"Even cows need a gigabit connection!" How ROCK Networks is ramping up connectivity in rural Canada? - ETI
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August 24, 2021

“Even cows need a gigabit connection!” How ROCK Networks is ramping up connectivity in rural Canada?

The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch

Craig Corbin:

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of The Broadband Bunch, along with my colleague Brad Hine, I’m Craig Corbin.

In a time where dependence on communications in all shapes and forms has never been greater, finding an end-to-end communications systems integrator with expertise spanning everything from broadband, wireless, satellite, WiFi solutions, and rural broadband networks can truly be a game-changer for customers within a range of sectors. ROCK Networks, headquartered in Ottawa, is just such an organization and could even be considered a Canadian version of the classic Silicon Valley startup success story, with three-year growth of more than 5,000%, and ranked number one on the fastest-growing companies list in Ottawa.

Our guest today is the CEO and founder of ROCK Networks, a man with a career spanning three decades in roles that have taken him around the globe. Armed with a mechanical engineering degree from Memorial University and an executive MBA from the University of Toronto, he became the youngest vice president and general manager at Nortel. Top 40 under 40 honorees, the CEO of two venture-funded startups and has now been named one of Atlantic Business Magazine’s top 50 CEOs for the second year in a row. It is a pleasure to introduce the president and CEO of ROCK Networks, Joe Hickey. Joe, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.

Joe Hickey:

Thanks, Craig. Great to be here. Good afternoon.

Craig Corbin:

Absolutely, and so excited to be able to learn more about the story of what is going on there. Just phenomenal numbers with regard to the growth that’s going on. For those that are not familiar with your organization, give us the 30,000-foot overview to sort of get the conversation started.

Broadband Funding and Rock Networks Origins

Joe Hickey:

Yes, so ROCK Networks I originally founded quite a few years ago as a consulting firm and it was between gigs or whatever, and so about five and a half years ago I decided to focus on it full-time and basically start the company from scratch, so that’s the Silicon Valley success story I guess, the Canadian version is you don’t do it in your garage, you do it in your living room with the two dogs on either side of your laptop. So it started as a labor of love with a person of one and about a year and a half in, I acquired a company on the east coast of Canada near Halifax called Nova Communications. That got us to about 30 people and obviously ramped up the revenue of the company and since that time, we’ve kind of been working on a product diversification beyond public safety and radio and wireless communications to add broadband communications. We now have a satellite component to our business with partnerships with SES and OneWeb for GEO and LEO type solutions, low-earth orbit than geostationary orbit satellite solutions. Nokia is a key partner of ours in the broadband space and now we’re looking at future applications like the internet of things, those kinds of applications that will run on these future broadband networks.

Craig Corbin:

Joe, now with all of the money that’s coming into the industry as we’re talking about broadband networks, how does that set the scene for growth? Now we’ve seen it in the last many years, everything ramping up till now. How does that set the scene for growth for ROCK Networks from now moving forward?

Joe Hickey:

Yeah, if we go back a little bit, pre-COVID, we started the broadband piece of our business about three years ago and we’re out meeting with communities and kind of telling our story about how we would help communities improve their internet access in their local area, and then COVID hit and I guess we had some visionary communities like Pictou County and Nova Scotia that were on board, but then the government really got on board because COVID really highlighted that the digital divide wasn’t a crack, it was like a chasm.

So now in the last 10 months, the federal government in October of last year announced two billion dollars with the Canada Infrastructure Bank for low-interest loans to companies to build broadband. Then the government announced a $1.75 billion universal broadband fund that was grant money. The Ontario government, so the provincial government, sort of state-level equivalent in Canada, announced a program that was $150 million, then they upped it to a billion, and then in March of this year, the federal government added another billion to the universal broadband fund and Ontario added $2.8 billion to their provincial grant fund. So we’re poised with a large inflow of grant and low-interest loan money, $8 billion or more that has come into the Canadian market from government sources, to really help build out the rural infrastructure in Canada. If you look at building out this infrastructure, you got a diverse geographic area, you got a lower population density, and so the cost to build out these networks is obviously a lot higher than building out in an urban or even a suburban environment. So without these grant moneys, these networks won’t happen, and so the grants are coming in and we’re now starting to see a real uptick in the opportunity.

