Bridging Cannabis with Tech, a Glimpse into AWS reInvent, & Neutral Host Networks with CBRS. Also, we can't lose ACP!

Are your industries keeping pace with the technological revolution? If you're curious about the intersection of technology with cannabis and wireless communication, you're in the right place. I'm your host Drew Lentz, and I'll be sharing intriguing insights from #MJBizCon and Amazon AWS reInvent as well as an update on the Affordable Connectivity Program and its implications if not renewed. 

We also explore the security landscape of emerging technologies across a range of industries. I share my first-hand experiences from the Marijuana Business Conference MJBizCon and AWS re:Invent, demonstrating how security has become a cornerstone in the tech world. Discover potential threats in the cannabis industry, upcoming buzz at the CES and NRF conferences, and how neutral host CBRS is enhancing network coverage. As we navigate the exciting realm of CBRS and Wi-Fi, I'll introduce you to innovative companies like Infini-G and Kajeet that are reshaping wireless communication. So buckle up for this thrilling ride into the limitless world of technology!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:46

of a. There we go. Look, I'm live on X. Okay, that means it's streaming where it's supposed to be working. So good morning, good morning. Good morning, I'm Drew Lentz, the wireless nerd, and this is the Waves podcast. What's new, what's now, what's next happening in the tech industry, with a little bit of emphasis on wireless? What a week, man. You know, last week there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to talk about. It just got crazy. There's so many things going on.

Speaker 1: 1:23

I was out in Vegas, got to tag along with my wife to the MJ Bizcon, learn all about tech in the cannabis industry, and then got to go hang out at AWS re-invent, which was pretty awesome. Saw some Wi-Fi stands all over the place. That was cool. Big shout out to the team over there. That was really cool. That was neat. It was neat to be walking around and see those Wi-Fi stands everywhere Multiple hotels, multiple casinos and just looking around. There's some really good events that we're hosting there. My first time at AWS. That's pretty awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:58

What a song, man. Whoa, there it goes, comes back up. You know, jungle music always reminds me of the 90s and 2000s. Just getting into like just reminds me of all the fun stuff that was happening. It's just a beautiful dot com days, anyway, anyway. So what's going on with you guys? Lots of stuff happening, man, lots of things happening. So I want to talk a little bit about what I saw and what was going on, but before I get into that, you know I never I try and stay away from politics on this podcast the other one's not so much, but I will let you know that there's something that's going on right now and you know, with what's happening in the United States. The FCC chairwoman, mrs Jessica Rosenwurzel, is talking about the Affordable Connectivity Program, and there's something that's happening right now where, if Congress doesn't act, if nothing happens, over 20 million households will lose access to the Internet. The ACP vouchers provide a $30 monthly broadband discounts to people that are low income, and you know the Biden administration is seeking $6 billion for 2024, but so far nothing's passed and if it doesn't happen by April, it looks like the number is between 22 and 25 million households that will lose it. We've come so far, we can't go back and, as Rosenwurzel said, we need Congress to continue to fund this program. If Congress does not, in April of next year we'll have to unplug households and, based on current projections, there'll be about 25 million households. We will unplug from the Internet in April. So if you know anyone that is a higher ranking official, let them know that ACP is pretty important to a whole lot of people.

Speaker 1: 3:56

No-transcript, I gotta say. You know, I think a couple episodes ago I talked about different alternatives to lane fiber in the ground and what people could do for connectivity, and you started to see the hotspot program where carriers were providing hotspots and school districts were signing up for hotspots. How, now that that's going away as well, and there were so few communities that made significant investments in their community that took advantage of this time to build out networks that students could use. That now, you know, and communities could use that. Now that those programs are going away and now that ACP is, you know, hopefully, hopefully, gets, you know, everything goes through with that, but if it doesn't, now everyone again is at risk of losing connectivity. And now is the time for people to make these investments in their districts and in their communities to make sure that we don't have the broadband divide that we had before and that now is, you know, threatening to come back because of things like this. So I know that by administrations looking for $6 billion and with that $6 billion if it comes through, if you know, some of these Bede funds and all these other things happen. I really, really, really hope that communities are using every single dollar that they can in the wisest way possible to provide as much connectivity as they can.

Speaker 1: 5:12

And in some communities that is not fiber optic access, sometimes it's 5G access, sometimes it's Wi-Fi access, sometimes it's a combination of both, sometimes it's a combination of fiber and microwave and 3G, 4g, 5g, whatever G is out there at the time. Leverage what you have, leverage how those dollars to make an impact in the community. Fiber is great and fiber is not not going away, but it also is one of the more expensive options. So don't think that just because you can't trench fiber doesn't mean that your community can't do something. Now is the time to do something, especially if this stuff goes away. So I'm not this isn't getting out political, but just I mean just something that's out there. If, if ACP doesn't get renewed, you got 25 million people who will again be looking for some way to connect. So please stay cognizant of that. And and yeah, so that's my, that's my rant for today on broadband access.

