Fiber Forward - Q2 2024

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Dear FBA Members,

As we enter the middle of this year, we can reflect on the amazing opportunity ahead of us to build out our nation’s critical broadband infrastructure with fiber. The historic levels of public and private investment in fiber which has heightened our optimism has been tempered by the continued market softness in sales for our member companies on the supply side of the fiber industry, due to network operators continuing to drawdown inventory from COVID-related stockpiles and the slowness of state NTIA BEAD Volume II approvals.

The good news is that these delays appear to be in our rear view. Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington, and West Virginia join Louisiana in receiving their approvals and now have the green light to open their state BEAD funding application windows. We expect NTIA state approvals to continue to ramp up over the coming months, leading to increased purchasing and networks starting to light up unserved and underserved households around the country.

The second quarter got off to a strong start with a sold out LATAM Fiber Connect conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in April, followed by our second annual Fiber Day on the Hill in Washington, D.C., at the Rayburn building with over 350 members of Congress, the Administration, and other key agencies in attendance, plus another standing room only Regional Fiber Connect workshop in Little Rock, Ark.

Our next Regional Fiber Connect workshop will be in Deer Valley, Utah, on June 4, followed by our annual Fiber Connect 2024 conference and meeting to be held in Nashville, July 28-31. Fiber Connect 2024 is on track to be our biggest and best event yet.

I am very excited about this month’s Fiber Forward magazine. We have been working hard to continue to take our editorial content to the next level. In this issue, we explore some of the communities that we have and will visit

this year during our Regional Fiber Connect workshops. Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico in 2017 and the island is continuing to work to rebuild its infrastructure. We sat down with the USDA RUS representative for the Commonweath to talk about the challenges of Puerto Rico rural broadband. We also spoke with Dr. Karen Rheuban of UVA Health and the founder of that institution’s telemedicine organization for “Telemedicine’s Legacy and Future.” Dr. Rheuban first presented her efforts to FBA at the Richmond Regional Fiber Connect earlier this year, reminding us of the power of broadband to deliver better health care.

Looking ahead, our first Canadian Regional Fiber Connect will be in Calgary, Alberta, on October 8. We will explore the region’s Smart City and dark fiber efforts. On November 7, FBA will be Albuquerque, where we will have a wonderful preview on the community’s artistic approach to fiber and its mix of service providers within these pages.

One of the biggest deployment challenges our industry faces is railroad crossings, so we’ll hear what challenges service providers face in “Fiber’s Right-of-Way Train Wreck,” in this issue. Another big focus at FBA is sustainability. In this issue, we discuss “Sustainability’s Efforts and Values,” and dig into “Land O’Lakes Planting Fiber for Sustainable Returns.” Land O’Lakes Chief Technical Officer Teddy Bekele, who was interviewed for the latter piece, will be keynoting in Nashville--another reason to be at the event in July.

I cannot wait to see our entire industry at Fiber Connect 2024 in Nashville on July 28-31. Last year, Fiber Connect 2023 in Orlando, was the largest and best fiber broadband conference in the world. This year we will be taking the event to the next level, setting a new standard with the content, speakers, and overall experience. Again, what an exciting time to be in our industry.

Sincerely,

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About the Cover

Norman Rockwell’s illustrations and paintings appeared on hundreds of magazine covers during his career, the first on the September 1913 issue of Boys Life. Rockwell was serving as the publication’s art director and his illustrations could be found throughout the magazine during his fouryear tenure with that publication.

He soon started shopping his illustrations to other publications, including the Saturday Evening Post, where his artwork graced the cover 322 times over the next half century. Other publications that showcased his particular takes on American life included Life magazine with 28 covers, Literary Digest with 48 covers, and The Country Gentleman that used his art for 34 covers over a five-year span.

Our cover for this issue pays homage to Rockwell’s “First Signs of Spring (First Crocus),” which was on the March 22, 1947, Saturday Evening Post cover, tying into this edition’s long-form feature on the sustainability impacts of fiber broadband as well as our interview with Land O’Lakes CTO Teddy Bekele.

The talented Raleigh-based Illustrator Alice Holleman (www.AliceHolleman.com) once again designed this cover.

EDITOR’S MOMENT

Connecting Events and Stories

By Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief

Dear Readers:

I’m looking forward to catching up with as many folks as I can during Fiber Connect 2024. You’ll find a lot of the articles in this edition of Fiber Forward tied to recent and upcoming FBA events, such as the interview with Land O’Lakes CTO Teddy Bekele, who will be giving a general session keynote in Nashville. His presentation touches on many topics near and dear to FBA members, including sustainability, precision agriculture, and rural broadband.

Regional Fiber Connect threads running through these pages include a discussion with UVA Health and telemedicine that can be traced back to a presentation at the Richmond event earlier in the year, while our interview with Puerto Rico USDA RUS arose from similar circumstances. Looking forward to future Regional Fiber events, we spoke to the Cities of Alberta, Canada, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, on their respective approaches to incorporating fiber into their operations and for the benefit of their citizens.

One of the repeated frustrations I’ve heard over the past two years is the difficulty involved in building fiber networks near or across railways. UTOPIA Fiber was kind enough to discuss the builder headaches around railroad rights-ofway and why the permitting process can take six months or longer, resulting in projects actively looking to avoid dealing with the rail industry. In our Q3 magazine coming out in September, we’ll hear about a railroad company’s position on broadband utility crossings.

Fiber Connect 2024 will be full of information and revelations about the state of the industry and progress the nation is making towards reliable, high-speed, lowlatency broadband for all. I hope to see and talk with you in Nashville to hear your story.

Sincerely,

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Fiber’s Right-of-Way

By Doug Mohney

PART 1 – THE SERVICE PROVIDER’S VIEW

America’s fiber deployments face many challenges, with permitting and accessing rights-of-way among the longlead items service providers and construction firms face. Of the many types of rights of way network operator UTOPIA Fiber has faced, there’s one that’s the “cream of the crop” in terms of needed lead time and preparation when compared to getting access to build around or under state roads and canals and obtaining pole attachments, tasks which typically take anywhere from two to six weeks.

UTOPIA is no novice in building networks, with 23 completed city-wide projects, three more under construction, and some fiber operations in 70 cities across the country through operation of middle-mile and long-haul networks. And it’s the train tracks that are the biggest headache.

“Railways can be an enormous obstacle,” said Roger Timmerman, CEO, UTOPIA Fiber. “You try to design your network to avoid as many obstacles [as possible], you want the path of least resistance. When we’ve got a railroad permit that’s required, there are multiple stages involved. Your first pass, everything has to be engineered to a different standard than any other [build process] and each individual railroad [company] is different. You can’t standardize it. The design specs are a little challenging to deal with and because of that you’re more likely to get rejected and have to go back and forth. You might end up with weeks of time between each pass, back and forth through to get through this process.

“When you get through that and paid your permit fees, there’s another set of work for the build process, it’s another project of just getting it on the schedule to be able to perform the work. You have to schedule when you can build, you must have an approved vendor for flagging and schedule with the flagging company, so that’s another month or longer.”

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) asserts that the broadband and utility crossing permit process may take anywhere from four to eight weeks, but Timmerman says that assumes a clean design with a basic crossing request and getting everything right on the first pass. Multiple passes translate to multiple cycles at four to eight weeks per cycle trying to get things correct.

“When we’re doing a build, if there’s a railroad to cross, we’re planning on six months to a year to get where we need to go,” stated Timmerman. “All these processes of back and forth are a nightmare to deal with.”

Compounding matters are a variable and somewhat arbitrary fee schedule for permitting and having to conduct the same process on all railway designed land, even those that haven’t seen a train in decades or don’t have tracks on them. “Cost wise we’re facing one [build] in Montana where they want to charge us $130,000 for a permit,” said Timmerman. “It’s a footage-based [fee] structure that makes things difficult. At this point, the money is an actual obstacle. We’re trying to redesign it somewhere else just to go into a more reasonable fee structure.”

Could federal regulation fix the programs with the current situation? Timmerman is doubtful. “You’re hearing more people talk about this than you ever have before,” he said. “The frustration of the general public with how the need for broadband is not being met, gives the opportunity for legislators to step up. But you have the Association of American Railroads taking a defensive position that, ‘We’re not the problem, we’re great, we’re wonderful.’”

Assuming we can get an approved spokesperson from the industry, ‘Part 2 – The Railroad View’ is planned for the Q3 2024 magazine and will discuss the railroad industry’s position on the permitting process.

Source: Microsoft Designer AI.

Permit Problems Impeding Your Progress?

Expertise in Permit Exhibits Can Reduce Bottlenecks in Construction

One of the common roadblocks in the network build-out pipeline is the permit approval process. To keep your project on schedule it is essential that companies well versed in creating documentation for each municipality, department, and state for each type of permit (see ‘Permit Types’ below) are engaged to ensure each permit application is accurate and meets all the requirements. Long-term multi-jurisdiction and multi-national exhibit experience can ensure a seamless process by making use of sophisticated quality assurance tools and protocols and also by using streamlined systems for distributing documents to each of the necessary departments post quality control.

