Uwn Wispapalooza 2013 Special Event

Wow, there's a lot of people here. Thanks everyone for coming out. I'll get right to it. Alright, so in the past, some we we've done these we've done these world network conferences and we just announced everything we've work on. And we're a diversified company now Today, we're gonna do things a little different. So I know this is a WISP industry event, so we're going to specifically focus on what we've been working on for the WISP industry. So I'm gonna break this conference down into two parts: First, how we see the business future of the WISP industry. Second, I'm gonna tell you how we see the technology vision for the WISP industry. So let's start with the business side first. So everybody in this room knows what a WISP is; and it's a Wireless Internet Service Provider. But in my experience, trying to explain this to someone outside our industry, I get a reaction that looks something like this, right? There's a lot of reasons why, and one of the reasons why, is when you start with the word wireless, people automatically assume you're talking about mobile networks and smartphones. But the WISP industry, what we do is bring fixed connectivity anywhere. Ideally the vision is Ubiquitously. When I'm trying to explain this to people, I was thinking wouldn't it be great if there is some analogy for what we do, Or some company or market similar to what we do that we could use to explain the WISP industry. And interestingly, one of the companies that comes to mind is DIRECTV, right? So DIRECTV, they supply TV connectivity, but it's still connectivity. And they have installers that place a radio device on top of your roof, whether it's a home or an office. And in many ways it not so much different than how a WISP networks work where they have installers that have coverage areas and they send out installers to deploy these radios to these roofs to bring connectivity to people So let's look at DIRECTV. DIRECTV has 20 million subscribers, it's a very large network. And they've built this network over the past twenty years, and there's other companies similar to DIRECTV, there's DISH TV, their competitor. For over 18 years, they've grown their company to 14 million subscribers. And maybe a further stretch is the SiriusXM radio business in over 13 years, they've built their business to 25 million subscribers. So these are big numbers. And how do these companies build these networks and their subscriber bases? Intuitively, it comes down to two variables. Right? It's awareness— how many people know that these networks and businesses exist? And out of those people that know about the solution, how many people find it valuable enough to buy the solution and become a subscriber So the size of these networks are correlated to the awareness; how compelling their solution is. let's look at awareness—How does WISP awareness compare to these other businesses? Now if I asked everybody in this room what a WISP is, I'd get a 100% positive response that everyone understands the concept and tell me what it is. How about outside this room—what if we went to the Vegas strip, and you asked a thousand people, what's a WISP? What does a WISP do? Do you know anything about the wireless ISP industry? Maybe one out of a thousand? One out of a hundred thousand? I don't know what it is, but it's a big discrepancy. We have basically zero awareness compared to these other industries. So if that's the case, then the WISP industry, the numbers of our subscriber base should be much smaller than these other industries. DIRECTV, 20 million, DISHTV 14 million, Sirius XM satellite radio, 25 million. . .So airMAX to date how many devices do you think we've shipped? And we're not the entire WISP industry—we're the leaders. But just us alone, how many do you think we've shipped to date? With airMAX in 4 years—not even 4 years, it's 16 million. So it's growing at a very fast rate—in the next calendar year it will surpass the numbers of these other networks. And so how is that possible? If we only have a very small fraction of a awareness of these other industries, how do we have numbers comparable to them? And the answer is that our solution is very compelling. The economics and the value of the solution is so compelling, that we have an unbelievable conversion rate of those that are aware of the solution to those that buy the solution. So to me it's a very simple equation. The limiting factor to the growth in the WISP industry right now (and it's growing very fast) but the limiting factor to it exploding is really awareness. if we could create a program where every small-to-medium size business in this country and everywhere you go outside, knew what the WISP industry is, and the solution we offered, I think the growth would be incredible, and I think that it would become a heavy-weight industry. And I think your networks, the growth would be so explosive, the evaluations would go crazy, and you guys would all be millionaires, multi-millionaires and so on. multi-millionaires and saw right So how do we do it? That's what we're going to talk about right now. So I'll let JT talk. JT is in charge of the marketing effort, his team has done an unbelievable job and let him take it from here. So a WISP is a Wireless Internet Service Provider. Typically these WISPs, they're entrepreneurs. I call them Guerrilla Operators. The reason why most people have never heard of a wireless ISP is because these businesses tend to be smaller, they're not these juggernauts like the phone or cable company. They're really good at building out awesome networks, they're really good at delivering great customer service and really good at delivering quality products. And they're just looking to do something bigger with their lives, just kinda like I was trying to do with Ubiquiti. So we want to bring some unity to this whole network of entrepreneurs and supercharge their businesses if we have this idea of a "World Network". Ubiquiti World Network is an alliance of individual wireless ISPs that are going to band together and share a unified technology platform, sales, marketing and advertising assets, as well as combined political clout What we're trying to do with the World Network is preserve the spirit of these Guerrilla Operators, the WISPs, that makes them great, and just put some tailwind behind them. Thank you all for coming out and sharing part of your evening with us. Also want to give a shout out to the 3000+ people who are watching on YouTube live. We really hope that what we have to show you is going to be worth your time. So before we talk about the Ubiquiti World Network I want to talk about our competition. As you know, we go up against the phone and cable companies every single day. Yeah, we know how you feel about them. The thing is, DSL just isn't cut out for today's Internet. Web pages are heavier than they've ever been. They're so visual now. Online gaming is at an all-time high and we're streaming YouTube and Netflix to multiple devices in our households. And when you talk about the cable companies, you're talking about an industry low sub-30% customer satisfaction rating, it's ridiculous and I don't know how they get away with it! I think that's lower than any other industry in the United States. And they get away with it because they know that their customers aren't aware of another option for high-speed internet. We know better though, right? 0:10:47.029, Damn right! I'm speaking to 4000 wireless ISPs that can provide that high-speed Internet. See to me, it's not an issue of service it's not an issue of quality, because I can argue that our stuff is just as good, if not better. As Robert pointed out, this is an issue of awareness. You see when families move into homes and businesses move into their new offices, they're not aware of another option for Internet. When those businesses put together their plans for Internet, we are not at the table. We're a last resort. And only when the phone and cable companies fail, and those businesses have to find another option, are we called, and those businesses find a WISP. And those businesses under even worse circumstances than when that project began—same crappy budget, even less time, we get the job done. That's our power. That's what makes us special. And the nation should know about it. So at Ubiquiti, we've been thinking about this for the last year and we've come up with some really great ideas. And so we've put them together into the Ubiquiti World Network. Ubiquiti World Network is an alliance of individual WISPs working towards a single vision that leverage a unified technology platform, sales and marketing assets, advertising, and political clout—together. Now we took these ideas and we wanted to make sure that they work, so we tested them. And I gotta tell you, the results are amazing. But rather than hear it from me. I want you to hear it from one of your own, I want to invite Nathan Stooke of Wisper Wireless to come share the results with you. Thank you JT. As he said, my name is Nathan Stooke from Wisper and it's great to see everyone out here. You know, the vibe here at this show and the energy in the WISP industry is amazing. I can't think of a better time to be a WISP. And I was truly honored when Ubiquiti asked us to be part of their test pilot program. You know we tried lots of different things, some performed better than others, but honestly the results were truly, truly amazing. But before I go into the results, I want to talk a little bit about marketing in general. Because Wisper we just turned 10 last month, and we've never really done marketing before in the history of our company. marketing before in the history of our company We'd say, well we didn't need to do marketing because we couldn't keep up with demand. So why market when you can't keep up with demand, right? Believe me, it's a good problem, and I'm not complaining that I couldn't keep up with demand at all. And I know a lot of you are in the same boat, where you just can't keep up with demand to the point that you're doing this as fast as you can. Then I look back and say, wow, well what if I had started marketing 10 or 5 years ago? What would my network look like? You know right now I have a network that looks like about half a state, 188 towers—imagine if I had started marketing 5 years ago? Maybe I would only cover a quarter of a state, maybe I'd only have a hundred towers. But I'd probably have the same number of customers. Because my customers would be dense, they'd be more populated in areas where I was providing service—because when you're not marketing, you're stuck with just whatever comes your way. You know, you have a few customers over here, then you have one customer over here and there. So we looked at it and said, well we can't keep up with demand, we're just going to do what we can. Except, Ubiquiti came into our industry and what used to cost me $300/radio to provide service to somebody, now costs me $100/radio. Overnight, I could start providing service to 300 customers per month. Before I could only afford to do 100 installs per month. Now all of the sudden, I can do 300. And I know a lot of you are in that same boat I've talked to you at this show, and we're all trying to figure out—wait a minute, wait a minute, all of the sudden, I can keep up with demand. And this is great, but how do I create that demand. What do I do? And we know that the answer is marketing. But we're not very good at it. You know, we try to do some marketing, we try to do some things. What we used to say is hey we don't need to do marketing. But when I look back and think about it, really that was just what we were saying. It was just that we couldn't do marketing very well. We didn't have the resources, We didn't have the know-how, We didn't have the ad-copy, We didn't have all those things, and when a marketing program would fail for us, we would just say, well, we don't need to do that , we don't need to do marketing, and in fact, we became an anti-marketing company. Right, we said oh we don't need to do marketing, oh we're just gonna put out money into building our networks and providing great service to you, you're gonna tell your neighbor, and that's the word-of-mouth that I know you all grow by. But now all of the sudden, I have to create demand, I have to know how to market. We were just getting ready to start marketing and learning more when Ubiquiti approached us and said "Please would you part of our test program?" And believe me, looking back at how bad we did our marketing program before, I knew we needed all the help we could get. So I said, absolutely, absolutely, we will take any help we can possibly get. But we had been part of some other programs, where manufacturers and service providers, they had this marketing plan that they put together. And you know, ten minutes into their presentation, it was obvious that they weren't marketing you, they were marketing THEIR company. And all I got to do was stick a tiny little sticker on the back, usually without our logo that said, contact me if I want service. Those were there and it was clear that they were just marketing them. But as a I worked with Ubiquiti, it became very apparent early on, did they truly wanted to market my company, that they wanted to market Wisper, the WISP. And not