Speaker 1: 6:09

Anyway, okay, so, that being said, back to the other stuff. So I got to go to the MJ BizCon, the marijuana business conference, and and I wanted to go for a couple of different reasons. I love understanding what's going on in technology and I look at this as a combination of not just what's happening in the, in the industrial space, but in the retail space as well, and you know you're the retail delivery, whatever it is the use of technology is is huge to me. I love when people leverage it and they do great things with it, and so I really wanted to see where the marijuana industry was with this in in the States where it has been decriminalized and legalized for the most part. So so I got to walk around, man, and I saw some stuff. You know, my wife and I got to see how everything from the, from the lighting and the sensors and the and the irrigation and, and you know, the growing and the cultivation all the way to, you know, the, the harvesting and the trimming and the packaging and the go to market and everything.

Speaker 1: 7:06

You know that show is a tremendous show for showing the entire ecosystem in that business, but it kept, I kept walking around, and two things were were really clear to me. And you know, I I feel like I'm a late arriver to this. You know, even the people that were there were saying, yeah, you should see the show five years ago. And I'm not even thinking about five years ago, I'm thinking about five years in the future. It reminded me so much of the dot com days, like just so much, where you had this thing that people knew was a thing, and the early adopters were these people who had done it in their basements and who had built these small internet service providers and who had built these tiny web pages and who had done things like Yahoo and like Google and, you know, kitted together experiments and then big tech just formed out of that. And you see that happening in the cannabis industry. You see literally people who are doing this in their basement struggling with how they grow their operations to something that they can. They can generate the output that's needed by the industry. You know that the consumers are looking for and it's just so fascinating to watch.

Speaker 1: 8:03

And then I started to think about tech and I think about you know, on the production side and on the growing cultivation side, what was being done. And I got to, you know, interface with a whole bunch of people and, and you know, foes lighting was. Those guys were really cool to talk to and it just made me wonder how much tech is being used in these grow operations. So I, you know, I got some really good insight. One of the statistics I heard is 70 to 80% of the growers that are out there are leveraging technology in some way, shape or form, especially for vertical growth, especially for, you know, especially for indoor stuff where you can control the atmosphere. You can control you know how much irrigation you're pumping in, how much light you're giving, what type of light you're giving, when you're giving it to them, when you're feeding the plants, what you're feeding the plants, and then pulling that data back via sensors and via via some type of IoT network to feed it into a system to understand what's happening. And I think that that's fascinating, especially when you look at hydroponics overall, for not just for for the marijuana industry, but for tomatoes and, you know, lettuce and, you know, solving the world's food supply shortage. There's so many fascinating things that are happening there.

Speaker 1: 9:06

But it also made me think about the retail side and what they're doing. You know, in their retail stores, what type of Wi-Fi connectivity do they have? What type of point of sale systems do they have? You know, dutchu was was a great company that I got to, you know, learn a little bit about and you know. Then, video surveillance a lot of mandates are happening in these states where they're saying in order to open a store, you have to have mandated video surveillance of a certain amount of time with, you know, whatever backup is there.

Speaker 1: 9:30

So I really wanted to focus in on that and I walked around the show floor looking for tech, just looking, and I only saw like three, I think three tech companies where they're doing, where there'd maybe two tech companies were there who were saying, hey, here's, here's what we do, full stack solutions. So it was. You know, it was interesting to see that that that it didn't have such a strong presence. So I totally expect that to change over the next couple of years. But but if you're in the space and you've got you know, if you live in one of the states in the U? S where this has been decriminalized, that's definitely something you should reach out to. That's a market of people that need this, that can take advantage of it, that will take advantage of it. Just really, you know, just wanted to spread that a little bit because what I saw was fascinating, but I also saw that that there's such room for growth no pun intended in that space.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Then afterwards at night, I got to go over to reinvent and I got to see what Amazon was doing and, oh my God, what a show. Wow. If you've never been to reinvent, you know the AWS show. Um, it's expensive, uh, but it looked like it was so worth it. And and you just see all of the cloud, if you will. There's just cloud everywhere. I went from smoke clouds to data clouds all in one day and it was really interesting.

Speaker 1: 10:47

I think some of the standout things that I saw were around leading into retail. So in our national retail federation, the NRF shows coming up in January, and so I've got retail in my mind right now. What's retail doing? How are they doing it? What are they leveraging? Because retail touches us every day. Every body that purchases something in this country or in any country touches retail, and so the way that tech is evolving in retail is fascinating.

