The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Pete Pizzutillo, and I am joined today by Jeff Neblett. He is the CEO of ISPN Network Services and Iglass Networks. Jeff, hey, thanks for joining us today.
Jeff Neblett:
Thanks, Pete. I’m happy to be a guest here today.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, we got some interesting topics that I think are relevant for all the chaos that’s happening in the marketplace. But before we dig into that, it’d just really be helpful to understand how you ended up running ISPN Network Services and Iglass Networks. You know, what was your path to where you are today?
Jeff Neblett:
Awesome. Yes, I’m happy to share that. And my colleague and both ISPN and Iglass’s president and CFO was on the Broadband Bunch about two years ago. I was jealous that he got the first pass on the podcast, but I’ll take it. Unfortunately, this year I haven’t been able to make it to as many industry events as I’d like to. So it would’ve been nice to do this in person, but I’m happy to be here.
A bit of my background. So I joined ISPN as CEO in February 2020. ISPN has been around since 1994, so it’s a long-standing enduring business focused on the telecom and broadband space. But I joined the business along with Scott through an acquisition. And in that acquisition, the founder and CEO decided to leave the business. He was in his mid-seventies. It was a family-owned business. We got to know the family and management well, and they said, “Hey, we love the idea of you and Scott taking a proactive approach to management.”
So not only investing in the business but joining the business in a leadership capacity. So the thought process is, we could join ISBN and take it to 2.0. It was a legacy business that had done a lot of great things, but we wanted to continue investing in it and growing in it. So I have been with the company for about three-and-a-half years. And most recently in March, we acquired another business out of North Carolina called Iglass Networks. Iglass Networks is a network monitoring business. They have a 24/7 NOC located right outside of Raleigh in Cary, North Carolina.
It’s important for us to have that U.S. base, and it offers a complimentary service to ISPN. So now we are helping run, operate, and grow both businesses with a focus on the community broadband space.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Your journey sounds very familiar to mine, so I understand kind of where you’re going. So you guys are working with community broadband leaders and operators. What are some of the major challenges that they’re dealing with right now?
Jeff Neblett:
You know, I think, especially in the last year-and-a-half, something we have heard a lot about is staffing problems, scarcity of talent and expertise. I know the Fiber Broadband Association and NTCA have a bunch of training programs that they’re implementing, knowing there’s a lot of growth in this industry, but there is a lack of skilled personnel who can help deploy and support those networks.
So that’s one thing we certainly see on our end, especially in our line of business doing customer support, managed services, and network monitoring for these ISPs. They might not be able to find the right people or some of those people might be retiring, right? They’ve been around for a while and they’re ready to retire. Another thing we’re seeing in this space is that there’s been a history of a lot of different systems. It is something that amazed me when I came into telecom three-and-a-half years ago. These broadband providers use a lot of different technologies and systems. And if you think about the swivel chairing between different screens and different systems, that’s a lot for folks to learn and manage. So something that I’m seeing change and focus on is reducing that sprawl of systems.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Technical complexity seems to be a massive crippler in all these organizations, but the smaller you get, the more significant that becomes.
Jeff Neblett:
Exactly. And there can be a lot of risk if you’re depending on certain folks managing or understanding several of those different tools and systems.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Just to add onto that, one of the things that we see people focusing on is really focusing on the subscriber, right? So historically, as you mentioned, this was about the systems specifically around billing systems. I think people kind of build the organizations around that because it makes sense; it pays the bills. But consumer expectations have shifted, and subscribers are more tech-savvy. Plus, as you mentioned, there are fewer and fewer skilled resources around. So trying to help the subscriber do more self-service and get more intelligence is something that we see. Do you see any of those kinds of conversations when you’re talking to the market?
Jeff Neblett:
Yes. I certainly see the move there. We refer to our customers as our partners because we see them as an extension of our team. But a lot of the partner providers that we work with are moving towards getting more to the fingertips of the subscribers. When the subscriber says, “Hey, if I want to add a new service at any time can I do that? Can I do that online? Can I get answers to my questions quicker?” And as us serving as that frontline customer support from the ISPN side, it’s really important to us.
