Explore the steps of how to turn BEAD potential into fiber in the ground.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for today's Fiber Broadband Association webinar presented by IQGeo. Today's presentation is from bead application to fiber rollout. My name is David and I'm the webinar producer and virtual event operations manager here at FBA. Before we begin I do have just a couple of housekeeping items very quickly. So first and foremost attendees are in listen only mode during the webinar today. However, we will have time for questions at the end. We'll have a live Q&A session with our panelists here. So please submit questions through the questions pane in the control panel which should be on the side of your screen. And we don't have any handouts in there today but there will be resources on our website following the presentation here and the on-demand replay. So that on-demand replay is usually available within 24 hours of the webinar. So you can certainly view it then as well. And that's available only to FBA members. So if you're part of a member organization, you can go to the website and join and create some login credentials for yourself to access those things. So definitely do that and let us know in the chat if you have any questions about that. So again today's session is from BED application to FBA rollout. We're very excited to have IQGAO join us today to take us through this. And so basically today's presentation is focusing on the broadband equity and access and deployment program better known as BED. And we're seeing that it's accelerating the FBA market pretty quickly. These days and so in this webinar we've got IQGAO and we've also got FBA's VP of public policy, Marissa Mitrovich, who will be joining us. And they're going to discuss how we can turn this potential BED funding into revenue generating fiber deployments. And so we'll review the BED process and discuss the generation of FBA rollout applications and project estimates and the eventual construction processes as well. And so with that, I just want to introduce our speakers very quickly here. As I mentioned, Marissa Mitrovich is our vice president of public policy here at the Fiber Broadband Association. So we're happy to have her. We've also got Steve Tongish, the chief marketing officer at IQGAO. And finally, we have Jonas Bersdwecht, who is the Fiber product manager at IQGAO. And so we are very happy to have them. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand things over to Marissa. Thanks so much, David. And it's great to be here today. So from, you know, BED application to Fiber deployment, I think there's going to be a wide range of participants today. So I thought we would just start with and level set and go through the definitions as I speak. As a reminder, these are definitions, they come from NTIA at the Department of Commerce. Notice of funding opportunity. Eligible entity is going to be the state or territory who is going to receive the grant funds directly from the Department of Commerce. Subgrantee, that's going to be probably many of you who are interested in applying for these grants once the states come up with their application process. And so that will be anyone who wants to deploy Fiber. Unserved is what the broadband data maps. These are the maps of the Federal Communication Commission put together that are being referred to, were referred to, have been referred to, and will continue to be by NTIA. That is anyone with 25 megabits per second up or down 3 megabits per second up. That is considered unserved. Underserved is going to be 100 megabits per second in download speeds, 20 megabits per second uploads. That's the minimum criteria for these applications in the area served. And then community anchor institution is any institution. It can be your library. It can be in a resource center, schools that lack a gigabit level of broadband service. So one and two tables set there. And as we think about this, bead applications as the NOFO suggests, it goes unserved, underserved. And then if there's leftovers, you can go to the community anchor institution. There's quite a few things you can do with that 20% of funding. So let's look back and think about how we got to today. There's a timeline I've put together here for the $42.5 billion for the broadband equity access and deployment program. So it's really hard to believe it's been two years since the bipartisan infrastructure law was signed into law. And for many of you, you'll remember conversations with your legislators and lawmakers leading up to getting the bipartisan infrastructure law constructed, telling them what needs of your communities and your customers look like. And so on May 12, 2022, shortly after a notice of funding opportunity came out from NTIA that had those pages of criteria that suggest how the eligible entities and the subgrantees are going to be able to take advantage of this unprecedented amount of money that's going to continue to be able to take advantage of this unprecedented amount of money. That's going to connect every community. However, there's been a lot of questions since that May 12, 2022 date. There's a lot more to be shaped. One was we were waiting to find out how much money each eligible entity was going to receive. We found that information out back in June of this year. And that's when things really had started to move forward. That each eligible entity has been asked to put action plans together, which they all submitted to NTIA in August and then before December 2023. So by, you know, two months from now, initial proposals are due both volumes one and two, which cover a host of issues that I'm going to go over with you shortly. But that's really where we're going to find out what each state and territory is thinking about as far as the criteria you as a subgrantee are going to have to comply