Middle-Mile Madness - Episode 598 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:10):
Hello and welcome to Connect this. I'm struggling with Foggy Brain, which most of you'll probably think is just normal, Chris, but I'm back. Had a great time vacation. I checked out the eclipse [00:00:30] in Cleveland, Doug, our special guest today, got to see it over Arkansas. I don't know if anyone else saw it anywhere cool, but all of the pollen in the world was then dropped on my route, I think, and it has been killing me ever since. So I'm trying not to clear my throat into the mic too much, but it's going to be a fun episode for that. We're going to talk about Middle Mile. We're going to talk about why we're not talking about net neutrality. We're going to talk a little bit about the ACP transition [00:01:00] coming up. We're going to talk a little bit more about bulk billing likely, but mostly we're going to talk about Middle Mile now, perhaps the recent past. And in the far, far future, thanks to some thinking Doug Dawson's been doing. So with that, Doug Dawson, welcome to the show.

Doug Dawson (01:17):
Hey, welcome back from the Eclipse. So I can see that the Eclipse split your hair very nicely.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25):
I thought of you because, and I don't know how you'll react to this because it's not the Grateful Dead, but we [00:01:30] saw it in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We were just outside there. They set up speakers around downtown near it so you could enjoy their programming even if you weren't inside of the area and they're playing dark side of the moon and a bunch of other stuff. And when the sun broke through again after totality, they started playing. Here comes the Sun by the Beatles. So pretty awesome atmosphere.

Doug Dawson (01:53):
And quick question, who do you think my second favorite person in the Rock and Roll Hall and Fame?

Christopher Mitchell (02:00):
[00:02:00] Janice Joplin,

Doug Dawson (02:02):
Patty Smith. I'm a massive Pat Smith fan. All right, onward.

Christopher Mitchell (02:07):
So we I say, hi, I'm Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Travis, welcome.

Travis Carter (02:14):
Good day, Mr. Mitchell. We did not have the eclipse here in Minnesota. It was dreary and overcast like normal, but that is, I don't have anything wi today other than I hope we get into some good conversations about six gigahertz and the FCC, that's usually

Kim McKinley (02:30):
[00:02:30] And your favorite FCC Commissioner and your favorite, who is it?

Travis Carter (02:34):
Mr. Je pi. Man.

Christopher Mitchell (02:37):
I'll just come back and say name a third

Travis Carter (02:41):
Rosen Whistle or something.

Christopher Mitchell (02:43):
Okay, that's two. Those two I going to give you now. Who's the third? I'm

Travis Carter (02:45):
Wheeler. I learned that time.

Christopher Mitchell (02:47):
It was quick too. Now I just look like a jerk.

Travis Carter (02:51):
I have my Mitchell notes here, right?

Christopher Mitchell (02:54):
Kim McKinley from Utopia Fiber coming to us from South Kaki.

Kim McKinley (02:59):
South [00:03:00] Kaki. That is where I am today. I was in DC this morning and ended up in South Carolina on my way to Little Rock next week. So just doing a little tour of the country here. There was a Clipse though. I mean, somebody said there was an eclipse. I didn't even know. Yeah, thanks for the news Alert and Chris. Okay. What event do you not travel for that's like this? I mean, I think that you travel for everything

Christopher Mitchell (03:24):
That I traveled for. The last one, Jackson was like one and a half years old, and it [00:03:30] was super cloudy and on the way home, what's supposed to be a six hour drive turned into a 12 hour drive thanks to Road Construction in Iowa and the entire state of Minnesota trying to use the Iowa Interstates to get home, and it was awful and miserable and one of the worst road trips I've ever been on, and that actually says a lot. So I was really glad that this one worked out and now I'm going to start traveling more for these things, I guess.

Kim McKinley (03:56):
Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. I'm like Doug, moving on,

Christopher Mitchell (04:00):
[00:04:00] Doug. Oh, well, there you go. Just butchered it. I was all ready for it.

Doug Maglothin (04:05):
We covered this Maglothin. So close enough.

Christopher Mitchell (04:13):
We've been asked to do a adult version of this, and I think LOV would be a great guest to have on that version of it.

Doug Maglothin (04:22):
I think I'm creating a moniker for myself here that I'll never be able to get rid of.

Christopher Mitchell (04:27):
So Diamond State Networks, which we talked about a couple of years [00:04:30] ago, because awesome organization that was formed with a lot of electric cooperatives that are making really important investments in the state of Arkansas, Arkansas, rocketing from toward the back of the pack toward the front of the pack for Internet access in rural areas in particular. And you've been involved with that with Diamond State Networks?

Doug Maglothin (04:48):
That's right. Yeah, four years running. But hey, what a pleasure it is to be the second most. Well-known and well-liked Doug on this podcast.

Doug Dawson (04:59):
I just want you to let you [00:05:00] know with our monstrous fan base, you have definitely got your new moniker.

Doug Maglothin (05:05):
That's right, that's right.

Christopher Mitchell (05:07):
Middle Mile. So I've been talking a lot, but in the past we have talked about this and I have at times, Doug said for mn, this is just terrible. I'm so sorry Doug M, but I've said that in my sense is that Middle Mile will could get worked out over time as we [00:05:30] have more last mile networks, there'll be more of a demand for Middle Mile and it will make it less hard to solve that problem. Feel free to start off by laughing, but give me a sense of what your thoughts are about the current state of Middle Mile and where we need to go to help fix the problem of making sure that there is affordable transit everywhere.

