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Community Association Matters


Nov 17, 2020

Ana Sanchez Rivero: Hello and welcome to community association matters. The podcast that focuses on condominium and homeowner association, education throughout the state of Florida. So, my name is Ana Rivero, and I'll be your host for today.

And of course, the PA this podcast is sponsored today by Allied Property Group, as it always is, we are a full-service property management company. That's been servicing. Condominium and homeowner's association, through Southeast Florida, since 2003, as I announced in our podcast from earlier this year, we're now also, serving Southwest Florida as well.

So, if you're in the Fort Myers or Naples corridor, I think all the way up to Sanibel, give us a call. We're going to be able to help out your community as well. Today's episode. We have another sponsor with us today, which is Hotwire communications, and I'm super excited to have David join us today.

David Ramos is the Executive Vice President for Hotwire’s Southeast Florida region. David is a graduate of Trinity international university and holds an MBA from Nova Southeastern University and has even taught as an adjunct professor at Miami-Dade College. My husband went there. So, at Hotwire, he's had the roles and responsibilities all the way from VP of Consumer Sales to Regional Vice President. So, I think he's done it all, which is always the best. The way to learn in an organization. he has extensive experience in building and leading high-performance teams, and he started his career in education, which I think is always a great way to learn, to get, to start your career because you learn how to engage people and how to really, get them motivated. It's perfect for what we're doing today because. The whole purpose of this podcast is to educate board members and even community residents on some of the services and, companies that service condominiums and homeowners' associations and what they do. as your career evolved, you moved away from the education and moved into the private sector. Can you give us a little bit more information about yourself that perhaps I haven't included?

David Ramos: Sure. Thank you so much for. for having me and allowing us the opportunity, just to chat a little bit about what we do. we have a lot of synergies and we also serve some of those markets that you guys are in, in Southwest Florida.

So, we probably have some good war stories to, to share down the road. But, but yeah, I'm a local Miami native. I grew up here in South Florida, born and raised in Miami and, went to school here and, grew up here, Nolan. I've seen, the market just evolved incredibly over the last 30, 40 years and, started a family here and calling this home. This is a beautiful place to live. So, I am a Miami through and through, and now I live in Broward, in the West Broward area. But nonetheless South Florida is still in the veins. And great to see what's going on right. In our worlds, in the worlds that we operate in, with these properties and communities that we serve.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: just excited to see what's going on. Plus, what's coming our way in the future. Yeah. The, you said something that was so true, which is how much things have changed. And in the world of technology, it's like you blink and things have changed and moved along. I was looking today at the today show and they even had like auto driving planes, or they're flying planes using it to deliver cargo and that's crazy. It's amazing what they're doing. It's a little scary now. It's a little scary, but it's also a good thing. I think it's good for our future and I think it's gonna help us, but I'm digressing, right? I'm rambling on. I'm going to go ahead and share screen because you’ve forwarded to us, some information about your company and today's topic is really going to be about fiber optics. How did it, how does it work? What makes it better or different? And we're going to also talk a little bit about the comparison between the fiber optics and 5g, yeah.

Just some of the myths that have been going on between the two platforms. And I know you also sent us a video that kind of talks a little bit about, some of the issues that we're facing now, because a lot of us are working from home, because of the whole coronavirus. So, I know that there's a video that's embedded that I think is, is very informative that we'll be sharing.

So, let me go ahead and share this screen. And I appreciate everybody's patience as we, get used to our new technology. David, I'm going to go ahead and let you take the floor, tell us a little bit about the, Hotwire communications. How did you get it?

David Ramos: Sure. So, thank you. So, we started in 2000, where we're going on our 20th year in business or where we've grown up as a company. Now we're officially an adult company. And, and we've learned a lot along the way we were. Initially started in Philadelphia and grew into South Florida. Florida became our largest market, to date, and is where we currently house our headquarters. But we started focusing on providing internet and video services to apartments, condominiums, student housing, et cetera, and evolved to now be able to provide services to commercial entities like stadiums. We provide service for the Florida Panthers, the Miami Beach Convention Center, large-scale venues, as well as hotels like the Ritz Carlton, et cetera, and condominiums and homeowners' associations throughout the markets that we serve. Today, we operate in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, and then we have small presence in, other States like New York and California, but we were the first of many companies to build a fiber into the home technology and Florida specifically, which is a tremendous investment. We were, early on, one of the first to pioneer it where other competitors are traditional cable companies. I said, you guys are crazy. That you're spending way too much money. It's not necessary. No one knew that today we would be talking about self-flying airplanes and self-driving cars and everything else that we have today, right? Computers in our hands or cell phones and watches that we can talk to, like all that stuff was stuff of the movies. And so today, now everyone calls us, pioneers and geniuses and all that for what we did. But many years ago, everyone said, you guys are crazy. What are you doing?

