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.
Brad Hine:
Hello, everyone in broadband land. Welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Brad Hine, your host, here with stories, stats, and samples from the broadband world. Today we’re in Louisville, Kentucky at the WISPA AMERICA Conference. That’s Wireless Internet Service Provider Association. Their focus is on connecting residential, commercial government, the underserved, and the unserved pockets of America with high-speed broadband connectivity. We have a repeat guest on our show today. He joined us for the first time three years ago. He really needs no introduction into the WISPA space or the fixed wireless space with two solid decades of experience from Wisper Internet, CEO, and Founder Nathan Stooke. Nathan. Welcome to the Bunch.
Nathan Stooke:
Great. Thank you so much for having me again. It’s always fun to come and talk about our industry.
Brad Hine:
Great, great. You have been so involved in WISPA over the time since you started your own WISP. I know this is your 20th anniversary. Congratulations.
Maybe you could go back, for our listeners, to the beginning of that experience. Then we’ll start talking about you getting involved in Wisper. But can you take us back about 20 years and kind of the vision you had in mind and the goals that you had?
Nathan Stooke:
Absolutely. 20 years ago, I can’t even say we started out of my garage, right? We started out of my ’86 Honda Accord with a fold-up ladder. I was a programmer, I was a consultant and I realized that if I wasn’t working, I wasn’t making money, right? Because you bill out per hour, and I wanted to make money while I was sleeping. Well, I did all the research and I decided that I wanted to be a service provider. But service, what does that mean? I was like, restaurants are service, and I don’t like to cook, and 95% of all restaurants fail anyway. Why would I want to do that? What I wanted to do is be a utility. As utility, I sell you once. As long as I provide you with great service, you continue to pay me.
I did about six months’ worth of research, and I found out that the only utility that was regulated lightly was the Internet business. I was an IT consultant and had companies that needed internet and people that needed service. We set out to provide them with a service. I convinced my wife it was a good idea to put $36,000 across three of our credit cards because, “It’s okay, dear. Everybody needs the internet. We’ll be making six figures in no time.”
Well, what we know about our business plans for sure is that they’re wrong. I went three years without collecting my first salary because I just had to put more money into the business and keep growing. And plus back in 2003 when we started, not everybody knew they needed the internet. I saw it clearly, but it wasn’t until about 2008 when the rest of the world kind of woke up to, “Wow, this internet thing is really, really important.”
Brad Hine:
It started in 2003, and a few years later you got your first subscriber. Talk about that next phase of Wisper Internet and how you guys grew.
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, absolutely. We were doing one to two installs a week. We had no money for marketing. It was just as I found people. I had a friend that had been dying for our service, but I could never get him service. I went to his house really late at night, and I could see a blinking light through the trees. I’m like, “Wait a minute, there’s a tower over there.” I’d never seen that before. We were able to get up on that tower and then that got our density to the point where we had, instead of one, two, three installs a week, we were doing three a day. It was a great tower for us. I brought my dad out of retirement, and said, “Dad, I need you to drive the van while I’m taking support calls and sales calls. I can’t do it all at once.”
And so he came out of retirement and helped me, and we grew. Because I always wanted to make this an industry. When I did my research, I realized very much that I had to know what radios to buy, the cards to buy, and the pigtails to buy. We put them together in my garage, never used a Pringles can, but came close, right? You put all this together, and then you go install it out on a customer’s house. And I wanted an industry. I said, “This is going to be amazing. This is great.” And I kept growing the business that way. The larger vision was that we can be another option, not a third option, not a just if I have to, but just another option for people who actually want to do business with a company they like, a company that’s local.
Brad Hine:
Right. I’m sure you have friends calling you saying, “Hey, I heard what you’re doing. Can you connect me up?” Then you start getting commercial businesses calling you saying, “We’re getting a poor signal. Can you guys help us out?” Sure it starts rolling from there. Now, can you talk about the next phase? What was that point where you got to a certain point where you knew you were going to have to hire a bigger staff in your business?
