That Time We Talked To Tachus Internet Provider

This is episode number 103 of The Homeowner Show. Whether you're DIY or looking to hire, we're here to help you find the best information and options for you and your home. My name is Kevin Hackett, and here with me is Craig Williams.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to The Homeowner Show. We're glad that you could be with us tonight, even though Kevin could not be with me tonight, which may actually be a good thing. I didn't actually shower before the show, so the, the—

We're all We're all glad that we're not near you then.

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, we have fans going to push the wafting out the door so the unpleasantness can go elsewhere.

But we feel like we're kind of, you know, pre-back-to-semi-normal pandemic weird world right now because we are on a Zoom call tonight, which is not— Not our normal.

Let me tell you, the traffic is back to normal. I'll tell you that much. Is it really? Yes. I mean, not, not, it's not, it's not full on, you know, like 5 o'clock Houston traffic, but like there's a bunch of people out driving, uh, which is weird because everyone's supposed to be at home taking care of their kids, going to school.

Where are they going?

I don't know.

I don't know either.

Most of them are going to the liquor store. That's, that's what's going on.

To and from— look, there's too many of them apparently because they can go all over the place to find them.

Those— I drive past those, every single parking lot is full.

Well, I'll tell you what's not going very fast.

Uh-huh.

Do you want to know?

I do.

Okay, so, uh, we have a new reptile at my house. We have a turtle.

Oh, you haven't gotten rid of it yet? No.

Um, Craig, you, you're aware of this, but, um, my mother-in-law brought us turtle eggs from the lake up in East Texas, from Caddo Lake. And, uh, I don't know, I guess she just found them. I don't know. And they're dated, like she dated them May 21st. And so they've been in a, like a, like a milk jug, like cut-off milk jug with, with dirt. We got to keep them wet and all this kind of stuff. And one emerged about a week ago. And I think it wants to go to the pond. But it— my children, I've got a, you know, I got a 5-year-old and an almost 8-year-old. They're not letting that thing go.

Yeah, you got to convince them you're the turtle whisperer.

Right.

Yeah. And, and I'm like, okay, well, I don't even know what turtles eat. Like, I don't know what to do with it. I'm afraid we're gonna kill the turtle. We've got it in like— I'm not kidding. It's— I mean, this thing is like the size— it's gotten bigger, but it's like the size of, of maybe like a half dollar.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's really small. So we've gotten a roasting pan, water in there and everything. And my daughter yesterday, she decided that the turtle wanted to walk around more than the space that the turtle had. And so she took it out and put it in our courtyard. And something in her brain went off and she decided, I gotta go inside. So she goes inside and like an hour later, she's like, Daddy? I'm like, yeah? She goes, I think Timmy the turtle is lost. I said, Timmy the turtle is lost? What are you talking about? She said, well, I put him outside earlier in the courtyard and I can't find it. And so we start searching

our courtyard for about 20 minutes and our courtyard's not that big.

Yeah.

And she's bawling thinking that she's killed Timmy the turtle, right?

Right.

And my wife finally comes out and removes a, like, for some reason we had like an H-E-B bag in there. Obviously we're trashy people, I guess. And she removes, like, she picks it up and the turtle is inside this trash bag. Like Timmy's gonna die soon if we don't get him out of there.

I don't know why you didn't look there first.

I guess not. I don't know. But anyway, so yeah, the thing is, and this is the crazy thing, there's like four or five more eggs that have still yet to emerge. And so, I don't know what's gonna happen. Like we're gonna have a little turtle farm around our house.

You have to get creative with the name making. That's what you're gonna have to do.

Well, Timmy's Timmy wasn't very. Amy was not very creative. Uh, I think we're gonna have to have like a release party soon. We gotta get rid of Turtle. So anyway, that's the news around the Hackett house right now.

Fun stuff.

That, and, and I also, um, I, I did something that I, I didn't know if I was going to do, and that is I finally ran the battery all the way down on my EGO trimmer.

Oh, yeah.

Like, so I got the 2.5 amp-hour battery that came with it. And sucker's huge. And, you know, just, I've got quite a bit of weeding around my house. And it is not— I mean, it just blows and goes. It's awesome. But my grass got a little high when I was gone on vacation, came back, and it was way too high. And so I had to mow that thing down with a weed eater before I could actually use my mower. So I literally weed-eated like the entire yard. I've got a— I mean, you've seen my yard. It's, it's not a small yard for a residential neighborhood. And I had about maybe 1 or 2 minutes left to go and it just died on me. So

like full power and all of a sudden I'm pulling the trigger.

Nothing.

And it will not work. So if you're wondering how long those EGO trimmers go, a 2.5 amp-hour battery lasted me full blast for probably about 30 minutes.