with. Additionally, once we find out if these proposals have been accepted, kind of how this will work is if the proposals accepted, a 20% amount of funding will go to each state. States then can start running their grant process. They can start asking for applications. Once they begin that process and the selection process and have identified who's going to receive the grant funds. They will put together a final proposal, which they have 365 days to do and give to the Department of Commerce's NTIA. And at that point, that NTIA will look at it, see if it works, see if it's compliant, and then release the additional 80% of the funding. So that's a great thing. There will be ongoing monitoring and reporting and performance requirements. And that will have to take place that subgrantees, eligible entities and NTIA will participate in. I say all of this because there's so many different steps and you as the subgrantee, as you're thinking about how do you plan for this. There's a lot of information still we need to know. And there's going to be a lot of different boxes you're going to need to check. So as we think about these initial proposals, I wanted to start by just saying some of the things that are really important in these are, you know, mostly how are these grants awarded and what is going to qualify as for things like low cost offerings, which is a requirement for the grant. Which is a requirement of the program. How these funds are going to be used. What is the the extremely high cost threshold, which is how we're going to figure out if fiber can be deployed, which is part of the NOFO requirement. I have the list up here, which is also something you can get off of NTIA's website. But this is just just to really illustrate. There are so many considerations right now and that you all will need to take into account and also just the variables to plan for and something to know each state is going to have a different take on how this works in each territory. So I think that's really important to remember and why as you do your planning and I know many of you have been planning for months and months since the notice of funding opportunity came out in 2022. These are things that you you've been thinking through, but all of a sudden we're going to have come to a point when you now have to start doing this planning. I wanted to take you through some of the things that fiber broadband association members have been thinking about that impact subgrantees. Some of them were just mentioned on the slide we just went through. I come from a policy background. So these are the things that come up in conversations that I'm having. The fiber broadband association team has been having and our members are having with policymakers at the federal and local and state levels. This is also things that are coming in from our members who are saying this is what our company is talking about. This is what our leadership is thinking about. So this is really where we've been thinking about issues. So one is there's a letter of credit requirement. This is something that an FBA just sent a note to NTIA to say an entity. This letter of credit needs to be for 25% of this sub award. So the sub award is the award that the sub grantee will receive to deploy broadband and that ties up a lot of capital. So we want to make sure that we want to make sure every size provider who wants to take advantage of this funding can participate. So we've suggested maybe letter of credit isn't the only solution. That is something that the NTIA is looking at and we have heard will be maybe offering other options. So the manufacturing and supply chain. So there's a few pieces of that. Build America by America. The IIJA, which is the bipartisan infrastructure law, it has requirements to manufacture certain percentages of products in the United States that will go into the broadband network. So what we're talking about is that there was the office of management and budget put out some guidance earlier in this year to suggest that fiber optic cable is going to be considered a construction material. And then electronics and other parts and components of the network will be manufactured materials. We've weighed in on this extensively because as everyone participating in this webinar knows how this is looked at requires is going to cost money. So whether you're on shoring production of man in manufacturing products that costs money training a new workforce as well as planning. We saw in the pandemic how supply chain kind of really stalled a little bit. The fiber broadband association has a has a manual out guidance white paper about mitigating bottlenecks. We actually updated that this year. We've seen supply chain wait times decrease. Some people though over ordered and there's a surplus right now. All of those are going to play a huge role in how you think about your supply and your manufacturing. And I think the other thing that's really important on that is is cost. Are you going to have to store things? And then also deployment. Can you meet your deployment deadlines if you don't have the supplies you need? That's a huge critical part of this grant process. Affordability. The affordable connectivity program. Each BEAD proposal, each BEAD subgrantee application will have to have a low cost option. The bipartisan affordable connectivity program is one of the ways you can meet that. And it's currently scheduled to run out of funding. So as of yesterday, the White House asked Congress to re up funding for it at $6 billion. FBA supports that. This is a program that every congressional district is taking advantage of and over 21 million participants right now. So that's another thing because that subsidy is helping get people connected as well as helping companies be able to offer a great low cost option and making their technology, this fiber technology