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[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to think tech i'm jay feidel this is community matters and we're talking about ptc which is the pacific telecommunications council doing its annual pacific telecommunications conference which it has been doing in hawaii it's a hawaii organization a high-tech organization a high-tech communications organization doing its thing for more than 40 years here largely in the hilton hawaiian village and attracting business and academics involving telecommunications from all over the world they come they want to meet they want to learn they want to be part of this community that hawaii has established so ptc is an admiral admirable organization it has great legs and legacy and it's got to deal with covet okay that's why gary kim is here with us he's a member of the board of governors he's been a presenter he's been part of the industry um been involved in several organizations over the years and he's here to tell us about ptc 2021 hi gary thanks for coming around hi jay how are you i'm good but i'm i'm suffering over the news you know everyday the news and nps the news is delivered really by telecommunications our world is driven by telecommunications uh it would not be the same if one day we didn't have this it would be the ghost of christmas future and um we'd be really really sad all of us so you guys are very important in our lives um so i guess the first question i want to ask and we we should go into ptc in general but the first question i want to ask is you know what is the status of technology these days as far as ptc is concerned how far advanced are we how global are we what kind of technology are we relying on to provide broadband to the world well as you probably are hearing everywhere people talking about 5g the new mobile network uh primarily because it offers sort of 10 times to 100 times faster speeds than we're used to uh it'll allow us to actually substitute wireless networks in some cases for fiber optic connections which is a real big change obviously cloud computing continues to be the the backbone of the industry now we're hearing about edge computing which is ways to decentralize computing literally within kilometers or a few miles of any user's location which again is going to allow us to do things with 5g lower latency that we actually can't do now when we have to ship bits across the world across the continent or between the us and europe well you know my my recollection my understanding is imperfect of course but my recollection is that at the outset ptc was um you know interested in telecommunications um and it was a it was a limited um kind of look at things it was about it was about cables undersea cables hither and yan um and the and the technology of the pc really hadn't even you know caught up yet and um now we have a different a different affair you guys are bonded married if you will to all the technology that's coming down the pike on software hardware um you are you are part and parcel of this what i consider a revolution of technology um they they it can't exist without you and you can't exist without them when you go to ptc you'll learn that in the first five minutes to see the people there am i right about that oh yeah absolutely it's um everything's about computing these days the networks the devices the applications the use cases in fact uh i can't remember what year it was but i i do remember sitting around in a small room planning the agenda and the content for the next uh ptc and we actually asked ourselves whether we wanted to talk about voice anymore and the conclusion was no we didn't want to talk about it our customers don't want to talk about it the carriers don't want to talk about it it's just not the future so everything that we do now is basically data and applications yeah and if there is voice it's voice over ip sure it's just another application as long as the bits can get there you can do the voice yeah and and for a time in my observation there was a um a kind of debate going on um between undersea cable and satellites and satellites were all the rage were a lot of experts and satellites and that would be the way that you would you know convey signal um you know to various remote areas in the world um and you know to the extent that the technology reached the satellite devices you could get pretty good at a pretty reasonable rate you could get satellite connection in the middle middle of the sahara however it seems to me that ptc and the industry around ptc has returned to a focus more purely involved in undersea cable am i right about that uh well it's it's complicated answer because we have a tendency as technology types to think look there's one answer which solves all problems and works for all use cases in telecom usually that is always wrong i mean fiber and undersea cables are the predominant way that we move uh bits around the globe no question uh it's going to continue to be that way no question they're just the biggest fattest pipes that we've got on the other hand satellite still has many advantages because there are things like moving vehicles ships on the ocean cargo ships which can't be reached using fiber optic cable so satellite does have a role uh the satellite guys are actually also thinking they're going to have a role in internet of things for example because there will be lots of applications where things are moving around in very rural areas where you just number one aren't connected and secondly the ground infrastructure may not support it so satellite's still important it'll still be there though you're absolutely right most of the bits around the world now depend on those undersea cables in the fiber optics you know i'm thinking of something that i became aware of maybe 10 or 15 years ago was namely it was putting uh putting a uh a device in in a container on a container ship and this device would uh would you know it would it would be important for security and i want to ask you about that um but it would also be important for uh inventory and so the shipping company or the you know the shippers would be able to tell where that container was anywhere in the world because it was it was communicating with a satellite as you say that's the only way um and as a result you know the security of what was in the container would be enhanced and likewise uh the risk of loss