The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch.
Brad Hine:
We are here, live in Nashville at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center. I have another gentleman who is joining us today, Mark Klimek. Mark, how’s it going today?
Mark Klimek:
It’s going great. Wonderful show. Lots of excitement, lots of activity.
Brad Hine:
Mark, I know you’re from Nokia. You’ve spent the last three days in the booth and wandering around meeting everybody. Tell us about your experiences, for the first time back face to face for this trade show.
Mark Klimek:
It’s been exciting to see a lot of people that I haven’t seen for, it seems years now. It probably has been years, right? And I’m amazed at how old everyone looks now. Certainly, I haven’t changed but, but nonetheless, it’s been really… Just the number of people here and it really shows the demand for people to get out and see each other face to face to see what everybody’s got going on, to learn. They’ve done a really nice job with this conference, with all the educational sessions and such. So, it’s wonderful to be back in person.
Brad Hine:
Fiber Connect always knocks it out of the park. I think this is something extra special now that we’ve, I think I’ve said this a few times over the week, that we’re coming out of hibernation. Everybody’s talking to each other again. So, what has been some of your experiences with Nokia so far this week, specifically with maybe seeing some of your customers face to face and some of the partners that you’ve met with in the past?
Mark Klimek:
Sure. Our booth traffic has been really, really heavy. Very pleasantly surprised by that. We have quite a large portfolio, and one of the things we’re showing first time at this conference is a 25G PON. So we started, back in the day, with a 1G, regular G PON, and XGS is all the rage now, and that’s what you see most deployed. But we’re showing a 25G PON, which is the next step in the progression.
Brad Hine:
It sure is. That’s very exciting. Talk to us a little bit too, about the last 18 months and your experience. When people stopped traveling, we had to communicate remotely. What were some of your experiences, how the industry was communicating with Nokia, and in some of the needs that they needed to be met?
Mark Klimek:
Well, thank goodness for Zoom and other video applications, and the fact that we have the broadband infrastructure we do. Our sales team stayed quite engaged with customers, and we were able to have lots of virtual meetings that were very productive. We had to change a little bit, our, let’s say the marketing style, how to communicate with customers and show what we’re doing. It seems we’ve been fairly successful with that, and we’re able to stay in touch. What the pandemic did show is the need for broadband. So I think because you probably talk with most of the vendors around, and the channels and such around the show, business is good because everybody needs to build bigger pipes.
Brad Hine:
Absolutely. We’ve seen a lot of federal money come out in the last three years, and obviously, there’s been much more of a demand in the last year and a half. I know you guys are probably seeing a lot of projects in that way too, and a lot of folks that want to spend money with Nokia?
Mark Klimek:
For sure. And a lot of new builders do. They bid on, you know- We’re going to be receiving, whether it be RDOF funds or other funding, and they see the way to build the next-generation network is fiber. And a lot of these guys haven’t ever built a fiber network and that will be a learning experience for all of us, but it’s fun. I mean, it’s really exciting to just see that you go to build these networks and you really make a difference in people’s lives. You’re bridging the digital divide across the socioeconomic strata.
But also, is you see people moving from urban areas, and there’s a lot of people have relocated to smaller towns and such. Their lifestyle and their work capabilities don’t change. It’s really exciting. It’s a real defining point.
One thing at Nokia, we’re a global company. So we, you know, we see similar things all over, but we are doing a lot of work and XGS is just the rage in Europe. We’re building a lot of 10G networks there. Similarly, in Asia, Latin America, and in South America, building a lot of PON. The tide has really turned. PON is the way of the world these days.
Brad Hine:
You said it, you said it. So tell us a little bit about your background at Nokia, how long you’ve been involved, and kind of what your journey has been.
Mark Klimek:
I’ve been at Nokia a long time, but in this area, the fiber area. I actually started, came to Nokia, a different division to start in fiber-to-the-home, back in the late nineties. And along with Optical Solutions and Corning, started the fiber-to-the-home council 20 years ago. So it was pretty exciting. And now we have, you know, a show and hundreds of vendors at the time. It was the three vendors and trying to figure out how to find a customer, right? And I remember counting, like, we’ve got to show how many that there’s a market, and how many people are going to be deploying the fiber network. And you could count them all on one hand, and that’s, you didn’t even need all your fingers, right? And now, I mean, it’s really, it’s just amazing to see how this has transformed over the last two decades.
