Advertise on podcast: Beyond the Cable with Brad Randall

Mike Dano says politics is playing into a recent trend driving mergers and acquisitions in broadband. Dano, a lead industry analyst at Ookla, joins us to discuss what else is driving the M&A trend in the telecom sector as 2026 heads deeper into its last quarter.

"We try to understand at different levels of the installation so that when the installation does go in, we don't have these recurring issues," said Bryan Slayman, EnGenius' product marketing manager. Slayman, appearing recently on Beyond the Cable at Broadband Communities Summit 2026 in Houston, said their directly relationships with chipset providers, like Qualcomm, have proved invaluable. "That puts us in a really good position he said," speaking of his company's work with Campus Technologies, a student housing wired and wireless internet partner of EnGenius. "We can change depending on the demand of hardware."  According to EnGenius, Campus Technologies (CTI) wanted to upgrade their wireless infrastructure to meet demand but had trouble finding enterprise grade Wi-Fi equipment. The search for quality wireless access points led them to EnGenius. "We used one of our flagship access points," Slayman said. "We didn't have to go to one that was just available." After running a pilot at one of their properties, Slayman said CTI experienced great success. However, he stressed that CTI "put us through the paces" because the company wasn't familiar with EnGenius.

The culture of DojoNetworks is what continues to set them apart from their numerous competitors in the managed Wi-Fi space, according to Dan Myers, the president and founder of the company. Myers said the company has developed a family friendly environment to accommodate their workforce, which consists of several dozen employees spread out from Miami to Seattle. Twice weekly, Myers says all employees join in a company-wide Zoom call. "There are no silos," he said. "Sales gets to talk about what's going on in sales. Support gets to talk about what's going on in support. Engineering talks about what's going on in engineering." Myers said the calls, which began during the Covid-era, have provided cross-training opportunities for his team. "Everybody's all rowing in the same direction," he said. "So that's what I believe sets Dojo apart, and that customer care." Myers said he considers Dojo a 99.6% service and support company. "What we deploy just has to work," he said, adding that openness and transparency with customers is paramount. During onboarding, Myers said he has every new employee read a book called "Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service," by Ron Zemke. "It's not a heavy read, and it aligns everybody that you have internal and external customers and it's all about being open, transparent, caring, and solving their issue," he said. "And so, we're all aligned on that. From me all the way down to the newest hire." To hear more about Myers' leadership style, and more recent ongoings at DojoNetworks, catch the full episode.

David Tashjian, the SVP and GM of Xfinity Communities, says he's aligning internal messaging to reverse misconceptions around bulk managed Wi-Fi. Subscribe to the Broadband Communities newsletter!

To view the full multifamily track for Broadband Communities 2026, along with the rest of the agenda, visit the event's website or register here to get tickets!

It has never been more important for second and third tier internet service providers (ISPs) to educate their customers about the value they bring to the table in communities. That's according to Curtis Dean, the executive director of CBAN, the Community Broadband Action Network. "We as small, local providers need to do a much better job of making sure our customers understand the value that we bring to them," he said on Beyond the Cable. He said cheaper bundled service options from larger providers will continue to tempt many smaller ISP subscribers to switch. Dean also says that while no technology threatens fiber's performance, he remains worried that bundling and race-to-the-bottom pricing will drive churn and bleed subscribers away from the footprints of smaller fiber networks.

Robert Griffin leads broadband initiatives for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and said part of his job is to collect information from vendors, ISPs, and other tribal communities so it can be organized and considered for future deployments. Speaking to Beyond the Cable at Connected America 2026 conference, Griffin said the Choctaw Nation has been applying for broadband-related grants since 2017 and has been awarded over $75 million.

Having a homegrown telecom workforce can create opportunity for tribal members in their own communities and potentially could even bring people back who have left if the jobs are permanent. Brandon Dinsmore, a tribal outreach and workforce specialist for Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology (OSUIT), said training telecom specialists in tribal areas can be part of the strategy of keeping those communities intact. He made the comments speaking on Beyond the Cable at Connected America in April. Dinsmore also spoke about OSUIT's ongoing efforts to partner with tribes in Oklahoma to provide training and technology. In one program, run with the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Dinsmore said students learn how to climb utility poles and train to perform aerial construction of fiber-optic networks. He said the students also learn how to do trenching, boring, splicing, and troubleshooting. Listen to the full interview to hear more!