Doug Maglothin (05:52):
Well, I'll laugh a little bit, Kim, are you with me on that? Maybe middle mouse Halls itself? No, I think demand creates [00:06:00] some interesting opportunities. Certainly if you look at some states like Arkansas, we look like a patchwork quilt of I Lex where nobody really has a predominant footprint around the state. You go next door to Mississippi, and that's not really the case. It's dominantly at t from top to bottom. And so looking at both of those spreads, ironically, [00:06:30] we both have probably the least amount of middle mile access of any two states in the country. You could probably argue. And so Diamond State was really born out of that necessity. And I know that the Mississippi fiber network that's being put together in the spirit of Diamond State, I think they would probably say the same thing, is that no one else is clearly going to solve this no matter how much demand there is. So we're going to have to do it ourselves. Can I clarify,

Christopher Mitchell (07:00):
[00:07:00] So you're saying that in Arkansas you have a patchwork, there's a lot of smaller networks, and so there was never a dominant one and whereas in Mississippi you have a clear dominant provider and at t has fiber throughout the state, but no one can really access it on reasonable terms is what I would perhaps fill in the gaps. And so they also have to build one. So it sounds like no matter what your situation, you probably need more middle mile investment in your estate.

Doug Maglothin (07:26):
Yeah, that's a hundred percent true. And I think interestingly, [00:07:30] electric cooperatives add sort of a different dimension to this, right? First of all, they're nonprofits. They have expansive reach into rural parts of states. Arkansas being no exception to that. And since we're new movers into the space, we're coming in with a hundred percent fiber. So our capacity constraints are really sort of a non-factor. We're able to invest on horizons of double digit years [00:08:00] with no real problem. We can get access to capital for much lower than market rates. And so it takes a whole cocktail of that to get to a different place than you've been able to get to on your own. I've got plenty of experience in the for-profit world and VC owned and publicly owned companies, and you really can't get to this comprehensive platform that benefits rural and metropolitan the same without some of those ingredients being a little bit different.

Christopher Mitchell (08:27):
And so one of the things that I'm [00:08:30] curious about is as electric co-ops have been building these networks, how have they been getting access to a major pop or something like that? If there is not Middle Mile, because that's the qura that I have is I keep hearing from people that there's not enough Middle Mile and yet we see great last Mile networks being built by for-profit, family owned companies by telephone and electric cooperatives, by wisps in some cases somehow they're kind [00:09:00] of making it work. Can you just help us understand what's going on?

Doug Maglothin (09:02):
Sure. There are ways to make it work. I think every cooperative we've had that started a broadband project has gotten access to some sort of upstream connectivity, lots of aging infrastructure in Arkansas. So almost everyone probably bought their first 10 gig from one provider and then before they got to a thousand customers that had a week long outage where the incumbent provider that provided them service didn't [00:09:30] really mind them not being up and running quickly. And so that morphed from, okay, let's try to figure out how to help one another. So co-ops that touch borders would then try to establish some wholesale relationships between themselves, but then capacity and resilience become a problem. But neither one of those really help with the fact that we had co-ops that were paying in the multiple dollars per megabit of service for their access to upstream. [00:10:00] So 10 to $20,000, 10 gig connections, 30 and $40,000, a hundred gig connections. And our objective is we want that to be basically a penny of Meg is our blended cost for upstream access. So we're doing a pretty good job of that too. I think we've probably eliminated somewhere around 95% of our cost for upstream connectivity just at this point, and we're not even really a year into offering services yet.

Christopher Mitchell (10:30):
[00:10:30] Well, let me throw it open. Doug, I wanted to come to you first because you've been writing about this. Let's save the future for a little bit in the future of this call, but what's your question?

Doug Dawson (10:42):
First of all, every state has this problem. There's pockets of every state who are just not close to the backbones. So I mean, I was just working with an ISP in Arizona who was looking at $5 a meg, and the answer is, you can make it work, but that just kills all your profitability, that all your money [00:11:00] goes for that. And so the answer is yes, you can make it work, but it's very uncomfortable and when you're buying from the incumbent, it's doubly uncomfortable. Again, they don't really want you to succeed. I mean, you're taking customers from them, so there's almost no states except there's little tiny ones that don't have some place in the state that has this problem. And there's other states that are just as bad as Arkansas and Mississippi when you start looking out in the rural areas, and it's going to become very apparent with BEAD because [00:11:30] now we're going to actually be building out into these rural areas.

(11:34):
The second problem is, and the other Doug mentioned this, a lot of the routes are old and crappy, and so you can't order a hundred meg circa on a lot of these things because they're not fast enough to do that. The fiber's old, the fiber's getting older. The fiber is very susceptible to somebody knocking it down with a truck running into a pole. And so [00:12:00] the Middle Mile networks that we do have in rural areas were largely built by the telephone companies and the cable companies, and they're getting old. They built those things in the eighties and nineties and fibers very different today. The fiber in the eighties and nineties was very low quality because they didn't know how to build it. Right. They would pull it and push it and stretch it and bend it, and so when they build it 10 years later, it started getting these micro cracks in it. The fiber itself was pretty good, but the way they,

Kim McKinley (12:26):
But they haven't fixed it yet though, Doug at all.

Doug Dawson (12:30):
[00:12:30] Well, no, you have to replace it and they're not,

Kim McKinley (12:32):
Yeah, but they didn't replace it if it was eighties or nineties and they're looking at replacing it now or that's a little insane.

Doug Dawson (12:39):
We're talking about CenturyLink and

Kim McKinley (12:42):
I mean, I know.

Doug Dawson (12:43):
No, they have not.

Doug Maglothin (12:45):
Don't you? Right to compound that so much consolidation of these networks has happened over that same 30 or 40 years. The record keeping, it's not like it's sustainably electronic from 1988. It was on three by five [00:13:00] note cards that have subsequently been lost in a mop closet somewhere decades ago. And so when you experience trouble with your archaic fiber service, the time to resolution is astronomical,

Doug Dawson (13:13):
Right? They don't even have spare cards to fix it when it goes out. They're going like, does anybody know what brand this is?

