HITT- POTS Replacements, May 22, 2024

Transcript

Introduction

Your comments and questions are welcome for today’s presenters in the chat window throughout today’s event. Live q and a will follow each presentation.

We begin with this week’s HIT training. Today diving into one of the most ubiquitous and lucrative telecom opportunities today, Potts replacement.

Those analog lines and connections are going away, and you can cash in on this shift in technology.

Presenting today is Telarus VP for advanced networking and mobility, Graham Scott, along with featured industry experts, Dave Beagle, senior manager of strategic partner sales from Ooma, and Dan McDuffie, growth and strategy leader from Granite. Graham, welcome back to the Tuesday call. How are you doing?

Industry Shift and Market Analysis

Hey. Good morning, Doug. Great to be here as always. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to our partners and talk about some of the cool things that are going on in the space. So, really appreciate our guests being here as well. I think today’s content is going to, deliver some great value for, the tech advisers on this call.

So let’s go ahead and dump right in then. Before we get to our discussion on on, pots replacement, what we’re doing there, I got a couple things I wanna talk about of just the industry in general. So, Chandler, if you could advance to the next slide.

For those of you who have seen me speak before, you’ve heard me talk about this concept of I think we’re seeing a industry shift much like we saw in the year early two thousands when we went from t one, and those kind of things to cable, I think we’re starting to see something similar with the five g and c band. A lot of these connections are moving to those types of technology.

So for those of you who’ve seen me say this before, I know I put it out there, during our year end review, and I got a little bit of pushback on it. So but the results are in. We’ve had the first quarter. So if you wanna advance to the next slide there, Chandler, you’ll see that the companies that we do business with have now reported their first quarter results and fairly significant, pieces of information we can get out of this. So if you look at it, this is from, something called light reading blog. It was their May tenth edition.

But Charter sheds more broadband subs than expected. Seventy two thousand broadband subs down. Comcast, sixty five thousand broadband subs down. Altice, the third largest, thirty thousand subscribers down.

And then you look over here and you see AT and T, they doubled their expected output for air of two hundred thousand. I don’t have T Mobile on that slide, but they reportedly did somewhere around four hundred thousand new subs in the first quarter, and Verizon was somewhere in between the two. So that’s telling us two things. Number one, five g is here.

It’s real. Your customers are looking at it. They’re talking about it, and you need to be discussing it. So the other thing it’s telling us is that you’re looking at these numbers.

Right? You look at the losses and then you look at the gains by the wireless carriers. There’s a lot more going in than it’s going out. And I think that tells us that there’s a lot of new connections and new businesses that are going with wireless first.

So that’s a great thing. We like to see growth across those segments. So all in all, some pretty interesting news, and I just wanted to make sure I shared that with the call here before we jump into our main content. So, Chandler, you can go ahead and invite the, in, advance to the next slide.

POTS Replacement and Government Deregulation

So today, we’re gonna talk about pots replacement, pots of gold. And so when we talk about pots replacement, why are pots being replaced? I think that’s the first place we gotta start. So, Chandler, if you wanna go one further, I think there’s a couple of things that happened here.

So a lot of times in our industry, we are responding to new or or increased government regulation. So first off, for those of you who don’t understand, I should say, POTS stands for plain old telephone service. And I know there’s probably a lot of people on this call who have made a lot of money selling those services over the last number of years. But in two thousand nineteen, at the request of the carriers, the FCC deregulated copper lines.

So, normally, we talk a lot about new government regulations that create opportunities.

In this case, it’s a deregulation that essentially said, hey. You no longer need to maintain and manage these networks, and you no longer need to, you know, provide a certain price point. So the networks, the, the carriers were very, very, pleased by this. Right?

And started to look at shifts and how they could do that. The technology was there, and the carriers now are no longer required to cover the expense and burden of maintaining that old those old networks. As such, they were now able to pass those costs to the consumers. So what it ended up happening is, well, prices went up, and prices went up significantly.