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, it was interesting. When we first started, the first couple of years I did everything, like everything. Then it’s like, okay, I’m going to hire you so I don’t have to work 80 hours a week. I would hire somebody. Then I would realize there’s just more work for me to do because now I have somebody who can actually do that work. It was kind of this constant rat race of, “Well, I hired you, but I’m working just as much.” And really for me, it was the realization that, when I hire these people, I need to empower them. They need to be able to take ownership of what they’re doing and be able to grow. And I remember for the longest time, everything we did was word of mouth, just exactly what you said, the customer refers.
Then we finally hired a marketing person, and our leads went through the roof because we actually had someone out there trying to tell the world that we were there instead of us relying on the customer. And that’s when we really shifted and said, “Wow, we need a leadership team. We’re going to keep growing. What are we going to do?” And we really said, “How do we keep up with this? I can’t be the bottleneck for the company,” which I was. And that’s when I started reading books and started learning about becoming the leader that I need to be to grow Wisper instead of just staying where I was.
Brad Hine:
We’re starting to get out of the technical realm. You’re more into business leadership, training, mentorship, and things like that. Over the evolution of Wisper, at what point did you feel like you could maybe take your foot off the gas and make someone else responsible for some of that ignition, so to speak?
Nathan Stooke:
My wife is from South Africa, so we go back to visit family and everything. We hadn’t been back for seven years. In 2012 we decided to go back for a whole month. We took our kids. It took me two years to prepare my leadership team for me to be gone because I was like, “I’m going to be on safari. You won’t be able to contact me even if you wanted to. You guys are responsible for the company.” And I left for 34 days. I answered four emails. Those four emails were about speaking out of a volunteer class I was going to do. And I came back and we set record numbers of installs, record low number of cancellations. We built like 12 towers. And I’m like, “Wow, I’m the problem in the company. Guys, I’m taking another month off.”
I actually came back and took another month off when I got back. And it was really neat to see people kind of stepping up in that leadership side. I was very technical. I loved doing all the technical work, but I was just playing checkers. When you actually get into the business side, I was playing chess. You had multiple moves. I could put this person in charge of this, and I could do those things. And that was a real eye-opener for me. It worked out so well.
Actually now at Wisper, if you’ve worked for us for seven years, every seven years you get a 30-day sabbatical. You have to be disconnected from the company. We turn off your email and all your login. We want you to just relax, and reconnect. If you’re a workaholic and you have to go work, you get to go volunteer. But you can’t work for Wisper. And it just helps elevate everybody. It’s something to talk about as people take that time off.
Brad Hine:
Everyone can go on safari at your company-
Nathan Stooke:
They can. Now we have an office down in South Africa. So we’ll be able to have them go visit the office down there and then go on safari.
Brad Hine:
Fabulous. Let’s talk a little bit about WISPA. You’ve been participating in WISPA for many years, since when?
Nathan Stooke:
Oh boy. I got on the board, maybe three years after it started. I wasn’t one of the founding members because I was actually sick for that ISPCON. My son had gotten sick. I then got it and couldn’t make it. Then that was the show they formed WISPA. I was like, “Oh, that would’ve been great to be there.” But I’m so glad I came in when I did. The Founding Fathers did an amazing job. Then I was able to come in and be on the board after that. I think we’re into our 18th show that I’ve been running as the emcee. After my first one, my wife said, “You’re never doing that again. That takes way too much time. You have a business to run.”
I’m like, “Well, it’s kind of fun, and I want to do it.” I did a couple more. Then she’s like, “No, you have to find somebody else.” I would kind of train somebody else up and after two or three weeks worth of meetings, they’re like, “I have a business to run. I don’t have time to do that.” I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s a lot of fun. We have a lot of staff now that help. And it’s really neat to be able to influence what we talk about here: the content, what we need as an industry to grow. And we try to touch all the different bases for people who are brand new in the ISP industry to people who have been here for 20 years like we have.
Brad Hine:
Excellent, excellent. Essentially when you got involved in WISPA, you figured out that you just needed to delegate more things to more folks and get another team going just like you did at Wisper.
Give me your impressions of WISPA AMERICA 2023. The Broadband Bunch started right before the pandemic. We’ve done over 260 episodes now. A lot of those episodes are multiple panelists. There are hundreds of people that we’ve never met. This is the first time I’m seeing and getting to shake your hand and say hello. Give me your first impressions of WISPA AMERICA, and what we’ve been through the last three years.
