Light Reading Podcasts

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 "nonsen...

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...

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 c...

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 recentl...

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 War...

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...

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 ef...

Light Reading contributor Gagandeep Kaur joins the podcast to discuss the state of telecom in India in light of the ongoing surge of COVID-19 across the country. We discuss the most important stories happening in the Indian telecom sector – from forthcoming 5G trials to satellite services; how the current coronavirus outbreak is impacting the industry and her coverage of it; and what other develop...

Stanford University's Nick McKeown joins the podcast to discuss a career milestone and a very forward-looking 5G project that involves (hopefully not) crashing drones on purpose. McKeown today is set to receive the 2021 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "for contributions to internet router architecture and software-defined networking." This will happen during the 2021 IEEE VIC (Vision, Innovation,...

Michael Murphy, CTO of wireless for North America with Nokia, joins the Light Reading podcast to examine areas where open RAN needs to be fleshed out for vendors and service providers to reap the full benefits of this technology. Murphy recently wrote a Guest Perspective column for Light Reading about the limitations of open RAN and the importance of developing standards to help the technology mat...

On this episode, we hear from Francella Ochillo, Executive Director of Next Century Cities: a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that works to support local officials and community leaders in their efforts to expand broadband. She and I discuss the challenges local communities face in having their voices represented in broadband policy making, as well as how inaccurate FCC mapping dat...

It goes without saying that the editors at Light Reading are living the dream, but this job – nay, calling – is not all puppy tails and rainbows. The sad truth is that many of the email pitches we receive from public relations (professionals?) are off the mark. In this Light Reading podcast, editors Phil Harvey, Mike Dano, Jeff Baumgartner and I share some story pitches that are about as useful as...

Nick Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, returns to the podcast to provide an update on his research into how COVID-19 has impacted Internet traffic demands in the US. He also discusses the impact the pandemic has had on Internet performance and how service providers are responding to these changes. By analyzing interconnection data for two large ISPs in...

On this episode, we hear from Shrihari Pandit, president and CEO of Stealth Communications, which provides fiber Internet to businesses in New York City. Since 1995 Stealth has been active in New York, where it has installed over 80 miles of fiber. In the last couple of years it's extended its service to underserved areas of Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem. We discuss the company's expansion...

Jason Cohen, CEO and co-founder of MyBundle. TV, joins the Light Reading podcast to discuss how his company connects viewers to streaming services, and assists broadband and cable providers in identifying new customers. In addition, Cohen examines drivers behind the cord-cutting trend, and shares why many viewers are still holding out with traditional pay-TV services."One of the big misnomers is t...

Anand Shah, Verizon's director of technology strategy and architecture, joins the podcast to talk all about private networks. We cover the wide variety of use cases for private networks, the enterprises and industries that present the most challenging private network deployments; and we talk briefly about security considerations and edge computing advancements involved as well. Shah also reminds u...

On this episode, we hear from Peggy Schaffer, executive director for the ConnectMaine Authority. ConnectMaine was established in 2006. Since then, Shaffer says it has spent approximately $12 million in grant funding to expand broadband services to people. She and I discuss the state of broadband in the state of Maine and what her office has been able to accomplish; as well as what she hopes to see...

On this episode, we hear from David Gilford, principal at HR&A Advisors and co-founder of the Broadband Equity Partnership: a consultancy focused on ending the digital divide in the US.In partnership with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, the Broadband Equity Partnership recently issued a survey to 120 government and nonprofit broadband leaders across the country to assess local prio...

On this sponsored edition of the Light Reading podcast, we chat with Tyson Marian, Plume's chief commercial officer, about the company's new product, WorkPass. We'll cover what WorkPass is and why Plume is building services for small businesses. As part of that discussion, we'll discuss how Plume uses its experience in managing smart homes – especially its cloud and AI expertise – to help small bu...

Yousef Khalidi, corporate VP of Azure for Operators at Microsoft and a member of the founding team of Azure, joins the podcast to discuss how his role has evolved to working on Azure for Operators. Khalidi explains why working with service providers requires a different approach to enterprise customers."Operators have very unique requirements," says Khalidi. "The level of carrier-grade networking...

On this episode, we hear from Scott Willis, CEO of DartPoints, a colocation data center provider; as well as Bruce Garrison, chief revenue officer at Bluebird Network, a regional provider of fiber infrastructure. We discuss the different ways their companies are addressing the digital divide in the communities they serve, including in rural Iowa, and the ecosystem of companies necessary to improve...

On this episode, we hear from Gary Bolton, President and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association: an organization of over 350 companies focused on delivering an all-fiber broadband network across the Americas. As the head of the Fiber Broadband Association, Gary is unsurprisingly pretty optimistic about fiber's potential and progress. We discuss why he says the US needs a fiber-first strategy and t...

Light Reading's Mike Dano joins the podcast to discuss which service providers and vendors are pulling ahead in the planning stages for 6G.In addition, Dano examines whether 6G will reach the terabyte per second speed threshold, and whether the industry will experience a smooth transition from 5G to 6G.While much is yet to be determined in regard to the benefits of 6G, Dano says there are two tang...

Ed Fox, CTO of MetTel, joins the Light Reading podcast to discuss challenges in extending SD-WAN services to home networks, whether SASE makes sense to enterprise customers and how MetTel is helping its customers navigate the onslaught of video conferencing and messaging applications."Extending SD-WAN to the home – we've done it sparingly and not as much as you would have thought," says Fox. As em...

Light Reading's Alan Breznick is back on the podcast to discuss whether the NFL's $110 billion deal with a number of streaming video services will be the nail in the coffin for traditional pay-TV bundles."Everybody wants football and it's amazing that with football games on so many different places that the NFL is getting overexposed," says Breznick. "But it seems like you can't overexpose the NFL...