#18. India's laser powered internet.

Wifi Dabba  co founder Karam Lakshman, talks about wifi dabba's big vision  & how it's aim is to provide  an affordable, fast internet service powered by lasers that has the power to make the  existing internet infrastructure itself more resilient  . 

Transcript

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Hey guys, today I talk with founder of infrastructure startup in India. His name is Karam, he will be talking to us about how Wi Fi Daaba is about to revolutionize access to internet in India. Before I go there, I want to quote the statement that by I think Larry Page from Google. He said, It is often easier to make progress on Mega ambitious dreams, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. So very wonderful quote. Now, I would even say India is at the cusp of new technology revolution and a crypto revolution. So now is the time more than ever, that India should be seeking out folks like Karam to build that future. Wi Fi dabba has been the culmination of 10 years of a ton of experience building every kind of app and website you can think ah my co founders Shubhendu and I met 10 years ago. And we raised an incredibly tiny bit of money. And we knew we wanted to do something for that was accessible to the largest group of Indians possible, but we didn't know what. So we spent 10 years building every kind of app and website you can think of, and most of them failed miserably, but they were interesting and ahead of their time. So to give you an example, at the beginning, this was when Ola and Uber were just growing to be huge in the country. And we figured that, you know, if history tells us anything, when you have such a large group of people, like all of the drivers banded together in doing something, and they're in this sort of slight power struggle between the cab companies themselves at which changing incentives and that sort of thing. And governments that were trying to figure it out regulations about this whole thing. We figured that all of the cab drivers would love to have a community together, where they could discuss issues and you know, get things done. So that was an app called Stepany. And we found that when we delivered it to cab drivers at the time, data connectivity was one of their biggest issues. So over a 10 year period, we built a ton of apps. And we always found that if you wanted to build apps that really pushed, the level of connectivity required, it was very hard. At the same time, we had this sort of ritual in our office where all of us would go to the tea stall closest to the office and have Chai in the evening. And inevitably, those would be our stand up meetings. And inevitably, people would bring their laptops and you know, we'd want to get a little bit of work done. And we realized that at this chai shop connectivity wasn't that great. So we decided, hey, we can put an internet connection here would be useful to us, and it would be useful to everyone else. So we got an a broadband connection from the local ISP and installed it in the chai shop. And one of the things that we made sure was, we wanted the connection to pay for itself, it wasn't going to be free Wi Fi. So we set the lowest price point possible at the time, which we thought was like two rupees because anybody can afford that if you can afford to buy a cup of chai and you have a phone, you definitely can afford two rupees. And we gave an incredibly generous amount of data for years ago, which was like 150 rupees. Now we do one GB at one rupee, which is infinitely cheaper. But even at that time, it was a truly disruptive price. Really quickly. The chaiwala got fairly crowded, and there will be dozens of users on the service all of them paying every day, when we saw that we expanded to five stores and all five stores did incredibly well. And we've always focused on, you know, side of the road, small Kirana shops, bakeries, juice, shops, chaiwala, that sort of thing. At that point, this was late 2017. Sorry, late 2016. We applied to Y Combinator, and we got in and in that year, we expanded our network out to 1000 locations. So at this point, we realized that while the service was doing really well, deploying the underlying connectivity, there were a tremendous number of challenges like we were pushing the broadband system in India, far harder than it had been pushed before. Nobody had ever deployed a network like this. And what we found was all of our ISP partners at the time because you know, we were just doing the sales at tea stores. We were writing the software on the routers doing all of that sort of stuff, but the underlying broadband connection would come from a local ISP We were pushing the limits of what all of our partners were capable of. And we had dozens of partners. One of the really interesting things about the Indian connectivity market is, while you do have one or two major providers, even they don't have a tremendous amount of coverage across the city, like a major provider, like an airtel, or somebody might have only 30 or 40% coverage, you know, there are dozens of neighborhoods, but they are not available. Or even if they are available, they don't have capacity to serve new customers there. So anyway, dealing