Christopher Mitchell (13:21):
I've heard similar things from reports about zao, which I assume is still built 23 years ago. [00:13:30] It's not just the stuff built in the eighties and nineties. We're still seeing that with stuff that was built comparatively recently.

Doug Dawson (13:36):
I mean, starting maybe 2005 or 2010 two construction practice has gotten much better. People built fiber the right way now, so hardly anybody damages it during the construction process, and the fiber is amazingly clearer, so it's going to carry more speeds. So the old ones also just weren't even that good to start with. The old fibers, [00:14:00] even when they were brand new, could have not carried a hundred megabits or a hundred gigabits, and so we have this archaic middle mile fiber that's almost everywhere, and so a whole lot of the country, when you say they have it, they do, but it's one error away from collapsing, so we have to get all that fixed. The NTIA gave $1 billion to fix all the middle mile of the country and gave all the giant money to last mile. There should have been [00:14:30] 20, 30, 50 million for that, and so they really screwed

Kim McKinley (14:34):
That. Why do you think that is? Because that's what I was going to mention because the Middle Mile got nothing compared to the last Mile. Why? Or was it lobbying? What was the reason behind that Middle

Doug Dawson (14:46):
Mile? Yeah, because everyone's, all the big guys are lobbying for last mile money.

Christopher Mitchell (14:51):
Well, let's talk about how we got here though, to some extent, right? I mean, what's interesting to me is if you go back to 2009, we're [00:15:00] putting 7 billion into broadband, more or less. And the lobbying at that time for most everyone except for me, I remember being on the other side of this, was that it should be used for Middle Mile and only for Middle Mile. And when those programs were evaluated years later, the people who lobbied for it to be only Middle Mile then attacked the programs as being ineffective because so few homes and businesses had signed up. I think a lot of people learned from that and said, well, if we're going to spend money, [00:15:30] let's make sure we're signing up homes and businesses. And so they overcorrected perhaps away from Middle Mile,

Doug Dawson (15:38):
But those networks, a lot of them will finally be useful when we now build to be. They're like, they're not dead. They're still sitting there operating.

Christopher Mitchell (15:46):
Well, some of them are. I mean, some of them have been privatized, like the three ring binder out there by Reuben and is now no longer. But yeah, others, I mean some of the ones that

Doug Dawson (15:57):
The state in West Virginia, they gave it the frontier. They actually [00:16:00] had the network.

Christopher Mitchell (16:04):
Okay, Doug, let's give you a chance to, is there anything else you wanted to share and then I'm going to go to Travis, see if he has any questions.

Doug Maglothin (16:10):
No, I mean I agree with those points. Assuming I'm the Doug you were talking to.

Christopher Mitchell (16:16):
Yeah, yeah, Doug McLaughlin,

Doug Maglothin (16:19):
The only flack we really got when we applied for the N-T-I-N-T-I-A Middle Mile grant was from a local telephone company [00:16:30] turned quasi fiber optic provider that felt like the state should not support our application because they had a comprehensive middle mile, which I think was effectively left out of the room by ourselves in the broadband office and the governor's office. So we ended up with the state support. Now we did not win the grant. I mean, obviously it was so far oversubscribed that was not a terrible surprise, but I agree a billion dollars was never going to go far and [00:17:00] probably 20 billion wouldn't go as far as they would hope.

Christopher Mitchell (17:04):
Yeah, I know that from the tribal perspective, there's a need for billions of dollars of investment to bring Middle Mile from a meaningful point to a point where tribes would be able to pick it up and use it locally. So there's a massive need there alone just for Indian country. Travis, what are you thinking about?

Travis Carter (17:26):
Just curious, Doug, are you actually building the network or are [00:17:30] you operating on I use from other folks.

Doug Maglothin (17:32):
So we've got some that we build predominant majority, we've IU from our member cooperatives. Now the largest section of our network is provided by the generation and transmission cooperative that serves every electric cooperative in Arkansas. So all a multi conduit buried 2 88 in the first conduit network. And then we've got some aerial IUs in a minimal component of [00:18:00] our network that we lease from our members.

Travis Carter (18:02):
And then you hand off waves or lit service?

Doug Maglothin (18:06):
Either? We do kind of a range.

Travis Carter (18:09):
And what do you find your iscs, are they trying to get to? Are they get to the Internet exchanges predominantly for

Doug Maglothin (18:16):
Back haul? Yeah. There's no Internet exchange point in Arkansas, which is a problem we're also looking to solve. So we anchor our network in Dallas, Chicago, and Atlanta. Now we're working on some secondary distribution, [00:18:30] Kansas City being kind of a first target for that, but those are really the major points that we're connecting folks with.

Travis Carter (18:38):
And I guess operationally is the way I approach it because I'll tell you what, not all middle mile networks are built the same in order if we were an operator, we'd want to come and say the ones that are built along the railroads, those things are real reliable, are the ones down the interstate too bad the government doesn't let other people go there. [00:19:00] Sometimes these rural runs, they're tough. So if you're setting up shop, make sure you understand where your route is going to go. I'll tell you what, the number of cuts that we get on these fiber networks is just amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (19:15):
Is that just because of construction and farmers and stuff out there in the fields?

