John Fountain of Cox Communications: Providing Quality Commercial and Hotel Services

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast, we interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom. I'm thrilled to be joined by John Fountain, Director of Technology of the Hospitality Network and Blueprint RF Group at Cox Communications. Hey John, thanks for joining up, joining us on the pod.

Good morning.

It's good to have you here. We've loved working with Cox for a number of years now and getting to know big infrastructure, how it impacts the everyday consumer and worker. What's the area of your focus here within the hospitality network and BlueprintRF?

So my team is focused on hospitality that could be a hotel with a casino, a stadium, an arena, basically large public venues. And what we do is we provide managed services that could be voice, video, data, advertising, just a bunch of different services that are all assembled for the Customer based on their location, what are they doing, what's the purpose of the venue? So we customize that based on those factors. Right. Hospitality Network started in the casino industry in the early 80s. The first video on Demand was done here in Las Vegas. And since then that group has grown and provides other services to the hotel industry. And the blueprint side, we actually do managed services, but for the brands, the Marriotts, Hilton's, Hyatt's, that kind of thing. So if you're in a hotel room, you may be using our services. If you're in a stadium, you may be using our services.

Really interesting. I gotta imagine all of us, you know, almost take it for granted that content and connectivity is just there for us. But a lot goes into that, which I'm excited to dive into. But I want to get to know your background beforehand a little bit. Where did it all start for you? How did you get down this technology path?

So I started as a software engineer and worked in the defense industry for a little while. And the story is that in 1997, there was an ad in the newspaper and it said, looking for HFC manager. And if you looked up HFC at that time on bulletin boards, you would learn that it meant hybrid fiber coax. I looked at that and I said, darn, the cable company's gonna get into the Internet business. I wanna do that. And literally applied with the local cable company and ended up helping them launch Data Services. In 1997, we had Tier data services, one of the first in the country here in Las Vegas. Anyway, so that was the start. And. And at some point we looked at that, we said, you know what, you can do that at a house, but you can also do it in a hotel. And one of the hotels came along and said, we'd like you to install 23,000 rooms worth of data services. Can you do that? Like, yeah, we can do that. And so we launched data services in hotels in 1999. In Las Vegas, we offer DSL. So one of the big things, one of the features that makes us a little different is we can work in a hotel regardless of the infrastructure. So if you only have phone lines, we can use dsl. If you have Ethernet, we can use that. If you have fiber, we can do gpon. If you want to run a high speed over coax, we do that as well. So basically you have to design these system to be able to support any transport in a building. And I apologize, I missed a step there is what's the point is to provide wireless services in A hotel room. So if you're sitting there in your hotel room on your bed and you want to pull out your iPad and you want to watch Netflix, you're going to need a pretty good Internet connection. Now some of these buildings, and especially in Las Vegas, they're 50 years old. And so the infrastructure can vary a lot. So one of the, one of the claim to fame is one of the distinctions of what we do is we can again use whatever physical layer, layer one stuff you have in the building. And if you need to build more, we can build that too. But the point is you can leverage whatever you have in the building. I can go on a little bit further on that if you like about projects because I think one of the most exciting ones we've done is back in mid 2010s we actually took over services at the Laws Vegas Convention Center. That's a 3 million square feet facility. And when we walked in, in the convention industry there was actually very little and no wireless. In fact in that 3 million square feet there were only 160 APs. And we walked in and we said, you know what you guys need to do? Put wireless everywhere so that when somebody walks into the front of the building they can get on the Internet and they can use your apps, if you have one, and they can look up the convention center, you know, and you can use it for business that was not in the industry at. You could go Chicago, go to Los Angeles, any of those convention centers and you would find that they did not have wireless services. So we kind of changed what the standard was in the convention industry. So I'm very proud of taking over the convention center literally 10 years ago and operating that. So that was an exciting one. The other area that I think is very exciting is we do stadiums. So we just did the last super bowl at State Farm. That wireless service was provided by Cox. The video services entering the building, the phone services. Cox provides, I mean literally all the telecom for that building when that event occurred. So I'll stop there.

But yeah, let's talk a little bit kind of deeper when you talk about the layer one. Like because you said every building is different, right? Some new, some 50 years old. What's the, I mean give us a, maybe a current state. Is it all over the place in terms of age or is everyone starting to invest in infrastructure and update buildings?