Permit Types

State, City, County Departments of Transportation

Pipeline Railroad

Water/Sewer Authority

Specialty and Complex Permits (e.g. Bore Profiles, Historical Areas, Environmentally Sensitive Areas)

TCP - Traffic Control Plan Preparation

Permitting — A Deeper Dive

Every type of permit comes with its own set of formatting specifications, and these are in turn affected by the specific jurisdiction for which a permit is sought.

Land Base is essentially a trace of real-world entities such as roads, buildings, fences, and other major structures. Most jurisdictions require drawing these features on the prints, though some allow satellite imagery. Some jurisdictions require only the edge of pavement, right-of-way information, and street names as their base, while others require trees, buildings, parcels, etc

Routing is the aerial and underground path of the cable. The construction method is usually called out on the prints (i.e. strand, overlash, bore, or trench). Certain jurisdictions will only allow one type of construction (UG only).

Bore Profiles is the profile view of the plan set. A bore profile (see Figure 2) shows how the bore/utilities are placed underground. Rural permits might not require a dedicated bore profile, though cities often require one. The clearance requirement between the route and utilities will differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Traffic Control Plans (TCP) show how ongoing traffic will be managed if or when construction takes place. Some jurisdictions will need active TCP plans where each action is represented accurately while others will only require the typical TCP document.

Stages

The major stages involved in obtaining these types of permitting are as follows:

1.

2.

Reception of a Job (as KML/Spreadsheet/PDF): the approved design is provided as the input

Inventory of Inputs and Utility Drawings: inputs will be validated with real-world data and integrity will be confirmed

3.

4.

Land Base Creation: the land base will be traced and drafted in software (usually in AutoCAD)

Route Drafting: the route will be captured according to the jurisdiction rules

5.

6.

Utility Drafting: utilities will be captured exactly as present in the field and will be thoroughly checked

Bore Profile Creation: the UG representation of bore and utilities according to the depth from the ground and existing data is created. This will show the exact vertical clearance with utilities.

7.

Deliverable Preparation: clients generally require files in DWG and PDF formats, though other GIS formats such as Shape files and KML exist.

8.

PE Stamp: If the jurisdiction requires the Project Engineer’s stamp, the permit is sent for approval

9. Design is Implemented on the field

Submitting to the Jurisdiction: stamped permits are submitted to the jurisdiction for final approval

10.

Differences Between Jurisdictions

Permit drawings play a crucial role in construction projects. These initial sketches kickstart a project and help navigate the approval process for construction permits and ensure compliance with legal and safety regulations. The table below highlights some of the similarities and differences in the standards when comparing multiple jurisdictions.

Figure 1: Sample Permit Design Documentation

Traffic Control Plans (TCP)

Whenever construction occurs on a public right-of-way or near the road, incoming traffic and pedestrians will be affected. A traffic control plan (TCP) is a document that outlines the steps necessary to manage and control traffic in a workplace to prevent accidents and ensure traffic and pedestrian safety. TCPs contain various components which include the identification of traffic type, the determination of routes and traffic, and a plan to control its flow. Example TCPs are pictured below.

Traffic Control Plan Terminology

Signages warn motorists of potential hazards ahead. Speed limits set the maximum speed that vehicles drive, which helps ensure passenger safety.

Traffic cones direct traffic around a construction site.

Barricades block off an area.

Traffic controllers direct people safely through a disrupted area.

Traffic lights control the sequence of traffic flow.

Processing Time Frames to Consider

Permit creation: Depending on the size of the area and the type of area, the time to create a permit can vary from hours to days. A single sheet of an extension design’s permit could be done in half a working day’s worth of time whereas the permit drawing of an average-sized node may take a week’s worth of time.

Permit Approval: The approval of the PE or service provider usually includes a QC. Depending on the size, it can take a single day or multiple days.

Jurisdiction Permit Approval: Depending on the size, staff availability, and priority of the construction, these can vary from a week to months.

AI/ML Opportunities

A Surface detection tool that uses machine learning can be used to recognize the type of surface in a given area, which speeds up the process of determining what construction method to choose.

Land base feature recognition, road edge detection, and other real-world entities can be recognized and utilized for verification and file integrity checks.

Utility extraction and implementation on maps allows for detection of utilities from street view, which speeds up the total processing time.

The Solution

If gaining permit approvals have become cumbersome and are costing a considerable amount of time, money, and labor, then outsourcing permit approval is a valuable option to consider. This can help streamline the permitting process across jurisdictions and ultimately expedite network build-outs.

Figure 2: Bore Profile Example

This article is sponsored by IMMCO Inc info@immcoinc.com

OF PUERTO RICO RURAL BROADBAND

By Doug Mohney

Delivering high-speed broadband to 3.2 million people on an island in the Caribbean is challenging enough, but hurricanes, earthquakes, COVID, and ongoing economic conditions have only compounded efforts to connect the rural areas of Puerto Rico as its residents wrestle with tasks that stateside areas take for granted.

“I would like to say the challenges are all due to Hurricane Maria, but it isn’t,” said Maximiliano Trujillo, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development State Director, Puerto Rico. “There are historical challenges that Puerto Rico has had. Maria has exacerbated that need or highlighted more the need for broadband communications.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in the process of promoting the deployment of advanced, hardened voice and broadband networks in Puerto Rico through the Bringing Puerto Rico Together Fund. With $127 million allocated in Stage 2 deployments to deliver fixed voice and broadband service across 1.22 million locations across the island, 40% of the locations are expected to be turned up by the end of 2024 and an additional 20% more expected to be added each year thereafter until 100% of the locations are covered. Around 69% of locations are expected to have access to download speeds of at least 100 Mbps or faster with 31% percent having download speeds of at least 1 Gbps.

The FCC’s efforts are only the tip of the iceberg, with the USDA bringing in separate funding for creating opportunities and improving economic conditions outside of urban areas. “Rural Development has different areas of focus, providing mortgages for rural residents for housing and assistance to repair homes,” said Trujillo. “On infrastructure, [Rural Utilities Services] helps municipalities and communities to help build their community facilities and equipment. One series of grants that [USDA] have is distance learning and telemedicine programs that have a broadband component. We are living in a historic moment where the Biden-Harris administration has focused on Puerto Rico’s infrastructure needs and Rural Development is part of this effort to strengthen the economic development of the rural areas of the archipelago.”

The goal of the Rural Utilities Services (RUS) loans, grants, and loan guarantee programs is to build the infrastructure or provide infrastructure improvements in rural communities to help expand economic opportunities and improve quality of life for rural residents, and to do so in a sustainable

manner that puts investment into the area and continues growth in the community.

USDA is funding fiber in Puerto Rico through the ReConnect program in areas where it is expected to make a significant impact in socially vulnerable communities. Service provider VPNet won an $8.8 million grant in 2022 to deploy fiber to seven public schools in the Arroyo and Patillas municipios that is also expected to reach roughly 200 households.

For Puerto Rico, USDA rural development efforts means funding electrical infrastructure projects to enable and support broadband deployment as well as keeping the other daily necessities of life going, including potable water, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and the local supermarkets.

“If you look at a [satellite photo] of Puerto Rico at night just before Maria hit, it looked like a flashlight in the Caribbean,” said Trujillo. “The night that Maria struck, it all went dark and it took years in some communities to get their power back. Without energy, you cannot have anything else. Because of Hurricane Maria, the system was proven to be completely unreliable.

“There’s a strong drive to move into renewable energy. In the last fiscal year, we impacted 51 projects with grants over $8 million. With the private sector investment [match] of $18 million, we have solar panel investment with batteries of over $26 million in rural areas, that’s an investment not usually seen here, that’s a huge deal. With that, they can have operational internet and their Wi-Fi.”

Maximiliano J. Trujillo, State Director for Puerto Rico, USDA Rural Development, keynoted at Fiber Connect LATAM Puerto Rico about broadband’s impact on economic development. Source: FBA.

Land O’Lakes Planting Fiber

FOR SUSTAINABLE RETURNS

By Doug Mohney

Land O’Lakes, Inc., started out simply in 1921 when 320 dairy farmers gathered to form the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association. One suspects that its founders would have been humbled and awed that today’s member-owned cooperative generated net sales of $17 billion in 2023 according to its annual report and would be ranked on the Fortune 500 as one of the largest businesses in America.

Doing business in all 50 states and more than 60 countries today, Land O’Lakes operates some of the most respected brands in agribusiness and food production, counting 2,709 total co-op members along with 9,000 employees on payroll. The founding members would be further amazed by the astonishing productivity of the American farmer after a century of experience and applications of the latest technologies.

The founders would understand and appreciate some values haven’t changed over a century, such as giving back to the community and helping neighbors, as illustrated by the citations of product donations and employee volunteer

hours in Land O’Lakes’ 2023 annual report. But they would need a tutorial on other statistics like metric tons of carbon sequestered, grant funding secured for broadband infrastructure and expansion, and American Connection Corps fellows.