Speaker 1: 11:10

I got to see the grab-and-go store by Amazon and one of the things I saw was their single authentication deal where Amazon won, where you go up to a little terminal and you log in with your Amazon account and you associate it with your credit card and your ID and then you put your hand over it and it scans your hand and now you can use that technology anywhere it's available. You just scan your hand and it gives you immediate authentication to verification of your age. Authentication to your credit card Gives you the opportunity to do the grab-and-go stuff. But I like to think about the implications for retail overall with that and when you combine what's going on in cannabis with what's going on in traditional retail in the Amazon one, there was like a really cool tie over there for me Because walking around with my buddy Bender looking at both of these and understanding how they work together, it was fascinating to see that in the cannabis industry when you queue up to go into a store, there has to be an ID verification. You have to know who you are and what age you are and if you're allowed to buy it or not, and then that ties into your transaction and checking you in and putting you in a place online and queuing you up to go to the register, and if you solve all those problems with just scanning your handprint, just scanning your hand using that Amazon one. That was what an interesting take on that. Now I was a little skeptical. I'm not going to lie, because it's crazy. I think you just scan your hand and your entire world is on there. But Amazon already has that. They already have everything except for the actual imprint from my hand. So to see that was really interesting.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Reinvent had so many different things. One of the great things we saw was a cloud control bartender where you could get on an app or you could get on a web page and you could tell it to make you a drink, and it had 12 liquors that were hooked up to the machine. It would send it via AWS Lambda and it would queue up the drink and it would serve the drink to you. It uses the cloud for operation. That was pretty cool.

Speaker 1: 13:01

A lot of emphasis on security. There Got to be Miss Merritt from Guy Frick and then, of course, I forget the name of the company, but talked a little bit about security and what's happening and how all these things rely on security. And again back on the cannabis side, what are they doing from security? Because the attacks? Mgm, the big cyber attack that happened there. And then it's Caesar's. And then you talk about this quote unquote budding industry and cannabis. Like what susceptibility are they going to have to some of these hacks? And then you think, well, it's a cash based business, so you can't just take cash. I guess you can't freeze a bank account, you can't freeze credit card transactions, because it's not there. So I'm curious to see what the threat landscape is going to look like in that cannabis industry. So that's what was going on, really interesting to me. I had a good time at both of those shows. I would strongly suggest that if you play in any one of those spaces, whether it's cloud, definitely go check out AWS if you get a chance. Reinvent was really really neat. Lots of information, tons of people were there for that conference and then, if you're in the cannabis industry, mjbizcon was really just start to finish of what's happening in cannabis. So that's what's going on from the show perspective.

Speaker 1: 14:15

Again, you've heard me mention it before. We've got CES coming up in January. I'll be out there. If you're going to be out there, let us know. I'm going to do some fun interviews. A really cool crossover episode of Waves. That's going to happen. The plans are in the works. It looks like it's scheduled for the 10th of January, so I'll let you know more details on that, but that's about a month away. We're going to have a really cool crossover episode. It's going to be two teams working together, so hopefully that'll be fun coming at you live from CES. Nrf is happening right after that. Still no word if I'm 100% going to go to that show or not, but if I do it'll be phenomenal.

Speaker 1: 14:48

And then my talk did get selected for WLPC in Phoenix. So I will be giving a presentation at WLPC, talking about AI and the way that that interacts with doing wireless site surveys, and basically the gist is there are a lot of tools that are out there that can give you information, leveraging AI and ML. How do we use those tools day to day to do our jobs, and are they going to take our jobs? Are they just going to make our lives better? So I'm pretty sure you can guess which one, but it's going to be a fun talk either way, especially because everything is just moving so rapidly in the whole AI space that between now and February, god only knows where it's going to be.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Now, what I did want to talk about, you know, I talked about the ACP. Stuff covered marijuana industry covered re-invent. So the last topic that I want to talk about is neutral host CBRS, because there's two companies out there that are offering neutral host CBRS. So what that means is and this is like the golden use case for CBRS this is, you know, the DAZ, the digital antenna system. The DAZ and repeater system for so long has been the solution where, if you're staying in a hotel or if you're in a place, you know, in Disney World or Universal or whatever it is, and there's more facility that's needed in order to serve the number of clients that are there. Maybe it's out in the middle of nowhere. A DAZ system would basically tie into a network and then feed that data back to a carrier Verizon, t-mobile, whoever it is and that was always the use case. And DAZ is expensive and it's, you know, it's not easily deployed and there's a lot of really good solutions that solve some of those problems, but at the end of the day it's, you know, everyone's always looking for a better, you know, more cost effective alternative.