with dozens of these guys, their onboarding processes were terrible, their quality of service was terrible. You never got guaranteed speeds, you know, whole bunch of issues. And for us, that became a bottleneck. We wanted to deploy 10,000 stores. But you know, our partners were just not capable of doing it. So we were really optimistic that something could be done and had to be done. Because we were seeing ridiculous levels of data consumption at our public Wi Fi locations, you know, people would sit for the whole full day and watch entire matches. People who download the latest apps update their phones, you would even have roving sales teams that are other companies, when data breaks, they would sit down and have their meetings with their laptops using our Wi Fi, right. So we knew that data consumption was definitely something that was going to grow. And it was just the current system did not have the capacity to expand to new and bigger use cases. And it shows me overall stats, like one of the things that like I always tend to say a stat that really strikes me is India has spent about 20 years, and there have been about 20 Giant telecom companies, and about 50 $60 billion, if not more, that have been poured into connectivity. And while mobile has done pretty well for itself, they still only 7% of India has broadband access, right? That's only 20 million connections, technically valid only 1 million broadband connections per year. And the definition of broadband. We're being very generous here. Anything above 20 Mbps is considered broadband. So if the current and historical rate of development and progress has been any indicator, does that mean for the remaining 90% of India, we're gonna have to wait 100 years, right? There's got to be a better system. So when we take a deep dive into how our partners were actually deploying their networks, and what were the bottlenecks in the system, we found that really the core issue was underground fiber. Now the way that any ISP works on pretty much everywhere in the world, but especially in India, there are actually a great deal of similarities with how old telephone networks used to work. You know, that joke, the internet is a series of tubes. Well, that's basically the reality, right? It's all a series of wires connected to each other eventually. And the core of these networks is underground fiber, and that is crazy, expensive to deploy, like take a city like Bangalore, right, which is 625 square kilometers roughly, you need to deploy 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of underground underground fiber in concentric circles across the city, if you want to provide, you know, access to the entire city. And that's why most telcos can't do it. Because you're spending on the order of you know, in cheaper neighborhoods, it might be$20,000 per kilometer for you to dig in more expensive premium neighborhoods, you could be spending 250 $300,000, right. And as a result, to enter into the ISP business, even in a country like India takes something like $100 million, right, because you've got to dig these trenches, you've got to get local, bureaucratic permits neighborhood by neighborhood, you have to deal with local politicians. And it takes years right three to five years, at least, just to get your backbone network running. The second problem is, after you dig all of those trenches and spend those, you know 10s of millions of dollars, you because you're in a developing nation, and even roads and sewage and everything is being continuously upgraded in a city like Bangalore, the moment you put in your fiber underground, another public works department is going to come and pick it up. So India has like seven times the number of fiber outages compared to the global average. So even our core networks are not as as minimal as they are, are not as reliable as they could be. So we took a solid amount of time to look into how do you improve that layer that underground middle mile as it were, and make it cheaper and more accessible so you can deploy millions of connections? We looked at wireless technology like 5g, a whole bunch of other options. And then we found lasers. Now, this is really interesting. So as all things in technology as anyone that, you know, has been working in tech for a while knows, pretty much everything great was invented in the 70s 80s and 90s, but didn't have a use case or enough data or, you know, the necessary conditions to make that idea work. Like machine learning is a great example of this right, invented decades ago, but only now the corpuses of data required to make those algorithms work exists now, and we're seeing the benefits of it. So the same thing back then, lasers have been long been used for optical communication, primarily for space applications and uses by the military. Recent advances in like lens grinding technology, basic optical circuits and compressions have allowed the huge leaps in the throughput of the lasers now. So you can do up to like 100 gigabits a second across 20 kilometers on these lasers. And they are now much cheaper than they used to cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars, you know, two, three decades ago. But today, you can make them in the 10s of 1000s of