The Divide: How Highline and Ciena are tackling difficult deployments

This episode features Matt Hayes, CTO at Highline – a regional ISP owned by ITC Capital, serving Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia – and Kevin Sheehan, CTO of the Americas at Ciena, a partner of Highline's.

We discuss where and how Highline is helping to close the digital divide for unserved and underserved regions with public and private funds, and what role Ciena is playing in spurring those deployments.

We also discuss how the companies are preparing for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program – including Ciena's recent announcement that it will domestically manufacture some BEAD products – as well as how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help solve some of the labor shortages in the fiber workforce.

Here are some topics covered in this episode:

Related:Ciena bulks up on US manufacturing for BEAD

For a lightly edited transcript of this conversation, click the caption button on the player above.