Q2 '25 Earnings from Cable Giants Charter and Comcast

Full Transcript

0m10s Speaker 0

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and fifty first episode of The Week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Antner. How are doing, Roger?

0m23s Speaker 1

Hey. And again, I'm in a room with you. That's awesome.

0m27s Speaker 0

So we're doing this live together. And this week, we've got a great guest. We're We're talking to Eric Watko, CEO

0m33s Speaker 2

of Broadband One. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Don and Roger. Nice to meet you guys. I've been following you all, your podcasts and your articles recently and over the past years.

0m44s Speaker 2

And I love the fact that you've been following fixed wireless. And I really appreciate the invite to come and talk to you all now and your audience about what we're doing in that space.

0m55s Speaker 1

Yeah. So you're one of the smaller providers focused on fixed wireless. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing and what's special about you?

1m5s Speaker 2

Yeah, of course. So we like to describe ourselves as that innovative startup company focused at being a fixed wireless network operator, where we're delivering Ethernet transport and Internet services for enterprises specifically. And what really makes us unique from the get go is that we're leveraging our licensed millimeter wave assets. Currently, we own millimeter wave assets across 19 states and are operating networks in nine of those states. As we are moving forward, we're rolling out our telco as a service solution, where we have been commercializing markets and identifying really good go to market partners that we're excited to have on board throughout the Southeast, Midwest, and West Coast Of The US.

1m51s Speaker 2

Most recently, you might have seen, and I think what started this conversation was we've launched our service in Savannah, Georgia, but we have a hit list of other markets that we're gonna be looking to bring to production by the end of this calendar year. So we're really excited about that. And if you don't mind me, lastly, I'll just give you a few highlights because I'm sure you're gonna ask, but I thought it'd be good just to help us build on this is that when we go and talk to partners, there's a couple highlights that we really like to bring up to them. We first like to let them know, look, we're not here to compete. We're really here to partner, and we can dig into that maybe later as you wish.

2m28s Speaker 2

But we really look to partner versus going direct and competing. I've heard in the past your own articles and your podcasts where you've talked about fiber and fiber is great, but it's used for the right applications. We view it as well. We view we're complementary to fiber. We're not competing head to head fiber.

2m46s Speaker 2

And then the other things that kind of help us is that we're really focused at those tier two, tier three markets. Right? The underserved, smaller markets that maybe don't get all the love from the major players in the tier one NFL markets. And then lastly, what we look to focus, right? It all comes down to performance, is we're really looking at how do we deliver a period grade service with 99.99% available uptime, but also making sure we get that same kind of service.

3m13s Speaker 2

If we're complementary to fiber, we want to make sure we're delivering gigabit services with low latency. So that really, as you ask like, hey, what differentiates ourselves? It's our licensed spectrum, but it's also those elements behind the conversations that we've been talking to a lot of partners throughout our markets.

3m30s Speaker 1

All right, great. So what are some of the markets you are currently in and what are some of the markets that you're planning to

3m38s Speaker 2

go in? So currently, we're in what we call commercialization, production stage in Salinas and Savannah. And we have a partner out in California, in Salinas, in the Monterey County, Etheric Networks. They're a hybrid WISP fiber provider. We partner with them.

3m56s Speaker 2

They're our go to market partner there. Like you said, Savannah, we just commercialized and we're actively talking to go to market partners there. And if you were to look at our map or where we're really concentrated, we have a great density of spectrum and assets throughout the Southeast. And that's kind of our key markets throughout Georgia and different cities. We're talking like Athens, Augusta.

4m18s Speaker 2

If you're a golfer, most people know where Augusta, Georgia is, down through Louisiana and Texas and into the Panhandle Of Florida, and then expanding our presence in California as we move forward too. So that's kind of where we're our current list is of which we call our top 10 markets.

4m36s Speaker 0

I know Salinas well. I I grew up in between Monterey and Salinas.

4m39s Speaker 2

There you go. A good portion

4m41s Speaker 0

of my family lives in that area. I know Salinas well and I know that that area needs And the challenges. More more and better broadband. Right? So I think that's fantastic.

4m50s Speaker 0

Exactly.

4m50s Speaker 1

So what kind of companies are taking advantage of your solution?

4m54s Speaker 2

We've come to realize that we categorize them into three buckets. Initially, we really thought it was just gonna be other WISPs that might be really interested in these markets. But we come to realize the other people is, yes, it's WISPs. So WISPs are very interested. Like I said, etheric, they might consider themselves a WISP predominantly.