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, absolutely. I may be a little biased, right? Because I think the show was amazing. I know I don’t have any control over the vibe, but I can influence it. We try to have a good time and try to share. That’s one of the reasons I got onto the agenda committee.
At WISPA, we didn’t even have an agenda committee. My friend and I formed it because we wanted to make sure that we didn’t turn into the cable industry where they didn’t share information. “No, you’re a competitor of mine. I’m not going to share what I’m doing with you.” And I’m like, “No, guys. We’re all in this together. We’re all fighting the same battle.” And I wanted to make sure that we were sharing. One of the things I did, much to my CFO’s dismay, is I sent my financials out to the entire attendee list because somebody asked me for them.
I’m like, “Sure, here’s everything I have, all my details.” Because I wanted other people to see, “Oh wow, we’re doing better than Wisper here. Oh gee, we need to do better because they’re able to do it.” It’s all about helping our industry and helping us grow. And that’s what these shows are about. That’s why I still stay connected to them because I want to make sure we keep that vibe of solving problems and helping each other.
And honestly, we’re going to have record attendance at this show. COVID obviously kind of messed us up a little bit, but with every show we keep growing, more and more people come. 90% of the room stood up when I said, “If you have more than two people here.” I mean, that’s amazing. I remember years ago when people were like, “Ah, I can only afford to send one person.” And now they’re like, “There’s enough value there. I’m sending in as many people as we can.” It’s just great to see that.
Brad Hine:
I can attest to that community in as many WISPs as we’ve interviewed over the last few years. It’s always interesting to dig into some of the stories that parallel yours. You don’t pull your company up by its bootstraps and run it for years successfully growing a subscribership in a footprint without getting input from other people. I can see how valuable WISPA is to all these folks. And it’s great that you’re sharing, well, we’ll call it the truth. The truths of the industry, we want to get to the truth. We don’t want to know opinions anymore. We just want to know what works. And it’s great. I know that you also have a training university. — Wisper University. Tell us a little bit about that.
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah. I’m really big on training. I love to hire based on attitude and work ethic. I can teach you anything we need you to do. When I would come to these shows, I would tell people, “Oh, we have a three-week training class for our installers, or we do this.” They’re like, “Well, can you train my installer in a week?” “No, my install class takes three weeks.” Then they kept asking for it and asking for it. And I realized, “Well, that’s a need that people have. We’re already doing the teaching to our own installers, so we might as well include others.” We went out and set up Wisper University, and allowed people to come in and see what we were teaching our employees because we have to teach them anyway.
Then what was neat about is we would learn too, because a small ISP somewhere else learned something that we didn’t learn. Then it filtered up into that class. We’re like, “Oh, this is great. You saved a hundred dollars a week with your installers, and you have three, I have 34. That’s major savings for us.” I love talking to the small operators, the new operators, and the old operators because we can all learn something from everybody else.
Brad Hine:
Wonderful. As a former software product guy, myself, feedback from your audience is enormous. How are you going to shape a product, or a service, or a curriculum? What you’re offering without it? Let’s jump back into the WISPA Show. We just had a keynote today. Can you talk a little bit about that speaker?
Nathan Stooke:
Absolutely. Yens, he’s from South Africa. I got to see him speak. When I was down at a conference speaking last year, I saw him. I was like, “Okay, he has to come to our show.” Normally we don’t pay for our keynotes. They just come. And I’m like, “I’m going to have to get the budget. We must bring him here. We’ll pay for his flight; we’ll pay for his hotel. We just have to have him here.” And he hit it out of the park. He was here to explain to us kind of how LEOs, low earth orbit satellites, work, and maybe some of our opportunities and some of the challenges that we face as an industry. It was really good how he pieced it all together.
And I’d have to say it was one of the best, if not the best, keynotes I’ve seen at any one of our shows. It was very specific to our industry, and very eye-opening, and maybe a way that we haven’t looked at the LEO as an opportunity and a threat. Those are the type of things that as we continue to grow as an organization, we can afford to bring in the keynotes and those types of things that maybe we’re not all thinking about. We all have our biases as to what we think about LEOs. He came in, and, I think, he correctly showed us a different way to look at them as an opportunity. It’s like, “Oh, that is amazing. That just made the whole show worth it.”