affordable. Permitting again, back to delays, timing, weather, that can all cost a lot of money as you plan for things. We have recommendations on permitting that we've put on our website and really encourage, as does the notice of funding opportunity coordination on this issue at the state level. And that's something where the more you as a subgrantee can communicate, hopefully you can get that process moving as efficiently and expeditiously as possible. So you can meet timelines. Again, something you have to put into your financial planning. Grant taxes. Grant taxes. As of now, the subgrantees will be taxed on any money that they receive. That's a lot of capital that's not going to go to deploying fiber and will be taken away that we, I think every applicant really would like to be able to be investing in deployment. There's some legislation on Capitol Hill that has not yet been passed at the federal level that could help relieve this tax. But it's certainly something to, you know, be aware of that's going to impact how you approach your subgrantee application. And then lastly, but certainly not least, is this the extremely high cost threshold. Now, this is a threshold to be set to figure out what is the most each state is going to allow to have you pay per location. So, you know, you don't want to set it too high because that means you don't get to as many houses with with fiber. You also don't want it to be too low. So that's something we've been thinking about and creating models on to say you can look at census blocks. You can combine projects. Each state has the flexibility to create how they're going to set this extremely high cost threshold. But that's going to also play a role in how you think about planning. How much is each, you know, location that you are going, you are able to deploy to. And so I think those are all really important issues that we've been thinking about at the Fiber Broadband Association and that all play a role in your financial planning and your planning. So at this point, I appreciate you letting me walk you through how we got to today where we are and where we now have to go. There's clearly a lot of variables that you as the sub grantee are going to have to be aware of and consider. And so I'm going to turn it over to Steve with IQ Geo, who's going to now talk about maybe because I know this is a lot of things to consider how you can think about planning. Steve, I'm going to send it over to you now. Well, let me start by saying thank you very much, Marissa, for that information. It's exciting, but extremely daunting because there's clearly a lot of information that people need to process and manage. And some of the key words that I walked away from in that process were affordability, permitting supply chain. All of that's really important. David, did we have a poll we wanted to run about? Yes, we can do that. That would be great because I think we wanted to find out where people were with respect to seeking BEAD funding. Absolutely. So we're going to launch a quick poll here. You should see that come up on your screen. So I think what we were trying to understand from the people in the webinar here today is if they're actually in the process of seeking funding or plan to seek funding. Because that will allow us to understand a bit more about where you are. So you can people should be able to answer that poll now and David, you'll let us know when you want to share the results. Sure. So we've got quite a few responses coming in. We'll give it just another minute or so here. So again, if you're like to know where you are in terms of planning for BEAD and seeking that funding. So it looks like we have a good number of results here. So I'm going to go ahead and close that poll. We can fire up the results. Let's take a look at the results. Okay. So it's a bit of a mixed bag here. So a good percentage of people are already seeking funding, which is surprising. That's great. And there's quite a number of people who are looking at doing it. So, yeah, that's, there are, there is a lot from clearly from what Marissa had to say, there's a lot that needs to be considered. So let's go into some of that. And let's look at how we move from that planning phase to execution. So David, if you want to flip back to the slides. That's perfect. Okay. So maybe we start by who is IQGEO and why are we doing this? So just really quickly, some of you probably know who we are. We're a software provider and we work in the, in the telecommunication and utility space. And we work with a lot of different utilities and telecommunication companies, a lot of fiber operators to help them plan, design and operate their networks. And we work around the world. So we're, we're a very fast growing software company. If you want to go to the next slide, David. One of the things we talk to our customers about is this idea of working across the life cycle. And I think this is relevant to the conversation today because it is important. And you saw that in the materials that Marissa presented, all of this stuff is connected together. So she talked about putting in plans, but also about permitting and supply chain management and construction. All of those things have to be connected. And we feel it's really important that, that organizations that are engaging in this process have a clear life cycle strategy. So how are they going to go from planning and design to construction and then to operations and maintenance? Let's be honest. One of the reasons you're doing this is because it's a fantastic opportunity to secure customers for long term revenue. And so you need to make sure you're looking downstream and managing that fiber network going forward. This is a big topic and there are a lot of phases here. And the important thing is that for this webinar anyway, we're going to focus on that first bubble. We're