Speed Tests and Why BEAD Keeps Getting Messier - Episode 665 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I'm back temporarily. We'll see. I'm heading out to El Paso after we record this. I may or may not make it back from there depending on how Delta is feeling. So, but in the meantime, I'm gonna have a conversation here with Doug Dawson, the Principal at CCG Consulting. Welcome, Doug.

Doug Dawson (00:39)
Thank you, and I guess today I'm the community. Very good, very good.

Christopher Mitchell (00:43)
Right.

We are going to talk about, Ookla has made an announcement and Arielle Roth has made some pronouncements and ReConnect may or may not be reauthorized in a new form. So I think we're going to touch on those topics some and then I'm, know, Doug, I'm guessing we'll probably talk about them again in the future Connect This!, ⁓ which as of right now, it probably be late next week

Doug Dawson (01:07)
Probably.

We're good.

Christopher Mitchell (01:10)
So Doug, I wanted to first touch on Ookla and I'm curious your take on they have released a new product. Ookla is the company behind speedtest.net, which is the best marketed speed test available out there and ⁓ one of the larger speed tests, but they have come up with some new tech. They bought down detector and so

They're kind of cornering the market on some of the testing and Internet quality metrics. So Speedtest Pulse is this new, new thing, right?

Doug Dawson (01:43)
It's a new thing and I expect some of the big ISPs will buy it because it's probably going to be user easy, but it's nothing new and it probably is going to be expensive. And the fact is every good quality ISP today already has a Wi-Fi test meter. They can walk around your house and measure the strength of the signal. And this really only comes into use when you're trying to maximize Wi-Fi in a house. Like in my house, I'm on three stories. It's a long house and the damn thing is a hundred years old.

You got to get your way around all the big heavy walls. And so it's a really important function to locate your, and I think I have six Wi-Fi routers bouncing stuff around. So it's very important to get those right, but people have been doing that for 20 years with this handheld device. Now what I think Ookla will do different, the hand-held device just goes, I'm getting this many dB of signal. so as you walk around, you can see it go up and down. Ookla will actually give you speeds, I'm sure. That's the difference.

Strength of signal equals speeds. mean, it's the same thing. So they'll get some customers. They wouldn't even announce it if they didn't already have some test customers. I imagine the big guys will use it. The little guys will never pay a monthly fee for their techs to be able to do that because they're already doing it. Now, interestingly, homegrown people already use Ookla for that. I mean, I do my own testing, and it's really slow and annoying. But this isn't available to the public. I walk to a room. I take a speed test.

I move over six feet, I take a speed test. It takes friggin' two hours to get it balanced. But it works. But this isn't gonna be available to me. This is only available to carriers. if they made it available to the public, it would be extremely useful. It would cut my time from two hours to 15 minutes probably. But it's a gimmick. They actually recognize a very important market. People hate their is bad.

So many houses need multiple units and they only have one and so this is a know This is a good chance for ISPs to talk people into buying the upgraded more expensive router units, which is what they need I mean Wi-Fi is the source of 80 % of people's broadband compliance. So so it is a very important topic, but yeah

Christopher Mitchell (03:46)
Right, yeah, most people are using

that. They've buried it somewhere in a closet in the corner of their house, and then they run to the far side of the house to try to use it, and then they're surprised if it doesn't work. They also, I mean, people, I remember I was sitting next to a guy who was supposed to be a tech guy a few years ago at an event, and we're, there's some presenter, and he turns to me and he was like, yeah, he's like, I didn't do any of that wiring of my new house. He's like, I...

Doug Dawson (03:58)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (04:13)
I talked to someone and I'd use all Wi-Fi now and it's the only thing you need. And then he was just like so smug about it. And I was like, well, you're an idiot. I mean, if you want to do that, that's fine. But like the idea that you should be running your TV on Wi-Fi, that's dumb. know, like your entertainment center, stuff like that, like your office, you should throw them everything that you put that uses a lot of Wi-Fi. If you can put that on a wire, your Wi-Fi will be better for the things that actually need it and are mobile.

Doug Dawson (04:40)
Yeah, I mean I should do that, but wiring my house is beyond a nightmare. Some of the walls are literally a foot thick. I mean just getting it wired is like, you know, just a beyond a challenge. Yeah, I mean I... yeah, no, my house had an obitube and my attic...

