As speed offerings rising higher into the multi-gigabit levels by the year, naysayers might argue whether there is a customer need for such plans. To Google Fiber Senior Director, Product & Billing Liz Hsu, it’s not a question of whether customers will need those speeds—it’s an inevitability.

“It is going to be the new normal that multi-gig speeds are going to be really prevalent and needed. When we think about the emerging use cases like more immersive content experiences, artificial intelligence and cloud computing becoming more prevalent, it is not that far-fetched to me,” she said during a panel Tuesday morning. “It is a world where every single device, every single app is going to need more bandwidth, and so it really is about practical use cases where these new product solutions, densifying our network and building for speed even before consumers need it.”

For Nokia President, Fixed Networks and U.S. Country Manager Sandy Motley, speeds are only one part of the equation. Her excitement comes when she envisions fiber not only connecting a residence, but running down Main Streets across America connecting every streetfront. From there, the opportunities are endless.

“We can connect to businesses, 5G cells, smart cities and this gives the opportunity to innovate on networks and to have our networks support more than just speed, more than being a dumb pipe,” Motley said. She also noted that other capabilities built on top of the network can lead to significant increases in revenue. “Another point to make about innovation is in automation, and the fact that now you can slice up the network and we can have a slice dedicated to gaming, high performance or we can even have a slice that’s dedicated for working from home. This gives some real advantage for increases in revenue.”

But beyond the smart cities that exist today are the rural communities that are a challenge to serve for a variety of economic reasons, and it is in those hard-to-reach areas where Ciena CTO of the Americas/VP, Sales Engineering and Strategic Solution Sales Kevin Sheehan is seeing an abundant amount of creative thinking.

“What we’ve seen being very successful is having smaller purpose-built solutions that are ideal for going out and reaching a handful of residences, maybe hanging on a strand above rather than being in some type of structure,” he said. “And then modular solutions. One of the big economic challenges service providers face is the ability to make the business case work, so we’ve seen a lot of attraction around putting mixed services out in a rural location… At the same time you’re serving some active Ethernet connection, you can either pick up mobile wireless backhaul or even business connections.”

None of this matters if the customer experience doesn’t back up the marketing claims. Consolidated Communications COO Gaurav Juneja spoke to the importance of pushing innovation across all areas of the business to ensure that you not only attract customers, but keep them from churning to another provider. That can mean investing heavily in network resiliency to protect against outages during weather events, proactive network maintenance and stellar operational support when things do go awry. Above everything, he believes the drive to be better has to be a core value of the entire organization for an operator to truly rise above the rest.

“The more you can think about those boxes proactively and innovate, you’re going to instill that DNA, that top leadership DNA and proactive thinking DNA, within the entire culture of the organization,” he said.

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With over 700 attendees registered, the dinner is sold out and a record-breaker. It’s also record breaking in terms of the number of inductees—35 total.

It’s a short trip for Denver-based Syndeo Institute CEO Diane Christman, who is among 10 women joining this year’s class (for years, the Pioneers leaned male, but that’s starting to change). She’s joined by Charter’s Keely Buchanan, Marketing On Demand’s Susan Burgstiner, Broadcom’s Lisa Denney, Charter’s Sheri Langford, Comcast’s Amy Lynch, Broadcom’s Niki Pantelias, former Cox and Amazon exec Kathy Payne, NCTI CEO Stacey Slaughter and Comcast’s Jennifer Smardo.

Charter’s well represented with Charter Chairman Tom Rutledge and Field Operations EVP Tom Monaghan joining the Pioneers this year. Comcast has several execs being inducted as well, including James Manchester and Jeff Smith. The other new Pioneers are: NCTA’s Michael Powell, outgoing Altice USA exec Pragash Pillai, retired RBC Daniels exec Randy Wells, GrowthLix’s Shannon Saviers, Alpha Global Partners’ Sudhir Ispahani, Fuse Media’s Arturo Marquez, Liberty Latin America’s Balan Nair, C3 Broadband Integration’s Daniel McKay, Court TV’s Dick Beahrs, Broadband Success Partners’ Jack Burton, Mega Broadband’s Jack Dyste, Amazon Web Service’s Marc Aldrich and Technetix’s Eric Perbohner (deceased).

For the first time, the Pioneers is inducting what it’s calling the “Tech Ten,” a group of behind-the-scenes people who have enabled new, critical services to launch at scale.

“These men and women have devoted their professional careers and much of their personal lives to the creation of critical standards and interoperability to enable new services to launch at scale. Working with organizations such as IEEE, CableLabs, SCTE, SMPTE and ITU, they have been core to the evolution of residential business and enterprise endeavors,” said Pioneers board member Pat Kehoe.

The Tech Ten includes Denney and Pantelias as well as Calix’s Mike Emmendorfer, Ciena’s Fernando Villarruel, Jack Moran (retired), Applied Broadband’s Jason Schnitzer, Charter’s Pawel Sowinski, Comcast’s Robert Howald, SCTE’s Steven Harris and CableLabs’ Tom Williams.

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5G has captured a lot of headlines over the last few years, with wireless carriers touting it as the technology that will power the fourth industrial revolution. While it hasn’t quite lived up to the hype as of yet, it would be a major mistake for cable operators to turn a blind eye to 5G’s possibilities.

In many ways, 5G unlocks a number of new opportunities for cable operators. That’s in large part because their networks have plenty of exactly what 5G needs to thrive: fiber.

It’s no secret that mobile network operators are in the process of deploying small cells to improve their network’s coverage and capacity, and those small cells can be backhauled over copper, through the air over mmWave spectrum or over fiber. Fiber is the most cost-effective, futureproof and the best suited to handle the ever-growing data demands of customers.

“The only transport media capable of scaling to these demands is fiber meaning it’ll have to be available everywhere, particularly in the RAN to the hundreds of thousands of small and macro cells deployed worldwide,” Ciena senior director, portfolio marketing Brian Lavallée said in a company blog post.

Folks are also examining using 5G to serve folks with fixed broadband, particularly in areas that are harder to serve. According to ABI Research, deploying fixed 5G wireless networks would allow broadband providers to save time and money on fiber deployments in those areas. 5G technology also promises high bandwidth and ultra-low latency, so customers could ultimately experience a similar end product.

“What 5G is bringing us is high-level capabilities to support a user data rate experience of 100Mbps,” Corning Optical Communications optical network architect Kevin Bourg said during an SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo panel. “That’s a pretty good capacity that’s provided for a user with their end-point device.” That end-point device could be a mobile handset or even a fixed wireless access environment in areas where it’s difficult to provide high-speed broadband services.

The most successful fixed 5G broadband deployments will see 5G wireless networks and fiber backbones working hand-in-hand to deliver those next-generation experiences. “Areas targeted for 5G overage require lots of fiber to be successful, and not just for capacity reasons, but also to meet the other rather formidable 5G performance goals related to network diversity, availability, and coverage, since all three of these goals are achieved through a greater number of interconnected paths, of fiber,” Lavallée said. “It’s rather ironic that the projected performance goals of 5G wireless will depend on the availability of wireline fiber.”

Cable operators including Comcast, Charter and Cox were recently declared winners in the FCC’s CBRS auction, and Charter is among the operators examining how to use its WiFi spectrum with the CBRS spectrum to move traffic onto its own network that it may currently be paying someone else to carry. There are also a number of opportunities in the enterprise space the operator is keeping an eye on.

“There are applications where CBRS spectrum or WiFi spectrum used differently than it has in the past can be used in enterprise connectivity using a 5G factory… where you would control the inside of a building using spectrum,” Charter pres/CEO Tom Rutledge said during the company’s 3Q20 earnings call. “It’s a tool. We look at spectrum as a tool to extend the connectivity, and we plan to use it in ways where it takes our cost structure down.”

So how does cable’s 10G story play into the 5G narrative? During a Cable-Tec Expo panel on Mediacom’s 10G trial, NCTA svp, strategic communications Brian Dietz said they do compete in some instances, but they are widely complementary technologies. Consumers who want a seamless connectivity experience may have their needs fulfilled in the home by 10G, but will end up utilizing 5G whenever they’re on the go.

“Obviously, we think that 10G is a better product and will be a better product. It will be faster, have stronger reliability and lower latency,” Dietz said. “It is companies like Mediacom that are going to prove that in the marketplace, but we think there’s room for everyone in this field.”

So with all that opportunity, is there a reason to view 5G as a competitive threat? Of course. Those wireless companies that have been quick to embrace 5G could easily begin battling with cable operators for share, using the technology as the backbone for new offerings and bundles.

T-Mobile is currently piloting its own home internet product that relies on the power of the company’s powerful network. The pilot, which recently expanded to parts of 450 cities and towns, currently uses T-Mobile’s 4G LTE capabilities, but will soon be able to take advantage of the company’s 5G network.

At the same time, T-Mobile has just begun offering its postpaid wireless customers the chance to start testing its TVision video product. The internet-based streaming service starts at $10/month, but the live TV package that is most comparable to a traditional pay TV offering comes in at $40/month.

“We sequenced it to be sure it was here, despite all the merger and other distractions, in time for our 5G broadband launch,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said during the company’s 3Q20 earnings call. “We’re serious about home broadband. It’s going to be an important way that we grow this business and make money, and you have to have the full suite of services to really be able to serve customers there.”

Cable One pres/CEO Julie Laulis made it clear during its earnings call that folks like T-Mobile aren’t a threat yet, but it’s important to never say never. “Right now, the speeds that they’re talking about is not something that’s worrying us, but we would never count them out,” Laulis said.

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Initial founding members include AT&T, Bell Canada, Ciena, Ericsson, Facebook, InterDigital, JMA Wireless, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm Technologies, Samsung, TELUS, Telnyx, T-Mobile, US Cellular and Verizon.

The initiative will focus on three strategic actions: developing a national 6G roadmap, aligning the North American tech industry on a core set of priorities to influence government policy and funding, and identifying and defining early steps and strategies to facilitate and lead to rapid commercialization of Next G tech across new markets.

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Ciena named Mary Yang svp/chief strategy officer. Yang most recently served as vp, corporate and business development at NIO and has previously held senior leadership roles at Cisco, Fortinet and Nortel.

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