going to talk about planning and design and how is it that you can take your, your BED proposals? How can you get the right estimates that you need and the accurate estimates that you need so that you can move that proposal forward and be competitive with that proposal? So we'll, there's a whole conversation to be had about how you move planning into construction and onto operations. But today we'll just focus on the planning segment. So next David. We talked about this internally and we thought there's a lot of ways to do plans and the planning process, but we kind of boiled it down to three options, which hopefully you're familiar with. So you can do manual plans. So you can sit down with your, your engineers and they can sit down and use their, their CAD tools and their spreadsheets and their other applications to do a manual design. That can be done in house or you can ask a contractor to help you with it. You can purchase an automated fiber planning software and Jonas will be showing you what that looks like in a moment. So you can use a tool that would allow you to, to automate the process of, of high level estimation, high level design and even low level design. Or you could do something called a rapid cost estimate service. And, and it's a bit of a hybrid between the two and I'll, I'll explain what I mean about that in a second, but it's basically, it's basically using a supplier that is employing an automated tool. And it kind of gets you out of that manual design process and gives you some of the benefits of automated planning. Um, but without taking on the cost and expense of a, of a planning tool. So I think we had one more poll just to ask people here about how do they do their fiber planning today? Is it, is it mostly in mostly a, a manual process that you do in house? Is it, is it a manual process that's outsourced? Do you have your own automated planning software or, or are you not really doing that today? I imagine there are people on the call who probably aren't involved in this process anyway, but it'd be good to know where people stand. Okay. So what did we thought we do those three options? We thought we'd just talk briefly about the pros and cons. Um, so, because they're all good options. They're all good options. It just depends on, on maybe the scope of your proposal, what you need to do, um, how you're managing your process. So if you want to do manual design, whether it's in house or with a contractor, often this is a very well known process and the outcomes are very well understood because, because people have been doing it for years. Um, and it works extremely well with smaller network environments. Um, the, the, the negatives about it do doing a manual design, whether it's in house or outsourced is it can't be quite inflexible. Um, because you don't have an opportunity for example, to easily compare architectures. Um, and so it's, it's not terribly flexible when it comes to running different scenarios and, and it can be inconsistent. So we've seen this, that if you have multiple engineers working on a project, they'll all have their own preferences. And so you'll get slightly different design, um, arrangements and that can lead to extra costs. Um, and we've even seen it. It's funny. We've even seen it. If you have one engineer, oftentimes they can be inconsistent. That individual can be inconsistent. So it's, it's, um, it's, uh, it has the advantages of human intervention, but also the disadvantages. And, and this can be a time consuming process. And, and if you're outsourcing it, it can also be quite costly. So pros and cons there, whether you're doing manual design and also contractors. Um, next slide David. If you, if you want to purchase an automated planning software, so this is a tool that will, and again, we'll be showing you how this works, but this is a tool that allows you to set up your own design rules and run your own design activities. So this can be highly flexible because you can easily run multiple scenarios. It's fast. It's fast. It can take minutes to run a design as opposed to taking weeks or months to run a design. And it's great as you scale up because as you get more and more connections, uh, and, and more and more houses that you want to serve or businesses that you want to serve. Manual design can be, can be awkward. So a, an automated solution can be great. What are the negatives? Well, people have to run it. So you, you'll, you would need to have people in house that are, that are trained on the software and that they learn how to use the software and that they take the time to configure the software. And again, Jonas will explain a little bit about what that means. Um, and the final slide here. So this rapid cost estimation services where you get a third party and IQ geo does this, but we also have partners that do this where, for example, they use our automated planning software to run a service to do the cost estimations. So this could be the best of both worlds. So you don't need to worry about having users. It is still fast. It's highly flexible. You can run multiple scenarios quite easily. Again, very accurate. Um, it's great if you have smaller networks, but it can also scale. External, um, the, the disadvantages is of course you're using an external resource. There's always issues there. You do have to make sure you understand your costs and architecture because that all goes into the engine to, to do this for you. So you've got to make sure that that's understood. And if you really want to grow and you want to go from say 5,000 homes to, to 500,000 homes, then, then that can get to be more expensive if you run it as a service and you might consider buying the software yourself. So pros and cons all along. The purpose of these three slides wasn't to say that one is necessarily better than another. Um, but to say that, um, they, they