Brad Hine:
Fabulous, fabulous. Have you been on the expo floor this week? How’s the energy down there?
Nathan Stooke:
It is so good. And I love talking to exhibitors and having them say, “This is the best conference that I’ve ever been to.” And it’s one thing for me to say it, of course, we’ve already determined I’m biased, but it’s another thing for … That’s their professional career. They spend all their time going to these expo halls. They say that this is the best one. And what I love about it is when I went to the cable organization expo hall, it was like, “Okay, I realized why isn’t anybody sharing information? Why aren’t they helping me? Why aren’t they really talking to me?” And it’s like, “Oh, it’s the middleman that has to go back and convince the person below them that it’s the technology they should do and then convince the person above them that they need to pay for it.”
Whereas here with WISP owners, we’re the ones writing the check. We’re the ones learning what we need to do. When you walk around to these exhibitors, you are actually talking to the person that’s going to make the decision. And we’re all very interested in learning. We want to know. It’s great that there’s a different vibe here where we’re genuinely wanting to help each other and learn. And I’ve had manufacturers that are competing that when I ask enough of the right questions, they’re like, “Oh no, we’re actually not perfect for you, but you should go talk to that manufacturer over there.” I mean, who does that? Oh, the ones that come to our WISPA shows. That’s what we’re trying to create here. That culture of helping each other and being willing to just solve the problem.
Brad Hine:
That’s great to know. And that’s an important point, just solving the problem, make sure the technology or the solution fits the problem, right? I hear a lot of that in the industry. But I don’t see it as an example except when I go and being a vendor myself, I go and walk the show floor and talk to everyone. I get that same input.
When you walk the show floor, you look at the content that you put out for all the sessions. What are some of the main topics that you see for 2023? Are they still coming from the last few years? What are some of the ones at the tip of your brain?
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, so we have a challenge with these shows that 40- to 50% of people have never been to one of our shows before.
They may be new to the company that they’re at. We need to have some introductory content, kind of get them an understanding, some high level. Then we have other people who have been to every WISPA AMERICA that we’ve ever had. They want more content deep dives. They want to understand what’s really going on. Out of the 55 sessions we have, we’re able to really cover that whole gambit. And I think some of the ones that jump out to me are the spectrum updates. Spectrum’s a really big thing for WISPs. And that one we have at the end of the day tomorrow that really WISPA staff really does a good job of explaining what’s coming. Sometimes it’s way too far away.
“Oh, thank you for telling me about that four or five years from now.” But there’s a lot of stuff we’re working on that that comes through. The other ones we have are our deep dive. We have these two-and-a-half, two-hour sessions where the speakers can go really into depth about solving a problem or an opportunity that’s out there. And I think the other thing you’ll see for the theme of this is the right tool for the right job. This is what I have loved about WISPA. We’re a wireless organization, absolutely. But we are really a problem-solving organization. The right tool for the right job. If fiber is the right tool for the right job, then we’re going to say, “Great. May the best technology win. Let’s go do that.” If wireless is the best technology, then we’re going to say, “Great, go do that.”
Most of our members are doing both and have been for years. And we have a lot of content here for both fiber and wireless because again, we’re just solving the problem and the problem hasn’t changed. People do not have connectivity. We’re the ones out there getting them that connectivity, whether it be now in more urban areas where the big companies have forgotten them, or it is in the rural areas where they never went out there. And that’s what I love about our industry and how WISPA is always positioned. We have never been fighting only for wireless. We’ve always been fighting for politicians to pick the outcome that they want and let the market determine the best path there. And what we fight all the time is that when they pick the technology, everyone loses. And we’re trying to fix that as an organization.
Brad Hine:
A lot of great points. I think you and I could officially speak for the next four hours. All these rabbit holes are popping up now. I had an instance that happened on my property. We have fiber. I live in metro Atlanta, so fiber is an option for us. It’s a very saturated area. Four times in the last two years, my fiber has been cut for reasons that I don’t know how. And so, as a needed utility now. I’m without fiber for a week, maybe, a week and a half.