And you see an increasing need for data to drive insights on the ISP side. What are subscribers asking when they’re calling in, right? What are they asking for; what are their problems? And from there how can that lead to us changing the experience and improving it for them so they’re no longer having issues, right? Are they calling in because they have 20 devices connected to their network, and they keep having speed issues, right? Well, maybe there’s a need there for them to upgrade to a higher tier.
What’s important to us at ISPN is making sure the providers we work with get those levels of insights so they can take action on those and therefore improve the subscriber experience and from there their subscriber retention and all of that. We’re also seeing a lot on the network monitoring side, how reliable is your network? What’s your uptime? How often are there outages and why? Those are important questions that providers are asking.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, adding to what you just mentioned, the industry has been dominated by hardware and all the different types of hardware it takes to deliver services. And then I feel like software’s been a laggard. But now what you’re talking about is kind of an advanced move of not only having the systems in place, but the insight and the intelligence to do something with all that data that’s coming to you as a network operator. What’s that maturity like for network operators? Do you see folks being able to evolve and step into trying to figure out how to look at the performance or engagement of customers?
Jeff Neblett:
Yes. I think the good news is that there is just a lot more technology and tools to provide those insights. The customers we see that are the most forward-thinking are taking that next level and diving into those kinds of questions and thinking about software services that can get them those answers quicker. I think back to a recent customer conversation we had — it goes back to the system sprawl a little bit — they did a big review recently. And they realized they had a software and vendor list that was 13 to 14 different vendors. All different systems they had folks logging into et cetera.
And a big initiative of theirs was to just simplify that. And one of the reasons we acquired Iglass is when we think about the network monitoring side, there are a lot of different systems depending on the hardware, depending on the network, you might have fixed wireless, you might have some fiber, you might use Adtran, Calix. There are a million other different types of networking gear out there. You might be logging into four or five different systems to get a holistic view of your subscriber base and the network outages and things like that.
So on the Iglass side, they’ve built a platform where we can take all that data and all those network elements and use a single pane of glass where you have the visibility. And we have the eyes on that glass in our NOC to make sure we’re looking at all the alerts that are coming in and what’s happening across the network. So basically reducing some of that sprawl you see.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah. So I want to get back to your original point about the skilled personnel shortage. So we see a lot of different strategies there trying to re-skill existing staff or steal from other industries. But the model that is interesting is partnering with managed service providers like yourselves, right? So, you know, when does that make sense? If I’m a network operator, I have all these challenges going on, what does the environment look like for me to decide that I can’t grow this on my own? I need to look for somebody to help kind of outsource this function, or at least support or, in your term, a partner in this function.
Jeff Neblett:
I think there are several cases where it’ll make sense. I’ll give a few examples and maybe talk about some trends that we’re seeing. There have been a couple of recent customer signs on our end. One was a telephone company that is mostly fiber out of Wyoming. They have about 10,000 subscribers. But given the macroeconomic and labor environment recently, they were really having trouble keeping their support staff and then training new support staff. And that’s not what they wanted to be doing. They wanted to be focused on improving their network, building out more fiber, marketing, and a lot of other things. So we signed them a few months ago just because they knew that is a big piece of our bread and butter. Like, “Hey, you guys do that, that shouldn’t be our focus. You could do it better than us.”
So why don’t we partner with a managed service provider who knows our industry well and can allow us to focus on what our differentiators might be in our market? And, Pete, I know, you know, the competitive dynamics within broadband are only increasing, right? All the government money coming areas are getting a bit more competitive. So I do think as these community-focused broadband providers, these rural operators think about their differentiators, how do they differentiate themselves from the big folks? It might make sense to outsource aspects to managed service providers that really know their industry and their subscribers well.
Pete Pizzutillo:
To a point on that, do you get any pushback in terms of fear because that’s a pretty intimate connection, right? Giving access to my subscribers and data to a third party, is there some hesitancy within the network operators about that? And if so, what are some of the things you do to work through those issues with them?