all have a place and it, and it depends on the scope and scale of your project. Um, let's move on to Jonas now. So Jonas, uh, let me introduce, uh, Jonas. He's our, he's our, um, automated planning expert and he's gonna, we've been talking about automated planning software here for a moment, or I've been talking about it. So let's explain to you what it looks like and how it works. And that'll give you a greater insight into the, the use of these kinds of tools. Yeah. Thanks for the introduction. Happy to do so. Uh, I think what we first want to do is run another. Oh. And, um, ask the audience on the biggest fiber network planning. Pain points that they, that they have today in their, in their projects. Um, whether it's a poor design accuracy, um, lack of flexibility when, uh, yeah, doing, uh, doing their design and generating multiple scenarios. Uh, or the fact that it's a time consuming and expensive process, um, or could be, uh, could be all of the above. So we have that poll running and, uh, results are coming in. We'll give it just a minute here, Jonas. All right, we'll go ahead and display those results. Okay. Um, yeah, I think it's, uh, it's pretty clear. Half of the audience seeing issues in, in all of the three, um, pain points. Um, also quite a lot of people really focusing on time consuming and expensive parts. So really the, the time to do the planning and, um, yeah, time, time is money, of course. So, uh, yeah, a lot of people doing, doing planning, uh, thinking a lot of time will be, will be quite expensive. So, um, I think with, uh, with auto design solution, um, that is something that, that can be resolved. Um, and I'll, I'll talk about that in some detail. All right. Can you go back to the slides? Thank you. So I should have control. Okay. So, um, to start off, I want to highlight, yeah, a couple of flavors or a couple of differences that you can see in automated design solutions. Um, one is the cost versus design. What I mean with that is, um, how are, uh, the costs, uh, calculated, uh, by the, the design solution? Is there really a design, um, like, a whole cable network, uh, all the splicing, uh, that is feeding, uh, the cost? Or is there a high level estimate that is happening, um, just based on, um, street network or density, um, of the, of the areas that will, yeah, have a huge impact on the accuracy of the, um, yeah, of your plan. Um, and can introduce risk in your project. Uh, the less accurate you are, the more risk that you can introduce. Um, second, uh, point that I want to highlight is the granularity of the costs data that you get out of your solution. What I mean with that is, um, when you get costs results, are there, uh, an average for the whole area that you're, you're looking at? So do you get an average cost per home, um, for all of the homes within, uh, your project? Or can you go and zoom in on a neighborhood level or an individual home cost, uh, level and get that information from your auto design solution? The more granular you can get, uh, so the more details that you get in your costs, uh, output, uh, the more it gives you the ability to generate, uh, different scenarios and different options on how you want to deploy the, uh, the, the, the, the area. So it gives you a lot more flexibility. Trying to get to the next slides. All right. Um, then, uh, last point is the, the design details, uh, that you get from your auto design solution. So, um, is it just, if, if it's really using a, um, design using jazz data as well, uh, to, uh, to get to the cost and, and to determine that design is that design? Uh, just basically, uh, the routes to get to each home, uh, is it just the street network that's being used or is there actually some, some trenching, um, yeah, calculation that that's happening? Or do you, uh, get to a level of, uh, determining the cables, determining the ducts or even, uh, complete connectivity information? Um, like I said, that's influencing the, the accuracy, but it also, uh, gives you then the option to use that auto design solution in different, uh, project phases. So not only just for the initial cost estimate, but, uh, when it goes to a more high level design, detailed design phase of your project, you can use the same solution for, uh, those different phases. So it gives you a lot more, um, yeah, uh, the, the solution itself becomes more, more valuable. And wait. All right. So now I want to talk about some, some key elements of what, uh, what an auto design solution, um, should, should have. Um, one is that, uh, typically this is driven by geographic information. So there's, uh, GIS input data that will need to go into your, uh, into your, into your solution. So it's, it's, uh, being fed addresses, all streets, um, all of that information should go in to come up with a good, uh, good design. Um, the, there can be different levels of, uh, accuracy, uh, that you have. So, uh, the level of, um, information that you have at a certain stage in the project can be different for, uh, first planning exercise. You might not have the exact home counts for, for each address, or, um, if you're reusing existing infrastructure, you don't know the available, uh, capacity. Uh, once you go further down in your, uh, in your project and you go to a low level design, this is the information that you need, um, for, for getting to, to design that can actually be, uh, be deployed. So there's different levels of, of accuracy that could get into the tool. Um, but this has an impact on, uh, yeah, the accuracy of the results of course, as well. Um, and then, uh, the amount of data that, that goes into it for, uh, in green fields, um, uh, design. You can just feed it addresses and, and some streets, uh, for your initial planning. Um, once you go, um, yeah, to the next, uh, sort of phases, uh, you may want to reuse that existing infrastructure, uh, get the exact poll locations. All of that, uh, will be fed into your, uh, your solution. Um, another key, uh, element when, um, the auto design solution is, is really calculating, uh, complete network. Um, uh, that, that will be fed, will need to be fed detailed rules, uh, as well. So what goes into that? It's a, yeah, description of the network architecture that's being used. For example, the cabinet size that, that, that you're, uh, using, uh, like the, the amount of homes that you connect from a single cabinet. Maximum distance that you can get from, uh, the home to, to, uh, a drop point, uh, or something like that, for example. Um, what it will also need is information on the material and equipment that you, that you want to use in your, in your network. So the type of cables that you're using, type of ducts that you're using, closures, cabinets, all the different types of devices. All of that will need to be fed in, uh, also, um, whether you use aerial or, or, or underground deployment. And then, uh, last thing, uh, which is quite important, um, is that you feed it information, all, uh, the cost data. So what's the cost of trenching? What's the cost of an aerial deployment? Cost of all of the equipment, because this will, yeah, they should feed the, or they should drive the, the, uh, calculation engine. Um, if you have an auto design solution, it should use the information to come up with the best possible design to drive down the costs of your network deployment. But, uh, this is then of course also feeding the output, the, the cost result that you're interested in. So having accurate cost information going into the solution will give you an accurate estimate for, uh, for your deployment. So, uh, third thing that I want to focus on is having detailed output from your, uh, from your solution. One thing that's really important, that's the goal, uh, is a bit of material that's automatically calculated. That's, uh, the key thing that you're, that you're interested in when, uh, when it comes to planning is, uh, getting that cost information, knowing the cost per home, getting a general overview of, uh, the cost to, yeah, do the project. And, um, yeah, what is, what is even more interested is to get information on the individual cost of all the equipment and the volume of all the equipment that will be needed to, uh, deploy the network. Um, having this in an early stage can resolve some issues on, on supply chain, for example, that that Mercer was talking about. So if you have that information early on and have a good idea of what will be needed to, uh, deploy that, that network, uh, you can already start the process of ordering the material, uh, not over, uh, ordering as well. So, uh, this gives you some, some very, um, yeah, good, good insights for your project. The second thing, um, that I want to add an output is, uh, is related to that, that. To that, that, to that grand hierarchy that I was talking about earlier. So getting cost information per address, if you, if you had an information that you can go ahead and generate more visual representation for your network as well, generate this type of, of heat maps, for example, which really shows you where your costs are coming from, which, uh, neighborhoods, which, uh, homes in your target area are, are driving the cost for your, for your project. And gives you the possibility to do some, uh, to, to, to do some scenarios, uh, with that. And then, uh, again, on, on detailed outputs. If, uh, yeah, your auto design solution is using a detailed architecture network, um, and, and is, is generating that, that network. Um, then you can get full connectivity and use that for the later stages in your, in your project. Um, so it allows you then to, to trace through your network, for example, and really understand how each individual home is connected. Um, at, at, at every single location shows you clearly which cables are needed and where they are needed in the network. So not only in the bill of material, you see what, which equipment is needed, but also geographically, you can then inspect where, uh, all my equipment is needed. So that's, that, that, that, that, uh, that, that, uh, that, uh, I need to get to, uh, a certain home, um, and having this information again, allows you to do scenario analysis and do variations on your architecture. architecture to come up maybe with a cheaper solution to deploy your network. The last thing that I wanted to highlight on another design solution is that it should give you the if it gives you the possibility to influence the design and do that in a smart way. So really make certain decisions on your feeding boundaries. So which homes you serve with a single central office or with a single cabinet or where that location is of that feeding point and let the software really do, let all the design solution really calculate again the routes, the equipment, connectivity can really help to get a lot more accurate results without having to invest a lot of time and effort in it because yeah there's probably people in the audience that are struggling with investing time and effort in that planning process that if you want to do changes to your design this has a big impact on the design itself. This takes a lot of time, you have to recalculate your material your costs so that takes a lot of time so the other design solution should take that out of your hands and give you the possibility to make changes in the network design in a smart way and let the design solution do the heavy lifting and recalculate the cost and regenerate the network design. All right now I want to give you a quick demo of what that would look like with Comsof Fiber on Network Manager so our solution and so what I'm doing here is I'm in my web environment so I'm in a browser and I'm starting a new design so I have my addresses loaded in the database and my