The Cabling Podcast

Concert Technologies Discusses Active Project Management

Concert Technologies’ founder and CEO Dennis Mazaris, along with director of sales and marketing Zach Haverty, visit The Cabling Podcast to reflect on what has driven the company to complete 650,000 technology rollouts since its founding. Mazaris describes the company’s founding and evolution as a specialist in telecommunications project management. Haverty adds detail about the importance of actively managing each installation regardless of size or duration. The discussion takes several turns, combining lessons from the past with a vision of the future. Listen to this podcast episode to learn about the ingredients for success in ICT project management.

Data Center Cabling and More: Expert Insights from Mara Ervin

Mara Ervin, who recently founded Mara Jade Consulting, has spent decades serving the technology and business needs of data center operators and practitioners. From her roots in fiber-optic cabling to the formation of her multi-dimensional consultancy, Mara puts her experience and her connections to work solving data centers’ toughest problems. Listen to this episode to hear from Mara about the factors most affecting data center operation today, and what’s likely to have ripple effects into the future.

The Standards Explorer: A Conversation About This Valuable Resource

The Standards Explorer, available as a free resource from the TIA Fiber Optics Tech Consortium, is a valuable tool for anyone who plans, specifies, designs, installs, or manages fiber-optic networks. This conversation with the Standards Explorer's architect, Valerie Maguire, along with the TIA FOTC's Liz Goldsmith, dives into the tool, its history, and its uses for fiber-networking professionals.

IEEE Ethernet pioneers reflect on half century of technology, A.I. frontiers

For the new episode of The Cabling Podcast, CI&M sits down with IEEE-SA's George Zimmermann and John D'Ambrosia. (Full bios here.)

Here’s a timeline of topics George and John discuss on the podcast:

00:40 - George Zimmerman introduction.

2:09 - John D'Ambrosia introduction.

3:37 - Panel question one: Broadly speaking, over Ethernet technology's 50 years, how have IEEE standards worked to shape and guide the technology's adoption from it's inception up til present-day?

06:17 - Ethernet Alliance PoE Certification program co-pioneers make discoveries

06:40 - John: "We had to fill out the paperwork." Also: A PoE-enabled dog collar.

08:06 - The Marriage of Ethernet Applications and Technologies

09:49 - The Six Criteria for Standards Development

10:56 - How long can we talk before we talk about A.I.?

11:52 - The Plumbers of the Internet

13:22 - An Eight Lane Solution

17:10 - "A.I. comes with its own special requirements."

18:07 - What is the A.I. process?

21:47 - Hello, that's known as 'Ethernet'...

23:30 - Industrial automation, smart buildings and sensor applications: SPE technology update

27:27 - SPE: A Lot of Speculation

29:25 - Asking About Sustainability: How can IEEE standards address technology stakeholders' sustainability concerns and forthcoming ESG requirements? Is there a role for Ethernet in addressing sustainability? John: "Power comes into all of those conversations. You want to have something that will evolve to lower power." Notes on Energy Efficient Ethernet.

32:06 - Final notes: "Competition invites improvement."

Competitive advantages in data center and ICT fiber management

For the latest episode of the Cabling Podcast, CI&M sat down for a discussion with Mungree Singh, MBA, RCDD, CBRS-CPI, Systems Engineering Manager - West for global network infrastructure provider CommScope.

A technical expert in cabling and connectivity physical infrastructure for information communications and technology (ICT) and data center deployments, at work Singh has achieved noteworthy success in driving growth and exceeding organizational targets by leveraging her technology acumen and business wisdom in the market. As a manager, she has led cross-functional teams to a shared understanding in achieving business goals, and is conversational in Spanish.

Singh's podcast interview with CI&M probes the value proposition of fiber management via CommScope's flagship FiberGuide fiber cable management system technology, billed by the manufacturer as the industry's oldest and most comprehensive data center optical raceway system.

Read CI&M's article about the podcast with time-stamped discussion highlights and interview quotes.

IP security and access control focus with Alcatraz AI’s Tina D’Agostin

For this episode of The Cabling Podcast, senior editor Matt Vincent interviews Alcatraz AI CEO Tina D'Agostin to discuss the company's flagship "hardware as a service" platform incorporating its facial biometrics access control technology, the Rock.

The platform aims to transform building security by leveraging robust artificial intelligence and analytics capabilities. The company says the Rock enables building networks to make powerful decisions at "the edge," where an individual's face becomes the key security credential. During the podcast, the proprietary hardware technology is discussed by D'Agostin, previously an executive at Johnson Controls, in the context of the larger physical access control technology market for smart buildings.

