Aging Workers and BEAD Raising Workforce Concerns for Cable

ATLANTA -- The cable industry faces potential workforce struggles in coming years due to employee demographics and federal broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) plan spending, CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney told us Tuesday at SCTE's 2024 TechExpo. At the same time, BEAD is helping generate interest within the construction industry, he said in an interview. Meanwhile, some spectrum experts at TechExpo urged a broad rethinking of how the U.S. approaches spectrum management (see 2409240045).

A driver of potential cable workforce struggles is the significant number of people in the industry aged 55 and older who will retire before too long, McKinney said. Atop that is the BEAD construction boom expected in the next five to seven years. Much of the BEAD labor demand will be in field operations, he predicted. Cable operators also must staff up to handle new technologies, such as the addition of mobile offerings, McKinney said. With BEAD funding looming, a growing number of local construction companies are contacting SCTE chapters about obtaining certifications.

AI is helping mitigate some additional labor needs, McKinney noted.

Larger cable operators have enjoyed long-established relationships with construction companies that have resulted in readily available crews for expansion or other network projects, McKinney said. But the construction labor supply chain could be stretched in coming years. Moreover, another challenge for cable is the competition for labor against everyone from mobile operators to electrical utilities.

While digital divide initiatives are happening around the world, good global information sharing is lacking, said Kevin Hasley, Ookla vice president-strategic initiatives and World Broadband Association co-chairman. WBBA was established to try to fill that gap and serve as a means of sharing best practices from different regions, he said. The group has 300-plus members from 110 countries. He said a WBBA guidebook is being assembled about North American broadband investments.

Fiber networks are on the cusp of experiencing the same vendor interoperability that cable networks have enjoyed since the late 1990s, Calix Vice President-Technology Michael Emmendorfer said. Fiber interoperability is aimed at optical line terminal and optical network terminal interoperability, he added. That interoperability starts with standards, yet the ITU’s G.988 specification isn’t usable, he said. There have been various development efforts to get to multivendor interoperability for OLTs and ONTs, and a few large service providers have their own standards -- open OMCI -- for their networks, he said. Meanwhile, the Broadband Forum is working with CableLabs on defining standards for OLT/ONT interoperability, he said.

Higher-band spectrum such as the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands were unsuitable for fixed wireless access, but that’s changing, Liberty Latin America CEO Balan Nair said. It’s possible to get 100 contiguous MHz in those bands, and that can provide considerable FWA capacity, he said. The traditional problem with such an approach was that spectrum's range and how prone it's to interference. However, relatively cheap chipset technology is good at handling out-of-sequence packets, he said. That could make FWA using those higher spectrum bands a route to broadband delivery for more homes, he said.

Comcast Fellow Robert Howald said the company remains on track to meet the end-of-2025 deadline for its major network upgrade, which was announced in 2022. He said it’s employing technology that will allow for last-mile delivery of 10G service either over fiber or coaxial cable. Comcast is also focused on making its network more intelligent, with AI helping locate impairments.