These days it is very expensive to convert a 40 year old building to Ethernet. You're talking several hundred dollars per room. And so a lot of folks, the hotel owners will Just not perform those upgrades. So if I get into a building and all they have is phone wire and coax for TV, you put DOCSIS in or you put DSL in. That's nine times out of 10. Now, there is some really cool technology called. Well, it's G hn. You can go look that up. Basically what it is, DSL over coax or over fiber. And so now they make these little transceivers that will convert fiber to coax. You go all the way to the room and. And then you convert it from coax back to fiber. But you can get 2-3Gbps on these connections. Well, that is pretty much as good as ethernet or anything else you're going to be able to put in a room. So is somewhere in between just using DSL copper versus replacing everything with ethernet in the middle, there's this way of converting coax into high speed. And we're seeing more of that now. Again, it still costs a couple hundred bucks a room, if not a little bit more. So it's a significant investment, but it substantially changes the available bandwidth to the rooms. And the real driver there is. I mean, they're building new buildings. They don't even have coax in the building. You want to have everything ip. So you have wireless ip, you have IPTV in the guest room, where the TV is just pure Ethernet. Your phone is ip, the phone on the side of the bed, everything is converged onto one network. The alarm systems that they use for the staff, the soft keys that you use to open the door, all this stuff rides over an IP network. So getting two to three gigabits per second into a room allows you to do lots and lots of stuff.

Yeah, talk a little bit more about that. How much more, you know, load there is both consumer and backend side on these systems because you're just seeing more and more. Right. We're seeing temperature sensors now and everything else. What does that do into the infrastructure itself?

Well, luckily, the IoT devices are usually low data rate. Right. So a thermostat isn't going to generate 100 megabits of traffic. It's going to generate a few kilobits per second at best. Same for a door lock. A door lock, it's going to check in once an hour and it's going to send some data whenever you scan it, whenever you push a new key, you know, you send some data to the lock, but it's very low data rate. So IoT today, at least, the alarms, the drape controls, the TV and lighting controls and the do not disturbs and the soft keys, they're generally low data rate. All that stuff together is a few kilobits per second. However, video, MPEG2 is six megabits per second and MPEG4 is about four and a half or four megabits per second. So we. You have a lot of video going to the rooms. The real challenge is that if you think about it the way a hotel is wired or a large building is wired, there's a closet at the end of the hallway and there are 60 rooms connected to the same. Same couple of switches. So it's not just one room worth of data. You have to multiply it times the number of ports on a device. And then the biggest users are either video and the Internet. I mean, we routinely give 20, 30 Mbps to the guest to get for Internet services. Right. Some as low as 4 or 5 megabits, that kind of thing. But, you know, 20 megs is common. Right. At home, you get 100 meg or a gig and you're still not satisfied. Right. But hotel rooms are catching up slowly but surely.

Okay. Over the time period that you said, especially when you said, oh, cable companies getting into the Internet business, there's been these like step functions of new technology, but really like new customer demand. Right. As soon as the iPhone came out, we wanted WI fi everywhere. Now Netflix, we want video everywhere. Is that. Do you see that as like a load on the system or.

Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, when we first started, we were doing 512kbps and we called it the DSL killer, because DSL at that time was 56k. That's as fast as you could go. And it was always on. Wow, what a concept, right? You don't have to dial up, but in the, you know, in the time I've watched this, it's gone from 512k. And right now in my house, I have a gigabit. Right? And I mean, I'll put it in perspective when I was in age myself, but when I was in college, the entire college ran off of a 1 1/2 megabit per second connection. Okay? That was what the engineering department had, 1 1/2 meg. All right? You can't do anything with 1 1/2 meg these days. You can't even load a browser. So, you know, it is exponentially grown. And then on top of that, the overlaid services have grown. Right. Lots of operators offer gaming services. Actually, Cox offers a gaming package where you get Low latency connections so that you can do gaming. Right. I mean that idea when data started for the cable companies was not even on the radar. Right. It's just a new thing. Right. And you know, people routinely are doing what we're doing right now, which is video conferencing. You know, that takes a few makes from you and a few makes for me. And you have to have these connections these days. Now one of the things, I may not be obvious, but once you hear it you'll go, yeah, probably Covid. When everybody went home, we had to build the network out. I mean we, we literally did five years worth of network build out in a year because the demand just went through the roof with people working from home, the kids were studying from home, that whole thing. So. So nowadays it's like water, you gotta have a high speed Internet connection. It's a problem if you don't.

Right, Totally. Yeah. Really interesting. Are you, do you see what the next function is of need or is it really just bring the commercial infrastructure all the way to the home? Is that the focus?

