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 and Vetro FiberMap.
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 your host, Joe Coldebella. We are at Calix ConneXions 2023 in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. Joining me is Paul Palermo, Vice President of Business Development with Nrby. Paul, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
Paul Palermo:
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. This is awesome.
Joe Coldebella:
I am super excited to dive into what you guys do. Before we do that, I’d love if you could share with our audience a little background about yourself and how you found your way into the broadband world and Nrby in general.
Paul Palermo:
Certainly. I have been in the broadband world for a long time. My pedigree goes back through ARRIS, through Vecima, and Thomson Technicolor. So I have been in the industry for quite a while. I actually entered the industry back in the days of voice-over IP when consumer phones started to be distributed through cable companies. I actually worked for a manufacturer of phones and had launched a campaign to put that together with some cable companies. And the next thing I knew, I was part of the cable industry.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah, it’s always funny just listening to the different stories, in terms of this person had their father who was in the industry. I actually found my way into the industry through a poker game. I used to play with somebody who is in the industry. So I was looking for a new opportunity, and now I’m doing this.
Paul Palermo:
And once you’re in, you’re part of the team, your part of the team.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. We can’t get out.
Paul Palermo:
Part of the family.
Joe Coldebella:
I would love if you could tell us about Nrby. From what I understand, it’s fundamentally reinventing how mobile work gets done.
Paul Palermo:
That’s an interesting way to start it, for sure. Nrby is bigger than that. It’s a cloud-hosted platform. We’re all about data. Nrby drives everything from data, and that’s data that we take all the way from its genesis, which can be in the field with the mobile worker, right on through the monitoring systems across the network, where we’ll be able to draw in and aggregate that data to bring it all together into one view. We take all that data; we take the location sensitivity related to that data; and we add a series of unique identifiers across all of these various pieces of data.
Visualize the assets across your network. We bring all that together to one screen. And we do it with a series of analyses that allow you to start to spot the trends and the anomalies and see what’s happening within your network from multiple viewpoints. Because, again, we’re relating all those individual assets and active devices across your network into one view. So now, with that, you can spot those trends or anomalies and drill into them because you’ve got the underlying data as well.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay. I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down. Full disclosure, I’m not a technical guy, so I might ask some rudimentary questions. So I would love to take a little bit of a step back. One of the questions that I get is, “Why is data so important?” It seems like that seems to be the new buzzword. Data is the new oil. And not just in the broadband industry, but it seems like it’s pervasive everywhere even in healthcare. Everything is all about the data now.
Paul Palermo:
Absolutely, and that is the new oil. The new economy drives on data. With data, we know that we can get to faster, more specific, and more directed decisions. And that’s helping our businesses to respond more quickly. It’s helping us to give a better experience to our customers. It’s helping us to address problems without the additional expenses of the troubleshooting that might be involved in citing down to that particular event that’s causing that challenge or causing that problem.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay. Is the idea that data lets the person get better actionable advice? So instead of duck and chuck, it’s like, “Hey, there’s the bullseye. And we can hit it”?
Paul Palermo:
Very much so. Data’s definitely doing that for us. Let’s keep in mind, though, that it’s data. An item of data is just a single point in time. The data here might be Joe’s blue shirt. That’s a data point. But Joe’s blue shirt, tanned slacks, dark hair, and dark eyes. Joe’s got a five o’clock shadow this morning. Now, all of a sudden, that data has become information, and that information has painted a picture. There’s something we can visualize to that. By having just those individual points assembled into information, assembled into a whole set, I now have something that I know. And now I can start to make other assessments about it. Obviously, that is a very rudimentary example.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure.
Paul Palermo:
Apply that to a network that’s giving you hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of data points across multiple devices, all at the same time, and be able to assemble those individual data points into information. And do it visually. Do it to a point where I can spot the trend that’s happening within. I can spot the anomalies that are taking place within. And now I can start to take action based on that. In Nrby, we do exactly that. Some of that allows us to automate and dynamically take actions. Some of it allows us to analyze, structure, and play it into future actions. We can start to give a level of predictive analysis as to where things may be headed just from that picture that we can paint with those data points.
Joe Coldebella:
The word that I grabbed onto was ‘predictive’. So the idea is that it’s not foolproof, but it’s giving the person who’s analyzing the data the most information. So it’s not just the one day where I’m wearing the blue shirt, tan pants, and the five o’clock shadow. That is one point in time. But then you’re also collecting tomorrow, the next day, and the next thing. Then you pull from that a clearer answer that’s possible in terms of what’s going to happen moving on from that.
Paul Palermo:
Precisely. For the broadband guys, I’ll give an example from a customer.
Joe Coldebella:
Perfect.
