Cable had a broadband speed advantage for a decade, and they marketed to their advantage. Fiber took the lead on speed and followed the same marketing strategy as Cable. The reality is that broadband speed doesn’t matter nearly as much to the consumer experience as we pretend it does. The success of fixed wireless broadband has made that plain. Fiber companies can’t afford to be complacent. They need to invest in other elements of the customer experience, or risk being ill prepared when others in the industry change the narrative. Join us for Fiber for Breakfast with New Street Research’s Managing Partner, Jonathan Chaplin, as he shares insights from his latest research.

Webinar Presenter:

Jonathan Chaplin is Managing Partner of New Street Research, a boutique equity research firm focused on the Communications Services industries with offices in New York, London and Singapore. Prior to New Street he led the Telecom Research team at Credit Suisse and the Telecom & Cable Research teams at JPMorgan. Jonathan started his career in finance in the M&A group at JPMorgan, focused on the Telecommunications Sector. Jonathan has repeatedly been recognized as among the “Best on The Street” among Telecom analysts by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, and Institutional Investor Magazine. Jonathan is an avid alpinist, climbing technical peaks all over the world whenever he can tear himself away from the worlds of finance and communications.

With the new bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) law mandating an historic investment in high speed rural broadband that has drawn comparisons to the electrification of rural America last century, it is clear that more work needs to be done to maximize its effects. Federal and state governments have been busy mapping the neediest communities and starting to plan for the implementation of the BEAD program. At the same time other broadband programs such as the Tribal Program, RDOF, and RUS Reconnects have been making funding awards. As this happens, it is becoming clear just how much is at stake if federal and state permitting requirements delay these important broadband infrastructure builds. This has become a major priority for the Biden Administration and FBA has already brought members in to speak to the Department of Commerce about addressing this problem. Just as important is an effort in Congress to confront this issue by streamlining the permitting process legislatively. Come listen to this Fiber for Breakfast and to the leaders of this effort in the House of Representatives as they talk about their plans to legislate important changes to broadband permitting. And bring your own ideas about the areas on which this legislation needs to focus its attention.

Webinar Guests:

Kate O’Connor
Chief Counsel for the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce

Evan Viau
Professional Staff Member for the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce

Many companies talk about placing a priority on customer service – but i3 Broadband is so laser focused on the people they serve – they’ve built an uncompromising commitment to exceptional service at the very top of their company core values. That has earned i3 one of the highest NPS ratings in the industry. i3 Broadband CEO Paul Cronin will be on Fiber for Breakfast to talk about how the mission to improve the communities they serve, is also improving the bottom line. This as i3’s rapid growth model reaches into underserved cities that need (and appreciate) broadband for economic development and a better quality of life.

Webinar Guest:

Paul Cronin joined i3 Broadband, LLC, as Chief Executive Officer in February 2021. Paul is a long-time cable and broadband industry veteran with strong experience leading both large-scale operations and smaller business units in start-up and turnaround environments. Prior to joining i3 Broadband, Paul spent 20 years with Cox Communications serving most recently as Senior Vice President of Operations in the Atlanta corporate office. He also held the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cox’s Northeast region. In those roles, he led all facets of operations from customer care, field installation and repair, outside plant, government and community affairs, and customer experience at the regional and corporate offices. Paul started his career with American Cablesystems and also worked with Continental Cablevision and Media One in the northeast region. Paul serves on the Board of Members of WH i3B Holdings, LLC, the parent company of i3 Broadband. He holds an MBA from Providence College and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Plymouth State College in New Hampshire (now Plymouth State University). Paul is a recognized leader who listens, leads with integrity, drives organizational change, and inspires teamwork in order to achieve extraordinary results.

How much will it cost to reach universal broadband availability in the United States? Answering that question requires understanding network construction costs, estimating the number of unserved and underserved locations, and defining “broadband” – and that is exactly what Vantage Point Solutions has done in their recent whitepaper, Cost of Bringing Broadband to All.

Larry Thompson, PE, co-author of the paper, will discuss the methodology and findings of the report during this Fiber for Breakfast presentation.

In particular, he will explain how previous estimates came to be so far off the mark and will share the implications raised by this new research, including – perhaps shockingly – that even the current funding infusion is woefully inadequate to truly finish the job once and for all. And while the cost to bring broadband to all is high, the cost of failing to do so is higher.

