April 18, 2025
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[Tyler Hoffman]
Good afternoon, everyone. I believe everyone's getting, uh, let in from the waiting room at this moment. Uh, I see a number of attendees joining the webinar at this moment. Uh, we're gonna give it a couple minutes here just for folks to go ahead and figure out some of the technical, uh, bits and pieces here. Uh, we know Zoom had a big, uh, nationwide outage yesterday, which, uh, instilled some fear in our team. But I... We do believe everything is now back and working, which is pretty exciting. Um, in today's webinar, you'll notice that you are muted by default, uh, e- in the, in the session. However, we really encourage you to use the chat, not only to ask questions, but also to kind of give us comments and reactions, uh, as we go along in the session. Uh, we will cover all questions towards the end of the webinar just so we can keep our run of show on track, but we're really excited. Um, again, uh, for those just joining, we're gonna give it one more minute for folks to go ahead and, uh, get signed on to the webinar today.
[Tyler Hoffman]
The run of show for us today is, uh, a few things. One, for the few folks who don't know about us already, I'll just do a quick introduction on who we are and why we're the credible Starlink player in the space. Uh, then we'll quickly dive into what are the old Starlink business plans are or were, and kind of now what the new Starlink plans are going to be and what their kind of operating model is shifting towards. Uh, a big part of that conversation is gonna be about priority data and specifically what happens to your business on when you run out of priority data, like throttling, uh, your options for buying more data or living with some of the hidden costs, uh, especially with those local and those global priority plans. We'll also be [coughs] get... then getting into our solution to the problem, Metro Bond. Uh, I don't wanna steal Tom's thunder, but we address a lot of the cost overrun, speed issues, carrier, uh, redundancy, things like that. Uh, then we'll also share a case study. Uh, we've had some really cool connectivity solutions deployed recently, uh, with our Metro Bond solution, bonding multiple circuits together. And then finally, we're gonna end with a Q&A session, uh, to finish it off and make sure we get a lot of your questions answered.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, just as a quick housekeeping item for us, we wanna make sure we're covering a few things. Uh, as we've already mentioned, your microphones are muted. Uh, that's intentional just so we can kind of keep the dialogue going. We don't want this to be death by PowerPoint. We did open the chat. We did open the Q&A. We want this to be an engaging conversation. If you run into any technical difficulties, our director of marketing's email is right there to help you out with any of those issues.Um, I've already said it, I'll say it again. Please, again, let's make this an engaging session. Please share your questions in the Q&A window. You don't have to wait to submit them. Submit them now as we go on during the session, and Tom and I will answer those for you at the end. Finally, this webinar is recorded. We live by record once, distribute forever. So we're gonna go ahead and share that recording at the- uh, after the webinar. We'll distribute it via email. We're gonna share these PowerPoint slides. We're gonna share a transcription of the webinar. It's gonna go on LinkedIn. Uh, you'll be sure to pat- be able to see it, not only for yourself, but for any clients and colleagues that you'd like to send it out to as well.
[Tyler Hoffman]
But without further ado, most of you on this call today probably already know who we are. Uh, but for those who don't, Metro Wireless is an owner-operated company. We're super proud to be based out of Detroit, Michigan. Uh, they've been here for a long time. We got started in 2013. But what we do is we are a nationally managed service provider focusing on wireless. Uh, we are carrier agnostic, and what we mean by that is regardless of whether we're doing AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile data, Starlink, which is obviously the big topic today, maybe even Amazon's new LEO satellite option, which we wanna get into next year, our big focus is keep your carrier, but get rid of the headache. And so we offer premium wires- wireless solutions to help you and your clients and the MSPs, uh, solve any wireless connectivity challenges that they're facing. Uh, we offer a 24/7 client NOC that's based here in Detroit. I like to tell folks, please excuse the Michigan accent when you call in because our whole team is based here. And, uh, I won't, you know, go line by line here about... Just 'cause I'm Mid- I'm Midwest modest and I don't want to brag too much, but, uh, we're very fortunate to boast cool things like a nine and a half out of 10 on our CSAT scores. Typically, it takes less than 30 seconds to reach a live technician at our NOC side, great Google reviews, and our average client typically stays with us for at least five years. So we've been very lucky to, um, build a good reputation on that.
[Tyler Hoffman]
That's enough about us. Why are we the credible experts on Starlink? Well, we're an official Starlink partner. You can actually find us on the Starlink website. Uh, here I call out [clears throat]... Excuse me, I'm getting over a cold here. Uh, you can see our name listed on the Starlink web page. Um, I just want- as a note of caution, there are a lot of vendors out there who claim to resell or to be partnered with Starlink, but they're actually not an official partner. Um, I'm not saying that you have to use, uh, Metro Wireless as your Starlink provider, but please do your diligence when you're evaluating options for getting Starlink services. The other piece that I want to call out is we're a big Peplink shop. Peplink is part of the black magic that we use to bond Starlink with 5G and some other things, uh, that we do. And so [clears throat] as part of that, uh, of course being a great Starlink partner, we've installed and managed hundreds of sites, not only throughout the US, we actually have some sites in Canada, we have sites down in Costa Rica now, I think we have some coming online in Mexico. Uh, we're waiting for Starlink to become, uh, available in India because we have clients out there who are looking for sites. And so we're doing a lot of cool things with Starlink today. Uh, as part of the Peplink platform, we got a big shout-out from Peplink which is similar to Cradlepoint if you guys know it. Um, some of the cool things that we can do via the Peplink platform with Starlink is offer you one or multiple public static IPs, uh, we can bond multiple wireless circuits together, which Tom will get into in a bit. Uh, we can do active-active SD-WAN failover, out-of-band management, things like that. So, uh, via the Peplink platform, that's really where our secret sauce comes together and we're very proud of that.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Now, let's dive right into it. All right, we're assuming today that our audience has a pretty good sense of not only what Starlink is, uh, they're- they may or may not be using Starlink for business today. Uh, we're gonna consider any C- Starlink consumer or residential plans out of scope. The reason for that is Metro Wireless is a commercial-only provider, we don't do any residential services. And any businesses that elect to use the residential s- Starlink offering for their business are currently or, uh, operating outside the terms of service of Starlink. We're not the nanny state, we're not the police, but it's just out of scope for the conversation today. We're only focusing on Starlink's priority data plans. Um, with that in mind, I'm gonna give you a breakdown of the old plans as well as what's happening with the new plans. So today, if you had signed up, say through us or another provider in Starlink in the past, Starlink typically offered two types of priority data plans. And again, I'm just focusing on the US market today. There were the fixed site and the mo- and the mobility plans. Fixed site being it was just that one location, mobility meaning you could drive around with it, maybe like in an RV or a mobile command center. And a user or a customer would purchase a priority data plan package, for example, 40 gigs per month, a terabyte per month, five terabytes per month, and that guaranteed you the fast lane on the highway experience. Uh, I consider this the toll road kind of experience, is- is what I would like to tell our clients and users. But the key part is, in the old days, upon exhausting that priority data, you would then be moved to something called a standard data. And what standard data was is that Starlink typically was as fast and had as low of latency as your priority data plans, but during times of network congestion, there could be- you could be subject to slowdowns in your network speeds. It didn't happen all the time, but it could happen. Uh, most users frankly didn't notice and they just kind of utilized the standard data until the end of their billing cycle when the priority data renewed over to the next cycle. Uh, that's all changing and there's lots of thoughts behind wh- why that's changing with Starlink. Uh, we at Metro Wireless take the perspective that the network is getting more congested, there's a ton of demand, and despite how many more satellites that Elon's putting up into the- to space, uh, the user demand is simply outstripping the- the, uh, capacity of the network. So what's, uh, i- what's happening under the new plans? So it's the same concept. You can still buy priority data p- pools, 50 gig, 500 gig, terabyte, five terabytes, whatever kind of bucket size that you find appropriate for your needs.But the problem is once you exhaust your priority data, your standard data is now gonna be hard throttled down to one megabit per second downloads and 0.5%, uh, 0.5 megabits per second uploads for the rest of your billing cycle. Now, if you're just running, like, a simple POS transaction or an ATM machine or something like that, that might be sufficient, but Tom and I and the Metro Wireless team take the perspective that that's just not gonna work for most commercial customers, right? And so this is essentially kind of a hard cap on the data usage that Starlink is enforcing on their customers. And unfortunately, even if you had purchased Starlink data, either from Metro Wireless or any provider in the marketplace, no one is grandfathered into the old model. Um, so in order to, uh, you know, stay on the toll road experience, you have to buy more data. There's some other options that Tom is about to get into. But what we're seeing is that for high usage customers who are using five to six terabytes a month and weren't paying for those priority data plans, uh, they're facing cost increases of two to five times. So it's a pretty serious problem that, uh, a lot of folks are gonna be facing. The effective date is actually today, April 17th, so a lot of customers, uh, even if they may are not aware yet, they're gonna be seeing on their bills pretty shortly or getting communications of, uh, what's gonna be happening there, uh, on that piece.
