From Chaos to Innovation, 2025’s Biggest Fiber Deployment Lessons.

Welcome to Bite Size Fiber Wrapped, our special end of the year episode where we take a step back, look at themes that shape 2025, and share some of the stories, surprises, and lessons learned from across the fiber and telecom world. I'm your host, Ellie Pulse, and joining me for this very merry episode are some of our favorite returning guests, or should I say fiber elves, who've been keeping us laughing, learning, and occasionally troubleshooting all year long. Stefan Schneider, our go-to operations expert and longtime friend of the podcast, here once again to unpack what really changed in network operations this year. Greg Ross, with more than 35 years of experience in network design, build and construction, and a deep understanding of what happens when real -world conditions meet ambitious deployment plans. James Roach, who has kept networks running through storms, outages, and everything in between, bringing the practical insight that only years in the field can provide. And Steven Bates, who's been working on the field for the future. So grab a cup of cocoa, settle in by the glow of your . and let's wrap up the year bite-sized fiber style Pilot's cost contextquele e.g. Gentlemen, welcome back and happy holidays. So before we get into the serious stuff, let's start with something festive, what's the Christmas chaos moment you've had on a project where everything went sideways, but somehow worked out? I'll jump in here because it takes me back to probably my second year in cable. Basically, we had contractors and they were doing a bunch of stuff wrong. Things went sideways from the get-go, right? So we got down to the wire where they told us if we did not get the work completed by December 31st, we were going to get thrown off the job. We were not going to get any more work. So for the month of December, I think me and the team worked probably 14 to 16 hour days right up through Christmas Eve. I was actually doing Christmas shopping at midnight at Walmart. Got it done and we got the rest of the work. So there was a bright side to it, but the month of December really sucked. Ellie, I don't have to go back that far. I can go back to last year. Last year, before I even started at IQG, I was working for a contractor still. I remember it vividly. We had a railroad crossing in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that we were promised that we were going to get before the end of the year, right around Christmas time, obviously. The construction guys built 1,500 homes on the other side of the railroad track and all we had to do was tie in across the railroad track and we would automatically get 1,500 homes and we could report our numbers and we could get good numbers for the rest of the year. So we were waiting and waiting and waiting and we finally got the railroad crossing permit the day before Christmas Eve. And we actually had crews out there stringing a 288 count over the railroad track and they was able to splice in on each side half a mile apart. So then we were able to actually turn up those 1,500 homes on Christmas Eve and we made our numbers for the 31st. That was last year. Nice. Yeah. It's always a little nerve wracking when someone says, oh yeah, it's supposed to go perfectly smooth. This is, this is going to work. Yeah. We waited 12 months for that permit to come across a railroad crossing, 12 months. So it was a nightmare. Wow. But it worked out. There you go. For some weird reason, December, it's the worst month ever when you're in telco product management or you're on wireless, right? Because everybody needs to make calls for Christmas and New Year's. So one time, many years ago, we had done a pre-massive network upgrade across all of our network to basically enable voice over 3G, right? So at the time you're doing voice on analog or 2G and 3G was just for data. We went in and said, no, we need to support this. We need to launch this as a product. This is going to be so good. So great. You can do all these things. And the people in engineering timed up the upgrade to basically be launched, tried and deployed by the 15th of December. Queue basically the 23rd and this thing's not working. No one can make calls. We're frantically having people work back to like revert to the old, you know, GSM calling gateway. So at least people could make calls during Christmas. And we pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Basically on December 23rd, 10.55 PM, it's basically, yeah, this works. This is not running. We have been basically told by our management that if this thing failed, forget about any new product enhancements on the next year. Because your abject failures, you should be launched into the sun on a rocket. How are you going to ruin people's Christmases? We thought that we're just going to divert traffic to about 30% of the network. We did 10% all work, 20% all work, 30% all work, 50% all worked. We ended up actually switching the entire network to voiceover 3G on December 23rd, just before Christmas happened. There you go. So mine's a little bit different. It's not necessarily project related, but I kind of think back to my days in the field. And I remember being on call for Christmas. So I was network maintenance. I'm on call and I literally end my on call Christmas morning at 730 in the morning. So you usually take seven days of being on call. I was called out