Christopher Mitchell (04:48)
I know what you're talking about. I found an oven tube in some of mine.

Doug Dawson (04:59)
is they added onto the house upward and backward and so inside of my attic is the old roof with the new roof above it. So you can't even walk in my attic because it's actually an old roof. I can't cross from one side to the other which makes it hard to move my wires. Anyway, so it's a novel idea to come back to the Ookla idea. Verizon or somebody might buy it because it allows their technicians to be really dumb. They're just going to walk around saying, you know,

Christopher Mitchell (05:17)
Well, there is something here.

Doug Dawson (05:23)
100 megabits, 99, 107, that's the spot. So if it really works that smoothly, it's kind of cool. But you know, it's not going to be cheap. Ookla really likes to make money.

Christopher Mitchell (05:34)
Right, well this actually gets to two things I wanted to discuss in addition to that.

One is you were talking about what they're calling active pulse. And that's something that, you know, it basically looks at the DV from the Wi-Fi and presumably it may be doing some additional wizardry, wizardry, that is looking outside the local network versus inside of it to try and figure out if there's an additional problem.

Doug Dawson (05:41)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (05:58)
But the thing that I think is a bigger deal over the longer term is this continuous pulse. This is something that Sasha Meinrath unveiled, I don't know, two years ago. And I've worked with him on trying to get some of these out in the field. He developed something called RadarPods, which would do these regular speed tests. It's a device you plug into your Wi-Fi router. It's a little Raspberry Pi. And it does wired speed tests on the regular, but it also does like 15 second keep alive.

Doug Dawson (06:03)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (06:27)
And so it detects outages regularly and it does it to a non-proprietary open database that is available for people to use, which is very different from what Ookla does. I want to come back to that second part, but this continuous pulse, think will be helpful for identifying the sort of common problems that can exist. mean, for instance, whenever we're talking to you, we have a good connection much of the time.

When I'm talking to someone in LA, they have a good connection much of time, but every seven minutes there's a glitch because charters cable constantly glitches. It's not like a 10 minute outage. It's like a 30, it's like a half a second outage is what happens, right?

Doug Dawson (07:00)
Right.

happens to me all the time. I you know that I'm on Charter too, so yes, it's just a nightmare. And it's gotten way worse since the hurricane. It actually was getting better and now it degraded again. But that's a very useful thing. it's also another feature of that. The one thing that speed tests don't really do is measure your true speed, because carriers have gotten very smart about speed tests. What they do is when they know you're hitting a speed test site, so they give you really good service for

you know, one minute to two minutes, and then they drop back to their regular service. And regular service is usually degraded. And the only time you see that at home, which we don't do very much anymore, but if you try to upload a big files, the number one way to see it, or download an absolutely gigantic file, if you try to download whole DVDs to take three minutes, you'll see that it goes fast, fast, fast, fast, slower, slower, terrible. And it's always done that. I mean, they use a technology they call burst at the ISP routers.

that they figured this out a decade ago. And so they really trick your speeds. It's not a complete trick though, because 90 % of the things we do, we do within two minutes. So you go to a website or whatever, and those all hit the fast speed. So you're not really getting cheated, but you're getting cheated if five people in the house are on a live connection at the same time, because then all of a sudden you're using that long-term bandwidth.

Christopher Mitchell (08:16)
Right, including that, clears the rest.

Doug Dawson (08:29)
And then all of a it's like, why is our quality going down? Well, because it is. Once we've been on here for two minutes, it's not as good as it was before. So I guarantee you, two minutes after we started this podcast, I don't have as good a bandwidth to you as I did at the very first two minutes. measuring that is important. I don't know what you do with it, because the ISPs have always denied it, and they all do it. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (08:52)
All

right. Well, this is what drives me crazy about the whole idea of the speed test. Because this would be like if I'm driving to work and it's a 10 mile drive, and for the first five miles, I'm driving 65 miles an hour, and then I hit a giant traffic jam, and then the rest of it is I'm crawling along at an average of 10 miles an hour. By the speed test methodology, I'm driving 65 miles an hour to work, because that was the fastest speed that I had.

Doug Dawson (08:55)
Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (09:19)
And the question

Doug Dawson (09:19)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (09:20)
that they are answering at Ookla is what is the maximum theoretical capacity of your connection, not what is your experience? And this is where Sasha Meinrath and others have been trying to figure out what is your experience, but that is not what Ookla is measuring.

