Waves with Wireless Nerd
Join me for a weekly look into what's making waves in tech and the wireless industry! What's new? What's now? What's next?
Waves with Wireless Nerd
Switching things Up: E-Rate Changes, Industry Acquisitions, and Wireless Insights (& a new job!) from the Front Line
Ever wondered how a court ruling could reshape the landscape of technology in education? Join me, Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, as I unpack the recent Fifth Circuit Court decision that shakes the foundations of the Universal Service Fund. This isn't just a legal matter—it's a critical issue for K-12 schools and libraries nationwide who depend on affordable tech access through the E-rate program. We reflect on the wider implications this ruling could have on educational institutions already stretched thin, and consider the potential impact on tech procurement and maintenance.
But it's not all challenges and uncertainties. Celebrate with us as we mark one year of the Waves podcast and the exciting acquisition of ISP Supplies by Wav, a move that underscores the camaraderie and innovation within the wireless industry. Get a front-row seat to the industry buzz and insights into what's on the horizon, from Mobility Field Day 12 in San Jose to the rising tech trends for 2025. Amidst industry insights, I share a personal career update following my layoff from Cisco, navigating through the ever-evolving wireless landscape. Tune in for a mix of industry insights, personal stories, and reflections on what lies ahead.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Everybody. It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and we are celebrating one year of the Waves podcast. This is episode, I believe, number 51 or 52. Either way, it's been one year and we're so excited. Cue the applause yay, it's been fantastic. It's been such a cool year of growth, getting this thing off the ground and working with it day in, day out, week in, week out.
Speaker 1:Missed a couple of weeks here and there. It's been a hectic couple of weeks. I'm a little under the weather so I've been a little hesitant to record, but I figured there's so much happening right now that it was worth jumping on real quick and having a couple of conversations about. So if you're joining us on YouTube or on X or on LinkedIn or on Instagram, please feel free to drop a comment, say hello, etc. Etc. What a week, man. Lots of stuff. The last two weeks have been kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:So if you don't know me too well, then you don't know that politics are like my sports. I'm not really. I follow the Astros. Try not to follow the Cowboys, because they just break my heart over and over and over again. So what I do like is I like politics and regardless of the outcome of the politics. I enjoy what's going on. So I've spent the last couple days really trying to understand what's going to happen over the next four years and what that means for us, what that means for me and what that means for you, and what that means for our customers and what that means for people that are in this industry doing something. And I guess we can lead off with that. There's one thing that's affecting us here in Texas, I think a little bit more than some of the other states, and it's kind of like a second layer on top of what's already going on.
Speaker 1:So let me pull up an article real quick here so that we can see, so I can show you what I'm talking about. And if you're watching on the video, I've moved my lighting from here into the studio. We've redone the studio. My wife and I have redone our podcast studio. We've got some new gear going in there. It's going to look spectacular. My wife and I have a podcast that we do, so we're revamping that thing. So I apologize if the lighting is a little bit harsh. Maybe I don't look best, but whatever, you know I'm not here. I've got a face for radio. They say a face for radio.
Speaker 1:So what I was going to talk about, though, is E-rate, and what happened a couple of weeks, months ago, is something that I covered on the show, and that's that the Fifth Circuit Court rules that the USF fund, the Universal Service Fund, is unconstitutional, and so that's why I got up on the screen. Right, this is July 25th. So seven six months ago, five months ago, right, this is July 25th, so you know seven six months ago. Five months ago, they said that the FCC and everything that they were doing to put money into the Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional. Now there hasn't been an exact ruling on it yet, so everything is business as usual for K-12 and for education in the United States, but everyone was kind of on pins and needles, trying to understand what was going to happen with the election and what the outcome of the election and the race for Congress, for Congress people look like, for the Senate, everything everything came into play here, so if you don't know what the USF is and you're unaware, I'm going to try and break this down real simply and you can research it, because I might be wrong, but I'm going to get pretty close. I've been doing this for a while, so hopefully I don't get it too wrong.
