Speaker 0 | 00:01.300

Hey everyone, this is Phil Howard here and welcome to another thought-provoking business producing episode here on Telecom Radio 1. Today, we’re doing a wireless episode and, you know, to just stay in true form here, we want to do this entire episode wirelessly. So, everything being recorded today, all of this voice over IP stuff that we do is all being done… over wireless LTE bandwidth today. So this recording, everyone on the phone, we’re all doing this over wireless. I hope you feel good about that. So you can test the call quality and really see what it sounds like when you’re running your voice over a wireless backup. I’m very fortunate to be joined today by Kurt and Greg from Microspace Communications. Gentlemen, welcome.

Speaker 1 | 00:52.658

Thanks, Phil. Hey, good to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:54.819

Excellent. Hey, so why don’t you guys just give me a little, just a… brief background you know real short history of where you came from and can we spice it up a little bit you know keep it PG but I want to hear you know one of you maybe Kurt you give me your in your best business weird crazy story that you’ve ever experienced in the telecom world okay Kurt go sure quick let me give you a quick intro of microspace so we’re a

Speaker 1 | 01:23.900

managed services provider who’s been providing communication solutions across North America for 30 years. The most recent solution that we brought to market is our managed 4G LTE service that we call Cellcast. It provides high speed connectivity and comes in a number of flavors depending on what the end customer needs. So as with all of the solutions that MicroSpace provides, it’s managed 24-7, 365 from our NOC here in Raleigh, North Carolina. And you know you call our support. number and you’re guaranteed to get a live person on the phone each and every time. So we really specialize in that white glove level of service. Real quickly a bit about myself. I’m in my 26th year with MicroSpace. Spent the first half of my career here in engineering and helped develop a lot of the systems and procedures we’ve gotten placed down on the other side of the building as we call it. For the rest of my career I’ve been working in sales and business development. So as the acting channel manager for the Cellcast line of products, we’ve helped move our company from a direct sales organization into a channel sales organization, specifically with this product line. And it’s become a real nice source of revenue for the company outside of the direct sales that we’ve traditionally been involved with. Just a little more information that we’ll talk about in the middle. or in a minute. When I’m not here at Microspace, you usually find me out flying around in airplanes, and I’m also a flight instructor, but that kind of feeds into my story. So I’ll let Greg give a brief intro on his role here.

Speaker 2 | 03:12.230

Thanks, Curt. I think you’ve done a good job of providing a solid overview of what Microspace is all about. But I’m Greg Curtin. I’m the VP of Sales and Marketing here at Microspace, and I’m almost 20 years with the company. But both Kurt and I spent the last couple of decades doing enterprise quality communications networks. So we understand that customers depend on us each and every day to take care of their communications needs. And we understand that’s a serious responsibility, and we make sure that we do that, whether it’s through our partners. our satellite-based communications networks with the wireless 4G fully managed services that Mike, that Curtis has mentioned. Kurt spends his time on a plane. I like to spend my time on a boat down to the other coast. So my family and I do a lot of boating and fishing down there. So a little bit about Kurt and I there.

Speaker 0 | 04:25.004

Just making sure we have a, do we have a backup for Kurt? I mean, since we are speaking about backup here, do we have a backup in case one of those planes goes down somewhere someday? 20 years is a hard, is a hard, you know, it’s hard to back up. We’re 27 years.

Speaker 1 | 04:40.578

Thankfully, flying just about as long as I’ve been here at Microspace, generally a pretty safe endeavor.

