Connected Nation

How being "a canoe in a sea of battleships" steers this ISP's mission

• Jessica Denson • Season 5 • Episode 32

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On today’s podcast, we talk with the CEO of DigitalC, a company that’s offering lightning fast-internet to anyone in its service area for just 18-dollars a month, for five years! The service is 100 Mbps download and 100 Mbps upload speeds.
 
 Find out how that’s been made possible through a unique partnership. Plus, we’ll explore the community approach DigitalC takes – that’s setting it apart from other, much larger I-S-P’s.

Recommended Links:
DigitalC Website

Jessica Denson (00:08):

This is Connected Nation, an award-winning podcast focused on all things broadband from closing the digital divide to improving your internet speeds. We talk technology topics that impact all of us, our families, and our neighborhoods. On today's podcast, we talk with the CEO of digital CA company that's offering lightning, fast internet to anyone in the service area for just $18 a month for five years. And when I say lightning fast, I mean the service is a hundred MVPs download and a hundred up. Find out how that's been made possible through a unique partnership. Plus we'll explore the community approach digital C takes, that's setting it apart from other much larger ISPs. I'm Jessica Sen, and this is Connected Nation. I'm Jessica Denson, and today my guest is Joshua Edmonds, the CEO of Digital Sea, a Cleveland based internet service provider. Welcome, Joshua.

Joshua Edmonds (01:05):

Hello there.

Jessica Denson (01:06):

How are you? Doing

Joshua Edmonds (01:09):

Well, today, it's a Friday and yeah, the weather's incredible out here. I just feel really, really great today.

Jessica Denson (01:16):

We were talking right before the podcast, how it seems like the week right before a holiday, which we're recording this right before the July 4th holiday. It seems like it's crazy,

Joshua Edmonds (01:28):

But it allows us to, I don't know, offset the capacity that we might not expend next week. So now we're just getting everything done right now.

Jessica Denson (01:37):

That's good. Yeah, we can all take it easy next week. Right. And you're okay with me calling you Josh instead of Joshua, is that right?

Joshua Edmonds (01:45):

Oh yeah, I'm the youngest.

Jessica Denson (01:47):

Alright.

Joshua Edmonds (01:49):

You can call me a whole lot of things I've desensitized.

Jessica Denson (01:54):

That's hysterical. Well, I met your chief marketing comms officer at Digital Sea at a recent conference in Texas, and I talked to her for just a little bit and the thing she was so excited about you guys are doing, we had to arrange this interview and I hope our audience is excited. I had the privilege of doing a pre-interview with you and you've got lots of energy, you got lots of great things to share. So I've been looking forward to this one. So I really thank you for joining us. Before we get started and talking about Digital Seal, I'd love to share with our audience a little bit of your background share what you were doing leading up to your years before you landed at Digital Sea.

Joshua Edmonds (02:36):

Yes. So Digital Sea is a full circle moment for me. So my first instance where I was focusing on digital equity, I actually came in the form of me working at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority. So CUA County, that's Cleveland, Cleveland's in CUA County. And at that time I was working on President Obama's Connect Home Initiative and Connect Home had just launched and we were really focusing on connecting our most vulnerable residents in public housing to internet access. Fast forward after that worked in philanthropy at the Cleveland Foundation, finding ways to invest in Cleveland's digital divide. Then the city of Detroit poached me where I worked as the director of Digital Equity inclusion for the mayor for four years. And then Cleveland brought me back to Run Digital Sea, our nonprofit technology social enterprise, headquartered in Cleveland, all focusing on home internet and expanding our digital literacy portfolio to residents.

Jessica Denson (03:32):

Now, when we were talking previously during our pre-interview, you really talked about how each role informed you in different ways, taught you different things about the approach to digital equity and just general this industry. Can you expand upon that a little bit?

Joshua Edmonds (03:50):

Yeah, absolutely. Right. So the first role in public housing, I mean that you're seeing this stuff on the ground as many people know, that when you're serving in a capacity in public housing, you are seeing people where the needs are just so profoundly great, and it actually just exposed a lot of the assumptions that you might've had about the digital divide. They're going to be challenged at that level. And so being able to work on the ground and serving again some of our most vulnerable residents that kind of help create this human-centered design approach as relates to our interventions that are crafted. And then at the Cleveland Foundation, allowing me to be able to seed a philanthropic ecosystem or think more regionally, that allowed me to activate much more of the strategic side. How do you build ecosystems? How do you build communities? How do you find different sources of funding?