Okay, so that's not bad.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Well, and I'll tell anybody that's interested in checking one out, ever since they, uh, they pulled them from Home Depot, uh, they're on, they're on a pretty good sale right now. You can pick them up pretty affordable.

Are they?

Yeah, yeah. So they're not, they're not a bad deal. And I'll tell you, I just, I just picked up the, uh, the Ryobi backpack sprayer, so I'm, I'm putting it, I'm putting it through the ropes this week. We're gonna, we'll, we'll end up doing a full review on that later on.

Cool.

But the other big thing that's happening around the country right now is all the little chillins are going back to school, only they ain't going anywhere.

They're staying where they're at.

They're at home.

That's right. And the thing, let me tell you, we have 4 kids going to school at my house right now, and each one of them is on a laptop or an iPad. And the item in the house that is most scarce is bandwidth.

Ah, yeah.

And I— my, my 11-year-old came downstairs yesterday morning and is just like, she's, she's frustrated and upset because her, her video keeps freezing and she can't talk to her friends and she can't communicate with her teacher right. And, you know, it's like, I don't know, I don't know what to tell you. There's 3 other people using this thing right now. And so anyway, because of all that that's going on, we knew this was going to be coming up. We reached out to to TAKUS, and we said, we wanna talk to you guys. We need to bring you guys on the show. We wanna talk about what it is to have a good internet service. We wanna talk— and for those of you

that don't know, TAKUS is a new internet service provider in our area, um, that Kevin has actually been using. And, and so on the line, we, we've got Hal Brumfield, who is the CEO, and Carter Old, who is the president and CFO of TAKUS. Uh, and they're with us tonight. We are super excited to get to chat with them and talk about all things internet. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Thank you, Craig. Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate you having us here.

Yeah, so I mean, it's a pleasure to be here. Uh, no, we're, we're just so excited to talk to you guys. And I know you guys, I mean, this, these have, this has probably been like one of the busiest times for you guys since you guys started the business. I think you guys told me you guys are, are 4 years old now. Is that right?

No, we're actually about a year and a half old.

A year and a half old, sorry.

However, Hal and I, yeah, no, but Hal and I have known each other now for going on 4 years.

Okay, that's what it was.

Okay, wow. Well, so talk to me a little bit because, you know, one of the things that I think is kind of a misnomer out there is like, if I'm not using AT&T or, you know, Consolidated or Suddenlink or one of these How dare you mention that name? Like, there's, there's the, you know, the quote unquote, the big companies out there. And, and a lot of people think that that's their only option. And maybe that's true. I mean, I think that that's something we want to talk about later, but kind of talk to us a little bit about how you got into this business and starting, starting, you know, your own Yeah, sure.

I'll go ahead and take that. How do you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. So to make a very long story short, I've been unemployed since April 7th, 2000. I say that jokingly because I haven't been employed since then. I've worked for myself and had some successes and failures. I had a company I ran for about 13 years that I sold. back in 2014. And after selling it, kind of semi-retired. And unfortunately, around that same time, my father passed away from cancer. My mother was a retired schoolteacher, and she had retired early to take care of him for his last year of life. And about the time I sold our company, I unfortunately had him pass

away. Helped get her into a 55-and-older community so she could be there with people kind of in the same situation, same age and all that. And she got set up with internet and I set her up with streaming TV, which she was, you know, didn't know what streaming TV was in the world. Once I showed her that it was live local, national, local and national TV, just like we have today with a Guide to DVR, she was on board. And her all-in bill Between the internet and her streaming TV service was about $100 a month, of which $70 was her internet service. And everything was fine. She's a retired schoolteacher, fixed income. And you roll forward about— well, roll forward 12 months, and she goes out to the mailbox to get her 13th month bill,

and it had gone from $70 to $150.

Oh my gosh.

Of course, she calls me all in a fit about You know, a, uh, $80 a month increase. Um, service hadn't gotten better. She didn't make any changes. Uh, service had actually gotten worse because more people had moved into the neighborhood. Uh, she was in a fairly new neighborhood when she originally moved in. And, um, you know, for a retired schoolteacher on a fixed income, uh, and by the way, she was a counter-IED teacher for almost 30 years.

Oh, wow.

And, um, she, um, She, uh, you know, retired from there and actually still does some substitute teaching today. But anyway, not to get distracted or off on a different topic with that, but she, um, anyway, she was upset and, you know, $80 a month for a retired school teacher. I mean, that's grocery money. That's, that's part of a car note, insurance, um, part of her mortgage. I mean, it was, it was a big deal.

Yeah.

