Anterix Inc. (ATEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome, everyone. Thank you again for joining us for the last session of day 1 of our 2021 Telco Media Conference at Bank of America. I'm Dave Barton. I head up Telecommunications Services and Infrastructure Services Research for the bank based here in New York. And we're super pleased to have with us today, last but not least, by a far stretch, the President and CEO of Anterix, Rob Schwartz. Rob, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Dave, and thank you, Bank of America. Looking forward to the conversation.

Yes, me too. And so this is the first time actually we've had Anterix at the conference, which we don't get to say that very often about companies. And you guys have kind of burst onto the scene, stock has doubled in the last 6 months or so. I think people are really paying attention. For the audience that may not be as familiar with the story, maybe you could give us just a brief background of who Anterix is and what you guys are doing in the telecommunications space?

Absolutely. Happy to do so. So Anterix is a wireless communications company, but it's different than the traditional carriers. We're focused on empowering our transformative broadband, as we call it, to enabling the modernization of critical infrastructure communications. And so what does that really mean? We are founded by the founders of Nextel. A lot of our original team like myself are from the original team of Nextel and like the business model for those who are around remember Nextel building a business within the carrier environment. We're focused on a unique solution what we think of as a better mousetrap to be able to solve the unique needs of critical infrastructure, and that's taking our nationwide footprint of spectrum. We own 900 megahertz spectrum across the nation. We've gone through a regulatory process at the FCC and gotten a rulemaking last May that allows us to use the spectrum for broadband. And specifically, we're applying it to solve the vertical needs of utilities and other tangential critical infrastructure to allow them to build private communications networks, private LTE networks to solve their unique needs. And so we've already started commercializing that spectrum. We've announced our first couple of customers over the past months that I'm sure we'll talk about. And our model is unique in that we lease that spectrum to utilities, long-term leases, typically 20-plus years and then we then work with these utilities to help them build up and stand up their own private networks, which -- the way they historically solve their communications needs, unlike a lot of other industrial users, is leveraging private communications. But they haven't had broadband spectrum to enable them to capture all of the value that we capture out of having broadband in our pockets and our phones and what other industries use. But there's a number of unique needs that these customers have, and we're focused on helping solve that.

So -- thanks for that intro. So I've got a lot of questions on this. So the first is you -- your kind of core asset is this 2 x 3 megahertz, 900 megahertz band spectrum. And when you say broadband, what you mean is you're taking these narrowband slivers of spectrum inside that band and aggregating them together into this 2 x 3 aggregated capability and then deploying that for a private LTE network. Is 2 x 3 megahertz truly broadband in the world that we live in?