[Tom Benson]
So to be clear, Tyler, if you signed with a provider, let's just pick one arbitrarily, uh, MetTel, Granite, Epic, whatever-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah
[Tom Benson]
... uh, and you have a three-year term, um, are you grandfathered in such that you don't have to worry about this? Or is this gonna affect you too?
[Tyler Hoffman]
This is gonna affect you too, regardless if you're buying, say, through like a MetTel or a Granite or direct from Starlink. Every s- everyone, no matter what kind of contract you're on, is facing this, this, uh, situation.
[Tom Benson]
Understand.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah. It's... And it's, uh, it's a pretty big deal. The other thing too I wanna call out is Starlink is also adding another fee. It's called the terminal access fee. Uh, I'm looking at my, my notes here just to make sure I have it right. So the, the terminal access fee is a new fee that Starlink is charging for every single dish that is placed in service today. Uh, that fee ranges depending on whether you're on like a local US-based plan. I'm seeing about $40 a month for that plan. And if it's a global plan, you're typically paying about $150 a month just for the ability to have that dish connect to the network. Um, so again, two, two different types of fees now. One for the priority data pools, as well as just a terminal access fee to have that dish attached to the network. Um, that's another big part of the ch- the changes in the, in the operating model these days.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um, Tom, I'd love for you to tell us about what happens kind of now when you... You know, your, your options.
[Tom Benson]
Great. So, uh, to the extent that if, if you're involved in Starlink, uh, let's just arbitrarily say you've sold 100 of 'em or 50 of 'em, or you're a customer who has 100, whatever, um, you may be ahead of the curve. And if you are ahead of the curve, so be it. But if you're behind the curve, here's what's happening. Throttling to one meg down is a material impact. The, the former plan was once you ran out of your priority data, you would run at 100 meg down. 100 meg down is not a hardship.
[Tom Benson]
One meg down is. That... Your business is now done. You are not running your business on one meg down, period. And this impact is going to happen beginning
[Tom Benson]
when you r- exhaust your priority data. So this week, next week, first week in May, second week in May, the noise is gonna start to get higher and higher as people experience this problem. So you have three options if you're running Starlink Primary and you run out of priority data. One is you can do nothing and run your business on one meg. Well, that's ridiculous. That's not happening because nobody runs their business on one meg. You didn't put in 160 meg download circuit to run on one meg, so that's preposterous. Businesses will not limp along on one meg. Their second option is to pay for more data, and so this is the pay-as-you-go option, and the dollars on this are $250 per terabyte.
[Tom Benson]
That is the hard cost from Starlink. $250 per terabyte.
[Tom Benson]
This is a known fact. There's no getting around it. There's no grandfathering. Everyone's going to pay this. There are no exceptions to this rule.
[Tom Benson]
The question does become, in the channel, is it going to be $250 a terabyte or are our competitors going to upcharge for that? And the answer is, I don't know. I have seen emails where they're offering $500 a terabyte, but I can't tell you what the channel policy is going to be. So you're gonna wanna check with, what are you charging for an extra terabyte of data? And then if you del- delve into that a little bit more from the customer experience, not only are you gonna have to add data, but they're gonna have to evaluate how much data to add, which means they're gonna have to grind down and actually evaluate this. When they installed it, they installed it at, "You can run at at least 100 meg forever. It's unlimited." Right? That's easy. This now becomes hard. How much data did I use? How much data am I going to use? Was that a fluctuation or not? And you have to purchase the data ahead of time, because purchasing it behind the curve is difficult. Um, it's difficult. So now this becomes a process you have to manage. Uh, so from a cost overrun standpoint and a time investment standpoint and, frankly, a bit of an emotional investment standpoint, there's a bait-and-switch element to this, right? People put these circuits in based on one premise, and that premise has completely gone away. Uh, and businesses generally don't like changes in their policy that cause them to have to invest more time and more money into a circuit that they already have. So your third option is just take a look at Metro Bond. That's what we're here to talk about. We believe that it addresses a problem in the marketplace.
[Tom Benson]
Which problem o- or who does it affect in the marketplace? People who are using more than their priority data plan.
[Tom Benson]
So the total addressable market, if you will, is one, people who use Starlink, but then two, people who use more than their priority data. How do we find out who's using their... M- more than their priority data? Well, who's yelling about it would be your first step. Who just got throttled? Who just got a notification that their costs were going up?If you just do a back of the en- a back of the envelope math, if you're spending arbitrarily $500 a month with some channel provider on a Starlink one data... one terabyte data plan, but you use four terabytes, you have to buy three more terabytes.
[Tom Benson]
And three more terabytes is gonna cost you $750. So your $500 circuit now becomes a $1,250 circuit. Or five terabytes, means you have to add four more terabytes. You can do the math, it's $250 per terabyte. What we're focusing on here is the high volume users. They're going to be looking for a solution. This is a massive, not just greenfield opportunity, but existing base opportunity. Every Starlink user who ex- is exceeding their current priority data plan and is threatening to be throttled or have cost overruns becomes a target market for changing over to a different service.
[Tom Benson]
Metro Bond is a service that we're, uh, proposing to be that solution, and we'll get into the details of that. Looking just a, a quick glance at our prior, or pardon me, our data plans and our customers. Uh, we had, uh, customers on one priority data plans, and we have one, two, three, four people who are exceeding their priority data plan. We have to go back in and manage that. Uh, that's four out of six. I would predict 20% of your existing customer base is exceeding 20 to 30, and 70% is not. So that, that's the ones that we wanna focus on first.