And, um, you know, that happened and there were a couple other stories and I'm not going to get long-winded and tell you the other stories, maybe for another time, Similar situations to that. And I just got really aggravated with certain experiences like that. And I decided to take the money from the sale of the previous company to start an internet company, because I'd been in that industry for a while and been in tech for over 20 years. And I said, there's got to be a better way to do it. The prior company I had was an IT services company. And, you know, I always started with the customer first, made sure that the customer was happy. And we grew to one of the

largest, fastest-growing companies in the US according to Inc. magazine and one of the fastest-growing IT service companies. And, you know, we never had a salesperson, never did any marketing. It was all due to good customer service. And that's the same Same ideas I applied to TACUS, and you know roll forward, you know a year or two from that date, and met Carter, and we you know kind of just stayed in touch. And you know one one day we just kind of decided, you know what, we have some very complementary skill sets, and we very like-minded, and you know we decided to to really give this thing a go, and. Went out and really kind of started, started what you know today as Tacus. And it's been a

very fun, wild ride. And it's so refreshing to be in a business where people thank you for what you're doing. Because, you know, with social media and everything else, people are quick to criticize but not, not Oh, for sure. It's been a really, really cool experience.

Yeah, most definitely. You know, most definitely.

Well, and I'll just— so, you know, I'll just tell you real quick. I mean, I'm, I'm out and about in, particularly in this area, quite a bit. And one of the reasons that we, we reached out to you guys is I kept telling Kevin, like, I keep seeing everyone with these, these TACUS signs in their yard. And people don't just put signs in their yard because like, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, just put whatever sign you want. And it was signs like, I forget the actual wording on the sign and you guys may actually know what it is, but like basically saying like, we're happy with our Taka service. And that just speaks volumes. I mean, when people are willing to do

that for the service that you're providing them, that like, that they're that happy with the service, they're willing to put that sign in the yard.

Yeah.

That speaks volumes to me.

Yeah, I think it does. It does. That's for real. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, it really is about— yeah, sorry, Hal. It really is about internet done right. I mean, both of us, and really, Hal is the architect behind it. He spent several years perfecting it and trying everything else. I mean, I think it's probably safe to say, Hal, that you backed into being a fiber to the home company, right? With TACUS, you wanted to provide the best experience and find the best way to do it, but you tried everything else from fixed wireless to 5G, you know, to looking at upgraded cable technologies. And we realized, you know, gosh, really fiber optic cables are, they are the linchpin of the communications

infrastructure of the country. And so really the best way to do it is to extend that fiber network that businesses have, that enterprise-grade companies have, that cell phone towers have fiber, and bring that fiber all the way inside your home. And so that's really internet done right. And we're blessed to have the resources, the backing, the fantastic team that we've assembled. It's now a team of 55 and growing at least one a week now.

Wow.

That's our hiring pace. Really in the midst of all this, we've certainly been, On the one hand, it's strange to be in the middle of a global pandemic and with everything else that's terrible happening around us and a lot of people's careers in jeopardy, but at the end of the day, I love win-win business propositions because Tachus wins when our customers win and they win by saving the money, they win by being able to educate their children from home and actually work from home with a reliable, fast internet connection. And so really at the end of the day, it is internet done right. And the only way to do that is to do it from

scratch. And so that's really been the story of Tachus over the past couple of years. And we've just been building this out. It's 100% organic growth of our network. And then we light up the network and then the customers come.

Well, and to kind of build off of that a little bit, and I don't want to disparage any other company, but has that been sort of the issue and the bad experience that you hear so often? Is other companies trying to tap into other preexisting lines and use those rather than building their own infrastructure like what you guys are doing?

Yeah, certainly, Craig. I think that's where it begins, right? They have infrastructure that, depending on where you are, they've invested tens of millions, maybe billions of dollars into the ground, and they want to leverage that, right? They want to use what they have. and then they try to upgrade by patchwork. But at the end of the day, what we're talking about is underlying technology that was the best of the late 20th century, right? So this is 1990s technology, cable technology that is being tried to suit 21st century bandwidth consumption.

Right.

Consumption that is now actually outpacing The underlying infrastructure. And so really what we're doing with Tachus is we're looking at the next 10, 20, 30 years, and we're building a truly generational network that if— it's a buried fiber optic network all the way inside your home. And so with minimal changes to it going forward, we can rise to whatever bandwidth consumption demand is there for the next couple of decades without any issues.

So if I'm hearing you right, basically you guys are You're laying the groundwork, not just for what you need right now, but for more than what you'll need in the future. In other words, you'll be able to tack it up later on if you need to. You'll be able to put more bandwidth going through that line, even more so than what you're putting through it right now. Is that what I'm hearing right?

