705 Internet in a Box: Rythmz's 5G Solution Explained

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals, where we do all we can to talk about products, stories, and tips to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. Today is a show where we are doing another vendor pitch profile for the IT Nation program. Today, I'm going to be chatting with Steve Copeland, founder and CEO of Rythmz, a company that's specializing in providing portable 5G network solutions, Wi-Fi services, basically network as a service.

So, Steve, how are you today? Good, how are you, Marv? Good to talk to you.

[Steve Copeland]
Good to see you virtually at this point. I did just see you recently.

[Uncle Marv]
How are you? We're out there. We're around.

I'm doing good. So, you guys are a company that's popped up on the scene here that there's a lot of buzz around Rythmz.

[Steve Copeland]
Thank you. It seems to be coming that way. We're about eight months old.

I left this industry. Some people may remember me from Spam Soap way back in the day. I had my own MSP, worked at a large MSP.

So, I came back after 12 years. You missed us. I did.

You know what? I will tell you, after being in a bunch of different industries, there's nothing like the managed service community. It is very inspiring to be around people that just want to help each other and move forward.

That's one of the things I did miss. You don't get that in alcohol or banking. No bank's going to give you an idea of how to actually do better with your bank, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Well, alcohol may help a little bit.

[Steve Copeland]
Yeah. Well, the alcohol industry is way more cutthroat. It is tough.

[Uncle Marv]
It is tough. So, let me do this. Let me first, for people that either don't read the podcast cover or check the show notes and you're just listening in your car, Rythmz is spelled R-Y-T-H-M-Z.

Yes. So, you have got to go to that.com and find out all about them. But first, Steve, give us a quick short overview of, I know I mentioned all those things, but in a nutshell, what is Rythmz?

Rythmz is internet in a box.

[Steve Copeland]
It's really that simple. So, we've taken a different approach, not just a true 5G solution, which is usually one SIM provider. We take up to seven SIMs, bond them all together for bonded aggregate.

And when I say aggregate, it's really all together one big pipe. So, you're getting all the bandwidth from that, but you're also getting all the redundancies. When I founded it, one of the thought processes and one of the things I wanted to do was to make sure we're carrier agnostic, meaning I don't carry the vendors.

I can't be a Verizon shop or I can't be a T-Mobile shop. It had to be all together. And we come into play from disaster recovery, business continuity, multiple different places.

And as we've grown, we've learned through our partners a lot more things, which has become really interesting for me and unique pieces. And just so everybody knows on the piece, 5G, every technology takes time to get there. We didn't have railroads right after the steam engine.

So, as far as I'm concerned, everything's a lab toy at one point. It's past lab toy stage. And it's really become this cool moment of it's expected to grow at 40% between 2024 and 2030.

And that is just for small and medium-sized businesses. So, it's an exciting time to get in here. Basically, we hit to replace fiber, replace anything.

So, it's kind of an interesting way to go. I've got tons to talk about on it.

[Uncle Marv]
So, we're good. Well, let me start with two questions and help clarify some stuff. Because if you're doing all those SIMs and aggregating them, is this, in a sense, SD-WAN for 5G?

Yes.

[Steve Copeland]
Okay. Not only is it SD-WAN for 5G, it's SD-WAN for start-ups. They're like SD-WAN for their internet.

So, that's the encapsulation.

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Steve Copeland]
So, you found my secret sauce.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, that's what I do. I dig deep. So, then, of course, the next question is most people thought of this as simply a mobile solution.

Meaning, I'm on site someplace that has terrible Wi-Fi or we're in a new building that's being built. Service isn't there yet. Or we're at a conference at a hotel and the Wi-Fi sucks.

That was the first thought of what Rythmz can do. But you've said it's much more than that now.

[Steve Copeland]
It is. So, when we first came up with this, the beginning of this is at a vodka company. So, at the vodka company, the Wi-Fi went down.

The WAN went down, not the Wi-Fi. My boss came up and he goes, the Wi-Fi is down. And I go, no, the wide area network is down.

He goes, that's not what anybody else thinks. And I laughed. And it was like a little humble lesson.

I'm like, ah, forget. People don't know all this tech. Because I was talking to the director and tech guys.

It was interesting. So, then I had to fix it. So, when we fixed this, we came out with this.

And eventually, we thought the first part we thought of this was it was going to be an event play. Right? So, the first test we did was at the Rose Bowl in California with a small band called Coldplay.

And it held up. And I went, okay. And then a friend of mine who owns an MSP still, who I still consult with just as a friend.

Like, hey, how are you do? We were in a peer group together. One of his clients, which was one of my old ones, found a fiber-sniffing backhoe.

I just went around and read through it. He goes, how do you do this? So, we shoved a box out for him quick.

And I went, light bulb kind of went off. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. This is actually there.