for at least six hours a night, every night leading up until Christmas Eve. I got home Christmas morning, technically at 1am and tried to get some sleep, woke up about three or four because I couldn't sleep. Cause I'm like, okay, I know I'm getting called out. I know I'm getting called out. My daughter was three comes downstairs at 650 in the morning. And I'm like, okay, I got 40 minutes. This is going to work. I start taking stuff off. Everybody gets up. I start making breakfast at seven o'clock. My phone rings and my whole family just turns and looks at me and I answer the phone and it's dispatch telling me that the oncoming on call is taking it and have a Merry Christmas. And he just wanted us to call you to give you that last moment of fear in the holidays. So I was actually off call, but it was that moment where it's like, I almost killed him, but I appreciated the, the fact that they called me and I was actually able to enjoy my Christmas morning. That's funny. Well, that's nice. Then shout out to your colleague for taking that over. What has been your, wow, we've come a long way moment this year? You know, I think for me, it's, it's kind of been the past couple of weeks realizing that I'm coming up on being here a year and realizing that I'm in a place now where with the team that I'm on and the people that I work with, it's, it's knowing that who to call and you're starting to get really good responses outside of Stefan. Um, but no, I think it's one of those things where you just kind of sit back and go, wow, I've been here a year. It doesn't feel like a year. And the team that I'm surrounded with and the people that I'm working with are actually helping me get things done and do my job better. And when I started with this company, it was such a new position to me. It's kind of that look at how, you know, we've developed the customer success team over this past year. Well, I'll, I'll segue into, uh, what I think my wow moment is. I remember starting here at IQ geo and I was talking about if we could do a certain thing with telephone poles and network manager and help these companies and telco do make ready, do poll analysis, do poll audits and stuff like that. And over the last, I don't know, over the last 60 days, it's really came a long way. I mean, it's really matured into something that we're, we're not a hundred percent there, but I feel that we're about 80% there. And we actually signed our first paid POC with one of our biggest customers. And now we're starting to set up instances for other customers and do demos with the poll agent. That's really came a long way. And I thought it would take more than 10 or 11 months to do that. It's been really, really successful so far. Yeah. It's great to see how much we've grown over the last year. My moment kind of aligns with that a little bit. And I think it's just to see how much the products have progressed in the last year, probably in Stefan, argue with me, tell me I'm wrong, but probably as much within the last 12 months as in prior two to three years, there's been that level of growth, uh, in the products. I'm not going to argue with you. I feel like, um, I work insane hours and I'm constantly plugged in doing a bunch of stuff and yeah, it's a, it's good to see that all that's actually like manifesting itself into, into things. And our customers seem to be happier with the direction that we're, that we're going. It's exciting to basically see what you've conceived and all the like effort that you put into like motivating the team is actually manifesting itself in the real world. You're my human JIRA boards. That's a first I've never been referred to as a human JIRA board before. Thanks. Yeah. You know, such could be worse. Which podcast topic this year has sparked the biggest aha moment for you all? I think for me, it's probably all the talk about paper and permitting. Yeah. I would probably just say the progression away from paper to a much more digital format, still a long way to go. There's still a lot of, uh, a lot of old cable dogs and telco dogs out there that are going to push back on that. But I think the industry as a whole starting to make a good progression in that area. Yeah. I agree with it. Going to just an all digital format would be, uh, that would be very, very good for everybody. You know, it could help the, the construction guys could learn to work off of that and get past that. Just like Steve said, you know, get past that old mantra of needing construction prints and stuff like that. Then we could really turn the corner with this. I think that's, uh, that's really good to look forward to. I think. Yeah. I think with the kind of the adoption of AI to help improve that digital format, I'm seeing a lot of conversation around how to transition from paper into a digital format and what that looks like for different levels of the business, whether that's someone using their phone for something, a computer for something else, and even an iPad, depending on your role, and level of need for information at your fingertips. I think that is that kind of conversation is really going to be a good one as we start to go into 2026 of how that evolves. I think for me, when we were doing the break, fix podcast, it kind of blew my mind as we were talking how much data we have about the state and the reality of network and how little of it gets used to help with actual operational processes outside of