dollars per unit and we spent the last two years refining, deploying, and, you know, figuring out how to take this technology and this hardware, and put it out in the field in a way that it can replace expensive on the ground fiber, and do so reliably and cheaply. So we've had more than a dozen units now deployed across the city of Bangalore over the course of the last year. And we've done extensive field trials. And you know, if you know anything about India, the outdoor conditions are rough, right. And banglore got a great variety of battle, we've had incredibly hot summers, incredibly windy days, heavy amounts of rain, monkeys messing with the poles, parks, that sort of thing, right, because we install these lasers on rooftops and telecom towers across the city to form a grid. And that's how we deliver high speed Wi Fi. So we're incredibly confident with this breakthrough middle mile tech that we have. And we're going to be deploying the fastest and cheapest Wi Fi mesh that anyone's really ever seen and the most competitive markets in the world. And the most interesting bit about all of this is because we have, you know, the lasers and not underground fiber. And because we've built our routers by ourselves, and we own every part of the network hardware and software stack, we're able to tokenize and modularize the entire system, and we're able to allow for distributed ownership of it, we consider that distributed ownership of the system is a really important element for this to be successful. Because going back to the original point that I've made, less than 7% of India has internet access, and between what the government and private industry has done so far, we've only been able to make so much progress. So we need a better financing and technology system for this stuff to scale really quick. So we're running what we call an ISP in a box system, right? We can take all of our lasers, all of our routers, dump them in a shipping container, send them to another city. And we could have a partner deploy a broadband network that can serve hundreds of 1000s of people in a matter of weeks, if not a few months. This is unprecedented and unheard of. And the reason that distributed ownership is central to this is because we can also offer financing for the person that wants to deploy the network, including the software stack and the hardware stack. This is like a turnkey solution that's required for a lot of the developing world like the next pretty much two to 3 billion users of the internet. So yeah, our mission is low cost internet access for everyone. And we hope to bring a billion Indians online over the next couple of years. Yeah, wow. That's a that's a lot to take in. It's wonderful. I know when you mentioned monkey messing with the cables I was reminded on my childhood days and but yeah, I imagine that you know happening in India, where you have this another level of unknown unknowns and but one other thing that you said is guys started with an incredible small amount of money. I would want to add to that was like even though that was the case, I think there was no smallness in the the vision that you have you guys have I mean So it's a bigger vision, it's a audacious goal, or you've, you've kept on you kept you and your founder kept on doing that over several years. And it just wanted to know what drove you to do this, you know, most of the startups that I see in India, have that fancy shiny app and get get exited in like less than five years. And your model is more on the long term side. And of course, you know, infrastructure and all those things requires a lot of capital and long term thinking, What kept you going in all those years? Yeah. Interesting question. Honestly, I wish I knew exactly what it was. I think it's a combination of two things. The first is whatever the reason, both shubendu and I, Wi Fi does other co founder where failure doesn't bother us, like we have been rejected so many times and failed, it's so many things that, honestly, you just sort of look at it as a learning if you just use it, I think part of it is. So when we originally started working together pretty much 10 years ago, we a friend of we had barely any money, right. And a friend of ours was running a music production studio, but still runway, you know, bands would come into the car, podcasts, audiobooks, things like that. And he was kind enough to give us a little bit of space to work out. And I think because we've been exposed to so many creative people trying to make albums and art and that sort of thing, that you realize that even they face a ton of failures when trying to create something new and different and unique. And so you sort of realize that if you want to do something worth doing failure, sort of baked into the process, and it serves as a guide, like this, like Italy, it's a real Okay, a more concrete example of the sales, decentralization of the Wi Fi double network really started occurring to us about two years into building Wi Fi dabba, right. It wasn't a core focus right at the beginning, our focus was always what are the lowest number of components that you can use to build a network? And how do you make it the cheapest, right? And maybe we would do like a franchise program