America’s farmers have been data-driven since the first fields were plowed, but today’s world of precision agriculture requires refined accuracy in measurement and operations for assessing fields, planting crops in the most productive manner, monitoring their growth, protecting them, and knowing when to harvest them. To enable it requires reliable high-speed broadband.

“Most people don’t know how advanced agriculture is at the moment,” said Land O’Lakes Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Teddy Bekele. “It’s still one of the least digitized industries and we still have a long way to go to catch up, but there has been no shortage of innovation in agriculture. Back in the 1920s, 1930s, 30% to 35% of Americans were directly involved in farming. Today, it’s less than 1%, yet we have substantially more

Land O’Lakes CTO Teddy Bekele (R) with FBA President and CEO Gary Bolton. Source: FBA.

people in North America and around the world. That is less than 1% responsible for feeding animals, feeding humans, and generating fuel while finding ways to farm in a very environmentally sustainable way.”

Broadband is an enabling technology for productivity today and a revolutionary one for the future as farms and the businesses that support them continually introduce innovations for increased productivity, efficiency, and environmental stewardship.

“We need fiber!” said Bekele. “All our businesses are developing sophisticated technologies, primarily created at our headquarters in Arden Hills, Minnesota. The process begins with data collection at the farm level, which requires reliable broadband. We analyze this data to develop models and recommendations that help our member owners make smarter decisions. However, for farmers to utilize these insights, internet connectivity is essential.”

Bekele and his team have been working for over a decade on this approach, being able to accurately model farming and all of its inputs and predict what the outcome of a particular crop would be in a particular field. Land O’Lakes has around 115 research plots around the country where it plants its seed varieties, applies its crop protection, uses different types of practices, and records the data on how different products perform in different soil types and environments.

“The limiting factor has always been broadband,” said Bekele. “Over the years, we developed a number of unique applications. We had some really neat modeling technology back in 2016 and we could predict the yield outcome of a field by analyzing farming practices, climate conditions, soil, and nutritional profiles. But we didn’t have the technology infrastructure to gather the right data from farmers and get the insights back out to them. That became a huge problem, and it was aggravated even more during COVID. It wasn’t just precision agriculture that was suffering due to a lack of broadband and fiber in these communities. Students were expected to attend school online, but broadband wasn’t available.”

Land O’Lakes did what it could during COVID to help, opening guest Wi-Fi at its locations, such as feed mills and dairy operations, so students could do their homework or people could get a telehealth visit. But the fundamental problem of connectivity remained, with the company recognizing it needed to take steps to proliferate broadband to all its offices and ultimately to the communities it serves.

“We always knew that broadband was critical infrastructure, and something had to be done to close the digital divide.” said Bekele. “With COVID, we realized broadband had to be one of the pillars of our work. I personally decided to get involved in the FCC-USDA Precision Ag Connectivity task force not only to ensure that our current tools delivered the expected value, but to ensure the infrastructure is ready for the future of ag productivity, including private networks and automation.”

Land O’Lakes works with a “cooperative system footprint” of 10,000 rural communities, as it highlighted in its 2023 annual report. “We know better internet connectivity is critical for education, economic competitiveness, accessible health care and food production,” the document states.

To foster increased rural broadband, Land O’Lakes launched and leads The American Connection Project. Its activities to date include providing free, public Wi-Fi access to over 3,000 locations in 49 states as a short-term solution for broadband access, building a coalition of 175 business partners to push for significant investment in broadband through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and launching the American Connection Corps in cooperation with twenty organizations, a long-term effort to train community leaders that will work to increase digital access and inclusion in their hometowns by coordinating with local partners to access federal and state

resources for broadband access and delivering digital literacy to marginalized members of the community.

Started in 2021, the American Connection Corps supports fellows on a two-year, full-time paid fellowship to focus specifically on connectivity, with 155 fellows having gone through the program so far, they’ve expanded broadband

Cullman Electric Cooperative’s Mitch Loftin (right) and Barry Garner, show students the technology and equipment involved in splicing fiber at a recent high school career fair. Source: Cullman Electric Cooperative.

Farming has always been data driven, as this slide outlines some of the many applications touching farm operations. Source: Land O’Lakes.

infrastructure and accessibility in rural communities through their work.

“We are continuously assessing our own facilities and our network of approximately 800 or so independent retailers across the country,” Bekele said. “We’re exploring options to extend fiber to those locations, branches, and to grain silos. Additionally, we are considering establishing fixed wireless solutions. There is significant need for broadband across open lands where farmers grow corn and soybeans. Ensuring connectivity on these fields is crucial to collect data and provide farmers with key insights to optimize their yields.

Broadband connectivity plays a key role across all four Land O’Lakes business lines of Crop Inputs & Insights, Animal Nutrition, Dairy Foods, and Truterra. Farmer insight models for crop insights use a lot of different technological tools, including IoT sensors, remote sensing using satellite and drone data, and AI to sort through all the information. The generated insights make recommendations on what type of seeds to plant and when and how much crop protection needs to be applied, depending on the condition of the soil, crops, and presence of disease or insects.

The animal nutrition business buys crops like corn and soybean and then blends them into optimized feeds for farm animals such as chickens, cows, horses, goats, and pigs. “Our formulations of macro and micro ingredients are based on deep scientific research designed to optimize the performance and health of the animals.”

Truterra, the ag sustainability business of Land O’Lakes, works with farmers and their ag retailers to offer consultation, tools and solutions to help improve the environmental impact of agricultural production. They exists to create market opportunities for farmers and ag retailers, and they do that by helping them adopt practices that benefit their operation from an environmental standpoint, while also making good agronomic and economic decisions.

“As a cooperative, it’s our mission to ensure that the row crop farmers’ in our network are not only productive with the insights we deliver, but to also help them leave the soil in a better condition than when they started farming,” said Bekele. “We can advise them on the best products to purchase as well as the most relevant and sustainable practices to employ such as cover cropping and tilling methods to preserve more minerals in the ground and ensure the soil is healthier with less water runoff. At the end of the day, if they follow these recommendations, they will sequester carbon into the ground and get compensated for it in the form of carbon credits. They will also have access and control over their own data to better understand their fields and the health of their soil.”

Bekele said. “In addition to the research, we also have technology deployed in different operations to gather data back from sensors and quickly adjust recommendations to adapt to the needs of the animals.”

Many are familiar with Land O’Lakes Dairy Foods, with its butter and cheese available at supermarkets across the country. “Our dairy producers are part of our cooperative system, we buy all the milk they produce, and then turn it into the products you’ll find in the store,” said Bekele. “We have over 1,200 dairy producers in the network across the country.”

Land O’Lakes’ “nirvana dream,” as Bekele described it, is to see all 10,000 rural communities in its service footprint fully connected to reliable broadband. “The primary advantage of fiber is that it offers the highest bandwidth available, making it optimal for delivering broadband to homes and communities. It’s proven technology. It’s high speed. And it can scale quickly.”

Bekele concedes that there are challenges in the distances involved in

connecting rural farms with fiber, but other broadband alternatives are less capable in how they perform and what they deliver. “I know that there’s a lot of fixed wireless solutions being used,” Bekele said. “However, terrain, weather, and population density could all have an impact on the quality of broadband delivered, whereas fiber really doesn’t have those issues.

“Satellite is an effective solution in extremely remote areas. However, in communities with 4,000 to 5,000 residents using the same spectrum or bandwidth, it can lead to problems. Higher user density can cause

(cont. on page 57)

Land O’Lakes insight models are built using real-world data collection from hundreds of test fields around the country. Source: Land O’Lakes.

Calgary’s SMART CITY AND

DARK FIBER

By Doug Mohney

An interview for this story was conducted via email at the request of the City of Calgary. UK English spellings such as “fibre” have been converted to their U.S. English counterparts, with all due respect to our northern neighbors.

As a part of its Smart City approach, the City of Calgary views fiber as a key technology to enable businesses, entrepreneurs, and communities to create solutions along with delivering services and solving community problems. The city currently operates around 800 kilometers of fiber at 1,000 locations, with demark points ranging from office buildings accommodating hundreds of employees to control cabinets necessitating machine-to-machine direct connections and backhauls to specialized control centers.

The primary function of the city’s fiber network revolves around supporting various specialized city-owned networks and emergency services. It also plays a pivotal role in bolstering the Smart City program and facilitating the city’s LoRaWAN® network, crucial for IoT applications. “Smart Calgary Strategy,” a white paper released in February 2023, says the city has been investing in digital infrastructure to delivery Smart City initiatives since 2003, with the Information Technology Department leading its Smart Cities initiative since 2017.

“The City of Calgary’s demand for network connectivity continues to grow significantly,” said Ryan Angelo, Information Technology Leader - Fiber Optics, City of Calgary. “There has been a notable surge in the deployment of fiber to city infrastructure, including highbandwidth connections to critical systems like traffic control, water and waste networks, security and safety locations, as well as wireless towers.”

Deploying fiber in Calgary has had its challenges, particularly with escalating construction and deployment costs, given the vast size of the city. City planners have implemented a strategy of integrating fiber deployment

in large-scale city construction projects to keep costs in check. For example, building an airport tunnel included incorporating direct connections to a mobility operating center and Calgary fire and water services.

But, like most cities, there’s always extra cable capacity available once the enterprise WAN is enabled and all the government buildings, traffic lights, cameras, and IoT devices are up and running. “Recognizing the importance of fostering innovation, economic growth, and competition within the community, the city licenses its excess dark fiber to businesses and organizations,” said Angelo.

According to the city’s website, “The City of Calgary’s dark fiber network stands as a testament to its commitment to technological advancement, operational resiliency, community empowerment, and fostering collaborative partnerships for a more connected future.” The city’s dark fiber enables new options for organizations to expand their high-speed networks within Calgary, but to be clear, the city is not providing internet access or any other sort of public access to its mission critical or regulated assets. It is, however, more than happy to lease available dark fiber not actively used to connect city buildings, facilities, or other assets.

Calgary’s dark fiber is also helping research groups in town develop new technologies and innovative services and wider connectivity with the rest of the world, including collaboration with the Calgary Internet Exchange (YYCIX) while partnerships with entities like Cybera and the University of Calgary further amplify the network’s impact. Cybera, a not-for-profit agency helping Alberta advance IT, operates CyberaNet, Alberta’s publicly funded high-speed network connecting the province’s educational institutions, researchers, and IT entrepreneurs, and provincial, national, and international research networks. The University of Calgary uses the city’s dark fiber and space in some facilities to conduct quantum encryption research and enable its research with fiber-as-a-sensor technology.

Calgary leverages other city construction projects to deploy its own fiber.

Source: City of Calgary.

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By Doug Mohney

LEGACY AND FUTURE

While many of us became familiar with telehealth over the past four years, UVA Health has been at the forefront of the practice for three decades and today is the hub of a 153-site statewide telemedicine network supporting upwards of 90,000 patient encounters per year. A lot has changed since the original program launched in 1994.

“We launched our telemedicine program because of our recognition that so many patients had challenges accessing our specialty providers,” said Dr. Karen Rheuban, a pediatric cardiologist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and co-founder and Director of the UVA Center for Telehealth, which now bears her name in recognition of her work.

“The University of Virginia traditionally served patients in the western half of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which

extends to the far southwest corner of Virginia, which is in fact as far west as Detroit, Michigan,” said Rheuban. “For many decades, my pediatric colleagues and I traveled to Bristol, Virginia, to see patients every other month. With that came the recognition that in between our visits, it was a hardship for our patients to travel to Charlottesville to access our care. That was the genesis of the development of our telemedicine program.”

Specialty medical care such as neonatal care, pediatric and adult specialty care, and other services such as acute stroke intervention or high-risk maternity care has always been more accessible in urban areas and municipalities with established medical schools, such as Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. For rural patients, there are often sufficient numbers of primary care providers, but accessing specialized providers is a challenge due to the travel time necessary to reach them.

Source: UVA Health.

In The Beginning

“Thirty years ago, we launched our telemedicine program to provide improved access to specialty care from healthcare facilities such as hospitals and clinics. Medicare and Medicaid regulations related to reimbursement required patients to be at healthcare facilities. Of course, most homes were not equipped with connectivity to support telemedicine encounters,” said Rheuban. “At that time, few patients or providers knew about telemedicine and broadband was certainly a far cry from ubiquitous.”

Establishing on-site rural telehealth facilities in the mid-90s was no trivial task. Running a (then) state-of-the-art 1.54 Mbps T-1 connection to a southwest Virginia community hospital or health center cost $6,000 per month, along with $150,000 per site for networking and proprietary video equipment. Electronic medical records (EMR), if they existed, had to be accessed through a separate dial-up process.

“It was an environment where there was little to no reimbursement of telemedicine services, and a lack of understanding of the applicability of telemedicine both by patients and by providers,” said Rheuban. “However, when patients began to use telemedicine, even as far back as the mid-1990s, the value and convenience was clear. After testing a telemedicine link to a remote community hospital, my longstanding patient’s father said, ‘Tell everybody that if I don’t have to drive back to Charlottesville, I’m never coming back. I want all my son’s care to be this provided this way.’”

Navigating technology, pricing, and payments weren’t the only challenges UVA faced as it built and established telemedicine standards. The regulatory environment had to be modified as well to permit the practice.

“Early on, every provider who was to deliver a telemedicine service to a hospital, contractually would need to be fully credentialed and privileged at that hospital,” Rheuban said. “You can imagine what it would take for a 25-bed rural critical access hospital to credential and privilege 1,000 UVA providers; a huge amount of work and a gigantic burden. We were very fortunate to work with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO), now known as the Joint Commission, and CMS to facilitate new regulations that enabled credentialing and privileging by proxy. In other words, if I’m credentialed and privileged at the University of Virginia, the medical staff of a community hospital could elect to accept my credentials by proxy. That policy change eliminated a huge burden for telemedicine providers and patients originating at site hospitals as well.”

The Pandemic Accelerator

Telehealth is incredibly important today in terms of delivering health care and contributing to better outcomes – in other words, making people better and keeping them out of the ER and hospital when not needed, along with saving patients time and money. Any topical discussion

about telemedicine goes hand in hand with the changes in regulation and mindset that took place during the pandemic, when face-to-face meetings with a doctor or a visit to the ER for anything except the most necessary critical care were discouraged.

Telemedicine emerged as a necessary lifeline for doctors and patients alike. “The COVID-19 public health emergency truly transformed telehealth,” said Rheuban. “Those of us who were already using telemedicine were able to rapidly scale to provide services across all the disciplines, and not just for specialty care, but also for primary care. That was probably the one blessing of the COVID-19 public health emergency...scaling up telemedicine. We learned a lot during the last four years in terms of utilization, technology, integration, broadband, and what works, what doesn’t work. And hopefully, as we scale our broadband infrastructure, access to telehealth becomes available to every patient - wherever they are located. And adopted by every provider and health care facility as well.”

Cullman Electric Cooperative’s Mitch Loftin (right) and Barry Garner, show students the technology and equipment involved in splicing fiber at a recent high school career fair. Source: Cullman Electric Cooperative.

Public policy waivers issued during the crisis enabled health care organizations to implement telemedicine service more broadly and integrate them into everyday care, particularly since Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance companies issued waivers that enabled reimbursement for telemedicine services, regardless of patient location. That being said, Congressional action is necessary to make those changes permanent.

“Policy changes at the state and federal levels exponentially increased the availability of telehealth services to patients. Reimbursement is critical for adoption by providers, and broadband is critical to patient engagement and a high-quality encounter,” said Rheuban.

Today and Tomorrow’s Telemedicine

Better and faster bandwidth to health care facilities and homes delivered via fiber has opened a wider range of uses, including early access to care in the home, a possibility that was literally science fiction when UVA first started its telehealth program three decades ago. Virtual telemedicine visits are now integrated with electronic medical records, patient portals, scheduling systems, peripheral devices, and remote monitoring tools.

Today, UVA Health conducts approximately 8% of its ambulatory visits via telemedicine across all specialties and via many different modalities. Although down from 30-40% of visits during the peak of the pandemic, the transition to virtual care is here to stay.

Prior to COVID-19, the use of telemedicine saved UVA Health patients more than 35 million miles of driving. “We stopped counting after the public health emergency when we scaled telemedicine exponentially,” Rheuban added.

“Nearly every specialty can incorporate a form of telemedicine in its care delivery model. The modalities

range from synchronous telemedicine supported by realtime video to asynchronous evisits conducted through a patient portal and econsults between providers,” Rheuban said. “Telemedicine facilitates earlier access to care, and remote monitoring programs allow for the monitoring of vital signs obtained at home and tracked by the care team to enable timely interventions and better outcomes.”

Delivering mental health service using broadband in the home has grown in utilization and offers some advantages compared to a traditional office visit, Rheuban said. “Behavioral health visits represent one of the most utilized of all telemedicine services. Some say, ‘Think inside the box’ because the video connection is often non-threatening for patients, reduces no shows, and helps to maintain continuity of care.”

Higher broadband speeds enabled by fiber have significantly expanded the tools beyond simple video consultations between doctors and patients, enabling a telemedicine wave of specialized care available to hospitals regardless of location. There are many reasons to deploy and integrate telemedicine solutions in both rural and urban settings, to make the right care and right provider available at the right time to the patients that need them.

“We have deployed technologies to hospitals that require significant bandwidth,” said Rheuban. “Hospital-to-hospital, and hospital-to-clinic services require more bandwidth than does a home telehealth visit because of the need to transmit large files necessary to manage higher acuity conditions. For example, in a telestroke encounter, we require high-quality video to enable detailed patient examinations and expeditious review of CT scans and other imaging modalities to render an opinion and initiate care when every second counts.”

There is still a need to ensure sufficient reliable highspeed broadband availability across the spectrum of care --- from in-home services, to care through local clinics and hospitals, and through facilities providing specialized care. Not every condition can be treated virtually, particularly

when hands-on care and ancillary services such as imaging, laboratory testing and procedures are required.