street information here and what I'm doing is I'm drawing a boundary for a new design that I want to do a new project that I want to do So I have this area that I'm targeting that I'm considering So I'm just generating a design boundary calling it a demo area and then I have the the option to generate a workspace for it. So what is a workspace? This is a particular scenario that I want to that I want to consider. So this could be a particular network architecture architecture. You could also just have a single scenario that you're running but it could be a particular network architecture. It could be a subset of my original yeah my original area so leaving out certain homes or certain neighborhoods from my from my calculation. So I have this workspace setup that's running So there's a lot of there's a couple of steps that are happening to prepare the area so selecting the the addresses that are covered also picking up any existing infrastructure that I can reuse for my calculation It's it's pre-processing that area so connecting everything up and then running the calculation. So when running the calculation it is applying the configured network architecture to this particular area and it's determining how to group the homes. So my my my design rules so how are my homes group based on the size of the of the clusters based on the the maximum distance that I can go So it's grouping that it's determining the equipment that is needed to feed all of the all of the homes and it's creating all that connectivity information Then yeah, what it's also doing during a calculation is generating the the bill of material So like I showed that in presentation you for this workspace for this scenario You get a bit of material with high level cost information. So it shows you What it costs to connect that average cost to connect the home in that area Some high level information on the costs, but what is most interesting is that you get detailed cost insights. So here you can see the amount of trenching that is needed to connect the homes The amount of equipment that's needed for example, you need five cabinets in this area This is what it costs to connect all the homes And even the splicing cost is included here in the splicing volume So you immediately know all of the details of of your your design to connect all the homes And what is what is interesting as well Is that you get the cost information on a very detailed level so per home you can see the cost so this is $1800 to connect this point this is more than $3000 to connect another another address You can see that there's a lot of Trenching that that needs to happen to connect up to this to this single home So that's all being taken into account when come on coming up with these individual costs So it gives you a lot of detailed insights in the cost information which allows you to then do that scenario analysis and maybe leaving out some homes and rerunning to see what the impact is on your costs And the last thing that I'm showing here is that you have that full connectivity information as well automatically being generated So this is really a design with splicing with all of that equipment that is feeding that bit of material and that cost information So what I'm doing here is just a trace for an address location where you see on the left hand side all the equipment that is being passed to connect at home So it gives you a lot of confidence that you can you can build a network based on based on this on this design and that your project is not at risk And that was everything for for me Thanks very much Jonas appreciate the overview I hope that that helped people to understand a little bit about what automated fiber planning is all about and how that differ how that differs from manual planning procedures and operations so providing a lot of flexibility and agility that I think again speaks to some of the things Marissa was talking about regarding affordability and and putting your proposals together So hopefully we have some questions that people would like to ask Hi Steve I can help with that I've seen some come in and Marissa the first few are addressed to you So the first one is what is your best estimate of where all aggregate states will end up with respect to beta awards for fiber versus fixed wireless So, you know each state is so different at this point You know, I think it all depends how they put together their extreme high cost modules I've been reading some of the volume 2 proposals which include this A lot of them haven't Even indicated how they're going to approach that threshold But I do think there I mean, I would say there's a good opportunity for a lot of fiber to be deployed We know there will be other technologies that are adopted though Okay, thanks and the next one also for you is do you anticipate any delay in service provider bead applications? Is they consider whether to continue with a cam or bead? I'm not sure if a cam is if i'm saying that correctly. It's a cam Yeah, that's the abbreviation. Um I don't I don't know I honest. I can't adjust that one. I'm sorry. I don't know Okay, no worries And then one more for you. Is it possible to use my current fiber infrastructure during the planning of a new network? Thank you. Um, yes, absolutely uh, the bead funds are to make sure unserved and underserved locations Can be served with minimum of a hundred over 20 although there's a fiber preference Yes, you can upgrade existing infrastructure and you can use those funds for that Great. Thank you Steven Jonas, I think these next few are more IQ Geo specific So the first is is there a way to figure out is there a way to figure out the optimal location of splitters and their location? As a function of dwelling density Sounds like a Jonas question Yeah, it's a quite specific question. Um, so There there's a possibility to to generate different