That's right. I'm not sure how familiar you are with fiber optic technology, but it's really— Absolutely zero. Well, I'm going to do a terrible job of it, and Hal does a far better job than I, so I'm going to hand it over to Hal to talk about that. Okay. Thanks, Carter. Yeah, there's an internal joke that we have. It's a little tongue-in-cheek saying is, as soon as someone comes up with something faster than fiber, they've invented a time machine. Because fiber internet is light. It travels— your internet travels at the speed of light. And to give you a little background on— and again, I'm not bashing competition, I'm just talking about pure technology as a whole— Sure. With the copper lines

that are in the ground or on the poles servicing homes today, they have a single copper line that gets branched off into multiple neighborhoods and multiple homes as it passes the entrance to those neighborhoods. And similar to the freeways, you know, we live in the Houston area, we know what happens if you try to be downtown at 8 o'clock in the morning or back home, leave at 5 to head that way, you get stuck in a grind of a traffic jam.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, we see that with internet. And there's a lot of similarities in those two as an analogy. What happens with copper is you take a neighborhood with 50, 100, 1,000, 2,000 homes, and you funnel those all down into a single line or a single strand of copper, things slow down. So we see that today with what I call the rush hour on the internet, where at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, things slow down until about 9 or 10 o'clock at night. Same thing in the morning if you happen to be at home, and especially right now with a global pandemic with kids trying to work from home, parents trying to— I'm sorry, kids trying

to do school from home, parents trying to work from home, your Zoom meetings freezing up. You know, it's because of that older legacy technology where you're on a single lane of traffic or a single copper line. With fiber, on the other hand, a single strand of fiber, which is about the size of a human hair, will carry 1 million times the traffic that that single copper line will carry. So think about that for a second. One strand will carry a million times more than that copper line, and TACUS is putting hundreds of strands of fiber in these neighborhoods that we're building out.

Wow, that's amazing.

So that's why it just doesn't slow down. We don't see that rush hour happening on our network.

And so if these fiber lines have hundreds of strands within them, these copper lines are obviously hitting a ceiling at some point. And so if I'm hearing you right, like these fiber lines, they haven't— we haven't reached a capacity where we could hit that bandwidth ceiling, if I'm using the right terminology there.

Not even close. We haven't scratched the surface on it. Now, just to be fair and to be clear, there is a limitation, and that is the electronics on each end of that fiber line.

Okay.

But the great thing about putting the fiber lines in the ground is as technology changes and as new ideas and new technologies develop to utilize that fiber at those faster speeds, for us, all we have to do is we change the router in someone's house and we go from 1 gig to 10 gig. We could actually provide 10 gig today. The equipment that we're putting in place supports 10 gig. We just— we're not quite there yet, but I see over the next, you know, couple of years, we'll probably slowly, you know, graduate up to where we have multi-gig services moving on up to 10 gig and then 40 gig and then 100 gig services. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know if we'll see that in my lifetime.

Mm-hmm.

But the fiber that we're putting in the ground probably will.

No, I actually don't. Kevin actually knows a lot more about this kind of stuff. And when you say we can provide up to 10 gigs for like that, what does that mean?

So think of it— I use— I'm kind of a car guy, so I use cars and roads as an analogy. So think of it this way, most internet providers today offer, you know, the minimum, or what the government considers to be high-speed internet, as defined by the government, is 25 megs down, And Carter, I'm going to tap you for what is the upload speed? Is it 4, 5? By 3, 3 megabits per second. Okay, 25 by 3. So 25 megs down, 3 megs up. So according to the US government, that is the definition of high speed. So think of that as miles per hour in a car.

Okay.

So you're speeding in a school zone at that pace.

Okay.

1 gig is 1,000 miles an hour, so it's 1,000 megs per second. 10 gig is 10,000 miles per hour.

Good grief.

And the other thing I'll mention about fiber is that because there is a near infinite amount of bandwidth, by utilizing fiber, you have symmetrical speeds. So more people are using devices today that send data than download. Rewind a couple of years ago when we had dial-up and DSL and so later copper coax service. The download speed is always faster than the upload. If you go do a speed test on any of the copper networks, you'll notice that it's much, much faster down than up. Mm-hmm. With ours, it's both ways. So the speed is symmetrical. And that's important. Used to, you know, it wasn't that big a deal. But today, with all of the personal digital assistants, the Google

Homes and Amazon Echos, Yep. the cameras, the IoT devices, like your, you know, people have toasters connected to the internet, your alarm system, your AC system, you know, all those things are sending data. Whenever you go check it on your phone, your home is sending that data to your phone. Whenever you go and you ask, hey Siri, what is the weather like today? When you ask that question, it's having to send that data across the internet uncompressed.

Yeah.

Meaning that it doesn't have— I don't know if that makes sense when I say uncompressed, but it doesn't have a chance to kind of squish the air out of it to make it a smaller piece of data.

Yeah, 'cause it needs to be in real time.

Exactly, exactly. So when you ask that question of your smart, your digital assistant, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, it's sending it uncompressed, getting the answer, and then you're receiving it. So the point is, is more and more people, the upload bandwidth usage is growing at a faster pace than the download bandwidth usage.

Hmm.

And, you know, according to a bunch of experts that are smarter than me, or, you know, they're saying that trend is going to continue until ultimately we're sending as much data as we're receiving.

I don't doubt that.

And so one of the things that I've kind of heard it described as is like, when you're downloading information, it's things that you're, you know, that you're pulling from the internet, you're pulling from, you know, whatever, whatever service is providing that, you're pulling it to you. And so at that 20, that, that government high-speed number 25, you're pulling it 25 times. But the problem with that copper line, from what I've understood, is you're trying to— it's as if you're trying to drive against one-way traffic, and it's very difficult to do because that copper line is so small. And so that's why you're getting like 3 up whenever you're getting 25 down. Is that, is that a good way to kind of

categorize that? Like you're just not able to get back through the line?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's probably a good analogy. You know, you— the, the reality is that copper has a finite amount of bandwidth and they are able to allocate so much up and down and they choose to allocate more down than up, because historically we've downloaded more than we've uploaded, they could, you know, and they could offer a symmetrical service, but they would have to slow down your download.

Okay, yeah, yeah, which makes sense.

So, so Kevin, think about it as it relates to total capacity. Right, so you add 25 plus 3, you get 28. So it's 28 megabits per second of total throughput in that FCC-defined broadband. For Tachus, if you have our 1,000-megabit symmetrical service, you have 2,000 megabits per second of total capacity.

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so let me ask you this, because I think this is a question that a lot of consumers are asking, and that is, well, how much do I need, right? I mean, you're— I'm sure you get that all the time. How much do I need? I mean, y'all are offering 100, 500, and 1,000. Is that correct? Those are the 3 categories that y'all are offering?

That's correct.

Okay, so, you know, I've had people that are less familiar with bandwidth and with all of those sorts of things to ask, well, how much do I need? And my general answer is that That's a difficult question to answer with just a simple question because of what you just said. It all depends on how many IoT things, which you mentioned, that means Internet of Things, how many Internet of Things you have at your house. How many computers do you have? How many cell phones do you have? How many things, thermostats, alarms? I've got a Wi-Fi sprinkler system. Like all of these sorts of things that are connected to your internet makes a difference in the amount of speed you need. Because I

think what most people think is like, okay, well, if I'm streaming a show, then I want, I want to make sure that I can get it. So I want the fastest I can possibly have because I want to be able to stream that show and not have any, you know, buffering because that's what I'm used to whenever I had dial-up, for example. So I'd like to hear your response to how you would answer that question. How much do I need?

You know, it's a relative term, and you did hit the nail on the head that it is dependent upon how many devices you have, but it's also dependent upon how much you actually use. And, you know, I guess my simplistic analogy would be how much do you really need? Probably not a ton because it's not a need, but, you know, you could drive a moped from here to New York. And it would get you there, but it probably wouldn't be that much fun. Yeah, and it wouldn't be a great experience.

No.

So, you know, with bandwidth, the biggest thing that I see bandwidth helps with is streaming television, gaming, and if you have several devices on your home network— cameras, thermostats, those type things. But kind of going back to the streaming TV thing, you can read studies where people say you only need 30 megs of bandwidth to do Netflix. Yes. Well, that's probably accurate because you hit play, go make dinner, come back, and it started. And it's buffered enough to where the stream will be fairly stable. You know, you'll only see the spinning wheel of death every 5 to 10 minutes. And it'll work on 30 megs. But that's not a great experience.

Right.

With ours, with our service and fiber service, when you hit play, it starts. It's almost like you're watching a DVD, for those of us that are old enough to remember those. When you hit play, it just starts. And that's, that's the experience you have with us. And then you compound that with live local and national TV, which is truly the definition of streaming TV. You don't have the luxury of buffering that. If you hit play and you start watching that spinning wheel and go make dinner and come back, it's still going to be spinning because it's a live stream. You're not watching something that's prerecorded. So, you know, it depends on how many televisions you have that are streaming. It depends on how many

teenagers you have and some adults that are gamers, how many of those you have and what you're doing with that. As well as how many devices in the home you have that are connected to the internet. I'll tell you a quick story, and this isn't me trying to give anyone a sales pitch because I hate sounding that way. But I had TACA service installed at my house several years ago and ended up going out of town maybe 6 months to a year after it was installed. And I'm sitting in a hotel room, like, my gosh, this internet is so slow. And I did a speed test and I had 100 megs on the internet, of internet in a hotel room.

And that's when kind of the light bulb went off and I said, wow, now I kind of get it. Because once you, once you have it and you get used to it, you realize how slow 100 megs seems. And, you know, that's a long-winded answer, but going back to your original question, How much do you need? I don't need that much. It's really a question of, what do you want your experience on the internet to be like? Yeah, and Hal, I'd also add to that, you've talked principally about the experience from a content perspective, a content consumption perspective too. You have to take that into consideration on top of how is your house configured? Do you have a hardwired house? Meaning, do you have Cat5e,

Cat6 cabling there that's actually able to accept gigabit service? Or do you connect to a wireless router that distributes the signal from there? And most people don't realize, they think, oh gosh, well, and they get frustrated sometimes. And this is something where We at Tachus have really tried to educate the consumers that Wi-Fi actually has significant limitations. And this actually goes to the underlying premise of Tachus's technology as a whole, which is that fiber, hardwired fiber is the fastest way and the best way to gain experience. Same thing with respect to wireless, right? So if you, the moment you transition from an internet connection to a wireless connection, you know, it's kind of an underlying phrase that we say a lot, you know, the time internally too, is that you're

only as fast as your slowest connection.

Hmm.

And even if you're bringing a gigabit TACaaS service, symmetrical gigabit service into your house, there's going to be a step down if the only thing you have there is a wireless router because the limitation of Wi-Fi is actually only about 600 megabits per second with current technology.

So, that's the ceiling of wireless technology right now?

That's the theoretical ceiling of wireless, which in reality is far lower depending on where you are. If you're in an area where you have high density and you have a lot of competing wireless signals, your capacity is actually going to be far lower. Your speeds are going to be lower than that. So, Craig, you were talking about having 4 children, some of them preteen. And so as they're— if you have Wi-Fi in your house, even if you have a gigabit connection, let's just say you transition to Wi-Fi right inside your home, and then it's the signal, it's a Wi-Fi signal that you're receiving. And by the way, we'll go into detail on this a little bit later, but

Wi-Fi is not the internet. They're 2 completely different things, right? You receive the internet through Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi in and of itself without an internet connection is not internet. But no, but the moment you— let's just say you have your older children, Craig, who are consuming a lot of bandwidth, or maybe they're doing some role-playing games, some games that just have a lot of upload and download. And so suddenly you brought a gig into your home, you distribute it with a Wi-Fi signal, you already have a theoretical ceiling there. and then steps down further, and there's only so much of that signal remaining to be allocated to your other 2 children and you and your wife if you want to watch something else independently. And so that's where, again, back to Hal's

answer, it depends. It depends on how your home is configured. It depends on your content consumption. Mm-hmm. It depends on how much consumption and bandwidth you require at any given point in time. So there are all these little bottlenecks that in order to have the best experience, quite frankly, bring a gig service into your home, have your home hardwired with Cat5e or Cat6 cabling. Those are the only 2 today that can accept anything higher than a cat. Cat6 can certainly accept a gig too, but Cat5 caps off at 100 megs, but a Cat5e receives a gig. And that's the only way you're guaranteed at each of those endpoints to get the highest and best signal there and a true

gig signal inside your home.

Does that make sense? No, it absolutely does. I think you explained it really, really well. To be very, very practical, and I think I wanna get into this, I'm glad you started talking about Wi-Fi a little bit 'cause I think it's a natural place for us to kind of land. And one of those things is to realize that anytime you plug something in, it will be faster than if it's wireless. It makes sense, but a lot of people don't necessarily understand that. So to kind of put practicality to that, I— so I had Tactus Internet installed in my house as soon as it was available. I pre-ordered it in my neighborhood out in Montgomery. And they got to my street and they

installed it as soon as it was available. But I was, I was, one of the things that, that I had to kind of realize initially is that the way my house is configured, I have a very odd layout to my house. So, it's a one-story house, it's 2,400 square feet, but it's got, it's got long hallways and then other hallways. And so, there's like little, it's a long way from one place in my house to the other place in my house. And there's a lot of walls in between. And so I realized very quickly that the router that I had, which was really— it was a good router, it's a Netgear Nighthawk router, which is statistically a pretty good router depending

on which version you have. It wasn't reaching all of the spots in my house. So I did a lot, a lot of research. And whenever the TACUS installer walked into my house and saw the eero mesh system, he was very happy. that I had chosen that because I know it's a very good system. But on that system, I've got, I've got your 500 up and down, uh, your 500 service, and which is half a gig. On my, uh, you know, on any of my routers, on my beacons or my router itself, the best I can get is about 260 up and 260 down. Sometimes I can get up to about 290, but you know, I think a lot of people are not going to fully understand, like, oh, I'm paying for 500,

why am I not getting 500? However, if you test that, actually Eero, you know, they've got an app, and on the app it tests the speed at the modem a few times a day, and every time it's like 498, 499, it's right near that 500 number, but then whenever it's broken down into from my router to the wireless beacons and then to my phone or whatever device it is that I'm actually reading that number from, it's, you know, 60% of that. And it, it's going to exactly what you're saying, that you're just not gonna get the throughput that you would if that thing was hardwired from the modem.

Well, first off, Kevin, I'm thrilled to hear that at the modem you're actually getting 498, 499 symmetrical. We love hearing that the technology works and and happy customers. So thanks for passing it along. But no, you're absolutely right. Think about it. If you had 2 daisy chains and they were at a certain distance from one another and all you had between one daisy chain on one side was air, meaning you had a wireless signal between each modem or each Eero mesh network system, and the other system had was fixed and actually wired, hardwired there, at the end of that system, be it 100 feet away, even without having rooms in the way or walls in the way, the

speed at the last modem in that wireless daisy chain would be less than the speed in the modem that is hardwired, if that makes sense.

No, yeah, that That makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, I would tell a lot of people, especially, especially those— we've had a couple of episodes on like home building, that kind of stuff. Like, a lot of people are saying, ah, you don't need hardwire in your house anymore because everything's gone wireless. But my— I'd like to hear your thought on that because I've been telling people hardwire your house, like put the highest level of cable, you know, Cat 6, Cat 7, whatever you can put in, the highest you can put in. Because at the end of the day, the more things you can hardwire, the better your speeds are going to be forever.

Absolutely. I would not recommend skipping the hardwiring inside the home, whether you use it today or in the future, because at some point you'll probably want to put that in. To add a little bit more to the wireless side, 2 things I wanted to bring up was one, using Carter's analogy of having the devices daisy chain. I'll say it a little bit different way: is if you have A is the one that's hardwired, B is another beacon or repeater that sits in the middle, and C is your device. Your device is connected to B, and B is connected wirelessly back to A. The B device has to split its bandwidth or its throughput to talk back to A

and C being your device. So every time you go from A to B to C, your throughput will be cut in half. Mm-hmm. And that's exactly why you're seeing 250 or so on the wireless side, but you're seeing 500 running the test that's hardwired. Because it's having to take half of its bandwidth to communicate back to the main router or the main hub that is hardwired.

Yeah, so it's not that you're not getting that speed, it's that you're not testing it at the right spot.

Correct, correct. And, you know, another thing I'll say is we get the question often of, you know, like, you, you know, you have a 500 meg service but you're only seeing 250 on the wireless, why do you need And the answer to that is, if it was just you in your home, I would say you don't need it. But if you have multiple people in your home, each one of them is getting that 250 meg speed, and each device connected is getting that 250 meg speed. So you have 2 devices that are sending and receiving traffic at that speed. speed, well, 250 and 250 is 500, so it's utilizing the full 500 meg bandwidth. And if you were to upgrade that to 1,000, well, even though

everyone's still getting 250, your experience would be different. It would, it would be faster because now you have more bandwidth that's been shared out amongst all these individual wireless devices that are connecting at 250.

Yeah, I think that's different. I think that's really difficult for a lot of people to understand because they're looking at their speedtest.net and they're just going, look, I'm not getting any higher speed, or I'm still experiencing lag time here and there.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot more to understand than we can possibly explain on here, but one of the things that I would like to hear you talk about also is what makes one router different than the other. Before we do that, I think I'm realizing we're using terms that I'm not sure that everyone fully understands. So what's the difference between a router and a modem?

So I'm trying to think of an easy way to describe that or explain that. So a modem is when you connect your device to to a modem. You are directly connected to the internet. You are, you are, uh, on the public side of the internet. Think of it as— an analogy might be if, if the outside world is the internet and you're inside your home, uh, when you step outside, you're not protected by your home anymore. You're exposed outside. This is a really bad analogy.

No, but I love it.

It's basically, you're saying that it's complete—

I'm just glad you're answering that now.

He jumped on this grenade for you.

I think so many people—

That's right. Thanks, Al. Yeah, exactly. He's a great man.

People don't understand this. And so I think it's, it's a really good analogy is basically you're saying that a modem provides completely unfiltered internet, 100%. It's the, it's the most toxic version of the internet.

Right? Yeah. Do you need a job? Because you can explain that a whole lot better than I did.

Let's talk after we're done. You never know.

But yes, would it be a good analogy to say that a router instead is instead of the modem where you have that direct connection that Direct connection to toxic internet there that Kevin talked about, that it's— that a router instead is more like a repeater or amplifier? Not really. I mean, maybe repeater might be a little bit of an analogy, but a router, you have a— if you look at a router and you look at the little plugs or ports in the back of a router, you have an internet port or WAN port. WAN stands for Wide Area Network. or the internet. And then you have LAN, which are usually like 4+ that are kind of grouped together. So LAN stands for local area network. What the router does

is it puts kind of a filter in between the inside or LAN, which is your inside of your home, and the WAN or internet port. So you're, you're kind of hidden behind this filter sitting inside a router. So said another way, a modem, you're wide open to the internet. There is no protection whatsoever. You're exposed to anybody and everybody on the internet. A router, on the other hand, gives you— depending on the router, will give you a layer of protection, kind of hiding you behind a filter per se. And I hope that made sense for everybody. I, you know, that was a bit of a question I wasn't really prepared for. No, well, and thanks for that too. I think a lot of our

customers too might have routers that have firewalls on them that actually end up slowing down the internet connection even further. Back to that, you know, talking about that filtering there, do you want to talk about that for a moment? Yeah, a firewall is a really complex device and topic, but think of it as a wall. You know, if you're, you know, if you're inside a walled-in castle or you're outside, well, the firewall is kind of that wall protecting you inside, on the inside, and you can allow certain people in and out of that wall. But in doing that, it does take some time to kind of check IDs, if you want to call it that,

to allow those people in or out. The devices that we install have the ability to be a modem or a router. We can— there's a setting that allows our customers to either be wide open exposed to the internet, and the reason you would do that is if you had your own router and you wanted to control that access in and out, or we can set our device in routed mode, which does have a firewall on it. You're not exposed to the internet. Everything that you see, or should I say people out on the internet can't see through our device if we have it set in routed mode. But if you have your own router, it's recommended that we set ours in bridge mode. By

default, when we do the initial installation, and unless you ask, we always set our device in routed mode. But if you have your own router, and we don't set ours in bridge mode, we leave it in routed mode, it could cause some slowdowns on your network. So for those that are listening that do have their own router that would like us to set our device in bridge mode because you may be having some intermittent issues, feel free to call our tech support and have them change that.

Yeah, it's real simple to do because I had to do that. We use a certain device device at my house to watch TV, and it was not getting the speed that it needed in order for us to do that. And I wound up calling, and I'll just take a moment and talk about your customer service for just a moment because I was thrilled. One of the things that you get with TACUS is when you call TACUS, Someone answers the phone, and it's the same person every time. And she is fantastic, right? I mean, that's a big—

She doesn't go to sleep. Yeah. No, she's not. Appreciate the feedback.

I mean, she remembers me when I call. Maybe that means I call too much. But she remembered me, and she immediately said, I tell you what, we've been working on this for you. And this was— I mean, like I said, we had just gotten our neighbor There are some things still to work out, but I got to speak to the infrastructure specialist on your end, which I'm kind of like, oh cool, like there's actually a person for me to talk to, and they were willing to talk to me. I didn't have to go through 19 channels and get hung up on 4 times and all of that just to get to the person I needed to. And he immediately

said, hey, let me tell you what, we did not set you into bridge mode and you're using your Eero system. Let me put you in bridge mode and see if that makes a difference. He put it in bridge mode, restarted my system, and boom, within just a moment, everything worked. So what you're saying is not just— it's not just lip service. I mean, that's exactly what needs to happen. So, you know, I would tell our listeners right now, if you think you're not getting the speed that you think you should be getting and you're using your own router, call them and tell them to put it in bridge mode because it'll change everything for you.

Yeah, and you know, we're— one thing I'll say to that is, you know, one question that might come up is, well, why didn't the technician that installed it do that for me initially? And, you know, the install techs are fantastic pulling cable and getting the initial router set up, but they're not tech support, right? So, you know, they They're there to get your internet working and meet the deadline or meet the start time for their next install. And so yeah, if you are experiencing any issues where you think you're not getting the speed that you should, by all means, that's why we have the folks that we do to take care of those issues.

Hey everybody, this is Craig. Thank you for tuning in this week. We're so glad that you could join us. We wanted to keep the party going with the guys over at Tacus because we had lots and lots and lots of questions. So if you can, tune in next week for the continuation of this interview. If you have not yet, go ahead, hit the subscribe button, the like button, all the buttons. Until then, we'll see you next Tuesday.