going to take some time, but it is a miraculous thing. When you have someone put on an Oculus or a VR set, it’s almost like the light switch goes on, “Oh, now I get it.” But it’s one of those things where if you go into a room, even if people that are technology-forward and ask them about VR, they haven’t experienced it yet. So I like how you’ve shifted and said that technology is coming. And we’ve got to be ready for it.
Gary Bolton:
Well, when you start talking about the metaverse, people will start rolling their eyes because they’re thinking of gaming. And so if you’re not a gamer, probably it doesn’t resonate with you. At the White House, they had some great training opportunities using VR. One of the demonstrations they’re showing is on painting, using spray painting like you’d paint a car. And they could do that all virtually using VR. I’m an educator. I teach at the university. Just trying to do this remote learning and things that we had to do during COVID-19 is very difficult. But you can all of a sudden have an immersive experience. Also when you think about medicine and imaging and things like that. So once we get beyond just gaming, gaming is what drives revenue.
Joe Coldebella:
It’s the gateway into the VR. I interviewed a medical company last year that used augmented reality for someone in Kansas City to speak with somebody in a rural area. She was a cancer specialist. And obviously, a cancer specialist can’t go out into rural areas. It just doesn’t make sense in terms of costs, in terms of travel. And so she was able to connect with patients and discuss their treatments and talk about their diagnosis and stuff like that. People don’t see that. I think that one of the things that the industry needs to educate everyone is that there are some cool things that we don’t even know that are coming down that we need to prepare for.
Gary Bolton:
Well, exactly. As I said, change appears incremental until it’s too late.
Joe Coldebella:
I appreciate your time. It has been a phenomenal visit. So you say the fight is over, but let me tell you, folks. I was at Mountain Connect, and I was just in a room full of about 30 folks or so. And the discussion of fiber versus wireless versus LEOs came up. Gary, you happen to be in the room, and it was a spirited discussion. You go everywhere.
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. Well, my blood gets up a little bit when you start bringing up the Low Earth Orbit satellite because we had a big fight in RDOF. After all, the FCC had awarded Starlink, Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world, $885 million, almost a billion dollars to do RDOF with LEO satellites. I’m a technologist. I grew up engineering at companies that created great innovation, but it’s about people. And so when you go and say, “Okay, I can connect these people with LEO satellites like they did in RDOF, then you start digitally redlining.” You’re saying, okay, all these people are connected, so they’re good.
And so meanwhile, as the infrastructure money comes out and you can be able to connect everybody with fiber, those people that were going to be relegated to LEO satellites were off the table. They now were served, so they weren’t eligible for this money.
And so we must be able to put the critical infrastructure that’s going to serve generations to come and not be able to put up an antenna and say, “Okay, this person is connected. Check the box.” This is important. Think about electricity. If we hadn’t poled actual electricity at everybody’s home, we could have dropped off a little generator or a windmill or something and said, “Okay, you guys are good enough because you’re out in the remote area,” but it’s transformative. This has to last for generations.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. I have no idea if the LEOs are going to work anyway, but I hope there’s going to be more of an application in terms of business that the satellites will be used for planes in terms of when folks are flying through the air and then they can reach out that way.
People don’t know what they don’t know. So when all of a sudden you have somebody who has a really slow internet connection and then they get something that’s souped-up, they’re like, “Oh, my God. This is what I’ve been missing.” Unfortunately, we’ve got to make sure that people aren’t shortchanged.
Gary Bolton:
Don’t get me wrong. If you get a LEO satellite connection, it’s great until someone else adopts it, right?
Joe Coldebella:
Right.
Gary Bolton:
Because it’s a shared medium. And so the more people on it, the worse it’s going to be. So everything we do is with math and modeling. And so the way we were able to convince the FCC to reject the RDOF award was to be able to provide a model that the FCC could put in their inputs and Elon Musk would give them any input they want. But it just showed they didn’t have the capacity. It wasn’t going to be able to be sustainable. And that’s what we’re about, is we must have sustainable long-term solutions.
Joe Coldebella:
So speaking of long-term solutions, as I said, after Mountain Connect, I got into the car and drove up to Yellowstone and some other states. And I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. There are me and two cows. And what do I see? I see two big spools of fiber in the middle of nowhere and a Vantage Point car. So it’s happening, Gary. It’s getting everywhere.