Travis Carter (19:19):
Predominantly it's farmers in the spring when they're out tilling or whatever they do, and then you get a lot of river runoff [00:19:30] on different river runs and stuff. So I would say the problem is broader than just having one middle mile provider. It would be ideal to have multiple that have multiple different routes because we're not living in the day anymore where Internet's just a nice thing to have. It's a necessity for a lot of these folks

Doug Dawson (19:49):
And it's just not rural. I had a client for years who lived on the route that goes from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, fairly populate the whole way, but that route was mostly along [00:20:00] a two-way highway and one of those poles got hit by a truck or something literally once a month and they went down for years. They finally rebuilt it to follow the brand new Pennsylvania turnpike and got off of that road. But that road was a really bad choice, but there was not many roads between Philadelphia and Harrisburg.

Kim McKinley (20:19):
I was going to say

Doug Dawson (20:19):
Have boxes.

Kim McKinley (20:21):
They have worse drivers in Pennsylvania than they do in Utah. I was just shocked by that, that they hit the

Doug Dawson (20:26):
Pole.

Doug Maglothin (20:28):
Part

Doug Dawson (20:29):
Of it's they [00:20:30] have the worst roads. They're roads.

Christopher Mitchell (20:32):
I was just going to say I grew up on not far from those roads and they are very narrow and they're built on horse trails. Doug McLaughlin

Doug Maglothin (20:39):
In Arkansas, we're worried about dove season. So a well-placed 12 pack and 12 gauge and you can have a

Kim McKinley (20:49):
Delve season. What is this thing? Birds. Birds, yeah, but what do the birds do? Are we shooting the birds or the birds [00:21:00] just sitting the birds eat it.

Doug Dawson (21:04):
No, the people are shooting at everything in sight during their drunken.

Doug Maglothin (21:07):
Anything that that is cute and cuddly, we want to kill it.

Kim McKinley (21:14):
Okay. At

Christopher Mitchell (21:15):
Least I have to say the doves are small enough that it takes some skill, not like a vulture or something, I don't know.

Doug Maglothin (21:24):
That's right.

Christopher Mitchell (21:26):
Doug McLaughlin, you mentioned you're going to think [00:21:30] about that IXP solution that seems like it is very much bound up in all of this. So what's going on there?

Doug Maglothin (21:37):
Well, so clearly there's a need for it. Like I mentioned before, we've only been offering real services on our real network for about a year, and we've scaled from zero bandwidth subscribed to we'll be pushing over a terabit probably in the next few months. So I think we're [00:22:00] answering a lot of backed up demand. We're not even done building out yet, so I think we're going to be in the multiple terabits of upstream backhaul before you know it. So our ability to attract content providers is going to become pretty high, and that isn't a utility that we want to keep closed up and just monetize for ourselves. We feel like that's something that we can turn into a service architecture that benefits the whole state and every locally owned ISP in the state. And so the [00:22:30] primary targets that we're looking at are a little more metropolitan areas, but also college campuses or big connectivity points that we feel like would benefit the most from having an Internet exchange point.

(22:45):
There's obviously some political ties that make that a good public-private partnership. We've got a statewide regional educational network that I think would benefit tremendously from that as well. The hard part right now is if we're going to fund [00:23:00] this with public dollars, how do we fit that into a large enough beat application that the five to $10 million that it would take to operationalize a data center of that nature, does it make your beat application get disqualified because the cost become too prohibitive? So there's some mass application options that we're looking at. Arkansas was one of the states that exhausted every dollar that it got on last mile with no consideration for middle mile previous [00:23:30] administration, previous broadband leader, broadband office leadership. I think it would all be different if we had the same broadband office leadership now, but you look at Alabama, they've put over $200 million into their middle mile infrastructure and that's growing it seems like every time you turn around. So we're trying to get creative with it. We feel like there's enough demand that it's a model that probably floats even without public dollars, but in order to gift [00:24:00] the state something that is open access, that can be publicly used by all, I think it's in the interest of the state to partner with it.

Christopher Mitchell (24:09):
Travis,

Travis Carter (24:12):
I'm still stunned. There's no Internet exchange there. I'm just googling how I can set one up. I mean that would be well mean.

Christopher Mitchell (24:19):
We wrote about Montgomery was the first one in Alabama that was just, I want to say in eight, nine years ago, one in Alabama

Travis Carter (24:27):
Without question. This is the most [00:24:30] important thing to do. If you can consolidate those bits and start and use those eyeball networks to have content guys come to you, you're going to save everybody a fortune. So

Christopher Mitchell (24:41):
Doug, what are the hurdles to that? Finding a good spot and obviously then the money to build the physical location.

Doug Maglothin (24:50):
There's so many reasons for it mean. So Arkansas is the home of a tier one player, a multimillion subscriber broadband company that's not [00:25:00] got the greatest reputation for quality networks. I think a lot of the reasons we've already cited aging plants and terrible record keeping, very bad outages. Their history had a very bad track record of data center investments gone wrong. And so I think that probably has prevented Windstream from making more of a move on an Internet exchange. To be honest, our competitors that have gotten to some size Riter communications, former company that I worked [00:25:30] at many years ago, I think they've been more in the flux of last mile growth and their VC owned. So I don't think that probably fits their investment strategy necessarily. But anyway, so I think now it's down to us. We've got the scale, we've got the most traffic of any network probably in the state of Arkansas, and so I think that we probably have the best foothold to make that happen.

Christopher Mitchell (25:53):
Are there complex politics or anything? I'm wondering about one of the municipal networks like Clarksville for instance, [00:26:00] which I think is a major university there. I don't know Arkansas as well as I should,

Doug Maglothin (26:05):
Small university there.

Christopher Mitchell (26:07):
Okay, so is something like that or is you need some place that's in Little Rock or what are the considerations?

Doug Maglothin (26:14):
Yeah, I think our two targets would be either northwest Arkansas where the University of Arkansas is around Fayetteville, Bentonville or here in Jonesboro where the Arkansas State University campus is. Ideally we sort of split some [00:26:30] traffic load across two different Internet exchange points. I think we're looking at both options right now to be honest.