Speaker 1:Basically, the USF is a kitty, a fund that's put together and it's raised from a fee that's attached to your mobile devices and your phone lines and whenever you pay this fee it goes into this pool and that fee is then used for E-Rate all across school districts and libraries across the United States. And essentially what happens is E-Rate, which is this discount program for hardware. It's not necessarily a discount program, but what it does is it provides an offset cost for schools and libraries and educational institutions to procure telecommunications and telecommunications and internet and network connectivity equipment. Long story short, all of the Wi-Fi and the network devices that are in any K-12 school in the United States that's a public school are more than likely paid for by E-rate 80% or so 90% paid for by E-rate. So what this means is that if this goes away, if E-rate goes away, that is going to severely impact the amount of technology that school districts can buy.
Speaker 1:If your city is anything like my city in the United States, here in South Texas, we already have a budget problem. We already have issues with school facilities and with paying teachers what they deserve and paying administrators what they deserve. We already have issues. If you remove E-rate, then technology will be so drastically expensive that it will be almost impossible for educational entities to keep up with regular technology cycles, not to mention just procuring new stuff and opening up new schools, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So there's pros and cons of both sides. I don't see any other pros. I'm not going to lie. I'll let politics seep into this one a little bit. I like that this happens. I like that there is a government program that helps offset the cost of technology for school districts. Now, whether it's E-rate or not, I like the idea that the government at large helps out local school districts. So I'm sure that there is something there for a replacement for it if and when it goes away.
Speaker 1:But the issue is that if it's just pulled out of the hands of the educational institutions now, would they have to go spend millions of dollars to refresh their network equipment? Or they have to supply iPads or Chromebooks or tablets or whatever it is, to students so that they can continue to learn? E-rate is a significant part of that, not to mention the internet access that actually connects the schools to the network. So if E-rate goes away, it's going to create an issue. Technology refresh cycles will dwindle. Technology sales might be affected and when you think about the impact that that has at a student level or at a classroom level, the number one place where people cut costs in schools is they get rid of people. That's like HR is the number one thing. So if E-rate goes away, what impact is that going to have on teachers?
Speaker 1:Because less teachers, larger classroom sizes, less technology going into the campuses it's a big deal, and the reason that it's important specifically in this election is because of this guy, ted Cruz from Texas, ted Cancun Cruz as we call him down here in South Texas. If he ends up running the Senate Commerce Committee, ted Cruz is the guy that is not a fan of E-rate. If you go back and you look at what he did in the past and this is from the Benton Institute, if you can see it on my screen here if you go and you look and you see what he did, he's the guy that said, hey, usac's role has shielded the FCC from accountability. Usac's transparency and tool oversight is increasing overhead costs and the USAC has a history of poor performance. So Ted Cruz has asked to examine the following questions Does the FCC current designation of USAC as a permanent USF administrator, comply with federal law? What is the USAC budget and planning process? What are they doing with USF? What are they doing with E-rate?
Speaker 1:Cruz was reelected in the state of Texas. There was a gentleman named Colin Allred that was running against him. That did not succeed, so Cruz has now been reestablished. Cruz is from the state of Texas. That AT&T is also part of the state of Texas, so we could go look at lobbying dollars if we want to, but essentially this creates an issue from an E-rate perspective and that's why I wanted to bring it up, not to talk politics Again. It's not important what party he's a part of. What's important is that this is a person who is critical of USAC, usf and E-rate funding.
Speaker 1:And now that it's been brought in front of the Court of Appeals and it's been you know that's what this other article says. It says that it has been deemed as unconstitutional. For now, what does it mean? It's unclear. We're fairly certain this will not jeopardize E-rate funds for the 2024 to 2025 school year. This is from the Superintendents Association. In July they said this.
Speaker 1:There are three scenarios the decision could be applied nationally, meaning all USF programs would be halted. The decision could be applied only to the Fifth Circuit, which is Texas, louisiana and Mississippi, and the decision is stayed depending upon appeal process to the Supreme Court. But that all assumes that our government stayed the way that it was. The government is not going to stay the way that it was. The government is not going to stay the way that it is today. Come January, a couple things are going to change, and one of those might be that Cruise gets put in front of that.