Doug Dawson (09:28)
Right. Right.

Right, that's absolutely the truth. you know, even on a speed test, what you'll notice, you notice they have jitter on there. Nobody talks about it and they don't look at it. And they have two actual different jitter measures. That stuff is all over the board. I mean, just on a two minute good quality speed test, you'll see that change by a thousand percent. I mean, it's like up and down and up and down, which means...

You know, the bits are coming at very different rates to your computer and for a live thing like this podcast, that's not good. I mean, that's where all the little glitches come from. It's not from speeds. It's all from that jitter. Yeah. Yes, we are.

Christopher Mitchell (10:09)
I mean, I'll tell you, we're seeing it right now.

We're seeing it. I have not, you and I, we're recording later in the day than we normally do. And all those kids came home from school, Doug, and some of the parents came home and they're watching Netflix while they're getting dinner. Your connection is the worst I've seen it in a long time.

Doug Dawson (10:18)
Yeah. no, no, this is a.

Yes, because every end at 17 degrees in Asheville and everybody's home using the Internet. There's nobody out driving around right now because it's snowing. Everybody's home. Everybody's home. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (10:36)
So here's the other thing.

We looked at using the Ookla data, which is, as you said, pricey, but it is a very large database with a lot of tests in it. found it really, I don't even know that we got to the part of like getting close to a contract, but as soon as we started talking about it, they were like, by the way, one of the things you absolutely cannot do with our data is criticize any ISPs or write anything that could be interpreted as a criticism of any ISPs.

Doug Dawson (11:03)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (11:04)
And we're like, what? Are you kidding me? Like, okay, like you're supposed to be the metric that is measuring like these people, but like you can only use it to say nothing or positive things about an ISP. That's interesting.

Doug Dawson (11:19)
Well, because the

ISPs are their giant customers, they're paying them 500 times more than you're paying them. So if you go, I'll pay as much as Verizon, then you could criticize Verizon.

Christopher Mitchell (11:29)
Right. Criticism rates.

Doug Dawson (11:31)
No, no,

it's a joke. It's really useful data and you can do amazing things. I've used that big database. I mean, you can start seeing ISPs that slow down at 530 and all that stuff that you couldn't normally see, but there's enough tests that you can see it. it's, you know, the best use I've had of it is to see that without naming any carrier names, FWA wireless is awesome for a mile. It's medium good for two miles. And after that, it just sucks.

Christopher Mitchell (11:34)
Yeah, OK.

Doug Dawson (11:58)
But that's not, they market it in a much bigger circle than that. And so people are really getting hornswag on. A lot of people have it. It's not that good. But everyone tells them it's good. And they go, OK, it doesn't seem that good. And it's just pure distance. mean, cellular signals don't travel very far. And so you can see that. You map that on a map. And you can see the speed decrease by quarter of a mile. It's amazing.

Christopher Mitchell (12:10)
Yeah, well...

Well, this is where my frustration-

I believe it. When we were looking at this, I I really like using MLab data. I'm a big supporter of MeasurementLab, but they don't keep any kind of, I shouldn't say any kind, they have very limited IP triangulation or just, they have some tools that they use, but the accuracy is not enough. So you to, you learn a lot more tests than you do with.

Doug Dawson (12:33)
Yeah.

Cough

Christopher Mitchell (12:40)
with ⁓ the Ookla think Ookla is more aggressive about trying to really triangulate where a person is. Whereas MLab is concerned about having data that could be considered personal. And it drives me a little bit crazy, because like, what are we doing here? Are we trying to really collect data that's valuable? Or are we just playing a game of like, we don't know anything that's too valuable? For the love of me, I don't understand what violates what I'm risking if someone knows what my Internet speed is.

It seems like they're all right.

Doug Dawson (13:07)
Well, mean, Ookla

puts it within three or 400 feet of your house. And if you're in a busy urban area, it gets you within the block. But if you're not in urban area, you know exactly what house is there. It's like, there's two speed tests there. There's two houses. It's real easy to figure out which one it is. But in an urban area with Ookla, you can get it down to the block level, which is fine. I mean, quite honestly, that's perfectly good.