Christopher Mitchell (26:37):
Well, do you work with the municipalities though that are building their own networks?

Doug Maglothin (26:41):
We do. We have sort of announced our presence to lots of the municipalities here. Probably the biggest success story in Arkansas is Conway Corp. It's

Christopher Mitchell (26:52):
One of the older ones too,

Doug Maglothin (26:53):
Right? Yeah, they've been in it for a long time. So Jason Hansen, their CTL and I are good friends and have been [00:27:00] for years and we're working on getting our services to them and bringing them in. They're sort of the beacon for how to do municipal networks in Arkansas the right way.

Christopher Mitchell (27:11):
Cool. Kim, what's going on with Utopia in Middle Mile? You've had to get up to, I know you have it frankly, before you had a whole lot of homes to connect to. I think you had a path down to Vegas and some other places, right?

Kim McKinley (27:25):
Yes, we do. But thank you Chris. [00:27:30] We built a lot of it. We use other carriers depending to get to some of these places, but I mean it's a various sources of how we have our middle mile in Utah. And Doug, I'm getting really offended that you were like how to do municipally owned in Arkansas the right way. We know that we're the pros over at Utopia doing municipal.

Doug Maglothin (27:50):
I don't know that you speak redneck fluently enough, Kim, so I don't know if I can count on you guys yet or not.

Doug Dawson (27:58):
She never heard of Dove [00:28:00] season.

Doug Maglothin (28:02):
That's right.

Kim McKinley (28:03):
I actually had to text Travis and go, what is Dove season?

Travis Carter (28:06):
I told her they shoot the soap

Doug Dawson (28:11):
And the chocolate bars.

Travis Carter (28:12):
The chocolate bars? Yeah. Chocolate bars and soap.

Kim McKinley (28:15):
Okay. So I'm from the south and I've heard of squirrel season and squirrels going through fiber. I've just never heard of Dove season. You learn something every new, every show here on

Doug Maglothin (28:24):
ConnectUS. It's not the pretty white ones. They let go at the weddings. These are like the brown ones [00:28:30] that you wouldn't even know they were there.

Travis Carter (28:31):
I didn't even know that. All right, dove season. Here we go.

Kim McKinley (28:35):
What we're learning on connect this today.

Doug Maglothin (28:38):
Glad I could bring some culture to this project. I

Travis Carter (28:40):
Love it.

Christopher Mitchell (28:42):
So where are the major drains then for you? You head up to Missouri or where do you go?

Doug Maglothin (28:49):
Well, so we've got four that we've set up in state. So Texarkana right at the Texas border, Northwest Arkansas, Fayetteville where [00:29:00] the university is. Little Rock obviously is a good connectivity point. And then up here very close to Jonesboro. So we've got kind of four places to dump traffic out of the state and then those pinned down usually to multiple tier one hubs. Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and like I said, we're working on Kansas City as well.

Christopher Mitchell (29:20):
So let's talk about the future. Doug Dawson, you paint a bleak picture, which I think we've covered a little bit of regarding the aged nature [00:29:30] of much of the middle mile that is being used. But what are the problems with the future of Middle Mile?

Doug Dawson (29:37):
Well, the problem is, and he also touched on, I mean every year we use more broadband and so we have to carry more and more and more and more. And if you start trending that out 15 and 20 and 25 years, we're going to be carrying 10 to 15 to 20 times more broadband. And these networks that exist today, well first off be 20 years older and they can't [00:30:00] handle, so when you start looking out, I mean Zao just built a nationwide network at 400 gigabit lasers. And so that's sort of the state of the art now. I mean there's a handful of terabit laser routes in the country on the east coast and they're not the only one, but so there's other people building between the major cities with 400 gigabit lasers and those are going to be full in 10 years. So those routes will get completely subscribed, absolutely full.

(30:28):
And so we have to keep on investing in [00:30:30] those. And interestingly, Zao built those routes. Their justification for doing them was artificial intelligence. They believe there's going to be so much traffic just from that. That's why they built those routes to reach AI data centers. But then we take all the stuff we've been talking about, all these secondary routes of which that's the vast majority of Middle Mile or the routes to get to Jonesboro and the routes to get to every other mid-size town to get to every county seat. Those are already [00:31:00] old. Those are not, even if they upgrade those electronics to a hundred gigabit, that's not going to be enough bandwidth in the future. And so going to have to, essentially the middle mile routes are going to have to be faster than a terabit. The ones that Zayo is doing today at 400 are going to have to probably be four or five terabits.

(31:22):
And those lasers don't exist only in the lab and almost all the existing fiber can't carry that. We almost [00:31:30] have to replace every middle mile route in the country in the next 20 years. We should be starting now. I mean this is not a theoretical, I mean the last mile, all the ones that go out to the rural areas are already inadequate and all the new stuff has to either be completely overbuilt with better, clearer fiber. The fiber you need for a 400 gigabit and the fiber you need for a four terabit, very different fiber, way more expensive, extremely high quality, [00:32:00] they make it. But we're going to have to get to that, which means even the routes that are being built right now by zao are going to be good for 10 years and they're going to have to be upgraded.

