BROADBAND NATION EXPO, ORLANDO – While Day 1 of 2025’s Broadband Nation Expo centered around the role networks will play in AI as well as economic and data center growth, the second day of the show revisited its digital divide roots to analyze the industry's progress - and shortcomings - in access.
Of course, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program was a hot topic, now that NTIA approved its first batch of state proposals. We heard broadband officials from Arizona and Nevada discuss where they’re at with BEAD and the next steps before shovels can hit the ground.
Broadband as a utility
The first panel of the day centered around broadband’s value as a utility, providing an interesting contrast with yesterday’s opening remarks from TIA.
Angela Bennink, general manager of Kitsap Public Utility District in Washington state, noted public ownership of infrastructure is key to make sure the public still has a voice in how they get broadband, especially given the absence of a wide-scale affordable broadband strategy like the Affordable Connectivity Program. (ACP).
“I don’t think ACP comes back, I mean in reality,” she said. “So I do think we take that into our own hands as utility providers.”
And access is merely the first step, said Jamar Davis, lead for Charlotte, North Carolina’s Smart City initiative. “The next step is how do we support the services we provide to residents,” from transportation to things like water and waste services.
Comcast's AI spike
Just when we thought we’ve heard everything about AI’s impact on broadband networks, Comcast Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi shared some stats on how much traffic genAI is consuming. Since the start of 2025, Comcast saw a “three-fold increase” in the amount of traffic that goes to ChatGPT, he said.
“And this is in a world where 89% of the AI traffic is still textual based,” Nafshi said, adding traffic shot up even higher after OpenAI launched its Sora app for AI-generated videos. The Sora service “now consumes more traffic than Xbox Live on our network.”
LEO lowdown
Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite is the new kid on the broadband block, but it’s already got potential to complement fixed wireless access (FWA) in rural areas, according to Mike Lubin, senior advisor and VP at ViaSat.
He predicts satellite will wind up as FWA backhaul “in the interim” until fiber or another optical communications technology comes along. Some combination of satellite and FWA is “going to be the paradigm” for connecting about 2.6 billion unconnected folks globally.
So far, Starlink and the newly rebranded Amazon Leo are the main satellite broadband players, but Lubin noted many other LEO operators are entering the space. Soon enough we could also see next-gen geostationary (GEO) providers with “even better economics potentially than LEO constellations.”
Talking take rates
When a build goes off the rails, usually it’s because an operator’s take rate didn’t pan out, said WISPA president and CEO David Zumwalt on a panel about assessing the “true cost” of broadband.
“If there are other competitors in the market and if [the provider is] slow to deploy for whatever reason, then the take rate assumptions don’t work out,” he said. “So there’s a problem then for the whole schedule of how you deploy and start to monetize the deployment of this network.”
The other piece of the puzzle is understanding the deployment environment and having a product that can easily adapt to change, noted CommScope Senior Solutions Architect Paul Hubbard.
“These networks are not fixed assets,” he said. “They’re always going to evolve.”