Light Reading Podcasts

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...

Adtran's CTO, Ryan McCowan, discusses the benefits of Mosaic One, a network and services optimization platform purpose-built to reduce subscriber churn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode, we hear from Blair Levin, who oversaw the creation of the National Broadband Plan under President Barack Obama and served as FCC Chairman Reed Hundt's chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, as well as Clint Odom, senior vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Urban League. Earlier this year, the National Urban League put forth the Lewis Latimer Plan for Digital...

On this episode, we hear from Bruce McClelland, CEO of Ribbon Communications, about his company's work with broadband service providers in the rural US.McClelland says he took advantage of this last year of lockdown to reach out to policymakers in Washington, DC, and local reps at the state level, to "gauge tone" on rural broadband. We talk about his takeaways from those conversations, as well as...

The King of Cable, aka Alan Breznick, returns to host the 14th year of Light Reading's Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies event on April 28-29. While this year's event will be virtual, Breznick and his fellow cable industry experts will cover an array of topics including 10G, DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0, DAA, Wi-Fi 6, fiber deployments and more. Breznick joins Light Reading's Phil Harvey and Kelsey Z...

On this episode, we hear from Kostas Kastanis, deputy CEO of Upstream – a mobile technology company that works with providers to offer affordable and secure access to Internet services, primarily in emerging markets. Our conversation focuses on Upstream's work in Africa, where its service Zero-D offers free Internet access through an ad-supported model. Kastanis says this works especially well in...

The Light Reading podcast welcomes Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading's principal analyst, mobile networks and 5G, to preview some of the discussions and topics that will be part of the 5G Next Wave Digital Symposium. The symposium will be moderated by Brown, along with Jim Hodges, chief analyst, Heavy Reading, and it will feature speakers from Swisscom, Anritsu, Red Hat, 5G Americas, Telus and more. As...

MNJ Technologies COO Ben Niernberg returns to the Light Reading podcast to discuss predictions for growth in the MPLS and SD-WAN markets. According to a recent Avant Communications report, over 60% of enterprises plan to increase or significantly increase their SD-WAN usage this year and 59% plan to increase MPLS usage in 2021.Niernberg shares his perspective on these results, explaining that ente...

On this episode, we hear from Claude Aiken, president and CEO of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA), which represents the wireless Internet service provider industry, covering an estimated 6 million customers. We discuss the role of fixed wireless technology versus fiber when it comes to ending the divide in rural and hard-to-reach areas, how WISPs have kept people connect...

This episode of the Executive Spotlight Q&A features Plume Co-founder and CEO Fahri Diner, a veteran telecom entrepreneur and investor that Light Reading has covered for several years. In this interview, we discuss Plume's origins, why it exists, and what technology advantage the company has in the market. We also talk about Plume's recent $270 million funding round, a massive Series E round that...

On this episode of The Divide, we hear from Judge JD Clark of Wise County, Texas and Councilmember Craig Rice of Montgomery County, Maryland – co-chairs of the National Association of Counties (NACo) Broadband Task Force. The task force, formed in October 2020, is a coalition of nearly three dozen county government officials from across the US studying the country's digital divide and the challeng...

Light Reading Senior Editor Jeff Baumgartner joins the podcast to discuss the state of streaming video services and why they're eating away at pay-TV subscriber numbers. He also discusses new streaming services such as Paramount+, whether live sports can keep pay-TV alive, and what other features are keeping pay-TV subscribers from cutting the cord. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

The Light Reading podcast welcomes Dan Kurin, the tech coordinator at Factory Two and Brandon Corder the CEO of Beats x Beers to discuss an upcoming experiment with low-latency broadband in Flint, Michigan. Using the LoLa software system, developed in Italy and popularized by Internet2, a group of musicians at Factory Two will conduct a real-time musical performance and hip hop masterclass over a...

Mike Dano joins the podcast to discuss the significance of the FCC's $81 billion C-band spectrum auction. Mike recently wrote that 5G in the US will become a lot clearer by the end of March, with the C-band spectrum winners soon to be revealed. In this episode, we discuss how the results of the auction are likely to shake out and what impact the spectrum allocated will have on Verizon, AT&T and T-...

On this episode of The Divide, we hear from Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow in governance studies and the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institute. As a researcher and policy advocate, Dr. Turner Lee went on a ten-city tour investigating the digital divide in the US up close, which she writes about in her forthcoming book, "Digitally Invisible: How the Inte...

Erik Brenneis, head of IoT for Vodafone Business, joins the podcast to discuss growth in the IoT market and explains how Vodafone Business' customers are using IoT in their sustainability strategies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Heavy Reading's Sterling Perrin gives a quick rundown of what's coming up in the optical networking space for 2021 as he previews Light Reading's Optical Networking Symposium on February 16 and 18. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst for Private Networks at Omdia, joins the Light Reading podcast to discuss his predictions for the growth of private LTE and 5G networks."By 2025 … the size of the global market will be $5.2 billion," which is a significant leap from the predicted market size of $1 billion this year, says Tomasi,Private networks could be a major opportunity for telcos to "enter into...

On this episode of The Divide, we hear from Virginia Lam Abrams, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs and Strategic Advancement at the alternative broadband provider Starry. Starry's service is live in five major cities, and the company sets itself apart as a hybrid fiber-wireless provider that uses fixed-wireless technology for last-mile connections. We discuss Starry's overall rollout mod...

This episode features Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA). We talk about what digital inclusion work looks like, how the digital divide is being made worse by digital redlining, and what needs to happen at a provider and policy level to change that. Sign up today for the Light Reading newsletter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inform...

The Light Reading podcast welcomes Detlef Nauck, Head of AI & Data Science Research for BT's Applied Research Division. Nauck gives us an overview of his work and the processes involved in using AI and machine learning in traditional telecom networks. Nauck said BT is working to help drive standards for machine learning model management and governance – if companies can better explain and interpre...