Leading an $80b Telco Project with Tony Speller, SVP at Comcast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Tony Speller, Senior Vice President of Comcast, about the inner workings of their massive $80 billion project to build the nation's largest networks. Thank you to US Cloud for being our podcast takeover for this quarter. To learn more about how you can save on Microsoft support, listen to the end of the episode or go to uscloud.com today. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) When I saw this article come across about this $80 billion project that you're a part of at Comcast, I said, I have to talk with Tony. What is that project? What are you guys doing over there?

(Tony Speller at 00:00:43) Yeah, we have a lot going on in this $80 billion project. I'll start with the upgrades that we're doing to our network. You know, we're building out our network with FDX. We started that build out over the last couple of years here, just constantly going through the footprint, upgrading all of our technology. But we're also upgrading our network facilities as well. You know, you just mentioned about the amount of storms and activities that come through. We have to build a network so we got resiliency there and redundancy to be able to keep our network running even during the toughest times. But, you know, really sum it up, we're upgrading the network, give our customers more bandwidth, blazing speeds, hardening the infrastructure out there around resiliency. And so those are really the big things that are happening.

(Tony Speller at 00:01:50) And then, of course, there's a lot of network expansion that's happening too. You've heard about that where we're building out into the rural areas, some of the more unserved areas and getting those homes connected with broadband.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Nice. And then you've been at Comcast for more than a decade, right?

(Tony Speller at 00:02:10) Yes, I have. I've been at Comcast a long time. I started in this business as a frontline cable installer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) So like going into houses, installing the cable?

(Tony Speller at 00:02:22) Yeah, going into the homes, installing the cable, crawling underneath homes, pulling cables, going up the poles. You know, I've done it all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Oh, that's so cool. And so from twelve years, you started installing cable, and now you're like Senior Vice President of Operations and Engineering.

(Tony Speller at 00:02:42) Yeah. And it's, Joel, it's been a journey, you know, from being that frontline technician working on homes. You know, it was a journey over the years from there to a frontline supervisor and into a manager and, you know, constantly moving around in the company to get to where I am today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) Oh, is Comcast slowing down or speeding up?

(Tony Speller at 00:03:11) Oh my goodness. I would say we're speeding up right now. You know, I don't think there's a day that I walk in here where I'm bored or there isn't something new that the company is doing. This is a company that's constantly every day, one, looking to figure out how do we keep staying on top from a customer experience, but also from a technology standpoint, just really, really pushing every day to refine our technology, make it better and better.

(Tony Speller at 00:03:41) And the thing that I appreciate about Comcast is that we're constantly thinking about not just what we're doing today, but thinking about what do we think customers are gonna need, you know, years from now. And because it matters. What we do today matters in terms of how we win tomorrow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:01) So one of the things I was very curious about is what your role is in this $80 billion project with Comcast.

(Tony Speller at 00:04:09) So my role in the $80 billion project is the deployment and build out of our network, because part of my responsibility as the lead of Technical Operations Engineering is to deploy new technology solutions into our network. And so part of that has been deploying products or technologies like our FDX, DOCSIS 4 product, adding more bandwidth to our network to be able to give our customers symmetrical speeds. We've also been putting a lot of money into what I call the resiliency of our network, and that is making sure things like our core network, our facilities—we call them our headends and data centers—that we have redundancy into those locations and that those locations are resilient for storms and hurricanes impact. And then also we spent a lot of money just building out our network into the rural areas as well, expanding our network so that we can provide broadband to the unserved areas as well. And so I would say that, you know, my role in this has been sort of three-dimensional: resiliency, expansion of the network, but also increasing bandwidth capabilities so we can give our customers faster speeds for the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:36) That's amazing. Do you have any hard numbers of what the improvements have been?

(Tony Speller at 00:05:42) Oh my goodness. Yeah, we've had some pretty significant improvements. You know, I'll go back to times like the hurricane, like some of the most recent hurricanes we've had in Florida, and I look at the turnaround time in these big hurricanes like Ian, where we were able to turn around the recovery in those hurricanes and, you know, restoring the entire network in about sixty to ninety days. And the reason why we're able to do that is because the network held up materially during these events because we were able to build more resiliency into our data centers and hubs where we didn't lose those sites, and it became more of just, hard building or putting fiber and coax back up on the poles after the storms were done.

(Tony Speller at 00:06:41) And so I would say, you know, if you look back years ago, something of that size, it could have taken us almost six months, you know, maybe even a year to get fully recovered, and we're able to recover in, you know, somewhere in the ballpark of about ninety days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:58) Hurry up. I need my Netflix.

(Tony Speller at 00:07:00) You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:02) Yeah. People love the internet. I've seen that you guys are doing stuff across the board. But one area that I was curious about that just kind of popped into my head is how much has gaming changed? So I grew up—I think when I was—I'm 37. I think I was 12 or 13 when Xbox Live came out. But from then till now, gaming has just exploded. Do you see a lot of that on your networks?

(Tony Speller at 00:07:28) Yeah, we see a lot of—I would say the two things that we really see on the network is gaming, and then it's also video streaming. Those are the two things that I think has really changed the game because you think back years ago or, you know, coming up as a kid. You know, we weren't even talking about video streaming.

(Tony Speller at 00:07:49) And then when we were talking about gaming, we were talking about a game that was typically not connected to the network, and we're just playing a more software-based type game. Now we got gaming where people are competing with each other in different countries around the world, different states. And so gaming is definitely occupying, obviously, more bandwidth. And, you know, those are some of the reasons why we're doing things like the ultra low latency, because, you know, I look at gaming, you know, things like gaming and video streaming. Those are an experience, because I kind of put them in different buckets.

(Tony Speller at 00:08:33) You got speed, but then you also have the experience side of it. I think we've all, Joel, been on the phone with somebody or on a football game where there's a football game that's going and you say, "Touchdown," and the other person says, "Well, what are you talking about?" And then you hear twenty seconds later, they go, "Oh, it just scored the touchdown." And, you know, that's the latency that they're seeing across the network. And that's the piece that's really gonna be important for the future because if you're gaming, you know, and you're trying to play a game, you know, latency of just like a few more milliseconds of latency is gonna determine whether you win or lose the game. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) Oh, I know. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about that. I saw—when I was preparing for the interview, I was reading past releases. I saw something in March, an announcement saying that there was upgrades for 20 million Xfinity customers at no additional cost. How did you guys do that? Why didn't you just raise the bill?

(Tony Speller at 00:09:34) Yeah. And so one of the things, Joel, we've been trying to do is to continue to give our customers more value, continue to give them more speed. And this has a lot to do with what you and I just talked about, the build out of the network. When you say, "Hey, Tony, what have you been doing with that $80 billion?" A big piece of that is continuing to add bandwidth to our network so we can continue to increase the speeds. And so in this next round, we increased our speeds to millions of customers across the Comcast footprint here. And we've done that pretty consistently over the years. I think we have a proven track record of just continue to increase the speeds and not to increase the rates as we're doing those speeds. But that's been a huge value add for our customers because that's one of the things, Joel, that we see is that customers continue to want more and more broadband.

(Tony Speller at 00:10:33) That's the one thing that's super important to customers, staying connected. And doing a rollout of that massive scale, you know, really takes some planning to be able to do that because, I mean, we had to be planning for something like that two, three years ago to be able to take on that much incremental bandwidth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:55) Yeah. You guys are doing all sorts of interesting things. I talked with Justin. Shout out to Justin. But I think we made a joke or something like a week or two ago about you guys having a mobile service. And he's like, "Oh, we do." And I was like, "You guys have a phone service?" I don't think many people know about that. Are you involved in that at all?

(Tony Speller at 00:11:12) Yeah. The mobile service, technically, I'm not involved with the mobile service, but, you know, clearly it's something that I'm part of, I clearly promote, you know, Xfinity Mobile. You know, we have a great mobile product. We have a great mobile product which is a great add-on for our broadband customers, for any of our customers and our broadband customers. You know, I think that just helps us to be able to continue to compete better and to be able to give our customers sort of the product convergence that they want between their data product and their mobile product and having their mobile product, you know, essentially become part of the portfolio and being able to utilize our Wi-Fi even greater.

(Tony Speller at 00:12:06) And so, yeah, we're super excited about mobile. We're kind of in the early stages of mobile, but, you know, looking forward to seeing mobile grow over the next several years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:17) Yeah. Well, now people know. Ultra low lag technology. I want to talk a little bit more about that. I'm always curious how big companies work together. I saw that you did a partnership with Meta and NVIDIA and Valve to make the internet experience for gaming even better. Do you actually go hang out with these executives, and are you involved with that directly?