[Tom Benson]
So that th- the downside is costs are going up and thr- and, uh, and speeds are being throttled. The upside is, one, we have a... we're proposing a, a real solution, alternative solution. And then two, there is an opportunity with the Starlink changes on the upside. And, and it's this. The mobile plans used to be very small and cost-limiting, uh, or use-limiting, I guess. You could only put 40 gig through it. But now the one terabyte data plan is good for mobile use anywhere in the country, and this opens up the opportunity for mobile command centers, mobile assets, mobile medical, mobile valuable, I guess, is the term that I would, I would roll up to. If it's valuable and it's mobile
[Tom Benson]
and you need internet when you park, Starlink is now a very valid option for that. And then
[Tom Benson]
adding Metro Bond to that, where we start weaving in additional circuits, we can turn mobile valuable into basically an office experience wherever you go, where you park your asset and you're running as fast as if you were sitting in the office. That's the goal of Mobile Metro Bond, and we're looking forward to talking about it more. And then finally, Starlink did come out with a, another dish. So, uh, the dish is the Enterprise dish, and it costs less than the High Power dish. Um, and the High Power dish has come down in price too. So if you looked at this six months ago and you saw a $2,500 dish cost and you had a 30 location place, and you're like, "Uh, 75 grand up front, I'm gonna move on." Dish costs have come down substantial. Uh, the Enterprise dish is now 600 bucks, and we'll roll that into a monthly. So, uh, if you wanna test the waters on Starlink, the cost of entry has dropped. We gotta manage the data usage on the backside, but the cost of entry has dropped. So that's the current state of affairs, um, and some back of the envelope cost, cost analysis.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Great. Thank you, Tom. And a- as you mentioned, the High Power dish is the Starlink High Performance dish. Uh, specifically the Flat High Performance Dish compared to the Enterprise dish, which is a lot more affordable. Uh, we actually tested both dishes side by side in our lab. Uh, the performance results were actually very similar from download speeds, upload speeds, and latency. So we expect most clients to move over to that Enterprise dish. And, uh, real quick, just in case you didn't see it on the right-hand side, to Tom's point, we took a data sample. Uh, thank you to our NOC team and Alex for putting this data together. Uh, you know, these are some of our data whale users, right? You can see that even if they're, you know, buying one terabyte of priority data, there's a l- ton of usage going above and beyond. So if you're, if you're potentially having a problem, y- you really wanna start looking at your data usage patterns now over the last few months to see how big of an issue this is going to be. Um, even our clients in the bottom two rows, for example, uh, who, you know, elect for the smaller kind of more backup plans, uh, they're exhausting their priority data buckets, right? And so, uh, they're at risk for cost overruns. Now, uh, of course, we don't just, uh, keep this data to ourselves. We've already had conversations with these clients, or they could be Metro Bond clients already. But, uh, we wanna paint the picture that you gotta act quickly. This is a, this is a real problem.
[Tyler Hoffman]
So Tom, tell us about the solution. I, I know we've kinda teased it a bit, but I wa- I want you to t- you know, give us the full story on it.
[Tom Benson]
Yeah. So Metro Bond is, uh, it's a... What we're using here is PEPLINK SpeedFusion technology. And what, what we're doing is we're, we're introducing a 5G circuit or multiple 5G circuits to the Starlink solution in order to, uh, uh, really deliver a number, uh, deliver a number of attributes. Um, if I back up and just look at this sort of globally, we're a wireless managed service provider. We reco- We operate a fixed wireless network in Detroit. So if you're in Detroit, that's relevant. If you're outside of Michigan, it's really not. But we deliver wireless from, from rooftops. We deliver wireless through 5G, and we deliver wireless through Starlink. From where we sit, we deliver wireless solutions, uh, by doing an objective analysis of what makes the most sense. And Starlink is very valid, but it's, uh... there's other wireless networks out there. And so if you look at the 5G network and the Starlink network as sort of a, an ingredient list of, "How are we going to make our solution based on what's available to the end user?" That's the basis of Metro Bond. Along with spe- PEPLINK SpeedFusion technology, which is a, a bonding technology that takes multiple circuits and turns them into one usable circuit. So I say this relatively frequently when I talk to people. When we, when we bond, we're 100% relying on PEPLINK SpeedFusion. It's not our technology, it's not our code, it's not... [laughs] We didn't invent this, uh, our big brother is PEPLINK and they've been doing this for s- at least six years. Uh, I remember when they were labbing this up in 2018. So it's well-proven technology. It's used worldwide.If you type Peplink SpeedFusion into the Google machine, you will get 10,000 results and you'll see that this is well-established technology. [smacks lips] So what we're doing with Metro Bond is this. We're taking the Starlink dish and then at a minimum, we're adding one 5G circuit to it. How do we add the 5G circuit? We deploy a Peplink modem, which is part of our solution anyway, which is sort of the secret sauce of our solution, is... And then we turn on an unlimited 5G data SIM. Then we bond the Starlink and the 5G data SIM together,
[Tom Benson]
and then we dynamically allocate how much Starlink data we're using throughout the month to sit within your data plan. So if you have a one terabyte data plan, we make sure that that data is allocated properly such that you don't go out throughout, th- through... It, it lasts through the end of the month. It may be that we're using 60% Starlink, 50% Starlink, 45% Starlink. We have to do the math, but that's our job behind the scenes. And there's... The settings within Peplink are robust enough to make that happen. [smacks lips] The next question comes, "Well, would I lose performance?" No. Actually, you would gain performance. We've added an entire, uh, one more circuit to this, a 5G circuit, which across the country is running 100, 150, 200 meg down. So your performance goes up. Now instead of just having one Starlink circuit on the download, you have a Starlink and a 5G circuit bonded together on the download, which roughly doubles the speed. That's the shorthand for... That's shorthand. There's some math behind it, but think twice as fast. Or if we bond three circuits, three times as fast, or four circuits, four times as fast, et cetera, et cetera.
[Tom Benson]
Another hidden attribute to this is on the upload, it's actually more than 2X, uh, speed increase because Starlink upload is, is okay, but it, it really nets out to about 15, 16 meg up.
[Tom Benson]
Starlink is heavily tuned for download, whereas the 5G channels, a lot of them are hitting 40, 50 upload these days. Uh, there's been significant improvements in that. And so if we can take an upload speed of 15 and turn it into an upload speed of 50, 55, you know, that's a 4X gain. And, uh, stating the obvious, every Zoom call, every Teams call, including the one we're on right now, is dependent on upload. So we're seeing more and more and more... In fact, even in the case study we'll talk about that, but I'm getting requests all over the country of, "I gotta get 50 meg upload. I gotta get 100 meg upload." There's no wireless provider who can get you consistently and guarantee 50 to 100 meg upload off of a single circuit. You have to bond it. So those are the attributes of Metro Bond. Both circuits at the same time bonded together, you're connected to two networks at the same time. It's an... Uh, it's not a load balancing circuit, it's a bonded circuit and, uh, you get both sides on the download.
[Tyler Hoffman]
... you know, use this? Uh, it's a very simple network diagram, but I know you and I like to use this to kind of paint what an average deployment looks like.
[Tom Benson]
Yeah. So there's, there's flavors here, right? This happens to be a four-bonded solution, or what we would call Metro Bond X4.
[Tom Benson]
This particular network diagram is one Starlink and three 5G modems, three separate 5G modems connected to three separate towers pulling down three separate data streams. [smacks lips]
[Tom Benson]
Each one is bonded together at the Peplink head end, and so you're gonna have a Peplink router, a Peplink router, a Starlink dish, and then a Peplink controller router, and that bonds all four circuits together on both the download and the upload. [smacks lips] The second attribute to this is no- it's, it's not just bonded, it's also delivering
[Tom Benson]
CISO-qualified static IP. I, I say CISO, chief information security officer, where we have a number of clients who are coming to us and saying, "We need static IPs." Not persistent IPs, static IPs. And we need a range of static IPs. So subnet mask gateway, public static IP. Uh, we can deliver one, five, or 13
[Tom Benson]
through the Metro Bond solution.
[Tom Benson]
And the in- information security officers and the bank security officers are signing off on this. So to answer your questions about, can I do security? Can I offer static IP? Can I offer a range of static IPs? Yes, you can on this solution.
[Tom Benson]
So now you're getting quad download and quad upload. If you wanted to, you could make
[Tom Benson]
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile Starlink. Now you're connected to four separate networks. So not only delivering u- uh, upgraded performance, but you have delivered quad-carrier diversity.
[Tom Benson]
There are companies who absolutely value that in and of itself. [smacks lips] So you have network diversity, you have route diversity, and you have a circuit fast enough to deliver your cloud applications even in the event that all of your terrestrial circuits are cut or flooded.