In a recent article for CI&M's sibling publication, Smart Buildings Technology, D'Agostin noted:

"Almost all physical access control companies are now working to either create or integrate touchless authentication into their systems. Technology once seen as a 'nice-to-have' or complementary feature for a security system is now viewed as a 'must-have' in extraordinarily high demand. This is a technology that’s connected to everything from confirming access based on employment records, to serving as a way to permit or deny access based on vaccine requirements to enter a premise."

This discussion originally appeared in a recent edition of Endeavor Business Media's Smart Buildings Technology Podcast.

USGBC LEED expert talks ESG essentials for smart buildings

For this episode, we bring you a topically relevant recent interview from The Cabling Podcast's sibling in Endeavor Business Media, the Smart Buildings Technology Podcast. For the interview, senior editor Matt Vincent sits down with Tommy Linstroth, founder and CEO of Green Badger, a provider of a SaaS with comprehensive data analytics capabilities used to automate and easily report LEED compliance and ESG metrics for smart building construction and integration projects.

As stated in his biography page on the USGBC website: "Tommy Linstroth’s career has spanned the private, academic, and non-profit sectors in the Midwest, West and now East coast, where he is the Principal of Trident Sustainability Group – a triple bottom line consultancy firm and CEO of Green Badger [a provider of ESG LEED sustainability reporting software]."

"To date, Linstroth has personally been involved with over 60 projects achieving LEED certification, with another two dozen underway. These projects include the first building in the Southeast to be both LEED certified and in the National Register of Historic places, the first all-retail LEED shopping center in the nation, the first LEED McDonald’s restaurant, and Sustainable Fellwood, one of the largest green affordable housing developments – part of the LEED for ND pilot program and LEED for Homes program – in the nation."

"Green Badger is the direct output of his experience with LEED. Green Badger provides a mobile solution to LEED construction documentation and allows for easy management of construction waste, sustainable materials tracking, erosion and indoor air quality reporting, and managing low-VOC [volatile organic compounds] products – including a bar code scanner that gives real time VOC information."

The following re-posted interview seeks to pinpoint Linstroth' s perspective on a specific set of question related to matters of ESG, i.e. Environmental, Social and Governance, compliance. 

Questions included: For contractors and for property owners/managers, what does ESG really mean? How can gathering stats and data on ESG be used to inform change for different types of organizations? What are the most important ESG metrics, and how can they help propel positive outcomes? What is the value of tracking ESG metrics, in terms of asking probing questions that can lead companies to new processes, automations, use-cases, and efficiencies? And finally, what are your predictions for ESG developments in the smart buildings arena this year?

Peter Jones and Sam Johnson, Ethernet Alliance - Part 2

Earlier this month, Cabling Installation & Maintenance's Cabling Podcast sat down with Cisco's Peter Jones, Ethernet Alliance chair, and Intel's Sam Johnson, the consortium's High Speed Networking (HSN) subcommittee co-chair for a discussion of the latest industry trends and technology advancements emanating from the Ethernet Alliance (EA) -- of which there's been no shortage.

With all the high-speed fiber applications being developed, it's tempting to think that copper could eventually become a forgotten medium in the Ethernet landscape. From CI&M’s perspective, it looks like Power over Ethernet (PoE), and single pair applications might keep the market for copper cabling afloat for the near- to mid-term. CI&M chief editor and editorial director Patrick McLaughlin kicks off the questioning to ask if EA sees the case similarly.

Later in the podcast, the editors ask for a recap of the latest buzz heard within EA surrounding the expansion of Single Pair Ethernet for smart buildings and industrial sites. The discussion also takes time to go around the most recent iteration of EA's Ethernet technology roadmap, and inquires for a recap of in-progress Ethernet standards work for each segment.

On the High Speed Networking front, CI&M asks about major Ethernet cabling and connectivity upgrades that co-location, cloud, and hyperscale, as well as service provider data centers might be implementing this year, and probes for implications regarding deployed and imminent 800G and coherent terabit technologies for data center networks. Regarding HPC connectivity deployments, we find out during the course of the interview how perennial DAC and AOC technologies are co-existing, and much more.

Peter Jones and Sam Johnson, Ethernet Alliance - Part 1

Earlier this month, Cabling Installation & Maintenance's Cabling Podcast sat down with Cisco's Peter Jones, Ethernet Alliance chair, and Intel's Sam Johnson, the consortium's High Speed Networking (HSN) subcommittee co-chair for a discussion of the latest industry trends and technology advancements emanating from the Ethernet Alliance (EA) -- of which there's been no shortage.