Sure. So you're right, Dave, it is 6 megahertz of spectrum that the FCC based on the ruling last May allows us now to go forward and provide to these customers. 6 megahertz is -- 3 x 3, as you refer to it, is one of the standard 3GPP size blocks to be able to use under the LTE technology. So it is pure broadband. There are carriers that use that amount of spectrum, and we're excited about being able to bring that much to the market. It's worth noting that 6 megahertz is part of a 10 megahertz block, which our rule-making allows us to move the incumbents in that band into the remaining 4 megahertz. And those incumbents are typically 2-way radio providers, as we call SMR providers. And the retuning of those customers is the process that we go through to take our narrowband and turn it into broadband. In fact, we just did that with our first customer. We announced last December, Ameren. Ameren is a utility in Illinois and Missouri. We signed a $50 million prepaid lease to provide them spectrum for 30 years. We have an agreement, and we'll be working with them for the next 30 years. And under that agreement, we've now begun the retuning process. In fact, we applied to the FCC for those first licenses and just recently got the grant of those licenses. Based on delivering that spectrum to Ameren, we expect to actually get the first half of that payment very soon in the coming days. And so with that, we'll see $20-plus million of proceeds from that. And that is our business model. To the capacity question, I think, that is embedded in your question, these are single users utility like an Ameren that's putting up an LTE network primarily for their own use. And I said primarily because initially, it's going to be for their own use, but often companies like Southern Company, as an example, another utility that is in Georgia, Alabama, they built their own private LTE network but then are bringing some other like-minded customers onto that network. And that can include other utilities like municipals or cooperative utilities. It can even include public safety or other potential users who want to leverage that network. And I think it also embedded besides the question of is it enough capacity in these utilities, we're working with over 50 different utilities in our pipeline, and I'm sure we'll talk about some more, but the capacity modeling that these utilities are doing and we're working with them on this, as are leading vendors that are part of our collective ecosystem, Ericssons, Nokias, Motorolas and engineering firms like Burns & McDonnell and Black & Veatch, they do the capacity modeling out 10, 20 and, in Ameren's case, 30 years. They say all of the use cases we think we're going to need, we look at the capacity requirements, and we can fit that within the 6 megahertz of spectrum. So we're not concerned about that not being enough spectrum. Although as always, there's spectrum entrepreneurs, if you can look at our history through Nextel and beyond, we've always had our eyes on the next spectrum opportunity, either expand within the exiting band or also to be able to bolt on additional spectrum bands. We've recently announced our partnership with Federated Wireless, the leader of the CBRS movement, the FCC rules that went on the auction recently in the past year and one of the SaaS, the spectrum coordinators of that band. With that agreement, we're now partnered with them in offering CBRS in complement to 900 because CBRS is a good mid-band spectrum band similar to high-powered Wi-Fi, which is good as you use Wi-Fi in your office building, in your home, but as soon as you go outside, you need robust low-band spectrum, like 900, to get broad coverage with good economics. And that's where our joint offering now of CBRS along with 900 fits. And it also allows you the incremental capacity should you need it in a spot area of coverage in a building, a campus for us a substation or a place where utilities have considerable needs.

So I want to ask another kind of an associated question, which is, yes, Nextel was a very successful company. The better mousetrap was the idea that you could take slivers of SMR spectrum and knit them together and create a mobile capability that hadn't existed before. Morgan O'Brien was a part of that. But they came a moment when the better mousetrap wasn't a better mousetrap anymore. It was a low bandwidth, voice-centric solution. It didn't have a data component. And that's why Nextel and Sprint ended up merging together. There are a lot of companies out there today that are putting literally hundreds of billions of dollars to work to create these C-band centric, 2.5 gig centric mobile, 5G, network slicing, low-latency, super high-speed capabilities together. So how future-proof is your 3 x 3 solution in a world that's coming that looks a lot different?