[Tom Benson]
So this product has any number of reasons for people to evaluate it and perhaps purchase it. Yes, it's a cost containment effort, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's also a risk management tool for your cloud applications, and it's a circuit you can use every day so you make the internet go faster. So it's a triple win in the channel and for the end user. Uh,
[Tom Benson]
and that's why, you know, that's why we're really excited about this. The timing is perfect for it.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah. And we're, we're certainly getting the mo- mo- momentum behind it. Um, we really appreciate... I'm seeing all the Q&A questions coming in. Thank you. Please continue sending those in. We'll definitely get to those at the end. But, uh, Tom, I don't, I don't know if you can see these, but the quality of the questions are really, are really high, so I'm excited about it.
[Tyler Hoffman]
It's looking good. Um, I want to touch on real quick, [coughs] there's a lot of cool things that we can do inside the Peplink, uh, portal. It's, it's a cloud portal that everyone gets access to when they sign up with Metro Wireless, whether you're an MSP, an end user, whether you want your MSP or your partner, your trusted advisor to use this.Um, you know, folks can have access to the cloud portal, uh, via Peplink. And again, uh, I'm gonna call up some of these features. We are so happy to do demos of our cloud portal tool. There are way more features than I can discuss on this. There are features that can be better described by our solutions engineers than Tom and I. Uh, there's a lot of cool stuff here, but I'll, I'll call out a couple. Uh, number one is on the left-hand side, you can see here, uh, we are bonding together four different circuits for this particular client. Uh, priority one is a Starlink circuit. Now, what's interesting about the Starlink circuit here, you can see it's in red. There's currently an outage because that dish is obstructed. Yes, we have that level of visibility into all of our Starlink deployments. Uh, again, other providers like MetTel and Granite are not doing this. Starlink directly is not doing this. Uh, but it's really cool. Uh, in this case, maybe a bird landed on the dish. Maybe there's a lot of snow on the dish that hasn't been melted by the snow melt feature yet. But in priority two for this, uh, deployment, we have a Verizon SIM. It's on standby currently. It's an LTE SIM with good signal quality. In, and in priority three, you see both CenturyLink. That's probably a coax or a fiber circuit, if I know it. And then also an AT&T FirstNet, uh, circuit. That's also, uh, I believe this is a government customer, so they have the FirstNet access, uh, on an LTE SIM.
[Tyler Hoffman]
What's really cool about this, uh, you know, screenshot is not only are we displaying that we can bond multiple circuits. And by the way, you don't, you don't have to get all of your circuits from Metro Wireless. We did not sell this client the CenturyLink circuit, but if you wanna connect it into our SD-WAN and Peplink solution, we're happy to do that and help you with that. Um, here what's also cool is we're managing this via out-of-band management. So even though the Starlink is showing an outage, uh, due to an obstruction, we're still able to... Or my NOC is still able to remotely log into this deployment and troubleshoot it and look at the statistics and kind of see what's going on, maybe reboot something, et cetera. Uh, so that's very cool with the level of integration we have with the, uh, via the Peplink, uh, InControl panel. On the, on the right-hand side, again, it's a very small screenshot, but what we're trying to show you is kind of the, the high-level dashboard view of the statistics that you see with every deployment. You have uptime data, GPS data, uh, what ports are plugged into the ethernet handoffs, uh, the current status of all the different circuits. If it's a wireless circuit, you can see what band and f- of LTE and flavor of LTE and 5G it's connected to. CPU usage, temperature, kind of all the statistics that you want. Uh, the screenshot that's not on here that's also really nice is for our multi-site clients. You have your own, I'll call it a folder, if you will. So when you log into your InControl cloud portal, you can see all of your sites from a single login, a single pane of glass, and you're able to, uh, take a look at all the circuits. And again, it's not just a single pane of glass for all the circuits that you purchased from Metro Wireless. It could be for your own fiber circuits, or if you bring, uh, any other type of WAN connection for whatever reason. We're able to plug that into it, and you're able to get the statistics on that. So you can monitor all of your connections, you can configure outage and usage alerts across all of those connections. It's a very cool way to set it up. And again, this is something that Starlink directly is not doing, and a lot of other providers just simply do not have the capability to do.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, Tom, you have a very cool client case study, and if, uh, that I want you to talk about. I know that, I know the network diagram's similar, but I want you to kind of tell the story about this one.
[Tom Benson]
Well, yeah, this wasn't just theoretical. We deployed this, uh, two weeks ago. Uh, when you guys were-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah
[Tom Benson]
... when we were a channel partners, if you went out there, um, we were deploying this as we speak. This was a customer in Texas who deployed two Metro Bond X4 circuits, uh, and it, and both of them wer- went in, in the flavor of three 5G plus one Starlink. Uh, we put three antennas on the roof. Uh, as an aside on antennas, uh, I'm a- I'm becoming an elitist on antennas on the roof. The new 5G signals are higher frequency. They're not penetrating the building as well. That's just physics. And so if you put an antenna on the roof, you're getting absolutely clean signal, particularly if you use a, a high-quality antenna. It's a bit of a pain to put an antenna on the roof. It is not required to put an antenna on the roof, but if you wanna go fast, as fast as possible, I like antennas. Uh, so we can talk about that when we engage in your deployment. Um, there's about 40% gain available to you if you're on an antenna. Anyway, this client case study, they put up three 5G antennas on the roof, plus one Starlink. They bundled it all together.
[Tom Benson]
And
[Tom Benson]
what they were able to do is gener- end up at 365 meg download, and at initial deployment, 365 meg download and 71 meg upload combining four circuits together. That's before optimization. That's before tuning. That's, uh, with their people on site
[Tom Benson]
installing all four circuits, bringing the cables down, terminating to a Peplink router, and then putting into the firewall. Additionally, this customer got 13 static IPs at both locations, or a /28, so 13 usable. That was a requirement from, uh, information security. Uh, this is a Fortune 1000 global utilities firm. Their standards, uh, I will put forth, are as high as anyone. If you look at the utility industry and the Fortune 1000 in, uh, size companies pub- with... They're publicly traded, but they're not a US-based company. Um, the standards that you have to hit for information security right now, what Wall Street demands from you, and then the utility sector is the most scrutinized sector in the country. It is more... The information security requirements are higher for utilities than they are for banking. The Department of Homeland Security oversees security for utility companies, and you have to meet their standards. That's the standard that we adhere to. So I'll put forth that if we can hit their standards, we can hit anyone's standards. Um, and that was the net solution. They installed it themselves. Set up was about four hours. We managed it from afar. Everything worked upon turn up. It was sent kitted, and we are currently at two sites.
[Tom Benson]
We're burning in right now. We're looking to optimize. I still think we can get over 100 meg upload once we really get into tuning it.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah.
[Tom Benson]
But we need their help a little bit on the tuning side. So we're getting into that next week.And they're look- e- evaluating now adding this to another 20 to 25 sites across the country. Um,
[Tom Benson]
the partner on this is now recommending this to anoth- five, another five companies. So once it gets established, it starts to take off. Um, and so that's the case study that we delivered. So this isn't a theoretical drawing on paper. This is something we have delivered.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah, and we've, we've been lucky. We've, we've deployed this similar solution in a few sites, and it just... It's always so fun. You, you do that one first site as a proof of concept, and then it kind of snowballs from there. And, and Tom, this was a great example of that, so uh, thank you for that.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um, real quick before we get into the Q&A session, you know, we, we told you what we were gonna tell you. We told you, and I'm gonna tell you what we told you, and then we'll get into the Q&A session here. Uh, but just as a reminder, why are clients electing for, you know, bonded Starlink, Metro Bond, managed Starlink from Metro Wireless? Essentially, why are people coming to us instead of Starlink Direct or others? [coughs] A very common capability simply is the static IPs, right? Whether you need one, five, 13 or more, we have the capability to deliver a number of static IPs regardless of how many wan- connections we're bonding, whether it's AT&T, Verizon, Starlink, Century Link, et cetera. We have the capability to do that. Uh, not only that, but as you saw earlier, we were very lucky to have very good support. Uh, Starlink only offers web chat and portal-based and email support. Uh, there's really no true good phone number to call into. Whereas with us, you get that 24/7, 365, NOC based here in Detroit, and we average less than 30 seconds to reach a live technician. Uh, what's also cool is we have access to Starlink's direct level two engineers because of our relationship with Starlink. Uh, I forgot to mention this earlier, um, but that's really helpful for us because it h- you know, if... We haven't had a r- the issue often, but for any challenging support situations, it's always good to have a, a direct Starlink person to speak to. I also sit on an advisory panel for Starlink and Peplink, and so I'm able to give them feedback on, say, the pricing and data plans and kind of lofty topics. I also give them feedback on mundane things like my install technicians, sometimes they want a shorter install cable and sometimes they want a longer install cable. And right now, they only offer one cable length, and so I'm able to provide them feedback on things like that, that I get from, uh, you know, feedback from our field guys. Uh, and the last thing is our, is our professional installation. Uh, last week, our lead installer was in Texas installing a couple sites for Starlink. I think, Tom, that was part of the case study you were just talking about. Uh, this week he was in Atlanta installing some other sites. Uh, we also rely on a third-party contractor base that's very trusted, uh, both inside the US and outside the US. So, um, we always a- allow clients to self-install, but about 80% prefer that we manage the installation for them. We take that very seriously because a failed install means an unhappy client. We would never want that. Um, so we do that and we do it quickly, right? We're all about fast at Metro Wireless, whether it's the pre-sale cycle or our installs. If you're local to Michigan, we typically get you installed within a week. If you're out of state, no more than three weeks typically we're scheduling an install for you. Um, Tom, before we get to Q&A, keep me honest. Am I forgetting anything? Is there anything you wanna summarize?
[Tom Benson]
Yeah, just from a summary perspective, there's, there's two tracks to this webinar, and whichever one is more attractive to you, go with that. There's a cost containment element to this. That's a bit of an easy button. And I guess one thing that we'd skipped over is you can now compete with Starlink Direct. So for all of the people you've talked to, "God, we're Starlink Direct," and your, you have your channel pricing, and your channel pricing is more. It's like, "Oh, we cut. That's the end of that." It's not anymore. If you're Starlink Direct and you're using four terabytes, your circuit is now $1,000 a month. And to answer someone's question, Metro Bond is, is 800 a month.
[Tom Benson]
So you're now 20% less than Starlink for a four terabyte user. So focus on the four terabyte users and above. If they're a 10 terabyte user, it's a no-brainer. So, there is a cost containment element to this within the channel. There's a cost con- There's also ability to, to directly compete with Starlink. If you wanna go down the path of saving people money, that's fine, that's great. We're in that business. If you wanna go down the path of this runs faster and it ha- it's more diverse such that... and it's safer. I'm connecting you to two, three, four separate networks at the same time and containing your costs, go down that path. If you really wanna make it powerful, combine it. I can save you money, make you run faster, and make you safer so you can always get to your cloud. That's the full value package of Metro Bond. And if you put all three of those together, you're going to hit the... It's the ideal circuit. Uh, this is not the wireless that you're used to seeing that's, that you limp along and you still have to start shutting applications off. That's very 2017. This is everything works when you switch to wireless, and that's the, the service we're selling. It's high availability, high performance.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Well said, Tom. All right. Uh, I'd like to get to the Q&A. Um,
[Tyler Hoffman]
and Eve, t- thank you for consolidating. I'm also gonna manage it, uh, I can see on the chat here, too. Uh, real quick, this webinar is not intended to be a sales pitch or a proposal or to say, you know, why we're, why we're special and all that. Yes, we of course, we have a great solution, um, but it's meant to be educational. Uh, if you have any requests for more information or anything like that or any quote requests, please send those to sales@metrowireless.com. That's all I'm gonna say on that, and I'd like to get into Q&A. Tom, I have the questions pulled up in front of me. I think the way, because we have so many good questions, I'm gonna start reading off the questions and answering them. And then, Tom, interject if you think I'm missing a point that you think would be, uh, valuable to bring up. Does that sound good?
[Tom Benson]
That sounds great. Yes, and the ch- and the chat's right in front of us.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Okay, good. Awesome. Zachary, I promise I don't play favorites, but Kathy Weldon is a favorite of mine, so that's, that's fair. John Chambers, yes, of course, the recording and PowerPoint will be sent out after the call. Give us a couple days to k- kind of get our ducks in a row. Uh, we wanna get a transcription going and some other kind of marketing comms together, so that will be coming out.Uh, John, you also had a question about, "If a client has seven individual site dishes or sites, is the one terabyte data plan per dish per link, or can you aggregate that across a client's sites?" Uh, John, let me know if I'm not answering this question correctly, but the standard way that Starlink works together as... or works today, is you cannot cross ca- or cross-site pool data on Starlink data plans. It's funny you ask that question though, because behind the scenes, although I can't promise it yet, uh, we are working at Metro Wireless to offer a- a- a pooled plan offering for Starlink. That might be coming later this year. But as of today, no one in the space is offering the ability to pool, uh, priority data across sites.
[Tom Benson]
Uh, no, it's starting to emerge, Tyler. There's, there's some people who are starting to... there's beta testing on pooling.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Beta testing
[Tom Benson]
There's beta testing on pooling out there.
[Tyler Hoffman]
And I think we're, we're probably one of the ones he trusts in it.
[Tom Benson]
Yeah. It's ve- it's very new though, so it doesn't surprise me that... it's very new. Um...
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah.
[Tom Benson]
What, what I'm very curious about is, is there an advantage to this, or is it...
[Tom Benson]
it's, it's emerging. Let's just say it like that. Um,
[Tom Benson]
let's keep our eye on this pooling thing, because right n-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah.
[Tom Benson]
The rates that I've seen on pooling are outrageous.
[Tom Benson]
Outrageous.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yes.
[Tom Benson]
So yeah. We're pooling, but it costs three times more, so do we really need to pool? So let's th- let's keep our eye on that.
[Tyler Hoffman]
That's fair, yeah. So that, that's definitely something to watch. We are actually actively having conversations on a way to do it. Uh, because we, Jon, we do recognize there's demand for it. But, uh, more to come on that, I'll, I'll say that much.
[Tom Benson]
More to come.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, John Murray, you had a question. "Does Metro Wireless have the ability to limit data usage via the Starlink circuit?" Uh, you know, can we set it via the managed router? Yes, that's exactly what we're doing for a lot of our clients who, um, are gonna be using our Metro Bond solution. Within the Peplink portal, you can set it such that when the Starlink WAN circuit hits, say, 50 gigs of usage or a terabyte of usage, fail over or, or, or switch all data traffic to that, say, 5G SIM or to whatever other WAN circuit. Or you can set it at, hey, at 50 gigs of usage, do a 50/50 allocation betwe- of data traffic, et cetera. We do have the ability to set that within the Peplink, uh, router setting. And that's, again, part of the secret sauce that we have there. Uh, and that's how we're gonna limit a lot of these cost overruns or throttle issues that, uh, customers face. Uh, Robert, obviously, you know, you made the comment about the firewall. That's kind of how we, we plan to do it. Uh, but instead of the firewall, we do it via our Peplink handoff router.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Jim, you asked a question. Uh, good to s- good to see your face and, uh, d- see your name pop up, by the way. Uh, your question was, "Once limited by Starlink, if you have Metro Bond, do you fail it over to the 5G?" So yes, depending on how the customer wants to set this up, you can be running, uh, both circuits active/active, or you could be running active/passive, right? You may have seen my screenshot earlier about the different priority levels that you can set within the Peplink In Control portal. Um, some clients really want the benefit of the speed, the, the fastest performance in running both circuits active all the time. Uh, others want to be more cost sensitive and, say, run the Starlink, you know, until the priority data exhausts and then switch over to the 5G. Uh, we can set it up either way, but the answer to your question is yes.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Greg, you asked a question, "Can you take over Starlink service that was sold by another provider and add Metro Bond to it and bill it all under Metro Wireless?" Yes, we can. It's a little cheesy. I love the name that we came up with for it internally. I hope we make it public. We're calling it Metro Retro, so... uh, or we, we might call it Metro Retro. But yes, the answer to your question is-
[Tom Benson]
[laughs]
[Tyler Hoffman]
... there are existing circuits out there that we know that clients are gonna want to add the Metro Bond solution to, and we have the ability to take over the billing on an existing dish, add a Peplink device, whether the client installs it or we install it ourselves, and then bond it together with that 5G, uh, and add additional circuits to it. Um, that's something that we think is gonna become really popular. Uh, again, I like the name Metro Retro, but, uh, we're gonna have to see what the, what the vote is internally on that.
[Tom Benson]
It's super cheesy and it's my name, but, uh, but just... so a quick test, we'll do a quick focus group. Just put into the chat Metro Retro, as in we're retrofitting the service, if you like it or not.
[Tom Benson]
Um, and the answer is... and we can send... yes, absolutely. We think there's a huge, uh, opportunity for this. If you look at all of the installed Starlink dishes and they hit a problem, we can send this out and it's a two-stepper. We can send out the Peplink router, we can put an unlimited SIM on it, and we can turn it into a Metro Bond solution
[Tom Benson]
immediately. We don't have to wait to transfer the Starlink service. We could solve this problem in a week. So you definitely have the ability to solve the problem, um, with a retrofitted, with a, an add on a piece of technology and to get it installed, and we will definitely work with you for that. So I'm glad someone asked that question. Um, yes, the answer is yes, we can fix the problem.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yes. And, uh, and you make a good point, Tom. Yes, we have the ability to take over the Starlink billing. Or if the client doesn't want to do that and just wants to layer on the, the, uh, the bonded 5G option, that's, that's an option too, and they can continue with the Starlink billing. So thank you, Tom, for the expanded answer there. Uh, John, your question's a bit more technical. I'll touch on it briefly, but I think it definitely deserves an offline conversation. Um, you know, yes, we do have latency and performance data for clients who, when they're bonding circuits, we do get that there's some latency-sensitive clients and deployments out there in the space, uh, when they're bonding circuits together. Uh, I know... I'm very well aware of the one that you're referring to on bonding it with the, the latency there, um, and the load balancing. What my concise answer to this is, there's a lot of testing and optimization that we need to do with every site. We know that yours was a rush delivery, of course, over a Thanksgiving week to get it live ASAP due to a, a fiber issue. Um, but there's lots of options that we have to evaluate, to test, to optimize, et cetera. And it's always worth taking time with the client, not just upon the first day of install, but, say, a week or two later to see what settings we can optimize. How do we route the traffic? Is bonding making the most sense for this client? Is load balancing making the most sense?Does everything need to be routed through, uh, a static IP or can we route some traffic through DHCP? There's a lot of options that, frankly, go beyond my technical capability, um, so I'd like to continue that offline if that's all right with you.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, [coughs] Keith Tuttle, "Can you establish, uh, VPNs across Metro Bond?" Uh, Jim, you answered on that. Yes, uh, Jim is- or has a deployment where we're doing that today for him already. Uh, we can do site-to-site VPNs, too. That's a very common use case for credit union clients of ours. Um, so we can kinda do those types of things. We can do the VLAN tagging, the Q-in-Q routing, all sorts of that type of, uh, informa- things we can do. Again, not just with Starlink or 5G or LTE, but with, you know, our fixed wireless product, with fiber, with coax, et cetera. Uh, yes, we can set up all those site-to-site VPNs both in the star kind of style as well as the, uh, the hub and spoke model there, too.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Robert Glenn asked a question, "Is Metro Bond a single SIM for all carriers?" Um, this depends. We're typically, in most cases, deploying a carrier-specific SIM for each deployment. Uh, most... and as part of our standard operating model because we're, again, the premium wireless c- carrier and we are carrier agnostic, we're always deploying two SIM cards. We run a site study for every service address that you send us. And let's say you're in Plano, Texas. Uh, if the best predicted carrier in Plano, Texas is ver- is AT&T, we'll put that in SIM slot A, and if the second-best predicted carrier is T-Mobile, we'll put that in SIM slot B. All Peplink routers have at least two SIM slots. Um, and so we will then test which carrier is performing best for each deployment. We also have a SIM that's a carrier-neutral SIM that can, um, uh, lock onto e- or any of the three carriers and test and use which of the carriers is best. Uh, not only can it rotate and select whatever it thinks is the best carrier, but we can also lock that SIM to a particular carrier. Uh, Peplink in the carrier-neutral SIM is very smart. However, it's not always the smartest, and so we have the ability to lock that SIM to a specific carrier, uh, if and when we need to. So, that's a, that's a really cool solution we have there.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um, Nathan asks a question is, "If you're using a static IP, are you limiting the bonding solution bandwidth to only one of the carriers?" No, that is certainly not the case. The- the- the- the real key benefit to Metro Bond and the solution here is that we are able to bond those connections and aggregate the speeds, both the download and the upload, um, to, uh, and pushing all of that traffic through that static IP block. It's not just taking the benefit of one of those WAN connections. It's really stacking all those connections together and pushing them through that true public static IP block. Um, that's something that's
[Tom Benson]
Nathan, I'm glad you asked that.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah.
[Tom Benson]
Th- i- this is absolutely a bonded solution. You're using all of them at the same time. And I understand why you're asking the question. It's why I keep hammering on this. There's a lot of people out there running around with, "We'll rotate carriers." This is not rotating carriers. You are using all the carriers that we provision at the same time, full stop. But
[Tom Benson]
we're one of the very, very few who can offer that. And so I appreciate you asking the question and looking for clarity. Uh, we are using all the carriers at the same time. They're all bonded together. You get the aggregate bandwidth of all the carriers.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Zachary, "What is the ballpark cost for a quad-bonded Metro Bond product?" Uh, Tom, I'm gonna have you opine on this one and then also make sure you call out, you know, uh, Starlink, you know, what this, you know, Starlink verse 5G and ho- how we do that.
[Tom Benson]
Yeah, so e- every circuit you add adds cost, so a s- a Metro Bond quad 4
[Tom Benson]
is circa $1,400. It, it depends on the mix a little bit. If I bring in four Starlinks, it's gonna be, cost more than four or five Gs.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah.
[Tom Benson]
But you're never gonna get quad 4 for less than 1,200, and it could go as high as 2,000.
[Tom Benson]
So, Metro Bond Quad 4 or Metro Bond X4, 12 to $1,400 a month based on best performance. Metro Bond X3 obviously is about 25% less than that. And then Metro Bond X2 or met- you know, flagship Metro Bond, if you will, Metro Bond X2, that's gonna come in 800 a month, which would include a one terabyte data plan. I, I wish I could give you a flat answer, because if I put in a 500 gig data plan, it's gonna cost a little less. So, think 500 to $2,000 a month.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah, because it... and, and absolutely right, Tom, on the, on the quad-bonded solution. As I know it, I think we just did a rural hospital in Western Michigan only using it for backup. I think they bought the 50-gig plan Metro Bond add on.
[Tom Benson]
That was less than 500. I think that was 460. That was less than 500.
[Tyler Hoffman]
I think it was less, yeah, it was less than 500 out the door I think-
[Tom Benson]
Less than 500
[Tyler Hoffman]
... in the MRC, right? Yeah. So i- again, Nathan, unfortunately it's not a clean answer but i- it just ranges on the mix of the circuits that you're using. Um, Ahmed asked the question if you guys can have a demo router. We do have a demo process. There's some parameters in place just to make sure that they come back or get contracted on quickly. Um, so, Ahmed, please email us at sales@metrowireless.com. We have a very, uh, slick process for demos. It does work for us and we're, we can, uh, talk to you about that offline.
[Tyler Hoffman]
John Murray, "Can you buy the antenna as a monthly cost as opposed to an NRC?" Uh, John, I'm assuming you're discussing the Starlink, uh, antenna. Uh, yes. With the... now that the enterprise dish is a lot more affordable than the high, the flat high-performance dish, Metro Wireless is offering an amortization or a rental or lease option on the Starlink dish, uh, to be a monthly cost. Uh, we're seeing clients get excited about that because, as we all know, upfront costs can sometimes be hard to get approved by finance teams. Uh, we also do the same thing on the LTE and 5G antenna side. Rather than buying those upfront, we can offer those as a, as a, uh, a monthly lease or rental option as well. Uh, pricing is, is best probably communicated via sales@metrowireless.com. Um...Jeff, uh, Raines, good to, good, good to see your name again too, of course. Uh, "Most areas where we h- we have a need for Starlink, I wouldn't think they would be able to connect to one or more or two towers. Is that true?" Um, there's some nuance to this. As long as Starlink has a clear view of the sky, so it's not interrupted by trees or buildings, Starlink can see a lot of dish, or, um, the dish can see a lot of satellites. We typically don't run into this issue. But one thing that our field installers always check when they're installing Starlink, especially in areas where there might be other buildings or, uh, trees in the way, is, there's like, uh, the best way I can describe it to you in simple terms is there's a Starlink app, and you, it, you use it to kind of, it, it takes like a survey, if you will, of the sky to give you a sense of like, you know, if there's gonna be projected issues of outages and things like that. Um, shockingly, after deploying hundreds of these, we have not run into issues with line of sight to the sky. The other thing I will say, the benefit of the high performance dish, despite it being way more expensive than the enterprise dish, is that it has 140 degree field of view, so it has a better chance of seeing a satellite than the, than the enterprise dish, which only has 105 or 110 degree field of view. Um, so that's, that's something to keep in mind there. But again, uh, in the field, we really haven't run into issues, uh-
[Tom Benson]
Yeah
[Tyler Hoffman]
... with, uh, this, the dish seeing the, the, the, the satellites up in the sky.
[Tom Benson]
Tyler, reading that question again-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah
[Tom Benson]
... and yes, to everything you just said. Starlink is, if you can see the sky, you can get Starlink. I think what Jeff's drilling into here is, where, where we have Starlink, we're not gonna be able to see a 5G tower. Yes or no?
[Tom Benson]
That's what I think he's getting at. Or if he's not getting to it, like I'm gonna answer that question anyway.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Sure, please.
[Tom Benson]
So Metro Bond is reliant on connecting to a cellular tower. There are areas where cellular does not exist. It is difficult to find a place where I can't get connection, but I just qualified a s-, I just qualified a solar farm in Nebraska last week, and the nearest tower was nine miles away.
[Tom Benson]
There are places where we cannot deploy Metro Bond. They are Starlink dependent, and they're going to pay the overage costs, and that's the way it is. So, to be clear, we, we're not trying for 100% market share. We are very much focused on high volume users who have access, you know, reasonable access to a 5G tower. And that's about 99% of the businesses in America. The 1% that don't fit into that, we can't help them. And we're not claiming that we can.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yep. Agreed.
[Tom Benson]
So the r- we're ve- we're focus, we know who we can help, and we can help a lot a lot of people. But yes, Jeff, your, your point is well-made. If I'm 15 miles from a- the nearest cell tower, Metro Bond is not going to work, and they're just going to have to use Starlink and pay the freight, and that's the way it's gonna be.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Absolutely. Um, John Murray asked, "Any particular information you need to qualify the installation?" Uh, just send u- send us the site address to sales@metrowireless.com as part of our process. And, uh, Dick, Dirk Dobbins, this is gonna answer your question about prequalification for 5G signal as well. When you send us a service address, to sales@metrowireless.com, my team is always qualifying that site, reg- reg-, even if you want Starlink, we're always taking a look at cellular options too, to see who has the closest towers, at AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Does that tower have LTE, or is it 5G? What kind of 5G, right? Mid-band, millimeter wave, et cetera. And so we're always able to provide either the partner or the end user a really good sense of what their experience is gonna be like before they ever sign the dotted line, right? Um, in addition to that, Dick, or Dirk, as I mentioned earlier, we're always putting in two SIM cards, at least two SIM cards into the peplink router, so we can test two different carriers, even if that first predicted carrier is not working as expected, like we want it to. Um, so that's, that's, uh, an important part there. So yes, we, we call it a, a desk type, uh, a desktop site survey, uh, desk chair recon is a, is another good name for it, so I, I, I like that, uh, as an option.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um,
[Tyler Hoffman]
Mark Blanchard, we are updating the old rate sheets on the Telarus back office. Thank you for that, Fadi. Clearly see that we need to get, you know, get those out. Uh, those just got pu- uh, finished internally in the last week or so. So, a good reminder for us to get the old rate sheets, uh, updated. Um, John Murray, you know, we stay out of the mobility game as far as Starlink and the T-Mobile cellular service. That's something that we're not gonna be able to, uh, provide on. I'm on the beta list, just 'cause I'm personally interested in how that's gonna work with all the cell phones. Very cool technology, but again, uh, consumer cellphones is something that we're, we're staying out of, uh, you know, today. Um, yes, John Murray, the access, uh, the terminal access fee is what you're referring to, that is a pass-through for Metro Wireless that will be shown on the, um, invoicing, uh, when clients see that on their, on their, their monthly bill.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um,
[Tyler Hoffman]
Zach, you asked a question about Metro Bond being unlimited. Uh, "If so, why would there be a benefit in using Starlink as a primary?" That's a question that we often get. Um,
[Tyler Hoffman]
so, you know, we, we always advocate for having an unlimited SIM, but sometimes clients don't want to pay the extra price to have an unlimited 5G SIM card. So, sometimes they elect for a metered, uh, SIM. Uh, frankly, that's a lot of our early managed Starlink deployments, are clients who didn't want to pay for the bonding service. So, they would use the Starlink as a primary, and if the Starlink network ever went down, it would fail over to a metered SIM card. That's still an option that we offer today. Um, again, why do... I, I think, Zach, we're getting to your question, people use Starlink, or at least, you know, why use it as the primary instead of the backup, uh, is because 5G signal is not always great everywhere, right? Even if Tom and I love to hammer on how much an external antenna install for 5G is important, uh, you can still run into issues with latency or speed throughput on 5G and LTE, and hence, that's when Starlink and bonding the two together really becomes, um,
[Tyler Hoffman]
you know, a, a thing. Uh, Justin, your, your Metro rep-
[Tom Benson]
And Zach, Zach asks a great... uh, I think the other-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Go ahead
[Tom Benson]