So, we've got those. And those are the standard ones. Cyber incident response, cybersecurity incident response.

The first thing you need to do is turn off the internet. We provide an internet or multiple internets. So, you can provide finance over to one side.

Make sure they're clean. Give that quick internet piece. Business continuity.

Nobody, and I'm sure, Marvin, you've never had this. A client calls you, hey, it's Thursday. We move into our offices on Monday.

We need internet. Never had that. Never had that.

The best part is.

[Uncle Marv]
Those calls come on Friday.

[Steve Copeland]
Yeah. You should see this up front. The best part about that was, we do a lot of ASCII events.

And one of the vendors there, and I'm not going to name who, called me up. And the person's laughing. And they're like, you know how you talk about on stage about how that never happens?

And I go, yeah, we just did that. So, we have just next day heard them about it. Wow.

So, those moments and those pieces are there. And then, really, with truly forward-thinking MSPs, and that's kind of what I was. And what I really strive to be when I'm going to have my MSP, was we have one guy who's rented out to food trucks.

They have like 10 food trucks. And he went out and he called me. He's like, can you talk to these two food truck guys?

I was like, sure. So, we talked to him. I just asked a simple question.

And they go, well, how often does your POS go down? Or how often does your POS work? And I go, oh, 75% of the time.

And the key is saying, how often does it work? And I said, well, so that means three out of four of your customers can buy your product. And you can literally on the video see the light bulbs go off.

And I go, what if we made that nine out of 10? Would that be better? And instantly got it.

And then, now, he sold all 10 of those trucks. Every weekend they go out, they call him. He comes in, plugs the box in, five minutes, it's up, and he charges every one of the trucks.

So, he's really kind of nailed it there.

[Uncle Marv]
So, there's some interesting plays with that. Okay. So, let me ask about the typical logistical thing for most service providers.

Because a lot of them are looking at 5G for backup. They may have a cable connection. If they can afford fiber, they have that.

Or they have that business fiber that costs less. So, where does this rank performance-wise? Because I know some people are like, 5G is not quite there in their area.

But go ahead.

[Steve Copeland]
Yeah, there's two different areas for this. You have 4G LTE-A+, which will get you about 128 megs. The problem is if you use one SIM, that's all you're going to get.

And it doesn't work. The other piece on that is size matters. Our antennas are not little, tiny Wi-Fi Nighthawk antennas.

Our antennas are big, huge antennas. So, we grab more pieces. But if you combine 128 and 128, you get 256.

You lose about 20% over the SD-WAN. But what if you start combining 128, 128, 128 all the way through? You can get up to a gig.

So, it becomes an interesting piece as you do it. And you've got to be a carrier agnostic. It's very, very important.

You don't want to be in T-Mobile's pocket. You don't want to be in Verizon's pocket. So, as you build that, that's really where that comes in.

And plus, where are we putting them? It's a SIM card in a router. It doesn't work.

The SIM cards and routers are down usually in a rack. They're down low. They're out somewhere else.

Our boxes are designed to be out somewhere, lifted up. The best use case is waist high, although it has worked in a basement, which we have as part of our use case for an IT conference. So, it does work.

So, it's where we're putting it and how we're using it. We're using old thinking for new technology. Does that make sense?

[Uncle Marv]
It does, but I still think the hang-up that you probably hear from people is, is it good enough to replace my daily driver in the office?

[Steve Copeland]
It is. Right now, we've got a client on one of our smaller boxes, only three SIMs. One of them doesn't even catch. So, I've got one of my engineers that has that literally sending him an alert because he has to reset it every once in a while.

That's a Verizon SIM. They're running 25 voice-over IP phones and 30 people over it doing 60 gigs a day. And I literally call that partner.

I'm like, they're blowing up my box. He's like, I know. It's great.

But the other key with that is bandwidth. If you don't have priority bandwidth SIMs, you end up with throttled SIM cards. Everybody's had it.

Like if you had a little Wi-Fi, they'd throttle you after however many gigs. So, you have to have that relationship, and that's really the big key is a relationship with the carriers is to have that unlimited. We can get unlimited on any carrier at any time with so many SIMs that it makes sense to them.

Does that make sense?

[Uncle Marv]
It does. Now, the cost for that though, what's relative in terms of ballpark? Are we talking about cost to MSP or cost to the consumer?

Okay. Let's clarify that because is this something that we can resell to our client or that we just send them to you and then we manage it?

[Steve Copeland]
No, we are a partner-only plan. We only work with partners. In fact, I need more partners because I have events everywhere.

So, those events that we get in the leads for, we want to bring in partners. It makes more sense for me to bring a partner in, cut in with them. Just so you understand, if you do an event Wi-Fi, these same boxes, and ours are built a little better just because I did it in my garage, are renting for $1,800 a day.