So, we are the largest privately held communications provider in Florida. we are privately held by Kristin and Michael Karp. What you see there on screen, they've been long time telecom experts and owned several companies prior to Hotwire in the telecom space and real estate and there’s a large real estate portfolio holding as well.

So, they have a large real estate company as well on the management and asset ownership side. So, it was a good combination of mixing both worlds. We have a captive audience where we know people in, specifically in condominiums and high rises and single-family communities, were suffering with poor service, bad customer service and very antiquated technology.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: And then we had this technology on the other side that we said, Hey, this is a good combination for us, so that we can go to the next slide. Yeah. And it's funny that you talk about, the movies and technology, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but it's funny. I always thought that Hollywood had an edge or some sort of secret embedded person in the government who would tell them about what's coming in the future, because it's amazing how things that we've only seen in the movies truly are now part of our everyday lives.

I know that you're going to go into your facility and that's something I've heard a lot about. I know you guys have invited us and our staff to go to take a tour of your facility. I've heard it's amazing. I think you also invite board members because I believe our board, we have a client that we transitioned from the old platform that you were just talking about with bad customer service and bad reception. And you guys came in, you installed the fiber optics, and they haven't had a single complaint. Not one call about any issues. Nope. You invited the board to go to the facility. So, talk to us a little bit about your facility.

David Ramos: And I think it's a good segue, from that comment, is look, the reality is there are so many technologies out there that exist, the stuff that we read about and technology that we see in the movies. But the challenge is that at the ground level, when we talk about the end user. The infrastructure that we have in many of these properties, like the one you're mentioning that we know we converted over. the technology. That the infrastructure can't support that technologies. Self-driving cars, for example, they've been out for many years. It's just that our infrastructure out in the streets, the network, the connectivity that essentially gets those cars to communicate to each other and to other cars is not ready. And so, we went ahead, and we built the infrastructure that allows for all these crazy ideas, crazy technologies to be used, in the residential space. Now we have smart homes. We have refrigerators that use wifi. You can set your laundry from your phone. You can name it, there's Bluetooth technologies. There's so much inside our homes, but if you don't have a strong infrastructure, a strong internet connection, fiber fed technology, none of those technologies work well. It just creates frustration. So that's where we build our business model.

Now, where does it all come from? And that's what you're referencing, our wire technology center. So, the kids all the time, we do a lot of work with schools and nonprofits are empowering communities foundation, which is, a foundation that helps to bridge the digital divide. Kids don't have internet, they can't study, they can't do work. They're left behind. So, we do a lot of work with, and the kids always ask me, how do you guys make the internet? Where does it come from? And it's a funny thought, but the reality is it does come from somewhere. And in our case, it's from the Hotwire technology center. And this is a building a facility. It's a data center, essentially within a facility. So, it's a bunker within a data center within an office building that we bought from a bank that had recently merged with another bank.

So, we've been here now just over four years. We moved our headquarters from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale. This is off Cypress Creek Rd., and basically it houses all our core team. So, marketing engineering, construction sales, our executive team or legal team, etc. Everything is housed here. But more importantly, our data, our master data center is fed out of this facility. This is what we feed over fiber to every property that we serve. Every customer that we serve, commercial hotel, et cetera, everything comes from here. It's a category five building. So, in the event of a hurricane, your network, the network that's feeding, all our properties is always redundant and stays up. It's a tier four center. From a data perspective, we house it with our own engineers, 24/7. During hurricanes our team is inside there making sure that services stay up because we provide lifelines as well for elevators and police and fire, et cetera. We can't afford for our services to ever go down.