only were they helping us, but they were going to elevate the entire industry, help the entire industry. It's so amazing that it's a complete flip. I've never heard of any other manufacturer in any other industry doing that. And it's absolutely amazing and we're glad to be a part of that. So now I want to go into what we did, I said we tried a lot of different things. So we did several different things. We did some web ads, we did some yard signs, we did some door hangers. And all of these things worked. But they didn't have a great return in some areas. Or we only had one billboard sign up and we cover a huge area. So what I'm going to talk about tonight is about what really, really worked for us. So you can see here, And that was our direct mail piece. To frame the test area that we did, we're around St. Louis, we cover most of southern Illinois, very rural. And we did this direct mail piece. So this is the piece that we sent out and this is our network with all of our towers. So the next map that you see, these are all the leads we got. And these are 60,000 of these direct mailers. Maybe we didn't need to send out 60,000 of them but we wanted to raise awareness in the area and we wanted to see what the return was. And honestly, if you asked my employees, they'd tell you that we did a lot of work . It was a lot of work. I mean we didn't even think about how big they were going to be, and then they brought [the mailers] to our warehouse, and we barely had any room to work on them, there were so many boxes. But we sent them out , and when we did that, our phones blew up. You can see the blue graph, that's how many leads were calling in and wanting service. That's our daily graph of all of our leads. And we only did this for one month. So we really only sent out one direct mail and we got all of these leads coming in. What's really, really cool is that I know a lot of you aren't doing any marketing at all—because just two years ago, we weren't doing anything either. If you look at the yellow, that's what we were getting for leads when we weren't doing any marketing. So on the next slide, you can see that if we compare everything on the graph, that blue line is our marketing for 2013, and you can see that huge kick-up. Now again, maybe we shouldn't have done 60,000, cause let me tell you, it was hard to answer that many phone calls, but it was great. You know, it also makes the graph look great because it just shot right up! But you can see, it's almost an 800% increase in our leads. And I know when I talk to you guys at these shows, you're asking me how do I get my leads up, how do I get my leads up. This was just one marketing, it wasn't even You know, as th\he marketing experts (which I am not) say you have to have 7 "touches," you have to "touch" the customer 7 times—this was one time and we got these results! So now you say, well wait a minute, 760 leads—what's the big deal. How many did you install? Now this next graph shows how many we installed. So you can see that during that one month we did 156 installs. And you remember I talked about 300 installs, I can afford to do 300. afford to do 300 This was a huge step to getting toward those 300. And you can see compared to 2011 when we weren't doing any marketing, 57. That's a 270% increase, that's huge. And the other thing that's really cool is that my guys now know what it's like to be really, really busy. You know, they say, oh we got so many installs, what do we do? It's a good problem, we'll hire more people if we have to, we'll install more things if we need to. So it was a huge success for us, this one tiny little thing in marketing really, really turned out well. Now you might say "Now wait a minute, you had 760 leads" and you only got to 156 of them? During that month. . . but now we've actually done quite a bit more because we were just tracking it for that month. So as you can see on this next slide, we have about 500 people in our database, wanting service. And as a business owner, we have lots of opportunities. Right? You know, I can get on this tower and it looks like it's going to have a lot of potential but it doesn't. And then I go deploy on this tower and it's great. Wow, let me go deploy on this one, hmm, it's not so good. I have 550 leads in my database, saying "we want your service". Well now from a strategic standpoint, I can sit back with my management team and say "great, we're going to grow in this area because—holy cow! we have more customers in that area than we ever thought!" and then I have more customers over here. So it was a tremendous, tremendous success. Marketing didn't fail! I just didn't have my network built out. So now we're trying to build out as fast as we can. And I just can't imagine what it will be like when we actually do that, the marketing where we have 7 "touches" and we have yard signs that go along with it, we do more direct mail pieces, I think it's going to be amazing and this is exactly what I needed in order to grow, to get to that 300 customers a month, 400 customers/month. I think there's no stopping us. We're in an awesome industry, the energy is high, new technology coming out all the time, and I'm so glad I'm a WISP, I'm so glad that I'm part of this Ubiquiti World Network. And the more of us that join together, the better it's going to be. And I just can't wait to see what it's going to look like in a year, or two. You know, we'll look back and see that this was a huge pivotal point in our industry in where we can go and where we're going to skyrocket! So please, ask any questions you have, afterward, I'd love to be here, This is gonna be great, this is very, very exciting. Thank you very much. Alright you saw those numbers, they were great. So, the effective close rate of this project was 540%. That's $540 Nathan got back for every $100 he invested. As he mentioned, we got a lot of leads from areas that he didn't necessarily have service coverage in. But if he did, and he closed out his leads at around 70%, you see that number [3,400%] up there right? That's awesome. I want to remind you: No targeting, there's no optimizations, we didn't have multiple grounds of ads going out. There was no larger nationwide campaign. There was no air cover. This was just a piece of paper, that Nathan sent to all the residents in his coverage area. That's awesome. Now imagine these numbers, with the full vision of the Ubiquiti World Network behind it. And I'm very, very pleased to announce the beta for the Ubiquiti World Network. First piece is a sales and marketing library. This is the collective experience, the collective stories of all of us. And we're going to place it all in