Webinar Guest:

Larry Thompson, PE is the CEO of Vantage Point Solutions, a premier engineering and consulting firm serving the fiber broadband industry. A licensed professional engineer, he held several engineering and management positions prior to founding Vantage Point Solutions in 2002. With over 30 years of experience designing fiber-based, wireless, and satellite networks, he is a trusted and respected expert authority on matters related to telecommunication technology and regulation. As such, he is a two-term member of the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC).

The level of BEAD funding is far more than adequate to complete the work started under the CAF II Auction, and continued under CARES, RDOF and ARPA: Fiber to every rural home.

In 2010, the consultants working on the National Broadband Plan estimated that the cost to build fiber to every rural home would exceed $300 billion. That estimate, as much as any other factor, drove the federal government’s view that rural fiber was prohibitively expensive. The FCC effectively decided not to close the digital divide, and instead pursue “good enough” solutions, including DSL, fixed wireless and satellite. Over the decade to follow, the FCC committed nearly $100 billion to non-fiber solutions while the divide grew.

As a nation, will we make that mistake again? Will exaggerated costs to build fiber networks divert public resources to sub-optimal technologies? Or will we commit to close the digital divide with fiber-optic networks to every rural community? Join us for Fiber for Breakfast with Jonathan Chambers, Partner at Conexon.

Webinar Guest:

For over 30 years, Jonathan Chambers has influenced the development of government telecommunications policies and the deployment of internet access networks. Early in his career, Chambers served as the Republican staff director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. During that time, the Committee overhauled most of the federal laws that today still govern the wireless, cable, telephone, and internet access industries. He later served as FCC Chief of the Office of Strategic Planning, where he was a principal advocate for reforms that altered $12 billion in annual FCC spending from support of voice services to support of broadband services and from incumbent subsidies to competitive bidding. Since early 2016, Chambers has worked with rural electric cooperatives deploying fiber broadband. He is widely viewed as one of the industry’s foremost experts on rural broadband funding.

IIJA / BEAD and the ARP / Capital Projects Fund each offer unprecedented funding to states for broadband infrastructure deployments. One of the requirements is that each state or territory assumes an active role in identifying those areas of greatest need for broadband infrastructure deployment (also meeting a long list of other requirements) and runs a grant program. A small number of states have been proactive in collecting data and making it available to the public. Two best-in-class examples include North Carolina, in collecting geospatial speed test data and associated primary survey research, and Georgia, in collecting performance data from each ISP based on a fabric of specific locations. Join us for this Fiber for Breakfast to learn how each of these data sets can be visualized and integrated into a broader GIS decision-making process that reflects the funding criteria of BEAD.

Webinar Guests:

J. Randolph Luening (whitepaper author), Founder and CEO, Signals Analytics, LLC / BroadbandToolkit.com
Eric McRae, Associate Director, Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia
Ray Zeisz, Senior Director, Technology Infrastructure Lab, Friday Institute, North Carolina State University

Join us for this Fiber for Breakfast, “The FCC maps are going to be wrong, and that’s OK.” But the challenge process itself will be challenging.

Scott Wallsten, President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute (TPI), will discuss the error inherent to any mapping process, the incentives the challenge process creates, and TPI’s own approach to challenges.

Webinar Guest

Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy. He was the economics director for the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Nate Denny, Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Department of Information Technology’s Broadband and Digital Equity Division, will provide details about how North Carolina is closing the digital divide by expanding access to affordable, high-speed internet in every corner of the state, ensuring it is equitably adopted, and making sure that residents are enabled to use it for everyday necessities. On this Fiber for Breakfast, Nate will speak to the impact on more than 100,000 households and 3,300 businesses across the state that will receive high-speed internet access through the recently-awarded $260 million in Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grants and will share information on the upcoming $400 million Completing Access to Broadband program. Through these federal American Rescue Plan Act-funded programs, as well as the additional funding programs coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, North Carolina is planning to connect the entire state by the end of 2027.

Webinar Guest

Nate Denny was named Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Department of Information Technology’s Broadband and Digital Equity Division in May 2021. He previously served as NCDIT’s chief of staff and legislative director. Before joining NCDIT in 2017, Nate was a presidential appointee at the U.S. General Services Administration in Washington, D.C., where he served as deputy chief of staff, director of intergovernmental affairs and senior advisor for congressional affairs.

The Fiber Broadband Association has sponsored a large random study of online consumers for 16 years now to monitor trends in broadband performance, satisfaction, life impacts, and more. The 2022 Study broke new ground, digging deeper into the ways that high quality broadband – especially fiber – is making a difference in the world. Join us on Fiber for Breakfast and see how fiber to the home is impacting the lives of those in low income and minority categories in terms of education, healthcare, entrepreneurship, and job quality. The session will also examine ways fiber is helping to lower U.S. carbon emissions, enabling new migration trends to more rural areas, and improving personal productivity.