Sure. So yes, I mean, the Nextel analogy goes so far -- obviously, 20 million customers almost in 20 years of a long runway. That was a great business. In this case, obviously, we've learned from our lessons there and by starting with the LTE technology, back then, there were 3, 4, 5 different competing broadband, if it wasn't really broadband, but cellular technologies. Now with the global confluence to LTE, the 3GPP standard, we're helping utilities join in this revolution on the front end. So they're part of the technology curve, the cost efficiency, the development curves of LTE. You have to understand that utilities for decades have used private communications. But very often, these are one-off technologies, the LMR technology for 2-way radio, different kinds of licensed and unlicensed technologies for field area networks and for AMI for automated meter readings. So when we went into Ameren, as an example, they had 18 different wireless systems operating under their umbrella in order to achieve the plethora of applications they have. These are all private networks, but they were networks that were on -- often on technologies that were getting closer to obsolescence. And so by bringing these together under the LTE umbrella, you have to understand the way LTE is built is that it integrates, it's interoperable with other LTE users. Now what's important here is we're not talking Ameren is a big utility, but their footprint as a service territory is relatively small as a wireless footprint. Our view in having grown up through the history of the cellular world is that when you start looking at these islands of each utility and you bring this together into a network of networks so that Ameren provides coverage in their service territory, and they have utilities surrounding them who have coverage in their service territories, they're used to working together. These are not competitive businesses. These are businesses that actually have just the opposite. They do things like mutual aid, which means when a Superstorm Sandy comes through, all the trucks of the other utilities are lined up at the borders to come in and help restore their fellow utilities' network. And so the ability to build scale nationally, which is the role that Anterix wants to play, to create the economies of scale for utilities in joining into this LTE revolution with the level of privacy and private deployment. What's important, I think, embedded in your question, is why private versus public? And having been worked in a carrier and having a lot of respect for the business models of carriers, there are certain customers that can do better to solve their needs with private networks. And the key issues -- first of all, it's a question of security, right, building a network that is fully air-gapped from other users and, importantly, from the public Internet. There have been a number of instances that have been shown of utilities, specifically, and obviously, other businesses where foreign actors, bad actors have gotten devices on public networks and have been able to tunnel into critical infrastructure and cause irreparable harm. This case being separate as defined by the Department of Homeland Security by several federal reports is clearly the first step in creating that level of cybersecurity required by these critical infrastructure entities that are under -- that are being targeted. I mean there's no doubt about it based on the incidents. The second is about coverage. Utilities build networks to cover their assets, not the population. They need to get to the people and the homes, but also they build transmission lines across unpopulated areas and put substations and nuclear facilities in places, importantly, where there aren't people. And those are the places they need to get coverage to and capacity, and the commercial networks don't necessarily provide that in the way they build them out as well. Then you get to the idea of capacity prioritization, right, who's going to be the prioritized user in the time of need? When a storm comes and networks are knocked down, which cell site is going to get restored first, the one in an urban location where the most carrier customers are in there or the one in the remote location where the most important asset of utility is? That's what's driven utilities to -- in history to build their own communications networks because they realize -- and all of this is from significant experiences, every utility I've been into, talking to CEOs, talking to senior leaders. They all have a very specific example of, there was this time when I needed this and our site wasn't restored fast enough, but when they have their own networks, their trucks roll, they restore the systems exactly how they need them and where they need them. And they build them to a level of resiliency, meaning, how fast they bounce back from problems and how reliable they are in the time of storms that are coming through, floods that are happening. And obviously, we have an increasing number of key incidents. And so utilities like Ameren and Southern Company and San Diego Gas & Electric, who is another one of our customers, are building these networks what they say are to utility grade. They're building in redundancy of power sources, of fiber coming into their sites to be able to have redundancy of communications. So they build it the way they want it for the needs that they have. And so while the carriers have a great model and absolutely will continue to have great enterprise businesses, these private utilities -- these utilities with private communications needs are very distinct, and they like to have a level of control of those assets so that it provides exactly the kind of service that they require, especially in times of need.

So I think that you guys have been kind of pioneers in this idea of the private network, and you've been laser focused on the electric utility industry. And I think if people don't know, it's a large part because the capital investment in this can be added to the rate base, and they can generate a return on the money of the investors. So not only does it make the business safer, more secure and better, but it actually makes -- it actually generates a return. And we're going to talk a little bit about that later from the regulatory standpoint. But when it comes to the private LTE network side, I'm interested because -- how hard to sell is it to go to an electric utility and try to convince them that they need to run a wireless business on top of their electric utility? Because it sounds like a heavy lift for most entities to kind of make that leap where they're, to your point -- but Ameren having 18 different [ mobile ] carriers moving to a network that they run themselves.

