Wavelengths

Crafting a quality company culture is simple, right? If it were, every organization would boast.

Creating quality and sustainable company culture in today’s workplace environment may be one of the most challenging endeavors for organizations. Wavelengths tapped an expert to break down this topic and shed some light on what organizations can and must do to revitalize their cultural impact. Kirsti Tcherkoyan, CEO of 20/20 Insights, joined host Daniel Litwin to talk about company culture.

20/20 Insights is a strategy and performance management platform offering an all-in-one solution for purpose-driven companies—their mission: to make every company a great place to work.

Tcherkoyan said her company, 20/20 Insights, was born out of the need to bridge the gap between the work leadership teams believe is essential in an organization’s strategic plan and what their employees are doing every day.

With all that’s going on in today's work environment, what did Tcherkoyan think was the biggest challenge?

“The biggest thing that we’re seeing that isn’t new but is especially challenging is the fact that we have five generations of workers in the workplace today,” Tcherkoyan said.

This mixture of generations came to a head during the pandemic. “The companies that were already focused on purpose and mission were a little bit farther ahead,” Tcherkoyan said. “But then we had the pandemic laid on top of it that just caused disruption from one end to another.”

Tcherkoyan said many companies that struggled with defining their purpose recognize the importance of doing so because of the pandemic. “That causes them to dig deep, and in some cases that means some executives have to leave because their own personal values don’t line up with the corporate values,” Tcherkoyan said. “It’s brought deep, deep questioning and change to the workplace that we’ve never seen before.”

It’s only natural with the expansion of 5G that an expected domino effect is following in its wake. All successful 5G deployments will need to interface with a growing array of IoT devices. And, to do that, 5G and IoT networks will need the right supporting technology to maximize data flow and operations.

Dan Gorsage, Director of Sales and New Business Development for Amphenol’s Mobile Consumer Products Group, shared his insights on how connector and antenna solutions will support the future of 5G-enabled IoT.

Gorsage said that in the first wave of 5G, mobile, phone and fix-based wireless networks seem to be the primary focus, but IoT will gain more traction soon. And, with IoT, there are additional considerations.

"When I think of IoT, I think of the hardware piece of this," Gorsage said. "You have sensors, you have an antenna and you have connectors. The segment that this passes through would be from some device, whether it's wearable or out in the field somewhere, passing through some gateway or hub and finally ending up in a data center where it will be analyzed. All the algorithms come through, pass back through, and give some intelligence to that, whether it's artificial or direct intelligence. So, the intersecting of this 5G and IoT, I look at them side by side a little bit, but there's certainly going to be that integration."

And for Amphenol's part, sensors, connectors, and antennas are their jam. And in the back-hall data systems, Amphenol makes cable connectors and fiber optics for all those use cases.

And while the promise of 5G is exciting, Gorsage said some limitations require addressing to unlock its full potential.

"Because it's short-range and such a high frequency, it's a line of sight," Gorsage said. So, thinking about an antenna for those applications, you're going to need, maybe 1,000x to cover a certain area, because you need the line of sight and because of the distance that it can only travel."

Level 5 advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are the milestone that would signal we have achieved the dream of autonomous vehicles. But the road to Level 5 ADAS is long.

On this episode of Wavelengths, an Amphenol Broadband Solutions podcast, Voice of B2B Host Daniel Litwin hit on two significant buzzwords: network convergence and network virtualization. Along for the ride was PJ Jayawardene, Senior Director of Wireless R&D for Charter Communications. The duo dug into the state of the union of each of these words and what they mean for the industry, as well as how service providers can be actionable around them.

Network convergence is a familiar trend for service providers. The term continues to expand and create strategic challenges. Convergence in the telecommunications industry is about providing a continuous network thread, according to Jayawardene. He elaborated that people are going to care about the different service providers in their homes. The goal is that all these things will be seamless to the consumer.

“It’s not just the one word. It’s not just convergence,” Jayawardene said. “You have to think about network and convergence together because, when you think about convergence, people think of multiple things coming together.”

Network virtualization is another big buzzword, as small and big businesses find the term popular. Growth is expected in virtualization for service providers. Some 2020 research from Spiceworks found that double-digit growth is expected within the next two years in the use of application, network, desktop, storage and data virtualization.

“The example is to start thinking of it as being able to build your own car,” he said. “With the parts you need to put together, you have this preference of a car that needs to go at a certain speed that can change its dynamic … and you put it all together.”

Constant and reliable internet is a needed utility for modern society. But despite ongoing efforts to deploy broadband internet in beyond urban and suburban centers, rural communities remain underserved in this market.

How does the historical growth of FTTH (fiber to the home) shape the rollout of fiber today, and how can businesses, state, local and federal governments support these communities to get internet access at scale?

Rick Schiavinato, Sr. Director of National Sales for ABS, and Jeff Reiman, President of The Broadband Group, joined Wavelengths host Daniel Litwin to provide some answers to these questions.

Reiman’s father, Tom, the Broadband Group founder, was a part of the first fiber to the home project back in 1986. Now, 35 years later, the conversation is still about how to get fiber out to underserved communities. Reiman pointed out that a significant objectives of that first fiber network project was to get fiber into the homes of underserved areas. Clearly there is still a long road to go to make that dream a complete reality.

The first big push for fiber networks began with municipalities and smaller players before large enterprise networks got involved. “The driving motivation for many regions outside the top 20 markets, which you might refer to as a tier 2 or tier 3 city, [is that] they were in a hard position,” Reiman said. “Consolidation of the industry was good for the large service providers, but it was not very good for the end-users.”

“It’s an interesting time in the fiber to the home space,” Schiavinato said. “You had a lot of companies that were driving that tier 2, tier 3 market with fiber to the home technology where the main areas, the main operators, were very much focused on legacy technologies and protocols.”

The era of 5G networks is upon us, but what does that really mean for the average consumer? What can people expect from the implementation of this new technology, and how will it impact our day-to-day lives?

A year after the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the way we live and work, a glimmer of hope lies on the horizon. Cases in the United States are dropping, and the vaccine rollout is well underway.

As a result, many of us can’t help but look back on where we started. How has the pandemic affected the industrial manufacturing and broadband industries? What have we learned?

Here to discuss these topics with host Daniel Litwin is Barry Holt, Vice President of Global Cable Operations at Amphenol Broadband Solutions.

A National Association of Manufacturers survey found that almost 80% of manufacturers expected the pandemic to hurt their business, especially in operations, workforce reduction and the impact of a global recession. However, Amphenol has come out from the worst of it relatively unscathed.

Holt largely attributed it to the company’s strict adoption of health and safety measures after the initial lockdown in China throughout its global facilities.

“We realized that it could be terrible if we had an outbreak that hit the plant, and we could be shut down for long periods of time,” he said as he looked back on the actions the organization took last year. “The biggest thing was not fighting the process and taking it to the extremes from day one.”

Although there was some pushback in the early stages of the pandemic, soon enough, Amphenol employees were grateful for the stringent measures that were put in place – especially in countries with more lax safety guidelines.

“A lot of the feedback we got from people as it got worse was that they felt a lot safer at work than they did at home or on public transportation or out in their daily lives,” Holt said. “I think that was because of the different approaches countries took, and people looked at work and thought, ‘I feel safe at work because everything’s being contained.’”

If you enjoyed this episode of Wavelengths, visit Amphenol Broadband Solutions’ website for more content and interviews with industry experts and thought leaders.