the library. What this is, is we're going lend each other, each other's experiences and so another WISP from another area can go and pull case studies, pull sales clout, whatever they need to get into that meeting and close that deal that previously out of reach for them. The next initiative is one where we're going to leverage some of our legal resources within Ubiquiti. We're going to see what's important to all of you, and we're going to address the issues today, so that we can secure our future. And finally, the crown jewel of our program, the advertising program. I know this is a little bit of a teaser. This is something special coming up. But our advertising program, we are investing millions of dollars into this program we're investing millions of dollars so that the nation will know of our existence and our excellence. We have a website to hold all of these initiatives. And this website will also double for all of the incoming leads and customers that come into our site. So the way it works is the customer will come on, they'll type in their address, then they'll get a WISP detail page—if there's only one WISP in the area they'll be handed off to that WISP or for multiple WISPs, the customer gets to choose. We'll also be launching with a lead management platform to help you get control of all the leads coming in. So I bet you're wondering, how are we going to drive all this traffic through the site. Well, we did tease the advertising a little bit earlier, and I want to invite our ad agency, DGWB to come up and share their advertising program with you. So before I actually call Mike up on the stage, I want to brag about [the ad agency] for a moment. This ad agency is awesome. I mean, they are an award-winning machine. Last year they won 32 "ADDY" [awards] and here's the kicker—that's actually a slow year for them. Their president, one of their original founders, Mike Weisman, is here to share that vision with you. Mike. . . It's great to be here. So JT has just painted an incredibly exciting picture of the future. 850+ maybe in this room, thousands of other watching on the web. United with Ubiquiti, to impact that future in a way that I don't think that anybody could possibly imagine until tonight. you see, the promises of a bright future from the cable and the phone monoliths, have simply come up empty. And it's forced thousand and thousands of customers from around the country, country to simply settle for the status quo, with no choice. Well we all know how we feel about no choice. And we also know that the status quo is simply not good enough. People don't want to be waiting and waiting. . . and waiting for the future to arrive. But tonight, with your help, that wait can be over. Because tonight, thee revolution has begun. You know, every revolution is begun with a single very clear vision in mind. And Ubiquiti has a very clear vision. It's about empowering people. It's about empowering people by connecting people. That's what the Ubiquiti World Network is all about. It's about empowering each one of you, empowering your customers and it's about growing your business and crushing the status quo, and bringing the most incredible Internet experience ever to rooftops all across the country. And every wonderful, great revolution at its heart is launched with a rallying cry. Our rallying cry is about the picture of the future that we hold what it looks like from our point of view. And we have a campaign that is designed to reach every television, every computer screen, every mobile phone, every neighborhood in the country. So ladies and gentlemen, the future starts now. We don't see things the way they are. We see them as they should be. We're engineers, it's what we do. With us, it's always faster this, smaller that, better everything. And the way we see it, the Internet's in a rut. Literally. The big cable and phone companies they're slowly digging ditches to bring you high-speed Internet. Slowly digging ditch, after ditch, and you're left to wait. Well we're not waiting. We're putting high-speed Internet where it belongs, on a pedestal. We're taking it to the skies and shooting it across the country. And not just for some, for everyone in every corner. Why? Because being connecting means everything. It's the great equalizer. Today's Internet is not a luxury—it's a necessity. It's running businesses, schools, lives and more. Way more. And it definitely doesn't have to involve waiting. Or burying cables, or buying bundles. It takes new thinking, hard work and a dedication to lifting technology to new heights. The future's not faster cables, it's no cables. So we're climbing stairs, and ladders and anything else that will allow us to connect you and everyone else you know to affordable, reliable, non-bundled high speed Internet. You can't wait for a hole to be dug. And thanks to the world's largest connected network, you won't have to. The future can't wait. Join the Ubiquiti World Network. The future can't wait. This campaign is designed to reach into every home possible. The "Future Can't Wait" campaign is going to air on virtually every major cable television network in the country. . .even A&E How many duck dynasty fans are there? That makes me happy happy happy . . . We're gonna go beyond cable we're also gonna reach every major network we're picking ten of the top markets in the country. And we're going to go into the neighborhood by airing on local news and traffic programming, to make sure that your customers, as they're getting ready for work in the morning, or wherever they're headed, school, work, are gonna be confronted with our message about the future. But we're also gonna take this message and extend it into the Internet. Take a look at the titles on this slide. We're not missing too many marks on this slide. But this is just the beginning. As JT mentioned earlier, each one of you is going to be armed with access to a marketing "assault kit" if you will, of pre-produced materials, that allow you to fight that battle in your own neighborhoods and markets. Pre-produced, on Ubiquiti's dime. Not yours. So where do you fit into the Ubiquiti World Network campaign? Well the answer is simple. You're everywhere in the campaign, because this whole campaign was designed for you, and around you. So every place that you see in the marketing materials that I'm going to share, with the circle "YOU.", consider that the place where you can customize all of the messages that you're going to see, with your logo, with your contact information, and also with customized messages. Here's a pretty good example of what the end of a 30 second spot might look like in terms of a 