scenarios of course depending on um Yeah, the the the the dwelling density I think steve also touched upon it like uh Seeing whether you need a distributed split or centralized split So these sort of of scenarios that you want to analyze also the split ratio and where they're located If you want to use in building splitters, for example These are all different scenarios that that you would be able to run quite easily um and use in in your evaluation, uh, for uh Well evaluate those those different network architectures uh for your for your project and see what is what is most interesting. So yeah, that's that that is a possibility Okay, great And probably very valuable in these scenarios where you really are targeting You know a low cost option or a best cost option Yeah, that that flexibility is really critical Okay, thanks. Uh next also for you guys Can we determine the cost of a scenario with a star topology versus a redundant ring topology? Um, yeah, so it needs that there are a couple of different, um Yeah cable deployments, uh, that are that are out there Uh, like a yeah more start apologies So serving every cabinet with a single cable or more tree and branch And also rings closed rings or open ring topologies are are quite common um, so yeah, and our solution is possible to uh, to yeah generate a network design for these different types of topology and and make that comparison Okay, and I think this might be a little bit related, but how accurate is the result of these auto design calculations? Um, what percentage difference will there be compared to the actual construction cost? Um, yeah, that's a that's a tough one Yeah, that's a good question. Um, so Yeah, like like you saw in in the demo and in the presentation, it's really a Network design where you have all your splicing your cables your ducts your trenching costs Loaded in so you need to feed that to the to the solution of course So the more accurate you get in in feeding that information in uh, the more accurate your um, yeah, your actual build cost will be um There's always yeah things that are that are unforeseen um That that the software cannot cannot know about so Um, I wouldn't say that it's 100% accurate, but it's it's it's getting pretty close But I think this also plays into the idea that we talked about at the very beginning about connecting up all these processes together Because the design is one thing and the execution is another And and if if you do a highly automated design and then a very manual construction process You've probably compromised a lot of your efficiency So you've got to make sure that that automation carries through Into being able to go out in the field and do inspections to make sure that those designs can be executed And being able to do as built capture as built accurately so that you can you can Make sure that the costs are mitigated and that you can manage that fiber going forward So it also speaks to that whole life cycle challenge and strategy Yes, thanks Um, one more can we use the solution to make detailed changes in the network design? The examples they're asking about are can we change the splices or change the type of cable? Yeah, so I talked about um Yeah, doing design changes and doing yeah more High-level change or influential influential changes to the design and that the software Generated the yeah, the whole routing and equipment Uh again on its on its own so more this is more for planning or high level design Um Yeah, stage of of the project of course with our solution It's also possible to go in into more detail and once you go into low level design and You're getting close to construction. For example, you need more control over the um, yeah Yeah, over the design over over the whole network and make these individual changes So it's definitely possible to then go in and Change the kind of the type of cable that you want to use or do your splicing in a different way or Use a different micro ducts for example Um, those those type of detail changes are also still possible But that's more for later stages in the project I would say and not when you're yeah doing your initial Uh initial cost estimates then then you want to do this these high level high level changes and rely on the the automatic functionality Okay, thanks. Uh, we are coming up on time. So i'm just going to get to one more uh for you marisa Uh, someone did ask if we're going to share the slides afterwards answers. Yes, absolutely So we'll share all of those and we'll also try to answer these additional questions We have a handful more but for you marisa real quick Is there a standard application for isps to apply across several states at once? Uh, there is not a standard application Okay, thanks and david we'll turn it back to you Thank you everybody for attending and uh, uh, thanks especially to our uh presenters steve and yonas and marisa Uh, just one quick announcement here a couple quick announcements Um, first of all, we have our uh regional fiber connect schedule is now up for 2024 And so if uh, you're interested in attending those you should start planning now Uh, we'll be kicking things off in richmond virginia on february 8th And then little rock in uh april and then we've got deer valley utah des moines iowa and albuquerque Uh, uh later on in the year. So we look forward to seeing everybody there And uh, if you want to view more upcoming uh webinars go out to our events page on our website And uh, we've got all of our uh upcoming webinars published there And then of course, uh, every wednesday we have our fiber for breakfast series featuring gary bolton Uh fba president and ceo. So that's wednesday every wednesday at 10 a.m. So, uh, we look forward to uh, seeing everybody uh, there as well But with that we'll close up the session and again, we appreciate everybody's time. Thank you. Thank you all Thank you. Bye