So, there's many carriers that come in there as well. We have a carrier hotel in there, and the whole goal is, look, if we have a center that’s redundant, it provides connection to other, data centers throughout the U S for us or in many other data centers that we operate or we lease space out of, or that are our own, and basically if something happens here in South Florida, everything just shifts elsewhere and keeps connected. Meaning you, as a resident or as a property or as a board member, never experienced the pain of being down. There has to be a very unique scenario for your service to go down.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: And I'm sorry to interrupt, but how bad in a hurricane, does that mean that your clients will still have service even during a hurricane?

David Ramos: Sure. So, there is no 100% guarantee for any provider, right? No, anyone that says they have a hundred percent uptime, run away from them quickly, but we work really hard to get close to 100%.

So, in our case, we have a rating that the industry uses, which is called a five nines, meaning that 99.999% of the time, your service is going to be up in the event of a hurricane. And actually, the last three hurricanes that we've gone through, we've been one of the only providers that have stayed up, right? So where our competitors in different neighborhoods that are hit the hardest are down or stay up as long as you have power, right in your facility, as long as FPL is working, or you have generator power, you'll have our service. And so that 99.999% of the time we're up, there are challenges, right? Property specific. If your property is wiped off the map, then no service. If you get a huge fiber cut in or power cut in front of your property, you're down, et cetera. So, there are exceptions, but we set it up where we can create as many redundancies as possible, and our main network, and then going into your property. So that if something happens, you're covered. We even go as far as if you're backup generators or backup power fails, we bring generators to your facility to power that technology. So we do that often, especially in the Southwest Florida market, where normally they get hit the hardest, but, we do everything possible to minimize any interruption in service.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: I'm going to go to the next slide, which talks a little bit about, or begins really our conversation, right? Because this is about educating board members on what fiber optics is. So, I'm going to let you roll with this because, I know you guys told me and you did this education us, but I don't remember anymore. You care is that it works right? That's the important part.

David Ramos: Quite frankly. Yes. That's all I care about.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: As managers, when we go do a board meeting, and we have to present a proposal, or we have to talk about services, we're expected to have a certain amount of knowledge about the product. And so, it's important that we as managers are educated on what you guys offer, because it's our ability to explain it to the board members and the homeowners, because they're ultimately the ones that are going to be paying for this service. So, it's important for them to know. So, fiber. Why is it different? What makes a different, how does it work?

David Ramos: Sure, the root of fiber, the fundamental component of it, is the actual wire, right? It's glass and that transmits light and unlike the other methods of delivery that exists, we have ethernet, we have co-ax, we have wireless, there's other methods that people can send you data, or in the case of our services, internet, TV, service, et cetera, fiber is the best method period so that you have wireless, you have co-ax, you have ethernet fiber is the best it's limitless. We can send you tons of information, whether you're a homeowner or whether you're the entire Brickell city center, for example, the fiber can carry as much as we want to put through it. So, from a capacity standpoint, property management hat on for a second and board member hat on, when everyone's home at the same time, especially during a pandemic or non-pandemic at six o'clock every day, or Saturdays at 9:00 AM, there isn't that bottleneck of traffic, right? Think of a highway. If you're on I-95 at five o'clock, forget about it. You're not going anywhere, but if you're on I-75, the Turnpike or highways that have much capacity you can fly through. So, fiber is that open highway that just allows traffic to go in and out without congestion. Our competitors and people that are not using fiber, pure fiber all the way through, have lots of congestion, meaning it's a poor experience when you go to use the internet support experience. When you want to watch TV, and you're paying top dollar, it doesn't matter who you're paying. You're paying top dollar for service. If you're not on fiber, there's many limitations to your service and the technologies you have in your home.

The way I like to explain it to all the boards that I deal with and all the property management companies across the market is you're paying for service. But in many cases, you're paying for a technology that's antiquated and hasn't been upgraded in many years. While our solution, fiber is essentially future proof. There's nothing better than it. So, as technologies improve, you literally only change what's on the end of the fiber, right? TV now is outdated, and you need 4k. All you do is change the TV, right? You don't have to rewire the building. You don't have to rewire the property. If you have fiber, if 4k is no longer the thing and it's 8K, we're ready. All you have to do is buy a new 8K TV, right? You don't have to rewire. I can't say the same for people that are building infrastructure differently. Other cable companies that are using old wiring.