or a partner program. But as we looked into, if you're going to build a system that has to serve a lot of people, traditional ways of financing that system is very hard, like you mentioned, right? This is hardware and infrastructure and a long term business, the traditional way that you start a business like this is either you're lucky enough to be born into a rich and political family, or you have access to a tremendous amount of private equity capital or things like that. Because the beginning is, so the barrier to entry for capital is so high in this game, the and that was a limitation for us, right? We will go to investors and tons of people and say, you know, hey, we need to raise a lot of money. And we've been laughed out of more rooms than you can think of right? We been rejected hundreds of times by investors and that sort of thing. And while it's easy to take as failure, like that feeling of rejection, when you step back, what people are actually saying is, look, if you're gonna take on such a competitive market, with such strong people, you need something that totally differentiates you. And it's one of the most that they have is capital way that you get capital also has to be differentiated and different to deploy the network. So, you know, that's when we realized and when we looked at models, like, you know, helium and freedom fi and things that were happening in cryptocurrency, we realized that yes, technology is usually still a good answer for things. And you can provide differentiation through technology. So we were able to solve one of the key pillars of building out a system like this, which is the financing part. So to come back to that original question, right? You can look at failure or building like things is how do you keep going on but it's not so much that it's just, you're getting feedback, it's just rough feedback. And that's all Yes, that sounds great at this, you know, Helium was on my show, you mentioned helium is the product person, Abhey amazing guy. Althea a networks was on my show. And their founder, they are doing something similar to you guys, but they are not in lasers at the moment. Which, you know, I'm super excited to see that. Indian founder has figured out a way in terms of serving that market future. Anyways. Enough of my mumbling but then okay, so Karam, this, you mentioned and sorry. I wanted to ask you about this is Wi Fi dhaba. Now, this idea and you know, I don't want to make it into like a cliche question like, how did it originate? And all those sorts of things, but Daba for you, I want to put it in a way like, Okay. Daba is, is a congregation place where people are, you know, having a chitchat or, you know, akin to water cooler, you know, if people would call in America, in your point of view, why that place is needs, fast Internet access, what I was trying to ask is, like, in an era of say, unlimited internet on phone, which I believe these big, big companies in India are offering, like reliance and others. Oh, absolutely. Um, so first thing is, so the small, like the dabas, and retail stores and that sort of thing, where we install is only one segment, right? We install our routers and offer service everywhere. So people get it for their homes, their offices, we have more than 100 residential buildings where, you know, we have a mesh network covering every apartment and all common areas and that sort of thing. So wherever a Wi Fi router can be put replace one, right because a lot like XFINITY here in the US where you can see me explain any signal pretty much everywhere. That's one of our goals, which is were deploying a mesh across the city. So doesn't matter whether you're at home, we are a shop out on the road, on the streets, and at a traffic light parking lot, wherever you will have a Wi Fi data signal available to you. So we're covering the use case of pretty much everyone. Now, coming to the is another way to rephrase your question is is mobile 4g enough for people right now? And given that mobile 4g is so cheaply priced in India? So the thing is, yeah, as it turns out, the appetite for data consumption for Indians is going through the roof, like on our network alone. And what you see anecdotally is, consumption rates are growing on the order of 50, to pretty much 100%, roughly 18 months or so you're going to have a Moore's Law effect for consumption in India over the next 15, like 20 years, for sure. Now, actual practical limitations today that users face is, let's say that you are the average person, the average young man, right, so 70% of India is under the age of 30 years old, right? That are a hundreds of millions of us in that age bracket. Now, the one of the cheapest plans that you can get gives you about one to 1.5 GB per day, which sounds like a lot. But let's see the IPL or the T 20 is going on. Within an hour and a half, you've exhausted that data cap. And now when you go to top up, it suddenly becomes more expensive because you're effectively doubling your mobile bill. So the amount of data that people want to consume is definitely higher than what is reasonable to pay for right now. The second thing is our 4g networks are choked, right, wherever the telcos could deploy their 4g Towers they have the spectrum