Christopher Mitchell (32:09):
Is that because they just need to use multiple wavelengths and they need enough space to have plenty of multiple wavelengths

Doug Dawson (32:18):
To get the technology to do terabit lasers is you got to be cross crossing a gillion little separate light pass just through one fiber. It's really [00:32:30] complicated and so it takes a really expensive fiber. It's got to have a really different inside sheath than the fiber we build today. So we simply aren't ready for a terabit world yet, and the middle mile route has to go to that. And so we're not at all prepared for this and what I expect is in about 10 to 15 years, we're going to see somebody asking for a giant 4,000 billion federal program to build middle mile. It's got to have,

Kim McKinley (33:00):
[00:33:00] I thought this was the once in a lifetime investment that we're never going to need any more federal dollars after being,

Doug Dawson (33:09):
And this is going to cost a lot more than the last mile because we're going to have 20 years of inflation first

Christopher Mitchell (33:14):
And electricity is going to be too cheap to meter. I mean, we've all seen these grand claims. Kim, you had your hand up.

Kim McKinley (33:20):
Well, I was going to ask this is that Doug, you're making this Doug Dawson, you're making this big proclamation that we have to replace all the metal mile and I talk to people [00:33:30] about broadband every single day. Yes, we know I have a great life, but I'm not hearing people saying this besides you really. I mean, you're hearing bits and pieces, but you're not hearing it to this extent of what you're saying. Is that because you feel like you're far outside of the conversation or do you think that people are just not thinking of it yet?

Doug Dawson (33:51):
Well, first off, I am hearing it, but I'm not hearing, I'm the only one looking out 20 years right now. I haven't heard anyone looking out 20 years, but I'm hearing it today because [00:34:00] little ISPs who have been getting along fine on 10 gigabit connections, that's not enough anymore. And often they can't buy multiple 10 gigs. I mean, the guy who gave 10 gigs, that's all they can get. And so they're trying to buy a hundred gigs and there's a whole lot of places where you can't buy a hundred gig connection. Makes sense mean There's a whole lot of places where you can't do that. And they only grew to that just because, I mean, just in the last five years, the average home and business now uses [00:34:30] three to 400 times more broadband, three to four times more broadband than they did just five years ago. The actual volumes we're sending to the pops are gigantic and they're going to keep on getting bigger.

Christopher Mitchell (34:43):
I would take the contrary to some extent with Doug, I think I would guess you'd push it out a little bit. I'm more in the line and you can laugh at me. I think that we have growth coming from two places. One is new people coming online and the other is everyone using more bandwidth from their home [00:35:00] connections or their mobile connections. And I do think that the growth of people coming on the network is going to be dropping down, and I would expect that at some point, much like electricity demand grows very rapidly and then at a certain point it starts to level off and now it's even negative a lot of times, and I don't think we're going to go negative anytime soon, but I would say that there's a good chance that we won't see broadband growth sustaining the level that it has.

Doug Dawson (35:29):
Every network engineer [00:35:30] I've worked with in the last 20 years who built a new fiber route underestimated the size they needed.

Christopher Mitchell (35:35):
Okay, that's really good.

Doug Maglothin (35:40):
No one's ever said, man, this network is way too fast and we built too much fiber. Right. Well, I

Christopher Mitchell (35:46):
Have seen that in a couple places, but it was loaded up with other issues around municipal broadband where people were like, ah, they overspent and this and that. But no, I think that's a really good point, Doug. I blame

Doug Maglothin (35:56):
Jim for that, but

Christopher Mitchell (35:57):
Majority of the time people don't [00:36:00] have enough fiber. So I mean, I don't want to, but

Doug Dawson (36:02):
You made an interesting point worth talking about Chris because

Christopher Mitchell (36:05):
Oops,

Doug Dawson (36:05):
It's my opinion

Kim McKinley (36:06):
The first time he's ever done that, Doug. So let's be

Doug Dawson (36:09):
Thankful for that. I know I'm a little bit shocked here, but we're always going to find new uses of broadband. We are just on the cusp of having telepresence where we could all be having this meeting by looking at, we're in the same studio, we're within years of that being a real [00:36:30] technology. All these wearables that everyone has these things are all going to start using data centers and actually have real bandwidth. Not the first generation, but the next one. And we're always going to keep finding more. We're going to find more. Yeah, no,

Christopher Mitchell (36:44):
I agree. And I think

Doug Dawson (36:46):
20 years is a long time.

Christopher Mitchell (36:47):
No, I agree and actually mean, I would argue against myself and say that if we would actually move to thin clients in the home and do a lot more in local and perhaps not even local data centers, we would have a much better security environment. We'd [00:37:00] have a better environmental footprint. It would cost us less every year for our devices. And so there's a lot of reasons to move to even more data than we've been using. Can I just

Kim McKinley (37:09):
Love that you said you're contradicting your own sentence like two minutes beforehand, just say Chris? Yeah,

Doug Dawson (37:17):
But there are three solutions. One is to make the middle mile better. One is to go to edge computing, and the third is all these access meet points the other Doug was talking [00:37:30] about, we only got have less than 200 of those things. We need thousands and thousands of these meat points, and so we can really change if we don't send as much stuff as far. We really cut down on the need

Doug Maglothin (37:43):
Here. Yeah, Doug, we're deploying in 800 gig network here in Arkansas, which we committed to that about three years ago. We got a lot delayed through Covid, so we're really just kind of getting to the meat of it. But even three years ago, the thoughts of someone deploying [00:38:00] a rural 800 gig network seemed absolutely preposterous. And now that the rubber's meeting the road and we're starting to see the bandwidth forecasting the way that it is internally, we already see the end of it. And so we're quite frankly glad that there's some 1.6 terabyte optics that are coming to market now so that hopefully they'll be affordable by the time we need 'em.

Christopher Mitchell (38:22):
Well, you,

Doug Dawson (38:23):
You're carrying those across pretty new fiber networks. The older fiber network can't handle either one of those.

