Special Event Coverage: Seeing is Believing by Tarana. Reimagining Wireless Broadband's Potential with Tarana Leading the Charge in Next-Gen Wireless Innovations

Embark on a transformative journey as I, Drew Lentz, your Wireless Nerd, team up with the front-runners of Tarana Wireless to reveal the true power of wireless broadband. At a recent "Seeing is Believing" event together with the local ISP VTX1, we were hands on with the equipment, got a tour of customer sites via private coach, and a walkthrough of the benefits by the CTO of one of Texas' largest Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP). We pulled back the curtain on the misconceptions surrounding wireless technology and its capability to rival fiber. Our discussion takes you through VTX1's bold transition to Tarana's innovative solutions,  where we dissect the game-changing experiences and the enlightenment of even the most skeptical technicians with their firsthand triumphs with Tarana's gear. The impact is clear: wireless is not just an alternative; it's a formidable contender in the broadband arena.

We further scrutinize the technical marvels behind this wireless tech company's ascent. With a staggering 28 patents and a reach extending to over 20 million households, we demonstrate just how they're recalibrating expectations for internet deployment, particularly in regions fraught with natural calamities. From the nitty-gritty of advanced signal processing to the practicalities of rural installations, we take you through an immersive experience that culminates in a candid chat with the installation team. This episode isn't merely about the triumph of technology, it's a testament to the resilience and innovation at the heart of modern connectivity.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:31

Hey everybody, drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and I'd love to talk to you about an event that I got to participate in from a company called Tarana Wireless. Now they came out and they did this field day called Seeing is Believing, and let me tell you, I've heard about their products and I've heard about people at their company and I've seen some people go over there and I've heard about what they can do in the wireless industry, but I've never gotten hands-on with their equipment. And it's my own fault. I mean, they're deployed just a couple of miles away from my house but I've never had the chance to go out and really get hands-on with the equipment. And all of that changed in the last couple of days because I got a phone call from a friend of mine who's the CTO of VTX1. And VTX1 is a local wireless internet service provider and fiber service provider and they have a whole bunch of Toronto deployed and they said we're doing this field day called Seeing is Believing, and I think you should come out and take a look at it. So what it was was an event where they brought out their sales team and their business dev team and their marketing team and they brought out a bunch of engineers an old friend of mine, mr Craig Muller, who I've worked with for, you know, I guess 20 years now in the industry they brought out a bunch of people people to come show off their products and show off what their products can do in real world scenarios. They didn't want to put in some canned lab environment, they really wanted to do some type of field deployment and have us be able to go out and look at what their product was doing and how it was performing in real world scenarios. So it was really neat and there was a smattering of people there right. So we had internet service providers, we had C-Lex and I-Lex, we had county officials, we had city officials, we had school district officials, we had people from economic development corporations, a lot of different people who were interested in how wireless could solve the problem that a lot of people say only fiber can do, especially now that the FCC has said that you need 100 megabit down and 20 megabit up in order to be a viable broadband provider. This was a way that you could do that with wireless and they really wanted us to get hands-on and show it to us. Now, of course, I've done you know I've done my fair share of homework on this and I understand what you know the capabilities are of some of this equipment and I know that it can work. But this was a great chance for people who had no idea what was going on in the industry to be able to see this firsthand. So it was a fantastic event.

Speaker 1: 2:37

Got in the car, drove out about 25, 30 minutes away from my house, drove out through the beautiful South Texas countryside, got out to the VTX1 training and technician facility campus and they've got a huge tower out there. They've got a lot of equipment. They've got a warehouse out there and they brought us into one of their facility rooms and they had the tables lined up ready for us to do a show and tell. And it looked like it was going to be a traditional sales presentation but it really wasn't, because after giving us an introduction as to who they were and who VTX was, they allowed us to go out and actually look at the equipment.

Speaker 1: 3:04

And a little bit about VTX One. They made headlines a bunch of years back. They got about $92 million $100 million worth of funding from the RUS grants, the USDA Rural Utility Services grants, and they cover about 42,000 square miles. They've got about 350 towers deployed and they've got 6,000 miles of fiber in the ground. Right now they're one of the largest fiber providers down here in South Texas. They are a traditional LEC so they still provide dial tone service, two-wire service to people that are out there and right now they've got about 4,000 Tarana customers and counting on their network. So it's a pretty good use case for it, right? They're moving completely away from their existing equipment provider and manufacturer and they're going all in on Tarana. So it's interesting to see what they're doing and why they're doing that.

