I'm there we go. Okay, can everybody see this? Yes, see my screen. There we go. Okay, perfect. So like Steve said, my name is Mallory Duvall. I am a consultant with consortia consulting, and so I'm going to give you, my goal is to give you kind of a little background about us, because we are a very small company. I'm sure most people haven't heard of us. And then to give you a little bit of digital equity information and how we're going about digital equity, I know at this point so many people have heard about digital equity, so not go into a lot of detail, but talk about, you know, some of the high level things. So consortium Consulting has been around for 33 years. It was started by four people who worked in the telecom industry. Decided to start their their own consulting firm because they believed, or they saw through their work that rural companies, specifically telephone companies at the time were not getting the same resources that I think most of them actually came from at&t. Maybe they were all at&t Originally, those rural companies did not have access to the kind of resources that companies like at&t, Cox, Verizon, those kind of. Companies can hire tons and tons of people, so they came together and decided they were going to help rural companies. This happened in Nebraska, kind of Lincoln, Omaha, Nebraska, and they did a lot of work with originally, Nebraska and South Dakota companies. We still do a lot of work with them, but we are much beyond that. The industry has obviously changed quite a bit. Most people don't have home phones anymore. You have your your cell phone, or maybe you have a VoIP phone. My office phone is VoIP, and my I have a personal cell phone, so I but I don't have a home phone. So most of these telephone companies, or telecommunication companies have really become more broadband providers, and there are so many more broadband providers nowadays that aren't even in the telephone business. They're just straight up broadband providers. So we now work with all of these as well as telephone companies still for all the regulatory issues, financial issues and things that they have, but we really, at this point, it's broadband companies, and we still focus on the smaller, more rural companies, and giving them access to the kind of knowledge that we can have by gathering our group of, I think we're about 2122 people, so that they're not having to hire All of us. And if you've been involved in telecommunications, broadband, any of the regulated stuff, you would realize that it's highly regulated. There's a lot of rules, a lot of things that they have to port on. And some of these companies are so small they only have maybe three or four employees, and that can consist of the people doing the outside plant work, their office work, everything they don't have the time or the manpower or the money, really, to pay, to hire people to handle all of this stuff. So that's where we come in. We come in and we help them navigate all of the crazy FCC orders, help them with their financial planning, etc, to help them be able to compete in today's industry. So kind of what I've already said, a little bit, we have financial solutions, regulatory support, business development and training and education go into those a little more so financial solutions, so for if you're a regulated Telecom, maybe that is forecasts and cost studies. Those are required by the FCC if you partake in certain aspects of the Universal Service Fund The they give you money to help serve high cost areas. So we can help you with those even if you're not regulated, though, we do a lot of we can do pricing analysis. We look at your budgets. We do a lot of analysis on your bottom line to see where you're at. A big issue right now, with a lot of small companies, is offering cable. Cable is very expensive for these companies to offer. Not everybody understands how that is all set up, but they have to, you know, for carrying certain channels, they're paying certain amounts, and specifically, like ESPN is incredibly expensive for them to offer. Most phone companies or telecommunications broadband companies that offer cable like straight up old school cable, not streaming, they're probably losing money on that service entirely, and so we see a lot more wanting some analysis done as they look to branch out and no longer offer cable, maybe they're offering it streaming. There's different services, some different items like that, but obviously you're still going to have people interested in cable, so they have to be prepared to have that backup information for all those that are like, I like cable. I don't understand streaming, not you know, digital equity, we're talking about digital education. That's another piece regulatory support. As I mentioned, there's a lot of regulations surrounding broadband. You talked about getting these, the bead money, digital equity grants. You get any kind of money from the government, it's going to come with a lot of little, little things that they're going to require you to do, reporting, filing, I mean, lots of things well beyond the grants. Everybody's excited about grants right now. You get the money. You're like, yes, we're going to build the network. We're going to do these programs. You know, especially the federal government, there's going to be a lot of requirements, and there are some at the state level too, depending on what state you're in and how that works. Business Development, this is where we're looking like, I said there's, you know, the cable things. People are interested in finding out how they're going to if you're not going to offer cable, how are you going to compete, and different things along those lines. So we can do a lot of that analysis. We will help you. We do board presentations. We will help you meet with your boards to understand all of that. So. Okay, let's training and education. So this, we can create videos that a lot of our clients so mostly broadband providers can use to help train their employees to meet certain requirements, or many of them use it to put on their local channels, on their you know, Facebook, website, wherever, to educate their customers on how to do things. It's a it's a great tool for the digital literacy, getting to understand how they need to do certain things, how they need to, like ACP, before it was taken away, was a one that people, a lot of times, didn't understand how the entire process was going to work. So we can put these trainings together, like I said, both for your your employees and for your customers. And we, you know, training can be done on just about anything that you think needs to be done. We've done all sorts of stuff, from cooperatives to, gosh, I said, ACP, and there's some the broadband labels are coming out, and those are going to, those have training requirements, a lot of different items. So now that's over. Digital equity came out with the digital Equity Act of 2021, which was part of the infrastructure and Investment Act II J that's been, that's a very big deal, at least in my, my realm. It's, you know, an FCC order. Nobody really wants to read it. Trust me, I've done it. You don't want to. But basically, the goal of that was, you want to promote digital equity and inclusion, so that all the communities can have access to and be able to use the full benefits of broadband and all of the digital opportunities that are out there. This the digital Equity Act consisted of three parts. There was the state digital equity planning grant, the equity capacity grant, and then the digital equity competitive grants. And then there are also tribal set asides that are not decided by the states for both the competitive and the capacity grant, and they have their own requirements. So the state planning grants that was for states to put together their digital equity plan, and those are in the process of getting approved now, the deadline for submitting those is obviously passed because they're getting approved. Now competitive grants were the deadline, I believe was the 23rd September, 23 so that deadline has also passed. The capacity grants those deadlines, it's going to depend on when your state's planning grant gets approved. I was hoping Erin would be on today, because I know she could give a lot of specific updates to the Arizona situation and where they're at, but the Arizona plan has been approved, so the capacity grants for triangle set aside. Since that is done directly through the NTIA, those have a different those are not going through the states. So that portal opened on September 25 and it will be open through February 7 of 2025 those are going to be accepted and approved on a rolling basis. So generally speaking, it's probably better if you get it done early, but it's going to be done just as is as we can be. They have a separate pool of funding directly for that portion, so it will not impact what states have.