Jeff Neblett:
Yes, it’s certainly a great question and occasionally you do, right? I understand that. I think ultimately on the ISPN help desk side of things, we think about just end-user technical or customer support. We often see ourselves as augmenting internal teams where our partner providers come to us and they would rather have their folks focusing on a few other things, right? It might be outbound calling to the local market to drum up additional subscribers. It might be tier two or tier three issues, right?
So a lot of times folks will use us to augment their internal teams. And then you also think about overnights in a 24/7 environment. We talk about when would it make sense to use someone in an outsourced capacity. Well, staffing folks, overnight, handling, you know, all the systems, et cetera, the complexity of that can be daunting and not fun, right? So that’s when a lot of times where it really makes sense. You want to be able to advertise that you are available 24/7, and you could get someone on the phone or via chat, et cetera, who can solve your problem and can help you and not just be kind of an answering service.
And a lot of times you make that argument and people understand that it really does make sense to outsource that. But you still maintain that local field, right? You still have your local CSRs or support staff that still have that day-to-day contact, whether it’s in the field or in the local office.
Pete Pizzutillo:
So what I hear you saying is that it’s not at all or none. There are ways to augment your current practices to shed some of the high frequency, lower value tasks to let your few key folks focus on some of the things that are really going to move the needle in terms of growing your business or keeping your customers happy. Is that what you’re saying?
Jeff Neblett:
Exactly. And the other thing to think about when outsourcing to a managed service provider is just like economies of scale, right? Because you as a smaller provider may not have the access or the skillset internally, et cetera, to more complex tools or systems. And what I like about what we do at ISPN and at Iglass is that we make the investment at a larger scale, and then we enable that rural operator with only 3- to 4,000 subscribers to get a piece of that scale because they can buy our services and our technologies at a fraction of the cost where they couldn’t make that full investment to the contact center suite, some of the AI tools we use, et cetera, in house. So I think there’s an aspect of that too.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah, you’re listening to the Broadband Bunch, and we’ve been speaking with Jeff Neblett. He’s the CEO of ISPN Network Services and Iglass Networks. Jeff, you’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’ve recently added Iglass Networks to your portfolio. So you had your core business, and you added the network NOC capabilities. What’s your thinking there in terms of why that one plus one equals three for you and your customers?
Jeff Neblett:
As we examined the ISPN suite of services and what would make sense to add to that suite and where would it make sense to go deeper? For the last few years, we’ve been thinking about it, and network monitoring and NOC kept coming to the top of the list. And we got to know the Iglass team. We first approached them about partnering with them and then got to meet the founders. And what I loved about the Iglass team was a lot of their core values and their purpose is really rooted in a similar way to that of ISPN.
So ISPN’s purpose is to help people stay connected. And that is exactly what Iglass is doing with its monitoring portal and its 24/7 NOC. And one of their values is customer driven. One of ISBN’s values was customer first. Both companies kind of see themselves as extensions of the teams of the providers we work with. So a lot of the stuff resonated.
When you just think about the market, having the NOC and the network monitoring tightly integrated with the customer support or technical support side of the house is valuable because we have a level of insight and a level of knowledge of what’s happening on the network side, and that directly impacts the customer experience, right? So we can immediately know that there’s an outage or some anomaly happening here on the network side, and it is impacting customers in X, Y, and Z areas. If they call in, we know what to tell them, right?
So as we thought about some of the problems that we’re seeing that rural broadband operators are confronting whether it’s staffing, whether it’s the systems and tool sprawl we talked about, uh, we thought that uniting these two pieces is powerful. It’s exciting to see. We’re in the early innings of integrating and all that, but I’m excited to see where that goes.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah. So I’m a firm believer in that type of continuity, right? Because going back to how network operators have been constructed by these functional areas — the subscriber, the customer doesn’t care about the different functions, right? Everyone should have a kind of historical understanding of the relationship with that customer. So having those tied together makes a ton of sense. So help me understand, like the customer service augmentation, are you guys offering full operations services from Iglass? Or is it bolting into the operational, the lower automatable operations, and that your clients still have an operations team and you guys are just supporting them? Is that how it works?