(Tony Speller at 00:12:41) You know, it's not me directly, but there are some folks in my company, you know, like Elad Nafshi. He's a Chief Technology Officer for the company. Yeah, we partner with them. You know, we meet with them. We sit down and try to determine how do we best support each other because, you know, I think the goal is—I think we're all trying to achieve the same goal, right? And a lot of the customers that they're speaking to are the same customers that we're speaking to, so we want to make it a really great experience. And so, yeah, we have a great partnership.

(Tony Speller at 00:13:34) In that new partnership, basically what's happening is that, you know, they're producing content, and that content is basically identified over the network. We have some new technology, what I call our virtual vCMTS—our virtual vCMTS, which is a more software-defined cable modem terminal, which was invented and created by Comcast, also has AI capabilities. But that technology, along with software that we put on our modems, it allows us to be able to take some of this content, like gaming content, what I call real-time content, and be able to tag that content and be able to do what I call dual queuing and be able to optimize the performance of that particular content. So the customers get less latency, and they end up with what I would call, you know, a blazing fast, low latency experience across the network. This is probably one of the most, you know, coolest things that we've done, and this is one of the coolest technologies we've come out with recently.

(Tony Speller at 00:14:42) And this will be something that'll continue to scale. We just recently started to deploy on this with some of our partners here, and I think you'll continue to see that grow and grow and grow, particularly as gaming and video streaming continues to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) Oh, yeah. Yeah. The thing that caught my eye in the article is that reduces latency to faster than the blink of an eye. And I was like, all right, you know, if they're my type of people, there's some engineer over at Comcast that knows the speed of an eye blink.

(Tony Speller at 00:15:13) Yeah. We're talking about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) A millisecond. Yeah. Yep. Yep. He's like, "We could do it. That's what we got to hit. That's the goal we have to hit." Let's get it down below an eye blink.

(Tony Speller at 00:15:23) Yeah. We want to get it out to—you know, we're talking like milliseconds now. Yeah. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) Yeah. Your next one's gonna be like a neuron firing, right?

(Tony Speller at 00:15:37) That's right. I don't know the speeds, but I would bet money that a neuron fires faster than an eye blinks. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) Oh, I would say so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) So do you currently game? I mean, I gamed before I had kids. Now I don't have any free time anymore. But do you currently have time to game?

(Tony Speller at 00:15:50) You know what? I am not a gamer, but I have a son who is, I would say, he has been gaming for many years. And, you know, that's the one thing—you can best believe he's a Comcast customer, and he'll call me up on a regular basis. And, you know, he'll say, "Hey, Dad."

(Tony Speller at 00:16:14) "I'm gaming right now, and I'm going against someone, wherever they might be in another state." And believe me, he's one that holds me, that keeps me true to the speeds of the network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) If you were my dad, I'd call you up, be like, "Hey. I need you to throttle this player in North Carolina. Just throttle him down, you know."

(Tony Speller at 00:16:37) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) That'd be fun. So, okay, AI, hot topic. Everybody's discussing it. Have you personally had hands-on, like, any project where there was at least one benefit added to the project that was a large language model AI type benefit?

(Tony Speller at 00:16:54) Yeah, we've been working on AI for some time in the company, you know, for many years now. And now we're seeing it in our tools. It's coming into our products. It's coming into the customer experience fold.

(Tony Speller at 00:17:11) And so I can give you a really good example. When I talked about, like, for example, the hurricane in terms of some of the faster recoveries we had there, one of those reasons is because we do have some AI-driven tools. And with those AI-driven tools, I've been fortunate to be able to work closely with a number of my partners up in HQ because they, up in our corporate headquarters, include us in a lot of the decision-making, in the development of these tools, because they want to make sure that whatever we build is actually going to work when we hit the ground and going to satisfy the needs of the field. A good example of one is that we have a new fiber telemetry tool. What it does is—it's an AI tool—it puts a telemetry across a fiber network.

(Tony Speller at 00:18:06) And during the last hurricane, what happened is we got cut in multiple places across the network. But I was able to run this tool, and it was able to tell me almost with pinpoint precision that you have a break at Fifth and Twenty-First Avenue. It would show me in the network where these breaks were at. And so as the storm was clearing up, I already knew where my fiber breaks were, and I could send people out to start working those repairs, or I could move fibers or roll fibers to get services back up and running. But it was just so fascinating because in the old days, Joel, what would have happened after the storm, we'd have been driving out there, putting up light meters, determining we don't have light, and we'd have been driving up and down the highways until we could find the breaks.