And I think we’re seeing that a lot in the marketplace. So if you wanna just take the, presentation down there for a second, Chandler, I’m gonna open it up to our our panelists. And, as Doug, introduced us, we’ve got Dave Beagle here from Ooma and Dan McDuffie from from Granite. And, of course, can’t have a PODSA conversation without Granite involved. Right? So, Dave, when you and I started talking about what we were looking at for this event, what we were gonna do, what we were gonna talk about, we started talking about the opportunity.

Size of the POTS Market

And there’s a lot of, contradiction or or differences of opinions in what the size of the current pots market is. What are you guys finding over there at Ooma?

Yeah. There’s a lot of, information out there. Depending on where you read, you’re gonna see anything that says that there’s forty million POTS lines that are still in play, as little as ten million. But the reality is even if it’s ten million, if it’s at the low end of the market, it’s still a very sizable one.

And, historically, if you think about POTS lines, specifically more around the fire life safety environments, these are areas that we’ve told clients to stay on POTS. You know? Majority of us who are on the call or even joining this, you know, from a a a webinar perspective have probably been selling a lot of cloud based voice solutions. And we’ve always said, for UCaaS and other things, if you have alarm panels, if you have elevators, if you have all these other things, keep it on pots.

And with the deregulation, this opens up an opportunity for partners to go back and talk to their base of clients to advise them to what is going on, where they can save costs, use that money that they’re saving, and reapply it and do other initiatives within their business.

So it it’s a sizable I think that at the at the end of the day, that’s what we should walk away with.

Considerations for POTS Replacement

Yeah. Awesome. And I think your your technology, AirDow, we’re gonna talk about in a little bit here. But let me just shift things over to you, Dan. Dan, what kinds of things do partners need to be aware of? What kind of things do they need to look out for when they start to explore these kinds of opportunities?

Well, really listening to the customer. You know, we see several different, kind of, opportunities here.

One is definitely market driven. Right?

You know, you have customers whose costs have risen significantly. These are, especially in you know, it’s it’s market. I would say, well, it’s broad, but it can also be very market specific. So think, you know, Lumen, CenturyLink, AT and T, Frontier, absolutely, you know, territories right now, frankly, over Verizon.

Verizon’s taken a little bit of a different tact. And from a cost perspective, I’d say in the northeast, you know, Verizon has has kept their their costs relatively static, whereas you’ll see you’ve seen people you know, customers paying hundreds, in some cases, many hundreds of dollars per POTS lines in AT and T frontier territories. So think, you know, state of Texas, California, there are huge opportunities there. It’s, that’s number one.

So, you know, from a cost perspective, your costs are going up dramatically.

You know, there’s the the it’s it’s truly a cost savings play. Second really is, is availability or or a lack of support. Right? So you’re also seeing in certain markets, the the, you know, that the that the, the leks are really starting to not support pots.

You can’t get new pots lines, if you’re opening up a location and or you’ve got a problem with your pots and they’re not getting repaired, or at least repaired in a timely fashion. State of California hasn’t hasn’t really seen weather related until recently, But with all the rain that’s happened in the state of California this year, like, literally for the first time, you know, you know, Cali is waking up going, like, what what Florida or New Jersey have known for a long time. When it rains, the pot’s lying somewhere. You know?

And then really Yeah. Is more of a technological understanding if you are really especially in the larger enterprise space. You know? They understand there’s an existential threat.

They’ve got a lot of locations. And over some period of time that, you know, you really need to start, you know, teaching those IT departments. They need to start thinking about a a replacement, you know, you know, strategy because of a larger company, the harder and the bigger that’s gonna get. You know, that’s kinda where we really focus in on with our customer base is, you know, teaching our customers and working with our saying like, okay.

You know, you’ve moved a lot of stuff over to whatever, you know, UCaaS. You know? But now, you know, you’ve got whatever, a hundred, four hundred, four thousand locations, and you gotta really start thinking about a big project here over the next eighteen to twenty four months before, you know, the tidal wave hits.