Speaker 0 | 04:47.424

So most of you guys like to like make your own airplanes too. So

Speaker 1 | 04:51.452

Well, I prefer to fly. I definitely have friends that like to make their own airplanes, but I prefer to spend my time actually flying rather than building. I would imagine that many of your podcast listeners are golfers and certainly familiar with the fact that Pinehurst, North Carolina, is about an hour drive from Raleigh. And probably the craziest story that we can come up with or that I can come up with is for several years we provided content distribution services for major Hollywood studios. We delivered blockbusters like Transformers via satellite to… hundreds of theaters across North America and help transition that industry into a satellite delivery model. Well, we would once or twice a year get all the Hollywood executives out to North Carolina and we would use Pinehurst and the golf down there kind of as a reason for them to come out and see our facility, be comfortable with what we do. And one of the years we did that, You know, for those of you familiar with Caddyshack out there, one of the Hollywood executives was just, you know, having the game of his life on the most famous course, number two, down at Pinehurst. And this, unfortunately, was causing a conflict in that he was supposed to also be in Dallas for a dinner meeting that night and was pretty close to the point where he was going to miss his flight. As a matter of fact, if he had driven back as planned. to Raleigh and to the airport there, he would have missed his flight. Well, for better or for worse, I had one of my little trainer airplanes down at Pinehurst. And we putted up to Raleigh-Durham Airport, got him on his flight with about five minutes to spare. And for years, that’s all he would talk about was flying that little Volkswagen airplane from Pinehurst to get back to his Dallas meeting in time. So that was a pretty cool mixing of my two passions. But at the same time… And boy, the stories that go along with that.

Speaker 0 | 06:56.539

So you flew him back.

Speaker 1 | 06:58.119

We flew him back. That’s right. We got him to the airport. He just made it through security with that 30-minute cutoff and texted us on the other side and said, guys, I made it.

Speaker 0 | 07:09.743

That’s excellent. All right. So talk to me. I want to, you know, sometimes the best stories also are the best horror stories that we have in the industry. So. Give me your best or worst, however you want to look at it. Give me probably the most memorable story of where you’ve actually saved someone with your products. Because we are talking here specifically about wireless backup. So to just put it real blunt and clear, there’s a lot of small business IT directors out there, VARs, MSPs, people that are running their business on Comcast because it’s affordable, Comcast Coax or TW Coax, whatever the Coax it is. And that’s very affordable. But if it goes down, and sometimes it’s just a matter of, you know, not if it’s going to go down. It’s just a matter of when it’s going to go down, whether it be once a year or twice a year. That can really affect the business. And you guys provide really a great and affordable way to kind of have a standby internet connection there that’s a great disaster avoidance or disaster recovery, however you want to call it, internet connection. So give me your best. I don’t know, your best save story, your best horror story.

Speaker 1 | 08:24.888

Actually, I would say for the wireless product, it happened actually just a couple weeks ago. And, you know, first of all, for our wireless failover, we are generally more than happy to send out a demo router. You know, we do site surveys beforehand to kind of make sure we think everything is going to work as expected. But then, you know, the proof is in the pudding, getting a router into the end customer’s hands. Making sure there are no building issues, make sure you’ve got line of sight or good distance from tower, tower loading, all those kinds of things. So bottom line is we do a lot of demos. We did a demo going back a couple weeks ago with a company that’s got a series of major distribution centers across North America. We happened to do this demo for their Durham, North Carolina distribution center. They evaluated for a couple weeks and it worked just fine. But. The IT manager that was promoting it was having a hard time getting the director of IT to sign off on it, kind of dragging their feet a little bit and you know finally it got to the point where they had had it for a couple weeks and I said hey guys you know we’d like to get that router back in circulation I’ve got other places it can go we’d love to work with you but if it’s not gonna happen you know no problem. So they packaged up the router we sent them a FedEx label they put at the front of the desk or front desk to to go out with FedEx that day and you wouldn’t believe it but they had a fiber cut. As the router was at the front desk they had a fiber cut. The IT manager Ran back, got the router, actually called us first, which was pretty nice. Ran back, got the router, got the business back online, and have since transitioned and become a customer. So pretty amazing timing on that, that the router was still on site. I’d like to say that I somehow coordinated that fiber cut. I would never admit to that outside of this call.

Speaker 0 | 10:21.937

Guys, I said horror story. I said horror story. That is not a horror story. That is… It was a great story. If that could only happen more often.

Speaker 2 | 10:31.861

Finding that almost on a weekly basis, folks will call us and they’ve typically had a scheduled installation date for some type of service that might be from their local cable provider. And whatever reason, that date is not going to be that. in a tough situation there. They’ve got to continue to do business but the connection that they expected that was going to be put in tomorrow has been put off by 30 or 60 days or some amount of time. So they’re all always very excited to speak to us and hear that in all likelihood we can get a wireless router sent to them. maybe the same day, depending on when the call is taking place and have their connection up and going. And we also like to stress the point that, in our opinion, it’s really smart to keep the technology in place once they do have their connection. As Kirk mentioned, with our Cellcast technology, we can turn a 99% availability situation into a 99.99 plus and it’s a very very economical way to do it.