Doug Maglothin (38:28):
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (38:29):
So I want to ask [00:38:30] Doug McLaughlin, I love Diamond State Networks because it's a creature of the electric co-ops, which are, there have nearly a hundred year history of serving communities. Minute wait. He just called you a creature. I just want also on my road trip, I've been listening to nothing but Harry Potter with my family, so got, I'm trying to make that conversion out of that world. There's a real danger [00:39:00] as we've seen, you mentioned the consolidation that we've already seen XO level three, so many different companies have now been consolidated and then there's that you want to extract as much as you can from those networks while delaying investment is something we see if profit is the only concern. And so I would not expect that DSN would be doing that. If you look at something like New Mexico though, although they do have a number of electric [00:39:30] cooperatives, I don't think they're in a place to necessarily do the same thing.

(39:33):
I love conceptually what Kentucky did, and I would like to see more states do that sort of an approach where the state would actually build a large open access middle mile. I would not do in any of the way that Kentucky did it. Kentucky seems to have left some politics in the way and worked with a contractor that I would never trust. But the idea of a state or cooperatives, I think that's really important and I'm just curious if that resonates with you at all or if you feel like [00:40:00] a full private ownership of something would be as good over the long term as well.

Doug Maglothin (40:06):
I certainly think it can be. I'm with you, so it shouldn't be a surprise. Some of our best technical resources came from the Open Fiber Kentucky project and you talk about some spot on knowledgeable people, they're just fantastic. So they've helped us get a lot further, a lot faster without stepping probably in as many potholes as we might have otherwise. We [00:40:30] happen to sit in a pretty friendly political environment, especially where electric cooperatives are concerned. We have a central state GNT that provides services to everyone that also serves as our statewide association where the lobbying initiatives and things like that happen from right out of Little Rock. So as far as policy, we've been the beneficiaries of some leeway to get things done, and I think the electric cooperatives in Arkansas have always made good on that bet. And so [00:41:00] I think our legislators have a very warm place for empowering us to do our thing. So to the extent that privately owned networks who really at the end of the day are owned by the citizens that the networks serve, if that's a model that could be rinsed and repeated around the country, I think five to 10 years from now we'd have a very different conversation about the need for broadband publicly.

Christopher Mitchell (41:25):
Yeah, well, that's my position. I'm thrilled to hear it vindicated by one person. Finally,

Doug Maglothin (41:30):
[00:41:30] Hey, the second most popular dog on the forecast or the podcast

Doug Dawson (41:34):
Forecast, and we have to look at those private providers because we're talking zao level three. They don't have a, let's spend as much money as we can to get this problem solved. They spend very begrudgingly only at the last minute, only right before the networks collapse, and you can't blame in business to make money. Level three, who actually has the biggest of these private networks has no money at all. They're [00:42:00] part of CenturyLink and they're simply running out of money.

Christopher Mitchell (42:02):
No, let's be clear about

Doug Dawson (42:03):
This. There's nobody out here rushing to make these big investments.

Christopher Mitchell (42:08):
It's not mismanagement in the sense that level, I mean, I don't want to make too broad of a claim, but to the extent that one of these companies says, we're going to really solve this problem with a far reaching investment that's going to help America, wall Street is going to be say what now?

Doug Dawson (42:25):
No, you're not. No, you're not.

Christopher Mitchell (42:26):
That's the system that we have. And so it's important to know that [00:42:30] we might want privately owned corporations to play important roles in our telecommunications system, but there's other areas where we really want to question their role as being the primary owner of getting out of town.

Doug Maglothin (42:45):
Yeah, Chris, that's it. A four or 5% rate of return just doesn't work in that model. So you got to change the parameters of the model for it to really sit well.

Christopher Mitchell (42:56):
Yep, Travis.

Doug Dawson (42:58):
And it's the delayed return because [00:43:00] these networks get full, they'll make a lot of money, they'll be completely full. I mean, Zao will be printing money on those routes when they're full, but they don't like the five or 10 years it takes to get there,

Doug Maglothin (43:11):
Right?

Travis Carter (43:13):
You Yes, Mr. Mitchell.

Christopher Mitchell (43:15):
No, I just figured you have other ideas. What's going to happen is in 15 minutes, I'm going to pull the plug on this, we're going to go into the green room and you're going to be like, I had a couple other questions, and those are going to be far better than anything I was going to talk about. No,

Travis Carter (43:25):
I think there's some real validity what Doug's talking about. [00:43:30] I feel like we'll get a little bit more use out of these networks. The problem tends to be optical link budget, and most of our networks have been built with 80 kilometer regions. And so a lot of that will have to go, they'll have to be an insert in the middle. So if you own land in the middle between two region sites, you're sitting on a gold mine,

Christopher Mitchell (43:52):
Then obviously that's the sort of thing that's going to slow this down. I mean, that's where earlier Travis and I were talking about eminent domain before the show started, [00:44:00] before anyone really joined. And this is where I actually like the idea of eminent domain because I don't think a person should be able to hold the rest of the network for ransom because they happen to have a parcel of land in the right spot that they want to retire off of.

Travis Carter (44:12):
Oh, no, no. But they'll get a nice, everyone has seen the farms driving out in rural America with the big cell tower next to the combine. I mean, they get rent off that thing. So it'll be a good opportunity for somebody. And then the other thing is bringing the content closer to the user. I mean, that's the initiative we've been on for the last [00:44:30] 10 years is try to minimize the amount of long haul or mid mile we have to use to get places. But the problem with that is you have to get to an economy of scale to be able to attract the content. This is where the Internet exchange is absolutely crucial. You've got to take all those people, consolidate it together so you can get the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to bring content to you, which Doug is a Middle Mile provider. I think that would be one of your key target markets to go after [00:45:00] is how do I bring content in. So Kim McKinley would like to open an Internet exchange down there and have you bring the content tour. So we've just talked about it on the side. She's ready to ship you switches right now.

