Rolando Rosas 5:45
Oh, well, that’s, that’s, that’s interesting, because it sounds like what I hear you saying is that there may be some hybrid type of work situation with specifically what you guys are doing. And what’s so fascinating is that some companies like Google, on one end are announcing they’re going to open up more offices, they’re hiring more people. And sounds like they’re they’re, they’re bringing more people back in, at some on the other side of the spectrum, like Twitter are fully remote as long as you want. No questions asked.
Sascha Segan 6:18
Yeah, I think a bunch of us are definitely going to come back to the office on some kind of basis, I think that the office environment really does give you opportunities for collaboration, especially in my gig, which has a lot of handling physical products I work with, you know, I work with laptops and smartphones all day, and there’s nothing like being able to hand off the smartphone to the photographer, and to the videographer. And you know, the editor has a question and being able to hand the smartphone to the editor and poke at it and say, Oh, it works like this. And this, as opposed to what we’ve had to do in the working from home context. So there’s definitely advantages to being in the office. But we’ve shown that we can still get things done when we’re not. So I think it’s really going to come down to people’s comfort levels.
Dave Kelly 7:07
You know, we we had a conversation about this recently, and we were talking about the technology that people are bringing home so that they can communicate effectively. Have you adopted anything new, since you got sent home any anything that maybe you hadn’t used before, for whether it be for video or audio solutions?
Sascha Segan 7:26
I mean, you’re looking at this thing right now. i This is a bumblebee microphone. And I was never a real audio or video person. I was always talent. But I consider myself very talented, you know, but but I always worked for organizations where there were guys who had the microphones and the cameras, and I would just sit in a chair, and they would point a thing at me. And so I had to get a much better microphone, I had to think about more even lighting in this space. All of these kind of production aspects that I never really had to consider before because I had a whole administrative organization behind me.
Rolando Rosas 8:11
And I think a lot of folks are in that boat. Like, you’re looking at these lights behind me, the blue and all. Those just appeared. Because we needed them. There was no studio to go to anymore, where we could do all of that. And like you said, if the necessity create, it’s the mother of all inventions. And so right now we’ve that’s kind of the modus operandi with what we’ve got to do. And it’s opened up some new opportunities, quite frankly, when when you look at God, I didn’t know this, this thing I didn’t I didn’t know this about this microphone, and you know, the hundreds of other ones that are out there.
Sascha Segan 8:49
You know, I have to say I never liked hearing my own voice on recordings until I got a nice microphone. And then I realized, yeah, I realized what I sound a lot better. Yes,
Rolando Rosas 9:02
you know that. There we go. Dave, that’s what we talked about we our mission really is to help organizations and professional sound better. That’s kind of our mission with some of the products that we provide. But you’re right, sometimes you just not aware of what a type of product like the one you have in front of you can do for you until you start using it.
Dave Kelly 9:24
But at the same time, we’re always hyper critical of ourselves. So I can listen to recordings of other people. But the second it’s my voice. Yeah, makes me just either just be hypercritical or hate hate myself a little bit, but I think that’s just how people might be when they’re just criticizing themselves.
Sascha Segan 9:45
Yeah, I think so. My daughter, my teenage daughter is in a arts high school, and she has been doing a lot of filming. And so I’ve watched her do these film projects around the house because you know, she can’t go into school. either, but they have a lot of technology. They have smartphones now. And I’ve been thinking she sounds absolutely great. She sounds amazing. And then when she plays them back she just winces because, as you said, you always sound worse to yourself.
Rolando Rosas 10:16
You’re always you’re your biggest critic, I know that I sound so nasally do I really sound like that? But but you know, you’re, you can complete there’s all kinds of mixers and stuff that can even you know, if we were in a professional studio broadcasting, they they fix all that. So you, you don’t hear the crackle in your voice and, and all the little nuances like Oh, read it like that. But hey, we gotta roll with it. We got what we got. I wanted to ask to get into your article, it fascinated me, because one of the things even before COVID hit, I’m always curious as to why do people gravitate to certain places, you know? Is it the food? Is it the culture? Is it the weather, which I want to ask you about weather and in factoring in this into your, into your piece, but I love what you’ve done with, you took certain elements, and you put them in and you factor them into getting the the your your your rankings. So I wanted to before we got into the rankings and all that stuff, I want to ask you why? Or how did you come up with this idea of, of this piece, because I think it’s a really interesting piece. But I want to understand that what got you there so that our folks can understand what went behind it.
Sascha Segan 11:36
So this completely came out of the pandemic. What happened was we started, we started working from home. And immediately there was this discussion within PC mag of, well, if I can really work from home, can I work from anywhere. And that led me last May to do a couple of shorter stories about places, lesser known places that might be great for working from home. There was one about low cost cities, and there was one about small towns, and these were like 10, or 15 towns each. And those got a lot of traction. These were these were your basic not heavy statistic kind of slideshow type stories where you see, you know, a big picture of Jonesboro, Tennessee, and then a paragraph about Jonesborough, Tennessee. And people really felt for these stories. And I realized that there were a lot of people looking at this new world of remote working and looking at the question of well, can I work from anywhere. And in fact, over the past year, we’ve had several people on the PCMag staff move out of New York City, to places that they consider more affordable or more friendly or more comfortable. So I decided to make the story much bigger and involve many more statistics, and try to come up with a list that really balances everything from tiny small towns to big cosmopolitan cities. The idea was to try to get something in there for everyone, and to focus on places that are not the places that people would automatically think of not the superstar cities, but places that you might never think of. But you know what? I might be interesting to live and work from there.
Rolando Rosas 13:29
Yeah, I saw that. But I saw that you you totally left out some some not that you taught on purpose. But you know, some of them didn’t make the cut. Let’s put it that way. Like, like an Austin, Texas, by the way, which does have great chili. So great tacos.
Sascha Segan 13:45
So the number one reason why places didn’t make the cut. And this is going to, you’re going to ask, you’re going to ask and you’re going to wonder about a ton of places. And I will tell you 99% of the time the reason those places didn’t make the cut is high housing prices.
Rolando Rosas 14:01
So housing was because I did see that in your pie in your your factors that you looked at that was that’s a considerable portion of what you factored into the rankings.
Sascha Segan 14:10
Yeah, so the rankings are factored. The biggest factors in the rankings are available, affordable, fast broadband internet, so gigabit internet and affordable housing. Because the idea is a place where you’re going to work from home should be a place where you can afford a significantly big comfortable, interesting place to work from home. And where maybe you already live in an expensive superstar city and you’re looking to save some money. So affordable housing. That was really important fast internet that was really important. And then I got to sprinkle in a whole bunch of other little factors just to make it more fun.
Rolando Rosas 14:51
Yeah, we have it here on the screen if you can, if you see that I see we put healthcare workers arts in education workers, non chain restaurants with should be probably the indie or are the mom and pop shops right? Yep. Coffee shops. If you’re a coffee lover, that’s gotta be a must
Sascha Segan 15:07
not just a coffee lover. So the idea there was that, yeah, you work from home. But if you want to get out of the house, where are you most likely to work a coffee shop?
Rolando Rosas 15:15
Right? Okay. Yep. And let’s see what else you got on there you had attractive setting what did exactly that mean when you had attractive setting is one of those factors.
Sascha Segan 15:25
So we had a couple of data partners for the story where we were getting information from various other organizations, and one of them was bestplaces.net and Best Places is this really wonderful website where you can punch in questions about cities and towns around America and get them scored and ranked on dozens and dozens and dozens of categories. It is so much fun to play with best places. And attractive setting was one of those best places categories where basically if the place is near, generally the ocean or some mountains, it gets a plus.
Rolando Rosas 16:03
Mm hmm. Interesting. Interesting.
Dave Kelly 16:06
Well, I would I would have to agree with both of those things. You know, I’m from the northeast. Mountain mountains. If I’m thinking about relocating, I want mountains. And I want water. So exactly. I think that was good. Now I have a question. If you were to write this piece, pre COVID, do you think any of these metrics would be different? Was there anything else that maybe you you, specifically, we’re looking at because of the pandemic?
Sascha Segan 16:35
I mean, there’s some more metrics that now that I’ve published the piece, when I do it, again, I might want to try to find numbers for because also some of the piece some of the piece was dependent, actually on just what I could get numbers for sure. And there’s stuff about kind of cultural production. That I don’t think I don’t think I factored in quite heavily enough. The I was looking very much from this pandemic mindset of you’re in your house, you never leave your house, you know, maybe you leave your house to go fishing at the stream or walking in the mountains. But otherwise, you do not interact with other people and you do not leave your house. And
Rolando Rosas 17:18
in the closet all day, right?
Sascha Segan 17:20
Well, no, you’re in a big 8.2 room house in Utah that you’ve got for an affordable price that you can sprawl out in, right. Um, but in a post COVID lifestyle, I think I want to look I would look a little more at situations where you would want to be around other people like sports and entertainment and you know, lively downtown’s, we didn’t factor in that heavily this time. Right.
Rolando Rosas 17:47
I didn’t see any Madison, Wisconsin, which you this is a this is one of those types of places that you just said, you know, I’ve been Madison several times, it has a lot of bars. It’s got a it’s a college town. It’s got it’s got a little buzz to it, even though it’s way up in the upper Midwest. And so it’d be awesome to see if you did factor that in what those rankings would look like.
Sascha Segan 18:10
Absolutely, there’s also a dial I might want to turn in terms of the fast internet ranking so that that counted for a lot of the score. And our partners Ookla speed test gave us rankings based on the percentage of people who had been running speed tests in that town who have verified gigabit internet. And so what that means is that a small town where a lot of people subscribe to The Gigabit service will score above a large city where gigabit services available, but there’s a lot of people subscribing to lower tiers, right. And so that’s a that’s a consideration and we went you know, we went this way, this time, we might go a different way a different time.
Rolando Rosas 18:58
And you know what, what I also loved about this thing is that it was it’s just it’s the numbers speak for themselves. And you kind of flushed out an interesting list to speak of, do we have already the the map did where it shows the there at the top there. There we go. I found this interesting. I’m a I’m a must have been in a former life, a surveyor or a cartographer or something like this as I find maps fascinating. That’s just kind of a boring thing that I like.
Sascha Segan 19:31
And you can tell I was kind of trying to sprinkle it a little over North America.
Rolando Rosas 19:35
Yeah, absolutely. Like I’ve been to MIT Bemidji, Minnesota. I went to college in Minnesota so I know there’s it’s nope, no, nothing bad about me but it’s way out there. It is way out there. But in reading your piece, you know they have a good internet, good internet. You’re gonna get really good bang for your buck when it comes to home pricing. But there is a cluster there that is almost like from the east of the Mississippi and includes a surprise Philly made your your your your rankings, whereas a lot of the big metro areas like obviously New York and DC here where I live. We’re not on there.
Sascha Segan 20:16
It’s all about that money.
Rolando Rosas 20:18
You get better bang for the buck and Philly. Yeah, exactly.
Sascha Segan 20:20
So the two big cities on the list are Philadelphia and Phoenix. And what came out about specifically Philadelphia and Phoenix is that compared to the other cities around them, compared to other Northeastern cities in Philadelphia’s case, and West Coast cities in Phoenix’s case, you just get a lot more living for your money there.
Rolando Rosas 20:47
Yeah. And I noticed that in California, specifically, you only had one city, it was way down south to the southern part of California. Yeah. And
Sascha Segan 20:55
it’s a it’s like a it’s it’s like a little it’s this interesting, little rural, almost like predesigned gated community there. The issue with California, honestly, is that housing prices are ridiculous all over California. Well, all up and down the West Coast, it was difficult to find places that fit our affordable housing criteria. And that really says a lot about the unaffordability of housing on the west coast in general. And you know, everybody knows it’s crisis in California.
Dave Kelly 21:27
Yeah, that’s true. You know, one of the things that I noticed that you didn’t have a sunshine index or weather as a factor that get left out,
Sascha Segan 21:37
that was just me being me. I like cold places, and I’m writing the article. You get to control
Rolando Rosas 21:45
the data. I, you know, I DC get some sunshine. But you know, we’re not Phoenix. I love going out there. But you know, when it’s August in Phoenix, you will melt into the pavement.
Sascha Segan 22:00
Yeah, that’s the thing. My wife, my wife is from Tucson. And I remember once we went to we went to a sauna. And he went in there and like he walked out after like three minutes and I said, so you didn’t like it in there was a too hot and he was like, no just reminded me waiting for the bus in high school.
Rolando Rosas 22:23
That’s good. Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s great. What Sascha the the I bet like a bunch of things. I want to I want to pick your brain about what surprised you the most like, I know what surprised me. But what surprised you most once you finish crunching all the numbers that once you put this all together.
Sascha Segan 22:40
So I would say Philadelphia was one of the big surprises. I was really surprised at how affordable Philadelphia came in as that was a big deal. I would also say just in general, I was surprised now I’m scrolling around the map on my own screen. I was surprised that we didn’t come up with many more mid sized cities. There’s not a lot of places on the list in that kind of 100 to 500,000 range.
Rolando Rosas 23:16
You know, there’s, I don’t think rah rah, your rallies and your rally. Exactly. Which, you know, that’s a new tech alley. Well,
Sascha Segan 23:24
So we’ve got we’ve got Morrisville, which is, which is I believe in the triangle. Okay. And so that’s, that’s kind of our Raleigh Durham location. Gotcha. There’s a lot of on the list. There’s a lot of places which are towns that are in a bigger metro area that honestly you want to think of them in terms of the metro area. So when you look at Morrisville, North Carolina, you want to think of that in terms of the Raleigh Durham area. When you look at Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, you want to think of that in terms of Pittsburgh. When you look at East Pointe, Michigan, what we’re really talking about is the North suburbs of Detroit. When you look at Lenexa, Kansas, what we’re really talking about is Kansas City is just that the way, the way the stats come out city by city, you end up with this one particular suburb shining over the other suburbs in that metro area, right. But when it’s one suburb in a metro area, like the North suburbs of Detroit, or the East suburbs of Pittsburgh, or the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City, you generally find that other suburbs in that area are also really good. I just didn’t want to have a lot of dots closely together.
Rolando Rosas 24:33
I see. I see. Speaking of dots closely together. Want to ask you about that. Obviously, this was more like you said, you were looking at, you know, if I had to be in a home, and I go on a bang for the buck and Utah, you know, I’m good there. But you touched on something else that earlier that I would I would it would have been good to see and I’m sure would probably completely change your rank. And if you have factored in demographics, like if somebody wanted some some of the cities, maybe that’s more diverse, closer to New York City. And I know some folks want to have that kind of more diversity in in in culture, diversity and thought in some of those other demographic factors that some people look for, in addition to high speed.
Sascha Segan 25:23
I mean, I was trying to pay some attention to that just when selecting some of them editorially. I gotcha. I mean, Philadelphia, for instance, is, is a very diverse place. But also when you looked at, for instance, Macon, Georgia, or let me see the scrolling around. Yeah, Macon, Georgia, some of those Detroit suburbs. We have a Baltimore suburb in there. Randallstown. Maryland. Got a couple in Maryland. Yeah, yeah. So there’s, there are some more diverse places, but it wasn’t your right. It wasn’t counted as part of the math. And if we had turned down housing prices a bit and turned up something like diversity, then yeah, you would have found, for instance, some more of those new york city suburbs really popping up. We had some new york city suburbs in our longer list, but they once more didn’t make the cost cut.
Rolando Rosas 26:30
Yeah, but anything I would have met. I mean, that’s why Philly is still a surprise to me. I, I had no idea that that the housing was that much more affordable, because there’s no DC or R or real round the ring of DC, you know, Rockville, Maryland, or
Sascha Segan 26:45
DC has gotten proved all the past 1015 years, though.
Rolando Rosas 26:49
Yeah, yeah, the pricing. You know, right now, in the last, I would say the leap right before the pandemic hit, the prices in the DC metro area have started to climb. And for some reason, during the pandemic, the suburbs around the DC area have have just not enough inventory for people right now. That’s what realtors are telling me is that there just is not enough homes to sell. And they’re like going around even knocking on peoples door. Hey, do you want to sell your home? Yeah, how much?
Sascha Segan 27:22
But now, let me tell you about let me tell you about something else that surprised me that I think was my biggest discovery when doing this list. Sure, which was the one of the one of the most common things about especially the smaller towns on the list was the presence of small local Fiber Internet providers. I feel like if there was one determiner, that one factor that brought a small town to this list that I had not actually technically predicted for, it’s that the town or the region has its own nonprofit, or Co Op, or small family run fiber provider
Rolando Rosas 28:06
model. For me. It’s that a model for other small towns that are maybe trying to revitalize their downtown or their small towns, and they’re trying to bring jobs here because I know a lot of businesses that consume broadband are looking for some of what you just said.
Sascha Segan 28:23
Yeah, I think absolutely. I think that in this work from home world, we are finding a lot of people who maybe do want to go to a small town lifestyle, but they want to go to a small town lifestyle with the ability to work like they’re in the big city. And the big internet service providers are not providing to small town America. And when they do, they are often providing either poor quality internet, or poor quality customer service. And they are not responsive to the needs of the local communities. Well, if you look at places like as you said, Bemidji, Minnesota, or Reedsburg, Wisconsin, or Montour Falls, New York, where the ISP is Empire access or to Vermont cities. These are all places where you have small, locally based ISPs running fiber that have decided that running that fiber is the way to revitalize the area. And in a lot of these places, it’s working.
Rolando Rosas 29:24
Wow. Wow, that’s interesting.
Dave Kelly 29:27
So I’ve been I’ve been working at home for about six or seven years now and and I’ve lived in the same town for about 16 My wife and I will have this conversation. So second time at this place, let’s sell and move and we say well, where do you want to go? Where do you want to go? I liked that. There was a few towns from Vermont that had popped up some other options that I hadn’t even considered like Macon Georgia, for example. But I really liked that you included Canada on this list because a there’s probably a Canada a because there’s probably We a lot of your readers that are based here in the US that may be somewhat frustrated with different things. And they’re like, You know what? Let’s consider Canada.
Sascha Segan 30:08
So I love Canada. I’m a big fan of Canada, I have family and friends there even though I am not Canadian myself. For the past 10 years at PCMag, we’ve been running a series of stories called fastest mobile networks where we drive test around the US every year to test the quality of the mobile networks across the country. And since 2013, we’ve been doing it in Canada too as fastest mobile networks Canada, so we sort of have a brand up there in terms of testing and assessing places for their tech quality in Canada. So I looked at Canada and I applied many of the same criteria, they had to be slightly different because the datasets different and the real overall. The real overall conclusion I came up to was that Atlantic Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are really where the opportunity is, in terms of once more affordable housing, availability of fast internet. And, in, in this case, also some access to culture. Maybe it’s not the, you know, super big city culture of Toronto, but a lot of people want to get away from Toronto, and the smaller cities in New Brunswick and especially Halifax, Nova Scotia, are also a really lively, interesting cultural.
Rolando Rosas 30:09
I’m going to Halifax so I could be close to Oak Island and start digging treasure. I just wanted to throw that in. I love this show. And you put one right near where I would want to go if I were to go to Canada and start digging, but I don’t think that’s in the cards for right now.
Sascha Segan 31:53
Yeah, it says something that actually when we published the story, one of the responses I got was from Hala Ghanians, which is the word for people from Halifax Halligan Ian’s saying no, no, please don’t tell people to come here. Don’t tell anyone more to come here. Yeah.
Rolando Rosas 32:08
Well, you know, Canada, is, you know, they’re pre COVID. They’re they’re really inviting for people to come to the country settle, immigrate there. They’ve actually got more strict and stringent now, because of what you just said, some, some some provinces don’t want an influx of people. They don’t want to overburden either their healthcare system, or or the towns as I’ve read articles, even in towns in Vermont. I don’t know if they’re the ones in Southern Vermont, you highlighted, but sometimes they’re in Vermont. They’re there. There’s not enough plumbers. There’s not enough electricians to service, the influx of people leaving New York City to these towns, because they just weren’t set up to have this many people. And so they’re trying to find plumbers and electricians to retrofit homes and upgrade homes because they just aren’t. And I would imagine Canada would be in the same boat.
Sascha Segan 33:01
Yeah, and I mean, that’s the danger with any of these kinds of stories where you’re suggesting that people move from a dense, busy place to a less dense, less busy place. But it’s always a it’s always a balance in that way. Because you also get authorities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick saying we need new people coming in. We’ve been depopulated over the generations by, you know, the the decline of the fishing and logging industries. And we don’t want to be, you know, howling human LIS wilderness, even though it’s beautiful and full of moose. So, you know, they want people to show up and balancing that with not creating a housing bubble and lack of plumbers. It’s a delicate balance.
Rolando Rosas 33:48
Yes, a want to switch gears. Now Sascha, you touched on, on the fact that there are some small coops and cities like this that are really doing some fascinating and interesting things around fiber. And I wanted to switch a little bit more techie speak. And this is you know, you can you can do some tech speak as well. And how this is all playing out when it comes to 5g. I know you’ve written a couple of articles about that, and how some of the carriers are looking at 5g very differently AT&T versus T-Mobile, and using fixed wireless as the method of getting home internet users and addressing those needs. And some are are going pure 5g as a mobile, and that’s the way to go down that route. How do you see 5g? And that’s a big term because I know you’ve talked about there’s three different five G’s. How does 5g generically fit into this? This this not this post COVID environment?
Sascha Segan 34:49
So I do think that we are seeing it’s actually not just 5g, but we’re seeing a dramatic improvement with some new technology. uses that are going to extend decent Internet access to areas that didn’t have it before. So 5g is never going to have the capacity of fiber, it is never going to be quite as good as a fiber connection direct to your house, the gold standard is fiber period. Even 5g biggest proponents will say that, you know, we do not intend to completely replace fiber, but it’s a lot easier to cover square miles with 5g than it is to cover square miles with fiber. So you’re gonna see you’ll see fiber hoods, fiber neighborhoods, hopefully spreading, but then outside those zones. You see the carriers, especially T Mobile and Verizon, hopefully start to cover some of those suburbs and exurbs with a 5g service that is better than what they’d gotten before. And then once you get way out into the country, once you get into your into your distant, small towns of 400 500 people, that’s where something like Starlink comes into play. And the next generation satellite services, which can reach even where 5g doesn’t reach.
Rolando Rosas 36:11
And that’s where isn’t that where Musk Elon is that Elon Musk or Bezos is one of those billionaires that’s fighting for the satellite internet based services
Sascha Segan 36:21
there. Yes, Starlink is Starlink is Elon Musk’s? That’s the only one currently on sale. It’s in a beta test. But there are two more very similar players called OneWeb. And Amazon’s project Kuiper. Hang on a sec. Someone’s calling me. All right. Oh, no, it’s one of my test phones. And I don’t know which one. But yeah, so one web and project Kiuper from Amazon are also doing this lower satellite thing where they are trying to put a whole bunch of small satellites around the Earth to deliver much better satellite internet than was available previously. And so you’ll have, hopefully, within five, six years, you have these three layers of fiber and then outside that 5g, and then outside that much better satellite than we’ve had up until now?
Rolando Rosas 37:11
Well, I can I can imagine when you’re saying that especially low earth orbit, I’m thinking about how autonomous vehicles, especially the commercial ones, that are you’re going to need connectivity, if you’re going to if you’re going to haul merchandise coast to coast, right. And you would need all those sensors to pick up in where it’s going and all that. And if you have a cluster of internet that’s blanketing basically the country coast to coast, and it’s it’s a good quality internet that that will allow, in addition, obviously, the electric batteries and all the rest that you need in the infrastructure, you need that internet coverage, in order for this to work. No.
Sascha Segan 37:48
Yeah, though, I think if you’re talking about things like long distance trucking, that is definitely going to fall within the 5g circle, because you’re gonna have 5g Towers all along the major highways. And this, the satellite stuff is really for outside where they can establish that infrastructure. In my mind, because it’s more expensive. It’s more expensive per byte, it’s the terminals are more expensive. The dishes are very complicated, but you’re going to have 5g along all the major highways. And that’s what’s going to create a world of autonomous trucking, as you say, when you have standalone 5g networks, really low latency, you end up having the self driving trucks, eventually, at the very least self tracking trucks. And then that definitely, definitely changes and to some extent revolutionizes how freight is transferred, transported in the US.
Rolando Rosas 38:43
Right? I think so. And I think that if you you probably up on this, the the last mile carriers like FedEx and UPS, they’re already experimenting with autonomous commercial trucks, I know that Tesla is talking about theirs is not out yet. They’re still working on it. But there’s a lot of money being pumped into the ecosystem for autonomous vehicles. And those are depending on, you know, some type of coverage to make them to make them work, in addition to the infrastructure that’s needed to make that happen.
Sascha Segan 39:18
Yeah, and we definitely need the nationwide standalone low latency 5g networks to make that happen. And that’s something that’s being laid and over the next three, four years, a big problem with 5g Marketing and this just gets us on a total tangent, but 5g is a lot of my job. And a big part of the problem with 5g is just that the carriers jumped the gun on marketing it just they started marketing it way before it was ready. And so they over promised and under delivered and a lot of the stuff that you hear promise from 5g. I think it’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna happen in like 2023 2024 and the carriers are all promising it for 2020 and they could never have delivered it on that calendar.
Rolando Rosas 39:58
Oh, Unless we were a small island country,
Sascha Segan 40:02
even then, some of the some of the some of the technical standards they need hadn’t even been set yet. Like a lot of industrial 5g relies on a standard called Network slicing. And that standard was only set at the end of last year. The hardware for that is only becoming available later this year. So they really, really jumped the gun.
Dave Kelly 40:26
So which which cities are furthest along with the deployment of 5g
Sascha Segan 40:33
in terms of so in terms of 5g cities, that’s a study we’re going to be doing this summer. When we are going to do our drive tests this summer, we hope to hit 30 US cities and do some pretty aggressive driving around them with all three of the major carriers to check out the 5g. I would say in terms of carriers. At the moment, it’s T Mobile that is most fulfilling the 5g promise. And they’re doing that because they they fortunately went in relatively early on what’s called mid band 5g. And that turns out to be the sweet spot of 5g where you can both have coverage and performance. And AT&T and Verizon are really playing catch up there and they will start catching up next year. But this year, T Mobile is really leading in terms of the 5g experience
Rolando Rosas 41:24
is the ultra wideband that Verizon is marketing. Is there a difference there? Is that just a marketing jargon for them when they’re saying ultra wideband 5g? Oh
Sascha Segan 41:34
no, that is amazing. Actually, that technology. So ultra wideband 5g As per Verizon is something called millimeter wave. And that is very short wavelengths. They only go about 800 feet from a panel. But they deliver multi gigabit speeds, I’ve seen three gigabits off one of those panels. And so it’s terrific for delivering, say, in city home internet, or for lighting up a stadium or a concert, or a concert hall or a convention center, where you have these really dense populations, all of whom are trying to use their devices at once. But it turns out, Verizon is trying to has been trying to cover cities with it for like two years now. But it just doesn’t have the range to cover whole cities, like so it’s a great experience, but you’re really only ultimately going to be getting it in places where large numbers of people collect densely.
Rolando Rosas 42:32
I see. Right, and you wrote a piece on the on millimeter wave for the Super Bowl, where they had installed. I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. They installed the antennas underneath people’s seats.
Sascha Segan 42:47
Right in a Super Bowl. That is a perfect example of a good use for millimeter wave. And to give you an example of where Verizon wants to go with this, beyond just people you know streaming from their phones in the stands. If you think about how sports games are broadcast, you have all of these cameras on and around the field. And these cameras all have to be connected by thick cables running hundreds and hundreds of yards to the to the so called mixing booth. broadcast booth.
Rolando Rosas 43:21
Yep, yep,
Sascha Segan 43:22
yep. Okay to the booth. And so that takes a long time. It’s expensive. It limits the mobility of the cameras. It limits the flexibility of what broadcasters can do. And now if you imagine those cameras, freed from those giant cables and made wireless, you can then move around much more freely. You can provide different perspectives. You can have a livelier broadcast, you can have a better broadcasts potentially with fewer cameras because you can move them from place to place. And that’s something you can do with 5g inside the stadium in the future.
Rolando Rosas 44:02
Interesting. Wow. So maybe some helmet cams or something to come up right
Sascha Segan 44:06
totally. Helmet cams and drone cams are both things that I have heard about, regarding specifically football for the past year and a half
Rolando Rosas 44:15
on, bring it on. It’s ready. We’re ready for some football.
Sascha Segan 44:19
Imagine, imagine loading up your app and being able to pick your player and then you just see the game in POV from that player in forte and that’s the kind of thing you can do love it. I love for ultra wideband this.
Rolando Rosas 44:33
Is the NFL actually talking about this or or is that or is that just conversation right now in wishful thinking?
Sascha Segan 44:39
It’s just conversation. I mean, a lot of this has to get kicked around. So first of all, the technology isn’t there yet. As I said, like this. This requires this requires parts of 5g that have not been created quite yet. Okay. But also, of course, you know, they’re gonna have to get permission from the teams, they’re gonna have to think about the players and their privacy. They’re gonna have to think about how fragile the cameras are, but it’s a concept and how
Dave Kelly 45:02
other teams can use that by analyzing, you know, so analyzing a game, total one thing, but that that brings it to a whole different level for sure.
Sascha Segan 45:14
But I’m just giving you an idea of what you could theoretically do with 5G in a stadium. And that’s why people that that’s why you really want to get excited about Ultra wideband, it’s not about covering whole cities, because they’ll never be able to cover whole cities. Right.
Rolando Rosas 45:27
Right. So so the application is really for mass gatherings are where lots of people tend to gather, it’s probably
Sascha Segan 45:35
are like sport Convention Center college campus, you know, well, convention.
Rolando Rosas 45:40
I know whenever Vegas opens up again, CES, I’ve been to there and the speeds aren’t always there when you have CES. Because there’s a ton of people all crowded in one area. We’ll have to see if next year. I don’t know if CES is going to be virtual again or not.
Sascha Segan 45:57
I mean, I hope business travel starts happening again. I would really love to start seeing the conventions again in 2022.
Dave Kelly 46:06
Well, I’m sure we’ll be back to normal relatively soon. Vaccinations are rolling out people will have their ID cards and people will be comfortable and they’ll feel safe before Yeah, hopefully this happens sooner than later.
Sascha Segan 46:19
So I noticed the trivia question was what is the number one work from home city? And we haven’t talked about that yet. Are we not supposed to talk about that? Because people are supposed to figure it out for themselves?
Rolando Rosas 46:29
No, we could say we’re rolling, we could go ahead and jump into it. But
Dave Kelly 46:34
before we before we jump into that, I just want to ask one last question. Sascha, what are some 5g hacks, devices or trends that the audience can take away I saw a video from mid mid September love last year, where they were saying 4g speeds just as good as 5g, but that was back in like September of 2020.
Sascha Segan 46:57
Well, that’s a problem that Verizon is having. And it is something that you need to be aware of. So Verizon and AT&T right now. So they can pop that 5g icon are running very slow forms of 5g in a lot of areas. And so you may find that in a lot of areas Verizon and AT&T specifically 5g speeds are the same or even worse than 4g speeds. And this is something that they aimed this is something that they will fix next year when they turn on mid band. But for now, you definitely want to consider if you’re on Verizon, and you’re not in one of these ultra wideband areas, you want to consider trying to toggle your 5g and 4g on and off and seeing which one of them works best for you. Because it’s not a slam dunk. Which one will be better than the other? Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 47:49
I see. So you can stay put on 4g and keep listening for 5g updates.
Sascha Segan 47:54
Exactly, exactly. It’s the same thing with at&t.
Rolando Rosas 47:57
Gotcha, gotcha. And let’s let’s talk about Chattanooga. What was so special about Chattanooga? I got to I’ve got a bone to pick because I had to put Austin but I know now why Austin is not number one. Yeah. Because you can’t find a house for less than $750,000. Yeah, we have. There was a guy from New York that used to that ran years ago, by the way, his whole campaign was the rent is too damn
Sascha Segan 48:24
high. I know that guy,
Rolando Rosas 48:28
too, thereby bringing the
Sascha Segan 48:30
rent is in fact too damn high. He’s not wrong. But Chattanooga, okay, so 10 years ago, some like 10 years ago, Chattanooga had a brilliant idea. They have a city run electric utility, the EPB. And they decided to have the EPB start running gigabit fiber over all of their, like, all of their power line infrastructure, not the actual lines, but the infrastructure. Because power goes to every house, right? You gotta power. And so if the power company can run fiber, they can run it to every house, they have the infrastructure, right? So EPB turn Chattanooga into the nation’s first mid sized gigabit city where everybody has the everybody has the availability to get gigabit internet and it’s worked out really well for them. And of course it helps the Chattanooga is a really pleasant city. Like it’s it’s, you know, it’s on a nice it’s on a nice river. It has some historic buildings, you know, it’s got some mountains around it. It has it has enough people and diversity and culture to be interesting. But where they’ve, where they flourished beyond some other midsize cities like them is by taking this gigabit advantage and pumping it into too, encouraging technology businesses and remote businesses to come. And that is working out for Chattanooga. And to some extent rating it number one for us. Like that’s our least the least surprising thing in our study, really. But yeah, because it gets these kinds of number one work from home ratings all the time. Because it’s affordable. It’s pleasant. It’s relatively diverse. It has a work from home and startup community. And it has this marvelously available gigabit internet.
Rolando Rosas 50:36
So it’s very tech friendly and friendly on the wallet. Exactly. And it sounds like it’s got some really interesting things that would draw people to the city beat besides the fiber as well as the price prices of the homes.
Sascha Segan 50:48
Exactly. So so it’s a it’s a mid sized city. It’s a real city, you get that real city lifestyle, but it it’s still very, very affordable.
Rolando Rosas 51:01
Awesome. Well, there you go. Chattanooga, big props to you. You dethroned. The if you look at, you know, whoever wrote about best places to work from prior to COVID. It had Austin usually one and maybe Raleigh Durham two or vice versa, or somewhere in the mix was was the cities because it was so hot, because sometimes they were affordable. And a lot of the tech startups and companies were expanding and moving there. And now because so many tech guys and gals are moving their prices now are up and up and up.
Sascha Segan 51:33
Yeah, I mean, you could really there’s a lot of talk about how and whether Austin is overheated at this point. Yeah, we definitely found we found little suburbs of Dallas and Houston to call out. Woodlands, woodlands and there’s a place called St. Paul which is north of north of Dallas and once again like as I said earlier in the as I said earlier in the stream when you take some of the suburbs also consider suburbs near them to be similarly good. So like when when we talk about woodlands, it’s other I think it’s North Houston suburbs, right.
Rolando Rosas 52:06
So Spring, Texas, exactly. Kingsville. Exactly. Wood and pinpoint. Well, you go up to Conroe, which is just north of the woodlands.
Sascha Segan 52:16
And then some other of those North Dallas Collin County suburbs were also similar. But around Austin, there was there wasn’t anywhere that people were signing up for enough gigabit where the houses were not insanely expensive.
Rolando Rosas 52:32
Oh, terrific. Well, Sascha, I found the piece interesting. I can’t wait to your follow on for that. And get bring you on again. But before we let you go, we have a few rapid fire questions we like to ask our guests that we bring on. There’s no right or wrong answer is your answer. So are we ready with that? Okay, so what’s your favorite musical group or musician.
Sascha Segan 52:59
So I really like a Canadian band called stars. They’re a kind of indie rock band that’s been around for about 20 years. And I’ve been listening to them for about 20 years. And they just write really beautiful music. It really touches me emotionally and has helped me through a lot of difficult times in life.
Rolando Rosas 53:20
There you go. They’re big plug for them. I’m sure now there’ll be setting Pandora and the streaming stuff on fire now. Your favorite app on your phone?
Sascha Segan 53:31
Ha my favorite app on my phone. I mean, I am the Phone Guy. That’s it, I would say that. I would say that recently, I have been thinking a lot about Citymapper. It’s a transit app that helps you get around your city. And as we’ve been looking at getting, as we’ve been looking at getting our shots and getting out of the house again, and the ability to get around New York City again, my my city, my favorite city. This app is really good at putting together the best way to get from A to B. And I’m really excited to be getting from A to B again, and not to be in the kitchen all the time.
Rolando Rosas 54:14
Great. I can’t wait to go to Times Square and Broadway and all those places. We certainly have folks that are there as well as some clients and I love the city. It’s great. It’s vibrant when people are there. It’s not quite the same yet. Exactly. Hopefully it’ll get back to that. Let me ask you about two other things. Favorite type of food.
Sascha Segan 54:38
Favorite type of food. I can always eat Mexican.
Rolando Rosas 54:40
My favorite. There’s actually a place in I’ll tell you my favorite place in Manhattan that has Mexican is it’s a small place called Mexicue. You know, yeah, that couple of restaurants in Manhattan.
Sascha Segan 54:55
It’s newer. It’s newer old offices actually. Mexico. I would call them more Tex Mex though. So Tex Mex,
Rolando Rosas 55:00
Tex Mex. Okay. Tex Mex, Tex Mex unless you have some others because I cannot wait to get back to the city. And I’d love to know where where do you go when you go? Okay, so I’m just asking where are you going? What are you is your favorite place.
Sascha Segan 55:11
So I live in a neighborhood called Jackson Heights, which is a very, very multicultural, heavily immigrant neighborhood. And there’s a whole bunch of places around this neighborhood which interpret Mexican food in different ways. We have a heavy taco truck presence, we have a heavy tamale lady presence. And then we have some other like small local places like there’s a place called El Rio Tinto, which I really like there’s a place called COVID Zingo, which I really like it’s an embarrassment of riches in this part of Queens.
Rolando Rosas 55:45
I can’t wait. And next time I’m there, I’m gonna I’m gonna take you up on that. I’m gonna hit those places up. Last question for you. Your preferred method of communication, you’re a tech guy is an email, is it text? Is it a phone call, instant message?
Sascha Segan 56:00
Or am I communicating with is this business or personal?
Rolando Rosas 56:04
Okay, take take them both separately.
Sascha Segan 56:06
Okay. I would say I would say business wise, actually, I do a lot of communication on Twitter. I am on Twitter all the time @SaschaSegan I have a big presence there, I engage with people, both publicly and through DM, I really find it efficient and fun and comfortable. Personally, I would say that I am always texting in some form. Whether it be regular SMS or Facebook Messenger, or, you know, some other form of DM, I kind of consider them all texting, you know, it’s all the same kind of thing. And that kind of asynchronous communication where I can think about my words before I actually say them, makes me a lot more comfortable.
Dave Kelly 57:01
Like mom always said, Think before you speak exactly.
Rolando Rosas 57:05
Well, I find these questions fascinating because every guest has a little bit of a different take and how they communicate and how they do and I just, well, at some point, Dave, we’re going to compile these and probably make a montage and, and put them all together and put all of our guests there and let them let people see what what they’ve said. Because I just find that really fascinating. So Sasha, before you go, if people want you said Twitter, if people want to get into hold of you follow you see your articles, what’s the best way to do that.
Sascha Segan 57:37
So I have a weekly newsletter called Sascha Segan’s Race to 5G, which if you Google the phrase, PCMag newsletter, sign up, you will get the signup page and then you can sign up for my race to 5g newsletter, which comes out every Friday. Otherwise, you can of course always find my articles on PCmag.com. And as I said, I am always on Twitter at @SaschaSegan. And if you want to get in touch with me to just chat about tech, that’s probably the easiest way.
Rolando Rosas 58:08
Awesome, awesome. Thank you, Sascha, thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it. We will tap you again for when you have the follow on or other interesting stuff. Because this is so fast. I could geek out here for another hour. But I know your time is precious. And you got to hop on another call shortly. Good.
Sascha Segan 58:27
Yeah, yeah. Let’s, let’s talk once. Let’s talk once the big 5g study comes out this summer, we’ll have a lot of great information that we gather grabbing from say the same word to it.
Rolando Rosas 58:37
I mean, to me, too. Awesome. And so let’s, or what are we jumping to now we’re going to Oh, yeah, let’s, let’s tell everybody. If you love this kind of content, go ahead and follow us follow Sascha as well. He’s got a lot of cool interesting tidbits. And information, hit the like button, hit the subscribe, hit all the bells and whistles because like this interview, we’re going to sneak it out. We’re going to get nuggets out to you. And the only way to get that is if you’ve subscribed and you get that notification. So go ahead and do that. Let us know if you have other questions or comments or other other themes that you want to see in future episodes. So go ahead and do that. It’ll mean a lot to us. And so go ahead and do that. All right. trivia question. I think we blew that one out of the water. But let’s go ahead and throw it out.
Dave Kelly 59:32
alanda you gave this answer away. But yes. Listen, I think a lot of folks out there probably already considering it and maybe you’re already doing some research. Chattanooga, Tennessee was ranked number one by PCMag. Wow, the best amazing place to work working and now we know why. You know, it does look like a fantastic place. To have the network. They got the diversity. They have the city. It looks like a great place. To be
Rolando Rosas 1:00:00
does, it certainly does. And so thanks against the Sascha for bringing us some value add for especially if you’re going to be working from home, whether you’re in a closet, or you want a much bigger closet, like some of the cities that he’s highlighted in this piece. So, thank you for joining us today, and we’ll see you the next time. Thanks for having me. Thank you
Recent Comments