Good evening, everyone.

Um, I'm Brad Wortell.

If you don't know or I haven't met you before, I'm the chief operating for Velocy Network.

Um also VNet Fiber.

Um appreciate everyone's time uh to to hear about our updates and then get some feedback and we can provide some um additional data and some of the roadblocks and things that we've been seeing that we can maybe work through here, and maybe council can help us out with and continue the growth that we have here.

I know while I'm working with Chuck before we had uh you know just a little bit of areas that we were in in the city, and it's been a little bit of uh time here since the last meeting, but I wanted to provide a printout here, and we can get you a digital copy of this as well so you can zoom in.

I know I tried to blow it up on uh a larger paper, but uh it didn't really blow up well.

So um, but if you know the city uh and and the roads and everything in here, this will kind of uh break out where we've been.

We've been really busy um the past year.

Um we started with uh permitting or working through uh permits with uh First Energy.

Um we had um set a number of poles in the in the city for some areas where we couldn't get on the telephone poles.

Um, and as you're aware, majority of the city of Erie, um the utilities are um through the air or aerial.

Um there are some areas that are underground.

Um there were some sections we we put some uh underground conduit in, but we really expanded uh dramatically from the border of uh Pittsburgh Avenue.

Um I would say from 26th, 26th Street to 38th Street, and then just recently we've moved all the way up to uh West Grandview Boulevard.

So everything that's highlighted in uh in orange is areas that those houses can get service from VNet Fiber.

Uh you need another one?

Here we go.

The area um you'll see a couple that are in bluish purple.

They would look blue on the computer, but it's more purple.

Um is uh State Street.

We've we've been working on um pole permitting and costing for State Street from about where um Collegiate Academy is up to 38th Street.

There's been an area there in the middle that we were running into.

There's issues with the telephone poles, and if you're familiar at all uh with the uh telephone uh and power line poles in some parts of the city, they're very old.

Some of them are probably in the 60 to 70 years of age.

Um, first energy is starting to do a lot of work on replacing those with more uh modern poles.

Um you'll see that in different parts of the city.

But that how that holds up some of our deployments because we bear the burden of paying for those replacements.

Um there's some changes in the FCC uh laws that are coming down that are requiring the power companies to I'd say take the burden on of a majority of those poll replacements because they should have been replaced 25, 30 years ago.

Um but what's happened historically is uh providers like us in other regions, other providers when they go to attach to a telephone pole if they're the next one on the power company or the telephone company of Verizon owns they own about probably 20%, 30% of the poles in the city would come and say, okay, velocity, you're the next one to attach.

We wouldn't replace this poll if it wasn't for you needing to get on it, and it's $15,000 for that one pole.

So we're still running into those things.

We had had a crew come out and survey West Bayfront two years ago, East Bayfront, and put together a model for us to be able to go on telephone poles in those areas.

That pricing two years ago is not the pricing of today.

So there's been some changes in the uh requirements and height requirements, a whole bunch of technical stuff and where we can attach and where we can't.

We are working very closely with First Energy and Verizon to see if there's some relief and some different ways we can go about getting on some of those poles.

Um there are areas in West Bayfront and even on um East Bayfront that there's poles on both sides of the street.

So the power company owns the poles, let's say on the north side, and Verizon owns it on the south side.

But if power lines cross your your lines, your telephone lines, we have to maintain clearances.

So now we get we would have to pay 800, 900, 1,000 to have first energy move the power lines up higher so that we can fit above spectrum.

So there's a whole bunch of different things that go into attaching to telephone poles.

We found a lot less of those problems south of 26th Street because there's not as much uh equipment and as many things attached to the polls.

So that's what's allowed us to spread out pretty rapidly from Pittsburgh Avenue all the way.

I mean, we just wrapped up McClelland and 38th Street.

Um that's we were over there.

Yeah.

Yes.

So McClellan 38th to um what uh East Grandview Boulevard.

I grew up on English Avenue, so uh you know my parents got fiber finally here, they've been asking for it for like 20 years, but uh over there on uh 40th in English, 44th in English.

We've got um a section in um you're over near Mount Calvary and Ricardo's, they're on the north side of East Lake Road.

Um that was a section we were able to get permitted and surveyed before Penelect changed the parameters, so we're able to get on a lot of those telephone poles at the rates that we had budgeted back two years ago, so that we were able to complete that successfully.

But then um, as you will see, there is a lot of the the red lines here across the city, and those are where our trunk lines are.

So that's where we have fiber now everywhere that is service servicing a business, a school, the wastewater treatment plant.

If you see here on the north side, um a lot of small mid-sized businesses.

So what we're doing right now is we're kind of in these areas is pivoting and looking to say, okay, what poles can we get on?

What things can we attach to and work with first energy that isn't a whole blanket amount, but we can build off of the places we already have attachments.

So wherever you see the lines, we permitted with Verizon or First Energy, maybe even 20 years ago, depending on where we built to.

So we're now trying to go and pick just being able to build off of our existing um fiber to then expand into those areas and then hopefully you know, see where poles are being replaced by First Energy.

Um we're gonna work on having some discussions with them on what their um timelines are for replacing poles and upgrading some of the facilities in some of these uh areas in West Bayfront and East Bayfront to allow us to come in and not have you know if we budgeted 100,000 on the West Bayfront for pole uh pole attachments, that's now 400,000, 500,000.

It's it's jumped dramatically.