Christopher Mitchell (13:34)
That's

what I'm looking for. Yeah, because I want to look at a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. okay, we're going to move on. This is a quick one. ReConnect Despite the fact that, you know, we are solving everyone's need, we have some senators that are going to reauthorize ReConnect to try to move forward with that bill, which I absolutely think is a good thing, but is somewhat silly given that... ⁓

Doug Dawson (13:38)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (13:55)
Supposedly, BEAD is taking care of all of these locations. You wrote about it on Pops and Pans by CCG, your blog, highly recommended. What's your quick take on it?

Doug Dawson (14:03)
Well, basically they're just renewing the old rules and the old rules won't work anymore. they should have put, and USDA is not creative. I love the folks at the USDA and they do a very good job, but they're going to follow the law to the letter. so, know, BEAD we're going to get a declaration out of NTIA one of these days in the FCC that broadband has been solved. There will be no locations that need broadband. They're going to say satellite gets everywhere. What else do you need? And so,

all of a sudden you can't make a ReConnect grant. The ReConnect also has always rewarded large contiguous study areas and there's no such thing anymore. So they could have fixed those couple things directly in the law and maybe they will by reading people like me criticizing them because if they really want it to work, a few tweaks and it'll work. Because there's going to be, I'm still predicting six or seven million homes that are not going to have good broadband when this is all done. It's very much a needed grant.

But they have to make it workable and if that law passes as it is, it'll never be workable. But it's a big stretch to think that that law will make it through the Senate and the House both and get signed. The chances are not looking good for anything related to broadband, to be honest. I'm very bleak on there being USF reform this coming year. mean, you know, the Senate's basically passed nothing in the whole last year.

They're just not motivated to actually vote on things.

Christopher Mitchell (15:22)
Well, the house

has been dissolved by the president, so it's been an interesting time. What you're saying about continuous study areas.

Doug Dawson (15:25)
Yeah. So, you know, so proposed legislation. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the trouble is, yeah, mean, ReConnect punishes you if you have served, you have to have at least 90 % or 75 % of the places unserved. You just can't find areas like that. They're all scattered around. But if you can pull in a whole half of a county and go,

Christopher Mitchell (15:32)
What you're saying about the continuous study areas is...

Doug Dawson (15:49)
If they have to it by site, because that's what BEAD did, I want to serve these 300 sites, then it'll work great. BEAD actually worked fine for that kind of stuff until they came along and gave all the money to satellite. But the actual mechanics of BEAD were actually not bad. But ReConnect has to mimic those mechanics or it won't work. yeah. It's a shame because, you know, it's the only grant program that will be surviving and we need a grant program. yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (16:08)
Right, it used to be that.

Yes. Well, let's move on to the last topic, which is Arielle Roth, the NTIA Administrator. You know, I just looked into it. It's interesting. In a quick study, I couldn't figure out where...

Doug Dawson (16:21)
I can't say anything bad about her. Ookla

told me I can't say anything bad about her.

Christopher Mitchell (16:29)
The, ⁓ she studied in Canada. Her degrees come from Canadian universities, which is where her patron, Senator Cruz, was born. I don't know, it's kind of, there's a little conspiracy here if you start digging around, I think. I'm not really sure. But ⁓ she's a habit of changing the rules after people apply for things. Something that, and you know, my colleague Sean wrote a story about this. I'd hoped he'd be able to come on to talk about it, but he...

Doug Dawson (16:32)
She did.

Yes.

Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (16:57)
⁓ doesn't respond to emails anymore from his boss. So I need to figure out what to do about that. But separately, it's interesting that that's what Blair Levin told him was that, just in his experience in the government, if you developed a program and then spent years working with people on it and then at the last second said, ⁓ there are new rules you have to comply with, that would not fly. But with this administration, people are just...

I think thankful that they're able to leave the room as opposed to ending up in a prison somewhere. So Arielle Roth has proposed that perhaps this might have changed since over the last week, but that anyone who receives BEAD funds would not be eligible for any future subsidies ⁓ from a universal service type program or otherwise. Not an unreasonable idea.

but one that is super impractical given where we are right now, I think.

Doug Dawson (17:50)
Well, the fact is every single change that NTIA has made this year has been to chop down the size of the program. First, they spent the first half of the year eliminating almost two million locations, which probably are still should be being eligible. And then they changed the amount of the awards and got rid of a whole lot more places that would actually get expensive broadband. And now they're starting to whittle away. They're not done.

