While Corning is continually investing in fiber and cable innovations to decrease cost and speed up installations, the company knows it doesn’t have all the answers. Rural carriers have good ideas to improve the fiber deployment process. If you’re willing to work with Corning, they’d like to speak with you.
“We’re energized by the unprecedented investment in the works to bring broadband to our rural communities,” said Mike Bell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Corning Optical Communications. “We're applying our best innovative thinking to address the real and pervasive challenges with rural deployments. We see tremendous opportunity to deploy rural networks faster, cheaper, and with less labor.”
Turning existing business models requires fresh eyes and new ideas, looking at all parts of current solutions for improvements.
“Will Rogers said, ‘Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.’,” Bell said. “If you're an open-minded and entrepreneurial provider willing to innovate alongside of us we want to work with you. And I'm serious when I say get in touch with us. Together we can bring life to an idea that could result in a completely new ecosystem.”
Corning’s commitment goes far beyond innovating with hardware and businesses but into education as well, illustrated by the company’s recent partnership with North Carolina A&T State University, the national’s largest historic Black college. The five-year agreement will provide $5.5 million in scholarships, including STEM, to build tomorrow’s workforce.
“We believe to be relevant, we need to look like the communities in which we serve and operate,” Bell said. “We want to tap into every single pool that we have so that we get the best and brightest talent to help us move to the next page.”
With $65 billion in broadband funding allocated and $42.5 billion dedicated to new infrastructure, Corning believes as many as 40 million U.S. homes will be connected in the next few years.
“To me, the excitement around this growth is reminiscent of those early days of fiber to the home,” Bell stated. “Except today it's fiber to the everything. With connectivity increasingly central to the way we live, it's no surprise that access to broadband is coming to be seen as a fundamental human right. At Corning, we believe bringing more connections to more people in more places is not simply good business. It's expanding the bandwidth of human potential.”