We’re using our phones to give internet to our computers working from home. Kids are doing homework at night. It’s interesting walking around in some of the booths here at the expo and hearing how quickly you can put a tower up and get people connected. It’s truly impressive in terms of the money that’s going into the market too. I’ll jump over to another question quickly. The CAF 2, the RDOF, and lots of government programs are going on. Is this money all realized? Is it out in the market? Are we still waiting for it?
There are some macroeconomic issues. You mentioned the 65 billion now being 400 billion in your estimations. That’s a simple math computation. I don’t disagree with you either. But what’s interesting, is the prices in the last three years, everything has gone through the roof. When we put those numbers down in the paper, they are immediately inaccurate now. I guess I’m starting to go down my own rabbit hole here. My question is, some of these monies are being realized. Now they’re getting out to the providers into the states. It’s not enough. What are they going to do?
Nathan Stooke:
Right. When you artificially say that the most expensive technology must be used, what you’re saying is we really don’t want to get to all the people who need it, the people who have zero Gs. We just want to show you that, “Hey, this is what we’re doing. And we’re doing a great job at it,” not looking at the real problem. Are you really trying to bridge the digital divide? Or are you just trying to say that we gave billions of dollars and look at what we tried to do?
And the WISPs out there again, we’re problem solvers. We’re out there saying, “Yes, we’re absolutely trying to solve that problem. We were doing it fine without government funding.” I would still say we won 220 million from CAF, the Connect Air Fund. We’ve been getting our funds for three years now. I would still stand up in front of anybody, Congress, anybody and say, “I don’t believe in subsidies.” I was doing what I was doing. And yes, I can do it faster. And I’m glad. I feel like we’re good company, right? We got the money.
But you’ve seen so many companies that get those subsidies that barely build out just the minimum. Then they go back and ask for more because it’s more expensive. Whereas I’m looking at CAF as a catalyst. My requirement is to provide a hundred meg down by 20 mega up. I’m offering 400 meg because I can. They talk about fiber being future-proof. I’m building a network that is kind of future proof into 400 meg. A software upgrade gets me to a gig because I can. I’m solving a problem for real, instead of trying to barely solve the problem to then go back and ask for more money. Depending on what you’re trying to solve, that is what is that money really going to be used for.
Brad Hine:
Good point. You started Wisper in Illinois initially. You’ve grown to how many states now?
Nathan Stooke:
We cover six states, but it’s a little misleading. We cover most of Southern Illinois, most of Southern Missouri, and then a little bit of Kansas, a little bit of Oklahoma, a little bit of Arkansas, and a little bit of Indiana. But our primary areas are Southern Illinois and Southern Missouri.
Brad Hine:
Can I ask if you’ve been through your own acquisitions looking at other companies in the market to benefit your own?
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, absolutely. When I started Wisper, I said, “I want this to be an industry.” There were so many mom-and-pop. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just that’s what we were, right? Somebody decided in private business, there was a financial investor that got into it. He was a financial advisor. He got into wireless, and I was only wireless, that’s all I learned. All I did was I was only an ISP. When I would come to him, he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know why I’m still trying to run my other business too.”
We’ve done 34 acquisitions since we started. It’s all about helping the customer get better service. There was another grocery store chain that had rural grocery stores. They started because they saw a need. They had dial-up first and got into wireless. Then we were able to buy them. I hate competing against other WISPs because they’re out there doing the same thing we’re doing. We just assume to buy them and add them into the fold. We always take all their employees and then always need more. And that’s been one of our strategies: being able to acquire the companies out there that are available.
Brad Hine:
Very cool. I follow Wisper on LinkedIn, and you guys are also a part of the Affordable Connectivity Program. Can you explain a little bit about how that works with Wisper?
Nathan Stooke:
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of those programs that actually works for the federal government. A lot of them give a lot of money away. Then it maybe isn’t used in the most efficient way it could. This one is on a specific customer basis. So the customer has to qualify. Then we provide them with a discounted service. As long as we’re providing that discounted service, we get credit back from the federal government. There is no paying me a lot of money and if I get the customers, then that’s okay. I must have the customer. It must be a real benefit to the customer. We’re able to do a hundred-meg service, 25-meg service for very, very little for the customer.