The next five to seven years are going to be very hectic in terms of the amount of money that’s coming into the market to build out these networks. The federal government has a goal of 100% of Canadians being connected by 2030 and in Ontario, the government has stated a goal, which is the largest province in Canada, of having 100% of Ontarians connected by 2025. So we’re at kind of the forefront of this push towards what we call community broadband networks, where we partner with the local municipalities or regional areas to actually build a network that they can have equity participation in, helps them create local economic development opportunities and the future is very bright.

Craig Corbin:

Let’s talk a little bit about you, you mentioned pre-COVID for a second. Let’s talk about what COVID brought to the market. There are some obvious topics there, but as far as your insight to the market and what the primary needs were, other than a broadband network for a rural community, what are those primary needs that you’re going to allow now those services and the different things that we can push to the consumers now?

Joe Hickey:

Yeah, and it’s not just consumer services like everybody wants to have their applications for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or if you’re in a business, right, that you would use one of those two applications. Or you have your home environment and you want Netflix, like those are kinds of applications that will run on the broadband network but what we see the real potential of this next-generation network enabling is a delivery of government services unlike we’ve ever been able to do. So what COVID showed us was everybody had to go online and what happened in the last year and a half would have probably happened over a five to ten year span. So now you’ve got everybody wanting to go online, governments being able to realize that they can deliver services online, so now how do we deliver more of those services?

So applications like telehealth. It’s no longer over the telephone, right? People want to do virtual care, under smartphones and see their doctor over video. That kind of application in rural Canada simply doesn’t exist today because the broadband infrastructure is not there. So when you think about the game-changing from a government perspective, they’re putting a lot of money in, but it will enable them to deliver services more efficiently to the consumers moving forward as well.

Craig Corbin:

So I know, and you and I have had several discussions about this now but so COVID also brought us … Like you’re mentioning, the necessity to communicate remotely and productively. Do you think that your average broadband subscriber than in their home can do almost everything they could do before remotely as long as they’re connected to a service such as one through ROCK Networks?

Joe Hickey:

Well to do all of these applications, I’ll give you an example of my own home. So my wife works in a school system, she helps developmentally challenged children. So she was supporting them remotely because the school system was closed. Then I had three teenagers that are doing school from home during COVID and if we didn’t have a gigabit connection, we wouldn’t have been able to work. I wouldn’t have been able to work, and even sometimes, when I was on Microsoft Teams calls and things like that, your internet connection is unstable because of the uplink … Like you get a gigabit downlink but you only get a 30 megabit uplink.

So, when you’re on these kinds of symmetrical applications, all of a sudden, the internet is unstable, I’m going into the application trying to turn everybody else’s computer on, that was because I’m on a business call and everybody goes, “What happened to the Wi-Fi?” So, you do need these kinds of connections in order to … In a multi-person household, which most households are, to be able to have everybody working seamlessly or going to school or distance learning, whatever, all at the same time. If it wasn’t for the broadband connection that we have in Ottawa, I wouldn’t have been able to function.

Craig Corbin:

That’s interesting stuff. We had mentioned on a previous call how important it is to work remotely, how important it is for all these services. So let’s step back a little bit and in your history. So I want to delve into what got you interested in these types of businesses? Where did you start that curiosity and that interest to get into this industry and start developing a lot of this technology?

Joe Hickey:

Well, I guess in high school, I always thought about becoming a lawyer and then an engineer for Mobil Oil showed up in grade nine and it was career day or whatever and talked about all the money that petroleum engineers could make and travel the world. So I decided I was going to become an engineer. But if I go back a little bit further in my life and I tell this story because I talk about the longevity of networks and future proofness and things like that when we talk about our broadband solution, and I recall when I was like five or six years old, I came home one day from school and I walk into the house and mom was in the living room and she was talking, and I looked around, there was nobody there. I said, “Mom. Who are you talking to?” She says, “I’m talking to Aunt Rita.”. I said, “But Aunt Rit’s not here.” She said, “Well I’m talking to her on the telephone.” So I remember when we got a telephone in my hometown in Newfoundland. I said, “Oh, okay. So that’s pretty interesting.”