Well, I mean VR will be part of what we see in the future, right. So there'll be more video coming both ways. There's more going to be more sensors in homes, you know, more of the control your home. That'll be standard versus you know, something you go buy after you buy your house. Right. New homes based basically come with that stuff in many cases. So I think from a bandwidth perspective you'll see those areas grow. Will it ever need a gig up? I don't know, it'll take a while. But you certainly have demands nowadays that are changing that. I mean I'm a gamer as well and I can share with you that gaming software today. I mean you can use a lot of bandwidth in some of these services. So that will only continue to grow. Two way services will grow. Having video cameras everywhere will be kind of standard. Right now it's a little bit of unique people. Not everybody on my block has a camera. Well, I suspect when my grandkids are around it'll be everybody has a camera. That's the default, right?

Yep. So take us through a little bit of like an implementation with say a new hotel, casino or stadium. You mentioned maybe we can talk about the Las Vegas Convention Center. Like what's the, what does success look like for them? Do they just say we want so that no one complains about WI fi dark spots or you know, how do they look at successful technology implementation?

You know what, when I spoke about it earlier, I Kind of missed a little step there. You. There were 166 APs in there. But I didn't tell you what we did. Well, what we did is we installed 1700 access points. So every 40ft on a square, there's an access point in that building. So if you can imagine a hundred thousand square foot hall, convention hall, every 40ft in the ceiling, there's an access point. And you know what that allows us to provide is not only very good connectivity in a crowd, right, because you have all these people standing next to each other. You know, at CES, right, you have 200 people standing within 50ft of each other, and they're all got their phones out, and many of them have two phones or even three. Well, if you want to provide WI fi, you have to be able to handle 100,000 unique clients a day effectively. Right? And so when you say success. Well, success is getting 100,000 people on the Internet with not a lot of them complaining. And we provide a pretty good service at the convention center. So our ticket volumes are pretty low, but those exhibitors need good quality Internet so that they can demo their products, so they can download videos, so they can actually do transactions. So to service an area that large, but also give connectivity at that granular level, you need a lot of equipment. And on top of that, we can also use that to do triangulation. So we can generally say, hey, this phone is in this area. And so we can enable the convention center to target advertising. If you're standing in front of Starbucks, you can get a Starbucks ad. If you're standing in front of Aces, which is a restaurant, you get a restaurant ad. And so, you know, success means giving them good connectivity, helping them manage their guests, helping them inform their guests, and again, support the exhibitors in their efforts to show their products and wares and etc.

That's great. Let's talk about managed services a little bit. Something you mentioned was the first Video on Demand was back in the 80s in Vegas. You know, obviously video has moved a little bit off, like a little bit off on the cable company to provide now, right? We got every streaming service you can think of. Where does Cox play a role, though, in that managed service on the video side?

Well, so for Hospitality Network, I'll give a different answer than Cox itself. But just to remind you, you can use Netflix on your cable subscription and you can see it on your TV and you can pull it up. You can use many of those services if you have them. And some of them we include Some services. So it's being intermingled, right? Everybody, there's all these sources now, but they're available in multiple forms. Right. So just that, just to say that now with hospitality and that concept, guests walk into hotel room, sometimes they want to use their third party video service. Well, what we do is we actually provide them casting in the room. Pull up your iPad or pull up your phone, start whatever video you want and then cast it to the tv. So that's, that's something that's only been done in the last five years in hotel rooms. Right. So providing a service where they can use that is really important. But we also have even direct connects to some third party apps where they're literally on the tv, kind of like your smart TV in your home. We do similar things in hotel room. In fact, we have our own, what we call in room entertainment system that we built and it's very custom to the hotel industry versus the home. Right. The residential version of that. In the hotel, you can watch first run movies, you have adult content, you have streaming services, you have multi language services. So, you know, we routinely provide Asian programming in Las Vegas. There's a lot of folks from the rest of the world that come to Las Vegas. You have to have that. In fact, our video system, you can actually have 42 different languages on the screen. Okay. Now you know movies in all those languages, but you can navigate the screens with all those different languages. In a residential environment, you don't need to do that kind of stuff. Right. So continuing on the managed service idea, we also will provide a COX and is what's called a facilities based provider. What that means in English is the fiber that runs into one of the hotels here in Las Vegas. Cox manages that. So hospitality network can actually provide the Internet transport and the Internet in the room and put it all together for the hotelier so they don't have to worry about all that stuff. Right. It's all packaged together. Additionally, video, right. So the hotel wants video sources so they can go dish directv or they can go to the cable guy. And so we will bundle that. We will provide them an Internet connection, what we call free to guest, which is the TV channels in the rooms and then we provide them the movies. And then another example of something that's unique to hotels is what we call I guestbook. So you know the word compendium, right? You ever been in a hotel and they got that book in the hotel room and on page three are the restaurants and on page four are the bars and whatever. Well, we do that all interactive on the tv, we call that, I guess, book. So, so on the TV screen, you'll see images or even videos of the different restaurants, of the bars, of the venues, the ticket, concerts, areas, wherever, whatever that building wants to demonstrate and put in front of the customer. So again, managed service in this context is provide all that as a bundle, make it interact. In fact, you know, if they have their services. So like you ever seen a mini bar? You know what that is? So a bar and a hotel room, right. If the hotel has that, we will integrate it onto the network for them. If they have IP phones, we'll integrate that on top of that network. So again, you're the common point because you're the transport into the rooms. Right? So you manage that whole thing. Now you get to a convention center or Allegiant stadium or T Mobile stadium arena. What we do is we not only provide that network infrastructure in the building, but again, we'll provide video to the building. We'll even help them run the screens, all those screens. So when you hit. When they get a touchdown, they hit a button and all the screens light up and go, touchdown. Right. Well, that is. That's an advertising digital service that's been integrated into the network. And we provide that. Right. So we help them create all the marketing material that they would put up there. You know, the ad. The ads for the different brands that they've made relationships with and the, you know, run the ribbon around the building. Right. That little ribbon screen that always has something funny on it. So, you know, again, we'll bring that all together in that facility. So the stadium doesn't have to pull in six different vendors to get it to work. Right. We can help them do that integration.