of the container would would be um you know would be improved um so that um there's an application seems to me that that should have should have been global and i suppose uh you're going to tell me it is global is it it's there and it's getting bigger every day i mean the growth rates for people putting sensors on devices are just astounding i mean it's double digit growth no matter where you look so it's definitely coming now the other thing that's interesting is you mentioned shipping containers one of the things we are now using shipping containers for is uh shop on the edge of the network data centers full-blown data centers with racks of computers in them self-contained powered by solar uh you know cooled they're on the spot and uh if you can get connected to a firebrock big cable that's great but there may be places where you well military applications for example you may drop one of these containers onto a battlefield communicate by satellite and so the shipping containers now become mobile data centers it's very interesting the things we can now do in terms of putting servers and computing capacity exactly where we need them and the amounts that we need them in non-traditional ways it's pretty interesting stuff yeah and you only hope the content that flows over that is is responsible content these days i'm not sure about that but let's talk about security uh you know uh of course uh we're concerned with security of of the information that's you know it's being that's being sent and received um now you know we're concerned about security of the of the equipment itself and i wonder what the and i i assume that is in the marriage because if if you have software and hardware and telecom you know capability you've got to have security so what what's the status of security on telecom in the world today never as good as we want it and the reason for that is there there are attacks on the network which you can actually do without actually doing much to an undersea cable at the bottom of the ocean you can literally put a device in the sensor on the outside of the cable and actually intercept some of the bits flowing now if they're encrypted all you know is you've got bits flowing you don't know what the stuff is then of course at the application layer there are all kinds of threats to applications and that means the in-house ones that telecom operators use to run their networks as well as all the other applications that flow over the top so it's cat and mouse game the hackers do one thing then we respond they do something else then we respond i mean it's just daily it's never ending it can't stop because there'll be new threats every day yeah and we're seeing that from russia especially so um let me let me ask what is you know you've been in a number of companies um and uh and i suppose that drove you originally to ptc uh can you talk about your own career and tell us your specialty or specialties more likely the case well i started out more than 30 years ago as a telecom journalist and i i specifically wanted to cover the business of telecom it just called me crazy it's what i like so i've been doing that and then along the way you discover that you like being a writer more than a business manager and i've been both i've been a salesperson and all that those things just don't float my boat so one day i decided well i'm gonna have to do content creation because that's what i really got into the business to do and one of the reasons that uh i switched from actually being a journalist to an analyst is it's one of the few ways you can continue to use your brain and write and interact with the industry and still make a living so basically i became a researcher and an analyst more than a journalist and you learn a lot that way you learn a lot of technology for sure absolutely so what kinds of companies have you been associated with over the years well the weird thing about being a consultant almost every large telecom in the world and now it seems most small ones make you sign a non-disclosure agreement that says amongst other things you can never tell anyone you work for us so and i i've done so many of these i don't remember which ones i've signed copies of them i just assume i can't tell you that because i don't know whether i'm under nda or not but what a wonderful answer to my question well it's just one of the realities of doing business i mean people just they don't even want you to to tell anybody that you've done work for them so yeah as a as a rule i have worked with competitive carriers upstarts startups cable companies attacking telcos more than tier one tail coast defending themselves from attack i mean that i can say well let's let's turn to ptc because you've been involved on the board of governors for some time and you've had you know participation and development of policy and of course the annual conference uh in hawaii um and um i want to know what it's like to be on the board of governors i want to know what it's like to look at the mission you know and to evolve um you know the activities of of ptc yeah so um actually i'm i'm the chairperson of the advisory council rather than being a member of the board of governors and as you can imagine the difference is advisory council we do lots of things in terms of program development and providing advice the board of governors as its name suggests really has financial and fiduciary control over everything that ptc does where we spend money how we raise money who gets hired at a high level who doesn't uh programs that we want to stop doing programs we want to launch that sort of thing and it's been really challenging this past year i sort of liken ptc to a small restaurant independently owned and the government says you have to stop serving food in your restaurant and oh by the way you guys can't even do takeout we'll let you put your food into a push cart and sell it on the street corner somewhere i mean that's the sort of financial impact that the pandemic has had and that the board of governors has had to deal with so their problems are magnified by the fact that the conference itself is our single largest revenue driver everything else that we do in terms of revenue does not match the conference if we lose the conference basically we lose the entire organization so it's been a really really hairy and challenging year yeah your answer does point out that um telecom is subject to regulation