In June's first episode of the Beyond the Cable podcast, BroadbandOne (BB1) CEO Eric Watko joined host Brad Randall to discuss the rapidly evolving telecommunications landscape. With over 25 years of industry experience dating back to the Nortel days, Watko focused heavily on how capital, community needs, and next-generation technologies are reshaping modern connectivity.

There are no regrets from NOVOS FiBER's chief technology officer, Rob Johnson, at Connected America as he reflected on his company's decision not to participate in the federal government's multi-billion-dollar broadband spend, known as BEAD. Johnson said he knows people in the industry who have quickly turned sour on BEAD once reading the fine print. "States have taken and made these things very patchwork," he said, citing one example where two providers were told to split a street by taking every other house on the street. "Well, they're both going to build the whole street," he said, referring to both providers. "Now they're competing with each other and all of the demographic data that they thought was driving their decision goes out the window." Johnson also touched on some of the shifting dynamics of the broadband marketplace. He said competition is fiercer today than it was several years ago but said staying local can give those operating close to home an edge. "A lot of people like the idea of shopping local," said Johnson, who represented the company while appearing on Beyond the Cable at Connected America.

Consolidations and network scaling are two key trends among US telecoms in 2026, but both can increase the complexity of operations, as Patricia Kellaghan of Synamedia pointed out during her recent appearance on Beyond the Cable. "Especially in broadband," she said. "What you start to see with these consolidation efforts is operators are inheriting more systems, more vendors, more device types, and more silos." Kellaghan, who serves as Synamedia's senior director of product management, said that's not the only pressures broadband providers are navigating. As a result, Kellaghan said networks need smarter tools so they can unify operations, many times with leaner teams. She said that applying visibility with intelligence can empower ISPs to address issues as they arise, without the need for long troubleshooting processes. Working with Wyndotte Municipal Services, in Michigan, a community-owned utility, Kellaghan said Synamedia's vendor-neutral Gravity platform enabled the network to eliminate manual setup steps and allowed them to streamline provisioning. "That really enabled them to eliminate a lot of manual setup steps. It allowed them to streamline provisioning, reduce the swivel chair with troubleshooting, and really gave their techs and their CSRs real-time visibility into the device, but also into the fleet and network health as well.

Service providers should begin offering tiered levels of service to customers based on quality of service, according to Robin Olds, a senior business development manager at Cisco Systems. Speaking on our Beyond the Cable podcast at Connected America, Olds said service providers could be doing a lot more, like offering network slicing and lanes of performance traffic across their network that they can monetize. He elaborated on that, pointing to current ISP pricing structures that are largely based on bandwidth speeds. "Latency, jitter, packet loss, these are all things that they need to consider," he said. "Additionally, they need to consider offering AI edge services to their enterprise accounts."

With a playbook adapted for an efficient rollout in the US market, agnoss CEO Christian Breidenbach-Kaack says the level of services agnoss can offer to multi-dwelling units offers clear advantages as a one-stop shop for network design, construction, operation, and maintenance.  The company, which has roots in Germany, is known worldwide for developi. Additionally, the company's name is a play on words, short for "agnostic networks," according to their company website. Speaking on Beyond the Cable, a Broadband Communities podcast, at Connected America last month, Breidenbach-Kaack said some of the lessons they've learned from Europe can help provide return on investment for fiber-to-the-unit.

In this episode we sit down with representatives of GFiber and KIVO, a dynamic pricing platform for telecom operators from PlektonLabs that won Startup of the Year at Connected America. Both interviews, captured from Connected America, dive into separate topics, including the nature of dynamic pricing, and how it can help telco operators. Tony Byrnes, head of new build expansion for GFiber, also uses the chance to dispel a myth about AI and its benefit, or lack thereof, when it comes to speeding up fiber deployments.

Tracy Doaks, the president and CEO of MCNC, says North Carolina has something special with the North Carolina Research and Education Network. Originally from Virginia, Doaks said the network, which is operated and managed by MCNC, gives tremendous benefits to smaller, mid-sized, and minority institutions in North Carolina. She said larger institutions can often afford to have their own networks for researchers. However, she added that having a shared network infrastructure has been great to make sure others share in the benefits. Also, by being a middle-mile operator, she said MCNC is able to provide smaller telecoms in the state with the opportunity to lease fiber for use in rural areas. She said rural medical centers also run on their telehealth network. "The larger incumbents aren't interested in those areas because the density is so low," she said. "So, that's been a real benefit to North Carolina, to have someone like an MCNC to be able to supply that type of connectivity." Now, she says MCNC is positioning themselves to handle the ongoing data center boom. Hear that and details about MCNC's new partnership with an electric co-op by listening to the full episode.