(04:43):

And even identifying different forms of capital from actual capital to social capital. I mean, it really allowed me to think much more strategically about the digital divide. And then when I was over in Detroit, the first two years I was actually a fellow at the University of Michigan. So I got to see the research component to researching the digital divide. And then obviously simultaneously I was working at the city of Detroit within the municipal offices. And the political side of the digital divide is absolutely fascinating and interesting and well, sometimes it's very, very, very challenging too. And then obviously in this current role, I'm seeing the business side of the digital divide, how one would actually create a sustainable endeavor, taking all of those past experiences from on the ground, from the strategy, from the political side of this, and then running an actual business operation where we're taking all those affirmation elements and blending those together to create a unique experience for not only the residents that we serve, but also just the incredible team that we have here at Digital Sea.

Jessica Denson (05:52):

Well, we're going to dive deeper into Digital Sea in a moment, but first tell me a little bit, did you grow up in Cleveland? What is Cleveland? What should people know about that area?

Joshua Edmonds (06:02):

Yeah, so I'm originally from a town called Paynesville, Ohio named after Thomas Payne, one of our signers of the Constitution. So I guess that's a fun fact. But Paynesville is about maybe about 20, 25 minutes outside of Cleveland. My father was a minister and a musician, and so we spent a lot of time going to Cleveland churches, just traveling. And during that time was able to just get a really great understanding of what a larger city was in Cleveland versus my native of Paynesville. But I live in Cleveland now. I've lived in Cleveland in the past, even before I left for Detroit. I mean, pretty much a lifelong resident at this point. And Cleveland is home. And so being able to do something special here we're absolutely motivated by guys like LeBron who were able to win a championship in Cleveland. It's special to do something for your hometown. So when the opportunity came to be able to come back to Cleveland, I love Detroit. I love the Midwest as a region, but being able to come back home and do something special was absolutely something I couldn't deny.

Jessica Denson (07:07):

And you said you were the youngest of how many kids? You said your father was a minister? Three. Okay. Are you all brothers or?

Joshua Edmonds (07:15):

No. So my sister was the oldest. She had the opportunity, she had the strength at the very beginning when girls mature faster than boys, so she would be my brother up until puberty hit us. And then we got super strong and my brother is 11 months older than me, so while he is my older brother

Jessica Denson (07:33):

Oh wow. Brother Irish twins.

Joshua Edmonds (07:35):

Yeah, there's that little period in time in January in February where we're the same age, and thankfully he's my older brother, but I'm taller than him. So

Jessica Denson (07:45):

Yeah, my younger sister, it's just her and I and she's taller than me. It's an issue. Well, let's move on now to Digital Sea and its evolution. It was founded in 2016 as a, what you told me was Tech for Good approach, correct?

Joshua Edmonds (08:02):

That's right, that's right. So the whole leading question, I would say the central thesis of digital C its founding was how do we connect the unconnected? And that was largely informed by the American Community Survey connected by the US Census as we were looking at the work of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance when they're highlighting the least connected cities. Bill Callahan, who was leading connector community, he did a phenomenal job of just getting the attention on these least connected cities. And that's really where Cleveland being one of those least connected cities, it required digital seed to then respond, or at the very least, take on that mantle for answering that question of how do we connect the unconnected in Cleveland and beyond?

Jessica Denson (08:47):

And it's really evolved. You're the third to take the helm, am I right?

Joshua Edmonds (08:53):

That's correct. So the first CEO Lev Ick, who is now the CIO for Arizona State University, Lev to me was the visionary. Lev was the one who had this vision of connecting the unconnected and building a coalition. And some of his ideas, I mean we're just now tapping into or catching up to what he said years ago. So Lev has always been ahead of his time, always been an incredibly innovative thinker, a phenomenal convener. So shout out to Lev. And then Dorothy Bonac was the second CEO. And Dorothy to me represented the heart and hands of our organization's history where Lev had that vision, Dorothy had the heart. Dorothy was the one who was able to get some phenomenal people that are even still here to this day on this team who were really convinced and bought in to this mission. So she really did a phenomenal job of focusing on the people and building a team that just cares about Cleveland. And then there's me, who I believe my role is just essentially combining both of those elements and executing. And so I was able to work with both of them in their respective capacities when their CEOs, and it feels great to just be in a succession of such phenomenal leadership.