like, Oh, here's the thing in the map. Having that conversation sparked a lot of thoughts about like, huh, we really don't grab that data and like mash it up with other data and think more predictably about what we can do with the data we own and the data of the other systems. And we've had some conversations afterwards where we've touched on the subject, but I don't think that I would have started having those conversations if it hadn't been for wonderful company here, bringing up that topic to my attention. I think to add on to that, Stefan, I think we're able to engage with customers more and build real life use cases to where we can start to learn more about what data is needed and when. Yeah. Whether it's ticketing or outage response, anything like that. So it's still that learning process of where we can apply it. Agreed. What technology do you think made the biggest impact this year? I would say the application of AI related to photos and things of that nature. We're seeing a lot of businesses revisiting roles like quality assurance and quality control using photographs instead of people with AI to kind of help take that to the next level. So it doesn't impact their bottom line as much, but it gives them a better sense of building a quality network. I think that's been really key. I think it's got a long way to go still, but the sparks of conversation that have happened around that, I think have been really huge. And even old cable dogs, I've sat with a few of them who are now in the fiber only business and going, yep, we need that. And I think it's just because of a lot of it has to do with the lack of quality fiber splicers. So are you saying you're an old cable dog that needed to learn new tricks or? Pretty much. Okay. Pretty much. I can be connected. I kind of thought the same way, but then I'll segue back into that PoE agent that we're developing. Like James said earlier, just do it in a computer using AI with all the points of attachment on the telephone poles instead of sending costly guys out there to do it in the field. We don't really need to do that. We're experimenting with the images that we get from the different years. Every 12 to 18 months when a new picture comes out, we can analyze that and see if anybody, for example, has a test illegally to a pole and then we can track it like that using AI to do that. And the providers can take advantage of that instead of going out in the field and taking pictures that way. I would say adding to computer vision, because we've been doing work on this for some of our customers, the prevalence of field sensors. It's actually been pretty interesting to see as someone who came from wireless and IoT for many years and kept hearing from people that you'll never put sensors anywhere because they're expensive and they're this and they're that. Seeing how much people have started putting sensors on cabinets, putting sensors on little stakes, adding real-time kinematics to process of capturing as builds and stuff like that. It's been pretty dramatic in terms of how much it's changed the quality of documentation in the field. And then on top of that, on the analytics side, I think we had a bit of the opposite moment. We did a lot of machine learning and AI 10, 15 years ago, and we kind of squeezed as much juice as we could out of that in that realm. Has been seeing some of that big data frameworks actually making their way to the geospatial and system of record realm. Very early days. Not many people are playing with that, but it is potentially going to be alongside computer vision pre-revolutionary because it's not just getting the right things captured and documenting reality, but also being able to much more precisely identify where things that may not be good at telling you how they're performing, how they're performing, and combining those two, you end up with a pretty good first step to network autonomy. Where do you think we'll be with that in another year, if you could estimate? That's a good question. If I keep my promises to Steven and he's not paying me for this, I mean, just deposit your envelope and the secret location. We've been developing constantly and delivering constantly for the last year and we've gotten into a really good cadence where three to six months, we have something that's good value out there. So I think that we're going to be pretty good at taking data and contextualizing it and reporting it for next year. We're going to keep improving with computer vision and identifying other use cases for auditing and more in-depth modeling or capturing of things in the field. And I think on the combined version of that, we're going to start seeing some strides for us this year for automating the process of taking those two extremes into something that autonomously can improve the quality of data in your network or autonomously can produce some good results. Stefan, if you don't deliver it, Steve told me I get to be your secret Santa. Well, you see what kind of sweaters I get. So, you know, I'm looking for that for next year. Okay. What other trends or technologies are you all most excited about for next year? I can speak on that one. It's been thrown out there in the state of North Carolina that we're going to try to develop a permitting process for like bead money and RDOF money and the real rule builds of North Carolina and other states to where we can do the permitting in IQGO. And then like we spoke