Light Reading Podcasts

This week on the podcast, we hear from James Clark, a fellow with the American Connection Corps (ACC) , who is working with Mille Lacs Band tribal leadership to preserve his ancestors' Ojibwe language. Clark, whose name in Ojibwe is Ozaawaanakwad, is one of 50 individuals tapped for a fellowship through ACC, a program spearheaded by Land O'Lakes and Lead for America that supports individuals seeki...

Light Reading Senior Editor Jeff Baumgartner joins the reboot of 'What's the Story?' with an update on the unfolding drama at the Rogers Communications board amid the company's pursuit of a $20.8 billion merger with fellow Canadian cable and mobile operator Shaw Communications. The leadership and control structure of Rogers Communications has been fraught with uncertainty thanks to Succession -sty...

Light Reading editor Kelsey Ziser, Jeff Baumgartner and Mike Dano join Phil Harvey for recap of some of the issues that were covered and smothered at Mobile World Congress Los Angeles. The gang takes a big picture view of the digital divide, talks about open RAN's progress in the industry and why Rakuten Symphony is so controversial (and innovative). We also cover the alarming disconnect between t...

LOS ANGELES – MWC LA – This week Rakuten Symphony released a reference architecture for a distributed RAN node and cell site transport device called Symware. Rakuten's not getting in the hardware business, its execs said. But it is trying to standardize certain network components so it can tightly control costs and speed up software-based innovation. The multipurpose edge appliance, built with har...

On this episode, Dr. Dominique Harrison, director of the Technology Policy Program at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies , joins to discuss her recent research into the digital divide in the Black Rural South showing that 38% of Black residents in the region lack Internet service at home compared to 23% of white residents. We discuss the causes of digital inequality in these commu...

On this episode, we hear from Ryan Meche, director of LUS Fiber , a municipal fiber provider in Lafayette, Louisiana. LUS Fiber emerged from Lafayette Utilities System (LUS), the city's provider of electric, water and wastewater for nearly 125 years. Today LUS Fiber serves about 25,000 customers in the city of Lafayette. We discuss why Lafayette chose a municipal broadband model, how it's funded a...

Evan Dixon, president of global fixed broadband at Viasat , joins the podcast to discuss the company's role in tackling the digital divide in the US and abroad. He also talks about how Viasat's forthcoming ViaSat-3 will change how and where the company delivers service, and he pushes back on arguments from the fiber industry that satellite isn't "future proof." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priva...

Craig Labovitz, CTO for the Nokia Deepfield business, is watching how distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have changed throughout the pandemic and how Internet growth changes the nature of cyberattacks. In this podcast, he talks about how service providers can strategically approach the fight against DDoS threats and attacks and how 5G networks add both bandwidth and breadth of devices to...

Consolidated CEO all in on fiber over FWA Bob Udell, president and CEO for Consolidated Communications, joins the podcast to provide an update on the service provider's fiber buildout plan and the company's efforts to deliver connectivity to rural areas. In addition, Udell explains why Consolidated is investing in more fiber across its market region of 23 states, instead of fixed wireless access....

Dr. Amy Sheon is a digital health equity consultant and president of Public Health Innovators , which provides digital health equity strategy support to healthcare systems, governments and advocacy groups. She joins the podcast to discuss the impact of the digital divide and digital redlining on public health, how health policy and broadband policy need to intersect in order to address this proble...

Suzanne Schnaars, senior manager of network engineering for Verizon, joins the podcast to discuss her team's work to integrate new technology into Verizon's network, support recovery efforts and lessen the digital divide.  "Knowing that the work I'm doing is putting the technology and wireless connectivity out to our country to help those kids learn and help those parents who are working remo...

BT Global's Chet Patel joins the podcast for a discussion on how the relationship between telcos and hyperscalers is changing as a result of enterprise demand. As enterprises become more reliant on cloud applications and need help managing their cloud infrastructure, telcos have shifted their focus from providing connectivity where their large customers are located, to where the cloud nodes are lo...