So 18 years later, I joined Northern Telecom, and I had spent my last 30 years in the high-tech industry. It kind of formed a basis of obviously an engineering degree and with Nortel, they encourage continuing education so they sponsored me to do my executive MBA and that kind of catapulted my career. Nortel was at the time around 60, 70,000 people, half of which were engineers. But engineers were an MBA, were considered I guess a little bit more business types and so I was promoted into the business ranks of the company and began my kind of innovation journey if you will. It stuck with me ever since. It’s a great industry, telecommunications is key to the world being a smaller place, and that motivates me every day. I tell my team, I said, “You can look at your job as a job or if you have passion for what you do, then it actually doesn’t feel like work.” That’s the way I feel about the business that I’m in. Every day, you feel that you’re making a difference.

Craig Corbin:

That’s awesome. I always want to get to the heart of the matter and see what makes people tick, what keeps them fired up about the industry. Now a little bit ago, you mentioned you started ROCK Networks in between a few gigs which I think is really interesting itself. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the other things that you’ve done. Nova Communications. Talk a little bit about how that started and your goal with Nova.

Joe Hickey:

Well, so Nova was an acquisition so it was a company in Nova Scotia. I had started ROCK Networks as I mentioned a year and a half earlier, like full-time on ROCK, and Nova was in the same space, like two-way radios, public safety, business process. So the police, fire, emergency services type customers as well as commercial radio, security guards, concert events, festivals, those kinds of events all use two-way radios or walkie-talkies when we were growing up, right?

So, I won a project with a federal government agency, and I took the profits from that project and worked with the Business Development Bank of Canada to acquire Nova. It was a larger company, I was a company of one obviously so it had to be larger. So I bought Nova and that basically gave us a base if you will for being able to scale up the organization. A bunch of technicians, salespeople, marketing people, and then a couple of people that I had worked with within the prior company I hired to join the team. One of them is my VP of marketing now and the dean, Frank [Roberge 00:15:35], and then I hired a couple of salespeople that I had previously worked with and we basically have been growing the company ever since.

So Nova was in the same business space, and as we had a larger team, we could then start allocating resources to look at the product diversification strategy as we moved into broadband. The other thing about Nova, in the first generation of broadband that was built in Nova Scotia, there was … Broadband at the time was defined as two megabits down and a half a megabit up, right? So you can imagine where we are today. It was built with a Motorola Canopy solution, a lot of the Motorola radio dealers also sold the wireless piece of the business from Motorola, and Motorola later spun that off and it became Cambium Networks. But that wireless network that Nova designed and built for two customers, Seaside Wireless and Eastlink, at the time, passed 93,000 homes in Nova Scotia and it was the largest rural broadband network in North America.

So Nova had a history and a lineage of working on broadband and then I joined a group called the Center of Excellence for Next-Generation Networks or CENGN, I’m on the board of directors, have been a founding board member, and I’ve been there the last seven years, and CENGN was all about creating … What are those next-generation networks going to look like? How do we use off-the-shelf hardware? How do we use open access or opensource software, Kubernetes type infrastructure, etc?

So broadband obviously was a key part of those next-generation networks. So I put my CENGN board experience, trying to look at the architecture for these next-generation networks, along with the Nova prior experience, then partnered with Nokia who was also a member of CENGN and basically brought our rural broadband solution to the table.

Craig Corbin:

You’re listening to The Broadband Bunch Podcast. Our guest today, Joe Hickey, president, and CEO of ROCK Networks. The Broadband Bunch Podcast, brought to you by UTOPIA Fiber, by DxTEL, by Calex, by ITK, and by ETI Software Solutions. And Joe, you mentioned earlier in the conversation the fact that ROCK Networks is involved with the low-earth orbit satellite industry, the medium-earth orbit, and I know last month, there was an announcement of a partnership with Intellian that will be very exciting for those that can benefit from this because it’s something that will focus on not only the land-based utilization but a maritime component. Tell us about that. That’s exciting.