Brad Hine:
Right, right. So you’ve seen all that evolution then, since, like you said, the late nineties. And I think what’s interesting to me here that is, you know, from year to year, and I’ve been coming every year since about 2007. And I’ve seen, back in that era, it was very heavy with service providers and greenfield projects. There were some years where it kind of died off. Now, obviously, I’ve seen a lot of new greenfield projects and service providers doing a lot of overbuilding now. Now that there have been all these federal funds. It’s very encouraging to see everybody here. I think there are probably more people here than there were two years ago, back in Orlando.
Mark Klimek:
Yeah, that’s what I understand. They set a record for the attendance this year, yeah. And with both vendors and other companies selling stuff, but also a large number of operators and people looking to learn and to build these networks. So it’s exciting.
Brad Hine:
So have you been attending any of the sessions here? Has there been a session or anything outside of the expo hall that’s been really interesting to you?
Mark Klimek:
I have attended several of the sessions, and I don’t know that any of them specifically jump out, but I’ve learned something at every session. And get different opinions, right? And you hear different perspectives of things, and there’s been a couple that was with our panels, and maybe it got a little bit heated with people in the panels at different debates. But that’s good. That’s what we want to see, because we don’t all share, have the same vision, right? And there are different ways to solve the problems.
Brad Hine:
I’ll echo what you said. We just need to keep people talking, keep conversations going. We need differences in opinions. I’m sure that’s what you saw back in the late nineties, and that’s what makes innovation, right?
Mark Klimek:
It is. And you’ve just got to convince, get mind-share such that you can get the industry to invest because it takes a lot of investment to grow these technologies, and for just the labor force to see that the council’s working with the Department of Labor on a training course for fiber technicians, which, part of it’s the product, part of it is the underlying components, but then you actually have to someone to install it. And it’s a neat technology, but people still need to work on it, and those are good jobs and it’s a good career path for people. So there are lots of aspects to what we see here at the show this week.
Brad Hine:
Right, right. So before I let you go, I know today’s the last day of the show and everybody’s getting ready to wrap up a little bit. I want to ask you the kind of question that I ask everybody. I’ve asked everyone all week, It’s called our Back to the Future question. So, you started back in the late nineties doing this. You’ve been with Nokia for a long time. If there was anything that you know now that you wish you knew back then, that would allow you just more vision moving forward? Is there a thought on the tip of your brain as to what that would be?
Mark Klimek:
Well, that’s a tough question. We’ve got to look at the end of the day, what server, what are we trying to do for the actual end-user. You and I, when we sit in our home or our business, what is it we… What did we need and what makes our life better? And then work back through how do we deliver that?
And I think you’re seeing more of it now than we did back in the day. You know, I come from a product standpoint, right? I build boxes and build optics stuff like that, so sometimes you get a bit disconnected from what the actual end-user might want to do. But every time we’ve learned a lot more about that, at least I personally have, and I think that’s if we focus on what people are going to do with it and what might be possible.
And the other thing, when we started. I started first with a PON, which was, I don’t know, 155 megabits. And when people were like, what would you ever do with this, shared with dozens of people, right?
Brad Hine:
With that much data.
Mark Klimek:
And now we have 10G, and we’re already looking at 25 and then there are standards for 50 and 100. And the other thing we’ve learned over time is there will be applications that we can’t even imagine, that we don’t know what it will be for, but we’ll use it and it’ll make people’s lives better. So it’s good. And you guys are doing a great job here by, you know, sharing some of the thoughts of different people and just letting people learn and hear about what’s going on in the industry. So appreciate that.
Brad Hine:
Well, thank you so much, you know, we aim to get everybody’s story on here and allow everybody to be heard at the Broadband Bunch. And thanks so much for joining us today. I wish you the best Mark, and to` Nokia also, and I hope you have a great rest of the show.
Mark Klimek:
Great. Thank you. Pleasure spending some time with you.
