Drew Lentz

Chief Technology Officer, WirelessNerd

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My Outlook for Broadband Communities Summit 2026: Is the Industry Looking Further Than the Build?

Drew Lentz · 2026-08-24

A technician on a residential rooftop adjusting a small fixed wireless antenna, with low houses and open sky spreading out behind.

I read the agenda for this week's Broadband Communities Summit in Houston, and it celebrates raising the money and building the networks while skipping the questions that decide whether any of it mattered.

Five things are missing or misshapen on that agenda: an industry grading its own homework with the same broken ruler, affordability , the last mile that has moved indoors, spectrum, and low-earth-orbit satellite. That matters because the people at this event are the ones that will be absolutely affected if public money moves away or goes towards satellite, and the households on the other end of those builds are the ones who find out whether coverage and connectivity are the same thing. I've worked on the digital divide in South Texas and on deploying connectivity for municipalities in low-income areas, and the agenda is packed with real wins. I still came away curious, and a little concerned, about what actually ties the event together.

It seems like the industry is finally grading its own homework. The problem is it's grading with the same ruler that was broken in the first place.

The ruler is broken

Day two turns into whether what was built actually works and who's checking on it. Here's the funding, you built it, you were supposed to hit these metrics, did you hit these metrics? That kicks off around 9:15 with the USDA talking about RUS compliance, in a session called "Built to Last or Built to Pass," and that day two panel asks, in its own bullet points, whether performance testing sample sizes actually reflect true network health, and what we're doing about it.

Which is the part that gets me, because field sampling and speed tiers and coverage maps are all the same things that have been broken for a while. To hear those recurring themes come up year after year makes me ask whether we're finally going to do something about it, or whether there will finally be traction on how all of this gets resolved. We'll find out.

The Summit has been around for over 20 years and it deals with broadband connectivity in communities and municipalities, and day one is about getting the money and building it, with voices from the states on funding milestones, public-private partnerships and a lot of private investment. We get to hear from people at Bastrop County, from Monahans, from the Texas Broadband Workforce Grant folks, and a lot of people will be talking about acquisitions and what the lay of the land looks like going forward, because there has been some cool movement in that space over the last year.

The affordability gap is missing

Underneath all the compliance language there's an uncomfortable thread running across both days, which is that the bottom-up stories are all on the agenda and all of them are fundraising stories:

Not one of those is a story about what actually changed in the household afterwards. There's a lot of back-patting going on where people are happy that they raised the money and happy that they could build the networks, but who's monitoring what that money did for the community?

The digital equity language is still there, it's just a matter of where it sits. On the keynote stage you've got Angela Siefer from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance on Wednesday, and the Cleveland model session talks about bridging Cleveland's digital divide. I hope those sessions talk about the affordability gap, because that continues to be the thing, at least in my community down in South Texas, where it's still the number one reason connectivity isn't happening and it's the fact that people can't afford it. When you get groups like SpaceX telling the FCC that no more subsidies are needed because coverage is everywhere and ubiquitous across the United States, that's an issue, because it may be ubiquitous, but it may not be affordable.

It's one thing to raise the money and build the network and make sure it's working and monitor and test it, but dude, a Ferrari is a great car. Not everybody can afford it, and I think we really need to look at that and make sure the affordability conversation comes up.

The last mile has moved indoors

The last mile used to be a term everybody used back in my younger years. Now that last mile has moved indoors: it's no longer, can we get it to the house, it's what happens once it's inside the home, or once it's inside the MDU or the apartment complex or the housing community. Where does the connectivity go from there?

That indoor last mile is a radio problem, which is why the near-silence about the radios matters. The word spectrum appears in the program only as a cable company's name. For a two-day broadband conference there's no spectrum policy, no CBRS, no 6 GHz, and nobody's talking about Wi-Fi 8. There's one radio session, with Ruckus and my buddies over at Cambium, but the technical side isn't front and center on the stage. That's a little crazy given what's happening right now with SpaceX and the rumors going back and forth, and given what's coming down from the FCC on spectrum auctions and who's going to take advantage of that.

LEO gets two bullet points

Satellite comes down to two bullet points on two panels: the rural panel Thursday at one o'clock on the role of satellite, fixed wireless access and other alternative technologies, and another one on disaster resilience. That's two sessions about the single most threatening technology to the people in that room, because it isn't only going to provide connectivity in rural areas and broadband across the United States, it's also going to affect all of the funding that all of these projects run on.

LEO as a technology appears zero times. The only time LEO is on the program is Leo Anderson, the CTO of Paul Bunyan Communications, on the esports panel. NRECA will be there, and NDIA will be there, so I hope questions pop up, because two bullet points is all satellite gets and I really hope to hear more people have something to say about that.

AI is OpEx, never a product

AI shows up only as OpEx and as load on the network. I don't see any conversations about it as a product: reducing tier one support, predicting failures, real-time monitoring, workforce readiness. There's a lot AI can do.

On the other side, there's a data center as broadband hub session about AI's fiber and energy demands, and Dr. Nicol Turner Lee from Brookings closes out day one. But nobody here is selling AI to subscribers, and that restraint is notable in itself, because there are so many sessions and conversations about AI everywhere else that I'm curious what this industry is actually saying about it.

So what am I hoping for in Houston?

The wireless conversation is more about business and finance than about technology and the application of technology, and it does make me wonder who the audience is. Being a nerd who walks into a conference that's all finance and management sometimes doesn't land right for me, but I'm always curious to see different and alternative perspectives when things like this pop up. There will be some great faces there, Terry Holmes and other buddies from back in the day, and hopefully I can talk tech with them.

This really seems like a chance for us to look back and see whether these networks have been built correctly, and how we're measuring what correct actually means, but also to address the elephant in the room, which is communications from space.

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