Speaker 0 | 12:08.852

Excellent. One, so to just be very specific. What does it do? What doesn’t do? So it’s, it’s, we’ve got a, I call this kind of like a dual WAN failover in my book. That’s, that’s a dual WAN failover. It’s not an act. It’s not a, it’s active active. It sounds like, or like it can pick up at any time, but it’s not like a traffic shaping SD WAN thing. It’s kind of like a partial SD WAN. Is that, is that safe to say?

Speaker 1 | 12:38.173

That is safe to say, Phil. And, you know, typically there are three flavors. And again, the most common flavor would be exactly what you just talked about, where you’re, Our router and we are a cradle point solutions partner and we are cradle point house from a hardware point of view so Typically the cradle point in a failover solution is actually actively monitoring the primary failing over to 4G wireless when the primary goes down and then when the primary is back up going back to the primary and You know, one of the differentiators that we bring is that we’re monitoring that process real-time, 24-7, 365. So we turn an unmanaged cable connection, or what can typically be an unmanaged cable connection or DSL connection, into a fully managed environment by running it through our router. So that’s the primary flavor, and that’s what we support most often. And, you know, with some of our larger customers, we’ve got one customer that’s got over 120 sites on our network right now. And at any given time, and they’re primarily DSL, so a little bit older technology, but at any given time, we see anywhere from five to eight locations that are hard down on the 4G failover. So it does happen. This is a great solution to solve that issue. And, you know, it is almost an SD-WAN light. You don’t have the long sales cycle of an SD-WAN solution, but it’s also forward compatible with SD-WAN. And that kind of talks about… The other way that we can configure this router these routers right now do come with static IP addresses. So Let’s say in a year the customer wants to transition to an SD-WAN solution at that point We can become a secondary WAN and input into the SD-WAN device at that point You can do some more traffic shaping and policy rules Share the bandwidth rather than just have a hard failover and fail back, but it is forward compatible with with an SD-WAN solution.

Speaker 0 | 14:40.889

So at that point you just become one of the ISPs for the customer.

Speaker 1 | 14:45.274

Exactly. And it’s important because you’re physically separately routed. You’re not bundled into the fiber that’s into the building just from another provider. You’re actually 4G. right to that device. So a completely separate route for data, which is pretty important.

Speaker 2 | 15:04.118

And Phil, we should also add that it’s a no CapEx model. So for a monthly percentage cost, the CradlePoint commercial router, that Kirk mentioned, is included. The wireless forging LTE data plan is included.

Speaker 1 | 15:27.304

The end user to.

Speaker 2 | 15:28.865

and what the data and and thirdly mentioned this number of times solution which includes communicating to the customer what’s going on with the network. Some of our clients, it’s very important for them to know when the time stays down. But we also are very sensitive to data usage and data overage. We want our solution to be one that has a very predictable monthly cost for our customers. We don’t want a data overage to occur. So at certain times during the month, we’re going to let our customers know that, hey, you’re, for example, hey, you’re at 80% of your data usage, just letting you know in case you want to make some modifications to your data usage. So that’s very, very important to us. And while we do actually depend on carrier, that’s not something that really is in their business plans, to communicate to the customer on a consistent basis during the month. And I might also add that if our customer wants to… have access to the portal and look at those type of things themselves uh you know data usage on a percent basis we have no problem with that we’re going to give them the login information okay so

Speaker 0 | 17:26.549

a couple court um couple questions here uh what kind of speeds are we looking at and i’m an i’m an ex fixed wireless guy do you have any sort of I don’t want to say like, not that this has anything to do with fixed wireless, but amplifiers or antenna boosters or anything like that that might help. Just curious.

Speaker 1 | 17:51.533

Sure. And great question. And that’s one of the most common questions that we get. So, you know, we are limited by 4G LTE speeds. The routers are capable of 30 meg both directions. And we’ve seen that in some cases, although that’s not typical. I would say typical average speeds are between 5 and 15 megabits per second in some form of generally symmetric up down, but not always. So a couple of limiting factors here. One is, you know, we do a site survey before we ever ship a router in and we base on a heat map that we’ve got from our primary providers and 99% of the time it’s Verizon. We’ve got the best. fixed wireless network out there today. So 99% of the time that ends up with the best coverage and we propose that as a solution. Once the router gets to site, there are some things that we can’t control. We can’t control router placement, we can’t control building construction. So we work with the customer to try to maximize signal level and to maximize speed. And we can actually do speed tests. directly on our router without anything connected. That kind of helps us make sure that the end user’s network isn’t a problem when we install. So we help a customer, again, maximize what they can get in any given location.