So, at the base of it all is what can we provide infrastructure-wise throughout your properties that allows you to have unlimited connectivity, unlimited, speed. We were ranked by Netflix right now. Everyone's killing Netflix, right, on usage. We were ranked to have been ranked the fastest provider for Netflix for the last two years. Plus, that's nationally and globally. So, Hotwire's infrastructure can send you a movie faster than anybody in the entire world over the Hotwire network, if you're a Hotwire customer. So, something as basic as that, when I order a movie, how quickly do I get it versus watching the little wheel spin and we're getting to it.

So, our goal is like, we want to remove friction from your experience. We want to make sure you get what you want as quickly as you can. And that if you're working from home, if you're doing homework, et cetera, you don't feel the pain of everyone else working from home and being home at the same time.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: I'm going to go to the next slide. So, I know you touched upon it, but let's talk about, what are some of the differences between what fiber optic offers versus what the old school people, ethernet I think is what we mostly use, right?

David Ramos: Yeah. When you, yeah, you'll have a combination of, depending on which company, if you're with a phone company you're typically going to have copper or ethernet-based services. If you're with an old cable company you're already typically going to be on co-ax or a hybrid fiber/co-ax. But nonetheless it's all antiquated and has bottlenecks. So, looking at the list we, we look at not to, over technify it, here, but the basics we over fiber can provide speeds up to a gigabit per second and actually we've gone beyond that. We're actually in the process of, of deploying a 10-gigabit connection to a home, right? Two homes, residential homes, 10 gigabits is essentially what we provide at the stadiums at the Fontainebleau hotel at the convention center. So, for whomever needs, something like that, not that everyone does, but if you need it, we can provide it to you. There's people that run businesses out of their home, people that are hedge fund traders from their home, gamers. And we can provide those speeds from day one with fiber. We were actually ranked ironically, we were ranked by PC mag, which is obviously one of the gaming publications. And they do a ranking every year of all the providers and they say who's the best for gaming. Who's the best from a network standpoint. And we were actually ranked the top in the Southeast United States for them recently. All the gamers out there, if you don't live in a Hotwire property, come and see us and, make sure you do your homework first and then come and see us. There's zero loss when we talk about signal and packet loss. And that's where we're watching a show and you're using something like zoom and freezing and pixelation and things like that attributed to the signal and the wire that's coming into your home, fiber, it's almost virtually zero. is what you're losing. As that signal gets to you, it's immune on now from a property management perspective, right? In a board perspective, we look at property values and how does this improve the value of our community? The infrastructure that we're building, especially if you're on the East coast or on the West coast, if you're on the water, the water, the sea water, salt, water, corrosion, and everything that goes into living on in those elements destroys, the infrastructure. In our case, it's immune to that. Fiber is immune to that. So, it's buried on the ground. and none of the environmental factors affect that. Meaning you don't have to rewire every few years, once you do it, you're good. You don't have to do it again. It uses less power, and maintenance is minimal and because obviously it's the way we deploy the network. We don't need power at each generator site in order to provide signal, which is why we can stay up there in hurricanes where others, if they lose power, that's feeding the neighborhood, they go down. Ours is a different deployment method, and as you grow, one thing we like to build into our relationships and our contracts over time, we know that what's important today, may not be important three years from now, right? So, technology grows, demand grows. And so as you, and as an association or a property manager may say, look, a hundred megabits was great, when we signed the contract three years later, we need to improve. Once we negotiate that or talk through what that means for the association, if they say, okay, we want to be at 300 megabits, it's just a matter of turning up the juice. We don't really, in most cases have to overhaul anything. So, you can grow, you can scale without having to disrupt your operations of the property.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: I think what, to that point, for example, here in our company, what do you work from home? Or like you said, some people run a business or if you're just in, you use it directly into your business. It's important because when you have multiple people sharing that internet connection and it bogs down from a business perspective, it's very frustrating. We experienced that now. So, we're, I wish we could get this in our condo here because we need it. We need to have a gigabit per second, not the 150 that we have now, cause it just isn't enough. So that's right. To your point, yeah.