So Yeah. Yeah. If I can jump in real quick and because I think this is important for people to know. It’s not always the IT or the CIO you’re talking to for these type of, solutions.

A lot of times, it’s the facilities managers. Right? It’s the people responsible for that infrastructure. And so if you’re talking to the wrong person, you may not be getting the inroad or the engagement you’re looking for.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good point.

Yeah. Really good point there by Dave. And and I think, you know, we’re gonna jump in and talk about the individual technologies that you guys have here, and I think it’s important. So we’re on this call. As you know, Telarus has a number of, partner suppliers in our portfolio, many of whom do a pots replacement technology.

Overview of POTS Replacement Technologies

So why did we choose these two? Okay. Well, Ooma with the AirDial platform and Granite with the Epic are definitely two of the leaders in this space. And so we wanted to highlight these two technologies here today because we’re seeing a lot of success with them.

Now there are more available. There are lots of other providers that do offer alternative solutions. So if you want to explore those, please reach out to your Telarus representative or me, and we can sort of talk you through what those options are. But we’re gonna start off with you, Dave.

If you kinda wanna dive into the air dial solution that’s offered through Ooma, we’ll have you go through that a little bit, and then we’ll bring Dan back in here to talk about Epic. And then, we’ll kind of finish up with some overall thoughts and some questions. So over to you, Dave. Let’s, let’s hear a little bit about airdial.

AirDial Solution by Ooma

Yeah. Fantastic. So airdial is a is a purpose built device by Ooma. It’s something that we leverage all of our capabilities from a manufacturing perspective and, and our experience of doing analog to digital conversion.

You know, most people, they know our history as an organization. We started off as a residential void provider. So we’ve had many years in experience in doing that. And so we we parlayed all of that into a solution for the fire life safety environment.

And we released our product a little over two years ago, and we have thousands of deployments.

You know, the the thing that we’ve always done as an organization is try to deliver things that are very simple to manage, install, operate. Right? We wanna make this, we wanna make this easy. A lot of our clients actually do a self install, which is somewhat unique in this space.

You know, Graham hit on it. There’s a lot of providers that provide a lot of different solutions, and a lot of them are bundled solutions where they will cobble together, you know, different devices and say, here’s your solution. A lot of those are not compliant for FireLife safety. And and what’s unique to, you know, us and even Granite is we’re single multipurpose device where you can add multiple endpoints or multiple pots devices to that to that unit and provide service via LTE or, or or Ethernet.

And what makes us stand out, I think, in the market overall is, you know, we have providers that we you know, the four that are listed here on the site, AT and T, T Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, but we have private cross connects with all of those guys. So all the traffic stays private, secure, and encrypted, and that allows us to claim MFBN status, managed facilities, voice network status, which is a a key tenant for certain compliances like NFPA, National Fire Protection Association.

You know, those are key things you wanna be looking at when you’re when you’re deploying for fire life safety. But the biggest thing that has set us apart is a patent that we have and what we call multi path transport. And when you leverage the terrestrial, the Ethernet connection on air dial and we send over LTE, we’ll send every voice packet over both egresses simultaneously.

Not one or the other, not primary, secondary, but both simultaneously so that if you have an emergency call that is up and active because we’re duplicating the packets, if they’re one of the egresses to go down, that that call stays up. It doesn’t have to tear down and reinitiate. So the way I look at this in many ways is a fail safe versus fail over. And because it’s a patent that’s unique to our solution, it’s won us a lot of businesses.

If you think a couple months ago, AT and T had a national LTE outage. People who had what they call cellular communicators tied to a panel or tied to an elevator and they were singular, they were exposed. Right? And so coming in as an adviser and and talking about how we can build in resiliency into FireLife safety environments builds a lot of trust and credibility, but also moves that sales forward.

Right? And then, you know, you can’t have any of this, I think, to go to the next slide here. You know, the topology and the and the technology is great, but, you know, we’re bringing pots into the into the twenty first century. Right?