That's one day, one box. And then down to about $1,200. Some of them, they put $1,800 and then they'll give them a discount.

But the big key with that is our boxes start at about 200 megs up-down. It's about $295. That's two SIMs. Then we resell that. There's places it doesn't work. If they're paying $100 for a DSL connection, not a good fit unless they want more bandwidth. If they're paying $1,000 for a 500-meg connection, yes, we fit.

They're paying $1,500 for a second connection, yes, we fit. Then we come into those pieces more often. So, from that backup standpoint and where they're costing it.

But some people, we got on with a partner and he was like, well, they're paying $195. And I'm like, they're never going to buy this. And he's like, I go, let's just not even, don't even target that.

And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, it makes no sense to have that conversation.

[Uncle Marv]
So, this would have worked for my client in Port Everglades that had a 3-meg bonded T1 and they were paying $1,000. Yep. It would kill that right up.

So, I had to, I got them into Airstring or Airespring. Airespring.

[Steve Copeland]
AireSpring. I was a partner of them.

[Uncle Marv]
Are they still with AireSpring? Well, yeah. They're on a contract.

But I didn't know about you guys back then. This was something we started two years ago.

[Steve Copeland]
Yeah. I'm a master agent. We can help you get out of those contracts.

[Uncle Marv]
Their contract's up next year. We'll chat.

[Steve Copeland]
You’re definitely going to chat for that one.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, partner only, which is great. Something that is affordable for us to sell.

Replace the daily driver. Now, the other question is going to be tech-wise, in terms of configuring static WAN IPs and configuring VPNs and all the things that we would normally do with our firewalls. Easy to do.

[Steve Copeland]
Included with it with our support engineers. All right. We can either act as a smart box, which is we can do all that.

So, we can technically replace the firewall. Or we act as a dumb box. So, if, like, there's a Fortinet you already have on site and you're already working with that, just go out WAN0.

[Uncle Marv]
So, we can do pass-through.

[Steve Copeland]
Just right through pass-through, yeah. And then we still handle that side of it, and you let the Fortinet do that bond between the two of them. And I've worked at Cisco for years, so that's not a problem.

Helping you guys figure it out. And that's part of our price. It's all part.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So, interesting. I'm looking at my questions, and all of these don't apply anymore.

I have a unique spot, right?

[Steve Copeland]
It's really interesting as we come out, when we talk about it with people, they're like, wow, we haven't thought about this.

[Uncle Marv]
You know, and we could kind of. Well, no, we've thought about it. Everybody's thought about it, but nobody's done it.

And there are so many scenarios that you can think of as to where this might apply. I mean, if you just look at the event, you know, support alone, it's not just events. I mean, any time there's an issue where you need to run onsite someplace and do something quick and temporary, that's it.

But now if we can replace the daily drivers with this, that opens up a whole new set of doors.

[Steve Copeland]
So, that was my original idea. What you caught on was right there. Because I had, when I worked at NLSIT in Orange County, we only had, we had 200 clients, not endpoints, 200 clients.

We were pretty big. But only at a 25-mile radius, right? And I was like, man, 200 clients.

I would sell this box. I would get, and I actually talked to the guy who sold it. At NLSIT, we kind of kicked it around in our head.

And he was the guy who founded SpamSoap as well. And I was like, I just want to kick this around. This was December before we launched in January.

And I go, if I took 20 boxes and sold it to 10 at 500 bucks or whatever a month or 200 bucks a month or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what the number is. And I could get it to him, have your internet up in an hour. And I walk in.

So, the original idea is I walk in with one of these boxes. And I come in and I go, I got the internet up. Hold on.

I'll deal with Cox. And he's like, that's brilliant. And we kicked it back and forth.

I let it go at Newark, and I didn't really have the piece down. And people didn't get it. But when I got to Houston, when we did the ASCII thing in Houston, they loved it.

I've got a beta partner with it right now. We're figuring out how, what the price point is. He's got it at 50 bucks a month, and he's got up to 20 people already.

So, that's an interesting internet insurance piece. We can get you back up. And it's way better when you walk in and go, I have the internet.

Now I have got to call Cox. Because your clients never blame you when the internet goes down. Never.

[Uncle Marv]
They don't even think of us when the internet goes down.

[Steve Copeland]
Yeah. And it's more reliant on the internet than ever.

[Uncle Marv]
So, let me just ask again and get the mental aspect of it. You talk about walking in with a box.

[Steve Copeland]
Plugging in.

[Uncle Marv]
But you talk about the antenna deal. I mean, is this something where you've got to run a cable up to a roof or next to a window or anything like that? So, people, you can literally walk in with a box, plug it in, contact the provider, attach an ethernet cable, and boom.

[Steve Copeland]
You don't even contact the provider. You just turn it on. It's already on.

It's always on. And you just plug in an ethernet cable into the LAN port, and we're good. Now your internet's up.