Ethernet Chair since 2020, Peter Jones is a Distinguished Engineer in the Cisco Networking H/W team. As stated in his Ethernet Alliance biography, he works on system architecture and standards strategy across the company's networking hardware portfolio. While at Cisco, Jones has been a major contributor to the Catalyst switching product line, including the Catalyst 9000 series and the UADP ASIC family. He has been active in IEEE 802.3 for several years, mostly working on BASE-T projects. He was the initial chair of the Ethernet Alliance Single Pair Ethernet technical subcommittee. He was Chair of the NBASE-T Alliance from its inception until its merger with the Ethernet Alliance. His stated core focus is working on the evolution of technology to add value to physical infrastructure and make technology consumable.

EA HSN Subcommittee Co-Chair Sam Johnson is the manager of the Link Applications Engineering team within Intel’s Cloud Networking Group. As stated by his EA profile, Johnson started at Intel in 2010 with a focus on 10G Ethernet PHY debug and has built a career based on High Speed Serial Ethernet PHY and pluggable media behavior, configuration and interoperability. After working to architect and develop the infrastructure that controls the Ethernet hardware in Intel’s current generation of NCNG products and IP, he went on to build the LAE team to support the link and PHY layer in these same products. The team’s responsibilities now span the NCNG portfolio and range from multi-vendor interoperability testing to electrical conformance testing to delivering customized Ethernet solutions for customers. Johnson’s role is focused on defining new features and implementation details for link behavior in current and future NCNG products while supporting debug and interoperability testing.

2023 was always going to be a banner year for EA, given the association's concurrent 50th anniversary, but the recent announcement of a prestigious ACT Turing Award honoring Ethernet technology inventor Bob Metcalfe put a definite exclamation point on the celebration. Reflections upon Ethernet technology's many OFC 2023 event highlights, not least the Alliance's ground-breaking live interoperability demo, are contained in the podcast.

Gigawatt data center fiber with Quantum Loophole’s Josh Snowhorn

Josh Snowhorn is founder and CEO at Quantum Loophole, an operator of data center campuses in the gigawatt scale. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Snowhorn's key founding and executive positions include time at Terremark, Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Cincinnati Bell, and CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE). Snowhorn founded the Global Peering Forum, the annual meeting for the Internet interconnection and peering community, where he serves on the board of directors. He also serves on the advisory board of Telescent, a maker of automated data center interconnection machines. 

 Last August, Cabling Installation & Maintenance (CI&M) reported on the ground breaking of the QLoop, the 43-mile hyperscale fiber ring connecting Quantum Loophole's 2,100+ acre Quantum Frederick data center development site in Maryland to the Ashburn, Virginia connectivity ecosystem. To kick off the interview, CI&M senior editor Matt Vincent asked Snowhorn for an update on construction of data center and fiber conduit infrastructure at the sites from the perspective of half a year gone by, in terms of deployment and installation progress. 

Snowhorn said that Quantum Loophole is building the largest medium haul fiber backbone that’s ever been created. The QLoop network ring network ring offers capacity for more than 200,000 strands of fiber connecting to the Ashburn ecosystem in under one half millisecond Round Trip Time (RTT). "And we are bolstering that with some pretty amazing cross-connect capabilities," he added. "Each property will have access to conduits and thousands of strands of fiber directly into the QLoop system to enable seamless, private and secure connectivity for all of our campus-wide customers.”  

Snowhorn continued, "We have completed our south Potomac river boring, which was over 3000 ft., and it goes 91 feet below the bedrock of the Potomac. That was a huge, 26-in. HDPE sleeve that was pulled through, and then 34 two-inch ducts inside of that. That's been completed and approved and vaults have been put in place. Terrestrial construction has started with multiple crews working laying in the 34 ducts, buried deeply to accommodate the most extreme security standards."

Later in the podcast, Snowhorn further explains that the QLoop fiber ring interconnects "literally hundreds of sites, hundreds of data centers, but we don't actually touch those other data centers once we get into Loudon County."

He continues, "We cross the Potomac, which is insanely hard to do: I now know why nobody tries to do it, because it's that hard. It's just been nothing but a struggle to get it done, but we're doing it. I don't think anybody's going to try and do it again for a long time. Machines blowing up, costs, the approvals -- going 9 stories below the bedrock of the Potomac is insane. The costs are through the roof -- I cannot think of a single thing that was easy about what we've done. We drop down [and] have over 500 vaults on the 43-mile ring, and those vaults are designed to create a massive intersection of splice points, so that people can tie into the system. We're a wholesaler to the wholesalers, so our goal was not to go build throughout the entire Ashburn corridor and interconnect every building and be another competitive carrier. We wanted to be a support mechanism to create an expansion of that ecosystem."

Read the full article about the podcast at Cabling Installation & Maintenance.