Robert Schwartz: Yes. I think, look, the complexity of decision-making is a lot more than just piloted, but piloting is a unique aspect of the utility journey. Most Utilities still want to stand up and kick the tires on their own systems. All I’ve got to say with this — the beauty of this sector is that they absolutely are working together. I mean through the Utility Broadband Alliance, through our own efforts with the Utility Strategic Advisory Board, we’ve met with numerous utilities this past week at DistribuTECH and they are all hosting and inviting in their brother and their fellow utilities to come see their deployments and talk about it. We were happen to be in San Diego where San Diego Gas & Electric is, and they’ve already deployed a private LTE systems and they had this from other utilities that could go and see.
And it’s not just seeing the physical assets out there, it’s what we were talking about earlier, it’s about the end-to-end connectivity. So in San Diego’s case, they’re showing that they’re deploying wildfire mitigating sensors to be able to depower lines before they hit the ground. They’re showing that they’re connecting a battery storage facilities that they’re rapidly deploying and they can provision private LTE much faster than anything else they’ve ever had in their arsenal. And so it’s not just about kicking the tires on the wireless network. It’s about understanding the use cases that are being enabled. But it’s absolutely a catalyst to getting through the process, but there’s a lot of other complicated steps, right? These are large complex organizations that you have holding company executives that need to understand and opine on this.
You’ve got operating company executives often that have to do the same and functional areas. And this is because, as I said earlier, this is not just a spectrum decision or a private LTE decision. These are often embedded in large rate cases that also include the cost of upgrades of the network overall, that’s the electric grid. And so that could be anything from reclosers to AMI systems to cybersecurity capabilities that are embedded into the rate cases, along with our spectrum purchase decisions.
Walter Piecyk: I think it was SPGEP, whatever it is, that also bought CBRS, do you have any visibility in terms of where they are with that deployment? How, if at all, it’s been integrated with the lower band spectrum and just any visibility on that?
Robert Schwartz: Yes. A couple of thoughts. One is, without getting into any of the specifics of kind of how they’re deploying, I’ve compared it before, but having just met with that team this past week in San Diego, it’s absolutely a complement. It’s like having again, WiFi in your offices and you walk outside and you’re using a cellular network. CBRS as a specific great broadband capability. But as you know, very limited range at the band where it is. And so it’s an overlay. It’s a capability. If you’re in a substation or in an area where you need more capacity as an overlay, it can be used licensed or unlicensed, as you know. But for covering wide areas as they said, the underlying spectrum is — it has to be low band. As you know, from your past, they need to be able to cover vast areas of territories often where there is no other cellular coverage, you need low band to cost effectively do that.
And that’s really been the model that they’ve used and why they have the complement. And by the way, it’s no different than the other complement of fiber, right? Fiber is a great tool and an asset that a lot of utilities have and it complements their communications offering, but it’s expensive and gets to very high-value assets, can’t give you the breadth of coverage that you get out of private broadband wireless.