Yes. I think you just kind of have to look out the window and see the network that utilities already run. I mean they're in the infrastructure business and in the capital investment business. And you're right, they do have a model that says they put together a rate case, they take that rate case to their state regulators and with the approval, they're allowed to invest that money for a fixed rate of return. And so they do have an economic incentive to invest prudent capital to enhance their model. So -- but they have fleets of vehicles and poles and infrastructure that they utilize for their own benefit. And embedded in that network historically is communications, right? Again, this is not a new idea to run private communications that were having to go into a customer and saying, you need to be in the telecommunications business. They're already in the telecommunications business. They run numerous existing communication systems, as I mentioned, Ameren, and they pull fiber along their infrastructure. They have towers. They lease space to carriers on their poles and on their attachments. And so they're pretty familiar with the complexity. Now what we've done as part of the Anterix solution is try to simplify that step forward from the private networks they run today, which includes 2-way radio SMR systems and [ scale ], as I mentioned, and AMI systems, and they transition from there into broadband. We've tried to make that solution as turnkey as possible. And one of the key ways we've done that is by bringing together what we call the Anterix Active Ecosystem Program. That program has brought together now over 50 different leading vendors, GEs and Ciscos and Motorolas and Ericssons and Qualcomm, Burns & McDonnell, all these leading companies that utilities know well that are focused on building this solution set for the utilities. It's important -- it's a solution. They're not buying spectrum. They're not buying end points or equipment. They're buying a way to create outcomes. And an example of that, I mentioned San Diego Gas & Electric, our second customer that we announced earlier this year. San Diego Gas & Electric has a long list of use cases. And that's what's important here on all of these customers. This is no longer about a point solution, and I'm putting something in place to be able to read a meter only, and that's the way it used to be in the utility world. Now they put an LTE. Similar to the phone in your pocket, it has applications, and it has a host of applications. A San Diego's primary application, which is very important, is wildfire mitigation, right? Everybody knows about the growing problems of wildfires, not just in the West Coast, but unfortunately growing throughout the region, the Western region of the country. And so in fact, as everyone knows, it bankrupted a major utility through the process of the liability exposure of wildfires. San Diego, unfortunately, is one of the first examples of a wildfire affecting utility over a decade ago. And because of that, they've been innovating since then on finding technologies to help them prevent wildfires. And what they've worked on with leading vendors is something called falling line conductor programs for them. Their falling line conductor program is that -- you can think about a power line. What happens when a wildfire starts, something breaks that line. It can be high winds. It can be a tree falling on that line. That line hits the ground in a dry area. It sparks. It starts a fire. But the technology exists today to put sensors on the poles around that line. We have it available to us and our kids are using it for their things around the house, but utilities haven't had the ability to deploy this on a broad scale basis in areas where wireless networks, honestly, don't cover into wildfire regions, into forests and into mountains where power lines go. And when that line falls, the sensors [ say that the current has stopped ] flowing and in a roughly 1.4 seconds it takes for that to hit the ground, they can depower that line. And when that line hits the ground, it's no longer live and not risking a fire. And when you think about your San Diego Gas & Electric, what's the value of preventing one wildfire? Well, in excess of the investment of this network. And so as the -- this is no longer just a telco issue, this is a risk mitigation issue for the C-suite. And so that's one example. San Diego is using it also for the deployment as they've talked about their battery storage facilities, right? Communications to all of these new renewable energy sources that are essential for utilities because they've all made -- predominantly every major investor on utility has made some sort of decarbonization commitment, becoming net 0 by a certain date. And so San Diego is one of those. And they're deploying battery storage throughout a lot of their areas, and they're deploying solar, and they're deploying wind. And how do you communicate with all these new sources of as we call intermittent power, meaning wind blows sometimes, but not all the time. You have to know and communicate with those devices real time with very low latency. So you know in a split second, in a millisecond to be able to turn something on or off, to be able to depower that line or to be able to switch from the solar to the battery storage. And so that communication networks is now becoming the essential element in what is becoming a top priority of utilities, which is decarbonization. It's also, for San Diego and others, a key part of the cybersecurity platform. It's an element of saying, I need to have a diverse and separate control of these very important assets and make sure no one else can be taking control of those assets. And so separating that network into private network matters considerably. And lastly is that resiliency aspect, the ability to say, no matter what happens, environmentally, I'm going to still be able to keep that network up and running as much as possible. And unfortunately, we've seen this incident happen too many times in this past year or 2 between what happened in Texas, what's happening in California with wildfires, what's happening with cyber and other issues, the ability to keep these networks up and running is life -- lives at risk, and we've seen, unfortunately, lives lost as a result. So when you talk about the benefit, we're no longer measuring in dollars of reducing cost of telco. We're talking about stopping wildfires, about saving lives, keeping electricity on in Texas when it's 110 degrees. And so these are life-threatening issues, but now the utilities are coming together to realize the benefit of being able to use broadband to solve these needs.