When they’re in an area where they qualify or the family qualifies, it allows them to have connectivity just like someone else who could afford it. It allows them to do schooling, do job interviews, and have remote jobs. And in a lot of the areas where we provide it, the customers weren’t signing up without it. I hope the government continues it because it’s not necessarily on the docket right now to be continued. But I really hope they do because it has been something that’s been good for our customers as we talk to them.
Brad Hine:
It’s a great program. Coming out of the pandemic and speaking to so many folks that had the experience of even their kids not being able to do their homework or to get to school depending on what area, what state you lived in in the country, some folks not being able to work, it impacts their own economics to their family. Having these benefits is a huge deal for them down the road.
Nathan Stooke:
Absolutely. And we did it during the first economic downturn. I’d never owned a business during an economic downturn until 2008. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m like, “Am I going to be in business?” Then we all realized that the internet was more important, right?
If you’re not going out to eat and you’re not going to the movies, what are you doing? Well, you’re sitting at home watching Netflix. But we had people losing their jobs in our area. We would give them free internet if they canceled their TV. That was our thing. If you’ve canceled your TV, because I feel that TV was a luxury, not a necessity, but your internet was a necessity. We would ask them, “Have you canceled your Direct TV or your dish or whatever it was?” If they said yes, then we would say, “Okay, we’ll give you three free three months of internet to help you get back on your feet.”
They could have gone and said they did it, but they didn’t. We didn’t care about that. But the idea was that we want to help the people in our community and that ACP is kind of doing similar to that where, “Hey, we can subsidize this connection for you. You can keep your connectivity because it is so vital today to be part of society.”
Brad Hine:
We’ve been stepping back in the past 20 years with you, with Wisper, and with WISPA and your participation. We hear a lot about digital transformation. You’ve experienced it firsthand, not just through your own business, but by being a part of WISPA, and hearing it from all the different WISP businesses. Are there certain things in the last 20 years that you’ve seen from a digital transformation standpoint that was a priority or most important? Or were there hurdles that you got over that you thought were absolutely the most important ones over the last 20 years?
Nathan Stooke:
My wife is from South Africa. I go back to visit there. When I would go back for the first couple of years before I had Wisper, all we had was dial-up. And I saw how that society operated without high-speed internet, even though we had had it here. Then when they finally got high-speed internet down there, DSL. They had online banking before we had online banking.
It was neat to see what that allowed them to do down there. And one of the things I saw down there is that a lot of people don’t even have a computer. Everything’s done on the phone. All of the industries that wanted to interact with you were focused on the phone and your interaction with that. Where in the US, digital transformation was first computers and everything. What the pandemic showed us really is, somebody said it, I wish I could claim it, but they said the pandemic was a time machine. It brought 2030 to 2020. The DoorDashes and all those things of all this delivery and everybody eating, going through the drive-through to get food and everything.
What I’ve been preaching forever is that the internet is more important than water. As an average citizen, I can buy water at the store. I can transport water, and I can store water. As an average citizen, I can only buy internet if the company can offer it at my house. And that sounds so trivial until we were all stuck at our house and people didn’t have the internet at the office because they weren’t going into the office. They had no internet at home because they were just using that because that’s all they had.
And now we see how important that is just to stay connected. Now that digital transformation that’s happening, people are way more understanding and accepting. They understand now what upload is. Nobody cared about uploading until all of a sudden my Zoom call didn’t work. And it’s like, “Why is this not working? What do I need to do?” And it’s like, “Oh no, our service is different. Our upload actually works.” Not like DSL or something like that. The whole world has become more educated. The pandemic allowed everybody to understand how important the internet is.
Whereas before it was some of us just out there beating the drums saying, “It’s important, it’s important. We must get this to everybody. I don’t care that they don’t have a computer. They have a phone. Let them use that” or whatever. And now it’s like, oh no, this is real. The divide has gotten even bigger. The pandemic made it even bigger. And now Wisper and WISPA and all of us are trying to close that as fast as we can. And unfortunately, a decade’s worth of building fiber isn’t the fastest way to close that divide at all.
Brad Hine:
Kind of forced us to make those comparisons- fiber and wireless. We’ll step back into your WISPA hat. Before we conclude with our episode for today, what are some of the positives you’re seeing going on now post-pandemic with WISPA? What are some of the positives and wins that we’re going to take into the future in terms of people being more aware and acknowledging the fixed wireless technology?