Speaker 1:This is an issue y'all. This is seriously an issue for anybody in technology, for all of you that work in education and technology I know you already know about this, so I appreciate you just listening to this part but for anybody who doesn't know anyone who's on the equipment manufacturer side, who's not paying attention to what's going on, this is going to severely impact the number of shipments that go into educational entities, should something like this come up. So be aware, keep your eye on it. It's not the best scenario. And then in Texas there's a whole other system that our governor is trying to push or promote, which is the school voucher program in the state of Texas. And if school vouchers do in fact succeed in the state of Texas. That's even more money that's going to be taken out of the public school districts in the form of vouchers giving people the ability to choose where they spend their money, which you know hey, it's again not political, that's entirely up to you. We can vote for it, we can not vote for it. But the idea is that you get a voucher. So all the tax money, all the tax dollars that you pay into the school district, they usually just stay within the school district.
Speaker 1:In the state of Texas, the governor is saying well, if I want my kid in private school, I should be able to take that money that I'm spending and get a voucher for it and take it down the street to the private school and say here, let me offset the cost of private school so I can get a different type of education than I get at regular public school. So if that indeed happens and the rise and prominence of charter schools in the state of Texas, those two things combined are one of those perfect storm scenarios where we're already going to be losing funding because of E-rate hopefully not. And second, if school vouchers come through, we're going to be losing even more funding in our public school systems, which is tough. So I talk about this again, not politically, but from the perspective of technology. What does this mean for the future of technology in schools, in K-12, in higher ed, in libraries? It's something to be aware of when you're making purchasing decisions. It's something to be aware of when you're looking at renewing contracts and when you're looking at what your support structure is going to look like over the course of the next couple of years. Again, the American Association of Superintendents says it's not something to worry about for 24-25, but come September-October of this next E-rate cycle, it's something that everyone in that space is definitely going to be watching. So I thought it was worth mentioning because that's happening, man, that's really happening.
Speaker 1:There's a few articles that have popped up and let me see if I have one of them open, but it was essentially. It was what a Trump administration means for wireless, and there's a lot there. I don't want to unpack that one right now, but there's a lot there. Regarding the FCC, open spectrum or reuse of spectrum, allocation of spectrum. There's a lot that's happening there. We're not even going to talk net neutrality or any of that stuff, but just know that there's a lot that's going on. This election is going to have some impact overall.
Speaker 1:So, that being said, let's move on to something else. There have been some really cool acquisitions in the last two, three weeks, and it's really cool because it's not just acquisition, it's consolidation. The first one that I want to give a shout out to is Motive Companies has announced the acquisition of GXC. Now, gxc is somebody that you might not have heard of, but someone that I've been following for the past two years or so, because they're doing some really cool stuff in private 5G and private 4G spaces, specifically for renewable energy and IoT replacement inside factories and industrial spaces, and to see them get gobbled up so early was kind of cool. So GXC has reached an agreement to be a part of Motive Company as a leading provider of renewable energy and infrastructure solutions, and that's really cool. That's great for them. Bob Istwan, ceo of Motive, says many of us on the leadership team, myself included, have been personally invested in GXC since its early days, witnessing firsthand its growth and innovation. So GXC is based out of Austin, texas, got some good friends that work over there and they do some really neat stuff. They provide the orchestration software on the back end. Usually it's a piece of Bicel's equipment on the front end that's doing all the radio stuff, but there's some really neat things that they're involved in. So kudos and congratulations to the team over at gxc and motive on the acquisition. That's really cool. You know what's even cooler than that texas company from college station texas?
Speaker 1:One of my, one of my favorite companies to do business with in the entire industry isp supplies has just been acquired by absolutely one of my favorite distributors in the wireless industry. Wave has acquired ISP Supplies. There's a personal story that I have here about Wave and about Norm and about everybody that's over there and what they were able to do for me when I was just getting my first business started and what they were able to do for me when I was just getting my first business started. As the story goes, I needed some credit to purchase the equipment to do my first deployment when I decided to kick off my own company and Norm went to bat for me and he helped me. If it wasn't for Norm I wouldn't have been able to kick off my consulting company. I've told everybody that story. Norm is such a good dude and ISP Supplies the team at ISP Supplies have been Johnny on the spot with getting equipment in my hands specifically for the deployments that I've done and I know that for years Steve and the team at ISP Supplies have been that same way with everybody else.
Speaker 1:These are absolutely two wonderful organizations. I'm so happy for them. I'm so happy that the industry is going to reap the benefits of this. So it's just really really, really cool. You know the whole team. Shout out to the whole team over there Cousins, zach and, of course, norm man. I'm so happy for you guys. So kudos to Wave for picking up just an incredible group in ISP Supplies. It's so neat, so happy for them. It's always more fulfilling when you see two people that you really like coming together. Right, that's pretty neat and it's a great. I mean that whole entire industry, wireless and it's a great. I mean that whole entire industry. Wireless distribution is just so great. I mean there's such a good group of people there.