David Ramos:  I think that those numbers tend to be misleading and I, a lot of our competitors do a great job of, of throwing the word fiber around and gigabit and the speed, the numbers blow you out of the water, but what they're, what they fail to tell you is, it's stressful enough when you're in an office or when you're in a home and you're sharing it with the people in your home. Yeah, what they fail to tell you in many cases is you're sharing that connection with the entire neighborhood. So, at any given time, you're sharing that with about 300 homes or businesses all at the same time. So, imagine if you have kids at home and everyone's on an iPad and the husband and everywhere everyone's doing something online. It's straining the connection. Now multiply that by 300 homes, all doing it at the same time.

In our case with fiber, we give every home their own dedicated connection. So, what you do has no bearing on what your neighbor is doing and vice versa. So, we removed that shared aspects, giving you a dedicated connection. And then within your home, there's enough bandwidth coming in that everyone can have their own bandwidth and not feel the pain of fighting for connection.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: That's true. Even when I was working from home during the pandemic or even recently, when the kids were still not back in school here in Miami-Dade County, and we, I had to stay home with them. It was frustrating even between the three of us, because they would be doing their thing and they would be kicked out or I wouldn't be doing my thing and I be kicked out.

So, it's definitely, a plus to have a fiber off. The next line, where we talk a little bit about the differences between five G and fiber optics. So, talk a little bit about 5g exempt. It's really, Tiffany knew something that some of us know that it's out there because so the commercials right at and T or whatever, but what is it and how is it different?

David Ramos: Sure, so 5g is a fancy term for a fifth generation, right? Basically, it's the fifth generation of wireless signal, which we use on our phones essentially. That's the primary use, is for you to be able to use your cell phone in a better way. When 3g, 4g were deployed, some of the LTA technology, Facebook live and streaming, and some of those things weren't really, what they are today. So 5g, the goal was to be able to allow users on their phones the opportunity to watch videos in a better way. To have streaming sessions in a better way, Facebook live in a better way. And so 5G is essentially bringing the current networks that exist today up a level.

So, if you see a lot of the towers, as you're driving down the highway, you see a lot of the cell phone towers, et cetera. And the challenge is those signals can only go so far, and especially in areas where we have a lot of density, like downtown Miami Brickell, the beach, derails that signal. Once you get into an area like that, it's hard to reach the person on the phone that's walking down the street or sitting there having coffee. 5g, essentially the ultimate goal is to make sure that signal gets closer to the person that's using their phones so that when I'm on my phone doing Instagram or Facebook live or whatever, that I have a seamless experience. Because I'm using more data, I'm using more bandwidth to watch the video or to do business or whatever. So, what 5G essentially is in our markets, right? The markets that we cover, it's not a replacement of fiber. We actually have to power the 5g devices with fiber. So without fiber, those devices don't work. And in many cases, they're small cells and they're literally small. They're like small antennas that you'll see. You may, you'll pass by them all the time. You won't even notice, but you're seeing them on the sides of buildings. You'll see them on the rooftops of two- or three-story buildings. Basically, we're connecting that small antenna, with fiber back to the big antenna, right? Or the hub site power. So obviously in downtown, they're not going to allow us to build another tower in Miami Beach. You're not putting up another tower. So, what we do is we connect the small antenna to the big site that powers the signal and by doing that, we're bringing that connection closer to the ground, closer to where people are sitting, walking at restaurants, et cetera, to provide a better experience. It's intended for outdoor use. Obviously, it's not something that in most homes it's going to replace a traditional cable company or internet company it's intended so that when you're out and about when you're in a restaurant you can still use all of your devices the same as if you were sitting at home. Or in your office.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: And I guess that's why, look just speaking from the commercials I've seen, cause I am not into the techie thing. I'm pretty good with technology, but I'm not into it, but that's why you only see it available in certain areas because they have been able to basically put this fiber connection in this smaller antenna to hook up to the bigger antenna.