Joe Hickey:

Well, so we have three partnerships that we’ve sort of announced in the satellite space. So one is with SES, the largest satellite company in the world. They have geostationary and medium-earth orbits, so GEO and MEO we call it. Lots of three-letter acronyms and we announced a partnership with One Web out of the U.K. and that’s for low-earth orbit and so we basically have basically all of the sky-based or space-based segment covered with SES and One Web, and Intellian is the ground-based terminal partner for both SES and One Web. So now we have a complete end-to-end communications solution working with those three companies. We’re working on trials right now with the One Web solution. SES has some next-generation systems coming in the next 12 to 24 months, and now we’re going to start looking at … Once we have the connectivity piece in place, sort of like once you connect everybody with rural broadband, what are the applications that you’re going to run on top of that? So things like the internet of things, being able to remotely monitor networks anywhere in the world or provide broadband data to a ship anywhere in the world. Those are the kinds of applications that we’re going to start to see now with those three partners in the satellite space.

Craig Corbin:

That’s exciting, given the fact that literally, this will enable touching any remote location around the world. That has to open up a lot of opportunities. Talk about that if you would.

Joe Hickey:

Yes. So I’m sure we’ve all heard about Starlink, right? Elon Musk and obviously they are looking at the solution as well and then there’s Telesat in Canada so there are other LEO players. The unique thing about One Web is that its orbit is based on a polar orbit. So as they put up their satellites, they start covering from 90 degrees north and going south. With Starlink, they have an equatorial basically orbit, so they start from zero degrees and start working up. So right now Starlink goes up to about 50 degrees north and you can look at it that One Web comes down from 90 degrees down to 50. So we think about Canada or Alaska, across the top of North America, with our One Web solution, we can provide a broadband data link into any community or any area with our Intellian-based terminals.

So you go from let’s say an L-band or a C-band type internet connection that maybe gives you one megabit or two megabits, and all of a sudden, you can bring a 200 megabit connection down into a remote community. I mean it’s a game-changer, these communities trying to get access to the web and other applications.

Craig Corbin:

That’s fantastic. I’m curious about some of the discussions we’re having now on IoT. So we’ve gone from telecom networks in their basics to ISPs to wireless internet service providers and ROCK Networks connecting Canada and the rural communities. Kind of away from that, but more on an IOT scale, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that communities need up and above broadband connectivity but regarding the internet of things? What are some of the things these communities are looking to do moving forward?

Joe Hickey:

Yeah, so a lot of people talk about smart cities. So like traffic lights, parking garages, being able to identify where there’s a spot available that you can go in and find or whatever. You try to talk those applications to rural Canada, they’re like, “Joe? We don’t have any traffic lights in our community, right? And the only parking garage is the local lot next to the Tim Horton’s coffee shop or whatever, right?” So you got to think about applications for rural communities.

So when you think about rural, I remember I heard on an Association of Municipalities of Toronto which is all the communities in Ontario, they get together for a conference every year and we’ve done presentations to them over the last two years on community broadband networks. But it was a presentation by one of the mayors from Caledon, and he said, “The federal government definition of broadband is 50 megabits down and 10 megabits up. But if you’re operating a dairy farm and you have an automated milking production line,” he said, “A 50 megabit connection is not sufficient.” So then the joke going around at the end of the conference was even cows need gigabit connections. But that’s an example of an IoT-type application, and so you think about municipal waterworks or the SCADA systems that are used to develop those and moving them to an internet protocol-based system. Those are all IOT or sensor-type networks.