5m16s Speaker 2

Other players though are like regional fiber operators, people that might not be the national fiber providers, but the more localized regional ones that might be localized to a specific market or to a specific state and are looking to expand new revenue streams or just don't have the capital maybe to add infrastructure to get more customers on net. And then there's this kind of third bucket, and it's what we call the hybrids. And the hybrids could be MSPs that maybe are reselling fiber and fixed wireless and IT services, or it might just be a fiber operator that is already familiar with both fiber as well as fixed wireless, and they try to find the right tool for their market to deliver the service. So it's it's one of those three is that we've really come to realize that we talk to and have really understood and see the value in a partnership with us.

6m9s Speaker 1

And so what kind of speeds and bandwidth can they expect?

6m14s Speaker 2

So our platform today will deliver one gig down. So from what we call a hub site, we can easily get one gig out through a pretty good radius. Depending on the topology and the rain fade, as you can imagine, all has an impact on this. But easily over a mile, we can get to one gig down, and then roughly it's a four to one on the return. So three, four hundred meg on the returns.

6m40s Speaker 2

And then it could be sliced up less than that. Good.

6m43s Speaker 0

Yeah. That's good. This would be ideal for somebody who's running SD WAN as one

6m48s Speaker 1

of their additional links. Right?

6m51s Speaker 2

Bingo. That's why, yeah, the fiber players or the hybrids, that's exactly their first use case going, hey, look, can you get me into a market first? Maybe there's a new industrial park or a health center that's popping up and they have yet to really get fiber there first. They're like, we'll get time to market quick with you from a fixed wireless as they build the business case and trench the fiber to that facility, and then they go in with exactly that. If it's a manufacturing facility or a hospital, they'll say, we got a diverse, redundant, highly available solution where we got fixed wireless that you'll continue to use as well as fiber.

7m30s Speaker 2

So we'll make sure you as your critical infrastructure were always up.

7m34s Speaker 1

Yeah. And based on how many customers they can get via fixed wireless, they can decide if it's worthwhile to build out with fiber or not.

7m44s Speaker 2

Yep. And that's what we're hearing from just the sole fiber providers, because they know they're already laying routes and they're like, Hey, I'm passing a lot of businesses as I go down the street to get to a neighborhood or to get to some other office park, but two blocks that way is another good business and a block over there or a couple blocks that way. And we're like, yeah, that's where we can get you those partners or those customers on that, your main fiber that you're pulling through quicker than maybe what it'll take for you to get the regulatory and capital and all that to go do that project.

8m15s Speaker 1

That's really cool. Have you looked at also supplementing that with, like, unlicensed spectrum?

8m21s Speaker 2

We have looked at it and partners ask us and that's where the WISPs really come in because many of the WISPs are much more familiar with unlicensed spectrum or even CBRS spectrum. I heard your last interview with EOD who I'm familiar with. And some WISC are doing that saying, hey, can I complement or can we do I wouldn't say a dual modem, but can they go to market with two solutions? Meaning, can they use an unlicensed spectrum that maybe does residential or has a little further coverage, but lower speeds, but use yours as an overlay for the really high capacity premium services in a market? And that's where like, yeah, like, we can share the infrastructure and build that out in a given market together.

9m8s Speaker 1

Yeah. That's always a cool solution. Do you pick millimeter wave for the reliability, I would assume, and the predictability?

9m16s Speaker 2

I will say we picked it, yes. The assets we own, the licenses we've owned have been part of a portfolio for quite a while. And it's been one that going back to even the LMDS days, right? That people have been looking at, hey, what do we do?

9m33s Speaker 1

I remember that.

9m35s Speaker 2

Yeah, exactly. Right? And so people have been asking or our investors like, hey, when is the right time to monetize millimeter wave? And how do we monetize it? Especially since '28 got reclassed back in 2017, 2018 to be 3GPP compliant for five gs services.

9m55s Speaker 2

So we had these in our portfolio and with the past two years growth, and this goes back to why it's great to talk to you all, been seeing and reading, and my interest specifically at the edge has been this demand and growth for fixed wireless and using high speed pipes for all these new applications to enterprises. And that's where, like, we got a perfect set of assets here. We just gotta put them to use, take them to market in a unique way, and find the right partners who understand that they can go after those customers that maybe they didn't think before.

10m29s Speaker 1

You know, because you brought up that four letter word LMDS.

10m33s Speaker 2

Yeah.

10m34s Speaker 1

I worked for LCC at the time, like what, twenty five years ago. I vividly remember our COO was like so excited about our work with Teligent, you know, we're going to build 28,000 sites, you know? Yeah. And then a couple months later, oh, we had to change order, we're building 4,000 sites. And then, oh, we're gonna do 800.