everywhere um perhaps as much or more than other areas of tech and you've got to deal with regulation in everything you do um and gee whiz that's that's a burden to start with because you have different regulations emanating from different governments and government organizations and so forth um but going going to the conference itself um i've been there a number of times i've videoed a number of your conferences i've enjoyed dealing with jason o'rourke who put me in touch with you shout out to jason o'rourke of course and um and you know i'm interested in kind of it's not only you know that it's your biggest revenue source but but the the quality the experience of being there i'd like to discuss that with you there are virtually hundreds or thousands of exhibitors um and they all pay for a booth i suppose and they bring their wares a lot of them are selling high-tech and telecommunications there are people who come from all over the world to rub shoulders and and schmooze and exchange business cards uh it is a marketplace of people ideas and high-tech uh what is it to you well it's interesting you bring that up i just wanted to make a couple of observations for those of your viewers who are literally in the islands as residents because this conference which is about three and a half to four days per year has really extraordinary economic impact on the local economy i'll give you a couple of examples and these are not official ptc comments they're mine personally because i play with excel spreadsheets but um normally in a given year over a three and a half day period the hilton itself just the hilton is going to book three and a half million dollars from the conference uh if you use a 1.5 multiplier which is what uh the bank of hawaii uses for the impact of tourism in the local economy that runs the actual economic value of those four days up to 8.75 million dollars now that only covers the people who are physically staying on the hilton property that's 200 people there are 7 600 human beings who are also at the conference and if you assume that each of those people are spending 1500 bucks which actually is pretty low for a business to business conference they're going to be spending an additional 11 million well 11.4 million dollars which at a 1.5 multiplier is an astounding 28 million dollars so that sum total over four days the economic contribution locally is like more than 37 million dollars and that's that's using a consumer multiplier i can run those numbers using the business to business conference multiplier which is 2.6 and it'll blow your mind absolutely and again not official ptc numbers i understand that we're doing a formal uh economic study of this in fact i think tourism department's doing that but it's a huge huge local driver of revenue for locals really is that is very impressive i'm so glad you mentioned that because i you know i wanted to know about that and the other thing is if you walk the floors at ptc you see a lot of local hawaii companies startup companies companies in tech of all kinds of tech and telecom they're there they're they they have a place too so you have a certain and you know what they call it a commercial exchange an economic exchange with the local economy and of course we have wanted to build that sector in the local economy since the days of john burns um and you know you help us realize that so that's a tremendous um you know contribution to the hopefully the diversification of hawaii's conomy just to have a platform for those companies yeah one of the things we started doing just last year and of course this year with the all virtual format we've got it it won't have the same meaning but my expectation is that going forward we have a part of the conference physical location called the hub and it's where exhibitors are and we have sessions that are running what we decided to do last year is open those up to the general public so that you don't have to register for ptc you can come right into that main hub area you can see all the exhibits and you can hear content most hours of the working day and that's all free for the general public and again the idea is just to try to open up what we're doing to locals to share that the knowledge we've got with them without having them have to you know pay a registration fee for something that may be of tertiary interest at least immediately yeah that's a that's a great idea because over the years you know ptc has been like a best kept secret and uh we have to we have to make sure the public knows about it not not only on the technical and content side but on the economic side of the contribution to the economy so to let people in and we'll show them does show them a lot so now here we are and it's february actually january 10th january 10th 2010 and all of a sudden there's covet and there are rumors that covet is coming to hawaii you had a bit of a scare as i recall at the conference last year by some fellow who who did have uh kovid kane was coming from china but he never he never actually got here as i recall so it was only a scare that would have been a bad thing if that happened at the january 10th conference but since then of course we've seen it you know grow to a pandemic and it certainly has affected everything since january 10th and i wonder if you could describe you know your analysis and the evolution of of your of our conference uh over the last several months and and how that affects you you know between conferences and how certainly how that affects you in the conference now coming yeah so one of the things about ptc that most people generally do not understand is if you look at the registrants the people who are going to the sessions and so forth that number might be 2 000 people or so there are actually 8 000 people physically doing something at the conference so what we do is actually sort of the tip of the iceberg is the the sessions uh four fifths of the actual activities people that are in hawaii to make deals to barter bandwidth to create deals that they want to finalize and sign contracts on in june and january in hawaii happens to be a great place because people love coming they can basically outline what their objectives are for the year where they need bandwidth where they don't data center connections they may need new routes new partners that sort of thing start the discussions in january and then sign the contracts in june so it's