... answer to your question, Zach, is, um...Why would people, why, why use Starlink over 5G? We would love to do an objective analysis on a per site basis to see which one is the best, but the facts on the ground are this. There's six million Starlink circuits out there, and so whether we have the opinion that they're necessary or unnecessary, the fact remains that there's six million Starlink circuits out there. And X percent of them are running into this overage problem, and that becomes an addressable market, and we have a solution for it. Um, I tend to agree with you [laughs], Zach. I, I think that there are Starli- I, I qualify Starlink circuits in the suburbs that are bathed in 5G signal, there's four towers w- that are not two miles away. And Starlink is absolutely not necessary. The customers want what they want, what they want, and now they end up with a problem. And so, uh, if I was, if I was qualifying a greenfield opportunity, I would recommend... I, I would show all the available options and say, "This, these are your options. Which way would you like to go?" And on top of that, uh, subjectively, there are people who are adding Starlink because it's the latest cool toy. And so be it. Uh, we're not here to say no to you, but it ca- it came with a certain value package, and that value package changed significantly, and so now what do we do? And, uh, that- that's the situation we're sitting in right now.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yeah. Well, well said, Tom. I'm continually surprised by how many inquiries we get for Starlink. And w- we go back to the client because we do that desktop site survey and say, "Hey, you have a really good 5G tower a quarter mile away. Y- of course, we're happy to sell you Starlink, but you know, you might more cost effectively and find a better solution via 5G." So we're, we're always taking a look at those options to see what the best, what the best is for the client. Um, we, we got some feedback on the Metro Retro. I, I, I'm seeing some mixed answer. Again, some thumbs ups, maybe some mixed answers. It's a little cheesy, but people like it. Maybe a Retro, Metro Repo. Um, uh, Andrew Jennings asked about, a question about Wi-Fi as a WAN, which is a pretty cool technology. Uh, Wi-Fi as a WAN is something that we do offer via the Peplink portal, or, or the, the Peplink platform. Uh, we have a yacht deployment that uses this. It's very common in marina styles. So what can happen with our Peplink deployments is, uh, let's say a boat or a yacht is inside a marina. Uh, that Peplink device, it can pick up, uh, via the outdoor antenna, it can pick up local Wi-Fi signals. And as long as we know the Wi-Fi password, we can treat that Wi-Fi network as one of the WAN connections that we bond to the boat's Starlink or 5G signal and offer that as part of, uh, the bonding solution. So, uh, we do that over here in the, in the Detroit River for, uh, a yacht owner. He really likes that setup because when he's in the marina, it, it, the Wi-Fi as a WAN serves as his primary connection when he's in the marina. And then when he leaves the marina, he has the 5G and the T-Mobile, uh, uh... This, sorry, the, the, the Starlink and the T-Mobile 5G, uh, k- you know, bonded together for his connectivity.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, our last question here, and I know we're over time, but I, I really appreciate all the questions. John Murray asks, "If a customer purchased a flat high performance antenna, uh, what happens if the antenna is broken? Does the customer have to buy a new one? How is it different if they rent it?" Uh, my understanding, John, is, uh, the Starlink's standard warranty on the flat high performance antenna or the enterprise dish, uh, is both. It, it's either one year or two years, and I believe it covers kinda standard, uh, defects in workmanship, and we kind of extend that same warranty to that end user. Uh, I don't believe it covers hail damage or kind of other accidental damage in that sense. However, the benefit of choosing the amortization option or the monthly lease option is, if the dish brea- if, if a customer, uh, leases the dish or rents the h- uh, the enterprise dish from us, we have the, we're offering the, the benefit or the protection, if you will, is if the dish breaks while it's in service, we'll replace that dish free of, that enterprise dish, free of charge. Uh, so we expect the take rate on that to be pretty high from a lotta clients, uh, just because it gives them the protection in case the dish breaks.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Um, I'm seeing a couple more questions here. Sorry. I missed a, in a different section. Uh, Dick... Sorry, D- Dirk. [laughs] I did that twice now. Dirk Davins asked, "Does Metro manage the onsite equipment, cabling, roof, dish install, with W2 or local subs?" Dirk, we have three install options. You can either self-install. You can have professional install done by our W2 guys. That was my lead construction manager, who was just in Texas last week and Atlanta this week. Uh, s- it's more expensive, but I'm shocked. 80% of my clients elect for our own W2 guys to do it. Or we do have the option, and some clients, just from a cost perspective, 'cause it's about half the cost, do have the option where we hire a local sub. Uh, we have a very special process where we only hire qualified people with experience in this space. They have a very strict SOW and SOP on how to install the service. Uh, there's checks with our NOC team and during testing and turn-up along the way. Um, so yes. We can manage it, you know, all three ways. It just depends on budget and your appetite, your, you and your client's appetite. Um, Dirk, you also asked another question about, "Do you have any customer-facing collateral that could be shared for prospecting? Any estimated cost of the Starlink and 5G on the bonded showing ROI or cost savings, as well as business risk mitigation?" Uh, the answer is yes, yes and yes. So, uh, not only do I have a case study that we're gonna distribute as, after, uh, this webinar and kind of the follow-up communications, uh, we have some cool, a lotta great blog content that's getting a lotta, uh, hits, uh, that we're gonna send. Um, the cost savings is a big piece on this, right? And so, uh, we're gonna share those details with you. Um, that's also to say, Dirk, we're always happy to co-brand anything with you. If, if you have, uh, clients of yours that you wanna partner up with and co-brand marketing collateral, uh, we have the capability to do that with you, and we're always happy to do that with, um, partners and trusted advisors. Um, that's a, that's a request that we certainly get, uh, quite a lot.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, before we an- or before we close out the session, I know we're about seven minutes over time. I wanna, uh, let anyone ask any other questions, uh, before we close out here. Or Tom, or is there anything else that you think that we're forgetting that we should be sharing?
[Tyler Hoffman]
Oh, you're on mute, Tom.
[Tyler Hoffman]
But that's okay 'cause I know we're waiting for folks too, to see...
[Tyler Hoffman]
Oh, Thom- Thomas, you're on mute.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Tom is still on mute. I'm not seeing any other questions coming in. Um, but I, again, I, I appreciate it, uh, everyone that, um-
[Tyler Hoffman]
Uh, what's the question?
[Tom Benson]
Yeah, sorry, I muted myself. It- it, I muted myself 'cause something was going on. The question was about managed WiFi. Can we offer managed WiFi on site? Yes. And then what flavor d- exists on that? The simple solution for, let's say construction WiFi, is to put two high power WiFi dishes on the roof of the construction trailer and blast it in every direction as far as we can. That simple.
[Tom Benson]
Mesh WiFi solutions on a construction site or mesh WiFi solutions at any site is more complicated. And yes, we offer that too. That it's a topic for a separate webinar. I, I'm, I'm stoked you asked that question because we have solutions for it, ranging from simple and not that expensive, to [laughs] complicated and frankly somewhat expensive. Uh, but we're deploying this for marinas. We have dep- we've deployed, uh, managed WiFi solutions all over the place. So separate topic, the answer is yes, we'd love to talk to you about it.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Yep. DAS too. We do a lot of DAS for cellular boosting, private cellular, things like that. That's a big part of it. Um, John, we haven't gotten any tariff in- uh, impact information yet either on the PEPLINK side or on the StarLink side. It's a topic that's very near and dear to my heart from a cashflow perspective, so I'm watching it very closely. I'm in very close touch with my distributors, to the point of being pestering to them to see what's gonna happen. Uh, once we know, we will of course communicate that information and update our pricing and all of that. Um, Fadi, did I, did I hear, did we, did we answer all the questions?
[Tyler Hoffman]
Okay, thank you. I, yeah, I missed a, missed one. Well, great. I... Look, everyone, I so appreciate the time. Uh, this was a very good session. I really appreciate the engagement. Hopefully you found this as valuable for yourselves and educating yourself, not only on the changes that are coming with StarLink, uh, but and how we can help with a solution. Again, uh, it's, it's, it's not to say that you have to use Metro Wireless as your provider of choice. However, we just want you to be informed with all the right options and what's gonna be happening here on the StarLink side. So, uh, thank you again so much for the engagement. Uh, please keep an eye out for our marketing emails. Um, you know, please give us feedback in all the marketing content we're putting out this year, right? Uh, my mother says I'm rejection sensitive, so p- try not to unsubscribe if you wouldn't mind. But please do give us feedback on how we can do better. If there are webinar topics that you wanna see, if there's marketing collateral, blog posts, case studies, things like that, however we can help you win, uh, we wanna partner up with you. So, thank you so much.
[Tom Benson]
Thanks everyone. Great questions. Uh, great jumping off point. Looking forward to seeing you in the market.
[Tyler Hoffman]
Bye for now.