Compelling. Thank you. So that kind of answers a lot of my use case questions, but what I'll ask now is, as you pointed out, you do have a handful of customers right now. And you've got -- I think you said probably, you've got at least 50 in the pipeline coming up. And given the compelling kind of argument you just made, I guess the question becomes, why aren't we seeing more happen faster? And how do we measure that as investors from the outside trying to see whether the pitch you just made is actually landing with the utilities and the regulators that have to adopt it?

Sure. Great question. I mean, look, as I mentioned, it was just last May that we got our FCC report and order, giving us the ability to provide broadband. October, it got finalized. December, we announced our first customer sooner after we announced our second customer. And we have a robust pipeline of customers that we're confident. We give a lot of this detail out. We had an Investor Day in May. And so I'll just point to anyone who wants to get kind of more color, it's worthy. We put a lot of time into explaining the background and story and some of the outlook. It's a good thing. It's available on our website. But I think a couple of things on demand side, right? So with our high confidence, we've said this fiscal year, our fiscal year ended March 31, so March 31, 2022, we will have $200 million of contracted proceeds, meaning, we're going to sign customers with $200 million of revenues. Now most of these customers, as we explained for the first time in detail in our Investor Day, are now looking to prepay for these leases. And that's a big improvement to our business model. We first started talking about it a few years prior. We expect to have long-term leases similar to tower leases, but in which the customers would pay over time. And obviously, that's valuable. Getting the receivables of a high credit grade utility is very valuable. But in this case, we're talking about now, like, what happened with Ameren is collecting the predominance of those proceeds in the first several years of the time frame. So Ameren, as I mentioned, we made our first spectrum delivery, and we expect to see that -- 50% of that payment coming in soon and the rest of it coming in within the next year or 2. And so our ability to translate spectrum what was narrowband and now we have a path to broadband into broadband licenses, and the FCC just issued those first Ameren licenses. So we've demonstrated that. We've really been derisking our model, Dave, over these past 12 months considerably, right? So we've taken out the risk of our conversion of narrowband to broadband. We've taken out the risk of the demand in the utility sector, both for the customers who have already come forward, and there's a lot of other indications. We have over 15 experimental licenses now, FCC experimental licenses with utilities and other key entities that represent groups of utilities. So Ameren and Southern were the early ones, but Exelon and SDG&E and Excel and NYPA, NREL. NREL is the National Renewable Energy Lab, right? There's a group there of 9 utilities that got together and said, with NREL, how do we use broadband to better communicate and control all of these new sources of renewable energy? And so they collectively are working on a solution of using broadband for that. As I mentioned, SDG&E is demonstrating that for their own deployment. So this is no longer a case of do we have momentum? We've demonstrated that. As we described in our Investor Day, we see this now as a movement. There's the ecosystem over 50 vendors have come together to help solve this. There's now dozens of utilities, right? 50 within our pipeline, over 15 entities working together with experimental licenses. And so it was also -- we've launched something called the Utility Broadband Alliance, something we stood up. We've brought some founding members together. Now there's over 9 utilities that are working in there to share their learnings. And what's that for us? That's an accelerator. It takes all of these parties together. Ameren, for example, did their pilot before they signed with us. They've shared openly all of that pilot information with anyone who shows up at the Utility Broadband Alliance meeting. There's dozens who have been through and talked about that. So for us, the ability to now take all of this translating into this increased momentum is being demonstrated considerably in our current activities. And then as you look forward, we've also said we estimate by our fiscal year-end 2024. When you do the math taking our existing customer pipeline, over 50 customers, about $3 billion of potential contracted revenues, we think we'll have about $1.8 billion of contracted revenues by our fiscal year-end 2024. So that's saying taking a portion of our existing customers in the pipeline, not even counting new customers that will come in there, but there's the vast majority of utility audience already talking to us about the ways they can use 900 megahertz broadband to solve all of these value problems. And so we're confident we're going to be able to translate that into this contracted proceeds, which at the end of the day, based on this improved model of prepayment, translates into cash flow.

