Cisco’s Rural Broadband Innovation Center: Leveling the Playing Field

welcome to z cast everybody i'm cs caraval from ck research i'm your host as always uh we have a really exciting topic today we're going to be talking with robin olds from cisco about rural broadband before we get going though i do want to give a shout out to e-week my media partner all z casts are done in conjunction with the e-week e-speaks program uh now as i mentioned before i'm joined by robin holtz his title his business development manager innovation transformation america service writer at cisco i did that in one breath robin uh that is a long title tell us what the heck you do at cisco well jesus i i really look talk to uh service riders and help them look at their business and transform it right like try to help them either create service creation you know offers that they're trying to look to offer to their customers or providing value or in this case what we're talking about today is what cisco's world broadband innovation or center is all about so okay now um to me rural broadband we talk about a lot of different issues in this country and um it's it's really important for a lot of things um uh the least of which is work from home so uh let's talk first a little bit about the work from home to trend uh what you're expecting what your certified customers have seen yeah yeah that's a good question so it all started right with the pandemic you know the pandemic really changed the way we work now and i doubt it's going to go back to the way it was pre pandemic so you know what's happened was it really highlighted the need for businesses not only to consider a you know work from home policy you know they're also considering return to work but now more of a hybrid work environment so you know at the end of the day what we're talking about is regardless of where you work it needs to be digital secure and inclusive uh so that you know we're working from anywhere by enabling a hybrid workforce and transforming into hybrid workspaces what does that mean for service providers well that means that broadband internet connectivity is more important than it ever has been you know an example this is my neighbor just moved from colorado um and he's working remote and he's you know him and his wife are both working for firms back in colorado and i'm in south carolina and they are um you know needing bandwidth connectivity and so you know i was recommending the local provider down here that got me the bandwidth that i needed for video because it's uh businesses really need that person-to-person contact and for service providers they need to increase that bandwidth and from a cisco's perspective you know we're trying to really help our service providers um you know and provide the connectivity that is needed for these remote workers and we're changing the economics of the internet right we're really looking from our acacia acquisition where we're providing 400 gig optics that mean a smaller footprint which allows you to to do more and then we're also showing how a small internet service provider can have the same hardware as a very large tier one service providers that have 30 million residential subscribers but they're using our flexible consumption model that allows them to get into that that lar that hardware but at a much lower cost price point by us scaling back the software and making it more flexible for them you know interesting yep sorry go ahead i said we talk about this as being a work from home trend uh but it's really a do everything from we're educating kids at home we're doing telehealth more uh financial services things are done you're doing legal over um the network so it's not just work from home it's everything at home and that has raised the value of the network correct and like it seems like all these things we're trying to do we can't do without a really good quality network yeah the network has been is extremely important now especially since you know the pandora highlighted that need for faster broadband speeds but i'm sure your audience out there knows that somebody during the pandemic that lives in rural america where their children had to you know learn from home uh but where they have limited bandwidth um an example this is one of my engineers you know his niece you know had to go down to the local mcdonald's to get wi-fi access she lived in rural west virginia and really it was in the winter months you know in the march april time frame where she was still learning and about working for you know learning from home and she just didn't have that broadband speed that she needed to be able to do the the type of calling that they were doing from a video calling perspective now you know in this country we talk a lot about economic recovery and where the growth is going to come from and it seems to me that part of educating from home is creating a quality so we can get more um people proficient in stem right now i'm looking at some stem data that i'll actually show uh in the z cast and when you look at the uh the average countries the us is well below it right i'm okay with loving countries like you know some of the the the nordic countries and things because they they put everybody there as an engineer but then when you start looking down you know slovenia denmark czech republic uh tech republicans they've been around that long and they're well ahead of the us as far as stem goes and it seems to me that our ability to educate people at home uh is dependent on the network yet there's so many parts of this country that don't have good quality programming programs and when i mentioned last we talked about this greater state of rural broadband what the heck is going on in this country with rural broadband what is the standard right now yeah it's a great question i mean the u.s government uh has been making great strides in the past three administrations um you know where they're providing funding to bridge that digital divide today there's over 38 billion in funding that's available right now this moment of time that a lot of service providers have applied for or are applying for and then there's about 67 billion in additional funding that's coming down and there may be more after that it seems like every time i turn around i read about a new government program that's our bill that's being proposed that might get passed and might provide additional funding but we hope you know that many of these search riders and even new entrants to the market are looking at this an opportunity to provide broadband access to you know these this these rural areas uh to really make a more inclusive future for all and you know from cisco's perspective really our our access methods are open right we want open access so you know many people are looking at it from a you know fixed wireless access method uh a fiber to the home access method or even a you know mobile network like on a cellular data like a you know hotspot type connectivity uh perspective and you know and that's really where it gets highlighted is that the us is trying to address this um you know the best example of this i could give you is there's a we have a case study on uh one of our search writer accounts truvista they're a service provider that's located in chester south carolina it's a high growth area for charlotte if you live in charlotte you may move to chester because it's you know you want a lower cost of living but you know one of the counties had 1700 homes that had um you know inadequate bandwidth and they contacted truvista and truvista worked in a public-private partnership format with the county to go after a usda reconnect grant if truvista would apply and do the fiber or build out to the 1700 homes it was going to cost them 12 million dollars but they received a 9 million usda reconnect grant which allowed them to build out that broadband connectivity so this really provided a lot of value to the community and it showed a partnership between the county and truvista and how they work together to address this all right thanks and while you give some kudos to the last three administrations i'm gonna say our government's not doing enough we need a national broadband policy like so many other countries have soapbox of mine that i've had for a while uh it's embarrassing that we don't have it being the most technologically advanced country in the world and if there's any government officials watching this if you're watching watching this send this to your government official we need a national broadband policy uh and then we need policies that our programs aren't so hard to fill out the paperwork i've heard that's an issue too but that's an aside now i know in an effort to help some of these service providers uh at cisco and i got the tour of this it was pretty interesting uh cisco was created a rural broadband center in its facility in rtp in north carolina uh so can you walk me through what that is and what its purposes yeah absolutely so it's a 20 million dollar investment for cisco uh in uh mooresville which is part of the research triangle park uh and what we've done is really created a rural broadband innovation center it contains a showcase and a lab you know the showcase is where we bring customers in and talk them through the technologies and then we have a hands-on lab where they can uh look at some of the solutions that we're talking about whether that's automation or infrastructure as code or even um uh you know looking at security solutions or tdm to ip or uh segment routing um you know and silicon one and the factors asics that we're doing but our goal of the the innovation center is really to address the digital divide by investing in rural broadband innovation and for our broadband search fighters so that they can see firsthand how the our state-of-the-art exclusions would work in their own environment but some of that even we bring in third party solutions to show them how that would again how we would demonstrate that open access whether that's passive optical networking or private 5g or even 4g lte to show them you know the different access methods that they can bring as a solution for this yeah and i think we're going to roll a quick video here um quickly walks us through that so we'll do that now now uh robin i know you know that i think one of the other purposes here is you you had talked about the acquisition made in cisco a vacation you also bought i think alex tara before that that building a next-gen network today isn't as simple as just upgrading you know your old network to the the new thing like we used to do uh modernized networks today are quite different uh than than ones the previous generation correct and i think part of the purpose here is also to help some of the smaller providers that don't have the technical skills uh to be able to use some of these new technologies that correct that's correct that is absolutely correct yes you know so so what we're doing is really basically using cisco's validated designs to you know modernize these rural network architectures and and really talk about open access again you know fixed wireless access or you know fiber the home whether that could be cable too right we have a lot of cable providers out there and then mobile network providers you know i really didn't define what a broadband service rider is but in essence it could be a cable company a telco electrical co-op it could be a new wisp or wireless internet service rider anybody is providing broadband access we want to bring them to the center so we can walk them through our converged software-defined network transport you know which is our way of showing how we would provide this service across it end-to-end segment rounded backbone to reduce cost and complexity out of their network and really help them with their subscriber message and management and in that some instances we want to talk about the route and optical networking and how we reduce the layers of complexity from optical to pawn to uh to route you know route switch on the backbone you know we can really shrink that down and we have a better uh capex or off x efficiency there but you know and then on top of that my biggest thing that i think is pretty exciting is that we demonstrate automation using crossworks uh our crosswork suite software to show them really how this can be put in place and even if you're a small provider you can afford uh automation it does not replace jobs you know a lot of people worry that there's going to be somebody's job going on but we're looking at actually making sure that when you implement a change implement it correctly so that the network doesn't go down you know these networks are so demanding now if everybody's working from home and doing business it's it's hard to take an outage in the middle of the day these days for service providers so you have to have an automated network so that you can also you know not only have it um redundant but have it resilient and that's our key to winning a lot of business yeah no um this isn't just a showcase for new cisco technology right service writers can actually use this to help them build a next-gen network faster is that correct and can you watch it yeah that that is that is right that yeah that is uh you know again what we demonstrate with the labs is we show them hands-on how they can do this today that's right okay let's yeah i think it's great that cisco put that kind of money into it i know um you know creating an equality and inclusive future has been a big mission for cisco from chuck robbins all the way down and so what kind of impact do you think this can have on cisco's mission of our purpose now of a power and inclusive future well you know we know off of some research data from the purdue research that you know there's a percentage of u.s adults living in rural areas that have less access to home broadband and uh in other devices like you know just smartphones and tablets and desktops and you know if we bring you can make the assumption that if you bring broadband to these rural areas that this is not only going to help the economy but it's also going to benefit society right you're going to be able to work from anywhere you're going to have people that are going to be able to buy from you remotely instead of going into maybe you know having to drive all the way in for a store but you know cisco's really addressing the digital divide by investing in the rural broadband innovation center for broadband service providers so that they can see firsthand how our state-of-the-art solutions work in their own environment and by showing them how to build it we hope to make an impact on creating an inclusive future for all and that's really you know how we're doing this yeah well well certainly uh uh i think your former ceo john chambers was once quoted as saying that uh equality in the world is created from education and uh the internet and education creates equality across the globe or something like that and so the first step in that would be creating equality in this country right and uh g2 patel who runs the collaboration security group at cisco actually talks about the importance of broadband and just creating more opportunities so i think it's great that cisco's doing that robin uh just is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up here um just that you know please go check us out before i put a couple you know links uh one is cisco four slash go for slash world broadband uh and then there's also a blog that gives in-depth detail into what our rural broadband innovation center is about you can actually search on robin holds on the cisco overall broadband innovation center if you look for it that way but thank you vs for having me i really appreciate the time today all right well i'll make sure those links are down below uh don't forget to click to subscribe and on on behalf of robin holes from cisco on cs caraval your host for zcast thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

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