It’s new technology. Let’s give you management tools so that a facilities manager, a safety compliance officer, building owner, whatever it may be, if they have a large distributed environment, they have dashboards that they can monitor their activities. Right? They can see what the LT signals are.

They can see what the battery levels, because these things have to have built in battery for for redundancy. Right? So they could see that status. And, you know, let’s give you asset management tools.

Label the lines. We know historically with pots, that’s been an issue. Right?

You know, nobody knows what’s connected to what. They wanna touch it. But also let’s give you analytics. It’s an administrative tool.

We can get in there and you can add at a port level certain conditions like, you know, firearms, different setting than what a fax machine requires. Right? So let’s make sure we can do that. Let’s make sure we could set e nine one one at the port level because in campus environments, the schools is a very big vertical right now.

In campus environments, we set emergency personnel to the endpoint, not the closet. Right? And let’s alert people. Let’s send you notifications in the case that there’s an, an incident or an issue.

Right? That’s simple from that perspective because we just send you an SMS or a text message saying, hey. Your your unit just kicked into the battery. Might indicate a power outage.

Now one of the things that you know, it’s not just our hardware. It’s a software that we develop so we can enhance these things. And we just came out with a new release last week. We have off hook notification.

We can send you a notice if somebody pushes the elevator button on, you know, in the elevator. It might indicate they’re stuck, and that’s a great that’s a great addition or an augmentation for these facilities managers. This doesn’t replace the monitoring companies. It just augments them, and it goes a long way with, again, bringing pots historically, right, into the twenty first century and bringing into the management platform.

Next slide. I think, Graham, I think, yeah. And and, you know, just overall, listen, you know, when we released this, we’ve won quite a few awards for this in the last two years. The the the last two are probably the most relevant.

Right? You know, we won an ELE. It’s an Elevator World’s Award for best communication system for elevator, and we beat the incumbent who won that who won that award for, like, six straight years. Okay?

We got, the Internet telephony product of the year award primarily because of the MPT, the multipath transport that we rolled into it.

Internet Telephony Product of the Year Award

You know, it’s our hardware. It’s a software. It’s the private network. It’s the installation options. It’s active active stuff. It’s all of these things encapsulated in a very couple slides. There’s much more to it, and we encourage to have these, you know, these conversations.

I will tell you, as a publicly traded company, you know, we have to be transparent. We have to cross the t’s and dot the i’s and make sure that we’re delivering on the promise for fire life safety. Right? We’ve gotta we’ve gotta make sure we’re we’re being on the upfront of that.

Expansion to Support Canada

A couple things that I just I’ll end here. So I just saw somebody ask about Canada. Yes. Just a week two weeks ago, we just made the announcement we can support Canada.

So we have that we have that engagement now. We’re ready to go. And then, you know, you know, we talk about the monetary aspects or the opportunity here. We see distributed environments where we’ve seen thousands of lines, and I know Granite has too.

You know? But there’s opportunity to go back to your base. There’s to land and expand in new opportunities, new engagements with education. But, you know, Ooma right now, we have a two to five x spiff depending on the term and the size.

Monetary Benefits of UCaaS and Other Solutions

You bundle that with our UCaaS and our other solutions. You can get all the way up to a fifteen x. Alright? So there’s a lot of money that could be made in this arena.

And with that, let me turn it over. Thanks.

Yeah. No. Thanks for that overview, David. I think that’s, that’s good stuff. Everybody loves to hear, about spiffs and and opportunity there.

So, Dan, let me turn things over to you here to kinda walk us through Epic. You know, I think there’s probably a lot of people on this call that have made a lot of money selling POTS lines through Granite. And so how could we have a conversation about POTS replacement without without talking to granite? And you guys have a pretty cool tool.

So why don’t you talk us through what’s going on with EPIC?

