By Ralph W. Brown, Brown Wolf Consulting, LLC; Scott Caruso, CableLabs; Hunter Albright, Curve10
The coming convergence of broadband, energy, and transportation has the potential to transform all three industries in unexpected and powerful ways – with significant impact on CAPEX, OPEX, and value creation opportunities. However, the potential of this transformation cannot be fully realized without successful collaboration across these three industries. The purpose of this technical paper is to raise awareness of this coming convergence and to stimulate conversations across these industries to take advantage of what, to this point, may be nonobvious synergies.
In the United States, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) represents a once in a generation investment in infrastructure for these three sectors and a unique opportunity to speed this convergence by creating an opportunity to completely reimagine the country’s underlying infrastructure. Historically, each industry has developed its infrastructure independently. However, as broadband has been a key driver in the transformation of many industries, as they digitize and move to the cloud, rethinking shared infrastructure can change the capabilities that the three industries can bring to market. It is the increased connectivity, reliability, bandwidth, and security of broadband that is enabling innovation at scale across virtually all sectors, not only in the U.S., but globally. Most importantly, the Energy and Transportation sectors are already poised for massive disruption and transformation and, as we will show, broadband is and will be a key enabler for this.