The challenge with IoT I find today is you have to think about an application by application type solution for a customer. So you got to find what is the key driver, is it a SCADA-type system? What are the connectivity needs? And we’ve been starting to look at partners like Nokia or Tech Data or Cisco or Bell and try to figure out vertical market applications that we can bring into different segments. It’s still embryonic. I mean there are many connected devices, so it’s not like devices aren’t necessarily connected, but people seeing value in having this overarching network that tries to manage all of their sensors and all of the data points in their network, we’re a little bit away from having those integrated solutions available. I think then we’ll see a massive explosion in IoT.

Craig Corbin:

Yeah, we read articles every day. Obviously, the bits and bytes and people want to drill down into the specific use cases and you mentioned bovine IOT I think in a matter of terms.

Joe Hickey:

Yes.

Craig Corbin:

Yeah. It’s really amazing how we can create sensors that will connect to a broadband network and report information on farm animals, crops, water patterns, all these things. To do so, you need partners in this infrastructure clearly, in your whole ecosystem. How important have partners been to you since you’ve started this journey?

Joe Hickey:

Yeah, so we talk about the core values of ROCK Networks, right? So we value our employees, we value our customers, we embrace change, we reward innovation. But one of the ones that kind of gets lost sometimes is what I call we nurture partnerships. So there’s no one company that can bring a complete solution to the market today, even the largest companies in the world without partners. So we don’t design any of the products, right? We integrate products and we deliver solutions. But to deliver those solutions it’s more than the technology. So when we think about technology partnerships, we have companies like Nokia, SES, OneWeb, Intellian, Cisco, companies of that ilk. But then we think about going to market partners in terms of you’ve got to deploy the networks so then we have customer partners like … In broadband like West Tower, building towers or fiber infrastructure or plexus building fiber infrastructure. So partners like that are important, and then as we look to finance these networks, we need private equity firms. It’s not just all government financing. Obviously, the number of government funds that are coming into the market is certainly helping accelerate the rollout. But still, communities, if they’re going to build their own network, are not necessarily going to raise all of the funds locally.

So we spent a lot of time working with private equity partners to bring community broadband solutions to the market and then finally we spend an inordinate amount of time at the customer level which normally you would say it’s a customer but when we look at community broadband networks it really is a partnership. We’re engaging with communities. Sometimes it’s a single community like Pictou County. Other times like a project that we just announced with the federal and Ontario government is in Northern Ontario. There are 41 municipalities, 12 of which are First Nation communities. There are 19,000 homes. It’s 400 kilometers wide by 150 kilometers high. So a very large geographic area, and you got to spend time building relationships with the local communities, the mayors, the CAOs, presenting in the evening at council meetings. So that’s a significant investment in building those partnerships, but then we show up at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario Conference and we talk about our approach to building community broadband networks, which I’ll talk about in a second, and the feedback that we get is this is exactly what communities are looking for.

So when we talk to communities, we don’t talk about what’s in it for ROCK Networks. We talk about what’s in it for them. So that’s the partnership model that we go to market under, so the term community broadband network for us has kind of five attributes if you will. One is that they’re meant to be affordable and high quality, so that’s why we like to do more fiber because fiber is impervious to weather conditions, and from an affordability perspective, we want them to have services at a quality and a price level that urban Canadians have. The second attribute is that they’re equitable, so rather than just saying we’re going to serve the 60% of the community which is typically the approach of some of the incumbents, they just focus on the core area of the town, everybody at the periphery gets left behind. So our model is 100% coverage, which aligns us with the federal government goal of delivering 100% connectivity to Canadians. The third attribute which is maybe the most important is that we work with the municipalities. Either the municipality is a 100% owner like a Pictou County or the municipality can be municipally influenced but having no equity stake but wanting to get the network for their citizens. Or it’s a public-private partnership with an equity stake owned by private equity firms, ROCK Networks, and the municipality.

So that municipal governance and go to market model to ensure local delivery and local support, local zoning laws, all of those kinds of things is a key part of making a community broadband network work. The fourth thing is that the network needs to be future-proofed. When we look at the future proof, we look at it in terms of both the longevity of the network and the speed that the network will ultimately deliver. This is the challenge with wireless networks, right? You put in a wireless network today, you deliver 5010 services, everybody comes onto the network and then you run out of bandwidth.