Speaker 1:Wincom, scansource, you know worldwide. You know it's funny, not worldwide, but I was talking to someone about the Wireless Without Limits cruise the other day. I don't know. Does anybody remember that? Does anybody remember Wireless Without Limits? Let's see if I can bring it up. It was a cruise that the Wisps and all the people that would. It was from Double Radius, they would do it. They would put together this cruise called Wireless Without Limits and it would take a bunch of wireless nerds and stick them on a cruise ship and these guys did the independence of the seas Five nights cruising from Fort Lauderdale to Haiti, to Jamaica, networking with other WISPs. It was just a really cool conference. I never got the chance to go and this is back from God. I don't even know the domains I haven't registered anymore. This was back from 2016. But Wireless Without Limits was just such a neat thing that Double Radius did that whole group of wireless distributors, tesco included and old Hutton Communications shout out to the old team at Hutton. Just such a fun group of people all together fighting over that market space Not even fighting. It's such a friendly group, man. So to see ISP Supplies and Wave coming together, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Let's see what else we got going on this week. There's so much man. I've not even talked about any crazy stuff yet. Also, if you are thinking about attending WLPC in Phoenix, make sure that you go online, let's see. I think it's still available. You can vote for the sessions that you want to see. Let me see if I've got the link here, and this is the best part about this. Let's see, voting is open from. I don't know if it's listed on here, but voting is open 6th November to 21 November.
Speaker 1:Okay, so check this out. There has got to be a link here somewhere. Let me see if I can find it. Check this out, there has got to be a link here somewhere. Let me see if I can find it. Let's see if I can look up WLPC Phoenix Voting. No, it's not. There's no. Oh, hold on, here we go. Look, we'll just jump on X with Mr Parsons here and the survey is right here. If you follow Keith R Parsons, go to at Keith R Parsons or look for the WLPC hashtag on X. You can see this.
Speaker 1:And so the presentations for consideration. There's 111 of them, which is pretty awesome. Okay, here we go 111 presentations for consideration and you can cycle through these. You can look and see the ones that you're interested in. And then, once you see the ones that you're interested in, then there's a link also where you can go complete the survey. I've already done mine, but if you go in and you look at it, you can fill out that survey and this is where you get to vote on what you want to see at WLPC. This is absolutely the most important part of WLPC, in my opinion. This is the part where everyone got a chance to submit an article or to submit an abstract, and now people get to vote on it.
Speaker 1:Does it matter what AP you buy? The 2025 edition by Wes Purvis. How about? Don't Wait Automate. How about? Let's see Jennifer Manella Dragonblood Revisited why your Wi-Fi Network is Still Vulnerable, but then you have all kinds of stuff like HackRF Port. Jennifer Manella Dragonblood Revisited why your Wi-Fi Network is Still Vulnerable. But then you have all kinds of stuff Hack RF, portapak for Wi-Fi Expert. Come on, these are great ones. Take a look at that.
Speaker 1:Go see what's happening with WLPC 25 in Phoenix. Go get your votes out there. Get your voice and your votes heard. All right, what else we got going on? Top Tech Trend trends for 2025. This is a pretty cool article.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot happening and obviously everyone's saying AI, ai, ai, ai seems to be the big one, but there's also some pretty interesting things down here. As you scroll down, 24% said robotics, and then, if you scroll down here even a little bit further, this was fascinating to me. It talked about 37% of technology leaders are considering implementing humanoid robots into operation, while 35% expect to have implementation of humanoid robots started and 18% have them fully implemented into operations in 2025. Okay, I haven't thought about this at all until I was watching the new video from Boston Dynamics. Oh, my God, did you guys see this, the Atlas video? Let's see if we can load it up.