And, and that was a great presentation from Dave. Some good things I think that Dave, pointed out with with, you know, which is the all in one kind of purpose built device versus what we would call these kind of hybrid pots replacement devices that are, that are out there in the market where, you know, you see what essentially is an enclosure with an ATA and a router. And, you know, we’ve been we know Granite has an EPOTS solution that’s ATA and router based. We’ve been selling for many, many years.

Perfectly fine for voice lines. Can work sometimes with fax, one, two pages.

But when it comes to, fire life safety, mission critical, communications, you know, where you get this, you know, digital to analog convert analog to digital conversion, you know, that the the, you know, this this multiline purpose built product, which Ooma has, which Granta has is is really is really the only way to go.

History and Acquisition of EPIC Technology

And, with with respect to to, to Epic, Granite, acquired the Epic technology now almost three years ago. It will be three years in June. And it really kind of came out of that, you know, need from Granite, obviously, the largest wholesaler of of of POTS lines, you know, in in North America.

It was really, for us, mission critical for us to have a product that we felt was both scalable and industry leading or had the potential to be industry leading, you know, which which we believe we have here with the EPYC solution. It is also a patented solution. So, obviously, a different patent. I’m gonna get to that in the next slide.

But, you know, everything with the EPYC devices is is engineered for scale. It is a a delivered solution, and one of the big key differentiators for with Granite here on this product is it’s kind of I I it’s it’s really a cradle to grave experience. Right? We, we onboard our customer.

EPIC Installation Process and Service Delivery

We provide you know, we basically do the site survey and, and then the installation of the solution. Yes. We do have some, some customers that will self install the solution, but generally speaking, this is a facilities based conversion. We treat it as such, and and basically come in and and, you know, and and deliver the POTS, you know, the the Epic solution, basically, emulated POTS as a as a service.

Okay? You’re not buying the the box. You’re basically buying a delivered, you know, pots line, emulated pots line from Granite. It is available across the US and Canada.

EPIC Availability and Configuration

We’ve been delivering, EPYC to to, to the Canadian market now for for almost a year.

And, you know, every device is dual SIM card, with, you know, with fully redundant. And and, typically, we do want it connected to the customer’s Ethernet as well in, you know, in kind of outbound only mode so that we can, have this that similar quality of service that Dave mentioned that they, that they, you know, that the how the Ooma product is engineered. I mean, that really is kind of, best in class as to how you would deliver a solution like this.

EPIC Footprints and Expansion Capabilities

Big differentiator for us is, we have two, two, footprints. There’s a four port and an eight port, box, and then we have up to twenty four ports of expansion capabilities off of the back of a single box. So we can get really high density, and we do have customers, believe it or not, who have ten, twelve, twenty, forty lines still out of sight. Not every, you know, customer in America has moved everything over to UCaaS.

EPIC Application in School Districts

You know, Dave mentioned, you know, state and local. We see a lot of school districts that have still have OLP systems. Okay? And, and that need, need a solution like this.

We also have a PRI expansion card. So you can actually deliver a traditional PRI, emulated, along with the FireInze life safety pots replacement lines in, in in a single epic box.

PRI Expansion Card for EPIC

Maybe next slide.

And so, really, the key behind our solution and our patent is that onboard class five central office switch. So, really, what we’re doing with, with the EPYC solution is we’ve taken all of the intelligence that the local exchange carrier delivers, you know, dial tone, and we’ve you know, that central office, and we’ve literally put it in the box. So the box itself is an intelligent edge device, and, and it delivers that dial tone locally. And that’s that local survivability built in battery, of course, which is, you know, which for for NFPA seventy two and and, and ULA sixty four. You know, for fire life safety lines and elevators, you have to have that built in battery.

Onboard Class Five Central Office Switch

That’s, you know, that’s that’s something that’s just just a a regulatory requirement.

And then we have that, you know, that that onboard intelligence that basically allows for all of the call switching to hand to be handled in the box itself. Okay? So kind of each box has its own, kind of, image of our of our CloudSoft switch, but in the box. And we’re using the connectivity of the Internet for essentially to hit our data centers, which you’ll see on the next slide, and then basically for PSTN origination and termination.