is full, they cannot add more capacity to it. So customers want more data, but the networks are not able to do deliver more data to them. The last and final thing, reason why that market is still not served is, again, a technical one for the telecom operators. So because of the lack of underground fiber that we talked about earlier, that's reliable. Less than 20 to 30% of mobile towers have backhaul to the internet. So the towers can't pass on a lot of the data that consumers want to consume to the internet itself. So because of these two structural limitations of 4g technology in the Indian environment, and the rising appetite or data for customers, we see that Wi Fi becoming a more and more viable option, especially if it's a national roaming network that's accessible to everyone everywhere, and where our price point is, like 10 times cheaper than anything else available out there. And we're bringing a prepaid revolution to broadband. So right now in India, although 98% of mobile connections are prepaid connections and only 2% are monthly, so speak connections in broadband, there is no concept of prepaid. You have to get a hiring plan to begin with, you have to buy your own router. The only prepay option is if you're willing to pay, you know, six months or 12 months in advance, which is insane because there are bank costs already 10 times more than mobile does in India. And most people can't afford that barrier to entry. These telcos also want customers data. So my question then comes is to you is, what is your stand on? Data privacy? And how when you provide the mesh network access to your customers? Is there an aspect of data mining happening? How the telcos do it, they provide you unlimited data, but at the at the cost of knowing where you are, where your location is, meta data, all of that? What is your sort of, you know, viewpoint on that? Yeah, no, great question. So we're taking a very long term and meaningful approach to privacy and security. So I'm going to give you two concrete examples where you can see structurally how we think about this as a company, and how this is baked into the product itself. So the first is let's talk about just first thing is open access for everybody. So right now, in India, if you want to provide data services, like internet connections to people, you need to be a licensed ISP. And the government only hands out so many licenses, now we have work and there's a high barrier to entry there, you know, a whole bunch of things. But we believe and so does the government that, again, because only 7% of the country, it has access, there needs to be a better framework in place where more people can get access to broadband internet. So we worked with the government and helped create what's called a PM WAN framework that stands for the Prime Minister's wireless access network interface and work. What it basically says the important thing about it is, is it allows anybody in the country without a license to resell data effectively. So the model that we were running, for example, Wi Fi Dabba, we used to do a revenue share with the shopkeeper, right. So if you're providing public Wi Fi, you get paid in order to in order to do so, previously, that was only possible if you were a licensed ISP, and we had to go through the process of getting a license and all of that. So now that's no longer needed. So anybody from their home office, whatever, if they believe that they have a community around them, that wants data, they now have the ability to go ahead and make money by providing data to their community, which is amazing, that's going to play a lot into Wi Fi dabba growth plan later on. But that's one core thing that we have focused on, which is removing barriers of licensing and otherwise so that more data can be provided to more people now coming to the security part. And like you mentioned, data mining and that sort of thing. So Wi Fi itself is going to be an ISP and a network unlike any other. One of the really cool things that we're going to be launching as the network goes live is we want to be more transparent on a infrastructure and data level higher than anyone else has. So we think of Wi Fi Dabba, almost like you know, a baby AWS, there is no, we're gonna provide API's for all of the functionality across the network. And we're going to provide developers tools and ability to deploy applications that previously could not exist, but now can. thanks to us. So to give you a sense under so there is a laser roughly two kilometres apart in a grid of 100, across the city of Bangalore, under each one of these lasers is a fair chunk of computing and storage power, right, we built a mini data center under each one of these lasers. Now we're going to give our developers API access to all of this storage and compute. So developers can build applications that are served at the very edge of the network, right. And they will have access to be able to visibly see how many devices on the network, what kind of devices, that sort of thing. We're also able to take that one step further because we do our own routers, and we've written our own router, os and our own firmware, we're able to provide developers router level access. So like let's say, for example, a developer wanted to build a really effective ad blocker. They can do it at the router level for the customer on the Wi Fi network. So there's a ton of visibility that the public is going to be able to have to see what's being consumed on the network who's consuming, what are the devices, what does the traffic look like, and the ability to shape and work with that traffic. We think that's going to lead to a higher level of transparency than ever before, and a whole set of applications never seen before. So we're really excited about that. So regarding the access the, you know, the government's plan to get like, you know, increase that 7% access, I would even say that in your case, like a network like yours, a project like yours also serving the need, the missing need in India, I think at the moment is the resilience part. Whenever we think about centralization or resistant networks, like the original aim of internet was to be this resilient network that if a lot of things go down, still the packets, the information packets get to the other end, I'm not saying that there could there could be like, a state sponsored attacks or anything, but since the internet is like the backbone of the countries these days, since everything is going digital wise, anything, everything is going at the digital landscape, or, you know, in the cloud, the resilience part is also often missing and or underlooked. And resilience is sort of, you know, somebody can argue provided by all the big players like Amazon and Googles of the world, but the added resilience, were these neural networks like yours provide. I think that's also a point I, I thought would be valid to bring up there. Yeah. Oh, no, you know, and that relates to cryptocurrency really well, one of the things that we find really interesting, and part of the reason why our network is tokenized, and we're taking the crypto approach where anyone can buy a hotspot. And you know, when data is sold on the network coins are minted and transferred to them is the software layer of the blockchain and cryptocurrency seems to be pretty well distributed? Yeah, certain issues. And it's an evolving system, and so on and so forth. But the underlying network infrastructure, physical infrastructure of the internet itself, is pretty centralized at the end of the day. So we're hoping that our decentralized approach over time will bring a lower level of stability and resilience to the cryptocurrency ecosystem that I think that the crypto world doesn't realize that it needs, I think they'll start to realize over the next couple of years, yeah, like we say, let 1000 Flowers bloom like yeah, you know, India needs a lot of startups, like yourself in the infrastructure space and the core technology space, a to be more resilient to whatever is outside like, you know, similar to how the human body works, right? We we are always self healing resilient networks. And, and as you said, every world world over in India, people are consuming more data, not less. Where do you go from here now, like, the future plans? And you know, one interesting thing that I thought about while you were talking is, Will in future, there will be a possibility of, you know, different dabas connecting to each other like a mesh network? Since I think you mentioned the the range is kind of roundabout 20 kilometres, which is pretty decent, you know, you get a lot of a lot of population in a 20 kilometer radius and in India or, you know, so then that would be interesting. If that's a sort of separate network on its own. I don't know what the legal implications around that are. And then the second question would be, it would be interesting, if you can walk me through how somebody who goes to a dhaba signs up, what is the the kind of user experience process like, or a person who signs up for a service? And is it easier to get in, get out quickly get work done? You know, that sort of thing? Because that will be super valuable. So I have more questions, but I don't want to bombard you with all of them. Right away. Yeah, no. So regarding the mesh, we're already a mesh. So anyone can rule them anywhere across our network, all of our routers and lasers talk to each other. And that ties into the sign in process really simply. So it works like any other public Wi Fi you have ever connected to either at the airport or a restaurant or anything like that, right? You see the Wi Fi signal, you tap to connect, you get a little pop up, it asks you for your phone number, you get an OTP and then you're signed into the system. And you only have to sign in once, roughly every month or so because government regulations require us to do that phone number OTP KYC roughly every month or so, but it's incredibly simple to second process that everybody is used to. So Once you sign onto the network, you can buy prepaid access. So you can buy data. It's one rupee per GB, which is like 0.001 cents per GB, no, sorry, 0.001 dollars per GB, you buy a data pack and you're connected. And now, wherever you are in the city, if you see a Wi Fi signal and your phone is connected, you will be able to use that data, you won't have to sign into anything. How do you buy it? Like, can you buy it through? Because these days, these apps, like