Jeff Neblett:
Yeah, it can vary by partner. So some folks utilize Iglass and say, “Hey, we love your monitoring platform. We still have our in-house staff.” But they’re going to use your monitoring platform and actually even follow the alerts from it, et cetera. A bunch of others says, kind of similar to the help desk side, “You have a 24/7 NOC staff, they know what they’re doing. I don’t need, you know, Joe getting up in the middle of the night with random alerts. That’s not a good employee experience. So you handle all the alerts and remediation for those alerts.”
So it’s a little bit of a mix of both. It can be fully turnkey for some; for others, it may not. And then sometimes that just depends on size or needs. The other thing I would just mention between the two companies, we’re now working with about 170 community-focused ISPs. And between the help desk managed servers, the stuff we offer at ISPN, and then the network monitoring and NOC, we service 3 million subscribers. So I’m excited to gather more insights and share those insights with providers on how they can improve their networks, and how they can benefit from the best practices we see across those 170 providers.
Pete Pizzutillo:
That teed up my next question. You have that purview, and you have this historical view. What are some of the big things from an operational perspective that is must-haves that operators should be thinking about?
Jeff Neblett:
When it comes to differentiating in the market, I do think the 24/7 presence in terms of someone being able to answer the phone and answer the chat. It’s funny, I didn’t realize how many folks would send people to a voicemail or just an answering service, someone who couldn’t really troubleshoot issues, after 5:00 PM. So to me, if I’m playing video games or trying to connect at home at 6:00 or 7:00, I have a problem. I don’t really want to have someone take my phone number and call me back the next day, right?
So I think that’s a big differentiator. On the operations side, I do think just being wary of many different systems with overlap where you’re having to have people on your team enter data into different systems, and they’re not interconnected or integrated. We’ve seen people run into trouble from that standpoint.
Pete Pizzutillo:
What about AI? There’s all this fuss over AI. How do you see that impacting both sides of the equation that you all are dealing with?
Jeff Neblett:
Yeah, right now it’s like the topic of the last three or four months. And the disruptive power across our industry and really every industry is insane. But from ISBN’s standpoint, about two years ago on our QC and our QA team, we implemented call analytics, an AI tool, that transcribed every single call and did some analysis on those calls on how we were troubleshooting sentiment analysis. It is insane what some of these tools can do.
We jumped on that bandwagon early, and it has allowed us over the last two years to review every single one of our calls and then focus our teams on the segment of those calls where there needs to be more training. Or it showed us that we need a better tool set or access to tools to better troubleshoot. So it’s been impactful to our business. And I think it’s only going to grow. For the help desk side, we’re implementing a new contact center solution, which has a bunch of AI tools. And the thing that I’m excited about most is just making both the customer experience and the employee agent experience better, right?
So how can we get the information on the agent side and call the help desk side to their fingertips quicker so they can troubleshoot faster so they don’t have to sift through things that may take time or may lead to a worse customer experience? And then on the customer experience side, things like self-service and a lot of other areas will be furthered quickly with the growth in the advancements in AI. On the network monitoring side, et cetera, it’s just going to lead to, in my opinion, better networks, better troubleshooting, and a better customer experience. Obviously, things are moving rapidly.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of dubious motives being mentioned around AI, but there are some practical and beneficial applications. And in this case, what I heard you say is that you reviewed all your calls and identified training opportunities. With 3 million subscribers, that’s a lot of freaking calls to go through. So that’s hard to do without any kind of machine support. That’s amazing. So if we’re talking to network operators, right? You’re standing in the hallway of one of these conferences right now, and they’re not sure where they are. What are some of the things that they can start doing today to start tackling the challenges that we talked about besides enlisting your help? What are some of the things they should be thinking about and lining up?