(Tony Speller at 00:18:58) I could run those—I could have someone from my network center actually push a button and run them, and they came back and say, you got twenty breaks, and here's where they're at. We need to get people headed out there. And so all those things, when I talked about the recovery, those are the things that help. I can tell you about another cool one that we launched too.

(Tony Speller at 00:19:18) We launched this one around commercial power because, you know, as you go into these storms and you start to lose power in different places, poles down, et cetera, you kind of got people running around. You're trying to figure out where to send them to best utilize their time. This new tool is AI-driven also. It looks out into the network, and it actually makes a determination. It'll tell you which ones have power issues, which ones we need to roll a technician to.

(Tony Speller at 00:19:47) And so this cool technology is taking telemetry and AI—what I call pattern detection—and it's making a determination exactly which ones we need to get a technician out, and the information is, like, super accurate. And so it's making us a lot more productive and a lot more efficient to be able to turn around the customer outages because now you've got people where the outage actually is, where you can actually do something, versus somebody running around just looking. And so the AI has really taken its toll, you know, and become very real in our company, and I'm seeing the benefits of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) Nice. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I love when I hear companies building internal tools that are making their products and services better. That's a good sign for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) Have you seen it roll out at all in support? I'm noticing that as a consumer, as I go about my everyday life, there is a huge spectrum from listening to the 1980s hold music and them not knowing anything about my account to me calling, an instant answer, and they'll be like, "Oh, I saw you had trouble with this specific thing on your account. Do you need me to go ahead and—" And I was like, "What? How do you know all this?" Are you guys—are you involved with the support at all at Comcast, and are they implementing any types of AI technology?

(Tony Speller at 00:21:14) Yeah. There's a lot of AI technology that has taken place on the support side to be able to support the customers, to be able to help with account management, to be able to serve a customer faster and more accurate, and particularly around troubleshooting too, when people call in and a customer is saying, "Hey, my modem's out," you know, being able to utilize technology to be able to quickly identify what's the customer issue to be able to solve it quicker. And so I'm not as involved on the customer side of that, but I am certainly very informed that we're putting quite a bit of effort there to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) In your day-to-day, like, what's the two or three things that you spend the most time on?

(Tony Speller at 00:22:13) I spend a lot of time—well, it's probably twofold, right? Because, you know, you're running an operation this size. We've got a huge base of technicians that are out servicing customers.

(Tony Speller at 00:22:27) So there's a big part of our time spent around capacity management in terms of making sure that we've got the right technician in the right place at the right time. There's quite a bit of time spent around network management, right? Because I like to split my day. You know, hopefully, it's less demand and more—I could spend more time planning than on the demand side.

(Tony Speller at 00:22:54) But when you're running a network this size, you're going to have some demand as well. And so I would say the two parts of what I spend a lot of my time on is really service delivery, making sure that we're servicing our customers, right tech, right place. The same thing on the network side, making sure we've got our network techs out in the right places and really doing a lot of preventive work, because we start off the day first thing in the morning, every morning, going through the game plan for the day. What are the key areas of focus in terms of preventive that we're going to focus on? And then, obviously, we're going to get some demand that's going to come through because just the sheer amount of storms and things that we manage on a day-to-day.

(Tony Speller at 00:23:39) But I would tell you those are the two things—this network is really network planning and capacity planning. But it is also, we're spending that time planning and forecasting for the upcoming months ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) Oh, nice. And actually I watched a video of you talking about an outage that you had during the Super Bowl. Tell me about that.

(Tony Speller at 00:24:05) Yeah, this was an outage where, the one I think you're talking about where someone intentionally cut the fiber during the Super Bowl. And this is where that technology that I was talking about a few minutes ago actually turned that event around pretty quickly, because as this individual cut the fiber, we were able to quickly run this fiber telemetry and see exactly where the fiber break was and get people out there and be able to turn it around. But I think in the case of the one that you're talking about here, the individual cut the fiber, actually turned around, and they got his license plates. And, you know, they got his license plate, and I think he was ultimately arrested in a few minutes for disrupting the fiber network.

(Tony Speller at 00:24:59) But the great news in that scenario, Joel, we were able to turn—the teams out there in that market were able to turn that fiber break around really, really fast, and it's because of the new technology and telemetry they were able to put on the network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Yeah. I mean, that's property damage. It is. That's not good. Fiber sounds expensive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:22) I don't want to cut it.