Jessica Denson (10:06):

And you're really a full fledged wisp now.

Joshua Edmonds (10:09):

That is absolutely right. We have our own network operating center here. We have our fleet of vehicles, we have our service distribution center and our warehouse, and we also just have our own in-house engineers. I mean, we are a full fledged wireless internet service provider, but we're also kind of a hybrid one because we do provide wireline services to MDUs our larger apartment buildings. Now I know a lot of wisp also do that as well, but it is something to note that while we're taking the best in fixed wireless technology, we're also taking the best in wireline technology as well, whether it's the form of repurposing existing cable or even running fiber.

Jessica Denson (10:49):

And your program, and I mentioned this in our open, it's $18 for the first year, and that stays for five years, correct? People just for that 100 up, 100 download. Is that right? And the program canopy, you told me, you said Jessica, remind me to tell you what canopy means when we do talk. So tell me a little bit more about the program and why it's called Canopy.

Joshua Edmonds (11:15):

Oh, yeah, phenomenal question.

(11:19):

So Canopy that, that's the name of our internet service. And the reason why we called it that is, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Last year we had raised a combined $53 million in all public funding. Well, some philanthropic, some public from the state of Ohio, the city of Cleveland, through their ARPA funding. I mean, it was a phenomenal time to be in Cleveland, and it still is, but I mean, last year was big for us, but that level of investment does not come easy, especially when our larger incumbents, they want that same money too. Everybody could benefit from that money and absolutely the nonprofit, but we're not the only ones. And so the lobbying that was happening against us, we expected it. And one of the things that they kept saying that people were lobbying against us, they were saying that, can your technology penetrate the tree canopy?

(12:11):

Because Cleveland has a tree canopy. We're known as one of the forest cities where it used to be in the days that a squirrel could jump from every tree and make their way all the way up to New York City without even having to touch the ground. Oh, wow. I don't know why that's an old story that gets told here a lot, but regardless, it is something where we said, you know what? The spirit of using what you have, that's what kind of separates us from a mentality standpoint. We could look at all those questions and people trying to undermine or perceivably, usurp the ingenuity that went into building and deploying our network with the vendors we're working with. I mean, it's a lot of intentionality. We could be ashamed by those questions or we could lean into it and say, you know what? Not only does our technology penetrate the tree canopy, we're going to brand it as canopy so that way people know that we have them covered. And so it was a very intentional way of using what was thrown against us and actually constructing a very solid foundation off of those bricks that were thrown against us.

Jessica Denson (13:13):

Yeah, that's actually very clever. Taking something that was used as a negative and turning it into a positive for your organization. One of the challenges though that we talked about with that is that because it's only $18 a month, there's some challenges with that, including skepticism. Talk a little bit about that and why that is, why you're able to offer the service for that low rate and what you're encountering when it comes to skepticism about it.

Joshua Edmonds (13:44):

So to your first question, why we're able to offer the service at that lower price? A lot of it has to do with one contextually right now, as we've seen the sun setting of the affordable connectivity program. And so the demand for high speed internet has now been so great because one, the pandemic co-signed this and then a CP and formerly EBB allowed for the demand point to be there. So when it was removed, these subsidies, it actually illuminated the value of what digital, what a community-based network could do on pricing flexibility. We don't have shareholders. We have a board, we have a nonprofit board, just like any other nonprofit and any type of revenue that we make, it gets invested back into the business. And so thankfully, we've been able to be, again, pretty phenomenal at getting a compilation of public and private funding to then support our growth.