Rheuban noted that there are communities 20 miles from Charlottesville that don’t have sufficient bandwidth to avail themselves of telemedicine services, forcing patients to drive back and forth for care. “We are exploring the feasibility of alternative access points for patients if they don’t have access to broadband in their homes,” said Rheuban.

Preserving and extending many of the advancements gained following the COVID-19 public health emergency will require more legislative effort. Making permanent the Medicare telehealth waivers put into place during the COVID-19 public health emergency represents a priority for patients and providers alike. The Medicare flexibilities currently extend through December 31, 2024, and require Congressional action to be made permanent.

Other policy considerations include licensure, which is a function of the states, and to ensure equity in access, the deployment of ubiquitous broadband. Federal BEAD funding is rolling out to the states for broadband expansion. A number of federal agencies have taken additional leadership roles, such as the FCC, USDA and HRSA, in expanding telemedicine services.

“We’ve worked with the FCC in their universal service programs and the USDA to scale telemedicine to rural and underserved communities,” said Rheuban. “The Rural Healthcare Program and the Affordable Connectivity Program enabled providers and patients to secure bandwidth, and under certain circumstances, covered the acquisition of devices. These programs impact low-income and rural patients who truly need [broadband] as a health equity consideration.”

In partnership with state and federal policymakers, Rheuban sees an ever-expanding future for telemedicine. “Patients and providers have become very comfortable with telemedicine following the public health emergency. The evidence is clear – telehealth IS healthcare in the 21st century, and with universal broadband access, we can deliver on the promise of connected care.”

FBA Board Member Kimberly McKinley with University of Virginia Center for Telehealth’s Dr. Karen Rheuban discussing about how fiber is essential for telemedicine and the future of health care. Source: FBA.

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FBA Photo Gallery

Expert panelists at Fiber Connect LATAM Puerto Rico explored BEAD and the importance of disaster resilience and recovery.

NTIA Federal Program Officer Cassidy Rasnick delivers the opening keynote on NTIA BEAD at the Richmond Regional Fiber Connect event.

Joseph Wender, Dir., Capital Projects Fund, U.S. Dept. of the Treasury, discusses affordable internet for all with FBA’s Marissa Mitrovich at the Richmond Regional Fiber Connect event.

The FBA Women in Fiber group held a meet-up event after the Regional Fiber Connect event in Little Rock.

Senator Roger Marshall (KS) underscored how critical fiber is to delivering reliable rural broadband at Fiber Day on the Hill.

FBA’s Deborah Kish and FBA Board Member Mark Boxer work on a fiber splicing demo at Fiber Day on the Hill. Source: FBA.

the

Department

of Public

and

Arkansas State Broadband Director Glen Howie discussed how his state has navigated fiber broadband expansion at the Little Rock Regional Fiber Connect event.

FBA’s Deborah Kish leads a VR demo at Fiber Day on the Hill.

Mara Candelaria Reardon, Deputy Director

Engagement at

NTIA/U.S.

of Commerce, delivered a keynote on digital inclusion

funding at Fiber Connect LATAM Puerto Rico.

Little Rock’s Mayor, the Honorable Frank Scott, Jr., spoke at the Regional Fiber Connect event about fiber’s value in connecting cities.

Ritter Communications delivered a popular panel at the Little Rock Regional Fiber Connect event focused on navigating broadband expansion.

Diamond State Network CEO Doug Maglothin discusses middle mile at the Regional Fiber Connect event in Little Rock.

Mears Broadband’s Heather Burnett Gold leads a Fireside Chat with Dr. Tamarah Holmes, Dir. of the Office of Broadband at the Va. Appalachian Regional Commission Program, about Virginia’s broadband efforts at the Richmond Regional Fiber Connect event.

Fiber Day Honorary Co-Chair Representative Troy Balderson (OH-12) stopped by Fiber Day on the Hill to support the need for reliable fiber broadband in every community, especially in rural environments.

Public Policy Outlook

By Marissa Mitrovich, FBA Vice President of Public Policy

Fiber Day on the Hill

On April 11, 2024, FBA held its second annual “Fiber Day on the Hill” in Washington, D.C., in the Rayburn House Office Building. Honorary co-chairs for this event were Senators Peter Welch (D-VT) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Representatives Annie Kuster (D-NH-02) and Troy Balderson (R-OH-12). Over 40 FBA members participated this year, as well as the full FBA Board of Directors, led by Chairman Jimmy Todd of Nex-Tech.

This event grew in both numbers and enthusiasm for fiber, bringing over 350 bipartisan attendees from Congress, the Administration, and FBA member companies. Senators Welch and Marshall along with Representatives Balderson and Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN-03) spoke about the invaluable connectivity fiber for all will bring. The event featured exciting new demos, while maintaining a focus on the fundamentals of fiber and the opportunity to learn to splice fiber. Five interactive demo stations demonstrated what fiber is and how it improves U.S. households, communities, and the economy – including facilitating 5G, precision agriculture, education, healthcare, and economic opportunities.

Fiber Day on the Hill also provides an opportunity for participants to explain what fiber is and how it improves U.S. households, communities, and the economy. We hope you will participate in this event next year. Please reach out to FBA to learn more about this opportunity.

Quarterly Policy Issue Overview

Affordable Connectivity Program

In January, FBA launched our Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) action plan, where we executed multiple initiatives over the quarter to raise awareness with Members of Congress, industry, and constituents about the importance of keeping ACP funded. Our advocacy strategy included: Participating in a coalition activation in support of ACP in January; hosting an ACP Advocacy Training Webinar; featuring the need for ACP prominently during our Richmond and Little Rock Regional Connect programming; FBA member meetings on Capitol Hill; State of Fiber delivered by Gary Bolton the week of the State of the Union; and featuring the AARP’s perspective of how the end of the ACP will impact the senior population on Fiber for Breakfast.

While the ACP officially ended at the culmination of April, Congress continues to mobilize trying to find a pathway forward to issue funding. The Senate Commerce Committee held an early May hearing on “The Future of Broadband Affordability” which focused on ways to fund affordability programs.

FBA continues to encourage Congress to appropriate funding for this program, which has been integral in keeping Americans connected to the internet. We continue to appreciate the ongoing, bipartisan leadership of Senators Peter Welch (D-VT) and J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Representatives Yvette Clarke (D-NY) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) who introduced bills in the Senate and House to keep ACP funded in the short-term. This is an issue that impacts every Congressional District and while Congress looks for long-term reforms, Americans need to remain connected.

Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Updates

At the end of April, Nevada, West Virginia, and Kansas joined Louisiana in receiving their BEAD approvals and now have the green light to open their state funding application

Representative Chuck Fleischmann (TN-03) spoke at Fiber Day on the Hill, urging that the need for fiber broadband is a bipartisan issue and fiber is necessary to support the future of America’s students and corporations. Source: FBA.

windows. We expect NTIA state approvals to continue to ramp up over the coming months.

Fiber Preference

In early February, FBA President and CEO Gary Bolton joined leaders from ACA Connects and NTCA calling on National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Assistant Secretary Alan Davidson to ensure states and territories fulfill their responsibilities to connect all eligible locations to high-performance broadband service and to prioritize all-fiber builds, as directed by Congress in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The associations explained how this vision can be realized using a datadriven analysis and took into account the efforts of other broadband funding initiatives as well. Assistant Secretary Davidson sent a response to all organizations in April 2024 that communicated assurance that “NTIA is committed to tracking States and Territories’ compliance with their BEAD obligations and will provide monitoring guidance for this process.” We appreciate NTIA’s ongoing leadership and diligence overseeing this historical, bipartisan program.

Permitting

In early April, NTIA announced dozens of new Council on Environmental Quality approved categorical exclusions “established to support National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews for broadband infrastructure deployments funded by the Internet for All programs.” Additionally, the agency issued an interactive mapping tool in late March that combines public federal maps from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Environmental Protection

Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other federal sources including State lands data, Tribal lands boundaries, and various “rights of way.”

Build America, Buy America Reporting Compliance

In May 2022, NTIA issued the Notice of Funding Opportunity for the BEAD program setting forth the mandate that “all funds made through the BEAD Program for broadband infrastructure must comply with the Build America, Buy America Act.” In February 2024, the Department of Commerce (DOC) issued a waiver of the Build America, Buy America (BABA) domestic procurement preference for the BEAD Program (BEAD Waiver). The waiver provides that “DOC will publish and maintain on the NTIA website a list of manufacturers and that manufacturer’s individual products that an officer of the company has certified…are compliant with the Buy America preference.” In addition, the BEAD Waiver provides that “BEAD Program recipients to whom the waiver applies must report on their purchases of items from foreign sources.”

After consulting with its equipment manufacturer and service provider members, FBA submitted a memorandum with recommendations in April 2024 to NTIA/DOC to adopt requirements and processes to ensure compliance with these certifications and reporting mandates – and to facilitate the flow of information among recipients, subrecipients, and equipment vendors. NTIA will issue final guidance on these requirements.

Availability of Advanced Telecommunications Capability to all Americans

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued its Section 706 Report “concerning the ‘availability of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans.’”