Nathan Stooke:
During the pandemic, it’s like everything kind of slowed down for people, not our WISPA staff. I mean, the government was in full force, full everything. And we’re like, “Hey, we don’t have that many people to right to do all this.” And I think you’re going to see some of the wins. We’re going to get us in spectrum, more spectrum being opened, more things. We thought we had won with the legislation and how it was written for all the government money. Obviously, we had some setbacks, right? For the 65 billion and we’re working towards those. But what I like to see is that people now in the government come to WISPA and ask our opinion on things. It’s not just us knocking on the door all the time and going, “Oh, don’t forget us. Ask us a question. We’re here. What are you doing?”
They come to us and say, “Hey, how is this going? This is what we’re thinking. What do we need?” And I think that really, really goes to the quality of staff we have working at WISPA. You’re going to see us broadening that tent and again, fighting for broadband connectivity and tech neutrality. That is what we’ve always done. It’s just going to be a louder drum because the other side is much louder. “Oh, you have to have fiber. You have to have this.” And everybody keeps saying fiber is future proof. It’s still only 20 years that they think the fiber’s going to last. Maybe it’s 30 years. Oh okay, well, it’s not quite future-proof and everything.
WISPA’s going to keep fighting that good fight and saying, “Hey, we don’t mind fiber. We don’t mind wireless. We want it just to be tech neutral.” And I think those are the wins you’re going to see in broadening that tent. We’re going to continue to educate our members on how to do both: how to solve the problems and what we’re doing.
Brad Hine:
Excellent. As part of the media, I always want to hear the truth. I love when I walk around the expo and I see just lots of academic conversations going on between everybody. Everyone’s awesome at sharing. Before we leave today, how can people get in touch with you or Wisper Internet or even WISPA staff for that matter if they have questions?
Nathan Stooke:
They can go to the WISPA website. WISPA.org has everybody’s contact information there for our staff. We have different people. Steve is over the state level. Because that’s one thing that WISPA has been doing well is branching more down into the states. That’s where a lot of that money’s going to go.
Brad Hine:
That’s a great point. Steve is definitely on our list of people we want to meet with. I think he’s got a lot of great information about that process and how the states are going to handle all that. I know a lot of people really want to figure it out.
Nathan Stooke:
It’s a good point. I’ve been on the WISPA board on and off for almost a decade now. We’ve always talked about the States, but we never had the resources. Everything was being done at the federal level. And now that the money’s being pushed down through the states. You as an operator have so much more influence. You’re not flying to DC to meet with somebody you don’t know. You’re going to your state capitol and meeting with somebody maybe you went to high school with or somebody who knows somebody and real constituents and everything like that. Everybody needs to get involved with that. You can make massive wins there and fight the good fight to get the most people connected. But it does take work. You must do it.
But then back to the contacts. Wisper’s website, WisperISP.com. Go to our website, and contact me, my emails up there. If you’ve been to the show, everybody gets a welcome email from me from the show. I love saying thank you to other WISPs. I know Austin, my assistant, is always like, “Well, you don’t have time,” so she’s, my gatekeeper. You don’t have time to talk to all these people. I’m like, “No, Austin, it refuels me. I must do this. I work 80 hours a week, but I want to spend some time helping other WISPs and everything.”
She’s like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yes, you need to schedule these calls. I love talking to people, helping them, answering questions they have, whether it be technical or business.” And it’s always neat to see them kind of grow. “Oh, we took your idea from wherever and now look at what we’re doing.” It’s like, “Well, you guys did the work. I just planted the seed.” I love talking to people and helping them, and I think that’s why I like shows too, because you get to walk around and talk to everybody and say hi to everybody.
Brad Hine:
Well, we sure appreciate you joining us at the show today. We’d love to have you come back at some time in the future. Also, I know you have stuff to report. There are two WISPA shows a year. I know we’ll be running into you.
Nathan Stooke:
Great. Well, thanks so much for having me. And yes, we’ll make that a date, WISPAPALOOZA. We can talk then and see how things are going.
Brad Hine:
Sounds great. And from everybody at The Broadband Bunch, thanks, again, Nathan. Have a great day.