Connectivity, LTE, and 5G

Everything is comes obviously comes with dual SIMS diverse carriers. We don’t charge for the LTE. The LTE is embedded, typically, unless the customer wants to use the box as a failover device, which you can use the box as a as a cradle point as well. Somebody asked a question I saw I just flashed through about five g.

We are looking at five g in the future, but right now for this product, five g is overkill. And, actually, you know, the the building penetration of five g, Graham knows this, we’ve talked about it, is is not you know, the the density of building penetration in five g is is not there. You get much better speed and latency with five g, but then you’ve got much poorer in building density. And so, really, for for this type of a solution, you know, LTE is really the way to go because you’ve got you’ve got better in building penetration, okay, and better density there.

Latency and Call Quality

Right? And and, and then we all you know, anyone who can who does this at all really has a a a singular focus on latency. So we manage through the software stack being able to handle any of the latency issues that you have with LTE to be able to kinda get those those, those calls through that, you know, on on, you know, on latency sensitive applications, I e, fire alarms, burglar alarms, access gates. These can be very latency sensitive because they’re, you know, they work off of DTNF codes.

If you have any latency issues, there can, you know, there can be problems with communication.

And, so that that’s that. We maybe move to the next slide.

Scalability and Operational Scale of EPIC

So we’ve engineered this entire Epic solution to scale. That’s one of the key elements that I kind of like to point out with Granite. I mean, obviously, Granite is close to a two billion dollar company.

You know, we we think in terms of scale in everything that we do.

We deliver thousands of epic boxes per month. That means that in any given day, there’s hundreds of installations being done somewhere across the United States and Canada that’s being delivered by a group that we have in Nashville, Tennessee of I think it’s up to between thirty and forty full time epic project coordinators and project, man, project, PMOs, you know, project managers.

So it’s, it’s it it it’s a it’s delivered to scale.

That’s what Granite is best at. And, we’ve delivered it also through our own network. Also, as Dave mentioned at Ooma, you know, privately paired with the carriers.

So we’re privately paired with all the carriers, and we have direct NNI connections through to those carriers through our our data centers.

The the EPIC, DCs sit across the Granite, managed network. We’re in Chicago, LA, New York, Atlanta, and Dallas.

And so everything is load balanced for latency across those data centers, and that’s where we have PSTN origination and termination points as well. We’ve got operational scale to be able to deliver millions of EPIC ports. Our our intention is that the millions of pots lines that Granite still manages becomes millions of EPIC ports that we manage on behalf of our customers and our partners, where I think the only, solution that has both Cal Fire and FDNY approvals for fire and life safety, you know, for, which are, you know, very, very difficult to get those approvals on and, you know, at least, you know, both of them. And, you know, and that, of course, goes without saying that our our our, you know, our status as a licensed CLEC in all fifty states, you know, gives us that along with those MFVM status that you really need to deliver, you know, a solution that has fire and life safety.

Regulatory Considerations for POTS Replacement

For sure. Obviously, some really good differentiators there. And I think, you know, just kind of letting everybody know here, we’ve got we’ve got things covered with some options for you in the portfolio. We’re really running tight on time, and I do wanna get in a couple of questions here.

Before we do that, I think, a lot of us really care about the types of companies that we do business with. So I had to give a shout out to, Grounders, Granite CEO here. I just posted a little link to an article in the chat. Check that out.

Just really cool stuff. And I think, anybody who wants to kinda get an idea of of that, I mean, these are the kind of things that I think make sometimes can make a big difference. So good stuff there. Doug, you wanna open it up?

Do we have any questions there that we can tackle?

Considerations for Customer’s Existing Equipment

As expected, we generated quite a few of them today. I don’t think anybody doubts the, efficacy and the, opportunity associated with pots replacement, but a lot of people have questions about certain parts of the, the safety factor, of course. One of the questions that came up over and over again was, what about the age of the equipment involved? If you’re dealing with old elevators or older fax lines or older other equipment that’s involved, are there considerations in pots replacement with regard to the customer’s existing equipment?