The most significant issue to FBA members is that the report will raise the Commission’s fixed speed benchmark for advanced telecommunications capability to 100/20 Mbps; the Commission’s fixed speed benchmark has been set at 25/3 Mbps since 2015. It also has increased the short-term benchmark for schools and classrooms’ access to 1 Gbps per 1,000 students and staff and reported that 74% of school districts meet this new short-term goal. FBA recommended in our response to the NOI ahead of this report that the FCC create a long-term gigabit symmetric, low latency benchmark in tandem with other federal agencies, and we still support this position.

Fiber Broadband Association Public Policy Leadership

The FBA Public Policy Committee is led by co-chairs Chris Champion, Vice President, Government Affairs, C Spire, and Jordan Gross, Director of State Government Affairs, Lumen. Ariane Schaffer, Government & Public Policy, Google Fiber, is the FBA Board Liaison. If your company is interested in joining the public policy committee, please email mmitrovich@fiberbroadband.org.

At Fiber Day on the Hill, Honorary Co-chair, Senator Peter Welch (VT) noted the need for reliable rural broadband is as important as rural electrification was in the 1930s.

Sustainability’s EFFORTS AND VALUES

by Doug Mohney

Source: Microsoft Designer Image Creator AI.

Environmentally friendly practices are here to stay and are now key metrics investors use in evaluating businesses, even though companies take different paths and practices in measuring and communicating what they do to protect the planet and why they do it. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting is a fact of life for publicly traded businesses, with 98% of S&P 500 companies and 90% of Total Russell 1000

companies publishing ESG reports in 2022, according to the Governance & Accountability Institute, Inc.

Global asset managers are using ESG frameworks to evaluate the environmental impact of companies as one of several factors in the companies they invest in, enabling them to evaluate how resilient they are to climate events and how well they are developing and implementing

practices for increased efficiency. At the end of the day, such things as more power efficient equipment and reductions in packaging are not only good for the environment, but also improve the corporate bottom line.

Fiber broadband is and will play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions in the years to come. A prime example: transitioning legacy copper and coax networks to fiber directly reduces carbon emissions by tens of thousands of tons annually by enabling work from home (WFA) and thereby eliminating commuting time, according to a 2023 estimate by RVA Market Research and Associates.

The glass core capable of carrying hundreds of terabits of data per second today is created out of silicon dioxide, an abundant and easily accessible material that makes up 10% of the earth’s crust. In comparison, copper must be mined and processed into a pure form that requires lots of effort and energy, with deep mines, big trucks, and lots of digging.

Between production and operation over its lifecycle, copper wiring has a carbon footprint that is 85,000 times higher than fiber. Shutting down legacy copper networks and migrating to all-fiber solutions has become a priority for service providers, since it enables them to reduce cost and drastically lower yearly carbon emissions. In 2023, altafiber stated that its legacy copper network made up 36% of its greenhouse gas emissions, making it a prime target for replacement, while the company’s fiber network only produced 6% of its emissions.

Copper’s value as a metal makes it a target for theft, a common problem for service provider legacy networks. On the other hand, fiber has demonstrated its durability over time, with the first cables put into service over 50 years ago continuing to be used today. Electronics upgrades have continued to increase the data carrying capacity of fiber while at the same time becoming smaller and more powerefficient with each generation.

For example, the first commercial 400 Mbps optical circuit from Ciena deployed in the mid-1990s took 10 full racks of equipment in a central office with its associated power and cooling requirements. Ciena today delivers 800 Gbps across a single fiber using a fraction of the power and space of a single 1U shelf, with terabyte speeds available in the future using the same physical footprint without having to replace or augment the existing media.

Additional carbon reduction benefits come from fiber’s durability. Fewer interruptions and service calls mean less truck rolls for repairs and less emissions from fossil fuel maintenance vehicles.

Hardware manufacturers in the fiber broadband ecosystem have a relatively clear path for environmentally

The approach we have decided to take to sustainability is a collaborative one.

Martha Galley, Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), Calix

friendly practices, even though they differ on how they implement and present those policies to their customers and stakeholders as it provides differentiators against their competitors.

“The approach we have decided to take to sustainability is a collaborative one,” said Martha Galley, Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), Calix. “My job is to align and make sense of our comprehensive strategy based upon the current market and the regulatory demands across the business units, all of which participate in various projects around sustainability. Some of those are outward facing, like our product pillar. Some of them are inward facing. Being a sustainable company has to do with our infrastructure, our use of power, etc. Second is to amplify, making sure that our story is thoroughly told well and accurately. When you put something in a regulatory report, it has to stand up to the audit.”

The third part of Galley’s job is augmentation of existing sustainability policies and practices. As a part of Calix’s executive leadership team, the CSO can find additional opportunities within and across the company that are appropriate to incorporate into the company’s own five pillars of sustainability: technology innovation, cultural and social impact, supply chain, enterprise, and partnership. Each pillar contributes to the vision and practices of sustainability.

“First and foremost, technology innovation,” said Galley. “Our entire product portfolio has responsibility for improving along three dimensions, including durability, efficiency, and recyclability. If something is thrown away, it’s obviously not very environmentally friendly. Is the technology durable for the environment? Are our outdoor devices [and] systems going to stand up to the weather

Calix Chief Sustainability Officer Martha Galley’s job is to align a comprehensive sustainability strategy across all company business units. Source: Calix.

conditions, for example? But the most important aspect of durability for us is our software-enabled network. Every 91 days, our customers get more capability, more value, because upgrades to the operating system are released three times a year. The bottom line about all of it is that we believe that our fundamental architecture is durable because value gets added and you’re not throwing those systems away.”

Calix’s efficiency work leverages iterative improvements on hardware to build more density into its access systems while lowering power consumption. More cards per rack footprint and lower power helps customers save money through lower operational costs for data center space and electric bills as well as impacting the environment.

“We’re assessing right now the recyclable content of our systems and we’ll set targets for increasing and improving it by working with our upstream supply chain partners we manufacture with,” said Galley. “We’re also interested in ensuring that our customers have an opportunity to keep their communities healthy by ensuring that electronic systems don’t end up in landfills. We’re starting with a referral program around electronics recyclability, but we’ve been thinking about a program that Calix would drive. That’s in its very early stages.

Cultural and social impact starts at home with making Calix a great place to work through creating and maintaining a great corporate culture. The company is sharing its best practices with its customers to help them retain their employees and better engage with the communities they serve.

Nobody is taking supply chains for granted in the postpandemic era. “This is about reducing risks,” said Galley. “We’ve done a tremendous amount to lower the risk and make sure we’re compliant with [Build America] requirements and to provide a sustainable product and service for our customers. We’re working with our supply chain partners, many of whom are quite adept. They’re larger organizations, they’ve been in [overseas] markets where the sustainability requirements are even higher than they are in the United States. We’ve learned things from them in terms of reducing our carbon footprint.”

Under Calix’s sustainable enterprise pillar are things many organizations look at, such as moving the IT organization into LEED-certified buildings for lower power and water utilization, converting to electric vehicles in India, as well as other projects that will reduce carbon footprint.

“The last piece, I think, is the most intriguing and the one that differentiates us the most, and that’s sustainable partnership,” said Galley. “It’s table stakes to be a responsible company. But what we like to think of is that we’ve got a purpose in conjunction with our customers. And that purpose is to help them make their communities better places to live and work.”

A part of its sustainable partnership philosophy is providing value-added services for their customers to sell. Calix was among the first to champion value-added services as a logical complement to fiber broadband connectivity. “Our customers make a little bit of money on providing those services to their subscribers,” said Galley. “It’s an ‘all boats rise’ model, and from my standpoint, that’s just about the most sustainable type of a business model that you can have. We believe that that sustainable partnership is good for subscribers, for BSP customers, and Calix, and in the cases where we provide branded services for those partners in our value chain as well.”

Other equipment manufacturers have their own approaches based upon their business lines and historic involvements in different markets. Harmonic’s methodology comes from 25 years of operation that started in the cable and broadcast world and now includes video, broadband, and media solutions. The company’s Corporate Social Responsibly (CSR) 2022 report highlights include 100% of electronic waste recycled, nearly 23% of its electricity obtained from renewable sources, and 22% reduction of corporate energy consumption at its three main sites between 2019 and 2021.

To broadband customers, Harmonic’s eco-friendly message is founded on its virtualized core software in its broadband portfolio, keeping heavy network lifting within the central office data center on COTS hardware, with relatively light hardware at the subscriber premise.

Harmonic’s approach to sustainability encompasses a virtual network core and being able to integrate with legacy systems, according to Senior Vice President Dan Gledhill. Source: Harmonic.

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“The fundamental benefit of the virtualized core is that you’re pulling complicated network functions out of purpose-built devices in the field,” said Dan Gledhill, Senior Vice President of Broadband Business Operations at Harmonic. “You’re centralizing them on incredibly cost-efficient and power efficient servers that get the benefit from standard processor curves that you see from Intel and the other leading enterprise silicon manufacturers. The result is that we end up with an architecture that has low power consumption devices at the edge of the network, because again, they’ve been simplified with this virtualized core. All the actual heavy lifting is done by an incredibly efficient, virtualized core technology that the operator deployed.”