Speaker 1: 16:25

So when CBRS came out, operating 35365 Spectrum and had some of the same characteristics and was that mid-band 5G play, now, this is when CBRS was like this viable alternative because I could put a CBRS unit, you know one, I think the rule of thumb I think that a comm scope used a while back was one CBRS, a E-node, for every you know three or four access points or something like that, where if you populate your hotel with the CBRS access points, then a phone that uses band 48, you know, lte band 48, like an iPhone or Samsung phone, then that phone could communicate with that CBRS node and it could carry that voice traffic and that data traffic back, so negating the need for DAZ, because now you can just connect to the CBRS AP. And that was great and it was like, oh man, this is going to be so cool, but no one was doing it. Because the problem was is your phone could communicate with the device, but the device had to communicate with a gateway that had some type of vendor or, I'm sorry, this, this, this neutral host system that could connect to multiple providers, whether it was Verizon, at&t, t-mobile, whoever it was. So so I got some. I got to see this firsthand. I got to see this vendor neutral stuff for this, this carrier neutral, agnostic approach.

Speaker 1: 17:38

When I was at Meta, there was this group that was there, and there's a product that's now come out called InfiniGee, and InfiniGee offers the ability to be a neutral host for CBRS. So I can go and deploy a whole bunch of CBRS devices at a location and I can tie them all back to InfiniGee. And InfiniGee is negotiated contracts with T-Mobile and AT&T, and so my phone will just automatically roam to the local network at the local hotel that I'm staying at, pipe it back using CBRS, which is extremely low cost comparatively speaking to DAZ, and then send it back across the network. And next thing, you know, I've got a really great call quality happening wherever I am. And that's the. That's the end of it, right? That's? Nobody cares how it gets connected, as long as it gets connected. So when you're talking about end users who are using technology, they don't care if it's CBRS or it's 5G or 6G or two and a half gig or whatever it is. Nobody cares, as long as it works and CBRS working hand in hand with a Wi-Fi provider being able to hand off from CBRS back to Wi-Fi, back and forth. That's like been this golden deal.

Speaker 1: 18:39

And so now you know Infinigee, joel, you know, dude, the first time I saw this project, joel, the guy who's in charge of it. I looked at it and I was just like, oh my God. I freaked out Like I lost my mind at how insane this is, because this was the promise of CBRS and now they're up and running. So go check out Infinigee. I-n-f-i-n-i-g. Infinigee is a company that's doing that, but so is a new company called Kajit K-A-G-E-E-T. So Kajit has now joined and this whole play, and they've made announcements that they, that they work with Timo and AT&T, and Verizon supposedly has come into both of those, but as soon as it does.

Speaker 1: 19:13

This is that whole CBRS thing. So if you operate a CBRS network, if you're thinking about deploying a CBRS network and you don't know how to have that carry, that carry over, that tie over back to the carrier or the carrier, the carry over to the carrier, whatever it is, if that's what you're looking for those are two companies please reach out to Joel, let them know that I talked about it, or reach out to me and I'll be happy to connect you and then, if you know the team, it could reach out to them as well, because what a cool space finally starting to see, you know, and DAZ is great, but DAZ is so expensive right Now, starting to see how CBRS can truly make an impact in that space. So, anyway, that's my 12 minutes for the day. I try and keep these things short.

Speaker 1: 19:53

Just a quick, brief update on what's going on Again. What's new, what's now, what's next? These are the three things jumbled into that. But what an incredible week last week to see so much innovation at MJ Bizcon and at AWS and VIN. It was just really neat to see those industries embracing technology. You know, obviously AWS is a tech company so they're not really embracing it, they're kind of leading the way. But seeing at MJ Bizcon where people are starting to embrace technology to help them out, that was those really neat to see. And then just InfiniGee and the whole neutral host with CBRS. What a cool thing.

Speaker 1: 20:26

So until next week, have yourself a wonderful week. Don't forget if you know someone who's in Congress. If they keep stalling, 25 million homes are going to lose access. So please, please, please, push for that ACP, or push for communities to do something that is permanent. Push for them to do something that's going to allow access to the internet, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in that community. You know we did it in the city of McAllen. We're doing it in the city of FAR. There's all these great projects across the nation. They're making it happen. Don't hesitate. Now is a perfect time to start building out these networks.

Speaker 1: 20:57

Anyway, that being said, have a wonderful week. I will talk to you next week. Enjoy your holiday parties this weekend. I don't try to think if there's anything else coming up between now and then, but you know I do want to do. I might do a pop in this week, just a special, just a special episode where we talk to some people about some really cool tech that's out there. So I might start doing a couple more of these. Anyway, have a great week. We will see you next week. Enjoy it. Hope, your hope your wifi is strong and your, your DNS resolution is quick. Have a good one.