Paul Palermo:
We had a customer who told us anecdotally in conversation, “You know, we have a node that is giving us a challenge. It seems like it’s just always happened.” So, we took all the data, and a long story short, and we laid it all out. We were able to identify that challenge, clear as day. The data spots it. Data doesn’t lie. Every Friday afternoon, right around the same time period, somewhere between 12:00 and 2:00 on Fridays, we’re having this anomaly.
Well, we dug into it a little bit further. And what we came to find is that this particular node happened to sit in a field that got mowed every Friday in the afternoon. And it was because of that data that they were able to understand the issue. Because otherwise, the guys would go out, check the node, balance it, review it, and everything would be perfect.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. Okay.
Paul Palermo:
We were able to use that data to identify when and what those RF signals were that were there. And then be able to identify what went on every Friday afternoon. It’s just a fun anecdote as to what data can point us to, in a simplistic form.
Joe Coldebella:
At the end of the day, that’s solving the problem. You look at the scale that we’re dealing with. Sometimes everything runs smoothly, but then there’s that one hiccup. What I would hope would happen is that allows the broadband operator to generate or concentrate resources on that area to solve the problem. Then things run more smoothly altogether. Is that pretty accurate?
Paul Palermo:
You nailed it. The nice thing about it is that they had tried to address this problem before. But they never addressed it at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon. They would go out there on a Monday or a Wednesday, and there would be no problem. The data told them this is something we can now count on, it’s predictable. And in that predictability, they happen to be there at the same point in time as the event.
Joe Coldebella:
I love that. I wonder if they said the person who was mowing the lawn, “Wow, you’re really dedicated to mowing your lawn on Friday.” Some people live in those patterns.
Paul Palermo:
Very true.
Joe Coldebella:
Who in an organization would use Nrby? Would it be the field people, the CEO, or customer service reps?
Paul Palermo:
Awesome question. Nrby really gets used by everybody across the organization. Again, it is data. And I’m going to drill a little bit deeper for you to paint the picture. We’re actually taking data from all the sources across. So we’ll get data from the ticketing system, so we know all the service tickets that are out there. But it’s not just a ticket anymore.
Because our technology is location sensitive, we can place on a map visually where that ticket is, the frequency of those tickets, and the frequency of a particular type of ticket, whether it be a customer internet ticket or a streaming-video ticket, or other. We can start to break that down. Now, at the same time, we can overlay the health of the actives across the plants. Give me the node health, give me the amplifiers, and give any of the readings that are coming from the actives across the plant.
Additionally, we can go to the devices inside the home. What’s the status of the modem inside the home? What’s the status of the Wi-Fi inside the home? And what’s great about it is that Nrby doesn’t actually monitor any of these devices. Our customers all have solutions that do that, and they specialize in that and do that extremely well. They gather all that information, but they’re all disparate.
So the guy that’s looking at challenges on the modem has to go to a different system to look at challenges on the Wi-Fi and has to go to a different system to look at challenges upstream in the plant. He can’t see it all at one time. Nrby brings it all together and gives them that visual all at one time. So now, they can start to identify issues that are happening.
We have a couple of fairly large customers. The way that they use Nrby is that we monitor all of the devices on their plant, inclusive of all the CP in their homes, all the modems in particular. Okay? What Nrby will do is, because it’s location-sensitive, it will actually paint the map for you. It will put a little dot for every modem. The green dots are those modems that are performing properly, and the red dots are those modems that are out of spec.
Now, ‘out of spec’ can mean a number of different things. It can mean that the modem is really impairing that subscriber’s opportunity for services. Or it can be out of spec, and the subscriber’s not really having major issues where they’ve called in a service ticket as of yet. But what Nrby’s system will do is scan all of that map, and we’ll identify those pockets where there are modems out of spec.
When we locate that pocket, we can go in, and we can review all of those modems inside of Nrby because we have all this data. We’re going to pull it from each of the individual elements. If we can identify perhaps a common RF impairment, for instance, across all of those modems reporting out of spec, we can go to the next level and we can take all of the service data and lay the service data over them.
We can say, “Here’s a pocket of modems. It’s 20 modems reporting out of spec in the same general area. Of those 20 modems, you know, 12 of them have service tickets, 8 of them have service tickets,” whatever it happens to be. Chances are good, Joe, because we’ve been able to identify this with data, we’re able to know that because of that common RF impairment, it’s probably not an issue in the home.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay, sure.
Paul Palermo:
It’s likely an issue in the plant. So before I roll 12 trucks and start scheduling these customers, let me get a technician in the area. Let’s take a look at the Nrby. Let’s identify what’s going on with the actives up that leg of the plant and identify if there’s something that we can see immediately that needs to be addressed.
Joe Coldebella:
Just to simplify, so is this being like the canary in the coal mine to get there before something happens? Is that the idea?
