Giving physical AI the edge. With Sameh Yamany, VIAVI

Nobody wants data centers near where they live: they use too much power, they bring few jobs, and they are tied to an AI that many people do not understand and fear. Yet we will use AI, and we need data centers to run it. The question is not whether we build them, but where and who gets to decide. In this Sparring Partners podcast, I speak with Mike O’Rielly, Principal at MPORielly Consulting and FCC Commissioner from 2013 to 2020, after 20 years working on tech and telecom policy on Capitol Hill. Mike argues that hyperscalers are losing the PR war to political pressure. As usual, our conversation ranged widely:

For years, the assumption in the US – and not just in the US – was that broadband means fiber, and anything else is second class. In rural areas, that assumption is running into two hard limits: the cost per passing keeps rising as density falls, and Starlink and Amazon Leo now set the price and speed baseline in the hardest-to-reach locations. In Sparring Partners, I speak with Claude Aiken, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Nextlink Internet, a rural operator that runs fiber, fixed wireless and mobile across 12 states. Claude was previously President and CEO of WISPA and spent a decade at the FCC, so he has seen rural broadband from the operator, industry and regulator sides. We don't agree on everything, but we agree that headline speed is the wrong thing to chase. Here is what we covered:

Does Open RAN need further opening? Can open-source facilitate and accelerate the adoption of Open RAN? Yes and yes. The OCUDU project was established on these premises to address common challenges that Open RAN deployments face. In Sparring Partners, I speak with Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT at The Linux Foundation, about how we need to move beyond open interfaces (which remain an essential starting point) to open-source RAN platforms that OCUDU builds with open-source software. You may already know this, but Arpit went further and explained what specifically OCUDU does that was missing:

Private networks sound such a good idea. There is a clear need for venues and enterprises to have better on-premises connectivity to support their operations and services. They can augment much-needed indoor connectivity, which today is mostly provided by Wi-Fi. Yet, deployments are only slowly taking off, and that’s the case across geographies. Do we have the technology? Yes. Are they too expensive to deploy? No. So what’s holding us back? Mostly the business models, the (real or perceived) complexity for enterprises to deploy them, and regulatory frameworks geared toward cellular networks owned and run by mobile operators. In this Sparring Partners, I spoke with Maria Lema, Founder and CEO of Weaver Labs, who addresses these issues from the assumption that a private network should be viewed as a strategic investment for the venue or enterprise. Once you accept that, many other pieces fall into place. Listen to the conversation, as I do not want to spoil it, but these are some topics we covered:

I don’t think I am the only one annoyed by the homogenization of content, driven by a combination of social media, reduced attention spans, AI and human slop, and strict PR and corporate messaging policies. The side effect of this is that in-person human interaction is becoming more valuable and worth cultivating. This is why I invited Keith Dyer at The Mobile Network to talk about this on Sparring Partners. He has launched a new in-person conference with a format that puts attendee interaction at the forefront. In our conversation, we discussed how industry events have evolved as we become submerged in (and want to avoid) repetitive, shallow content increasingly generated or over-edited by AI.