Looking Forward: Connected America
Connected America lands in Dallas on April 14–15, and it stands out to us for a simple reason: this is one of the first events we’re attending that is really built around regional broadband realities in North America.
A lot of the conversation in the world of telecom can drift toward national policy, big-market builds, or the same handful of metro areas. At Connected America, the focus is much closer to the challenges and opportunities shaping the American Midwest and other underserved parts of the country – markets that may not always get the spotlight, but are absolutely central to the next phase of broadband growth. Here’s what we expect to hear.
BEAD
The first big theme is BEAD: the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. For many recipients, like municipal organizations, utilities, cooperatives, and smaller regional ISPs, BEAD funding is the difference-maker in actually delivering broadband expansion. The stakes are high, and so is the pressure to get deployment, compliance, and long-term planning right the first time.
Driving the BEAD Conversation
Two sessions in particular should drive that conversation: “State Broadband Offices in Discussion: Progress, Challenges & Broadband Initiatives” and “Navigating the BEAD Landscape: Pathways to Successful Deployment”, both of which can be seen here. The first is likely to focus on where state-led programs stand today, what’s working, where the friction points are, and how states are balancing federal requirements with local realities. It should also get into how non-deployment funds are being used, which is increasingly important as organizations try to build sustainable programs rather than just complete one-off projects.
The second session looks like it will get more operational. That’s where we expect to hear about what early-stage BEAD implementation actually looks like on the ground: matching network design to program eligibility and technical standards, integrating new builds with existing fiber and middle-mile infrastructure, managing vendor and contractor relationships, and working through the practical complexities that don’t always show up in the policy summary.
This is a topic we’ve already seen surface with clients from a few different angles. On the IP address side, the questions are often very specific:
- How much of the allocated funds should, or even can, account for additional IP resources
- What kind of IPv4 space makes the most sense to acquire, how clean that space needs to be, and
- What a smooth transaction and onboarding process should look like.
On the network side, the conversation is broader and more strategic:
- how do municipal organizations and ISPs work together in a way that doesn’t just support deployment,
- how do municipal organizations and ISPs actually sets the network up for long-term operational success.
This is the piece we think matters most. ISPs can absolutely support BEAD recipients with services like 24/7 network operations, compliance and security support, and IP address management. But the real value is in helping shape the operational model early, before technical debt starts piling up.
IP acquisition and transition planning
A good example is IP acquisition and transition planning. Among other things, ISPs drive the IP strategy, deciding when it makes more sense to buy versus lease, and determining how organizations think about IPv4 usage while moving toward IPv6. In the latter case, and in most environments, IPv6 isn’t a clean cutover but a transition, which could mean some combination of dual stack or an IPv6-first model with IPv4 consolidated into a smaller block for gateway and legacy traffic, then selling the excess. In practice, that can look a lot like other translation and gateway models operators already know well, whether that’s public/private segmentation or carrier-grade NAT-style approaches.
The broader goal is common and straightforward: make sure valuable network and IPv4 resources are being used deliberately. Depending on where an organization is in its deployment lifecycle, that might mean holding those assets, reallocating them, or monetizing them. But none of that works without clear planning and direction.
The less glamorous work matters too.
RIR scanning, auditing, IPAM discipline, and baseline provisioning quality rarely make the keynote, but they have an outsized impact on how well these networks perform over time. It’s easy to automate around a weak foundation and call the job done. It’s much harder to recover when something breaks and nobody has a clear view of what was provisioned, why it was built that way, or how to unwind it. The operators that get ahead here are the ones planning for their future selves and setting a solid foundation, and then setting up monitoring, maintenance, and better operational hygiene.
Infrastructure
The other area on display is infrastructure, specifically the relationship between broadband expansion, data center growth, and the middle-mile networks that make both possible.
One session that should be especially telling is the “Middle Mile matters: Building the backbone of Connected America” discussion. Last-mile broadband gets most of the public attention, but middle mile is where long-term scalability is won or lost. Without strong regional backbone infrastructure, last-mile deployment becomes more expensive, less resilient, and harder to scale. The session will focus on the fundamentals that really move the market forward: how to strengthen middle-mile networks so they can support wider last-mile coverage, what role public funding and policy are playing in that buildout, how partnerships are helping fill gaps, and designing resilient, scalable backbones for future bandwidth and latency demands.
Making Engineering Choices
Our questions for this session are in the engineering choices.
- How are providers building enough redundancy into last-mile extensions so entire communities are not one fiber cut away from an outage?
- Where are aggregation points being placed relative to underserved towns? Are those locations actually reducing transport costs and complexity for future expansion?
- As new middle-mile routes come online, what utilization thresholds are operators using to decide when to add capacity, re-route traffic, or light additional paths?
After the Build
What we’re especially interested in is what happens after the build. It’s one thing to expand the network; it’s another to run it well. We want to hear how operators plan to monitor traffic across these new backbone investments, what telemetry they’re relying on, and how they’re using that data to guide capacity planning, improve resiliency, and make the network more efficient over time. The most valuable middle-mile strategies will support growth and create a stronger, smarter foundation for the communities depending on them.
We expect Connected America to provide an in-depth and useful read on where the middle-America market is headed from the perspectives of both policy and operations, and are looking forward to some interesting conversations.