Speaker 1: 3:50

One of the quotes that came from Sebastian, who's their CTO. He said we were taking things off the shelf and hoping heat and rain wouldn't take it down at the most critical time. Talking about what they were doing before the advent of things like Motorola, canopy and before things like Cambium came out with their Medusa product and now the Toronto product and Radwin and everything else in between. It was interesting to hear that quote because really that's what this culture was in the WISP culture those people who are trying to figure out how to provide internet service in these huge areas just by using off-the-shelf equipment. And so he's been there for about 20 years and now he's the CTO, so he's seen pretty much everything come through that you can possibly imagine.

Speaker 1: 4:28

And he tells a story at Wispapalooza, which is a fantastic event if you're interested in anything that has to do with point-to-multipoint broadband or wireless internet service providers. He was at Wispapalooza and on the last day of the event someone introduced him to George, who's their VP of sales, and said hey, you got to talk to this guy. He met him at a bar and he told him that this stuff was out there and he told him what he could putting out there. Most importantly, is it repetitive and is it consistent. And so they got that equipment, they brought it home, they threw it on the bench and then they took it to the technicians and said here, you guys have to go install this. This is what they say they can do. And one of the technicians said I give it six months before we rip all of it down.

Speaker 1: 5:08

This isn't going to work. There's no way it can work. Work the way that it's supposed to. Wi-fi doesn't work like that. Wireless doesn't work like that. But actually, because of what they've done with their technology and owning the entire communication, from the base node to the remote node, they own the entire loop. Right Now they can do some pretty interesting things using that technology. So VTX went out and Sebastian says in 20 years I've never seen anything like this. These are environments where typical fixed wireless wouldn't work and it's important to note that they are not a wireless-only camp and they're not a fiber-only camp. They use whatever tool is the right tool for the job and Sebastian stands by that. So whatever can provide the best route to connectivity available. That's what they go with In this case.

Speaker 1: 5:52

A lot of talk about the Tarana site. Obviously this was a Tarana event. Now what they go with In this case a lot of talk about the Tarana side. Obviously this was a Tarana event. Now a little bit about Tarana and I'm really looking forward to bringing someone on the Waves show to interview them, to answer some questions about the company. But it's about 15 years old and they put about $400 million into building this company and the joke is that it's a 15-year-old company with $400 million to become an overnight success because as soon as they hit the market, everybody loved them. Now you know, nowadays people want hundreds of megabits and even gigabit service over wireless and they really went after trying to figure out how to do that. And again, when they look at, when you look at owning the base station side and the subscriber side together, when you have that entire conversation, there's a lot of really neat stuff you can do from a technology perspective and that's what they leverage neat stuff you can do from a technology perspective and that's what they leverage.

Speaker 1: 6:37

They operate in three and a half gig CBRS. They operate in five gig and now they were just approved to operate in six gig. They hold 28 patents. They're deployed in 45 states. They've got over 20 million households covered using their equipment and the key here again is on the base node and on the remote node. They refer to them as the BN and the RN From the base node and the remote node.

Speaker 1: 6:57

On the signal processing side, just on their CPE, they can do 2.4 teraflops of signal processing on that CPE, which is where the house would be or the business would be. And so what you're doing is they've got active noise rejection and cancellation. They've got beamforming in the antennas noise rejection and cancellation, they've got beamforming in the antennas. They do a lot of really neat trickery, if you will, between that link in order to achieve what they can. Now there's a lot of RF that goes into this, and they used a one-to-one channel reuse, which is really fascinating to hear about how they do it, so that you can have a ton of scalability within their platform. But it sounds like a really cool product.

Speaker 1: 7:32

And again, when you start talking about speeds of a hundred megabits worth of service, 500 megabits worth of service, a gig worth of service, you know, in 2.4 teraflops of processing on the remote node, this is something that if you were told this at a bar, you'd be like, yeah, okay, show it to me. And that's what this event really was. So what we did is, after they gave us the introductions, they gave us the introductions, they walked us outside and underneath this big blue tent, underneath this big, you know, a couple hundred foot tower, about 300, 250, 300 foot tower, whatever it is that's out there, they showed us how they had one of their remote nodes pointed at a wall and they were bouncing the signal off the wall and even in this really weird RF environment, they were pulling 200, then 500, then 600 megabit per second. And then, when they took that and they aimed it right at the tower, you know, not even it was definitely this line of sight, but it was under that you know umbrella of RF coverage. Even there we were able to show a 992 megabit per second what they were pulling, so just phenomenal speeds for what you can imagine in wireless.