I I expect three or four more such changes. I call these, the NTIA has gone rogue. I mean, none of these are in the congressional law. They'd have no authority to make these changes. And so they're just going completely rogue. Their mission in life is obviously to salvage as much of the 45 million so they can say they gave it back to Treasury, which since it never got spent, they're not giving anything back. It's just money that'll never be dispersed, right? But that's clearly what their goal is.

Christopher Mitchell (18:41)
Well, the money's gonna be attributed

to the states.

Doug Dawson (18:43)
It's been obligated to the states, but nobody saw any of it. Yeah, according to the law. But they're paying no attention to the law. you know, I saw an article that said, Arielle Roth hints that there will be some non-deployment funds given. There will not be any non-deployment funds. They're not letting go.

Christopher Mitchell (18:45)
They're viral at all!

No, can imagine

that. I mean, I think certainly if you're an AI data center company and you write the, if you buy the right cryptocurrency, absolutely think NTIA might actually give you some money to build fiber to your data centers. I think that's exactly what the non-deployment funds will be used for.

Doug Dawson (19:17)
Now that's

very possible that they will make individual grants to big contributors. That possibly is true. That's not exactly what the states had in mind.

Christopher Mitchell (19:27)
But she's also claiming that she's going to exempt any BEAD recipient from any state laws that she doesn't like, including that neutrality requirements and low income requirements and things like that. This appears to be totally contrary to the American system and present law, but that doesn't seem to be pausing them at all.

Doug Dawson (19:34)
Yes.

Well, first of all, that's clearly against... It's hard to say it's against the law. It's against the present of the law. The law has always been... The industry has always said if the feds don't regulate something, the states can. And somewhere there's probably a Supreme Court decision 100 years ago that I just don't know what it is. But that's... It's been tested and it's won many times that that's how it works.

And so there's a ton of things that states regulate on broadband, like prices, like different poll attachment agreements, I mean, just all sorts of state rules for things that.

Christopher Mitchell (20:17)
They

don't look really, what do mean by prices? I'm not sure what mean by that.

Doug Dawson (20:21)
Well, like New York put the low income prices on. So anything that feds don't do, the states can step in. there's quite a few things that they regulate. and so like they have, states have very specific rules about how soon you can cancel somebody's service if they don't pay. There's all sorts of regulations at the state level. And so now they're just saying, we're NTIA. We'll tell you what you can regulate. So, and so now first off, net neutrality is a joke.

Christopher Mitchell (20:23)
Okay, great.

Right, let's just get it right from...

Doug Dawson (20:48)
because there's not one small ISP who can do anything to violate net neutrality, even if they really try. So, you know, we've gone back and forth about having people say they agree with it and not say they agree with it, and it's never made a witted difference. It's the jokiest topic in the entire industry because can you imagine, you know, our friend Travis in St. Paul would have somehow

broken the Internet by the way he treated people. mean, you can't impact it. The big guys don't want to do it because it's very bad press. They haven't done anything bad for years. They were doing stuff for about a decade, and they finally just got tired of hearing the complaints, and they stopped. So that one's not, that one, yes. no, no, I mean.

Christopher Mitchell (21:30)
not forever though, i think ⁓

Doug Dawson (21:34)
Well, what always keeps the big guys in check is they always know there's another administration coming and they don't want to give huge, they don't want to pay the public back huge amounts of money three years from now. That's what keeps them in check.

Christopher Mitchell (21:44)
Well, think, I mean, I think,

I think also that we're in, this is as good as competition as we're going to get. think, I don't think it's very good. And I think, you you agree, but like, this is as much competition as we are going to see. And so this is the least likely time when you would, know, Comcast and Charter are hemorrhaging customers. AT&T is desperately trying to like keep people on. They're not going to risk losing people to T-Mobile if they start like getting a bad reputation in that respect.

Doug Dawson (21:50)
Yes

Yes.

now.

Yeah, they

do want to do something that makes them sound bad, even if it doesn't really affect people. They don't want the bad press. You're absolutely right. So I'm not worried about that. Now the pricing is more important. And her list isn't done. I know what she's going to put on it. I think she's going to say that states who have rules regulating AI aren't going to get the money is what I expect before the end of the year. expect her to say that one. At this point, every state has an AI law and the district.