Last year, Vodafone and Intel published a paper on the power savings found using Harmonic’s approach in the service provider’s legacy cable plant, with an initial 28% reduction in power consumption by shifting functions to a virtualized headend and another 10% or more savings coming from adopting a cloud approach. Successive generations of architecture would also increase throughput substantially from 100 Gbps downstream using older models of cable tech to over 500 Gbps with cloud-based network architectures.

Why mention cable if the focus is on fiber? The world is full of legacy devices and media. Wholescale rip-and-replace is impractical for many operators, so there will have to be coexistence between fiber and older devices. The cable industry already uses fiber in most of its network and is increasingly using more for greenfield and competitive builds.

“One of the strategies we take is this really wide breadth of edge devices that have extended range such that you’re both able to deploy them in more remote locations and you’re able to fully utilize the capacity of those devices to get

more power efficiency,” said Gledhill. “If you’re using a single operational core and basically just mixing and matching these edge devices however you see fit to design a network that doesn’t have a bunch of unutilized capacity, doesn’t require a bunch of extra devices within the network, and also ensuring that the operators have the flexibility to reutilize whatever existing infrastructure may be available.”

Gledhill said that the Vodafone/Intel findings were the “basis” of a reduction in power consumption of its technologies, with other opportunities available for more reductions as more tools are brought to bear. “What we layer on top of that goes much further than what they actually wrote about,” he said. “They’re using a subset and focused on specific use cases that they see in their ecosystem, not necessarily what we focus on generally. We get to talk about use cases that will find the long-term operational efficiency, things like availability and reliability. We are very, very proud of the fact that our architecture and our solution have five nines availability and additionally, it leverages really intelligent analytics to achieve that level of performance.”

Intelligent analytics enable service providers to process all the data from the network and direct an operator to areas of improvement. Field service teams can be deployed with precision instead of a “shotgun blast” of truck rolls to pinpoint an issue, leading to fewer and more efficient use of teams and vehicles.

Working with existing service providers such as Vodafone that have legacy cable plant and can’t simply rip-andreplace existing infrastructure to migrate to fiber is a reality Harmonic and others have to work with in terms of capital costs and service providers being able to optimize their networks as budgets and schedules permit. It also means implementing an open ecosystem approach that can

(cont. on page 58)

Reducing packaging, as Lumen Technologies has done for its latest CPE, provides benefits beyond less trash, including lower shipping costs and less warehouse space. The box on the left holds six devices while the redesigned packaging on the right contains ten. Source: Doug Mohney.

Mountain Connect August 5-7, 2024 | Denver

ISE Expo

August 20-22, 2024 | Dallas

Tribal Net Conference and Tradeshow

September 16-20, 2024 | Las Vegas

SCTE TechExpo24 September 24-26, 2024 | Atlanta, GA

NTCA Fall Conference September 29-October 2, 2024 Indianapolis

U.S. Broadband Summit October 9-11, 2024 | Washington D.C. Calix Connections 2024 October 12-15, 2024 | Las Vegas

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Albuquerque’s

ARTISTIC APPROACH TO FIBER

Described as “the urban center of New Mexico,” Albuquerque has unique economic drivers, with the city’s website citing space technology, directed energy – not exactly something you find on a typical municipality resume – smart community technologies, and film and digital media among its strengths. A place where science and art freely mix, the city’s attractions include the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History and the backdrop to many popular TV shows and movies.

The city has taken a similarly diverse approach to the different types of licensing agreements it has put in place for fiber. “We want to encourage full market coverage, competition, and availability. We have four license agreements for fiber for the city,” said Mark Leech, Director, Technology and Innovation (CIO) for the City of Albuquerque. “There’s a combination that covers different parts of the city with different business models. Some are supplying end-to-end fiber to the home and businesses. Others are putting fiber into the ground for an open access network, contracting out the last mile to others.”

Albuquerque’s current economic base, anticipated growth, and dearth of fiber is attracting interest from numerous firms, including the privately-financed Gigapower open access fiber network provider, which is building projects in cities around the country. “One of our missions is to bring fiber to markets that really don’t have it. We feel we can bridge that gap and provide a different class of service than what they have today,” said Tom Kearney, Chief Operating Officer, Gigapower. “There’s definitely a need to be in that market to augment and provide different classes of service.”

Vexus Fiber, which has committed to covering 97% of the city, also sees a bright future for the city. “The prospects of Albuquerque from an economic development perspective are just continuing to grow,” stated Kevin Folk, Regional Vice President of Operations Southwest, Vexus Fiber. “Intel is a big presence here. You’ve got Sandia Labs, the Air Force base, solar companies looking to move here. There are a lot of huge things. It brings more workers to the city that require better, higher quality [internet] connections.”

Albuquerque hosts a vibrant arts community, hosting such events as the annual Balloon Fiesta. Source: Vexus Fiber.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History are just as tied to Albuquerque’s history and culture as its vibrant art scene. Source: Doug Mohney

Currently Albuquerque has what Leech describes as an “adequate” standard of broadband, but notes that different parts of the city have been skipped over due to geographic and economic reasons. “We’ve got digital deserts, with no infrastructure there,” said Leech. “There are pockets all over the place. If you think about the whole of Albuquerque as a piece of chart paper, we have areas that are red squares without coverage, yellow squares that have more than one incumbent, and green is the best broadband we can provide. We want to cover Albuquerque in green.”

The lack of broadband in parts of the city is not only a macro concern to city officials but also one that affects city operations in a rapidly growing municipality. As the city purchases older properties and puts up new buildings as the government develops, selling off older properties they’ve outgrown, having broadband everywhere is vital to ensuring the IT needs of departments moving into their new facilities.

Fiber is used in many typical ways by the city and to support some unique applications as well, tying back to the city’s embrace of the arts. “Within our portfolio, we provide fiber for traffic management for stoplights,” said Leech. “There’s an increasing push for our smart community

efforts, that’s more about putting cameras in high-crime areas. We may have locations that have one connection and need to support six cameras. We’re working closely with law enforcement for those needs at that point.”

Various wireless services utilized by the city, including the LoRaWAN® Internet of Things protocol, generic Wi-Fi, and CBRS services to provide bridging connectivity to Wi-Fi hotspots are all supported by city fiber that it owns or, more typically, is leased from a third-party. Connectivity will follow around the city’s bus lines and a seven-mile urban Rail Trail designed to link Albuquerque’s downtown area to nearby neighborhoods, cultural destinations, entertainment districts, and its historic Rail Yards. One area where fiber isn’t going are the city’s arroyos, dry gullies outside the city that quickly fill with fast moving water when it rains, leading to flash floods that can endanger people and property.

“We will use the fiber along the Rail Trail to monitor things like pedestrian flows, smart trash cans, and enable art being created through a collaboration with Central New Mexico Community College,” said Leech. “I’m really excited about the collaboration. We’re on our third cohort of artists. We put artists through IoT classes, and they build art that incorporates it. We put the pieces on the Rail Trail or in

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our city art gallery. It supports Albuquerque’s thriving and vibrant art community.”

Multi-state service provider Vexus Fiber believes in Albuquerque’s current and future potential, as well as that of the surrounding areas. The company is putting $250 million into covering the city, along with another $50 million going into the town of Santa Fe, roughly an hour’s drive north, and plans to expand to the adjacent township of Rio Rancho directly northeast. Albuquerque will be the company’s largest build to date, passing its projects in Texas and Louisiana.

“This is going to be a five-, six-year build. Albuquerque has about 360,000 homes,” said Folk. “Our commitment to the city is 97% of the homes passed, so we’re talking 350,000 homes. We’ve already got over 2,000 homes passed and we are anticipating a ramp up of our construction activities to be in multiple locations throughout the city at the same time. Our goal is 20,000 homes passed by the end of the year, and we’ve already started our project planning for the next year.”

Vexus Fiber has been working with the city government for several years, obtaining its license two years ago and trying to smooth out the various requirements it needed in order

to move forward with construction, including the volume of permits it needs as it increases its construction tempo.

“Albuquerque is a little bit different than some other markets that we operate in,” said Folk, compared to the company’s operations in Louisiana and Texas. “A lot more restrictions, permitting requirements. The city has had to figure out a permitting approval process with the amount of workload that we’re bringing to them and how they work. That took a little bit of time, it took a little bit longer as well with pole attachment permits.”

The service provider is deploying a combination of underground and aerial fiber, working with energy provider PNM for pole access in both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. “In Albuquerque, we’ll be on 40,000 poles,” said Folk. “That’s a lot of work for a company to ingest that resource load into their system.

“We’re also very conscious of the impact [our construction] has on the city’s resources as well as the residents. We’re not tearing up roadways, we’re doing boring as well as aerial work, but it does have an impact on the communities, in the neighborhoods where we work. You’ve got to be mindful of that, we’re very conscious of that impact because you know, where we’re building these are potential customers for us.”