(Tony Speller at 00:25:24) No. And it takes quite a bit of work to repair it too, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) Yeah. Yeah. He cuts it, and he just gets a bill for $80 billion. That's right. So in the theme of Super Bowl, I also had some questions for you about Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) What did you guys do with Comcast, the Super Bowl, and Dolby? How did that all come together?

(Tony Speller at 00:25:53) Yeah, that was a great partnership between, you know, Comcast and Dolby Vision to be able to provide our customers with this enhanced 4K technology here. That was pretty amazing to be able to do that, and also having a network that can support that, the amount of bandwidth that it would take to be able to deliver something like that. I would tell you the Super Bowl, that Super Bowl was our Super Bowl too. I look at the Super Bowl as sort of my Super Bowl too, because that's like peak utilization across the network.

(Tony Speller at 00:26:35) And if there's one—this is sort of like that one time of the year where we know the utilization is going to be super high during all the major sports games, and we want to make sure we deliver our customers just the best experience possible. So all my teams are planning. We put playbooks together. We're monitoring the network, and particularly if we're going to do something like enhanced 4K across the network. And so that was a great partnership being able to deliver our customers this really great experience.

(Tony Speller at 00:27:09) And if you can imagine, you know, just think about this way—I mean, a lot of people have 4K televisions out there now, and you think about the beautiful picture that you get with 4K resolution. Think about Dolby Vision and being able to get 8K resolution and what that content looks like. And for me, I can remember looking at it, you know, it just has amazing color. The 12 bits of color is just amazing. You look at the contrast and the darkness on the screen.

(Tony Speller at 00:27:51) Everything is just so crisp and clear. And that particular content really kind of gives you the best seat in the house. I mean, you can't ask for a better seat in the house to be able to look at 8K resolution from your sofa in your home. And then you couple that with the audio, Dolby Atmos, which is very amazing. You can hear things that you could never hear before because it uses technology called height channel.

(Tony Speller at 00:28:34) And what that does, if you can imagine, like, Joel, an airplane—let's say an airplane was passing by you. You would literally hear it in front of you. You would hear it pass you, and then you would actually hear it moving above you. I mean, the sound is just so real. It's like a three-dimensional sound. And so if you could think about coupling those two together in a Super Bowl and the sounds that you hear from the audience or the guy out on the field, it's just amazing to be able to bring that level of content and visualization to someone's living room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:16) Yeah. Next up, we're just going to get chips right in the brain, and we'll just—it's like we'll be there, you know?

(Tony Speller at 00:29:24) It's pretty amazing where television has come. You know, if you go back in the old days and look at an old television, and you're now talking about Dolby Vision, it's pretty amazing. But, yeah, that was a great partnership, and I think our customers really enjoyed that content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:43) Oh, yeah. I mean, our first TV, it was, like, also a piece of furniture. It was on the floor. It was giant. It was a tube, and they designed it so it was, like, partly like a piece of furniture with a bunch of wood around it and then the TV inside it. It was crazy. I remember having to help my parents, like, move that when we moved, and I was, like, "Now I can hang up, well, like, a 40-inch thing that weighs, like, five pounds."

(Tony Speller at 00:30:10) I remember those days, and I actually used to actually polish it for my mom. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) Yep. Oh, yeah. There was always, like, decorations on top of it too. Like a runner or something.

(Tony Speller at 00:30:22) That's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) Yeah.

(Tony Speller at 00:30:25) And it's come such a long ways from what we have today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) So, look, I don't have experience with running large networks like you do or even things that heavily operate in the physical world. My experience comes from software-as-a-service-type applications. And we'll have deployments, and we'll have things like that where, as a leader, you have to get the team ready for this sprint that we're going to go on or this 72-hour deployment. Like, whatever it is, you have to get them mentally ready. You have to get them focused as the leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) When you're going into battle with your team, right, when the Super Bowl is coming up, aside from the corporate checkmarks of, like, "This is covered, that's covered," what are you doing as a human, as a leader, to prepare the people?

(Tony Speller at 00:31:07) Yeah. I bring them together. You know, we get together, and we talk about these things as though it's a game, it's a challenge. It's more about winning, right? We celebrate the moments. We turn it into a moment. Right? A moment of pride.