Speaker 1:This dude, this Atlas robot, does some pretty neat stuff and I hadn't thought about it until I saw his little antenna sticking out of his head. So if you look at the screen here, you can see it's an Atlas robot working fully autonomous and it's taking out sections of metal and it's moving it from one location to another. And basically they told the robot hey, here's the location of all the stuff, you go over there and you figure it out and it's doing it. I wonder what type of latency and what type of connection these robots are gonna need. How much data are they processing? Real-time visual data, real-time telemetry data? How much of that is happening on the robot itself and how much of that is being validated or checked or used via a wireless connection? And if you're asking this robot to do something, what does that connection look like? So if anyone has any experience in this, let me know, because this was fascinating to me, really trying to understand what the wireless connectivity of these robots is going to look like. Are they 5G driven? Are they 6G driven? Are they Wi-Fi driven? Are they LoRaWAN driven, I wonder. So I thought I would share that with you.
Speaker 1:That new Atlas robot's pretty neat, but when you look at the statistics of the number of people that are looking at these humanoid robots, 37% of technology leaders are considering implementing the robots and 18% expect to have them fully implemented. Wow, I mean, what do we need from a Wi-Fi perspective? Granted, the other top tech trends are, as you can imagine, ai and AI and AI and security for AI. There's lots to take in there, but this is a great little breakdown. Rcr Wireless News covers it, but it's the IEEE's annual survey. If you just Google IEEE global survey, twice as many technologists expect AI to be the most important tech of 2025 compared to other areas. So 58% say AI, 26% cloud computing, and then there's that 24% robotics down there. So lots of things are happening in the AI space.
Speaker 1:Speaking of the AI space, let's click on the article, let's click on the blog. There it is. Cisco is introducing the new Wi-Fi 7 access point AI, ai, ai all the stuff behind the scenes you know I was lucky enough to get to work with the teams over there for a little while last year and really see what they were doing, and to see a lot of that come to fruition is so cool. The 9176 and 9178 APs are pretty beefy man, if you look at what they're doing. They're implementing some of the work that was done, not just the AIRM stuff, but the wireless health component and the backend AI that's happening on the Meraki dashboard is really, really cool. So now also, I saw that these Wi-Fi 7 APs have Cisco Spaces included of every wireless subscription. So, out of the box, it says you'll have access to rich AI, 3d mapping, dynamic IoT services, precise asset tracking and more. So one of the things that Cisco does is you can identify where the APs are. The APs can identify where each of the other APs are, but that was only a feature available in Spaces. Well, now that Spaces is part of this, that's pretty cool, not to mention all the other bells and whistles that they've loaded in to these devices. There's Mr Lawrence Wang down there on the bottom, senior VP and General Manager, there are some really cool tech specs to these APs that are out there, so take a look at them If Cisco is your thing. These new Wi-Fi 7 APs are pretty substantial and they've got some really cool functionality If you want to learn more about it.
Speaker 1:Next week they're going to be presenting at Mobility Field Day 12. Mobility Field Day 12 is taking place in San Jose Sorry man, my nose is just going today. Let me see if I can bring up the page here. Mobility Field Day 12 happening next week Wednesday the 20th and Thursday the 21st. Niall and Cisco are presenting myself. Daryl Deroja, cheryl Connell, Kerry Culp, kerry from Velespan what a cool. I love Velespan. Lee Badman, mark Houts, ron Westfall good old Ron Ron, the Analyst man I love listening to that dude talk. Scott McDermott, troy Martin all of us are going to be either there or virtually there, but really expect Cisco to talk about what this new device is, some of the benefits of it and what it means. So if you're looking for more information on that, please tune in next week for Mobility Field Day.
Speaker 1:It's going to be interesting to see what Niall has to say too, especially now that the heat's been turned up, with Meter doing all the things that Meter does. Is Niall going to step up and compete with Meter? Are they stopping where they are? Are they moving in a different direction? Are they going to deploy CBRS the same way that Meter is? We don't know, but we will find out next week. That should be pretty cool.
Speaker 1:What else? What else? Boost Mobile says it's ready to rumble. That's an interesting story. Basically, boost Mobile started as this MVNO Mobile Virtual Network Operator, using equipment from other companies, using towers from other companies Verizon, at&t, t-mobile, whoever it is and now they've started to build out their own 5G network. But what's different about what they did is they built their entire 5G network on O-RAN or Open RAN infrastructure, and because they built it on open infrastructure, that allowed them to move faster than the people that were on these closed architectures. And so now they've been deploying so much 5G that they're saying well, look, we started as an MVO, but now we're achieving incredible speeds and we're going to start cranking out these service plans that are 25 bucks a month for the life of the service plan. Going to start cranking out these service plans that are 25 bucks a month for the life of the service plan, and so they've got a marketing campaign that kicked off in july. It is pretty cool to watch.