Oh, wow. A lot behind the scenes for sure that's going on.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I was mentioning the commissioner has 1700 access points. Well, Allegiance Stadium has 1800. Well, you know, plus. Right. And in that case, by the way, There were the APs were installed under the seats and overhead. And so there's a combination of different ways of delivering WI fi to the seats and to the floor and to the concourse, to the outside area. I mean, even the grass that gets pulled, the Allegiance Stadium, the grass can be pulled out of the building. Right. And they can change the floor. Well, even that when it's pulled out, the sides are all covered with access points so that you can use it as a. What do they call it, where you sit behind your truck and drink beer. You can tailgate in that area. And you can still get WI fi connectivity and stuff like that.

Really cool. You know, a lot of the specialty work in hospitality. Seems like it's all over the country, obviously, hospitality. Do you test things in Vegas first? Because it's more leaning, like they're more forward to doctors or how does it.

It depends. So, okay, so hospitality network, we're very casino hotel oriented because we grew up in Las Vegas. However, those hotels have brought us into 24 different states. So Hospitality network is in half the states in the U.S. right. Sometimes they're standalone brands. So like in Atlantic City, there are a couple hotels that are not associated with others and they're huge or 5,000 room hotels. They might come to us and bring a new technology that the others have not. And that's happened, you know, in different ways. It just depends on what technology. Like the most effective, the one that was most prevalent at first in Atlantic City was the safety buttons for the employees. Atlantic City was the first and very aggressive at legislating that was required. And so those hotels came to us first, before Vegas to do that kind of work. Now we in our blueprint RF side where we manage brands. Right. Again, I mentioned some of those before. The same thing happens. You know, one of the brands might say, hey, we want to test a new IoT technology, but we want to do it in Kentucky. And then we'll just do it at whatever location they're interested in. So it varies and it'll vary by management group or by hotel brand or by what state, you know, depending on what they're trying to get done in those areas.

Okay, got it. We know Cox as a whole, like, invests heavily in technology, always focusing on obviously the infrastructure. And you mentioned how it sped up significantly during COVID How does the hospitality, you know, kind of whole playbook fit into Cox's investment strategy? Maybe this is. I'm not trying to talk about investments as a company, but maybe more investment in technology. Where is that? You know?

Sure, sure. So Cox has multiple businesses. Cox Enterprises owns cable company, but they also own Autotra. They own Cox Manheim, the auto folks. They have a media arm. They have farms, believe it or not. Oh, and even cloud services. They have a rapid scale is a division of cox that does AWS type services for companies, Office 365, those kinds of things. So the answer to the question is Cox is doing a bunch of stuff. It's really wide. Really wide. But from a hospitality investment perspective, HN and Blueprint are where that shows up. Right. So for example, developing that video System that was an investment by Cox to put that together and offer it. But again, you know, we call them new business ventures. So there's Hospitality Blueprint, Rapid Scale, which does the cloud stuff. There is a business unit that. The name escapes me that does the safety buttons and people tracking. They're very prominent in health care, so they do hospitals. So in a hospital, if you. If you're a nurse and you need help, help with security, you have a button, you hit it, security will be dispatched. They can even see where you're standing and tell how long it's going to take to get to you and all that kind of stuff. So I think just generally speaking, there's a lot of outlets for Cox to invest to increase technology or add technology to the folio. So. And again, there's Cox Enterprises, and then there's Cox Communication. There's Cox Automotive, Cox Media. I heard a statistic that everybody in the US Touches Cox three times a day. So in some way or another, you touched our services three times.