(Tony Speller at 00:31:25) When we're going into a Super Bowl, we're probably as nervous as the player on the field out there because we are so excited about giving our customers a great experience and not wanting to disappoint anyone with an event or an outage, because you never want someone to be sitting in a home with a house full of people, and then all of a sudden, you know, they don't have service going into a Super Bowl. And so our goal going into that is, "Hey, we know things can happen, and we're going to be prepared to react." And so it's all about bringing them together, getting them ready to win, making this feel more like a game to them—that we're not going to leave one customer behind. And in the event we have an outage, we're going to be ready.

(Tony Speller at 00:32:21) Our teams are going to be ready because we literally put people—we look at every piece of the network and every facility, and we say, "Hey, we go through almost like a little war game. What if this was to happen? You know, how fast could I get someone here?" And so it's really a motivation moment for me, a moment of pride when we're going into a big event like that.

(Tony Speller at 00:32:46) And our teams take it very serious because they really, really want every customer to walk away with a great experience. And so if you were joining one of my calls going into the Super Bowl, you would hear us giving the motivational speech, and you'll hear the confidence in the teammates out there in terms of wanting to make it happen. And even in the chats, they're back and forth in the chats going on behind the scenes, talking to each other throughout the entire Super Bowl. The bridge is open. I'm dialing in or I'm chatting in.

(Tony Speller at 00:33:22) And so it's actually a very—it's actually a fantastic moment for us as leaders and teammates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) Nice. High energy.

(Tony Speller at 00:33:32) Very high energy during these events. They take them very serious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) Nice. Yeah. And there's stuff that's beyond your control too. Like, reasons why I've lost internet in the past that were beyond the ISP's control, like car accidents, weather, tree trimmers, like, things like that?

(Tony Speller at 00:33:49) We do have those things happen, and we'll prepare ourselves for the big events. And you could get someone run into a pole. You could get a tree fall down. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the tree falls down and we'll have our teams ready to get out and try to just restore and mitigate as quickly as we can. And a lot of times, we'll even run a temporary cable or fiber just to get the network back up and running during these bigger events, so that our customers can get restored quickly. And we've kind of made that a practice that we'll lay temporary cables down pretty much at any time just to restore until we can get the pole back up or the fire under control or, you know, whatever has happened in that area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:40) Yeah. I actually don't mind it that much as long as it doesn't impact work. Like, I live out in the country, and every couple months, we get a power outage for twelve or eighteen hours, something like that, tree falls on something. And I'm just like, alright. This feels pretty nice. You know? You can hear the animals outside. You spend more time with the family. And so I'm definitely a half glass full type of person when it comes to outages, unless if it's the podcast. Unless if the podcast is happening and then, like, the fiber's out and I'm like, come on, guys. Let's go. But we don't have Comcast out here. We have just some local—it's called, like, CEMC, like, the county fiber. But I do live, like, in farmland, and I do have fiber. So I'm grateful for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) Okay.

(Tony Speller at 00:35:29) Well, yeah. I wish we were servicing your area, and hopefully—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:32) I would be a customer. I promise you this. Yeah. I've been a customer of Comcast. You can probably look up in my profile, probably, like, fifteen years. I lived in Florida for a long time, and that was the provider. And so I was a Comcast customer through multiple hurricanes, through all of that stuff. And I will tell you what, man, I don't think there was ever a situation where the power was on and the Internet, like, wasn't really working. It was almost always connected. Like, when the power was back on from the storm, the Internet was there and ready. So I have nothing but good things to say about a real ten or fifteen year experience as a Comcast customer.

(Tony Speller at 00:36:13) Well, no. Well, thank you for that, because that's exactly what we try to do. And, you know, while power is down, we go into these storms and we start to restore as quickly as possible because the goal is that by the time the power comes back on, we want to make sure the network is up and running. And some of those new tools I mentioned to you a few minutes ago, those have been really essential to helping us be able to do it because we know where the fiber breaks are. We know where power is down versus having physical damage. And so these things have really changed the game around restoration for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:53) So I'm always curious to know when I meet senior executives what they are currently, like, right now, something that you're learning as a leader.