Speaker 1:Fierce wireless did a great little write-up here about boost mobile and then being ready to rumble if I could get rid of that big advertisement. Let's see where's their, their prepaid ban, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A new class study talking about how great they are. Let's see second quarter 7.3 million subscribers Crazy, right, that's a lot. Anyway, they have an advertising campaign. That's pretty awesome. But if you want to take a look at what Boost Mobile is doing, it's crazy to think that there could all of a sudden be another carrier in that carrier space, because it seems like it's already a little bit crowded. But I mean, then again, we only have three options. Right, in the States you've got three main carriers, so having Boost Mobile come in is going to be pretty great. Oh, let's see what else we got going on. Voting for WLPC, we talked about that. Tech Trends we talked about that Standing desks don't do squat, according to a new study, and TechCrunch picked up this article, as have another couple of ones where, over the years, startups have gained traction by designing, making and selling standing desks.
Speaker 1:Where Apple CEO Tim Cook called sitting the new cancer, but a Washington Post study of more than 83,000 adults found that standing for more than two hours a day not only doesn't protect against cardiovascular risk, but it also heightens an individual's risks of circulatory problems, including varicose veins, abnormally low blood pressure and blood clots. Standing only burns nine extra calories per hour. They said. Sitting too much is problematic, so the idea is to get up every 30 minutes and make sure you move your body. But overall, standing desks, it looks like they might go the way of the open office plan or the remote worker plan, I don't know. It seems like we're going through these cycles of everything. Oh, that's a great idea, maybe not. Let's go ahead and bring that back in. So standing sitting might not be the new cancer. Sorry, tim Cook. Oh, what else we got? I think that's about it. Wave is quiet and all the other things you know.
Speaker 1:I was slipping through the news. Let's see what I have. Look, let's go crazy here. Let's see what I have open on my tabs. You guys want to scroll through my tabs? Ieee study, gxc Ah, look, it's me on Instagram. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Wireless Without Limits. No, that was about it, man. I think that's all I got for this week. It's been a crazy week. There's some personal stuff that I have going on that I have alluded to online, but I'm not going to give up the goods just yet. But Monday I am starting a new gig. I'm very excited about this. This is the part that I'll talk about.
Speaker 1:I've spent the last nine months or so. I got the layoff notice from Cisco in January and they kept us on board till March and they gave us a really cool package and I've spent that time really starting to look at what's happening in the industry and analyze what's going on and really see where I think this industry is going and then combine it with my personal goals and what I want to do. And there's been some good opportunities that have popped up and I've seen some of them through. I've jumped on planes, I've flown out, I've interviewed with people, I've sat through really long meetings. I've sat through pitches and presentations from every level you can imagine, from little startups who are trying to make their name to people who could just give me a whole bunch of equity and they just really want my help get a business going, and big companies that are trying to make dynamic shifts in the market or dramatic dynamic shifts in the marketplace.
Speaker 1:And after going through all that, I would say that I've learned a couple of different things. One is I would jump on LinkedIn and I would find things that I thought, oh man, that's interesting. And I would crank that apply button and send out a resume and say, hey, if you're interested, let's at least have a conversation, keep my options open, right, dude? I don't know what's on my resume and I'm probably not a really good resume writer. I don't know what's on my resume and I'm probably not a really good resume writer, but there were so many times that I would get a notification two hours later or 24 hours later saying sorry, we don't think that you're qualified for this position.
Speaker 1:And I'm sitting here scratching my head because I'm like I've done exactly what you're asking me to do the whole AI thing in human resources and I want to have a chat with a recruiter that I was talking to because his insight on this was really, really interesting. He's been doing corporate recruiting for a long time. I said, dude, there must be something going on with my resume, because if I don't have a personal connection to the company he's like, well, show it to me. I showed him my resume. He's like yeah, he's like there's probably three or four different things here that are immediately flagging you through AI and I thought that kind of sucks, because it's a bad feeling. It's a shitty feeling when you're like, oh, I think I can do this, and you hit the apply button and they turn around. They're like no, and then you realize that it's not them, quote, unquote. It's not the man, it's the computer that's kicking you back.