Speaker 1: 8:32

Then, after we got hands on, they said, instead of just looking at this in this very closed, fixed environment, let's get on a bus. So they loaded everybody onto a bus, we all got to sit on there and we got this really cool tour all across the South Texas countryside we covered in an area called Willisee County, an area called Cameron County, up through a city called Raymondville and La Sada and all these very rural areas. And Sebastian sat up front with the microphone and walked us through not only what they were doing with the deployment and information about the individual houses that we were seeing or the places that were connected and the way that they mounted or you know things that they had to think about when they were doing the installation, but he even talked about things where you had a base station that was, you know, pointed at you know, zero degrees, like true north, and then you had a subscriber or a remote node, a house that was connected at like a 45 degree angle or a 90 degree angle, not even aligned with the actual base station or the base node itself, and it was still able to pull hundreds of megabits worth of service. And they talked about why that was important from a redundancy perspective. Down here in south tex we have these little hurricanes we have to deal with from time to time, so being able to have redundant nodes and redundant connectivity is super important. And the comment was made that you can't do that with fiber. You've got your fiber connection. When that goes down, that goes down. In this case, if you're talking to a base station and something happens with that tower, well one of the other base stations can pick up the slack on that. So that redundancy was really key to them and that really raised the attention of the people that were there from the counties and the economic development areas. So that was interesting to see.

Speaker 1: 10:01

One of the ones that stood out to me is they had the 6.1 mile shot pointed directly at trees and I've got a little video here of it so you can see it's pointed directly at the trees through the canopy 6.1 miles, 294 megabit per second down, and one of the key things here also was that there were 92 other connections on that exact same base station at the same time that that speed test was done. So it's fascinating in the sense that not only were you able to get these hundreds of megabits worth of service at that mileage with non-line of sight shooting into a tree, but you were doing it at the same time. There were 92 other connections and when you compare that with technology from before, you couldn't even get 294 megabit per second from one subscriber module or one subscriber unit, much less all of these other ones connected at the exact same time. So it was fascinating to see how much money they saved in deployment from a capacity perspective by deploying just a single Tirana note.

Speaker 1: 10:57

We went through about 10 stops on the bus. We saw every type of install you can possibly imagine that was out there. We saw things on poles. We saw things on roofs. We saw things pointed in different directions. We saw all kinds of great stuff shooting through legs of windmills. We drove past their corporate headquarters. We drove all across beautiful South Texas. It was a great time, especially being from this area and being so proud of the area that we live in. It was great to see so many people from outside of the area be able to admire some of our beautiful landscape, and there were people that came in from all over the state. It was really really neat to see.

Speaker 1: 11:34

Next, we went back to the headquarters, to the training room, and we got a rundown from the installation team on what it was like to physically install these devices. Now, what was cool about that is they gave us the opportunity to ask any question we wanted to the operations team and the install team, and that was really great because we got just a raw, you know, uncut, version of what it was like and we got to hear some humorous stories. We got to hear some tragic stories, but all together they were really happy with the ease of use. We talked about training programs. We talked about, you know, having to be certified in CBRS and who signed off on the license.

Speaker 1: 12:03

We talked about the you know the way that the screws and bolts go in there, understanding if it was easy to install or not, and one of the key things that there was a big takeaway was from the subscriber and the remote node connection there at the subscriber's house or their place of business. The time for alignment is so shortened because you can just set it up and it auto aligns to a certain extent, it's got a 60 degree antenna and once you align it, it trims itself down to about 30 degrees on its own. So being able to quickly identify how well the alignment is working, which base station it's connected to, saves so much time, which saves so much money. They talked about a typical install of about 30 minutes. To get out there, get on site, one of the people, one of the installers, walked us through an actual phone call where he said okay, this is when they call in, this is what they ask, this is how we respond, this is what we give them. So we got to really understand what it was like from the perspective of the operations crew and the install crew, to understand overall what this looked like. They talked about the tower install being very simple, very easy to do, not a lot of small parts, lots of big parts, a 35-pound piece of equipment connected with fiber power and a Cat6 cable if they wanted to run management to it. So it was pretty neat.

