Fiber for Breakfast 2023 Week 22 – The Middle Mile: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You!

Wireline network operators, generally assisted by government funding, are beginning to extend their broadband services beyond metro areas, and potentially into outright rural areas. This extension of their networks beyond the reach of the edge central offices of the metro network will create a new network segment – the middle mile network, sometimes called the second-mile network. This new network segment will raise new networking challenges as it carries a mix of services that were previously served by separate networks that were terminated in a metro central office; any special network treatment was performed in the access network, not transport. In addition, vendors are introducing new (and sometimes novel) optical transport formats to minimize costs in this new network environment. This complexity in the aggregation network calls for network design and control specific to this new second mile network. Join us for Fiber for Breakfast with Rick Talbot, Principal Analyst at ACG Research, to learn more.

Guest Bio:

Rick Talbot, Principal Analyst at ACG Research, for the Intelligent Optical Networking and 5G RAN xHaul practices, combines expertise in network access, transport (particularly optical networking) and switching technologies, including Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and a deep understanding of the telecommunications industry competitive landscape, business (and regulatory) issues and economic trends to provide a comprehensive view of the industry. He gained this broad experience in over 40 years of technical marketing and sales engineering roles at network systems vendors as well as network architecture design roles at service providers.

Rick holds an MBA degree from Southern Methodist University and a Bachelor of Engineering science degree from Trinity University. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Texas and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE).