Light Reading Podcasts

In this special sponsored podcast episode, we speak with Scott Lawrence from CSG's Experiences Practice division. His job focuses on coaching companies to make decisions that can help them evolve and improve the way customers experience their products and services. Lawrence discusses how and when digital transformations are effective, how companies should measure success and the art of creating a culture that values constant improvement. This podcast is sponsored by CSG. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Light Reading's Jeff Baumgartner connected with Plume CEO Fahri Diner to get caught up on all things related to the management and security of the smart home. As part of that discussion, they chat about the drivers of the vendor's latest deployment milestone – 20 million "active" households worldwide that have been fueled by an average increase of 1 million activations per month thus far through 2020.They also dig into the role of open source in smart home deployments and how Plume's recent acquisition of Walleye Networks fits in with the company's broader tech and services portfolio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rita Marty, VP of Emerging Services Security Architecture for AT&T, joins the Light Reading podcast to discuss 5G security."We're taking all the learnings from LTE and 3G and applying it to 5G so we don't have the same problems day one," says Marty. "One thing that's unique about 5G is that it's designed with security in mind from day one." AT&T is also working closely with the standards organization 3GPP to develop the "5G security posture," explains Marty.As 5G is being deployed nationwide, AT&T will continue to work on improving security for previous mobile generations. "You want to continue to harden the legacy networks like 3G and LTE," says Marty. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iain joined the podcast back in August to talk about open RAN's potential in the telco space, particularly as the UK government imposes a ban on using Huawei equipment. On this episode, we talk about what we've learned about open RAN since then, whether or not the technology is living up to the hype; and what's in store for open RAN in telecom next year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Light Reading's Open RAN Ecosystem Symposium starts up again on Thursday, Dec. 10 and will feature open RAN discussions, case studies, cautionary tales and service provider perspectives. The symposium is moderated and chaired by Gabriel Brown, Principal Analyst, Mobile Networks & 5G, Heavy Reading. In our discussion, Brown tackles where exactly service providers can find savings by using open RAN, and we add some context to the discussion of whether general-purpose O-RAN kit is actually less expensive than what is on offer, at scale, from big vendors like Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mauricio Sanchez, research director for Dell'Oro, joins the Light Reading podcast to clarify the definition of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and explain what this new trend means for the future of the SD-WAN market."We see SASE as the intersection of networking and security in a cloud-delivered vehicle or solution," explains Sanchez. He adds that this trend has been a long time coming as the industry has been pursuing the goal of "a single control panel that an administrator can look at and control the network experience and the security policy in their environment." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer founded his company in 1999 to sell symmetrical, low-cost, Internet connectivity to businesses. That whole time he's said some variation of the same thing about Cogent – he knows it's a commodity business and it's much simpler that way."Look, we don't sell things that people don't want," Schaeffer told Light Reading in 2018. "We only sell things people want, and we sell it cheaper. It's not really complicated."Now Cogent operates in 47 countries, connects to nearly 1,300 data centers and is constantly building one of the most interconnected, high-capacity Internet backbones in the world. In this podcast, we talk about why companies are still buying huge amounts of bandwidth even when their offices aren't full of people. We also cover the significance of Cogent's recent traffic growth – close to early pandemic levels – and how that underscores the trends we're seeing in the consumer video streaming market (and why that growth will keep on going). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brett Lindsey, CEO of Everstream, joins Light Reading's Phil Harvey and Kelsey Ziser on the podcast to discuss the company's strategy around building fiber networks in the Midwest. Lindsey also addresses how Everstream competes with incumbent telcos such as AT&T, and how the pandemic has impacted the construction of new fiber buildouts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Light Reading's Jeff Baumgartner has been keeping us up to date on the much-talked-about Starlink satellite service from SpaceX, as well as other satellite competitors in the field like HughesNet and Viasat.He's here today to talk more about the difference between these players, recent developments in the satellite broadband space and why they matter and what's likely to happen next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roopa Honnachari, industry director for Frost & Sullivan, joins Light Reading's Phil Harvey and Kelsey Ziser on the podcast to explain how COVID-19 impacted growth in the SD-WAN and cloud services markets, plus her forecasts for growth over the next few years. Honnachari also discusses why telcos are bundling in a number of security features and enterprise business services with their managed SD-WAN platforms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.