(14:43):

And so I would say from all of our funding sources, if someone already pays for the infrastructure at that point, we're not seeking to pay off our infrastructure. So typically with telecom billing, whenever someone's deploying something, there's the two costs. It's the infrastructure costs and the service delivery fee. So at this point, if the infrastructure's already been paid for from these other sources, we are not looking to recover those costs because it wasn't our money. And so thankfully, since that infrastructure has been paid for now, it allows us to then reward the consumer directly by having this lower service cost of $18 a month minimum. And now I do want to be clear though, the $18 that is for our 100 100, thankfully with Tarana, and this goes under my chief operating officer, Jose Valdez's decision. I mean, he was phenomenal. He is a phenomenal thinker and executor as well, and just a great copilot.

(15:38):

He was the one who really made sure that we left enough room on the bandwidth side that we were then able to tier our pricing. So the city of Cleveland and the agreement we have with them, it's $18, 100, 100 for five years, then adjusted for inflation for the next five. So it might be arguably $20 or less for the next 10 years, but we will be able to also tier and offer those tiered services beyond. And that's how we start talking about modeling sustainability as well. Because at $18, it's very hard to model sustainability, especially in a city where a third of our residents are living in poverty and even more of them are adjacent to it. And so to try and expect us to get a mass $18 on average, that customer acquisition costs even outweighs that internet price. It's not the most sustainable model until you begin tiering. And so thankful that our technology allows us to tier, we're actually in some cases getting even with significant tree coverage, over 700 download, over 300 upload. And so thankfully we are able to do that, and in some cases we've been even to be able to get a gig. And so we are a carrier class infrastructure that absolutely has sustainability on its mind and that sustainability is $18 a month is part of that sustainability, but it does not end at that $18 month product.

Jessica Denson (16:56):

The $18 a month, though we should talk about that, is part of a partnership with Citi of Cleveland. I live in Louisville, sorry, the city of Cleveland, where you're going to connect almost 24,000 households at that rate, correct?

Joshua Edmonds (17:11):

That is absolutely right. So within the city's contract as it relates to the ARPA funding to bridging Cleveland's digital divide, they broke it down with an emphasis on digital literacy and skilling as well as on this infrastructure deployment. So of the city, they allocated $20 million for which 11 million of those dollars actually went to the digital literacy and skilling, and the remaining actually went to the network build out, and then the rest of the funding that we received from those other sources then also went to the infrastructure deployment as well. And so what we agreed to connecting 23,500 households to our service within four years. And so we're very aggressive. And to actually answer the other part of your previous question, the skepticism that we're seeing, I mean, that's real. I mean, you have a phenomenal product out here. It's priced well. The speeds are competitive.

(18:06):

I mean, you have all those things, and yet people are still saying too good to be true. I think that a lot of us being local has helped clarify some of this where it's like, look, you can show up if you want to learn more about our product. We have a 2 1 6 number that residents call. So this isn't something that they got to call one 800 number that further pushes us away from the community. No, it's a 2 1 6 number that they're calling to learn more about it. That's managed by actually a neighboring organization geographically to us. So that's great. In addition to that, over half our team lives in the city of Cleveland. 100% of us live in northeast Ohio. And even our partnerships that we've been building here, they're all local. And so having that local presence, that local visibility, and just continuously showing up to these community meetings, putting on our own, our headquarters is actually a community and collaboration space. All that local, local, local is allowing us to then scrub elements of that skepticism. Because at the end of the day, if someone's like, okay, well fine, if I have a bad experience, I know where to find you. And we're like, absolutely, yes you do. Please show up. Please find us, and we'll be diligent in writing any wrongs if there are any.

Jessica Denson (19:17):

And when we talked to you, you made an emphasis on the difference between those early adopters versus mass adopters, that those early adopters, you really need to start to be a part of that and it leads to the mass adopters. I'm probably butchering that a little bit, but so explain why those two groups are important in this process.

Joshua Edmonds (19:37):

So the earlier adopters are important because those are essentially our first wave of messengers. Our number one, I mean, we have our marketing analytics. Valerie's done a phenomenal job of getting us to be much more data driven on the marketing side, and that marketing has obviously influenced the rest of our company. And so on the marketing analytics side, we see by far the number one, and I think this is actually going to be much more true as other cities began deploying. So they should take note of this, the number one indicator for awareness for us has been word of mouth by far residents talking to other residents. So I mean, we are in an election year right now, but we're putting up our door hangers or not door hangers. We're putting up our yard signs too, see the presidential yard signs right next to elect Digital Sea, I guess.