about earlier, you know, get construction guys to use digital copies instead of paper copies. We're going to try the same approach and in North Carolina in these real rule areas where some people don't even have permitting agencies in these small towns and stuff like that. So we're going to kind of treat get like an 811 locate system, right? So we're going to draw the permit polygons and network manager. It doesn't have to be anything fancy and, you know, and then we're going to present that to all these different municipalities and see if they will accept them wholeheartedly. Cause typically everybody knows when you do permitting, this agency wants that this agency wants that and so on and so forth. If we could get like a statewide acceptance of a permit electronically like that, instead of sending in paper or shape files or anything, you know, GIS related data and stuff like that, we could get them to accept that. That's what we're going to try to shoot for, to help these providers get permitting for the bead money that's out there for them to build in the rural areas. I'm starting to see a lot of push toward, especially with us creating kind of that digital twin of the network, being able to standardize things such as permitting documents and construction documents. Cause they're, they vary so much right now between business to business. It's really an opportunity to try to set some sort of standard. Nothing's going to be perfect or nothing's going to be exact so that we can start to improve communication with municipalities, with local governments, city governments, um, even federal governments, as they start to build more infrastructure. I know that a lot of the time around permitting is because everything is so different. So hopefully we can start to build some sort of standardization. And I think there's a lot of businesses and partners we have that are kind of helping to do that using our tool as the base. Oh yeah. I'm happy to see the bead money starting to go again. I think we had some pretty lofty goals for this year and they didn't happen because that all got retracted and, uh, revisited, but the awards that are starting to get handed out, I think that's going to be a something that we should be able to capitalize on next year. That's actually a good call. I think the flow of money is good. It's definitely moving people at work kind of like on a holding pattern for a while. There are lots of little bits and pieces of technology that are super exciting. I think one thing that maybe it's going to be more relevant in the North American market than say, for example, other markets, it's the fact that overbuilders are going to have to operationalize or build, right? So if you're an overbuilder and you're a small company with a small footprint, right? You're not going to go in and go buy a massive OSS or BSS system, right? You're going to go for things that are more right-sized, that are more geared towards wholesale. And that's where I see a lot of exciting things happening for customers and for us, because it's a, it's a more competitive market where wholesalers are going to be able to effectively actually wholesale their networks to other carriers and operate autonomously without having to build themselves into large, into larger telcos. With that is going to come a ton of automation. So where I see the exciting technologies is that we have been treating automation as a resource replacer for a long time, and that has not really worked out the way that people thought it was going to work out. You can't just take people out and replace it with an algorithm and expect the same results. Algorithms don't know how to react to calls on Christmas day at 7.30 PM, but we're seeing more technologies around agents that are used to complement and enhance the workforce. And that part is really, really exciting because, you know, we've all built networks and sometimes you feel like you're building a castle with a toothpick and getting some digital help. It's well received. All right. Well, thank you guys for answering all the serious questions. Now some fun ones. If our Bite Size Fiber podcast had a holiday party, who's DJing and who's still talking about data accuracy? Stefan is talking about data accuracy and Steve is DJing. I think you have that backwards, Kyle. I think you have that backwards, yeah, exactly. No, you know what? Steven would be an actually great DJ. That said, it's all the hits from the 70s, you know, back when he was in his prime. At the 80s. I am a true child of the 80s. All right. What is your bah humbug moment from this year in telecom? Every time I have to jump on a call with James. Oh, sorry. Did I say? All right. Well, on a more positive note, what is one word you all hope defines 2026? Growth. Oh, yeah. I was going to say prosperity. I hope to find realization. Good luck with that. I want to say thank you, all of you, for a wonderful year of, you know, podcasts, good stories, great laughs, comedy, drama. You've helped make this year very, very good. So thank you. Yeah, thanks for going on the podcast. I can't believe how fast the year has gone. And that's a wrap. Literally, from all of us at Bite Size Fiber, thank you for listening, laughing, and learning with us this year. Have a wonderful holiday season, and we'll see you next year right here on Bite Size Fiber. Happy holidays. See you later. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.