10m59s Speaker 1

In the end, we built four, literally four, you know. I've never seen a project melt down like that. So we need to realize potential, right? And so I'm really excited about companies like you that are doing things. And I think by now, you probably built more sites than Teligent did with all the hoopla and the billion dollars of funding twenty five years ago.

11m23s Speaker 2

Yeah. And it's a couple of things. Like, we view ourselves being almost in that cusp of the perfect storm, like you're alluding to, and that's maybe what was missing over the past decades with LMDS and and the other bands is where people always thought of it as some kind of home broadband service, and they didn't see the demand for high speed pipes at the edge of the network. And like you said, as fiber's taken off, it's great, but the cost of it and the use of it in every market, it can't serve all. Right?

11m56s Speaker 2

And it's not right to serve at all because of just cost to deploy it is crazy. But as you've probably been listening to all the earnings calls from the other tier ones, they're all seeing the value in one fixed wireless, period. Right? There are so many millions of fixed wireless subs out there today, but now also the use of millimeter wave for specific markets that are looking for the bigger pipes that you don't need to go five miles to get to this house, only need to go mile away or what have you to get to this rooftop to deliver a really high speed service and I don't have to pull fiber. MNOs are really seeing value in that and especially this frequency range for that.

12m35s Speaker 0

So if you're doing millimeter wave to like residential, for example, are you using external antennas to hit that or how does the propagation profile look?

12m43s Speaker 2

Yeah. So the platform that we are leveraging and what we are responsible for is basically from what we call this hub site where it's a RAN. Right? It's a MIMO beam forming four sector type of deployment at a given rooftop or cell site where we start from. And then, if someone has an end customer, and again, right, we're really focused at enterprises, so let's talk more of like a small business, an office building or an MDU or something like that, is yeah, we will deploy the CRE because we wanna own that customer experience and ensure we hit that availability, but we'll work with our in market partner, deploy your CRE at the rooftop of that facility or on the side, Takes like not even thirty minutes to deploy, install, commission it, register back into the network.

13m34s Speaker 1

But you have to go through the wall, right?

13m36s Speaker 2

Yeah. So you will need a cable to go through some access point in the building. Sometimes on the roofs, they already have access points. Sometimes if it's on the side of the building, like you're mentioning too, yeah, you gotta go in through the side. But, yeah, it's pretty straightforward.

13m49s Speaker 2

It's Ethernet on the other side. So you take that Ethernet cable, you plug it into if you got Wi Fi access points, if you got another little switch in your office that you're running another all your computers off of, just plug right into that, and you're up and running. Or if our partner wants to put up another device there to kinda aggregate or deliver almost like a managed router type service where they want to deploy other services, go ahead, right? We're completely transparent to that. Deploy whatever additional equipment you want for that customer to meet their needs, will be your high speed pipe to that building.

14m20s Speaker 1

Yeah, and I really don't see that when fiber comes, it's the end of the road for you. It's actually the road to SD WAN for businesses. Not for coffee shops and barber shops, but for medium, larger enterprises. They want the redundancy of SD WAN, and you're the independent link that feeds into that, especially if it comes at an attractive price point.

14m46s Speaker 2

And those partners or that end customer like you're alluding to, Roger, we've discovered is different in every market. Like Salinas is big in Don came from there, so he knows. It's light industrial and agriculture. But there's a lot of warehouses that have small manufacturing firms, and they just want really good Internet because their business runs on it. So they need good connectivity that maybe they're not getting it from a traditional cable or fiber provider.

15m16s Speaker 2

So that's that market. You go to Louisiana and Texas, oil and gas is booming again in the Southeast in that part of the country. So that's where those customers are like, yeah, we need redundancy. Redundancy for oil and gas and refineries and customers like that critical infrastructure, they'll take as many other links as possible, especially because they know hurricanes come through The Gulf all the time. And then there's other ones, MDUs, which are looking for multiple links as well.

15m45s Speaker 2

What's their primary? What's their secondary? As they grow, how do they expand? So yes, that's what we're starting to see in different markets. There's different verticals almost.

15m54s Speaker 1

Cool. Well, Eric, this was exciting. Thank you very much for shedding more light on another part of the telecom icosphere that we haven't talked too much about. So thank you and good luck. Keep up the good work.

16m9s Speaker 2

Really appreciate it. It's nice talking to you and look forward to crossing paths in the future.

16m13s Speaker 0

Awesome. Thank you so much, Eric. Roger, we'll talk to you next week.

16m16s Speaker 1

Talk to you next week.