5-second tag. Localized, custom offer, your logo, your contact information. But aircover alone, as we know, as JT's mentioned, isn't enough. We know that to keep the phone companies on the defensive, we're going to have to take this battle to the ground. And we're going to have to fight this battle on the streets, literally. And so to enable you to do that, we're going to be providing you more providing you more. We're going to provide you with billboards, we're going to allow you to have access to materials for local newspapers magazines, print. We're also going to take this message to the neighborhoods, by producing posters that can be put up in the local coffee house, or the laundromat, or wherever your customers gather as neighbors. We also want to make sure that you can mail into every mailbox for a prospect in your area with direct mail pieces, much like the one that Nathan has already mentioned that was so highly successful in his own tests. And we can even help you with targeting those mailboxes to make sure you're getting the most efficient buy possible. And then we're going to allow your customers to advertise for you. They're going to put their stake literally in the ground in their front yards and proclaim to the world that they didn't have to wait for cable! And then right to their front door. So what you have before you, is a pretty aggressive multimedia integrated campaign that's all there for access for you So let's talk about timing a little bit. JT talked about what's going to be to be produced for you. On December 1st, you're going to be able to log in, view your assets, fully customized for your neighborhood, ready to go. One month later, first week of January, we're going to be launching the entire campaign. Why are we picking January? Well there's a couple of reasons. We do not want to be caught up in the 4th quarter holiday marketing. This message is too important to get lost in all of the other advertising, so we're gonna launch at the beginning of the year, bright new future and here it is, ready to go. But the other reason, might be a little bit more important reason, and that is that 0:34:27.770,0:34:31.520 all of us need the opportunity to be ready, from an agency perspective, from the Ubiquiti crew, and then also for you, because the hope is that you're gonna have to go back to your markets and think about this for a while and take a look at your own advertising and marketing plans and think where can this fit in. Hopefully this will become your local marketing plans, customized for you. plans customized for you You might have to consider building a new tower, or maybe even expanding training for your staff, cause what Nathan experienced, is going to be on steroids, once we launch the campaign like the one that you just saw here. So this is all available to you. I would consider it Ubiquiti's investment in your future, and I have to tell you, I know that I look very young to many of you, but I've been in this business almost 40 years. And I can tell you that I have never seen a company invest millions of dollars of their own money to build somebody else's business. It's unheard of, but that's exactly what Ubiquiti is prepared to do, and it makes me so excited to see this, is prepared to do, this moment, all they're asking is for you to join the Revolution. They're going to be doing the spending. They simply want to make these materials available for you so why would you want to do this? Well, strength in numbers. Together, we can fight the battle with the phone and cable companies and we can beat them at their own marketing game. Together we can grow business, we can secure our futures and we can change the future, but we're asking you to join us tonight, because quite honestly, the future just can't wait. Thank you. OK, so I guess back to me. Before I start, I want to say a couple things about the World Network and what you guys just saw. So, about a year ago, we came up with this idea and maybe not even a year ago. At Ubiquiti what makes us great is we have just awesome people. We only have a couple hundred employees, each one of them are like super soldiers. They do lots of different things. And you see a lot of the engineers on the forum, and our typical engineer can interact with customers, he can solve problems, he can creatively find solutions, and this whole project was undertaken by two guys, JT and Joey Baker. And it's pretty incredible. And we're just very lucky to have great people. When you empower great people that have skills, they accomplish amazing things. So that's one thing I wanted to say. The second thing I wanted to say when we first disrupted the the WISP industry, the market and grew it back in 2008, we introduced our NanoStation product. And NanoStation was revolutionary at the time because it was the perfect marriage of hardware and software and plug-and-play mechanical design and it was robust and stable and it was the economics, the economics that made it such that WISPs could get an instant return on their investment and deploy their networks rapidly. And we came into the market at a disruptive price point. We could have charged more money. We could have, instead of selling those products for less than $100, we could have sold them $150 doubled the price and done very well. And I had arguments at the time with people telling me how to run Ubiquiti and they said, "Why are you selling this stuff so inexpensive. . . why are you leaving money on the table?" and the answer is, the way I see the world, the way I see business, the way business should be run it's not about profiting off of customers. traditional business is about trapping the customer, exploiting them, making money off of them, and that's everything that I can't stand for. So what I believe is transferring value to customers and empowering them, and so that's why we priced that NanoStation product disruptively; and the way it played out worked, and great in the long term. It helped the industry, I believe it's what made us successful. So when you see us investing millions of dollars and putting advertising on all these networks, some people are telling us the same thing, "Why are you doing this, why are you spending millions of dollars with nothing in return?" It's because we believe in you guys, I believe in entrepreneurs and I believe in transferring value to the customers and empowering them. I'll get to the technology part now. So that was the first time I think we did a business segment at one of these conferences, so let's get back to what a lot of you guys wanted to see. So, we're always working on tons of stuff at Ubiquiti—we're like an incubator, right? We