Speaker 1: 13:17

What followed? That was really interesting to me. It was talking about the use case because, let's face it, everybody loved this product by now. We got to see it, we got to get hands-on with it. But the big question was how much does it cost? So if you just jump on Google and you look at what the cost on one of these G1 nodes is, their MSRP is like 20 grand a pop. And when you think about buying them in bulk and being able to save some money let's say that you save 30% or 40% that's still a whole lot of money. When you have to put four or six of them on a tower in order to get a full 360 degree coverage, that's $80,000 worth of equipment that you're putting up on a tower. So that's a pretty big nut to turn right.

Speaker 1: 13:55

And as we were walked through the product, we got to understand more about capacity. We got to understand more about time. We got to understand more about how few no-goes they have when they're doing remote installations at subscribers' houses. We got to learn about the management capability 100% cloud managed. We got to learn a lot about the equipment and why, even though it is more expensive, how it might not cost you that much more to operate and it's actually going to save you money from an operational perspective. So lots of things went into this conversation. It was a great conversation to have and they were totally candid and upfront and honest about it. They showed us how we could build use cases.

Speaker 1: 14:30

And then the next part was really cool. They brought in their government affairs person to talk to us about what needs to be done in order to apply and receive bead funding. They talked to us about grants. They talked to us about what needs to be done in order to apply and receive bead funding. They talked to us about grants. They talked to us about government funding options, on how these ILEX and CLEX and wireless ISPs and government entities can take advantage of some of the funding opportunities that are out there and where Tarana fits into it. And they offered their help. They offered letters that they could send to them, vouchers and all the other things that they can do in order to help these entities be able to procure the equipment and use the equipment and service the equipment. And I thought that that was really neat to have that added aspect, because it's all cool until someone has to pay for it. And then helping people understand well, there's ways that there's funding that can be taken advantage of and it's out there. Being able to be steered through that by Toronto, that was really, really a cool step. Overall, I think it was great.

Speaker 1: 15:23

We had an after party. After that we went down. Elsa EDC hosted us, and they had some ice cold beer set up for everyone, but we all had to drive, so I don't didn't really see too many people drinking a beer. Lots of water, though, was about 102 degrees outside in, you know, the beginning of April, which is Texas, south Texas so we're drinking lots of water, had some barbecue sliders set up, great time to network, great time to talk to each other. It was just. Overall, it was a really good event, started about nine o'clock in the morning, went to about 4.30 in the afternoon, and we had a really fantastic time.

Speaker 1: 15:54

One of the things to me that was a key takeaway is I was sitting next to a gentleman who's been involved in some of the larger fiber projects that was that were down here, and to see him go uh, I don't want to say he was skeptical at the beginning. You know he was there and he was, and he was ready to learn, so it was fascinating, you know, to see that, but by the end of the, by the end of the event, it was like oh my God, why don't people see what's going on? It was so cool to see that the message resonated not just with him but a lot of other people in the room who finally understood hey, this is a viable thing, this is something that can be done, it's something that can be used, it's something that can be deployed and it can solve the problem, what people are looking for. So I'm not recording this as a Toronto fanboy by any means. I'm just trying to break down what we learned and what we saw. But I will say that if you're looking for multi-hundred megabit solution in wireless, please go give Toronto a look. Right now. They're the only ones doing what they're doing in the industry and, granted, there's going to be some changes over the next couple of years to the more things are more technologies, more things are going to be introduced, but for right now, take a look at Toronto, go see if that solves a problem of what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 17:02

Kudos to the team for coming down here and making it happen. I understand there was a pretty short schedule from the time that they decided to do it between the time that I actually got done. So thank you to VTX1 for hosting and allowing us to come into your house and show us what you're doing with this equipment. It's exceptionally cool. I'm so proud that this is happening in my community down here in South Texas and the team at Toronto. Thank you so much for supporting this and bringing your team down to help out with everything that was going on. So be on the lookout for the next Seeing is Believing Roadshow from Toronto. Hopefully someone in your community will host one of these soon. It's very, very cool to see just from a nerd perspective and get really hands-on. They give you the gear to pick up, they give you the stuff to look at, they give you access to the, to the installs and to the devices and to the dashboard, and it really gives you a chance to see and believe what Toronto Wireless is doing. Thanks for listening.