Device Certification and Infrastructure Considerations

Yeah. Good stuff. And I’ll Dave and Dan, just real quick answers, please.

Yeah. So, I I mean, the devil’s in the details. Pots replacement, is easy to sell. It can be difficult to deliver. And, and really, you need you know, the older infrastructure does need to be, need to be considered there. Typically, we’ll work with most alarm panels as an example with most older key systems with with with many, fax machines.

But we have an entire lab that does device certification and is really important to understand that the customer from the customer perspective, what they have, you know, in when that in in that infrastructure.

That’s why it’s really important for us that we have an an onboarding, you know, method where we have our project managers talk to the customer and make sure we know before we get there what we’re to connect where we’re connecting to to to to get the best success that we can.

Perfect. Dave, anything to add there?

Regulatory Compliance and Advising Clients

Go ahead, Graham. I was just gonna see if Dave had anything quick to add there.

Maybe we don’t have Dave.

I think we’re okay. Yeah. The other question that came up that we want to address here is, the regulatory aspect of it. Graham, you mentioned at the start that, POTS lines generally have been deregulated in the industry. There were a couple of questions from partners about to what extent does any deregulation extend to, city, state, local governments, and then also the regulations that are associated with, let’s say, HIPAA or hospitals, health care, other complications.

Many of those regulations are still in effect. And how easy is it for, our advisors to advise their clients on compliance with those other regulatory requirements?

Deregulation and Compliance with Regulatory Requirements

Yeah.

I think all of those are gonna vary by the jurisdiction. Right? I mean, you still have a lot of areas that require certain characteristics or things from the emergency lines. So that is definitely something you need to explore. I think the trend here that we want to communicate is as a general rule, everything is moving in this direction. Right? So even if those regulations are still in place today, there may be some requirements in some municipalities.

The technology now is available that it can handle those types of applications, and it’s just a matter of time before we move there. So great opportunity to have conversations with those customers. So, I’d love to get a few more questions here. I know we’ve got a bunch. Dan and Dave, do you guys mind kinda maybe pinging some of those questions in the chat and just seeing if you could answer those for us? Because I gotta turn things back over to my man, Doug, for his, the next part of the call. Thank you.

Cost Factor and POTS Line Replacement

Let let me throw one more out there because I wanna bring it back to, a non regulated perspective for a second. We talked about about many of the, hurdles to overcome, but I don’t wanna leave the discussion without talking about the myriad of lines that are still out there that are not part of fire life safety type situations. There are just still a tremendous amount of pot lines pots lines out there for which customers are drastically overpaying these days. And our our suppliers here are perfectly capable of taking those on and providing a very low cost replacement for generally used lines that need to stay in place. Correct?

Yeah. Great point, Doug. I think, you know, Dan or and Dave both hit it that a lot of the driving force behind this is cost. And, you know, you have that compliance piece as well.

But a lot of what’s gonna be driving your customers to make this transition is the fact that the cost of those pots lines that they’ve got is still in place is continuing to increase. Dave and I were sort of talking before the call. I saw one that was fourteen hundred dollars that a customer was paying for. I mean, that’s just a crazy amount of money.

Exponential Cost Increases and Surcharge Fees

And, Dave, I don’t know if you have anything you wanna add there.

You know what it is? It’s it’s it’s interesting because most environments, it’s just they they view the pots as just a couple lines, so nobody’s really paying attention to the cost structure. It’s usually going right to the AP department. It’s when the cost goes exponentially up the following month is when it gets everybody’s attention.

And so that’s the opportunity to do, you know, to advise on on what’s happening. But, we’ve seen people get stuck, where they’ve been exposed to a thousand dollar a month surcharge increases. This is the other thing. Your line your your your contracted rate may stay the same, but they’ll be added surcharges and fees sometimes to recoup costs.