Speaker 1:And what I learned is that the art of personal skills and soft skills and personal connection will absolutely always take you further than just being qualified for the job. I found a lot of jobs that I was way more qualified for than they were asking for and I was still getting kicked back. If you're looking for a job right now and I know a lot of you are just because all the layoffs just stick with it, but more importantly, start talking to people in the industry. If you can make your way out to events that are happening near you, go out to WICO if it's happening close to you and you're in wireless. Try and make it out to WLPC and see if you can at least get a show pass to show you don't have to sit through the boot camps. Go network with people and get to know people, because what I learned firsthand was that even me, a seasoned veteran, you tell by my that's what people with gray hair say a seasoned veteran I was getting my resume kicked back for jobs that I knew I could do in my sleep and it was like, wow, that was concerning. So I would tell you, if you're looking for a job, just stick with it and reach out to the people that you know, because ultimately, that will probably yield a much better result than just blindly submitting the easy apply button on LinkedIn or seeing what's out there.
Speaker 1:And I did my share of it. Man, I don't even know how many jobs I applied to. I'm not ashamed to say it. There were some fun ones. I was like, oh, that would be cool. I got a call back. I got a call back from one of them that was so awesome that I couldn't fulfill because they wanted me to move to Miami. But I will tell you, if you're looking to be a senior telecoms analyst for FIFA 2026, if you're looking for a gig, they have got a really cool package and they are recruiting right now. They're still recruiting for the position. Very cool position supporting the World Cup in 2026. Get on LinkedIn and find it. If you need to be pointed at it, let me know and I'll be happy to point you in the right direction. If you want me to introduce you to a recruiter, I'll be happy to do that as well. That was a really, really fun one that I had to turn down, but there's some really cool things that are happening in the industry, so don't get frustrated with lack of people returning your calls or returning your resumes.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that being said, as I was being choosy and going back and forth and trying to figure out what it is I wanted to do, and getting shot down by some people that I wasn't expecting, and then getting asked by other people that I totally wasn't expecting, I have finally made a decision to move into a space that I think is going to be incredible. I think it's going to do some. I think it has a really, really bright future and it plays off of my past and my history of what I've been doing for almost my whole career and, in a way, that's a little bit different, and I will tell you that the move is about simplicity and it's about user experience and it's about delivering a product that is easy to use, easy to understand and gets the job done when you need it done, where you need it done, and what has to happen in order for that to take place is substantial. It's incredibly substantial and I believe that this is a company that has the ability to do that and deliver that product. And it might not be for everybody. It would be for a lot of people. I'll tell you that I sat down and in my head I thought how many people would actually use this. Lot of people. I'll tell you that. I sat down and in my head I thought how many people would actually use this, and it was a whole lot of people. So I'm very interested to see where it goes. I'm so incredibly excited to be part of this team. It's just a bang up group of people.
Speaker 1:My first day is Monday. I've got my new monitor sitting right behind me on the floor ready to rock and roll, so wish me luck as I launch off into this next chapter of my career. The good news is they've assured me that I can keep the podcast. That's pretty cool, and not only that. They're going to send me to a bunch of different trade shows where I get to see you guys and talk to everybody and be out there and have fun and be involved in the industry as much as I like. I would not have taken a position that didn't allow me to be me. So don't compromise who you are. When you're thinking about a new job, think about who you are and what you want to do and where you want to go and what you want your brand to be, and find someone that will invest in you, someone that wants you for you. And I think I found that company. It's really cool. I'm very excited, anyway. That being said, I'll let you know next week who it is. I'll be changing my LinkedIn and I think I'm going to try to make a cool little funny video just to say hello. Anyway, yeah, I hope you all have a wonderful week.
Speaker 1:Pay attention to what's going on, whether it's politically, whether it's with jobs, whether it's with the tariffs oh God, we even talk about the tariffs. On the tariff front, y'all. I don't want to increase the price of Wi-Fi stand, but if these tariffs hit, I'm going to have to increase the Wi-Fi stand price. So I'm just giving you the heads up right now. Politics yo. Anyway, I hope y'all have a wonderful week. Thanks again for listening to the Waves Podcast. If you want anything or need anything from me, or if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. Send me a message, get at me online.