David Ramos: Correct. So, we and, the carriers we work with, the cell phone carriers, essentially, to build them out these 5g networks. Build them out for them. So they'll hire a company like us, and they say, look in downtown Miami, I want to deploy a hundred of these small cells because I need to activate, I need to turn on the 5g network in downtown, right? Miami, for example. So, what we do is we build, we negotiate with the owners of those buildings or those roofs, for roof rights, right? To be able to Mount the small cells. On the outside or above their building, we then do construction of the fiber line from that building. And that antenna over to their closest signal site, which could be a tower. It could be an office building, et cetera. Basically, what they're doing is amplifying the signal for that section. And that's typically where you're going to find the most people. Urban areas. And when there's a lot of traffic, ironically, where people are driving, you'll see a lot of that because their cars have technologies. That GPS and everything else that you use while you're driving.  So even along, congested traffic routes, you'll see a lot of 5g deployment, small cell, so we work with them. They're not replacing us and we're not replacing them. we're helping get this off the ground for them and, and make sure that everyone that buys a 5g cellular device, that it would work in these dense areas.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: So let me ask you, communities that already have your service with fiber optics. Can they add a tower on their condo to augment service or does it need to be attached? And again, I'm not techie, so please forgive my ignorance.  

David Ramos: Great question. Great question.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: Just wondering, does that mean that the homeowners in the building that have your service, are they able to then get 5g?

David Ramos: Great question. So yes, there's two scenarios. The first scenario is if you're bringing in the enhanced signal, whether it's 5g or not, but it's an enhanced signal. For example, we have a lot of condominiums that say, look inside my tower. The reception is horrible inside my unit, the receptionist is horrible, help us within my building to get better signal. That's not necessarily a 5g, but it's amplifying the cellular signal for the carriers. So, if you're suffering as a property within your building, as individual residents, board members, et cetera, and you need to amplify the signal. Yes, you can install a what we call a DAS system, distributed antenna system, where basically the same concept as the 5g. But in this case, we bring the signal from the carrier into your building inside, and then they install it throughout and amplify the signal. Not every property is a candidate for it. The carriers have to say, yes, it meets these criteria. And then we do the work on behalf of the carrier or with the carrier, eh, because we already have fiber inside the building. So half the battle was already in there. So that's, if you want to. Yeah. So that's, if you want to improve the signal for your residents inside your property, right?

The other aspect, if you happen to have a property that meets the criteria, as far as height, where you're located, et cetera. Some of the carriers do pay you as the property. They would pay the association or the, the developer, the owner for the right to mount their device on the roof. But that is to feed the neighborhood that's to provide a better signal for everyone outside of the building. So that you'd become an extension of their network. But if you meet the qualifications, they do pay, they do pay a fee for that. Sometimes they pay a monthly fee, sometimes a one firm fee, a one-time fee, but, but if you do fit the profile and you're a good candidate, there definitely is some revenue opportunity for the association in that scenario.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: Yeah. We have several communities that the antennas on their roofs. Yep. Yep. Okay. Do you want the video before we get it going?

David Ramos: Sure. So this is one, we've to see a lot of questions come up from properties and association property management companies and associations, as far as, hey, what are you? What's really different about you versus everything else that's new in the market. And so, this particular technology, you're going to hear a lot about it, especially in the downtown urban areas and it explains the differences between why and how we deliver and how it works versus what our competitors are doing in this space. But you'll hear a lot of this, especially if you're in a high-rise building, these folks would probably approach you at some point to say, Hey, we'll give you this kind of service, but we want to make sure everyone understands the difference between that and then having a dedicated fiber connection.

Video Shown

Ana Sanchez Rivero:  Wow. That was a really informative video. Thank you for sharing that. I think I learned a lot from it.

I have a quick question. Let's say that we have a client and they are interested in learning more about your services and how to bring the services into their community. And I was writing down questions earlier, waiting for this segment, or this part in our segment to come about, because I wanted to know, is this something that you can only do at construction?

And I know the answer is no, because you just did it for us in another community, but what is the process like for those who are thinking, this might be something we want to explore.

David Ramos: Sure. So, we do a lot of new construction. We probably do about 70% of the new construction, the markets we serve, but the primary source of growth for us as a business is going in and what we call overbuilding. A community where they may not be satisfied with their current provider, so their contract ends, they negotiate a new contract with us, and then we bring our infrastructure into the community. The first thing is, obviously, we want to make sure that all the, board members, property management, personnel understand everything outside of the service offered to the product, the internet, the TV, the voice, and the security, those are obviously at the core. We want to make sure you understand everything else that we bring to the table. As a community, tours of our facility is important. So, you see our network operations team, our customer service, what's going to essentially operate your community.