So fiber is what I call … I used to call it infinite bandwidth because as an engineer everybody likes the word infinity, right? To infinity and beyond, but in reality, infinity doesn’t really exist, except in the universe. So as a practical concept, I’d say it has inexhaustible bandwidth. There is no one home that can exhaust the amount of bandwidth that you can put over that single strand of glass. So it can be 100 megabits today, it can be a gigabit tomorrow, it can be 10 gigabits two years from now, 25 years from now it could be a 100-gigabit connection to that home. All those speeds could actually be delivered today if there was a need and the applications for them.

So that’s one attribution of future proof. The second attribute is the longevity in a network, and I go back to my story that I told you when I was five years old and caught my mom talking on the telephone for [inaudible 00:30:37]. That single piece of cable, copper wire at the time obviously, that was put in our home over 40 years ago, is still there, and that’s the value of a fiber optic-based network. When you put that network in, it’s good for 30 to 50 years, and that’s the second attribute that is very important for future proof because the payback window to build these networks in rural Canada or rural America for that matter, it’s not a two-year payback that you’d get if you’re building something in Downtown Toronto or Downtown New York City.

Craig Corbin:

Exactly. Right.

Joe Hickey:

The payback is very long, so therefore the asset has to be long-lived. The closest corollary I see to that is the original telephone network which was originally a utility, or the electrical grid. Which is also delivered as a utility where the electrical utility amortizes that asset over a 30-year life cycle. So that’s important in terms of future proof. Then the final thing from our perspective and what really resonated when we presented over the last two years to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario is that our network is built to be open access, or in the technical term, they call it to host neutral or carrier-neutral type model. The thing that’s important about that is if a telco builds a fiber-optic network, nobody else gets access. It’s a telco network. So if you can imagine that there’s no business case to build a connection in rural Canada today or rural America without subsidy, then the company that gets that subsidy, there’s nobody else going to come behind them.

So in effect, the subsidy is enabling a natural monopoly. So if that natural monopoly is to a single provider who doesn’t share to network with everyone, what benefit does that create for the community? If the natural monopoly is an open network that a local internet service provider, says Joe’s ISP or Craig’s ISP or Brad’s ISP, you start up your own little internet service provider, you sit in the local community, you walk down the street, people call you by name and basically when they spend money with you, you’re going to grow your team in that local community and that money gets recycled so there is an incremental uplift in terms of economic development activity in that community from keeping the telecom dollar local, and that’s what we hope to enable and stimulate these local IT companies and ISPs to grow which will put more internet technology out into rural communities and by having these networks be broadband-enabled, we’re starting to see rural Canada, rural America is starting to become a destination for people living the cities post-COVID, as long as they have broadband.

So one of the key attributes, when you’re looking at real estate in these areas is, “Okay, so I have a broadband connection?” If not, people aren’t going to move there. So the future of these communities is driven by their ability to move into a 21st-century network and that’s what our community broadband networks bring to the table.

Craig Corbin:

Yeah. That is phenomenal and you hit the nail on the head with regard to the movement away from the cities into the areas where people can enjoy a more healthy lifestyle and still be able to take care of their business as long as they’ve got the connectivity. As we begin to wind down our time here and so much yet to visit and I do hope we have a chance down the line to visit with you again Joe, but congratulations. Earlier in the year, I know that ROCK Networks became a little bit bigger with the acquisition of Acadian Communications, and real quickly, tell us what that will mean.

Joe Hickey:

So Acadian is an internet service provider in Nova Scotia and it was a strategic acquisition in that in order to bid on the federal government universal broadband fund, you had to have been an internet service provider for at least three years. So once the fund was announced, the submissions were due within four months. If you weren’t already an ISP, you had to buy one so that you could become one. So that was the reason for that acquisition and so that enabled us to submit applications for our project in Northern Ontario, with the community region we call H&M Coffee or Community Fiber Infrastructure, and we were, on August the 5th, the federal and provincial governments announced that they were granted $91 million to that region to build out their rural broadband network. The total project is in excess of $130 million so the grant money obviously is very important.

