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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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 developing topics she's tracking this year.

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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, and Challenges) Summit and Honors Ceremony, which will be held virtually on May 11 through May 13, 2021.After discussing the impact and importance of software-defined networking, McKeown reflects on what is changing about networking as we move toward more software-defined and open systems. Soon, he said, we'll be more worried about what we're doing on the network and not as worried about protocols and interoperability and hardware. "It's a big distributed system – a platform that is programmable by those who own and operate it," he said. "This is a massive change."

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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 mature."The [open RAN] principles are good to opening up the system to more vendors but there are some challenges along the way," says Murphy in the podcast. "The purpose of that article was to lay them out. It's not saying that we, Nokia, think they're not surmountable, it just takes a little time. From the standards perspective, and this is a very important point by the way, we believe the whole concept of open RAN won't follow unless it's based on standards."He adds that the industry is relying on the O-RAN Alliance to develop open RAN standards, but "we don't really have the full suite of specifications at a maturity level that is good enough to build an end-to-end O-RAN compliant system yet, so more time is required."In addition, Murphy discusses the importance of meeting parity in the open RAN journey, which he describes in his article as "the set of features or capabilities available with O-RAN-compliant products that should, minimally, be the same as those deployed today and in the future with incumbent, integrated solutions."

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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 data imperils state and municipal efforts, and the day-to-day work that Next Century Cities is doing to ensure local communities can get access to the broadband funding and services they need.

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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 a Shake Weight. Whether it’s letting us know which cities are the best to find herbal refreshment, where we can get travel-sized lawn samplings for our dogs to do their business or how to get more information on stories we've already reported on, these pitches were too wild not to share with our readers.While we've clearly made it onto some media contact lists that have nothing to do with the telecom industry, we are grateful to all the PR pros striving to better understand our beat, woo us with free water bottles (writing makes me thirsty!) and who actually answer our follow-up questions before the news breaks. Before you get a big head, though, we plan on future podcasts where we point out more pitches that simply struck out (so you’ve been forewarned).

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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 the US, Feamster and his colleagues identified a 30-60% increase in peak traffic rates in Q1 of 2020. In addition, their research data revealed a significant shift in traffic volume at the onset of the pandemic. Despite an influx of remote workers relying more heavily on home networks, the Internet has held up strong against capacity demands."I'm happy to report that the Internet, technically speaking, has done pretty well over the course of the pandemic," says Feamster.In regard to progress made during the pandemic concerning the digital divide, Feamster says some improvements have been made with subsidy programs, but "many communities and cities have the clairvoyance to recognize this isn't a long-term solution, necessarily, and it's been good as a stop-gap in some cases ... there are a number of places where the subsidy only needs to be part of the solution."

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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 and what it takes to get fiber to businesses in underserved areas, how ending the digital divide will change the US economy, and why traditional government funding methods for building out broadband aren't working.

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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 that everyone has cut the cord. There are still about 70 million households with traditional TV, and that's too many in our opinion. A big chunk of those don't know that there is YouTubeTV, Hulu, Sling…etc. We believe that with a helping hand, there are a lot of people who can make that transition to streaming that still want the traditional live TV content."Cohen provides insight into the channels and streaming services that are most popular among viewers – plus, some surprising results.

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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 us that managed services is a huge opportunity that surrounds private networks, even in those cases where 5G is not the most urgent need. For many businesses, in fact, connectivity, networking and IT itself can all be delivered as a service. "I mean, you don't need an IT department now to manage these private networks, we got it for you," Shah said.

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