This episode options David Witkowski, senior member on the Institute of Electrical and Digital Engineers (IEEE), the place he additionally heads up the Future Networks working group.
Witkowski returns to the podcast to debate a spread of matters impacting the broadband connectivity panorama, from the sluggish development of the US federal authorities’s BEAD program to the evolution of mounted wi-fi entry (FWA) and low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite tv for pc broadband applied sciences.
On the LEO entrance, scalability points (mentioned in our prior chat with Witkowski in 2023) stay a priority … significantly with the federal authorities’s BEAD program poised to award a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} to each SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon Leo, the latter of which remains to be within the strategy of launching its constellation and dealing with delays.
“Hopefully these up-and-coming constellations can come on-line shortly … I will be trustworthy, I do fear that it’s going to take a while to get these working, and for these communities that they gained BEAD in, they’re gonna anticipate these constellations to come back on-line,” he says.
‘AI divide’
Along with discussing broadband entry applied sciences, we additionally cowl the explosive progress of AI and the way that know-how has the potential to handle some points impacting the digital divide whereas exacerbating others.
Whereas Witkowski sees alternatives for AI to enhance cellular community efficiency (through AI-RAN, for instance), having unequal entry to broadband networks dangers “creating one more digital divide,” he says.
“There is a threat that those that have entry to higher networks will be capable of leverage AI to their profit. Those that do not have entry will fall behind,” he explains. “If I am now restricted in my capability to make use of AI as a result of my community is poor, then I am unable to compete with individuals who have that functionality … That does create the chance of a second digital divide, an AI divide.”
We additionally focus on rising considerations about fiber provide for broadband as AI calls for extra supplies from the market, in addition to how allowing issues are stopping community deployments, the state of broadband resiliency and redundancy within the face of maximum climate occasions, and extra.