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Folk anticipates that Vexus will create around 150 new permanent jobs in Albuquerque and the company is now working to establish partnerships with community institutions and the larger businesses in town, such as Intel, NBC/Universal, Netflix, and Amazon, along with the Mesa del Sol master-planned community of 30,000 homes being built in the southeast corner of the city.

However, Vexus faces a well-funded challenge from Gigapower, jointly owned and governed by AT&T and BlackRock investment management group. “We’re making a several hundred-million-dollar investment in the market,” said Kearney. “We keep it open-ended, but it’s close to several hundred million in Albuquerque holistically. Our minimum commitment to the city is to service 150,000 homes and businesses while constantly evaluating opportunities to increase and add to our build plan.”

Gigapower will offer services up to 8 Gbps symmetrical services initially using XGS-PON with the ability to scale upward to a minimum of 25 Gbps in the future. Construction will include a mixture of aerial and underground fiber deployment, leveraging PNM’s network of electric utility poles where available to increase speed to market.

Kearney said Gigapower is very far along in its initial engineering and construction plans and expects to start breaking ground and placing fiber this summer. “We’re working side by side with the city, PNM, and other municipal partners for permitting.”

Gigapower has two unique characteristics in its fiber builds in Albuquerque and other cities. First, it is an open access commercial wholesale provider and AT&T is its anchor tenant. “We’ve had conversations with dozens and dozens of ISPs that are interested in partnering with us and we’ve had discussions with various service providers.”

Other announced areas and cities Gigapower is competitively building out are Las Vegas; Chandler, Gilbert, and Mesa, Arizona; parts of Northeastern Pennsylvania, including Scranton and Wilkes-Barre; and parts of Alabama and Florida outside of AT&T’s current service areas, with company officials suggesting more announcements would be forthcoming in the future.

Vexus says it is ready for competition in Albuquerque and feels some providers will not be able to deliver. “There are some big challenges for city resources as you bring more competition. You have four to five providers that want to build their own network of attachments to the poles, that means somebody’s going to miss out,” Folk said, with Vexus having an advantage by being first in the market for a city-wide build and working with local officials to scale up the permitting processes. “We feel that with our customer engagement, customer service, local technicians, and local footprint, we can compete against the big boys.”

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Access to PNM utility poles in Albuquerque and the surrounding region is key for deployment of fiber in the area. Source: Vexus Fiber.

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(cont. from page 21)

latency issues, making it difficult to achieve the necessary connection or throughput.”

Having available bandwidth and the low-latency that fiber delivers are necessary for many of the solutions Land O’Lakes is deploying, especially data-rich applications when farmers are uploading data to complicated models for insights and downloading satellite imagery to assess the health of crops.

Bekele has seen firsthand how the best-designed precision agriculture software can come to a grinding halt for lack of a good connection. “In 2018, I remember traveling to see a farmer to showcase a ground-breaking crop-modeling application we had just developed using satellite imagery. I was so excited. I sat at the farmer’s kitchen table and tried to launch the tool. After the logo page, the application just kept spinning and spinning telling me it was loading. After a while, the gentleman smiled and said: ‘I guess it’s not working today.’ And I replied, ‘I know it works, it’s just not working here!’ I closed the device and then we had coffee and pie.”

can prove that they adhere to specific practices and meet manufacturers’ criteria, it unlocks exciting opportunities for them and enhances the entire value chain.”

As exciting as these opportunities are, they are just the beginning of improvements to food production in an area that has already made significant progress over the last decade. As more data is collected, analyzed, and understood, improvements will continue to increase. The introduction and use of automated equipment in the years to come is likely to provide further gains.

“Technology is crucial for modern farming, enabling the production of greater outputs with fewer inputs. It not only enhances farm productivity and financial stability but also promotes sustainable practices from both economic and environmental perspectives,” said Bekele. “Broadband is super critical for the food supply, the feed supply, the fiber supply, and the fuel supply. It is now a matter of national security.

High-speed connectivity and data-driven farming is especially important as today’s farmers and their customers are increasingly more concerned about environmental issues. “The ultimate goal is to have every field connected and data streaming from the field and the equipment,” Bekele stated. “As an input and recommendation provider, I want to process that data and deliver recommendations to help those farmers be more productive as well as environmentally sustainable with optimized water usage and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.”

Food manufacturers downstream from the farmer want to know how the grain is produced so they can meet the preferences of the grocery store shopper, such as organically produced or foods that have less gluten and or more protein. Bekele expects that food manufacturers will highlight products that use less carbon and water in their creation. Outside the supermarket, biofuel producers are also interested in the prospects of producing fuels from sustainably harvested crops. “Capturing accurate data in the field opens up numerous possibilities across the food, fuel, feed, and fiber value chains,” said Bekele, “If farmers

“We’re at a point where we’re not only enabling a variety of technologies but also beginning to unlock numerous possibilities. This is evident in precision agriculture, which encompasses the areas we have already discussed but it also extends to pioneering advancements in precision medicine and nutrition. The potential to use food as medicine is especially exciting for me.”

Advances in better understanding of genetics combined with artificial intelligence will lead to the ability to look at a person’s DNA and provide precise nutritional recommendations, with precision agriculture providing the audit trail of how the food was grown and processed. Further precision in the supply chain will also help to reduce food waste, helping to feed more people better at less cost and in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

“These advances are like building a high-speed train,” Bekele said. “And we are just starting to put the railway into place. It’s going to take time, but I’m excited about the direction we are heading in. It’s where we are, and it is exactly what we need to do!”

Truterra provides a data platform for farmers to monitor and monetize their sustainability practices. Source: Land O’Lakes.

(cont. from page 42)

work seamlessly with existing DOCSIS varieties and other residential fiber equipment.

“One of the major advantages that we enable and promote is an open ONU concept,” said Gledhill. “Very frequently when you’re talking to a fiber home vendor, there’s an ecosystem mandate to have the infrastructure on the network side dictate the in-home devices. We break that, we allow operators to utilize third party ONUs, which facilitate the hardware best-in-class, whether that means the lowest cost, the best Wi-Fi, the lowest power consumption, we give [service providers] the option and the flexibility to leverage whatever they may have in their footprint today, so that they’re not ripping and replacing and creating additional new waste. Plus going forward, they get to select their preference based on considerations like how green a solution might be. It’s a story about flexibility both on the network side and in the actual consumer front.”

Large service providers approach sustainability from a less hardwarecentric view and emphasize a more holistic method. They’re looking for reductions in carbon emissions and waste and increasing resilience against climate change events that impact their operations. Such firms also tend to be more precise in terms of how they measure their overall carbon emissions, defining them as Scope 1 and Scope 2. Scope 1 emissions include direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by the company, such as its vehicle fleet. Scope 2 emissions include indirect emissions that result from the generation of purchased energy.

Salesforce Net Zero Cloud to make it easier for customers to monitor assets in real time and identify emissions reduction opportunities.

Waste management, through reduction and recycling, is another AT&T goal. AT&T’s Sustainability Summary calls for a move to a circular economy, embedding sustainability throughout the lifecycle of a product or service. The company is seeking a 30% reduction in waste it sends to landfills by 2030, based on a 2019 baseline. It has identified many materials that it works with that can be reused or repurposed. For instance, fiber optic cable scrap can be shredded and milled to serve as components for roofing materials.

altafiber& Hawaiian TelcomGHG Emissions by Source (Metric Tons)

More moves toward a circular economy by AT&T include recovering and reusing electronic devices, such as mobile phones, internet gateways, and television set top boxes. For devices that can’t be reused in their entirety, individual parts may be extracted for reuse and the remaining plastics and metal are recycled.

Source: alta fiber Fiber For Breakfast 2023 presentation.

For example, AT&T’s 2022 Sustainability Summary repeats the company’s goal to be carbon neutral by the end of 2035 and actively working with its suppliers and customers to help reduce their environmental impact as well. By the end of 2022, AT&T had reduced its carbon emissions by more than 41% when compared to a 2015 baseline.

Beyond its own greenhouse gas emissions, AT&T has gotten 50% of its suppliers to set their own reduction targets and continues to support a gigaton of customer emission reductions through its own innovations and those of its partners, such as integration of AT&T IoT solutions into

Lumen Technologies’ 2022 ESG report documents similar effort, with the company reducing its Scope 1 and Scope

2 emissions by 25% since it started third-party verification documentation in 2018, with savings coming from companywide efforts including energy-efficiency initiatives, renewable energy procurement, and real estate consolidation.

Larger service providers, including altafiber, AT&T, and Lumen, conduct regular or ongoing physical climate change risk assessments to identify threats and mitigation opportunities from events such as flooding, storms, hurricanes, and wildfires.

Altafiber has seen the results of its assessments firsthand. Its climate assessment mapping of Hawaii using publicly available data showed the highest fire risk around Lahaina prior to the 2023 wildfire. “It was fascinating to see how accurately that risk map correlated with where this terrible wildfire event occurred,” said Nadja Turek, Sustainability Director, altafiber, during an August 2023 Fiber for Breakfast podcast. “The data that’s out there is very good and really informative.”

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