(20:25):

So it's seeing that visibility and then having a great experience has not led other residents knocking on doors and saying, y'all got to try this. It works. And there's a neighborhood called Glenville. It's a historic neighborhood. It's actually one of the homes where one of the creators of Superman lived. And it's really interesting when you go down one of the streets, it's like every house has our service because it took one resident who had a phenomenal experience who then went across the street and told that resident, who then went across the street and told another resident. And now we're seeing all of them having our service. And that's a beautiful thing that we know is going to then continue to grow. So the word of mouth and how we treat our customers has been the number one driving force for us getting our customers. And it's also been the number one driving force for us to be able to get out of that skepticism because it's one thing for me to say our product, it's great, but it's another thing for someone who actually has it to say it's great.

Jessica Denson (21:23):

Yeah, that's, it seems the community approach is a very strong element at digital C. When we talked before, you were like, well, we don't necessarily have the budget that the big ISPs have, those T-Mobile's or Verizons or at ts, but so you have to rely on this community approach you take, which when I met Valerie at the conference was very interesting to me. She talked about all the interesting things that y'all do and the way that you reach out. Share a little bit about that approach with everything from the collaboration space to community events.

Joshua Edmonds (22:00):

So one of the things that we quickly realize is that it's really hard. It's very hard to keep people's attention if they're not focusing on it. And what I mean by that is if someone's not focusing on their internet experience, I mean, sure, someone without internet, their life is so complicated that the internet is almost like the last thing they're thinking about. There's so many other things that are going on in addition to that, even someone who might already have internet who might be dealing with the provider that they might not love, but it's not to the point that they're just screaming, we need better internet. And I would argue majority of Americans and even in Cleveland are going to fall into that category. And so instead of trying to preach the value of who we are and what we provide, we said, okay, what is the community value?

(22:50):

And Cleveland where we are in the east side, and there aren't too many coworking spaces where an entrepreneur can leverage a state-of-the-art facility to help grow their business, to hold a board meeting here to help convey or get additional confidence from investors. And so our space is that space where residents can come in here, they can lease out our office spaces. We have an entire first floor where we do coworking. We do community activations. I mean, we've done everything from graduation parties to brunches to actually mini concerts, music series, comedy nights, poetry nights. I mean, we've opened this up because one of the monikers we've been using is we connect people and we could say, well, to what? Well to internet, to digital literacy and skilling training to each other, to a space that was curated connection. And I think those are the type of things where it's being able to actually lean into the community and not being afraid of or not, or having this unfamiliarity.

(23:56):

It's the fact that, again, over half the team, myself included, lives in this great city and we're able to bring people out and support of these events. I think those are the type of things that it is rewarding because the other side of the equation, culturally, as we're building out our organization, building out our team, we're not going anywhere anytime soon, and our broader community needs to know who we are, and they don't need to see us in stuffy suits all the time. It's really great to be able to see us just kicking back and laughing at the same thing because it's like, look, we're Cleveland nurse. You're Cleveland nurse. We share value, we share connections. What else can we do together? You're a customer today and a friend tomorrow, or a friend today and a customer tomorrow. But either way, we're committed to building and maintaining our relationships with community, and it's a phenomenal feeling to be able to be punching with all of our weight, all the way from our internet infrastructure to our social infrastructure at our headquarters.

Jessica Denson (24:53):

Well punching. I think that's kind of a heavyweight way of looking at things. If you want to keep up with that analogy. As a smaller company, you're doing big work and there's some unique needs and unique approaches. All of us at Connect Nation can relate. We do national work, but we're a relatively small nonprofit compared to some of the giants. So tell me a little bit about the idea of people over profits internally that you really use.

Joshua Edmonds (25:24):

Yeah, so that is absolutely one of our taglines that came up, and that actually came from last year's counter lobbying campaigns that we started using because we were seeing these profit driven behemoths attacking the nonprofit. And at some point we're like, okay, well, we're not profit over people. We're people over profit. We're focusing on the people in this city who we believe have been digitally redlined for quite some time. We've called ourselves a greenlining organization. We're going to digitally greenline this city, and we're committed to putting people over profits where the infrastructure investment that was made in digital C, we easily could have said, you know what? Yeah, it's $18 for six months and then we're going to every six months change the price of our service. And if you guys can't afford it, oh well, we'll just look to the federal government and if there's not a subsidy, we're not changing our prices.

