Hello readers!
Thanks for supporting Broadband World News in its various iterations over the past few years.
It's time for us to move our coverage from this specific site, but first, I'd like to take a quick look back and hopefully help you see why it makes sense to blend broadband tech coverage with fair reporting on broadband issues.
This site was first founded as UBB2020 and it borrowed its name from a concept put forth by Huawei, one of the site's first backers. Despite the unfortunate name, UBB2020 was founded with the lofty goal of covering the technology developments that would lead to widespread gigabit broadband connections worldwide.
The first written blog post for the site – that I could find, anyway – appeared on September 19, 2016, and it explored why anyone would even need a gigabit broadband connection. In 2018, the site's new editor (thankfully) renamed the publication and redoubled efforts to cover the technologies that underpin the gigabit broadband future.
In 2020, the pandemic hit while the site was smack in the middle of an editorial retrenching. The lockdowns, home-schooling and chaos that followed helped clarify what broadband issues BBWN needed to cover most. The debut of The Divide podcast in January 2021 was the first move in taking Broadband World News in a complementary new editorial direction and that coverage demands access to the larger Light Reading audience.
Now here we are in 2022, just a few weeks after BBWN's sixth anniversary, and I'm happy to announce that we've moved BBWN's newsletter, staff and editorial resources to Light Reading Broadband, giving our audience one place to get the industry's best broadband coverage.
Light Reading Broadband covers the political, technical and cultural shift surrounding broadband access and its importance to society. We'll report on the rise of smart cities, equitable broadband access, broadband mapping, policy, advanced and alternative broadband technologies and how service providers are expanding their reach. And, of course, we'll cover the digital divide, leading with The Divide podcast, whose 75th episode is in production as of this writing.
Meanwhile, Light Reading will complement that coverage with its usual focus on developing next-generation communications networks and what those networks can enable in terms of commercial services. For telcos, cable companies and cloud providers, we'll cover the people, technology and money powering the worldwide communications industry.
So, again, thanks for your support for the journey that UBB2020, Broadband World News and now Light Reading Broadband have taken thus far and we hope you're as excited as we are about where Light Reading's broadband coverage will go next.
We've ceased publishing new articles to this site, but we're leaving it up and leaving the archives intact for your reference. For all new coverage, including the latest episodes of The Divide podcast, please visit: https://www.lightreading.com/broadband.asp.
If you haven't already, please sign up for the Light Reading Broadband newsletter, which provides a weekly list of every Light Reading broadband-related story in one convenient email. You can sign up by visiting: https://www.lightreading.com/newsletter_signup.asp.
— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading
