Building a More Connected World with TRAXyL's Fiber Advances

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Let's have a conversation . So , as I said in the intro , outside plant fiber it's not the easiest thing to do . Who likes digging ditches ? Who likes trying to make sure that they they're meeting the the OSHA requirements for making sure that they have enough spillage on the sides so people don't get trapped and stuff ? What if I could tell ?

What if I told you you could do over a mile of fiber and that's a conservative number , a mile of fiber a day literally by riding on something almost like a lawnmower . Would you be interested ? Well , I got recommended to talk to a company from my good buddy , lee Lee Renfrow . Welcome to the show , daniel Turner from Traxel . How you doing , my friend ?

And we basically invented a concept to drive a machine we call it a trackster right on the surface of roads and paint communication lines right on pavement . And so we've built machines , we've installed product and it's out serving customers right now .

Yeah , so what's the Traxel system ? What is that ?

It's really a whole new way of thinking about delivering fiber , that last mile , using basically a new right of way that we've discovered on surfaces Ever since the invention of the telegraph . Cables have either been buried underground or strong arileon poles .

We've kind of flipped that all on its head and said , hey , let's use the existing pavement infrastructure and make installing fiber as simple as painting a road marking and just drive down the road and install it at a mile a day , generally speaking .

That's what enables us to be so fast and deploy infrastructure that actually ends up providing services , sometimes same day .

But it's really meant to be much different than micro trenching , for example , where we're still in that wearing course layer of that upper layer of the pavement surface . We're not cutting through the pavement , we're not creating a seam in the pavement that allows for water infiltration and other things to occur and create separations between those two pavement layers .

So it's really meant to be very fast , generate a minimal amount of debris and still provide massive amounts of connectivity with the fiber cables that we're using that are very dense .

Obviously you need that Traxxor operator who's going to be sitting there driving the machine and then having some people that can work at the start and end of a run to prep the starting and end points . We've even started splicing fibers before we've even delivered fiber to the other side .

So there's a lot that we can do in parallel and certainly there's some ideas to even shrink the size of that team . But we're really trying to increase the amount of fiber we can deploy and then hourly basis , on a daily basis , and just change the math for how fiber networks get architected .

You see in examples where you actually want to take a much longer path , but it avoids you having to do a big trench or a bore or something like that , and so it's giving you an alternative means to get between any two points . So it really becomes up to the installer to kind of choose what makes the most sense for them .

For example , we are installed on a bridge deck in Ohio and you could have run it down the center of the highway lanes if you wanted , but it made more sense both from the installation perspective for safety and keeping out of the lanes of traffic . We're actually installed on the shoulder of that bridge and we just go down the shoulder of that bridge .

So I think it'll just be sort of customer dependent and situationally dependent on where you want to run it . But you can also navigate very easily and make turns , and so you can avoid obstacles or potholes . Maybe that already pre-exist , or maybe there's like some sort of great or manhole cover you want to drive around .

Those are all possible now with this very flexible way of installing the fiber .

I was going to ask you about public highways , but if you're going across the bridge , that had to have been a public highway or a public road , right ?

But , yeah , whoever the surface owner would be would be like who you'd want to speak to or who we would speak to on your behalf if you had a sort of a need . Our website , traxelcom , just to throw it out there , traxylcom has a bunch of frequently asked questions and answers that are provided that can help provide a little more guidance and details .

And then certainly we're open to a phone call or an email if somebody would want to learn more .

One of the great things about our solution is is just so minimally invasive and there's just minimal impact to the road pavement itself , and so generally most municipalities and road owners have been very open to this idea of being able to provide fiber internet services without having to dig up the road or disrupt even the right of way next to the road that might

be full of other utilities to include gas , electric and many of the other items taking up those existing rights of way . And so I think pavement owners and municipalities have been very positive to it .

Again , just because it's not going to affect the actual use of the road , there may be some minimal disruption of traffic in that travel lane for a very short period of time , but other than that , once it's in place it's being used .

Right now , the current machine we're building is able to put down a 24 count cable , but we're looking at doing some things in the near future that will enable us to put down 144 fibers and beyond . So we're pretty excited about what we're able to do 144

strands .

We're looking at , obviously , the broadband funding that's coming in and we know that there's going to be some installers and ISPs and state governments that want to try to get more people connected and so we're looking at how can we be a little bit different logistically and maybe put some flag poles down in some states and some warehouses and get some equipment

into the hands of the installers out there . So we're in this sort of phase change of the company , where we're trying to push our machines and capability out to other third party installers .

We're trying to showcase our tech by being the installer ourselves , but certainly getting to that printer-printer-ink model where we can provide that equipment to third parties and have them use it . That's where we think .

How's your product or your installation process is affected by , say , doing a project in Miami versus one in Columbus , Ohio in December ?

We don't want to be below freezing during an installation and we don't want to have any moisture on the ground during an installation . So if it just rained or there's a lot of dew on the surface , that would prevent a good bond with our resins to the pavement . So anything other than that generally is pretty good .

There may be some upper limits on high high temps in the hottest part of the day where there may be some effects . But once the product's been installed and cured it can survive in extreme hot and cold temperatures , and so we've again had installations in the mountains of New York bridges in Ohio .

We've actually done an installation in Utah this year and we're excited to get through a Utah winter with it to showcase the capability there , and also down in hot places like Las Vegas , nevada and places in Florida that are also extremely hot , and in Texas too . So we've done kind of both hot and cold .

kicked in , which sunk into pavement , and in the winter areas I got to worry about snow plows , right . So let's talk about the durability . How can you put this in , and I mean how durable , to make sure that something doesn't happen to break the fiber ?

We have this installed in a port where there's huge top loaders that are massive pieces of equipment . They're going to be going over the lines every day . The resin is actually quite durable and bonds to asphalt stronger than asphalt bonds to itself . So it's a very , very hardy material that , when cured , is extremely durable and resilient .

It's basically like plexiglass when it's fully cured .

We've had installations where , in the testing that we've done , the samples have actually rutted under the loads of the weighted wheels going back and forth and putting ruts into the pavement and the signal actually still continues to propagate through because again , it's in this steel-wrapped small diameter cable that can take those pressures and loads and not be affected

by them and not create cuts or micro cracks or micro bends in the cable itself . So we're pretty excited about all the different use cases for it . And with regards to snow plows , we've done snow plow testing .

We've had lines installed and had multiple passes of snow plows going back and forth and because we're now flush to that surface , we actually have kind of two techniques .

We've developed One's actually surface mount which leaves a little bit of a bump up and I would say that's more resistant to snow plows and has actually survived multiple years of snow plows running over the lines .

And in fact that's what we have still installed out in Greenville , South Carolina , and also on the bridge in Ohio , is our surface mount , which is a little bit of our older technique . Our newer technique , flush mount again is inside the surface layer and snow plows just go right over top of it .

Now , certainly , if a plow is gouging into pavement and creating gouges , nothing's going to stop a plow , but the idea is that if you put them off the maybe beaten path of where the plow is sometimes the road has a crown to it and you can kind of be underneath where that blade's going to be .

It still should be very resilient to plowing and if something were to happen , we believe our solution is so cost effective and time install effective that you can think about building it out like the road network where there's multiple redundant pathways to get between any two points and you could reroute data around areas that have an effect or an error issue or

something going on there and then quickly reestablish new lines that have seen problems and just continue to enhance and evolve the network as you go . So still more to learn and be discovered there , but we are finding some very early successes that are highlighting the use of this stuff as something that's going to be game changing .

He called an ISP , they drove out to his house and basically laughed in his face , told him he'd never get fiber out to where he lived . And that idea of like , couldn't he have just brought it with him and paint a line behind him ? And it seemed really kind of a simple idea at the time .

And it's kind of like either easily dismissed or maybe it's so simple that people just thought that it would never work . And I think that was what gave me the confidence that I was onto something here , because I'm probably the only one stubborn enough to pursue it and keep going at it .

And so the company was formed as an LLC around 2014 just to sort of explore the grant opportunities and the patents and stuff that may have existed . I would say around 2017-2018 is when I went full time on it and my co-founder came on and went full time on it .

2019 is probably when we got our first big contract award , and then obviously we've done a lot of good things since then .

It became apparent that there's a lot of times where the line for traffic needs to go in one direction and the fiber cable has to go in another direction and so , being a D connected to the line paving system , you know , we kind of thought that let's be on our own and be our own thing and kind of blend .

So the thought process is blending it and so we have a number of techniques to blend to the surface . We can change the colors . The lines blend right into the surface , especially after several weeks of just sun and wear on them . They kind of disappear . We're pretty excited about some other techniques that we have to blend the lines and even more .

But yeah , being hidden in plain sight was kind of the thought there .

Not to mention , the resin bonds extremely well to itself , and so if you want to even just run a skim code over top of a different color , you could do that as well .

So extremely hard concrete , old concrete , very thick concrete that's been around for years and years and years and that stuff's pretty hard to get through . But you know we still managed to do 8,500 feet in three days out there , so still powered through the concrete .

And also , you know we can kind of use , we can install on probably any concrete that you throw at it at the machines , but asphalt is faster and easier .

But as far as smaller joints with concrete , yeah , we can just cross right over the joint using the standard installation process . The resins are pretty flexible so they can expand and contract somewhat with the joint and the cable itself obviously is somewhat flexible .

The fibers inside are kind of free to move inside of that tube in the center of the cable and so there's no stresses actually applied to the glass themselves .

Yeah , there might be some pole lease fees and make ready fees and there's going to be some costs associated with pole installations over time . But it's hard to compare direct to our technique apples to apples .

We found in a lot of cases our costs are significantly less , and especially in these urban environments where there's a lot of cost , and especially in these urban environments where there's a lot of other utilities , you're trying to avoid and you're trying to minimize your disruption and your restoration problems that you might run into .

So the way that Traxel is pricing it right now is a price per foot plus a mobilization cost , plus how you want to terminate , whether there's splicing or if you just need us to hand you the end of the cable . You know , are you going into a hand hole or manhole or are you just bringing it into a building ?

There's always some uniqueness to the termination , so we generally just price it out at a perfect basis and our pricing per foot . Obviously a lot of variables that go into that . But we want to be the lowest price possible and try to aim for that , and so we're trying to do things to bring down our costs .

We've sold anywhere between 10 to 20 maybe $25 per foot all in and I think that we're probably closer to the 10 to $15 per foot . If you give us a call , we can quote things right on demand . So all we need is a minimal amount of information . We can get a ROM thrown together and we just kind of need to know where you're at right now .

The mobilization costs are probably the biggest cost driver and that's what's hampering us the most , and so if we can get multiple installs in one location , or if we can get you know some kind of like , like if we can just have a facility out somewhere and be able to go from that facility , that's going to drive down the mobilization costs .

Ultimately , we want to get these machines into the hands of third party installers , and so there might be a lease fee for the equipment and then just a per foot Cost we would charge to that installer , and then that installer would be free to price it how they want to their customers . So we're still exploring the whole cost realm .

There may be some options to rent the lines on a per foot basis , like on a monthly basis , depending on the customer . Maybe they don't want to fork over any sort of upfront capital expense , but they're fine paying a monthly rental to use fiber and we can just maintain those lines . And I think that that model could work with other installers as well .

So that's a great model .

We kind of started off crawling around on our hands and knees to do this and we're getting to the point now where you have machines that are coming available . We're out doing projects . Like I mentioned , we did about 10,000 feet at Tendall . We've done several thousand feet at multiple other Air Force bases and Army bases .

We've done the bridge in Ohio , which was probably around 2,000 feet . The camp in New York was probably around I don't know 2,000 feet or so . So we're doing these one-offs . If we can find the right business partner that sees the vision that we have and wants to do 20,000 feet a month , that'd be kind of like where we'd be aiming for Projects like that .

But I think , as of right now , we're probably around 30 to 35,000 feet .

That's all they do is Traxel , or that's just another service that a company may offer , and do they have to buy the equipment ?

It helps us understand the use of the equipment and where to improve things and make things better . So leasing is kind of where we're starting with and then as far as like what , the types of customers that we think we need to find , there's gonna be fiber installers that already have bucket trucks . They already have horizontal directional drills .

Maybe they're an ISP that does installations themselves . Why not have another Traxler machine as another tool in their tool bag ? There may eventually evolve to where there's just companies that just do Traxel type installations , almost like you've got with horizontal directional drill companies that just focus on that tool .

But I see this as just being another tool in the tool bag , like I said , and it should be just as easy to use as all those other pieces of equipment as well .

Have you thought about those kinds of process and if you did , how they look ?

There's a number of ways to make the transitions how to work with the hand tools , because there's always that start and end points that you work with the chemicals by hand , and then , obviously , how the different pieces of equipment work , the general processes that are going on , and then there might be some specific things around the specific pieces of equipment that

they might be using .

Yeah , we've looked at all of that and I think it would just be getting lease agreements in place with the companies and then getting the operators to take the training and then whether there's a certification or if just a Traxel approved installer kind of a verbiage , that's probably still yet to be determined , but we're working through all of that right now .

Let's start the conversation and figure out what you need and we'll figure out how to make it work .

I may have to have you guys come back on or , if you ever find yourself doing a project in the , like I said , the Ocala Tampa corridor , give me a holler man . I might just show up and just see how this stuff is being done firsthand . This sounds extremely interesting .