(26:15):

That seems to be a bit of the status quo we're seeing in the telecom industry. And so that is a profit driven approach, whereas the people driven approach is, we're going to provide this service and we're going to give you the best that we can offer at a price point that allows us to want to operate this business efficiently while at the same time allows you to empower your family. And that people over profit mindset externally manifests off of the internal team dynamics. Because even internally, I mean, we have people here, some of our engineers, I mean, they are absolutely phenomenal. Actually. Everybody is. I mean, Valerie easily could be working in a major company, building their brand building, whatever, but we're mission driven, we're value driven, and I think those are the type of things that people gravitate to. And that's been a big stickiness to our team of this idea that there's other forms of capital that we can amass and the social capital and the team dynamics allowing us to sleep all at night knowing that we're changing the world one connection at a time. I think that means a lot for our team and as well, and obviously means a lot for the community.

Jessica Denson (27:21):

What about some lessons learned at this point for you? You had the same response last time. You're like, oh, Jess, it's

Joshua Edmonds (27:32):

A really authentic response. Like, oh man, there's so many ways to learn lessons. I mean, you can learn them via wisdom that you can download from someone else, or you can learn them and then inherently gain wisdom. I'll say

Jessica Denson (27:46):

Some hurt more than others, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Joshua Edmonds (27:51):

I would say the first one, and this is more so from the business side of this, it's fire fast and higher slow. I think that's something that we've seen we did when I took over the company in 2022, there were absolutely, absolutely firings that we did. And that's not to say that those people that we fired and let go were bad. I think for what we were trying to build and the level of effort that was needed, we had to make some very strategic decisions, but us doing so, it allowed us to really build a winning team that we have today. And so if we were afraid or reluctant to fire, we would've slowed our own growth. And firing is never easy to do, but it's absolutely necessary at times. I would say another lesson that we learned is if you're not committed to telling your own story, someone will tell it for you and most likely leave out important details.

(28:45):

And so that actually highlighted the need for public messaging in the form of counter lobbying as the beat for me, these internet providers as beat allocations are being made, and if a large incumbent doesn't get it, they're going to have to get very good at that public messaging, otherwise that counter lobbying is going to drown out whatever good they think they'll be able to do. And so just making sure that you have a strong concentrated effort there. And then I would say the last one, no, just enjoy the journey. This is something where obviously I've been circling this digital divide and been executing on this issue for quite some time, and to be at this point, it's a bit of a pinnacle in my career to be leading this organization full of phenomenal people making a difference in the city that I love. But at the same time, it's really easy to get stuck in stress and anxiety. I mean, there are absolute pressures here. There's pressures every single day, but not being able to take the time to enjoy this opportunity and enjoy this role and being able to show up for community as my authentic self, I would be doing myself a disservice. And so one of the things I've learned is just being able to intentionally unwind and not take things so serious all the time.

(30:03):

I'm still learning that one.

Jessica Denson (30:05):

Yeah, I think, yeah, me as well, as much as I can be giggly sometimes. Josh, before I let you go, we have to touch on some of the fun things that digital see has and is doing. All I have to say is three words, the bomber jacket. Talk about that.

Joshua Edmonds (30:24):

Oh my gosh. Okay. So one day I was watching, and I'd already watched it before, but it is a good movie. I was watching Ford versus Ferrari. I think it's a phenomenal movie. So I was watching that movie and I was seeing them walking around in those vintage Ford and Ferrari jackets, and it kind of dawned on me, I'm like, huh, this entire movie is about speed clearly. And the association with that actually led me begin thinking about, well, what if we did a racing NASCAR inspired bomber jacket? And so it went from an idea to me having a conversation with Chad Justin, who's a local fashion designer here, and we actually designed a bomber jacket that is actually inspired by racing, and it's high, high-speed internet instead of obviously nascar. So as we began looking at that bomber jacket actually gotten the attention of a number of people here.

