ComptelPLUS Fall14 Show Daily Day 2

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COMPTEL PLUS Fall 2015 Business Expo
COMPTELPlus | Tuesday, October 20, 2015 Beka Publishing, 4
DAY 2
Monday Keynote Speakers Address Competition,
Policy and Broadband-Era Innovation
It’s been almost 20 years since the Telecom Act of
1996 enshrined competition into the regulatory
framework for communications, and it’s safe to
say that the world has changed rather profoundly
since then. The arrival of ubiquitous mobile
networks, the rise of the cloud and the smartphone
revolution are but a few technology sea changes
that competitive telecom has weathered, seeking
opportunity questing after innovation.
Monday’s opening keynotes at COMPTEL PLUS
kicked off with a conversation with FCC Commis-
sioner Jessica Rosenworcel, followed by CEO
Roundtable appropriately entitled, “The Future of
the Industry - Are You In?” For the latter, moderator
Chip Pickering, CEO at INCOMPAS, sat down with
panelists Chris Ancell, CEO at XO Communications,
Randy Brouckman, CEO at EdgeConneX, and Laura
Thomas, CEO at TNCI, to discuss which trends and
technology changes are guiding their business
strategies going forward.
Modernizing FCC Policy for
the Broadband Era
While the FCC has worked on many policies
that have real effects on the market—notably
the Open Internet Order, the Commission is
focused on crafting a broadband-led policy that
translates into real benefits for consumers and
for the economy.
For instance, E-Rate, a byproduct of the 1996 Act,
is the largest education technology program in the
country, run by the FCC. But, Commissioner Rosen-
worcel said, it was in great need of being updated.
“We noticed that this tremendous program was
frozen in an era of dial-up,” she said. “In a digital
era when everyone and everything around us is
connected via broadband, our schools were stuck
in the analog era.”
The FCC introduced E-Rate 2.0 to address the
need for better-connected schools and libraries—
focused on speed. It’s a competitive program—
schools and states bid out these contracts.
“It’s a terrific way for the competitive telecom
community to get involved,” Rosenworcel noted.
“And having an anchor contract makes it that much
less expensive for providers to then deploy further
in the broader community.”
Part of the FCC’s E-Rate 2.0 initiative is also an
emphasis on Wi-Fi.
“There was a time not that long ago that
computer programs in schools meant marching
students down the hallway to the computer lab,
where there was a raft of bulky equipment was
that had all arrived shrink-wrapped and never
moved,” she said. “But that’s not the experience
our kids are having, or will ever have. We need to
prepare for one-to-one devices in schools, and
that means embedding Wi-Fi into our schools
and libraries.”
Rosenworcel also is a staunch advocate for
addressing the “homework gap.”
“When I was growing up, I needed pencil and
paper and my brother leaving me alone,” she said.
“But today, data suggests that seven in 10 teachers
assign homework that requires broadband access.”
At the same time, FCC data shows that only
one in three households subscribe to high-speed
Internet access. When the two statistics are over-
lapped, it looks like this: There are 21 million house-
holds with school-age kids, and a full 5 million of
them lack Internet access.
“It strikes me as a particularly cruel part of the
digital divide,” Rosenworcel said, “but it’s also one
we can do something about. I push continually
for more spectrum for Wi-Fi, and believe that we
can do more with the Lifeline program, along with
community-based programs. We can stitch all those
things together to make a difference.”
When it comes to the Lifeline program, she noted
that this too is a legacy policy. It was first imple-
mented in 1985 under President Ronald Reagan.
“The idea was this: If you want to participate in
civic and commercial life, you are going to need a
telephone,” she said. “In an emergency, you would
have a way to seek help. But it’s time for the agency
to consider if broadband should be included here
now. We use it to communicate with schools,
healthcare providers, to stay in touch with commu-
nity—Lifeline has already been updated so that 14
million get subsidized mobile communications. It’s
worth our agency’s effort to update this program to
include broadband.”
Rosenworcel also stressed the importance of
gaining end-user and consumer feedback on these
and all policy initiatives.
“Washington is not a normal place, and you can get
lost in policy discussions and get into pitched battles
about specific word choices in a regulation,”she said.
“But it’s so important to remember what thosewords
mean on the ground. It is incredibly valuablewhen you
can remind everyone inWashington on every issue
that there are real people at the end of the line. Hearing
fromconsumers directly is critically important.”
CEO Roundtable Focuses on
Investment Priorities
As we face the dawn of the Gigabit era, a raft of
consumption changes are driving business strategy
for competitive providers from the top down:
Those include the video traffic explosion, the rise of
network function virtualization (NFV) and software-
defined networking (SDN), and how to accommo-
date the transition period within which TDM and
the cloud will coexist.
“Looking towards the future, the NFV and SDN
areas are very important to us, and offer the biggest
potential to boost innovation,” said XO’s Ancell,
during the roundtable. “One of the biggest things
that it does, and what everyone talks about, is
enable on-demand business models. SDN allows
us to let customers have control over turning their
services on themselves. It also changes the time to
provision services to mere minutes.”
XO has continued to execute its fiber-to-the-
business plan over the course of the last year and
a half, with 1,000 more buildings brought on-net
in that time, with a clear path forward of offering
programmability as a differentiator.
By Tara Seals
Commissioner Rosenworcel discusses the Digital Divide with INCOMPAS CEO Chip Pickering.
(See Keynotes, page 32)