Looking Back and Forth on Fiber with Corning’s Mike Bell

Looking Back and Forth on Fiber with Corning’s Mike Bell

With 33 years in the fiber industry, Corning Optical Communications Senior Vice President and General Manager Mike Bell has witnessed tremendous growth and changes throughout his career, enabling him to share the history of fiber’s progress and predict its future path on the December 4, 2024, Fiber for Breakfast podcast.

“We’re known as inventors,” said Bell. “That’s the way a 173-year-old company like Corning, that invented the light bulb, still stays relevant today. Our inventors looked to cable TV networks and thought, ‘What if we could connect fibers like they connect coax cables?’”

Corning’s inspiration for hardened fiber outside plant connectors enabled fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service, an opportunity it created through forward-looking investment at a time when the industry was recovering from the dot.com collapse in the early 2000s with long-haul overcapacity depressing the market for new fiber purchases.

By investing in the then-unproven outside plant technology at a time of long-haul fiber overcapacity, Corning set itself up for success to support Verizon’s ground-breaking FTTH FiOS service in 2004 which two decades of continued fiber sales growth as FTTH grew to become the gold standard for home broadband connectivity.

“From a leadership principle, let me share a little bit more about ‘never waste a good crisis’ and what that means to us,” said Bell. “First, we continued to invest, meaning make bets in the future, even during the worst of times. If we hadn’t been investing during the downturn, the hard plant connector never would have happened, and we never would have been able to support Verizon. Secondly, having the right people in the right jobs to capitalize on the recovery. That’s something we worked hard on during that period of time, too. The last one is authenticity. When people know they can trust you, it really makes a difference. It makes a difference when you’re going through hard times with your own organization and it also makes a difference when you’re trying to collaborate with industry partners.”

Bell’s passion and leadership shone during COVID as he led Corning in connecting the unconnected during the pandemic, creating a dedicated rural team to focus on that overlooked area and working through business challenges, such as supply chain issues. His efforts inspired Corning to sponsor the FBA’s new “Connect the Unconnected” award, which will be presented to an individual whose demonstrated leadership in bringing fiber broadband to the hardest-to-reach, most remote areas and make service available to every home in those communities.

“Access to broadband, I truly believe, means access to opportunity, and we saw it more during the pandemic than any other time,” said Bell. “We all know that still today, only about 25% of Americans are connected with fiber broadband, so that tells me there’s still 75% of the job left undone and that’s what we’re passing on to this next generation of leaders, and all of you as industry leaders to collaborate and make that happen. Communities with high-speed fiber broadband have about 30% higher GDP growth than those that don’t.”

For more on Mike Bell’s insights on the history of fiber and a look at where fiber’s growth is expected in the years to come, tune in to the latest Fiber for Breakfast episode.

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