Paul Palermo:
It is. In essence, it really is. It gives the guys a level of visibility that they didn’t previously have. I shouldn’t say that. They have the visibility, but in order to do that level of analysis and get that data from all of those different sources and put it all together, by the time they’re there, we don’t know how many more service calls have already come in.
Joe Coldebella:
Sure. Okay, right.
Paul Palermo:
How many trucks have rolled to find out that there’s not an issue inside the home? So getting ahead of all that is hugely important. To break it down to the specifics, the customers that deploy this particular solution from Nrby have identified a 60% cancellation rate. So once the repair is made, they can push the button, see everything turns green, and they can call up and say, “Hey, Mr. Customer. You know, we did some significant work in your area. We think we’ve resolved your problem. Would you mind tuning into channel 123 and confirming for us that your streaming is still working again? It is? That’s fantastic. Do you mind if we cancel that truck roll for you, and not bother you this afternoon?” 60% cancellation rate.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s fantastic. That’s like a running joke. When is the guy going to get there? Between 12:00 and 6:00. And then you’re there the whole day. Then all of a sudden, they show up at 5:50, and you’re just like, “What have I done?” It’s definitely one of those win-wins. It’s a win for the customer, and it’s a win for the company as well.
Paul Palermo:
It puts the context around it, for the level of customer satisfaction, back to the operator. I was proactively notified. I got another call when they said it was done, and I confirmed it. They let me cancel my truck, so I don’t have to wait any longer. It’s that personal relationship that Michael here has been speaking of all the last two days. This helps them to guide into that, and a lot of that, quite frankly, can be automated.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. In terms of truck rolls, I would assume that if it’s a rural area and they’ve got to send somebody 60 miles or whatever, that’s not good. In terms of the size of operators, is there no one too big or no one too small?
Paul Palermo:
There really isn’t. The solution is scalable to virtually any size operator.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome.
Paul Palermo:
And it can be tweaked and customized to match that operator. You asked a little bit earlier about the whole Nrby picture. I’m going to step back again and paint more. The picture I gave you, was what we refer to as a “use case”. That particular one we call our “moose pin” or modem out of spec, which actually came from one of our operators. And their request is to customize the pin with a moose on it so that it gets everybody’s attention. So, it literally has a picture of a moose in a pin on a map.
Joe Coldebella:
I love it.
Paul Palermo:
It’s classic. That particular use case, again, has been adopted by several operators. And is incredibly popular. But when we talk about use cases, we scan the gamut of places across the organization where those use cases apply. Nrby really got its start back in safety, in all frankness. That’s really where we began. We were able to start to pin safety events. It could be anything from, “Hey, you know what? I have a sinkhole here.”
So we would drop a pin on that sinkhole, and we would set a geofence around it. Anybody with the Nrby app that entered into or out of that geofence was given an alert. And that alert could be customized with an MP4 file to say, “Hey, you know what? You’ve just entered a dangerous area. We’ve got a sinkhole at 5th and Maine. Please stay back.” This has gone so far as to; customers could use it for things like active shooters.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay, wow.
Paul Palermo:
You’re on a lunch break. You’re taking a drive down the road, go grab some lunch, your Nrby beeps and tells you that there’s an active shooter in the area. You may not have gotten that notice otherwise.
Joe Coldebella:
Right. Hopefully, that doesn’t get used very often.
Paul Palermo:
Hopefully, it does not. It doesn’t. That’s just one example from a safety perspective. We do lone workers. We can actually identify, “Hey, I’m working in this area by myself.” Click. “Here’s my location.” What’s important is that the Nrby app will identify the exact location, and it’ll give you all of the details that you want to have associated with it. And it will require an update.
So if I don’t tune back in 30 minutes, then we need to ping that worker. If we don’t hear from him in 10 more minutes, then we’re going to call that worker. If we don’t hear from 15 more, minutes, we’re going to send somebody to that site and make sure he is okay.
These are the types of things that we started. That migrated into maintenance for us, and that’s where we talked about the plant itself. And now we’ve got data coming in from all kinds of great providers out there that are monitoring these systems and bringing us the data that allows us to not necessarily monitor the plant — there are people out there doing that — but taking that data in, aggregating it, making it visual, putting it into charts, graphs, and heat maps.
Making it visual for everybody from the guy in the field, literally on his iPhone or his Android phone, to his supervisor, to the folks in the NOC. That visualization’s a fantastic tool for guys in customer service, but it also gives them the ability to output very consistent, regular reports for executives and chairmen. This is the kind of thing you can bring into a board meeting and say, “Here are the results from month one, month three, month five, quarter one, quarter two, and quarter three,” and have that type of consistent reporting.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. It seems like, the great thing about it is that you get everyone swimming in the same direction, in the sense that you have the data to back it up, so you’ve got some evidence. Then it’s not a question of opinion. The idea is that you’re showing facts. Correct?
