Chief Technology Officer of The EMEA & APAC Regions, ADTRAN HOLDINGS INC
Zach Hubeck interviews Ronan Kelly (Adtran) to discuss their fiber solutions in BEAD environments
Zach Hubeck (WAV, Executive Vice President of Marketing) interviews Ronan Kelly (Adtran's Chief Technology Officer) to discuss ...
About Ronan Kelly
Ronan Kelly, Chief Technology Officer for the EMEA and APAC regions at Adtran Holdings, has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences in 2023 and 2024, discussing the state of fiber broadband deployment, network security, and market consolidation. In a September 2024 interview, Kelly stated that the UK fiber buildout is continuing at a "record pace" and that subscriber additions are outpacing European peers at a similar stage of deployment, arguing that negative industry commentary is "not founded." He has also discussed the UK market's adoption of XGS-PON technology, describing it as the "most advanced fiber-to-the-home market in the Western world." Kelly has predicted that the highly fragmented UK market will consolidate down to roughly five major players, noting that rising interest rates have exposed weaknesses in some alt-net business models. Kelly has also focused on security implications of bandwidth abundance, stating in a 2024 presentation that consumers now have cost-effective access to more broadband capacity and compute resources than ever before, creating opportunities for both innovation and malicious actors. He has warned that quantum computers, while not "democratized" soon, will become accessible to powerful actors and pose a threat to current encryption methods, noting forecasts that quantum computers could crack RSA 4096 encryption by 2029. Kelly has highlighted Adtran's work on quantum-resistant cryptography and open, disaggregated network architectures, stating that the company deliberately moved away from vendor lock-in tactics to give customers more choice. He has also cited labor shortages as the number one risk to deployment targets, based on a poll of over 300 operator attendees at an Adtran event.
Transcript (18 segments)
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Interviewer0:09
Hey folks, I'm here with Ronan Kelly with ADTRAN. Ronan, how are you today, sir?
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Ronan Kelly0:13
I'm really, really good. Delighted to have the opportunity to chat with yourself.
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Interviewer0:16
Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
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Ronan Kelly0:18
My pleasure.
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Interviewer0:20
So Ronan, why don't we start off with what's your role at ADTRAN?
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Ronan Kelly0:21
I'm ADTRAN's Chief Technology Officer for the Europe and Middle East regions.
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Interviewer0:27
Very cool. And if you were to summarize ADTRAN's product portfolio in a couple of succinct sentences, what would you say?
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Ronan Kelly0:34
I think what really sets our portfolio apart from the competition comes down, at least for me, to three key words. First is simplicity. Our solutions are really, really easy to deploy, so that makes it much easier for operators to attract staff with a lower skill level to deploy very cost-effectively and very quickly. They're flexible, so that means they can use a very small portion of our portfolio to cover off the vast majority of their deployment use cases. And they're efficient, so they're really effective at lowering the energy consumption bills of the operator, but also because they're simplified down to appliance-like devices, that allows the inventory levels to be reduced when service providers are procuring that equipment, when they're stocking for that equipment, and also when they're sparing for that equipment as well.
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Interviewer1:22
Very cool. Now, in the US here, we've got a lot of federal subsidy coming our way in the form of the BEAD program, $42 billion to connect every American to the internet. Big B, yeah, and a B for a big mission. So you've experienced something similar in Europe with government funding. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and what were some of the lessons learned that ADTRAN is now prepared to not recreate in the US here?
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Ronan Kelly1:49
You're absolutely correct. We have seen this movie before in Europe. There were a number of targets set down by both the European Commission but also at a local government level. The likes of the UK government had a lot of targets, many of them targeting towards 2025 for completion of fiber builds and gigabit coverage. Really good for catalyzing the market and driving momentum for service providers, both existing but also new entrants to come into the market and start building out the fiber infrastructure. But the challenge that emerged as a result of that was the whole parallelism. All of a sudden we'd gone from markets that were doing modest levels of fiber deployment to an explosion in the number of operators building out fiber infrastructure in parallel. So we saw huge upward pressure on the need for skilled labor resources, people who knew how to design fiber networks, how to build fiber networks, how to do splicing, people who knew how to deploy optical equipment onto those networks and troubleshoot that equipment, people who knew how to do high-quality in-home installations for the customers purchasing the services. As a result, labor costs started to skyrocket very quickly because it was a limited labor pool. It took time to bring the knowledge and education up to the level that was needed so they could start to bring scale to these deployments. Even today, the industry is still suffering from that. We saw that here recently at the ADTRAN campus for the Broadband Summit. There was a poll taken of all the operator attendees, over 300 attendees in the room, and the number one problem they all cited as the biggest risk to their deployment targets is labor shortages, the ability to attract the necessary skills to design, build, and deploy these networks.
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Interviewer3:31
Now, you guys have a pretty sophisticated certification curriculum and testing and a way to educate. Let's say we're going to take an unskilled worker and give them a role to connect America through this BEAD funding. How is ADTRAN preparing that unskilled worker and getting them up to speed if they were to embrace a new role and try to help in that cause?
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Ronan Kelly3:52
Well, over and above the fantastic training and certification programs that we have, where we've put a huge amount of effort into is designing the complexity out of the products. We have a whole range of new optical line terminal equipment that operators will deploy in their central office or in their street cabinets, and we've stripped out all of the complexity. They're a simple appliance. Some of the simple things that you needed baseline education for, like anti-static handling to stop you blowing up line cards when you install them in a chassis system, correct alignment when installing line cards in a chassis system because you might bend them, that's all gone now. This is a simple appliance. All you need to know how to do is use a screwdriver to deploy these solutions. They're automatically discovered by the management system, configurations are automatically pushed down to them. So we're really moving from field engineers to probably below a technician grade needed now to do that deployment. That really allows service providers to tap into a much larger labor pool to get these networks deployed and built.
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Interviewer4:56
ADTRAN's ease of deployment. When you have a huge mission of trying to connect every American, it needs to be easy, simple, and quick to deploy.
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Ronan Kelly5:05
Exactly. Simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency is core to everything we're doing.
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Interviewer5:08
I love it. Beautiful. Now, ADTRAN has a long history of innovation. When you come to this campus here, you look at the patent wall and you can just say wow, these are innovators, these are engineers. What are some of the most recent innovations you're most proud of that the world needs to know about?
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Ronan Kelly5:28
It's actually been an eight-year journey, but we really commercialized it about four years ago initially as being this transition towards open, disaggregated optical line terminal or OLT solutions. The openness has been the key to that. We've tried to deliberately move away from the sharp tactics that we see employed across the industry by different vendors of trying to lock operators in. Instead, ADTRAN opened up its portfolio so that our customers stay with us because they want to, not because they're locked into our solutions. That openness, the implementation of open hardware abstraction layers on all the hardware that we deploy, the partnership with software stacks like OpenSync within the industry, really give our customers an awful lot of choice. If they're not happy with how ADTRAN is performing, whether that's from an innovation point of view, a cost point of view, or a quality point of view, they're not tied to us. They can move very easily. So when you see the customers that come to ADTRAN, you see the 300 of them that are at the event here this week, they're here because they want to be, not because they have to be.
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Interviewer6:32
Awesome. Love it. Well, there you go, folks. Ronan Kelly, Ronan, you're a gentleman. Thank you so much for your time.
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Ronan Kelly6:38
My pleasure.