Now, if you have static routes and VPNs and all that different stuff, if we haven't pre-configured that, that's not there. But you have basic internet backup. And that's the big key with it.

It's up in five minutes. So, it's already pre-configured to just work as a wide area network. So, that's the big key with it.

But, yeah, it's literally walk in, five minutes, and that was my original idea. That's what the big joke is. I have a lot of people go to the shop on our website.

We have a bunch of funny T-shirts. But one of them is, I brought the internet. And when I come up, I'm like, here, here's the internet.

And it's a fun piece.

[Uncle Marv]
I've checked out your little swag shop on the website. So, I was looking to see if all those shirts were there. And I normally don't wear vendor swag, but we'll see about talking to you guys in the future.

So, let me ask you this. I know that you're just eight months old, but this is something that's been born out of previous experience. And you've probably been learning a lot this summer as you're doing this PitchIT thing.

Do you have any goals long term that are different than when you started?

[Steve Copeland]
I did. So, long term, I thought this would just go out really easy, be that piece. It becomes more of an education piece.

I'm very partner focused. We're bringing on a channel chief because I'm not the sales guy. I'm the tech guy.

In fact, that's when I went to one of the user groups. They're laughing. They're like, you're doing sales.

I'm like, yeah. This thing sells itself. It's kind of great.

So, we are doing something really interesting, and it's probably coming out Q4, if it doesn't get pushed to Q1. We are doing historic and predictive outages. So, we're going to do historic outages when they've occurred across the US.

We've mapped every business in that area. And with our partners, we're going to help them co-market to send them out a flyer, sticker, something that goes out. And that thought process came because my air conditioner went out.

And I called a guy, and he goes, and I have an old air conditioner. And I'm cheap, Mark. So, I have an old air conditioner.

And I'm like, I know I can just keep putting 1500 bucks a year instead of spending 10 grand. So, I went out. One of my sons called a guy, and he came out.

He's like, oh, I'm not even going to work on it. And I'm like, what? And I'm like, where is that?

And I went, and the guy had left a sticker. Called the sticker. The guy came out, and had it fixed in two hours.

And I'm like, ah, what if the internet had that sticker? And so, that's kind of where we're going with that. And then doing some predictive outages.

So, AI-driven. AI. Again, one of those steam engine moments.

It's a large language modeling and figuring that out. Historic and predictable. And we'll get, from what I'm doing with the model right now, I think we're going to get close to 70, maybe 80% of where we can see where it's going.

Obviously, Hurricane Alley, and things like that are going to be a big deal for us.

[Uncle Marv]
Need a partner in Florida. I'm here. I can take care of it.

[Steve Copeland]
Well, definitely. We're going to do it. We're going to talk about it, for sure.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, we'll probably see you, let's see. Obviously, we'll see you at IT Nation in November, right? I'll see you in ASCII in Tampa, yes?

Yes. And DattoCon.

[Steve Copeland]
I will not be at DattoCon. We didn't do that. So, when I planned this out, I didn't do that.

We have a big telecom event at the same time. We'll also be at Channel Pro Defend West. Oh, and another thing.

You asked a good question that I didn't actually mention. If you're an ASCII member, you get six per year, 14-day proof of concept. Meaning, I ship you a box.

You don't pay me a penny. I'm all about show it, not sell it, right? That's number one.

Number two, if you're not an ASCII member, I'll give you one. So, we actually do proof of concept because it's really interesting. This is not a software piece.

I can't do a demo. I can't show you the box and, oh, wow, hey, it looks cool, right? I have to actually prove it.

And if you've got a bunch of customers, I said this to our partners, and they laughed, and one of them took me up on it, I'm like, you get six people in a room, I'm there. So, I will fly out anywhere. So, our new channel chief that's starting on August 19th, which is, I don't know when this is going to launch, but right about then.

So, yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, about that. Yeah. So, we're recording on a Friday.

I'm trying to debate if I push it out tonight or Monday morning, but it will be very close to that. So, all right. Steve Copeland, founder and CEO of Rythmz.

Check them out. Rythmz.com. Everything will be in the show notes.

You'll see them out on the road. And, Steve, I don't think you're going to be fighting for third place in that set of steak knives.

[Steve Copeland]
You know what? The first goal is just to get there, right? So, we were actually talking about this morning.

The first goal is to get there. The second goal is, and because they're your steak knives, sir, I will be happy.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Steve. Well, thank you for doing this little PitchIT thing here, and I will see you out on the road. Good luck on the road to IT Nation, and we'll see you there.

Thank you very much. All right, folks. That's going to do it.

Thanks for downloading and listening. Head over to the website and check out other PitchIT interviews as well as other podcasts at ITBusinessPodcast.com. That's going to do it for now.

We'll see you soon. Until next time, Holla.