Better Broadband

In early July 2022, nearly a quarter of the Canadian population was disconnected after a significant network went down. The outage impacted emergency services, banks, hospitals, and nearly every other industry (BBC). “Connectivity is at the heart of all businesses of all sizes,” said Steve Higgins, President of MobileWare. From residences to businesses, more outputs are connected to the network than ever before. Escalated by covid, it's expected that there will be 80 billion connected devices by 2026. “How do we ensure that the connectivity stays connected? Because without it, everyone is dead in the water,” said Higgins. What happened in Canada was catastrophic and “unacceptable.” The growth of IoT and IoT use cases solidifies the need for CAAS (connectivity as a service). Essential operational connections are integrated into the ecosystem. With more and more endpoints, there is a need to monitor and manage each of them carefully and have a backup in case the connection fails.Higgins' system offers nearly seamless connectivity because it utilizes the best network availability. It's an untethered solution. Typical connections are singularly dependent. The MobileWare SIM operates on multicarrier connectivity, shifting from one network to the next.From smart homes to massive machinery measuring output, the necessity to stay connected is growing daily. “Employees can work, machines can be measured, throughput can be had, refrigerators can be monitored, what level of temperature, service needs to be done, and that's the level of detail that our complex solution can have,” said Higgins. Connectivity as a service disrupts the traditional singular approach to network operations. Listen to the entire episode now to hear about how companies connect the dots of the rising business model. Better Broadband is available wherever you listen to podcasts, online, on Spotify, or on Apple.

In early July 2022, nearly a quarter of the Canadian population was disconnected after a significant network went down. The outage impacted emergency services, banks, hospitals, and nearly every other industry (BBC). “Connectivity is at the heart of all businesses of all sizes,” said Steve Higgins, President of MobileWare. From residences to businesses, more outputs are connected to the network than ever before. Escalated by covid, it's expected that there will be 80 billion connected devices by 2026. “How do we ensure that the connectivity stays connected? Because without it, everyone is dead in the water,” said Higgins. What happened in Canada was catastrophic and “unacceptable.” The growth of IoT and IoT use cases solidifies the need for CAAS (connectivity as a service). Essential operational connections are integrated into the ecosystem. With more and more endpoints, there is a need to monitor and manage each of them carefully and have a backup in case the connection fails.Higgins' system offers nearly seamless connectivity because it utilizes the best network availability. It's an untethered solution. Typical connections are singularly dependent. The MobileWare SIM operates on multicarrier connectivity, shifting from one network to the next.From smart homes to massive machinery measuring output, the necessity to stay connected is growing daily. “Employees can work, machines can be measured, throughput can be had, refrigerators can be monitored, what level of temperature, service needs to be done, and that's the level of detail that our complex solution can have,” said Higgins. Connectivity as a service disrupts the traditional singular approach to network operations. Listen to the entire episode now to hear about how companies connect the dots of the rising business model. Better Broadband is available wherever you listen to podcasts, online, on Spotify, or on Apple.

There is some exciting news to share from Clearfield, and they could not wait to spread the word: they just completed a new 100K square foot facility for warehouse and logistics space in Brooklyn Park just down the road from their headquarters. This facility will support multi-state regional telco providers and operators. To shed light on this project and how it reflects significant shifts in the fiber market, Kevin Morgan, Chief Marketing Officer at Clearfield, joined Daniel J. Litwin on this latest episode of Better Broadband. This facility fits in with Clearfield's multi-year plan to provide a platform to support the fiber deployments the industry expects over the course of the next decade. “The company's been built to simultaneously capture the market share while we're establishing a modular product line that can scale and grow with the needs of the market,” Morgan said. “Our ability to do that this year has been challenged in terms of the significant demand we saw for our product.” To meet those demands, Clearfield opened a new distribution center in Minnesota during their fiscal Q2, which effectively doubled their U.S. footprint. Providing fiber products to their over 700 providers in many under-served communities across the United States is a point of pride for Clearfield. And, as Morgan pointed out, now is a critical time for fiber-fed broadband. “We estimate the broadband providers will reach more homes with fiber in the next five years more than the combined total number of homes passed through the entire industry through 2020.” It is a time of enormous opportunity, and facilities like the one in Brooklyn Park will ensure Clearfield can meet the needs of the industry today, tomorrow, and in the future. Morgan noted partner providers were experiencing heavy demand and running into difficulties getting the product to support their needs. So, to ensure product availability for their client base, Clearfield is investing to increase its footprint and strengthen the supply chain to make these broadband initiatives a success.

We know broadband is expanding, even in rural areas. It can be difficult, however, to know exactly how much it's expanding and how customers are getting access.

Delivering broadband to rural areas may not be an easy task, but it's an important one - and one that broadband companies are increasingly eager to tackle. Those companies may be accustomed to planning on their own, but, working hand-in-hand with electric companies, especially those like co-ops that thrive in rural markets, can lead to big benefits for the telecom company, the electric company and consumers.

While broadband fiber may not be something the average consumer thinks much about, it has a great impact on all of our day-to-day lives. Unfortunately, high-speed internet is something many of us take for granted.No one knows this more than Kevin Morgan, Chief Marketing Officer for Clearfield. Host Shelby Skrhak had the opportunity to pick Morgan's brain on a “state of the union” of sorts for fiber deployment across the country and, more specifically, rural broadband fiber.For almost a decade, Morgan has been a seasoned advocate for broadband infrastructure and initiatives. While Morgan has always been thrilled to work at Clearfield, where he focuses on removing the barriers to fiber deployment, he feels that the tragic events of 2020 really showed the importance of the problems he is trying to solve.“This year in particular, in 2020, has been the most bizarre, challenging year in history in terms of communications. The entire economy is shut down, we came back, we've been in quarantine, and, all along the way, we've seen evidence of what a broadband connection really means to people in their homes and their businesses,” Morgan said.He went on to explain that the broadband used today is much different than it was even three years ago.“We were anticipating that this demand, this amount of broadband that was needed by the public, was going to come over the period of a number of years. When March hit in 2020, all of that demand accelerated right up to the present time,” Morgan said.He explained that, because so many people utilized broadband connections to work, for distance learning and to receive medical care via telehealth, 2020 really illustrated the importance of breaking down broadband barriers.“The ability to be diagnosed and talk to your doctor remotely over a video link, something that was far-fetched just a few years ago is reality today. So, these things make a huge difference, and the role that fiber optics plays in providing those broadband connections is undeniably the best of all the types of technologies out there,” Morgan said.For deeper insight into the current state and future of fiber-fed broadband, tune in to the latest episode of Better Broadband.