(31:23):

And one of the national folks that got the attention of is the Wendell Scott Foundation. The reason why that's important is because Wendell Scott was one of the first black NASCAR champions, and he was posthumously recognized by nascar. And so now this foundation is really carrying on Wendell Scott's legacy of being a bit of that underdog that was able to find success and win repeatedly. That's something that we saw as a value that was reflected. And thankfully, Chad was able to present that bomber jacket to Wendell Scott's grandson work. And so this is something that has now been this idea that represents a part of our brand that now has grown to us actually being able to formulate relationships well beyond. And actually just two weeks ago, I was able to accompany Chad and a few others to NASCAR's runway to the Raceway Fashion Show, all from this bomber jacket. So it's brought a lot of visibility. It's a great talking point. And we've even had viral Instagram influencers wearing our bomber jacket because it actually looks cool. And I told the team, I don't want one of those cheesy, corny, nonprofit style dumb jackets I want that's going to stand out, that's going to make a statement because that's who we are at digital C. We are meant to stand out. We're meant to make a statement, and anything less than that is incongruent with our brand.

Jessica Denson (32:49):

Well, I love it. I think it's a fantastic idea, especially since you want fast internet. It makes sense. It's a great way, a great approach. And I got to get my hands on one sometime. I'm just kidding. They're

Joshua Edmonds (33:04):

On our website.

Jessica Denson (33:06):

I'll go look and I'll include a link to your website in the description of this podcast for our audience so you guys can go check things out. What's next for digital C? What's on the horizon?

Joshua Edmonds (33:17):

So every year at digital C, we are striving to obviously get better, bolder, faster in our commitments to the city and beyond. And notice how I keep saying and beyond and beyond and beyond, because someday we do have plans of growing beyond our commitments to Cleveland. And that's not to say we will lose sight of Cleveland. No, this is home for us. And every single time someone sees something, we want them to say, I want what y'all did in Cleveland because that man, you guys killed it. And so yes, we're going to obviously eat our veggies first and make sure that the commitments we set in Cleveland, we make sure that those are going to be fully realized. But at the same time, we're proving the viability of this model of community-based networks that can scale. And so as other cities have been reaching out to us who are interested in our model, other large N-B-A-N-F-L style cities, they've been reaching out. But even some of these micropolitan areas, we are not at the point now where we're going to say no to anybody. We have a yes and culture that fosters innovation, and we're not going to stop at a no or budget. And so the thing is, there's absolutely a desire of expanding this and disrupting the telecommunications market beyond Cleveland.

Jessica Denson (34:27):

Well, I can tell you have a passion for it and love it. What do hope, my final question, what do you hope our audience remembers about this discussion regarding Digital Sea? What should they take away from today?

Joshua Edmonds (34:39):

I would hope that the audience can take away it's okay to be that canoe amongst the sea of battleships, and you can still win there. My mentor would tell me often that it takes five miles for a battleship to turn around a canoe. You can turn around instantly. And so as we're navigating the course of the beat allocations and our somewhat uncertain telecommunication future as an industry that is poised for disruption, it is okay to be that canoe that can compete. You might have a little bit of rocks, you might have ball, you might have bullets, you might have whatever. But with a little bit of effort and some boldness and the ability to punch beyond your weight class, you'll be able to disrupt your markets in the cities that you love to.

Jessica Denson (35:31):

Well, I love watching what you guys are doing, learning about it. So please, let's follow up in the next six months year and see where you guys are at.

Joshua Edmonds (35:40):

Absolutely. We appreciate the opportunity. We love the visibility, and we're thankful for any and all people who are doing something similar.

Jessica Denson (35:53):

Again, I've been talking with Joshua Edmonds, the CEO of Digital CA Cleveland based internet service provider that's doing some pretty incredible things at the community level. I've included a link in the description of this podcast to Digital C'S website, so you can look up that bomber jacket, or you can simply send Cleveland residents their way for $18 a month. Broadband, I'm Jessica Sen. Thanks for listening to Connected Nation. If you like our show and want to know more about us, head to connect nation.org or look for the latest episodes on iTunes, iHeartRadio, Google Podcast, Pandora, or Spotify.

 

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Jessica Denson

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