Paul Palermo:
Correct. Exactly. It is data. Now, the nice thing about is, this data comes in all forms. It could be static data. This cabinet has a specific number on it. This cabinet is at a specific location. That is static. Every time I go back to that cabinet, that’s not going to change. But the items monitored inside the cabinet might be dynamic. Maybe it’s temperature or throughput.
Whatever those factors are, because that data is being pulled at some regular frequency, we can capture that. Our system will capture it, document it, and trigger other events. So if we identify that temperature has risen within a given active device, we can now deploy something to address it before it actually goes down and becomes a service problem.
Joe Coldebella:
How long does it take for Nrby to be deployed? Is it a flip of the switch, or is it something that takes a little time?
Paul Palermo:
It varies a little bit. We have some use cases that are just super straightforward. So a lot of times folks will use this for things like pole audits or just basic device maintenance, power-supply maintenance, or cabinet maintenance. If we go to do a pole audit, we could literally be up in five to seven days. We download everything right from your files. Or if you’re using a public utility, the utility’s files. It gives us the latitude and longitude of everything there.
Most of the time, it tells us all of the attachments. So the teams that are doing the audits know what to look for. And they can capture, “Hey, you know what? Is this where it’s supposed to be? Yes. Does it have what it says it’s going to have? Yes. Are we being charged the lease for this pole? Are we supposed to be charged the lease for this pole?”
They can capture all of that information and data and start to create a good, clean picture. The nice thing is, because they’re capturing it electronically, Joe, it’s all right there in the app. It’s all in the digital record and in the cloud. It’s 100% archival. We keep all the data forever for the customer. They own it. It’s their data. Keep it all there. But the nice thing is that now it’s searchable. They can go in, and they can find anything that they need within that dataset at any point in time. No more paper, filing cabinets, coffee stains, and all the great stuff that we’ve read about.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. You’re listening to the Broadband Bunch podcast. We are at Calix ConneXions 2023. We are joined by Paul Palermo of Nrby. Just want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsors, ETI software and VETRO FiberMap. Couldn’t do it without those guys, so want to thank them. Paul, awesome visit. Really enjoy just learning the nuts and bolts of data. As you were talking about this, I thought about the issue of privacy. Can you unpack that as a final point? I think that’s one of the big concerns that everybody has in terms of data. When you collect the data, is it anonymous? How does that work?
Paul Palermo:
That’s a great, great question. It’s an important one that all of our customers ask and need to understand. In almost all cases, 95% of the time, we work with data that is anonymized and non-personal. So no PII data in the Nrby system. In those instances where it is required, we are SOC-compliant, so we’ve got all the compliances.
Joe Coldebella:
What is ‘SOC-compliant’?
Paul Palermo:
That’s the industry standard for data protection in the cloud.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay, perfect.
Paul Palermo:
We subscribe to that, so we make sure that all of our data is handled that way. We obfuscate all the data when we bring it through. When we do the unique ID elements, we create those unique IDs so they are internal to Nrby so that it can’t really be tracked by anybody else. It helps to keep all of that privacy in place.
Joe Coldebella:
As a broader question is, “Who owns my data?” Right?
Paul Palermo:
Yep. Great question.
Joe Coldebella:
I don’t know. I would love to get your thoughts on that. Is it one of those things where you own your own data? Or if someone captures it, they have control of it?
Paul Palermo:
I’m going to take it from Nrby’s perspective first and foremost. For Nrby, it’s your data. We use it; we’ll let you know what we’re going to do with it and how we’re going to do it; and we present it back to you. Our goal, really, is to take your data and put it into a format where you can analyze it. You can start to make decisions from it whether they be for budgeting next year, network planning for the next five years, or other. It’s your data. We don’t share the data.
We do create what we refer to as a “Nrby index” which is where we will anonymize data from like-sized customers using like use cases so that we can identify where the industry stands for certain things. It also gives new customers that come on board a reference point.
The best-in-class is doing it here. You know, right now, we’re performing at this stage. And our expectation is, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, we’re going to be at point X within the range of the Nrby index range of what best-in-class is performing at today. We do use data that way, but it’s 100% anonymized and aggregated across multiple different operators.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. This has been a fantastic visit. Appreciate you spending the time educating me. Hopefully, our listeners are getting some information, and learning things as well. If folks want to learn more about Nrby or get in contact with you, where can they go?
Paul Palermo:
They can go right to Nrby.com. Or they can send an email to me directly at paul@nrby.com.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Paul, I can’t thank you enough. Thank you so very much. Appreciate the time.
Paul Palermo:
Joe, thank you very much. This is a great experience. I really enjoyed being here with you guys and look forward to hearing more of your podcasts.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. That’s going to wrap up this episode of the Broadband Bunch. Until next time, we’ll see you guys later.