Jeff Neblett:
You know, as we think about the future of the industry and competitive dynamics, et cetera, I would just go back to what really differentiates you from the other providers or the bigger providers. And what’s your bread and butter? I’m still a newbie here, right? I’m learning so much, but I love the space because the sense of community and connection that the rural broadband providers we work with day in, and day out have is unbelievable. I really don’t think you see that in a lot of other industries or a lot of other areas across the U.S.; I was amazed at all the cooperatives out there, and they all really do care about giving back.
And building on that sense of community and understanding and listening to the community and their needs is important. A lot of the providers we work with do such a great job within their community. They are the trusted technical expertise within their community. They might not have Best Buy or Geek Squad or other things; they may not have these other technical experts to help them repair things within their local community. And a lot of folks turn to their ISP who they trust to help them through things like that. So there’s going to be opportunities for rural broadband providers to bring more to the end user. To add a lot of value, not just to make money, but actually to provide value to the end user. My feedback would just be to listen to the customer and focus on the community.
Pete Pizzutillo:
I totally agree about the community thing, where this non-competitive sharing cooperative ethos is strange but refreshing. You don’t see it in other industries. So that’s amazing. But you’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re relatively new to broadband as am I, but the consumer expectation has been set by folks outside of broadband, right? Telco and cable have always been bad at customer service, but other people have been doing a great job.
So I think what de-risks a lot of what we’re talking about is there are models to look at. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, right? And there are a lot of people that have already solved this problem in different industries, and reaching out to different industries to grab folks that have been there and have done that before is a good way to jumpstart and change out the DNA in a lot of cases to start solving this problem. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Jeff Neblett:
Oh, certainly I do. I would say that in some aspects of this space, there are very old-school ways of thinking, right? I do think to your point, you can look at other industries and how they have evolved. How have they innovated more rapidly? And take those learnings.
Pete Pizzutillo:
Just go look at your health insurance. Trying to file a claim and you got your chatbots and all the other stuff. There’s some painful stuff, but there are a lot of analogs that are applicable to this space.
Breaking out the crystal ball just to keep moving. If you’re looking ahead, where do you see us in 24 months? What do you think we’re getting right? And what do you think we still have some work to do in this area?
Jeff Neblett:
I by no means think that I have a crystal ball. And I believe there are others who are much better educated in thinking about where we’re going. But the increased demand that we’ve seen, Covid really shined a light on all of that. While it may slow down a little bit, there are plenty of rural areas that are either unserved or underserved. So just continuing to build out and focus on those communities is important. And I talked earlier about competition. I’d go back to that. We are certainly going to see increased competition among the ISPs in these spaces, whereas in the past there may not have been as much.
Consolidation is something we’re seeing a lot of. Our customer base hasn’t consolidated too much, but obviously, there’s a lot of money coming into the space, whether it’s private equity or government funding. There certainly is going to be a continued increase in consolidation among providers out there. There are ownership groups, et cetera, that are aging out. I’m keeping an eye on the technology side. Fiber certainly is the future, but there are other technologies out there that are making traction. T-Mobile has been making some traction with its mobile offering, et cetera. So those areas I’m focused on as well as AI and the rapidly advancing technology.
Pete Pizzutillo:
I think you mentioned a lot of good stuff in there. The consolidation one is interesting. Part of that value proposition is how can you take on new networks, new customers, and new support faster, right? That’s kind of where all the math is done. So it should be interesting to see the chaos that ensues there. Jeff, I appreciate you sharing your insight. How can our listeners learn more about ISPN Network Services and Iglass Networks?
Jeff Neblett:
Yeah, thank you, Pete. Check out our websites, www.ispn.net or Iglass.net. You can feel free to email me directly at jeff@ispn.com. But the websites are the best way to reach out. I would love to chat. I’m super passionate about this space, and I love making connections.
Pete Pizzutillo:
I appreciate you for joining the show. Thanks again. And that’s going to wrap up this episode of The Broadband Bunch. I want to thank everybody for listening. If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably into all things broadband like we are. If you get a chance, please check out our website broadbandbunch.com. We have multiple episodes that we release weekly and some other resources. We’d really love for you to reach out and share your story with us so you can reach out to us on the website. Thanks again for listening.