Craig Corbin:

Excellent.

Joe Hickey:

There are other projects that we submitted for federal government grant money and we’re still waiting on those applications to be reviewed. So Acadian is very critical to the future success of ROCK Networks.

Craig Corbin:

Awesome. That is fantastic, and we can’t wait to hear what the future will bring. As we begin to wind down, we always like to ask our guests what we call the Back to the Future question. If you could hop in the DeLorean, take yourself back x number of years. What would you whisper in your own ear, years ago, that would have changed the trajectory of ROCK Networks?

Joe Hickey:

So as I think about Back to the Future, I’m probably the age of the nutty professor. But I feel as young as Marty McFly, how about that? But it’s a great question and I’m actually going to give you two answers. One is I’ve been saying to my team, if I only knew 25 years ago what I know now, I would have been awesome. But they said, “But Joe, you’re awesome now.” If I think about it from a business context, so be bold, be daring. I tell my team thinks big, act big and you can become big. So that’s something, the innovation angle always stuck with me, so I’d be whispering that never give up on your dreams. The second thing I would probably whisper to myself is to be wary because everybody is not necessarily what they seem and I’ve had a few instances in my career that maybe did not go as well as maybe you would have liked them to. Different outcomes, but that’s part of the … As people say, yeah you got the scratches on your back as I do. You live and learn, and so I think those are kind of experiential type things that you learn as you go or learn as you grow, right?

But I’d actually maybe step back, maybe 35 years ago, a little bit beyond Back to the Future and I’ll tell you what I tell my kids who are 16, 17, and 18, I got two older sons as well that are 28 and 30. But I have three teenagers in the house and I give them … I call it Dad’s three teachings if you will. So I’ll share those with you. So the most important teaching I tell them is I grew up in a Catholic household, so I say God will always be there for you and always put your trust in God, always … I say don’t ask for outcomes, I always ask them, ask for inputs. So say, “God, please give me the wisdom, the knowledge, the fortitude, the strength, the willpower, whatever, so that I can do what I need to do.” Right?

Craig Corbin:

Sure.

Joe Hickey:

That’s kind of dad’s rule number one if you will. The second is to think outside the box. So I’m sitting down at the dinner table, about six, eight months ago, COVID time, so you’re in the house, all five of you are grouped together all day long, and if you’re familiar with Keurig coffee pods, right? You get the little cups and you put them in and you make your coffee, so they come in a box. You pick them up at Costco. So I laid a Tim Horton’s coffee box on a table and I said, “What do you see?” They’re like, “Dad, you’re going to give us another one of your stories, right?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Well what do you see? I see a box?” I said, “Okay, how big is the box?” It’s a foot long by … They use centimeters, right? So 30 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 30, right? I said, “Okay.” So then I turned the box on the corner and I said, “Now what do you see?” “Well Dad, it’s the same box.” I said, “Yeah, but do you see something?” “Well, I see the bottom of the box.” I said, “Oh. So you see a different perspective on the box.” “Okay, Dad, whatever you say.”

So then I said, “What do you think is in the box?” “Well, Dad obviously it’s Keurig coffee pods.” I said, “But imagine if you were inside the box, what would you see?” They said, “Well, we’d see the walls and we’d see the ceiling and we’d see the floor of the box.” I said, “Exactly. So think about that box as any problem that you have in your life. And if you’re stuck inside the problem, you will never be able to solve the problem. So step outside the box, step outside the problem, look all around you, the world around you, to bring solutions to that problem that is the box.”

Craig Corbin:

Excellent.

