Beyond the Cable with Brad Randall

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.