So that means no BEAD would go out. And the state broadband offices have no authority to say, we'll go along with that. Those are all done by legislators. So that would pretty much put BEAD to zero if they do that. And this would not be a giant shock. I really don't think it would. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (22:52)
Yeah, well, let's end by saying.

No, you're right. And not like that, but I mean, we know

that she's worked closely with Ted Cruz, worked for Ted Cruz. And this has been a big priority of his is to make sure that states are not passing regulations. And to be clear, these regulations are not, I mean, there's a number of states that I think would do things where you and I would be like, whoa, that's not a great idea. But this is pretty simple stuff. Like when people's human rights should not be at risk because states are handing over crucial functions to like poorly tested AI models.

Doug Dawson (23:02)
Yes.

Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (23:26)
Right? mean, like, this is like.

Doug Dawson (23:26)
Yeah, most of the state AI

laws, almost all the state AI laws to this point are about privacy, about your personal data. That's almost what all of them are. And these states already had privacy laws. This just sort of expands. They're just saying they're part of that too, is what those laws are saying. So you're not exempt from those laws just because you're an AI company. So some states are fiddling around with, you know.

all sorts of things like, you know, the ownership of songs and copyrights and now you're starting to get into some deep law there. Not, you know, who knows if they even have the right to do that or not, who knows? but meanwhile, don't forget, FCC says they're going to regulate AI, which they have absolutely no authority to do. None. There's no way you can read that in their congressional Charter at the slightest.

That's not going to stop them from trying, I don't think. I expect them to tackle that next year. And their first rule is going to be no state regulation of it. They're going to go no state regulation of AI. That's our first rule. I guarantee you that's coming.

Christopher Mitchell (24:17)
No, it's truly remarkable.

I mentioned before I enjoy The Verge's podcast and Nilay Patel has a segment that he calls Brendan Carr is a dummy. And the one that came out this past Friday talked about just the interesting juxtaposition of if there's something that Brendan Carr wants to do, there is no law that gets in the way of him doing it no matter what it is. It's not the constitution, not anything. If he wants to do it, he does it. If it's something he doesn't want to do, oh, the FCC just doesn't have that power.

Doug Dawson (24:41)
Nah.

Right, absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (24:49)
The FCC,

when he wants it to, override anything, override anything that it wants to. But when he doesn't want to do something, the FCC, ⁓ just so burdened, we have no powers. It was a pretty good, I thought, summary of what we've seen over the past year.

Doug Dawson (25:00)
Yes.

Yeah, that's really good way to describe his behavior. The funny thing is, all this nonsense that he's doing will eventually all be overturned in courts. It might take three, four, five years, but it will all get overturned because he doesn't have the authority. So it's like, sorry, he didn't have authority. So at some point, the courts will agree that he didn't have the authority to do ABCD. so he's really wasting a whole lot of folks' time. And the carriers don't want this nonsense. They really don't want.

to be put on the wrong side of public perception. I hate to say it, but they really like the term light touch regulation, meaning don't stir up the public. mean, you and I thought there was a lot of stuff that snuck under that umbrella that should have been regulated anyhow. But what they don't want is aggressive regulation, aggressive non-regulation that hurts people. mean, carriers don't want to be part of that at all. they may not implement a lot of this stuff anyhow. So we'll see.

Boy, the next two years are just going to be an adventure, regulatory-wise.

Christopher Mitchell (25:58)
Yeah, no, I certainly think so. Well, Doug, would say it has been a pleasure hearing you when I could clearly. You know, I'm curious when we put this back together in Riverside, if it can pull back together all of the stuff that arrived out of order too late. And people will be like, what's Chris complaining about? Doug sounds and looks great. But from what I saw, you were pretty blurry a lot of the time, and the sound sometimes didn't match. So from now on, we're only talking about earlier today.

Doug Dawson (26:16)
Yeah

And I can see me clearer, but

you pop in and out a few times. It's just, who knows, right? So yeah. It's a very odd platform, this one is. Yes, always good to talk to you, Chris. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (26:29)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why for Connect,

For Connect This,

we're gonna be back on StreamYard and we'll keep it going there, but for the podcast, we'll be on here. Doug, thank you so much and we'll talk to you again soon.

Doug Dawson (26:39)
Yes.

All right, thank you, Chris. Always pleasure.