Paytm, and all that Apple do a lot of like online sort of even pay, Paul? And also do you connect with all of them integrate with them? Or like they absolutely, yeah, so you can use your payment provider of choice. The most common ones in India are the ones that use the UPI system, which is sort of national settlement system. That's super straightforward. So there's Google Pay Paytm. Every bank has its own UPI app. And we see that that's how the vast majority of our users pay for something they're really comfortable with. And everybody knows how to use them. So how would that work with, say crypto? Because what I'm thinking is I interviewed, you know, Althea, and what they are doing is, so they have their own routers flashed ones. And so by crypto date, they, you know, they if you buy crypto and power usage, they tell you, you know, where you can swap the tokens and all those the usage metrics and all those sorts of things. I'm wondering, so this first payment off the bandwidth? And then how would that work? Is there plans maybe perhaps, in the future, to do something on the along those lines? And honestly, I have too much coffee. So all these questions are coming up. Yeah, it's awesome. Please keep them coming. So yeah, so we do have a crypto mining system in place. And the way that it works is because again, like helium or freedom f i, each one of the hotspots on the double network is owned by somebody. So while the user pays fiat currency, of one rupee, to get one GB of data and access the internet, when the user makes that payment of Wi Fi Dabba token is minted, and transferred to the owner of that hotspot. Now, the owner of that hotspot can take that token and swap out a uniswap or whatever. And the great part is, because Wi Fi Dabba will always be one of the liquidity pools available on the exchanges, because every single token is backed by actual revenue, because the user paying for that data. We think that we should have a fair amount of cryptocurrency usage and tokens being used. Oh, wow, this is getting me really excited. So you can hear it in my voice. I'm getting louder and louder. So this Wi Fi Dabba token, I'm not sure what to call it at the moment. But so this Wi Fi Dabba token has a is it based on existing saved, underlining, you know, like eth, or chia or like all these new ones, although so is it based on? Is it Yeah, so Okay, token launches in March next year, roughly about three months. So we will be announcing the blockchain that we are on then. So and like helium, and freedom phi, we're also gonna have a fairly unique proof of coverage system that demonstrates, you know, that the network is, in fact in place, and all of the nodes are alive and working, and a novel new proof of consumption system, right? Because our currency is not maintained arbitrarily. Well, our tokens are not minted arbitrarily through time or a cryptographic computation or anything like that, right, our token is generated only when revenue is earned and created in the system. So we're also going to be demonstrating a proof of consumption method in the next couple of months. Interesting, very interesting. Well, I'll be on the lookout for that, or, okay, coming back to the ownership part. Now, if I am a dabba owner, and I am interested in this side, it's serves as a great side income, like the more popular your data is more people are there or it works the other way around, too. If you have a good internet connection, people stay longer, people hang out more they get their work done, all those sorts of things. So as an owner, there are a lot of good prospects for me like for earning additional and all those sorts of things. How would that be enabled? I know it's in work, but just wanted to know your high level vision around that because I feel like that's that's really powerful. Because that's the thing that a telco or a bigger company or whosoever does tell me, they can do better marketing. But this is like a fundamental shift in thinking because the ownership is going to the actual user. And you know that that to me. Yeah, exactly. Very powerful. Yeah, no. So we're in production we're live, you can visit Wi Fi dabba.com. And for $100, purchase a hotspot, we're selling a total of 100,000 hotspots, I think we've sold. I mean, it went live only a couple of days ago. And I think we've already sold close to 1000, if not more. So you pay$100 for a hotspot. And from that point, it's a fully managed service from Wi Fi Dabba. So we will install it somewhere in Bangalore City, we will make sure that the presence of it is marketed. And we're also responsible for the maintenance of it, you're able to buy as many hotspots as you want when users purchase data. That is converted to Wi Fi dabba tokens, which you can then cash out on uniswap. As mentioned earlier, I'm understanding it correctly. So as an owner of a dabba, do I have to do any initial investment or like so on an average? What would I have to pay to you know, get this set up and then start? Start getting some, you know, folks? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get what you think. Okay, so the first thing is to realize this, thanks to the power of cryptocurrency and international commerce and otherwise, the owner of the hotspot does not have to be in Bangalore. So you, for example, via hotspot, we as Wi Fi double will take the responsibility to install it in a shop or in a home or because all Wi Fi hotspots give out the Wi Fi data signal and form a mesh. So and your earnings that you get are an average of what the average hotspot earns. So even if your hotspot is not necessarily in the most, you know popular location, you're still going to get a good return on it, because we're going to give you the average return across the network to make it fair for everyone. Because one of the interesting things that we learned was, So previously, for our lasers, we have the same sort of system set up where you can buy one of the lasers, and you get a revenue share of all of the subscribers within the region of your laser, like we have 100 of those. And we sold those out in like less than three months. And they're in that laser program or partner program. People could pick where they wanted their laser to go. And we found that most of the partners were like, Hey, why don't you just average out but the network win games. So for our last mile program, which is these hotspots, we're saying we're giving out the average. So, Kareem, we are that part of the show where all the sort of rainbows are gone. And now I'm going to talk to you about the gremlins. Yeah. What are the some of the issues or challenges that you guys still tackle with, say, having this new medium laser? You know, for my engineering days, I kind of remember like there the throughput? You know, there was a limitation to that. And then the distance and all that. So what has the technology or how far the technology has come now that and still is going through this shift that you what are those gremlins? What are those weird ghosts that come up now and then. So surprisingly, the most troublesome part of our network is when it's not the lasers. And it's not the hotspots themselves. It's not even on ground operations or regulatory mechanisms. The most surprising part where we have the most amount of trouble is when we install hotspots in public locations like retail, small Kirana, stores, retail shops, parking lots, that sort of thing. Plug Points tend to be a really big issue. So you plug in the router, and we have a system that detects or one of our things is we want to be really good at customer service, right? So we all have our routers, ping in every minute or so saying hey, I'm alive or you know, are not alive. If I don't get a ping and so that we can proactively the moment we realize that one router is down, we can immediately do something to fix it. So one of the most hilarious things that we found is the most common outage reason for a hotspot to go off is someone simply unplug the router from the wall in a retail location. So while we have hundreds or 1000s of hotspots across the city, something like 100 of them are gone because the shop owner or some guy pulls out the plug of the router and plugs in his mobile phone to charge. So that is one of the surprisingly biggest problems that we face where we get network downtime, because we're not able to have it reliable power source right at the end where the router is. Yeah, that's, well, that's a killer roadmap for lasers, right? We bought the lasers down from hundreds of 1000s of dollars to now 10s of 1000s of dollars. And they're about, say, one and a half pitch in size on average, we'll get confident over the next couple of years, we can bring it down to the size of a DSLR camera, and much cheaper. And with routers, we know we can bring in amazing efficiency with Alterations. We know we can do great things we're going to fantastic roadmap. Plug points, plug points are the bane of Wi Fi, Dabba, maybe put a lock box around it now. There's nothing you can do about that right now. So we tried the lock box. But you know what happens in the evening? The shopkeeper pulls down his shutter in terms of like, so yeah, I mean, the only way for that is to have just more of it. Right? I mean, that's the only way around it I guess, and maybe others but or other ways. But yeah, that's all right. So this was a fantastic interview. Karam, I learned a lot in this and I wasn't, I actually deep dive for quite a lot as what's happening, I would want to try out for myself. And, and the fact that anybody in the world can actually activate these Dabbas and sort of see them, you know, being activated and being around the globe. I mean, imagine this is just for India, like, you know, if you go to other countries, like if you go to Latin America, and places similar where you know, you have these, you know, place small places of congregation and, you know, having a chai or whatever coffee they have or whatnot, and then making a mesh like a people's network, sort of what helium and others do. And this, this would be like an add on to that as well. So I wish you the best. And I'm looking forward to many more announcements from you guys. And thanks for giving the time for this interview. Now, thank you so much for taking the time. It was genuinely thank you for the opportunity for being able to talk to your audience and you. Thank you, and I'd love to have you next time sometime next time when you're a little less busy.