So look at those embedded notices in the invoices.

Yeah. I got some, I got some quest q and a in here. I can go quick.

Address hospitals and HIPAA applications for emergency voice. Absolutely. We got tons of hospitals that are using this.

You know, it’s very difficult for them to move off of fax. Somebody asked about long form fax.

It’s really tough. We do very, very well with long form fax in the Epic solution. It’s because of that onboard class five switch. What we actually do is create an image of the fax and then we retransmit it, then we delete it off the disk. It’s, it’s you gotta have Ethernet connectivity to do long form fax. You got you got hospitals sending hundred page faxes, government of water authorities monitoring pots. We’ve we’ve got tons of water meters out there that we’ve done.

Do we offer a a POC? I’m sure room our office POCs. Granted office office POCs all the time. So I answer for both of us there.

And, minimum orders, generally, we’re, you know, we’re we’re very, you know, we’re we’re we’re channel friendly. You know? Again, granted is is, is generally engineered to scale, so we do much better on the on the rollout type business than we do on the transactional business. I think I think Umer is is is is very engineered to transactional business in addition, so it’s good for them. But we are, we we we do have lots of small customers that use the solution.

Yeah.

Cellular dialers versus parts replacement solution, that’s a good one. Because, you know, there’s a you know, if you do have a single single line of of, of, a fire or or a burglar, You know, there are cellular dialer solutions that are out there. What’s interesting is if you talk to the alarm industry, there’s a there’s really a division in even the alarm industry as to how compliant those solutions are. And generally, they’re single SIM solutions. Just Dave mentioned, if you have a NAPCO box that has an AT and T SIM card in it because only, you know, because they’re really a single SIM solution, it’s actually is hardwired to the fire alarm. You have to it has to be delivered by an alarm vendor.

And frankly, you know, those are those are called dial capture. So they’re basically transmitting the the the the alarm signal to NAPCO who then transmits it to the to the, you know, to the end, to, you know, to the end monitoring station. What we’ve done, at Granite that’s that’s very unique because we’re actually peering with many of those alarm monitoring stations ourselves. So, actually, we go privately directly from the back of the panel because the dial tone, but instead of sending it over to PSTN, it’s basically tunneling through the Internet directly into a, you know, the way that we pair with with with carriers. We’re also pairing with those alarm vendors. It’s a more much more robust solution than than dial capture.

You you touched on something, Dan, that I think people should know. Right? When we think about how we interconnect with fire panels, these are not fire communicators. We’re not we’re not touching the panel directly, which requires code revision or for it to be painted red.

There’s a lot of miss, misunderstanding about these type of solutions. These POTS replacement solutions specifically with Epic and us, you know, or Granite. Excuse me. You know, they these are shared line.

These are shared communication lines just like the POTS lines, and that’s the way they get treated. So when you think about what they call the AHJ, the authority having jurisdiction, if they understand that, they’re more apt to approve. It’s when they don’t know what these things are that they immediately just mark it off and walk away. And that’s where a lot of advisers we work with, they get frustrated because they just don’t know that aspect of it.

Yeah.

There is a certain amount of that takes time that needs to happen, and I know we need to wrap.

Thanks, Graham, and but Doug for for letting us go a little long.

Yeah. And then Dave, great. I gotta cut it off there, but for time, but, great information. I know there are a lot of other questions in there. Grant, last word?

Graham? No. I I just think yeah. I know this is this is a great conversation.

Really lots to lots to decompress and and kinda go through. So I put my contact information in the chat as I always do. Please reach out if you have other questions. Again, Airdial, Epic, just two of the solutions we have in the portfolio.

Lots lots to do. So if you have questions about pots replacement, please reach out. Huge opportunity. Lots of money to be made.

Absolutely true.

Back to you, Doug.

Thank you, Graham. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dave. We appreciate the presentations and all of the answers. More to come, I’m sure. And by the way, there was no AI used today in generating either grams or my hair for today’s event.