Wow. Incredible. You mentioned some of the new areas like VR and others that you see. Any other areas of technology you're excited about to kind of see come into to this kind of infrastructure?

I think that, you know, after Covid, a lot of the hoteliers are trying to be efficient, right? They need to get. I mean, I've seen the poor front desk guy, you know, literally, he's the guy actually mopping the lobby because there's nobody else in the building, right? So they're trying to lean down, but they also need to provide better services, right? You still need to service the guests. You can't just not do that. So I think for the next two years, Iot is already hot and it'll get hotter. So that'll be the soft key to get in the room. That'll be, you know, a button to close my drapes and a button to turn the lights on and off or even on Alexa in the room that you can talk to. That's in several hotels already. In fact, we're right now integrating a hotel where you could tell Alexa to turn the TV on and off and change the channel and. And ask it what's on tv, right? So Iot is probably the biggest focus in the next couple years because you got to add these additional features for the guests so they don't feel like they're all alone. Security is a big deal now. So that means the button, you know, the alert button, but it also means cameras in hallways that actually do analysis of what's going on. A camera in the parking lot that can tell the difference between a guest walking in and somebody trying to steal a car. Right. I mean, they just need more of those automations because staffing needs to go down to be more efficient these days. And, you know, with Airbnb and all this, there's a lot of competition. Right. And so hotel leaders need to stay in front of that and provide a good guest experience. Right.

Really interesting. Yeah, no, we're excited to watch it and showcase and continue to report here as more technology is built out, like you said, so people can be efficient, but more so that people can just kind of go about their day without even realizing that some of this is happening behind the scenes.

Yeah, I stayed at a hotel. I stayed in a location that you literally can. They gave you a link to their website and you literally can make the restaurant reservations from the app and you can have room service delivered, and you can. And it's not that crazy, but it's very easy for the guest. Right. It's not that hard to do, but yet it gives you a different experience. Right?

Totally.

Yeah.

We're even getting to the hotels, you know, where there's no key. It's from the app. Right. From the phone.

Right.

And that kind of stuff and more will be done.

I'm still a key guy, but I travel with everybody who does the soft key. I think it's funny, you know, we.

All have our things that we like to hold on to. I'm gonna throw a last question here at you, which is the theme of this podcast. We are a. We are the Tacos and tech podcast. And we gotta know, do you have a favorite taco spot, a favorite place you go to get taco?

That's funny. Gosh, I'm probably pretty easy. You know, I'm kind of like a Del Taco kind of guy, but whatever.

We like Del Taco, definitely.

So you asked about new technology. I guess I. I do. I don't want to miss one that I. I wanted to share here today, and that is that Cox is launching mobile services. And so you can now get a mobile phone from Cox. And what the cool part is that there are hotspots throughout the Cox footprint that you can leverage and the phone will connect WI Fi instead of using cellular, you know, reducing your data usage and things like that. But on top of that, all the different cable companies in the US share their WI FI networks. So if you have a Cox phone and you go to a non Cox market, you still get to use the WI FI services that are in those markets and which is kind of cool. That's a very big difference between a normal cell phone and what the cable guys are offering. So you should look into that. The prices are pretty good and they have some all you can eat plans and things like that. And I believe they're going to be doing the Apple phones pretty soon here, so it'll be just as interesting as any other cell service.

Yeah, no, that's. It's good to see how it's being implemented. We actually did an interview with the head of Cox Mobile maybe you know, a year ago as it was pretty quick but you know it's now it's actually coming out, it's live actually out.

There in the field in the. Live in the world.

Right. And it's interesting to see how like you said, you're in a non Cox market or maybe in a, you know, being able to switch between data and sell, which affects every place you guys have put in infrastructure right in, you know, put in these access points in other places. So that's all interesting to watch it all kind of come together, provide more services. So John, really appreciate the time together and getting to know the background and what you guys are working on. So appreciate the time and explanation here.

Thank you. Appreciate the conversation.

Thanks, John.

Take care.

Thanks for tuning in to Tacos and Tech Podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow Fresh Food tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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