Light Reading's editors are in the middle of judging the 2021 Leading Lights Awards and this is the third and final episode in a three-part podcast series discussing the Leading Lights finalists.  On this podcast, Light Reading's Kelsey Ziser, Fiona Graham and Iain Morris discuss trends they're seeing, what's happening in the awards categories that they're judging and what they've learned fro...

Open RAN is a truly different network architecture and over the next five years, those RAN sites will be able to perform functions that traditional RAN won't be able to do, according to Mavenir's EVP and CMO, Stefano Cantarelli. He also talks about the deployment at Dish Network and the challenges of building completely new networks. Cantarelli said Dish's approach is a fresh one, especially its d...

Vodafone's chief network officer, Andrea Donà, said the way to the 5G future is to first make sure you radically simplify and take care of legacy networks and services. Donà says that telcos need to "try and expose some of those inherent inbuilt functions within the network and start exposing them in a standard API interface-able way so that we can create new revenue streams." He continued: "We ne...

There are definitely reasons to be upbeat about the trajectory of 5G, according to Dario Talmesio, Omdia's research director for service provider strategy and regulation. This is especially true if you consider that "real" 5G – 5G standalone – doesn't exist yet in most places, yet service providers are still growing their topline with 5G services from their consumer businesses. A lot of servi...

New, improved 5G radios and other products are starting to make a difference in service provider deployments, according to Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading principal analyst covering mobile network infrastructure and technologies. Brown cited the second generation of 5G networking products and the move to use more 5G spectrum in the mid and lower spectrum bands as reasons that 5G service is improving,...

Light Reading's editors are in the middle of judging the 2021 Leading Lights Awards and this is the second in a three-part podcast series discussing the Leading Lights finalists.  On this podcast, Light Reading's Phil Harvey, Jeff Baumgartner and Alan Breznick discuss trends they're seeing, what's happening in the awards categories that they're judging and what they've learned from the contes...

Anand Shah, director of Technology and Architecture for Verizon, joins the podcast to share insight into industry progress for deploying network slicing, private networks and Open RAN.  "[Open RAN] increases your competition and definitely decreases costs for us, so we're all in there whenever we can save some on costs" says Shah. "The more vendors you include in any formula and the more equi...

The goal of the Cisco Rural Broadband Innovation Center is to provide service providers of any size with access to testing the same level of technologies that support broadband access, says Robin Olds, a business development manager for Cisco's Americas Service Provider group, who joined in on the Light Reading podcast with Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research. The $20...

Last week's telecom news highlights included a look at the wild valuation ride of social media and messaging platform Discord as it recently rejected a $12 billion takeover bid and then a $500 million funding round. We also review the latest info on 3G network shutdown dates for the big US carriers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we hear from Sam Sanders, founder CEO of Uprise Fiber . Uprise was launched two years ago on the West Coast by a group of telecom industry vets eager to use their expertise to provide communities with a new, better, and more affordable Internet option. We discuss how Uprise addresses typical problems people have with their ISPs, as well as the company's model of partnering with de...

Windstream CMO Mike Flannery joins the podcast to discuss why enterprises didn't deploy SD-WAN as widely as the industry anticipated they would at the start of the pandemic. Flannery explains how concerns around cost and ease of use stalled SD-WAN deployments for remote workers, but the tide is changing as remote access tools improve and enterprises budget for a long-term distributed workforce. "O...

Light Reading's editors are in the middle of judging the 2021 Leading Lights Awards and this is the first in a three-part podcast series discussing the Leading Lights finalists.  On this podcast, Light Reading's Phil Harvey, Kelsey Ziser and Mike Dano discuss trends they're seeing, what's happening in the awards categories that they're judging and what they've learned from the contest entries...

Marc Price, CTO of Matrixx Software, joins the podcast to explain how operators can rethink traditional mobile pricing models for 5G services. Price recently spoke at Light Reading's BIG 5G Event to discuss new monetization opportunities and the benefits of an open cloud-native network core for 5G. Price explains how Matrixx is supporting Visible, the MVNO run by Verizon, and why that approach fit...