actually um a really important conference for the uh industry yeah and i'm just a footnote to that my experience going to various ptc conferences has been that you find people there from every country every kind of company every language and they are friendly and warm looking for connection it is just to walk the halls is a joy because you see um there's this positive camaraderie uh in the industry in science and technology it's all there you know for my money it is the best of all the conferences that come here even conferences arguably bigger this is the one that has roots everywhere and has relevance everywhere so anyway there you have that experience and presumably some of those deals that were made last january have ripened over the summer even in the face of covid but it gets pretty threatening when you have another one scheduled for this january for essentially right now a year later and i'm sure there was a meeting of the board of governors and the advisory council where somebody said wait a minute what are we going to do what happened well basically we decided for the first time in our history in more than 40 years to do a virtual conference so that there literally won't be human beings coming to honolulu to meet will be doing that using zoom and and other uh video conferencing services um and that's okay for the conference part of it but as i mentioned earlier the people who are registered to actually attend sessions might be less than 2 000 people out of the 8 000 and 800 or so that are actually going to be there most of the people that are coming are actually not wanting people to necessarily know they're there all the time they're buying and they're selling and they're doing things in suites in the hilton in other hotels all over the city and that's really the the economic impact of it it's not just the people who are registered to be in the session rooms but it's all the other financial activities happening outside those meeting rooms so what happens to the presenters this year what happens to the people who participate what happens to the general public who shared you shared the content with last year i mean how is this going to work give me a a a pretty see uh on on on what the experiences will be by the various participants well basically we are not going to have the ability to host a physical meeting for safety reasons and health reasons as everyone could guess so we'll be doing both taped and live zoom presentations during the conference the rates for the conference have been dramatically reduced all across the board because obviously it's a product which is quite different than what we're used to a lot of the sort of trading activities that normally go on will have to move somewhere else because that that just can't happen uh in this this sort of restricted venue so you know we'll we'll survive it but it is not ideal everyone's looking forward to us getting our vaccines and our health certificates and opening back up because it's just not any way this crowd likes to do business it's very very face-to-face it's human relationships uh it's it's not just that aloha thing it's people need to meet face-to-face when they're you know 80 different countries represented hundreds of companies and it's a chance for people to really get to know each other face-to-face which is you just got to do that yeah but on the other hand uh footnote to that is you're developing systems you and i suppose a number of you know zoom and video contractors developing systems that will be useful later on even after the vaccine takes hold even after the world arguably soon returns to normal and that means um that some of these systems will continue i guess uh in the way ptc does business going forward i mean for example for people who can't make it for example for speakers who for some reason are not available here in honolulu gee whiz you could you could have them appear from anywhere anytime and and that would be glorious because it would expand your ability to get content yeah absolutely and we are expecting uh greater use of zoom and other forms of uh you know virtual interactions going forward but i actually would uh probably emphasize that the people meeting people face to face is really the guts of what makes this conference so special people are just they look forward to it every year they get to meet people that they've done business with virtually uh and you just have to have the person-to-person relationships it's a starter point thing yeah or maybe a repeat starter point thing where they you know in order to make a deal involving a lot of money at some point you have to look deeply into his or her eyes and have a human trust relationship to make that agreement yeah you really need that although later on you can follow up by by remote later on when the deal is signed everything gets done [Laughter] so if i'm if i'm say an exhibitor or a member of the public or a speaker and i want to ask you about the speaker experience uh what happens i i go on the website ptc.org and i participate what is that experience like what do i have to do um you know for my part in in putting this together um a lot of it in terms of the user experience comes from the energy that you're willing to put into it we have special interest groups that are meeting all over the place all four days that are communications attorneys um women in communications we've got uh specific islanders who meet separately because they have concerns that are very very specific to them and we try as much as possible to accommodate all sorts of special interests out there the submarine cable guys are big part of the community and they have real interest in terms of the number of new cables that are going up the bandwidth that's going to be available when those the cables are going to be active and when can we sign up and who else wants to join with us and oh by the way if we do that then there's this new route that we've never been able to get access to that we think we can get to now so there's a lot of that going on as well it strikes me also that you know business is diplomacy business is business diplomacy or maybe better style citizen diplomacy so when you have these people from these 80 countries coming around some of those countries may have issues on a diplomatic level but on a business level it's different and on a social level it's different and they are you know contributing a connection