Kim McKinley (45:12):
Right now? Right now. That would be exactly what I'm ready to do. No, she keeps it right there in the hotel room. Yeah, hotel rooms are where I keep all the switches and all the gear, but thank you Travis for that. Yeah, thanks for helping me out. Okay, back to you, Chris.

Christopher Mitchell (45:29):
So [00:45:30] this is something that we could talk more about in the future because it's not really the topic for today, but I would like to talk about a hypothetical future of thin client computing. And my argument is that we end up all paying a little bit more for subscription services each month, but we pay a lot less in terms of whether that is ourselves dealing with ransomware and the other problems and security issues. And Oh, I actually have a password, but I just lost the password. The [00:46:00] password, one password, password keeper thing, and all those hassles. And I think people end up better off, but I will candidly admit people would rather pay one time for something rather than every month, even if it would make their lives better on the whole. But I think that'd be a good topic for us to talk more about where the future of computing may be going.

Travis Carter (46:19):
Chris, you do know you have a pseudo thin client right now.

Christopher Mitchell (46:23):
What's that?

Travis Carter (46:23):
Your web browser,

Christopher Mitchell (46:25):
Right? No, I agree. And I think that that's for me, it's a sign of why this [00:46:30] could work. So my use case is, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry everyone, but this is something I love thinking about. I am a professional photographer. I do high volume photography with Nikon Gear. Nikon comes out with a new camera. It means I have to buy a new computer. It doesn't matter when they do it, but it ends up I need more processing power. I'd rather pay Adobe a little bit more per month, do all the processing in the cloud, whether you are an Apple person like Travis or a sensible person like myself, we all have devices that are unsecured and [00:47:00] we have to deal with this, and we're going to be dealing with this more and more because people making money off of the ransomware and all the other stuff are doing wonderful. And so we need to move to a paradigm which is securable. And I would argue that having boring dumb devices in the home and complicated services in clouds managed by security professionals will result in all of us having a better experience and having a better environmental footprint. And

Kim McKinley (47:26):
Travis? Nope, we just need to say it. Travis, what do we not like? [00:47:30] What is not acceptable?

Christopher Mitchell (47:31):
The green dot.

Kim McKinley (47:32):
It's a green texter. We do not like green texts. So sorry, Chris,

Travis Carter (47:37):
As a Windows user, you are running your seven virus scanners simultaneously, right? The only way to make sure you're going to be safe. No,

Christopher Mitchell (47:45):
But my point is that I'm happy to engage on that. My point is, even if everyone had as good of a security and the iPhone is possibly the best secured device, it's still not good enough. And we're still going to see different things come through and attacking it over time. But let's move on to [00:48:00] the last topic, which is we were talk briefly about bulk billing. So before that though, any last points on Middle Mile? I think it's interesting. I did not realize the extent to which the Middle Mile problem needs to be rebuilt. I was thinking very much along the lines of there's places in these states that need to be reached who haven't been reached, but Doug, as both Dougs have really opened my eyes to the nature of the problem. To me, it does seem like something that I feel like states would do well to start resolving some of these [00:48:30] issues by recognizing that the state, whether it works with a company that has a reasonable expectation of a rate of return in order to build Middle Mile across the state or whether the state were to do it itself and then lease it out on reasonable terms like California is attempting to do.

(48:48):
I think states should get more involved with this and help to resolve it. Travis,

Travis Carter (48:54):
Go ahead, Kim.

Kim McKinley (48:55):
I was going to say, what do we feel, I'm going to probably open a can of worms here. What do we feel [00:49:00] about the DOT systems helping with this middle mile problems within states?

Doug Dawson (49:07):
I have a big problem with them in that they are, I don't even know what the right word is, but they are so do things my way and no other way. They're very non-negotiable

Christopher Mitchell (49:17):
My way or the highway,

Doug Dawson (49:18):
My way or the highway that's in most states. And so they're behind the times, quite honestly. They put their own networks in, don't let anyone else share them. I mean, [00:49:30] they're usually folks who are 20 years behind in technology, so it's kind of a very, they got all the right away, but they don't have the people.

Doug Maglothin (49:39):
I agree with Doug. I mean the two things I'd like your help on are just better permitting practices that are a little more consistent and then potentially better future planning for road expansions and things like that. So we can sustainably put lines in where they don't have to be moved every third year.

Doug Dawson (49:59):
Doug, [00:50:00] and I just want you to know that I'm never, ever going to help anyone get a permit on a state road now that they bought. They go, you're that guy. He can't get this permit.

Christopher Mitchell (50:10):
Doug, I am curious because one of the things that I want to get into in this show that we didn't do today because I'm read it all, but I want to come back to is the NTIA has apparently relaxed a bunch of permitting rules, and I'm wondering, have you looked at that? Is that something, I mean, for me, I have to assume that if you are building networks, and I know that you do a lot of leasing, but [00:50:30] to the extent that you're building, how much of your time is permitting on stuff that it's already land that has been more or less totally altered by a road or something like that already?

Doug Maglothin (50:39):
It's more than you could ever possibly imagine. And you can be building a line that's three inches from 10 other lines that have been there for decades, and it could be a multi-year process, and heaven forbid it's in a national park or state park or something like that. I mean, you can just tack on [00:51:00] orders and magnitude to your weight pump.

Ry Marcattilio (51:02):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available at muni networks.org/broadbandbits. Email us@podcastmuninetworks.org with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter, his handles at communitynets follow muni networks.org. Stories on Twitter, he handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ISR, including Building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. [00:51:30] You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter@ilsr.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative comments. This was the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Thanks for listening.