Second. We love to connect you with other properties that have gone through it already and hear directly from them. What was your experience? Good, bad, or ugly? Your feedback? What should I look out for? We do tours of those communities. We have many communities that say, look, bring any of your clients here and we'd gladly show them how it went. We can show them a demo and they love telling the story because, for them, they were able to take their community and take an outdated, legacy system and now take their community to the next level from a technology perspective. So, it's a great, bragging, right? For them to say, look at how much more advanced our community is today because of what we did. So, we have a lot of referrals and references that can serve and that's on the board level and at the property management level. So, once you've gone through all that, kicking the tires and seeing how it works and all that, then obviously, we go through the negotiations of the business term contract, and once that's out of the way and we have everything is in-house, so we move pretty quickly. Our attorneys literally sit right next to me. We get negotiations done quickly. We understand time is money, especially if you have outside counsel. So, we want to make sure it's quick and affect that we work with all the attorneys that are in property management and association law. we already know what each side is willing to give on. So, it cuts through a lot of the, a lot of the clutter. Once we finish that piece, then we go live on construction and we've done over 600 conversions from other providers to us, meaning we are the company that has done the most conversions in our space. Though most are co-ax to fiber or something else to fiber in our space, we're the experts. We have property management or excuse me, project management teams, assigned throughout the entire project. They basically live on site. They deal with the resident communications. They set up the accounts directly with the residents. They provide weekly updates. They manage the engineers, the construction folks. And then we do the in-home installations. Once we do the installs, we have a team of educators that do virtual or in-person training on how to use it and make sure everyone's comfortable with everything we've done. The minute we leave the home everyone is a gigabit community. Everyone is a gig, a gigabit customer, gigabit home. Everyone is literally, within hours of us being there, now upgraded to the best-in-class service available. A smooth process depending on the size of the community, can range anywhere from four months to a year, depending on the size, how many units are in the community. But it's a very smooth process. And, and we have many teams that are involved to make sure that it goes well for, especially for the property management side. Cause you're the ones that are taking the heat on the project side of it. So, we work hand in hand with you guys as well.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: I have to say that we did, have that, and one of our communities and I was very impressed. not because you're here because. Where's your podcast that I think that, maybe we are doing the podcast because of the good service that was provided. I can say that for, from a property management perspective, from a board perspective and from a homeowner perspective, that it was a very easy transition. We had very few problems, if any, at all. And we had no complaints from the residents whatsoever and we've had no complaints from the. Residents since then. And prior to you taking over, it was a nightmare. We would get complaints all the time. So, I see that you guys have one too. We just choice award from the Florida Community Association Journal as we have. And I know it's hard to get this because it's people that vote for. So, tell us a little bit about that.

David Ramos: Yeah, so this is, this was a very special one for us. Again, we've been working in the community management and association world for over 15 years. And, and we understand that dynamics, it's a very tough, world to work in this well, right? It's non-stop, fast pace and demands constantly grow. They don't go down. So, for us to have won this award by, I think, in the space where the demands are so high, it just, it was extra special for us. So, we're very proud of this and all the other awards. We were recognized as the independent operator of the year, by Cable Fax, which is, in our industry, it's the equivalent to the Community Association Journal, and, and for us, it just brings home that everything that we were doing over the years, where everyone was calling was crazy, and you guys are, you don't know what you're doing, you're spending too much money, you're doing this, you're doing that. It paid off. We've built a model that everyone else now is trying to follow. Which is why you hear, fiber and you hear a gigabit, you hear it now everywhere and it's because of the work that we did. And we've been, we're not the biggest, we're not the smallest we're like that annoying little fly that just won't go away until we get it right. and we're proud of our team. Our team is incredible. Everyone from pre-sales all the way to operations, engineering, HR. You name it. Everyone understands what it takes to provide quality service, white glove service to our properties. And, and we don't take it for granted. it's embedded in what we do.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: So you're just like us. We've won the award seven years in a row, and for us, that is definitely the most rewarding of all the recognitions that we've received over the years. 

