Light Reading Podcasts

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The Divide: INDATEL and Connected2Fiber on monetizing 'fiber to the farmhouse' Jun 10, 2021

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On this episode, we hear from Ben Edmond, founder and CEO of Connected2Fiber, a cloud platform that allows fiber providers and MSOs to plan and monetize service routes; and Mel Wagner, CEO of INDATEL, a nationwide network of 700-plus rural broadband operators, and a client of Connected2Fiber. We discuss the work their companies are doing in rural America to accelerate broadband rollout, the challenges rural operators face with deployment and monetization – including current year-long delays in getting fiber materials – what policy decisions would benefit rural ISPs tasked with building broadband to the hardest-to-reach areas, and why it's crucial to fund middle-mile deployments.

Light Reading recap: Week ending June 4 Jun 07, 2021

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Last week's news highlights included a look at big telco job numbers (they're dropping), Huawei's software strategy and T-Mobile's plans to connect rural America. This podcast first appeared, in video form, on Informa Tech's executive community, The Network.

The Divide: How Project Nandi is addressing Internet inequity in the Twin Cities Jun 03, 2021

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On this episode, we hear from community leader Ini Augustine, founder of Project Nandi: a program that provides devices, technical support and broadband assistance to local families in Minnesota's Twin Cities. Project Nandi was launched in 2020 following the onset of COVID-19 to help prevent Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian students from being left behind by remote learning. We recorded our conversation shortly before the first anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and shortly after another Black man, Daunte Wright, was fatally shot by police during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. She and I discuss how her community's digital divide was worsened by the coinciding crises of the pandemic and police violence, why solutions like Project Nandi to address broadband inequity are necessary (though extremely hard to get funded), her plans to start a community fiber project and her message to legislators working on broadband bills in Washington, DC. Donations to support Project Nandi are being accepted here: https://www.givemn.org/organization/Project-Nandi

The Divide: Rep. Drew Hansen on passing Washington's Public Broadband Act Jun 01, 2021

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On this episode, we hear from Washington State Representative Drew Hansen, who has served the 23rd district since 2011. He is the lead sponsor of the Public Broadband Act, a recently passed law in Washington that effectively reverses a prior state law banning municipal broadband. We discuss the digital divide in Washington and why the Public Broadband Act was necessary, the difficulty (and "nonsense") he and his colleagues faced in getting it passed, what the next steps are once the law officially takes effect in July and more.

The Divide: Clearfield CEO Cheri Beranek on preparing for the 'fiber bubble' May 25, 2021

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On this episode, we hear from Cheri Beranek, president and CEO of Clearfield, a company that designs, manufactures and distributes fiber optic management products. We discuss how Clearfield creates its products to be scalable and cost effective for service providers, how the company is preparing for what she calls a forthcoming "fiber bubble" amidst labor and supply shortages, whether or not it's realistic to deploy fiber everywhere in the United States – and more.

Comcast crafts accessibility features for Xfinity X1 May 20, 2021

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Tom Wlodkowski, VP of accessibility for Comcast, joins the podcast to share how he got started in the accessibility field and explains the evolution of Comcast's Voice Guidance system on Xfinity X1 and the development of the Xfinity X1 Adaptive Remote. "In 2014, we launched the industry's first accessible set-top box experience for people who are blind or visual impaired on our X1 platform and we called that Service Voice Guidance. Think of it as a screen reader inside of a box, even though it's in the cloud because X1 is all cloud-based," says Wlodkowski. "Voice guidance, once it's enabled, reads all of the UI (user interface) elements as you navigate with the remote control using the D-pad (directional pad)." Previously, visually impaired users were limited to scrolling up and down on channels, and features that most people take for granted were inaccessible to them, adds Wlodkowski. The Voice Guidance capability provides visually impaired users with the ability to now "navigate TV listings, schedule and play back DVR recordings, navigate on-demand content and control settings such as parental controls," explains Wlodkowski. The end result of adding more accessibility features to content platforms extends beyond those with disabilities, says Wlodkowski. Closed captioning is one feature that everyone can benefit from, such as when an actor is difficult to understand or sound mixing muddles dialogue. "When you build an inclusive product, you end up building a better product for everyone," says Wlodkowski.

IBM and Lumen: Distributed cloud brings the edge to enterprises May 20, 2021

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IBM's Bill Lambertson and Lumen Technologies' Dave Shacochis join the podcast to discuss the distributed cloud and how it supports the delivery of edge computing resources to enterprises. "The distributed cloud allows you to bring down a whole set of public cloud capabilities and SRE [site reliability engineering] support on-premise or in your location of choice," explains Lambertson. Lumen recently deployed IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM's distributed cloud service, across 180,000 of the service provider's global edge locations. Shacochis and Lambertson share several use cases for how this deployment could help enterprise customers, such as providing video analytics to improve worker safety measures in manufacturing and distribution centers. "The integration and use case we tested was more facility and worker-safety based. Hard-hat detection is one of the computer vision algorithms that IBM software already knows how to plug-in and detect," says Shacochis. "Avoid one accident and the whole system pays for itself in many ways."

AT&T unravels its content, pay-TV empire May 18, 2021

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Light Reading's Alan Breznick and Jeff Baumgartner weigh in on the burning questions surrounding the recently announced media moves by AT&T. The telecom giant is spinning out its WarnerMedia group to a new joint venture it will form with Discovery in a deal that will give AT&T $43 billion and a controlling stake in the new company. The move unravels the $84 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner that was sealed just three years ago. What will it mean for AT&T and its competitiveness as a network operator? How will the new media company loom large on the pay-TV and consumer media landscape? Breznick and Baumgartner give their early reactions and address some questions that remain.

Limelight's Steve Miller-Jones on tracking the content delivery evolution May 18, 2021

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Steve Miller-Jones of Limelight Networks joins the podcast to talk about the future of media and video distribution. The pandemic changed our media consumption patterns, but what happens when we all start going to live events and large venues again – and is there a new media business model emerging with that change? Miller-Jones said he expects that broadcast TV, live events and linear programming will still continue, but "our expectation is going to be that we can choose how we're going to consume that." He said we'll want to see different camera angles at live events, pause and revisit media on different devices, and have more to consume that's "about" the event or the things we're doing in-person. He said that move to provide companion content to in-person experiences means "additional data, additional services, additional applications, or content that comes with what we're consuming, and there's going to be, I suspect, a whole sort of emergence of a different type of storytelling, perhaps in a different type of content management and content production."

The Divide: How 'Project Overcome' is tackling access in Clinton County, Missouri May 18, 2021

Show notes

On this episode, we hear from Mari Silbey, director of partnerships and outreach at US Ignite, as well as Alex Wyglinski and Casey Canfield, engineering professors and co-leads on a broadband deployment project in Clinton County, Missouri. The deployment, which will use RF-over-fiber to serve a rural community, was selected to receive grant funding through Project Overcome, a $2.7 million joint effort spearheaded by the National Science Foundation and US Ignite – with additional financing from Schmidt Futures – to fund novel broadband projects and find new solutions to closing the digital divide. We discuss more about Project Overcome, as well as details and plans for this specific deployment in Clinton County, Missouri, and the complexities of choosing the right technologies and outreach methods to service rural communities.

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