And so experimental licenses that you have with the prospective customers, obviously, you pointed out there's a collaboration among the utilities. Some of these experimental licenses will be -- will have compounded effects in learnings for other adjacent players in the marketplace. As you look at these licenses now that you have, presuming that these are kind of on the critical path towards getting to revenue with these players, where do we stand in those experiments? And how long does it take to go from we're interested to now we're experimenting to now we're convinced to now let's sign a deal, let's get this done from a rate case perspective?

Sure. It varies by utility. And let me give you just [indiscernible] number, but there's some that move faster and some that move slower. A lot of that is to do with replacement cycles and decision timing of the existing systems because the initial justification often comes from replacing a legacy system that's at end of life. At least that's what we've seen some of the initial conversations starting. But it's also important to note that experimental licenses is only one point of entry. Like San Diego Gas & Electric, for example, didn't file an experimental license. They went right to going out and saying, we know LTE works, right? This isn't a new technology. You can go anywhere in the world and see the scale of LTE. In fact, you can go in a lot of countries around the world and see our specific 900 megahertz band 8 functioning and being used by millions of users. So that's not the risk here. For them, it was saying, we want to see the connection of our use cases into private LTE. And so they're one of several parties that we see that could leapfrog over doing their own experimental license or leverage an experimental license of one of their brethren or one of the industry associations that's working on it. Recently, Motorola and Burns & McDonnell -- Burns & McDonnell is one of the leading engineering firms that consults to utilities on not just technology, but they do installations of large facilities, pipelines and other things. Both of those entities as third parties got experimental licenses to be used so that they can demonstrate as part of their sales process in their headquarters, facilities and their showroom vendor deployments the power of private LTE at 900 megahertz. And so the scaling effect of this ecosystem program, as I talked about it, right? Federated was the first one that we've signed a commercial agreement with, but we see the opportunity to actually continue to expand our business model with a lot of these other entities that are members of that ecosystem, not just to create more channels, which is very important, right? So take GE, for example, a member there. GE has a product called Orbit. It's the primary device that's deployed on a pole that has a wireless card in it that communicates to whatever assets there, a recloser or a transformer, whatever they're trying to get to. GE now has a logo on their products packaging that says, Anterix Active, meaning, it's fully tested and functioning within our ecosystem of 900 megahertz. Now every utility is getting GE marketing and GE sales calls, talking about the potential for the Anterix 900 megahertz product in conjunction with their distribution channel. And that's unbelievably powerful for us. We think it's going to lead to more opportunities to create greater economic value as well for us as we establish partnerships for distribution like we did with the smaller example of Federated, but we think that's a good example to say once we establish this platform, we really do it as a platform. It's not one-off sales to this utility or that one. We're devising what we see as this network of networks. That's the term we talked about at our Investor Day, we're following the Metcalfe's Law of the network effect, meaning that each time another utility plugs into this network, it gets incrementally that much more valuable for the next customer that joins into it because they share in their learnings, they share in their economies of scale of costs, the resources they have. And so attracting vendors, creating a standardization, that's our objective of being the de facto standard across the sector, and there's a lot of interest from utilities because it's in their interest to see that happen as well.

Yes. I've been asking this question for most of the companies that we've had at the conference so far, which is how has the pandemic been affecting the business and how it's coming out of the pandemic, change the business and what does the new normal look like? And I think it's less relevant for you guys, but what is more relevant is the craziness that we've seen with respect to hurricanes hitting New York City, wildfires burning down Idaho, crazy stuff that's been going on weather wise. I have to imagine that this is making the case for you for a lot of the use cases that you mentioned earlier. So I want to fold this question into another, which is the role of the regulators in kind of facilitating or obstructing what you're trying to do with the utilities here. I have to imagine all of this is moving in the right direction. When the hurricane hits, you [ sell ] the insurance companies. I'm wondering if I buy [ insurance ]?

Yes. So I think you're spot on, Dave. The connection between these unfortunate incidents that are occurring and, obviously, the regulatory and legislative environments that are now awakening to seeing they need to be more supportive than ever on solving those critical problems. And again, these are loss of life issues. These are not nice to have elements of network improvements. So absolutely, we're seeing that the more frequent occurrence of these horrible incidents that are occurring, going back to blackouts to weather incidents to man-made incidents where the lack of maintenance of some facilities possibly cause some of these wildfires. And so the situational awareness and then, as a response, the ability to command the control of assets is becoming more important than ever. And that starts first with visibility, just being aware that it's there. That was one of the issues that happened with Texas is that there wasn't enough awareness of what was really happening, power coming and going. And what was happening during the meltdown that was occurring there at the freeze. And so the first thing is every utility we're talking to has the intention of deploying tens of thousands, if not millions, of additional sensors throughout their networks. And that means you need to have low-cost capabilities of doing that. So you choose a technology that has scale capabilities, right, that there are global vendors that are making devices at low cost. And our LTE is the same as the LTE being deployed around the globe. And so any device that's available around the globe to solve some of those whether it's narrowband or broadband needs within LTE is available now to utilities because they have spectrum. That was -- the missing link was the spectrum. So for us to be able to first bring that forward of utilities to be aware of it was step 1. Now when you get into the regulatory world, I'd like to think that it's an area we punch well above our weight. As a small company, we spend a lot of time first in Washington focusing on the FCC and achieving the groundbreaking rule-making that we got to allow us to use this previously narrowband spectrum for broadband, now we're refocusing that expertise on to Capitol Hill and really making the case both to the state regulators, which are essential for awareness and approval of these rate cases, but now getting into all the federal legislation that's occurring about investing in our infrastructure and specifically our utility power infrastructure, given the incidents that there -- the confluence of the incidents are happening while those discussions are going on. And so we've worked very hard with GridWise Alliance, one of the key industry associations that's leading this charge on Capitol Hill to be certain that within the Senate bill on infrastructure that there is specific language that can allow funds to flow to help utilities invest specifically in private broadband networks. And so we're very happy to see the awareness being raised -- even just the awareness of -- because of the discussions that are happening. And obviously, from the White House down to all of the -- what's happening in the Senate and Congress about talking about the necessity to improve these networks. And how has that happened? It starts with a communications layer because if you don't have awareness about what's out there, the assets that are there, that are working or not working, the power lines that are connected or broken, then you really can't do much of anything. And so the awareness of this communication layer is an essential piece of it. It is literally in the bill -- in the conversation about -- when they talk about both broadband, allocation of funds, but also money being allocated towards our electric grid, specific language about the potential use for wireless broadband networks to solve these important problems. It's a piece of the solution. It's not the silver bullet alone, but it's an essential piece. And without it, it's going to leave a gaping hole in solving these critical problems.

Well, I'm kind of surprised that 40 minutes just went by because I've kind of ton of more questions about how you're a beneficiary of the [ President Biden's ] infrastructure bill and [ how you are ] as a platform and a lot of other things. But Rob, this is a great beginning. I really appreciate you being a part of the conference for the first time this year. I'm looking forward to having another chance to talk soon. And best of luck, and thank you for being a part of this.

Thank you, Dave. Thanks to you and Bank of America for hosting us and having us part of this important conference. And again, we've got to -- if you want any more information, we've got a great Investor Day presentation that's available on our website and happy to take inbound calls from any investors to our -- to Natasha Vecchiarelli, our Head of Investor Relations, can help you out there. So again, thanks, Dave.

Cheers.