Webinar Presenters:

• Deborah Kish, Vice President of Research and Workforce Development, Fiber Broadband Association
• Mike Render, Founder and CEO, RVA LLC Market Research and Consulting Group
• John George, Sr. Director, Solutions and Professional Services, OFS, and Chair of the Fiber Broadband Association’s Technology Committee

Electric Power Utilities have been in the business of delivering power and other necessary utilities to all the communities across the United States for almost 200 years, at every level of scale. They have created the most granular utility delivery system by leveraging generational investments into long-term assets that have allowed us to become the most advanced and productive economy on the planet. High-speed Broadband Networks are clearly a necessity to maintain our position as the economic and development benchmark in the world. This new utility is critical for us to monitor, manage, secure, and shape our power infrastructure as well as to deliver new services. This includes Internal Network Requirements, Green Power Initiatives, Rapid Service Restoration, Demand Balancing, Asset Tracking, EMA, Public Safety as well as Fiber-based Broadband Internet applications, just to name a few. In this Fiber for Breakfast, Scott Pell, VP of Quality at FiberRise, will talk about the flexibility of Fiber Broadband as a utility and how Power Companies will play a major part in the continued deployment of Fiber across the country.

Webinar Guest:

With 25 years of Broadband experience, primarily in underserved areas, Scott Pell has unique expertise in forging relationships across the industry to serve the broader marketplace. He recently joined FiberRise® as the VP of Quality. He leads the Process Improvement, Quality and Scaling Initiatives for the company. In January, Scott will take over the role of VP of Operations. Previously, Scott served as the division CTO for NRTC Broadband Solutions, where he led the scaling efforts to support rapid growth. Before that, he founded API Digital in Huntsville, AL which was focused on building, operating, and supporting networks for underserved areas…including Huntsville at the time. The company was acquired by NRTC in 2017.

How much will it cost to reach universal broadband availability in the United States? Answering that question requires understanding network construction costs, estimating the number of unserved and underserved locations, and defining “broadband” – and that is exactly what Vantage Point Solutions has done in their recent whitepaper, Cost of Bringing Broadband to All.

Larry Thompson, PE, co-author of the paper, will discuss the methodology and findings of the report during this Fiber for Breakfast presentation.

In particular, he will explain how previous estimates came to be so far off the mark and will share the implications raised by this new research, including – perhaps shockingly – that even the current funding infusion is woefully inadequate to truly finish the job once and for all. And while the cost to bring broadband to all is high, the cost of failing to do so is higher.

Webinar Guest:

Larry Thompson, PE is the CEO of Vantage Point Solutions, a premier engineering and consulting firm serving the fiber broadband industry. A licensed professional engineer, he held several engineering and management positions prior to founding Vantage Point Solutions in 2002. With over 30 years of experience designing fiber-based, wireless, and satellite networks, he is a trusted and respected expert authority on matters related to telecommunication technology and regulation. As such, he is a two-term member of the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC).

Digital literacy and internet access can substantially help people with mental illness. John Torous, MD MBI and Noy Alon, BS from the Division of Digital Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will discuss how the Internet and Digital Literacy can positively impact patient outcomes and how they have worked to improve patients’ digital literacy and use of smartphones. Dr. Torous and his team have also developed a digital navigator training program to scale Digital Literacy across the country. While their efforts are focused on leveraging broadband to improve Mental Health, these Digital Literacy tools can be applied to different use cases.

Webinar Guests:

John Torous, MD MBI is director of the digital psychiatry division, in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School affiliated teaching hospital, where he also serves as a staff psychiatrist and assistant professor. He has a background in electrical engineering and computer sciences and received an undergraduate degree in the field from UC Berkeley before attending medical school at UC San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency, fellowship in clinical informatics, and master’s degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard. Dr. Torous is active in investigating the potential of mobile mental health technologies for psychiatry, publishing over 200 peer reviewed articles on the topic. He serves as editor-in-chief for JMIR Mental Health (http://mental.jmir.org/), web editor for JAMA Psychiatry and currently leads the American Psychiatric Association’s Health IT Committee.

Noy Alon is a clinical research assistant at the division of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She graduated magna cum ladum and with honors from Brown University with a degree in Biology. She currently leads the department’s digital navigator training, digital literacy program, and app evaluation database (mindapps.org). She aims to attend medical school with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist.