June 2018

Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign manager, is calling for a single, privatized 5G mobile network across the country, arguing the current system is outdated. Parscale’s position contrasts with a reported proposal floated by the White House earlier in 2018 that included a plan to nationalize 5G networks in an attempt to guard against China. "It is time for America to have a single 5G network for all carriers. The days of dropped calls, slow speeds, and no service need to end.

The close working relationship between Verizon and information technology officials in Sacramento (CA) could turn out to be a model for communities across the country as cities move forward with smart city projects and the high-capacity communications networks needed to support them. About two years ago, Verizon approached the city to launch a 5G, fiber-optic build-out, with Sacramento as Verizon’s first foray into launching 5G.

Cisco announced the debut of its cloud-native broadband router, which is a containerized, software reboot of traditional converged cable access platform (CCAP) hardware.  The new cloud-native broadband router is notable on several levels, the first being that it's further proof that Cisco has moved beyond its roots as just a vendor of hardware boxes. With cloud-native, carriers can split disaggregated systems into even smaller, independent microservice functions that can scale up or down as needed.