The human-to-human connection transcends time. That thought struck me at a friend’s recent retirement. Life’s daily noise can mean long separations, but when reunited, it is like old times again. Often the bonds of those friendships are forged through the shared challenges of a work project or experience that, in the moment, was extremely stressful.
A Glimpse of the 2026 Innovation Demonstrations’ Backstory #
“The equipment is in town.” That was the good news. The bad news was that it was stuck in customs at the shipper’s location and would not be delivered until Tuesday. The good news was that a minivan was available for hire to pick up our cargo. The bad news is that by the time we got the equipment, it was almost 4 PM on Monday.
Fortunately, Lincoln Lavoie, the project manager for this year’s Broadband Forum Innovation Demonstrations, did a masterful job working with the rest of the team to ensure the seven demonstrations worked when the equipment finally arrived. Stay tuned for a wrap-up video with the real Lincoln Lavoie (and not the imaginary one in Jason Wall’s head) in the next issue of the Viodi View. In the meantime, watch this interview with Outsys’ Fabrizio Guidotti on the importance of open standards and software for driving broadband forward.
Thanks to the Broadband Forum, my employer, for supporting this newsletter. The content, views, and opinions expressed herein are not those of the Broadband Forum.
Hearing via Eyeglasses
Hearing loss can lead to a bigger loss: losing connection with other humans. Captify has a unique way to help people regain hearing by transcribing speech and projecting it onto their lightweight, 37-gram eyeglasses. The Captify founder provides an overview and motivation for the product, while this author reads along using the glasses.
Some Chirps and Short Thoughts
- The only sad part of the recent SCTE TechExpo was learning of the passing of Jim Farmer. Jim was a Cable TV engineering icon and a prince of a man. It was an honor to capture some of his career highlights in these 2013 interviews. I will always be thankful for the night he saved me from being shelterless in Las Vegas. More on that in a future issue.
- “Networks are living, breathing things,” said Mark Trudeau of Open Vault at the 2026 SCTE TechExpo. He was referring to the importance of having a baseline understanding of a network, applying continuous monitoring, and measuring performance over time to detect anomalies. For some reason, his comments took me back to the future, literally, to the era when the movie of that name was released. The memory was watching TV with the Suburban Cablevision team in Bob Ritchie’s (the original one, not Kid Rock) house and seeing fiber-optic modal noise. Every time the wind blew the fiber cable, white noise would appear on the TV screen. We had accidentally developed a fiber optic sensor. It took me decades to realize what we were viewing that evening. More on that someday.
- Back to the Friction – Following up on the “Chirps…” section of last month’s Viodi View, Ethan Ferguson makes a strong case that embracing struggle is more important than ever in today’s AI world. “Suffering, instead of something to be avoided at all costs, should be something embraced so that we may yet know what it feels like to be alive.”
The Korner – A Vulcan Mind Meld with Professor K.
What started as a joke inspired by a few words in a podcast led to the following article and somewhat disjointed, AI-generated video. The article and video start with a ridiculous idea for solving the “last 50 feet” of package delivery. It then evolves into the more serious discussion of how AI is really information compression. It then speculates that the Vulcan mind meld of Star Trek would eliminate the information loss inherent in human-to-human and human-to-AI communication. The article then speculates whether what is labeled as loss may actually be a feature and opportunity for unlocking knowledge and ideas.
Leave a Reply