Gary Bolton:
Well, by the end of the decade, we’ll have every American connected with fiber. So I’m incredibly excited.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s my hope as well. There’s one area that scares me a little bit, and ironically, it’s big cities. I would love to get your thoughts on it. One of the things that we say in The Broadband Bunch is that our biggest fear is that the digital divide will not shrink, but in some areas, it will grow. One of those areas is inner cities where unfortunately, sometimes the infrastructure doesn’t get there because there’s not the opportunity for cost for the companies to make sense. Does it make sense to have some type of wireless there? Or do we need to be fiber all the way?
Gary Bolton:
Yeah. Well, I’ll give you a quick answer. It’s fiber all the way. So when you think about people thinking about the digital divide, they often talk about rural. But the urban divide is a big issue. And so as I mentioned, I teach. In the spring, I do data analytics. So one of the projects that my team worked on a couple of years ago, the mayor of our community, said, “Hey, we’re a prosperous community, but we have certain zip codes that are just being left behind. And we need to figure out why these are generational poverty.”
And so my team took all the census data, crunched all the numbers, did regression analysis, and it popped out three things. If you’re paying more than 40% of your income on rent, don’t have access to computers and broadband, and don’t have a four-year education, you’ll be in generational poverty.
Now, this was not a broadband study. This was just looking at census data. But it crystallized the point that you’re in subsidized living, what happens? Retail moves away to the higher income areas. And so people living in subsidized have a hard time getting to a job because they must use some public transportation or walk or somehow to get there. If someone is too far away, they can’t make the rent, or go to school. So it’s just this death spiral into generational poverty.
And so when we connect every American with fiber, then we can provide the jobs and opportunities and education to be able to pull people out and have equality and equity.
At Mountain Connect, did you hear my talk where I talked about my dad and so forth?
Joe Coldebella:
No, I didn’t get a chance to hear that.
Gary Bolton:
Oh, a Montana speech. When I look back, I’m one generation away from poverty because my father was born during the Great Depression. He was born in a work camp for the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. His dad was in the rodeo, and that marriage didn’t last long. And he ended up growing up basically in an orphanage. Long story short, he used the GI bill from the Korean War to get an engineering degree and ended up becoming an executive which provided a great life for me. But you must have a way out of that generational poverty.
Joe Coldebella:
I love it. That’s awesome. Gary, thank you so much for your time. Were there any key announcements that were at the show that you were excited to share with everybody?
Gary Bolton:
Well, we did a bunch of announcements for the Fiber Broadband Association. I’d say the first and foremost most important one was when we announced the model that we completed for every single state and territory. It’s on the extremely high-cost threshold. And so in the BEAD NOFO, they said, “Okay, every project has to be fiber, but each state can identify an extremely high-cost threshold.” So what number is so expensive that you can be able to consider another technology?
Joe Coldebella:
Okay.
Gary Bolton:
And so the challenge of that is how does the state set that number? And so there’s a lot of political pressure, some from wireless and other industries to be able to say put that number low because we want to play. But if you think about, how we make sure that every American gets connected with fiber, you need that number high. Then you have to think about, okay, we’re going to get everybody connected.
So we were able to go and model, since we had the SEC’s fabric, on several locations, we were able to know what the allocation is on each state and several other factors we were able to put into there. We were able to calculate the exact number that’s going to maximize the fiber deployment and ensure every location is connected. And so we provided that for each state. Then the state office can change the parameters if they have different assumptions. Thus this model is paramount to make sure that we maximize our fiber deployment in every state.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s awesome. I love that. The great thing about that is that it’s just like the highway system. You want everyone to get good roads, but sometimes it’s going to be a dirt road. And so that’s the solution. So I love that.
Gary Bolton:
Well, we want to minimize the dirt roads. This is important because I like to talk about how much of our taxpayer dollars go to addressing our societal issues and the symptoms of those issues rather than the root cause. And with fiber, we can attack the root cause of these, and so it’s going to save us money in the long run. And so that’s why I always say it’s never too expensive to pole fiber to a location because of the incredible impact, the positive impact from economic development, jobs, education, and healthcare that fiber delivers.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s awesome. There was one announcement that I don’t know if you knew what happened today. You were awarded the 2023 Chairman’s Award. So I just wanted to say congratulations. I think that everyone in the community appreciates everything that you do. You’re a true road warrior. You’re a true advocate for broadband, and we appreciate all that you do.
Gary Bolton:
Well, thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me, and I always look forward to our discussions.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. That’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time, we’ll see you guys later.