So you're, we're going to, I know we're wrapping this up, let's go over the next couple of slides, but you're the fastest growing, company in the Southeast.

David Ramos: Yeah. Have we, so this is one that, another very, very important accomplishment for us. this is they're basically ranking. The fastest internet companies, right? How fast your connection is to the end user, across the us. And for us to see that ours was ranked the fastest in the Southeast United States, Maine, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, et cetera. In comparison, look at the names on the bottom, the multi-billion-dollar companies that we compete against that are a thousand times our size. This was a huge accomplishment for us that we literally left them in the dust and our teams were so proud of the work they did to help us win this. So, a huge accomplishment, if you're a business and you're a commercial client and you see this is something that's important to you as someone that says, okay, I'm paying Comcast and then, and look at where they're at. I want to be with Hotwire. Yeah, we'll sign you up. Don't worry. Take care of you.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: I was looking at it and I'm like, what? Oh my God, because that's me.

David Ramos: Don't worry.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: So, I think we've covered that anything that maybe, I'll this is maybe something else you want to talk about. Maybe you were alluding to this earlier.

David Ramos:  Yeah, again, this industry publication cable facts, they come up with awards every year and they say, who are the best cable operators in our case where cable, internet, and phone company, and they rank us. And this year we won the independent operator of the year. in our industry, there are hundreds of operators across the US, so to be selected and, just be ranked at the top of almost every category was incredible. Kudos to our team. Again, I can't stress it enough, our secret sauce, while we have great products and great technology are the people that are getting it done day in and day out.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: Just like us. So, I thank you so much for joining us today. Hopefully we can do another one in the future on another topic. I truly appreciate the time you've spent with us and educating us a little bit about fiber optics and what makes it different and how your company is the leader in that. So, I think that's extremely helpful. Anything you want to say before we close out?

David Ramos: Yeah. I, first of all, thank you. This was fun. You guys are awesome and again, I can't stress enough, you're one of the best management groups we deal with. You guys are just professionals all around and know how to run your shop, which is makes our life easier day in and day out.

Second, I would say to all your listeners, the technology we bring to the table, it may seem like it's way out there and may seem and sound like, oh my God, it's so expensive, we can't afford it. It's not, this is extremely attainable, extremely, we understand we still need to compete. You have a budget that you have to beat every year. So we understand we need to be a reasonable price, but it's the upgrade that every community needs and it looks for, it's only going to get worse, right? From a technology standpoint. Cars are driving themselves, 5g, 6g, you name it everything. Think cars will be flying? Yeah, you don't want to be left behind because you chose to stay with a sub-par offering or product or company. Give us a call, give us an opportunity to at least give you a technology assessment, just tell you what your options are. No obligations. Just, hey, you're part of the family. We love to educate people on what's out there. Would love to give you a technology review and just tell you what your options are, and, if when the time comes that you're looking for alternatives, please keep us in mind. You'd be surprised how easy it is for us to get this done for you.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: So where can they reach you?

David Ramos: So, you can call me directly. My number is (786) 431-7652. You can also email me at dramos@hotwire.com or you can check out our website, www.hotwirecommunications.com. There’s tons of content videos, testimonials, you name it, anything you need in there to find out what the story is behind the scenes.

And obviously Anna, please share my info if anyone reaches out. We're a local company with ambitious and huge goals. And we just want to make sure we get this message across to everyone. So happy to visit, happy to do a virtually, grab a coffee, and conference either, whatever it takes.

Ana Sanchez Rivero: Sounds good. I thank you again. And I'll definitely, we always do an accompanying blog, with the podcast and the video, and of course we're going to stream it on our website and on social media pages. Hope you can do the same. We will.

Listeners. I want to thank you guys again for joining us. I hope, like in all of our podcasts and videos, that you learned something. That I liked, the fact that we incorporated, some slides into this, and hopefully you got to learn a little bit about fiber optics and you might. Considering doing it for your community. I did. I agree with you David, a hundred percent. I am surprised that it is actually in line with what other communities are paying for internet and cable. Our thing it's definitely attainable, and guys stay safe and be well. Excellent. Thank you so much.