Speaker 0 | 19:20.763

Okay. Now, I mean, I was joking around with you at the beginning of this call about how I had my cell phone duct taped to the window because I’m in the third floor of my house because that’s where I get the best signal and I want to run this podcast over wireless. And All of that is true with the exception of the duct taping the cell phone to the window. But there are, I mean, there are like kind of like third, have you ever worked with any third party? I mean, there are third party, you know, devices that you can get that you would put, say, on the roof outside that would amplify your signal on the inside. Would that help at all?

Speaker 1 | 19:53.288

Yeah, we’ve actually evaluated several of those. Additionally, we’ve got some high gain antenna options for the cradle point routers. And the cradle point routers use two diverse antennas for the 4G LTE signal as well, which between that and the high gain, most of the time takes care of us. If that’s not good enough for a given location, we generally have two options. One is to send more equipment out to amplify the signal. But typically the preferred is to connect a long piece of Ethernet up to the router and actually move the router to a better location. That’s typically quicker and more cost effective, but certainly we’ve also gotten the amplification and the repeater route for 4G LTE.

Speaker 2 | 20:38.382

We still have other carrier options, as mentioned, but the horizon is very, very high percentage of our applications. If the additional amplification, the other things that Kirk mentioned work, then we do have other carrier options. So we’ll come up with one of those solutions to make sure that our customer gets the connectivity they need.

Speaker 0 | 21:09.827

Gotcha. And I only say this because I’m a guy that lives out in the sticks in the middle of nowhere where it actually applies to me. For the majority of customers that are within any NFL city or within anywhere near any form of, you know, human interaction. I’m sure they’re doing just great.

Speaker 1 | 21:27.533

And the great thing is, you know, Verizon and really all of the 4G LTE networks are getting better on a daily basis, even out in remote locations. It’s amazing how much the map, especially remote map, is changing on a day-to-day basis. And they’re starting to populate tower sites for, you know, future 5G deployments. So We’re also seeing towers getting more and more dispersed, a greater number, which means fewer potential 4G wireless issues.

Speaker 0 | 22:03.161

All right. Well, guys, I really appreciate your time. I’m going to give you one last thing here. If you’ve got one message that you want to deliver to the crowd out there that’s listening, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 22:14.656

Hey, you know, as much as we would absolutely like to be the guys that always come to the rescue, and again, I’ve got two of these temporary emergency overnight shipping situations that I’ve got to take care of today, I’d really like to get everybody starting to think about failover. As more and more applications are moving to cloud-based applications, that network connection becomes critical for everyone’s business, whether it’s… point-of-sale data whether it’s office 365 whether it’s your VoIP phone so this is an upsell opportunity for everybody who’s out there and supporting a network it’s simple it’s easy we can have it deployed literally overnight so keep it in your bag of tricks and understand that the technology is perfect for this application yeah so I think the only thing I would add is that with our for SOCAS technology

Speaker 2 | 23:13.412

it’s just not an opportunity that uh that folks can uh walk away from now we talk to customers especially that that have um locations that uh in the past they’ve just had to share with those customers sorry we can’t can’t help you right now uh there’ll be some connectivity at the curve maybe in the upcoming year and we’ll visit that with you with the self-cast solution that’s just not the case

Speaker 0 | 23:45.145

you can get to you failover but in many of those situations don’t discount the self-exploitation excellent all right guys well i really appreciate your time today anyone that’s you know interested or wanting to buy now by any chance or has an issue or they they need failover backup you can certainly go to thehowardstrategy.com enter your information and I will get back to you as soon as possible. And we will get you a wireless router cradle point shipped out, all pre-configured and ready to go for your failover or emergency situation. Hopefully that’s not the case. Gentlemen, have a great day. Thank you for being on telecom radio one.

Speaker 1 | 24:29.577

Thank you, Phil. Appreciate it.