have a lot of diversification today, but keep in mind whenever we do something new, it's with additional resources. It's not like we're pulling resources from product to products. So we're growing fast, but we've doubled our R&D staff in the past year, we're going to double it again over the next year I'll but for the sake of keeping the scope of this show focused, I'm just going to concentrate on what we've done in the WISP market, our R&D, and I'm going to focus on 3 new technology reinventions. So let's go to the first one. So I talked about the CPE, the NanoStation in 2008. And was done very well. We've sold millions and millions of NanoStations worldwide but the design has been bugging me for the last couple of years. It's not quite perfect. And we aim to make perfect products. So we wanted to redesign, we wanted to re-invent the CPE. And these are the kinds of things that we thought about. The old NanoStation, one of the things I didn't like about it, i s that it had a very wide azimuth pattern, which isn't good for spatial filtering. WE're in the unlicensed bands with a lot of noise and you want as tight of a beam as possible at your CPE to spatially filter out any interference, and make your networks more robust more scalable So, I knew we had to improve the beam directivity and ideally, make it uniform. The second thing I didn't quite like about the NanoStation is the mounting. There was no flexibility. It had to be mounted on a pole, it wasn't really wall mountable, unless it had an accessory, and there's really no alignment. So the elevation beamwidth is really tight, but there's really no alignment, so a lot of people were buying accessories to align the product. The third thing is the industrial design. What we've come to learn over the past several years is that it seems like there's customers that are very sensitive about the aesthetics of these radios on rooftops. So we wanted to try to make a beautiful, industrially-designed product. And then of course, the product performance. We wanted to improve the hardware, we wanted better software, we wanted a more efficient design, we wanted to really compact it. This is how we start designs at Ubiquiti. I had this idea of a floodlight, which you just saw. And one day I was looking at the floodlight shape, and there was something really elegant and smooth and symmetrical about it. So I thought, OK, let's start with a floodlight type of shape, and create a uniform antenna beam, and let's see if we can solve the other issues I talked about before. So this first design, it had a pole mount, now it had an adjustable alignment, so you could adjust it vertically, but it wasn't very robust, we had a door on the bottom, it was OK, we printed it out and made prototypes, a week later we tried to refine it, And then to make it more robust, we had discrete steps, so you could lock this, discrete steps, alignment angles. And we improved the door, but it still wasn't great, then we moved to another iteration of this alignment. And then we got more granular, almost like a continuous alignment and we improved the door more, but it still wasn't quite right. So we worked on it some more. This iteration had a push button lock so the alignment was actually very robust, and I was thinking this might be the product we would end up with. But we were discussing one day, you could mount this on the pole, but what about wall mounting, it's not very practical, and what if you wanted to angle the CPE when it's on a wall, in the corner, so say a base station. So we wanted to improve the mounting and make it more versatile. So we looked at ball and socket joints. And the ball and socket joints were difficult because it took up so much space on the backside, especially in a loco form-factor type CPE, that was difficult to do. So we kind of massaged and adjusted it, we added this neat polarity alignment bubble at the top so if you mounted it on a pole or a surface that wasn't exactly level, then you could adjust it with rotation. And this design was pretty good, but it still wasn't tight enough, I thought it could be more efficient. So we worked on it more, and we worked on it more. And we got it! I believe that this is the best product that we've designed at Ubiquiti—we're calling it NanoBeam. This is what it looks like. So it's really cool. It's completely sealed. There's no stickers, the LEDs shine through the enclosure, the door is really nice and robust. We have a ball-and-socket mechanism that just winds and unwinds and it clicks. Maybe I could demonstrate it here. It could mount on a pole, robustly, it could mount on a wall, with just one screw you can swivel it all kinds of directions, you could put it on a wall at a corner and rotate it so it's looking at the corner of the base station. And it looks really nice mounted! It's very compact, it has that floodlight, that very smooth, industrial design. And the best thing about it is the antenna. We worked really *** this antenna—we actually doubled the performance of the antenna over the NanoStation, so this is a full 19dBi antenna gain, very directive and in some points of the band it can get up to 20 dBi. It's the best product hands down, we've ever designed. And a lot of you might have seen the new airGrid we're shipping with improved mechanicals. So we have a solid reflector dish, a 2x2 version of that same design and it's really elegant. It's a reflector dish, it's a feed, and it's a backend cap, and it's a bracket. So it's really 4 parts, and there's absolutely no screws. It all clicks together. That's our high gain model NanoBeam. So we have 16 dBi, 19 dBi, 22 dBi and 25 dBi. (reveals airFiber5) Oops! Well I'm going to leave that there—I was told that was something else. So this is the NanoBeam I showed. Let's see if I can get it close to the microphone here. You can see it has a discrete point, it locks in place, and then you can press this button and you can unwind it. Complete, 3-axis freedom for alignment. It's got this polarity bubble alignment built-in, so if you're connected to a surface that's not level, you can compensate for it. The door is very solid, a 100% sonically-welded seal, no stickers, so it's like the ultimate for weatherproof performance. OK so, like I said I think that's the best product we've ever designed in the history of Ubiquiti in the history of 7 or 8 years. Alright so we re-invented the CPE. So the next step, we want to reinvent the backhaul. Unfortunately, the cat's out of the bag! OK. So, as you guys know, our airMAX line is built on 802.11 silicon, and we do a lot of things in software to improve capacity, scalability and latency for multi-point