The Blog

The U.S. mobile market is notoriously ultra-competitive, and household names like Sprint aren't the only ones to have been squeezed out in recent years.

Since 2020, Verizon Wireless has snapped up regional players such as Chat Mobility, Bluegrass Cellular, Triangle Mobile, and Chariton Valley Communications.

Tellingly, all four operators were participants in the telecom giant’s “LTE in Rural America” program, which leased 700MHz of spectrum to regional players in areas where Verizon had no intention of deploying infrastructure. After going live in 2010, the project was completed in October 2015, when all 21 participants were confirmed to be operational.

At the program’s peak, operators collectively covered more than 2.7 million people across 169 rural counties in 15 states.

Despite Verizon’s low-key takeover spree, dozens of smaller players continue to thrive in the U.S. This week we take a deep dive into the regional cellular scene and uncover the cellcos serving rural America.

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Tom Leins

WAN managers had to scramble to accommodate massive changes when the world shut down during the pandemic. Offices transitioned to remote work and navigated brand-new traffic patterns.

Our guest on this week's podcast navigated the added challenge of running a network within the healthcare industry, where business needs were changing in real-time.

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Jayne Miller

We've discussed the ways in which the WAN is moving away from private networks and MPLS in favor of reliance on the public internet. Not to mention the costs and benefits of that evolution.

Although it's certainly always been the case that WAN managers must stay on top of internet performance and outages, this is increasingly crucial in the internet-first WAN era in which we find ourselves.

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Jayne Miller

We recently took a look at Ukrainian operators and their relative positions in the country’s telecom market.

As the Russian invasion continues, we turn our attention to the efforts of Ukrainian telcos, who are attempting to keep communications online under the most difficult circumstances.

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Pete Bell

Recent months have seen an unprecedented level of M&A activity across Asia’s mobile markets, with eye-catching deals in Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

Today we examine the players reshaping the Asian telecom landscape.

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Tom Leins

While the key SD-WAN transformation use case was built around network cost and resiliency, its focus is now shifting to security.

Enterprises have moved to more internet connectivity. Traffic patterns have moved away from on-premise data centers to neutral colo facilities or cloud service providers/hyperscalers. And over the past two years, edge access has moved out of the corporate site—to home and remote connections.

These forces changed how enterprises approach network security, and SD-WAN vendors have responded with new partnerships and feature sets.

This review looks at enterprise security trends and how SD-WAN vendors have adapted to accommodate security needs.

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Brianna Boudreau

Coevolve CTO Ciaran Roche is back on the pod. He's in the hot seat to discuss how middle-mile solutions are selected to solve real-world enterprise WAN issues.

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Jayne Miller

Unlike network services, SD-WAN is not a commodity, and pricing strategies are still in flux. But as the service matures, this is beginning to change.

Median price points have started to decline and the range in reported vendor prices has started to converge.

Let's unpack SD-WAN prices—starting with pricing models.

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Brianna Boudreau

When it comes to the cloud and digital transformation of the enterprise, it's always useful to come back to the fact that physical geography matters to our digital world.

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Jayne Miller