Joe Hickey:

I said, “That’s thinking outside the box.” “Okay Dad, can we go now?” So I said, “Yes you can, but remember, that’s Dad’s rule number two.” Then rule number three is … I tell them you have to build your resilience and when they get upset, like my teenage daughter. If she’s making eggs and they’re not perfectly cooked, she gets upset and I’m like, “It’s an egg. If you’re going to eat it, then …” I said, “That’s a small thing. Don’t get upset by the small things. Because when you don’t get upset, then you can manage your emotions on the small things, then you’re ready for medium-sized things, and when you handle medium-sized things, you’ll be able to handle the large things,” and the one thing I share with them, in life, you will always encounter big things. Like your parent dies, I had a brother that died, I had a son who has autism and all those challenges, those are my personal challenges, but everybody has personal challenges, and if you’re not continually building up your resilience as you move through life, you’ll never be able to handle those personal challenges. So that’s if I was to whisper to my 18-year-old self, that’s probably the three things I would whisper.

Craig Corbin:

Very, very sage advice, and the world would be a much better place if everyone would adhere to those three bits of advice. Final question for you as we wrap up our visit, sort of the converse of the Back to the Future, we’ll ask you to pull out the crystal ball and give us what you see in the years ahead for ROCK Networks?

Joe Hickey:

So community broadband networks for the next five to seven years is going to be obviously a big part of the future of the company but if I think about technology in general, and the story I told you about when Nova was originally built out in 2007 the Nova Scotia Network and two meg down, a half meg up was broadband, right? Then it was five down, one up, now it’s 50/10. The U.S. government just passed the Senate act for broadband, and broadband in the U.S. is now defined … I think it’s 100, I’m not sure if it’s 100, 120, or is it 100 symmetrical. But pretty soon 100 symmetrical is going to be the new definition of broadband. So you’re going to need fiber-based networks.

Eventually, it will be gigabit and eventually, it will be 10 gigabits. We’re going to see new applications that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. So you know 15 years ago Facebook didn’t exist or Snapchat, all those applications, Netflix et cetera that we take for granted and if I think things like artificial intelligence and virtual reality, I saw a presentation from a CTO at Nokia a few years ago and he asked the audience a question, “Well why do you think with virtual reality headsets why they tell you not to use them for more than 30 minutes at a time?” Everybody’s like, “Well I don’t know. Just your head starts to spin after a while.” He said, “Precisely. Do you know why?” We’re like no, and he said, “Well, the speed that it delivers to that headset over a broadband connection is a few hundred megabits, and your human eye moves quicker than that 100 megabit connection can deliver, and to enable true virtual reality, you actually need a 10-gigabit connection, and then the destabilization of your eyes versus your ears and your inner ear and all that, is actually stabilized.

Craig Corbin:

Interesting.

Joe Hickey:

So I thought, “You know? [inaudible 00:43:14] thinking about things.” So eventually, we will have 10-gigabit connections to every home to enable virtual reality or artificial intelligence. So bandwidth bigger, better, faster will always be the case in telecom.

Craig Corbin:

Interesting. Very interesting. Well, Brad, I think you would concur that we’re going to need another visit with Joe in the very near future to continue the conversation.

Brad Hine:

Oh, I require one, absolutely.

Joe Hickey:

Reach out any time.

Craig Corbin:

Joe, this has been fantastic. We greatly appreciate that and we also want to thank the fine sponsors again of The Broadband Bunch, UTOPIA Fiber, building a more connected nation. DxTEL, creators of the Harper Broadband Marketing Library. Calex, the cloud and software platforms that simplify businesses, excite subscribers, and grow value. By ITK, In The Know Solutions Group, the process first, technology second. And of course ETI Software Solutions, your zero-touch automation experts. Joe, thank you again. Congratulations on all the phenomenal work being done. We can’t wait for the next time to visit.

Joe Hickey:

Craig and Brad, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to the podcast.

Craig Corbin:

Absolutely. That will wrap up this edition of The Broadband Bunch. On behalf of everyone here, thanks for letting us be a part of your day. We’ll see you next time. So long everyone.

© 2021 Enhanced Telecommunications.

About the Author

Priscilla Berarducci - Sales and Marketing Coordinator

Priscilla manages digital content and supports sales/marketing efforts for ETI. She also serves as brand manager for the Broadband Bunch podcast where she books industry professionals who want to share their broadband stories.