performance. But when you talk backhaul, right, backhaul a lot of times could support 100's or 1000's of clients. So any hiccups or anything anything you see in your backhaul, an be exaggerated as many times to your multipoint network. So backhaul is a very crucial piece of any network architecture. So we can use airMAX products, but we want something "higher end," we want something that's more robust, has more noise immunity, and most importantly, can support really low latencies. That's very important in today's world, where you have people doing all kinds of video streaming and voice-over-IP. You need a backhaul with sub-millisecond latency, and you can't achieve that by doing 802.11 silicon and doing software tricks on top. What you almost need is you need an application-specific design, and that's what our group in Chicago does. And to re-invent backhaul, we looked at four things. Well economics is of course important, backhaul solutions, proprietary backhaul solutions are still very expensive. Range is important, you want these things to match the range of airMAX PTP links. Spectral efficiency is very important, you want to pass a lot of throughput and get low latency while minimizing your use of the spectrum and making it more immune to noise, and of course, like I said, latency is very critical. So last year, we introduced airFiber. And there's a story behind this. We recruited the team out of Motorola, three years ago, and we brainstormed on how to make the perfect backhaul. We really wanted to do a 5 GHz backhaul solution. The problem is it's almost impossible to make a DFS compliant full duplex radio. Because you have to listen to radar signatures, and you can't listen if you have two transmitters blasting non-stop with 100% duty cycle. So we considered making a 5 GHz product just for the upper UNII band, the US FCC band, which doesn't require DFS. But we thought, well we want to make a worldwide product , and in Europe, you must have DFS in 5 GHz. So we thought, let's take a shot at this, in the 24 GHz band. Well we know it has range limitations but we thought well it could be a worldwide product. Let's try it out. So we put our 5 GHz design on hold, we had done a lot of the design and we put it on hold. So we rushed to design airFiber24, it released last year, and it's doing well! But one of the things about airFiber24, is the range, within 5 miles it works great. But at 24 GHz, you have rain fade, the free space loss is quite high, so beyond 5 or 10 miles, it's not a very robust solution. And what we learned is that most of the links are beyond the 5 and 10 mile point. So we jumped back to airFiber5 and we were determined to make it work. And we have some very talented people on that team, and they found a way to make a DFS compliant, full-duplex 5 GHz radio. And it's a completely Application-Specific-Backhaul-Design. Everything on the radio from the baseband and the protocol, the RF design, the synthesizers, the mixers, everything is done from scratch. And it's been a long road to get there. So this is airFiber5. It's a true Gigabit-plus performance, on a 50 MHz channel, so it's very spectrally efficient. It's full-duplex and the range on this thing is incredible. Links are capable of over 100 km. And there's a lot in this design that makes it work great. The antenna is phenomenal. We have basically a transmitter radio and an independent receiver radio for full-duplex radio operation. And they operate on the same spectrum, without a guard channel. That's how we're able to get the spectral efficiency. To do that you need incredible isolation between these two antennas. And at 24 GHz, it's a challenge, but we were able to do it. At 5 GHz, it's a much, much bigger challenge. And we were also able to do it. So under the hood there's some special things there. So this is one of the features that the design team is really proud of, so I thought i'd show it off. It's their alignment UI, and that's on the back of the unit, it actually tells you the local and the remote units' RSSI, as well as the modulation rate that it's locking into. and there's a lot of great features about this product, we'll talk about it soon, we have more info on our website. But I think what makes it disruptive and what redefines it as a backhaul solution is the Economics. We were able to get it down to under $1000 dollars. So I think you know the airFiber family is getting more complete and I think now, between NanoBeam and airFiber we've reinvented and kind of perfected the CPE and the backhaul. So what's next here? So now we want to improve the system, the multi-point network. So that's where airMAX-AC comes in. Now we've had airMAX-AC under wraps for a while, the first products are probably going to ship, we're shooting for the end of the year, it may be early next year, I'm going to give a very abstract overview of some of the features and benefits of it. One of the big game changers in airMAX AC is that we now have a dedicated processor for the airMAX protocol. So the airMAX protocol in our existing technology and products is all based on software, all the timers, all the scheduling, it's all software-based. And so it's much slower. Now we have a dedicated processor, so it will be much faster, and you'll see an improvement in scalability and latency. The next thing we have is advanced products. We have a whole new UI, more features, we have new base station products that are gonna be, I think, very compelling. And my favorite feature, which we've been working on a very long time, I think it goes back four or five years ago, we're introducing a technology it's essentially active frequency filtering. And I'm gonna talk about that right now. So, WISP networks, they operate in the unlicensed bands. And the unlicensed bands are getting more crowded and more crowded. So the key to robustness and capacity, scalability, is our ability to filter out this interference. And there's different ways you can filter out interference. The first way, the most common way WISPs figured out ten years ago, was using directional antennas. If you could focus where the antenna hears, you could spatially filter out a lot of the noise or a lot of the signals that you don't want to hear. Another way, is to use, 0:58:25.700,0:58:29.240 you can filter in the time domain, using scheduling techniques, like polling and like our airMAX does. Now what I have learned in the lab in the last several years of dealing with customers, these are good solutions to filtering out noise, but they're really just band-aids for the real problem out there. And so the real problem is frequency and selectivity of these radios. So we're going to