if you will between various countries and making and making life better in terms of diplomatic relations around the world so this is yeah well these guys are business people and and they just want to do business and politics are there no question about it i mean telecom is a political business and it's probably worse today than it was 15 years ago but that's that's just a a barrier you have to surmount and the people though are great yeah really i agree i've met and talked with a lot of them and i agree with that completely they're a joy um so i guess uh i'm interested in um in um what what you're doing um i'm sure there's gonna be meetings at least zoom meetings of the um the management so to speak um but there'll also be opportunities for you to speak and you've spoken at various ptc conferences in the past what's your role this time actually this year what i'll be doing is moderating which is um something that actually i find harder than speaking because you don't have any way of preparing in advance you don't know what your panelists are going to be saying other than where's the general topic we're going to cover and you have to listen very carefully and then formulate questions very quickly and then once they start talking with each other you just go with the flow of what's happening i mean you just can't pre-plan that stuff so you need to be flexible and that's what we do yeah yeah i'm i'm i'm familiar with that experience um the other thing is uh okay so now there are gonna be people who still wanna make deals uh even though they're not gonna be you know pressing the flesh um or having a cocktail or a meal together they're not going to be able to do that but they still want to make deals and business requires deals and that's no no no place other than communications is that so so very clear and so how are they going to be able to do that and so you have you have you have you have um speeches you have panel programs you have various kinds of you know group group presentations one kind or another um and you probably have vendors who are trying to sell their wares because that's always the case so i assume the ptc virtual would have that too but what about making deals they're going to have little rooms i mean virtual rooms where people can get together you know and and make offers and acceptances how are you going to handle that we will i as i understand it have the capability for people to go into the private chat rooms and and talk about things probably what will happen is what's been happening for the last 12 months or nearly 12 months now and that is it's just a lot more human effort instead of going to one place where they you can start meetings at 7am and work to 7pm literally one after the other in a meeting room you've got to schedule a zoom conference and sometimes with people you've never met before so you have to do all of that long distance flirtation so everything is just taking longer i mean guys that normally don't spend all day on zoom they're spending all day on zoom because it's just harder to create those personal relationships that are so much part of the capacity agreements that people are trying to get yeah and you have to make a platform for them you have to facilitate all of that which is more than just saying go have a meeting on zoom you've gotta you know do the data around it and introduce them and and tell them where and when and this is this is a lot of uh logistics zoom type of logistics right so uh if i want to be involved um i guess it's too late to set up my myself as a speaker but if i want to be involved i want to come around and and at least view some of these panels uh and symposia um or you know you know these large i remember you talking about the public forum that you had last year there were thousands of people in there um it was very valuable it was as big as any kind of tech conference i've ever seen and so the question is how do i get in to see that i i assume i go to ptc.org that'd be a good start but what happens and how do i do that and what does it cost me um it we've never seen prices this low and the reason for that of course is the experience has got to be scaled back it's going to be online only so that human touch part which is really such a big part of the conference we simply can't replicate that online uh the session content will be there as you mentioned go to the website and you can sign up and prices will probably never be this low again [Laughter] for many reasons we hope so right and and you know finally when is it exactly what days when should i plan to make a trip to ptc.org well i recommend that you sign up now and we'll we'll be holding the conference as the website will tell you middle of january as we always do and uh you know it frankly for us it's a test we actually don't know how much of what we're doing now will continue on in the future uh everything that we learn will be evaluated as we go forward hopefully by next january we won't have to deal with this as our only platform uh we'll you'll probably see us move towards some sort of hybrid platform uh totally online for people who really can't physically make the trip but most of the you know i mentioned there were like almost 9 thousand people who came last year uh i would say at least seven thousand those people there are business reasons for them to be face to face and and zoom just isn't gonna cut it for the kinds of deals that they want to do so they'll probably be there in person and we'll do as much of the enriched uh online experience as we can and we just don't know the answers yet uh how the mix is going to change yeah you don't mind if i make a prediction do you i like to make a pretty good sure okay my prediction is you're going to learn a lot about this how to do zoom for a large conference like this and you're going to make it as as palatable as facilitated as possible for everybody involved and when the smoke clears on on on covet yes you will have a you know person-to-person conference again because that's that's your bread and butter obviously but you'll also have a lot of people who will connect with zoom so whatever you had in the past gary you're going to have more in the future that's my prediction reasonable enough i think we'd agree with you about that thank you so much gary kim pacific telecommunications conference and council uh been great to have you on the show thank you thanks jay aloha you