attack this problem at the source. And you attack the problem at the source through active frequency filtering. So I'm going to take you guys back a little ways. One of the first chipsets that was in 802.11 that became popular was the Intersil, Intersil2 and Intersil2.5 PRISM chipset. And the first product that I designed when I was starting Ubiquiti were these SuperRange2 and SuperRange5 Atheros MiniPCI cards. And we sold a lot of them. But there was a pattern in the SuperRange2 cards we were selling. Anybody that replaced their Intersil2 card with a SuperRange2 card, in access point mode, they would always send it back to us, and say, "hey, this card sucks! it can't operate like my Prism card operates." You know my background is in RF engineering and circuit design and so I was doing all kinds of crazy things in front of the Atheros chip: Fixed filtering and attenuating and changing the low noise amplifiers, and I was working with customers to send them back-and-forth and try them—I said "try this design, try this design" and nothing I did helped. And it's interesting, right because 802.11b wasn't even OFDM, it was ⅕ the speed, ⅙ the speed in the lab as these new cards yet these Atheros radios were not performing as well in this 2.4 GHz noisy environments—and there's a reason why. The Intersil radio, it was a good radio design, designed for a commodity application, but it was a superheterodyne receiver, it had two intermediate frequency stages, it had soft filtering off-chip, it had a lot of design features that gave it great selectivity. So what is selectivity? Selectivity is the radio's ability to capture its signal and ignore other signals. right Now once the wi-fi industry evolved, it became about cost. It became about integration, low-power and so, all these off-chip components, which made the radio performance, the selectivity really great, were kind of cast away, for these other purposes. And so these wi-fi chips today aren't really capable of handling an outdoor, high-density, high power RF environment. 1:01:46.790,1:01:51.230 Now they work great indoor, but once you get them outdoor with interference, they don't have the selectivity, the selectivity degrades very quickly. And that's why sometimes, you might notice that even though you're using non-overlapping channels, your network still has degradation. And that's because these RF chips can't handle high RF power, if it's adjacently or even very far away from the signal, it will just "swamp out" the receiver's ability to select the signal of interest. So to illustrate this, let's look at a low energy RF environment. And to the wi-fi receiver, it can very clearly see the individual channels. And if it's operating on one of these individual channels, it's able to select and communicate on that channel effectively. And if there's a weak interferer on a neighboring channel or on a distant channel, no problem, it will still be able to operate properly. Now once you go outdoors, once you have directional antennas, focusing high energy density, then everything breaks down. Whether you have an interferer next to your signal, whether you have it 200 MHz, 300 MHz away, if it's strong enough, either a single signal or a combination of signals, it will just swamp out the receiver and so, the wi-fi receiver, or the 802.11 silicon doesn't see clear discrete channels anymore; it just sees a "blob." It's almost as if you don't have non-overlapping channels anymore. It's almost as if every channel is part of the "blob" and it's all just one RF space. So that's the problem that we're running into right now. And some people I think can see it right away. if you improve your spatial filtering, and you put a metal shields and things like that, you can improve the problem because it metal shields and things like that you can improve the prom because they're presents a weaker RF ambient noise environment, so the 802.11 silicon can operate properly, but in a lot of cases, you can't. So what 's the solution to this? How do we improve the selectivity of the radio? So one obvious way is to put a filter in front. Say your radio is operating on 5500 MHz, let's put a brickwall filter right in front of the radio. Now the problem with that is if you put a fixed filter in front of the radio, it won't be able to operate on any other channel. So once you deploy it on that frequency, you're done—you're not going to be able to change it. Now the second problem, more importantly, is that a small channel at 5 GHz, has a very tiny fractional bandwidth. And if you want a brickwall filter at a small, fractional bandwidth, you need a huge "cube," what they call in the filtering world and it would amount to a giant, giant filter, which is impractical for most of these applications. So what do we do? What if there was a way where we could take the RF ambient environment that the 802.11 silicon sees and what if there is a way to make it look like a low-RF power ambient environment? Then the chipset would be able to operate optimally, it would have great selectivity and a lot of the noise problems you guys are seeing in the field would be gone. It'd almost be like a return of the Intersil Prism radios but at much, much higher speeds, OK? So that's what we've been working on for a long time in the lab. And we're calling this technology, "airPrism." And it sits in front of the Atheros silicon, totally agnostic, but it's actually a tunable, active filter. So it works and is paired to the 802.11 silicon, and it moves with it. So no matter what channel you're operating on, we're essentially applying a brick-wall filter so you can think of it as we're transforming the RF ambient environment to a low-power RF ambient environment, so the wifi chipset in this case, could run optimally. So I believe, just like NanoStation change the industry, just like airMAX changed it again, I believe that moving forward, airPrism is gonna be a game-changer for this whole market and industry. And if you want to check it out, we have one product today we're shipping today with airPrism technology, we've disguised it, it's called the UAP Outdoor+. And if you want to get a glimpse, I highly suggest you check out that product and run some tests on it. That design was much easier because it was at 2.4 GHz, so we only have to apply filtering over essentially 80 MHz of spectrum, in the 5 GHz spectrum case, we had to tackle a few hundred MHz of spectrum, so the spectrum's bandwidth is much greater and the design is much more challenging, it's getting very close and it's gonna be shipping in airMAX-AC products next year. So, that I guess concludes the show, and thanks everybody for coming out.