(Tony Speller at 00:37:02) You know, the one thing I'm learning as a leader right now is that you have to be very dynamic in the current environment, and you have to be willing to pivot with the changing environment and conditions. You know, I think there was a time back when leaders, you could kind of set a strategy, set a style, and say, hey. You know what? I'm going to stay the course, and this is how I operate, and these are the principles to how I run my business. But I think now, Joel, we're in such a dynamic place where the technology is changing faster. The competition looks different even now. Our competition comes in different forms and styles now where the leader needs to be very dynamic now in terms of listening to the people, brainstorming new ideas, being open to new ideas and changes as well. It's the one thing that I see now that's more important than ever. If you can't pivot quick on your feet, if you can't move with the changing times and also continue to be innovative and not just, you know, because you're winning at something today, be comfortable at that. You've got to be thinking about what does Winning 2.0 look like on top of that. And so this new world is very dynamic, and that's the piece that I feel like right now I'm learning more than ever, and I'm kind of living the moment right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) And if you could go back to the first day that you became VP eleven years ago and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

(Tony Speller at 00:38:48) I would say don't wait for work-life balance to happen because it's never going to happen. Okay? And you've got to move to work-life integration. And to me, what work-life integration means is that you have to integrate it all together. You know your job is important. You've got big responsibilities at work. But if you're waiting, because a lot of people think that, hey. One day I'm going to get to the work-life balance and that's going to happen over time. It's not going to ever happen exactly that way is what I've learned. And if I was talking to myself ten years ago or fifteen years ago, I would say, hey. Focus on work-life integration. Integrate it all in together, so that you can make the balance work. And that's been the one thing that I've learned, and I would give all people that advice. And the integration works well, because you learn how to integrate it in and everything coexists together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) I fully agree with that. I do. I found that to be true myself. I think balance is a bad visualization because it implies that there will be some sort of, like, evenness, but that's not how it comes at all in life. Like, when I'm starting a business and my wife's pregnant, that's a very different balance than when the baby comes out. Right. You know? And it changes—let's just use the term seasons. It changes seasonally. Like, as you go through different stages of your life. So the idea of a balance, something that you're going to be able to set it, get it balanced and leveled, and it'll just stay, is setting yourself up for a lose situation. Like, you're going to lose a hundred percent of the time.

(Tony Speller at 00:40:39) I totally agree. And it's one of the biggest flaws a lot of times in leaders is that you think that you're going to get to some type of fifty-fifty, and it just doesn't come in that natural form. And integration is the way to think about it, work-life integration, and, you know, it seems to work itself out really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) Oh, absolutely. It's like in marriage. Right? Like, all the single people have this idea, like, oh, we're going to split stuff fifty—it's like, no. You guys are going to go into battle together. You're going to figure out what you're good at, and then you're going to own those areas. You know?

(Tony Speller at 00:41:17) That's exactly right. That's exactly how it works. And that one's been important to me is to figure out, you know, over time, how do you integrate, because you're a lot more happier when you can figure out how to integrate. And your expectations are different between an integration versus, you know, you're thinking that you're going to get to a fifty percent balance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:37) Oh, yeah. And it also helps with your spouse. Right? Because the conversation changes when it goes from balance to integration. It's like, you can have—and I don't want to project, like, my personal stuff—but you can have better conversations when you're like, okay. We get the benefit of, you know, dad doing this one thing, but then we also have to accept that he might get a call and he might have to go bounce out, but yet we get the freedom and flexibility to live this life. So and then from there, it's just that's all personal. That's between your family, your wife, your kids, you know, your spouse. That's, like, decisions that you have to make. But when that balance line is hanging out in the ethos, if you don't address it and you don't try to figure it out, well, then, like me, you end up in marriage counseling, and then you figure it out.

(Tony Speller at 00:42:29) No. You're a hundred percent right. Yeah. You're a hundred percent right. You know, I've been able to balance that out where, you know, the expectations is that, hey. I might be off today, but, yeah, I've got to take a call. I've got to take a ten-minute call at 10:00, and then I'm back to what I'm doing the rest of the day. That's what I call integration, versus, you know, a hard line saying, oh, I'm not taking any call from anybody today. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:55) Well, it works on the reverse too, like forcing yourself to rest when you're in a very productive, like, you know, week of your life. Like, sometimes I wake up and I have weeks where I'm just significantly more energized and productive. And so, if I have one of those weeks, I need to capitalize on it. And I mean, I have discipline and stuff, but you still have those natural ebbs and flows of energy within yourself. And so it's like, hey. This is one of those moments where I have to take advantage and tap into this, and then the time will come for rest. And then when it's rest time, it's like, alright, guys. We're going to go do something restful and relaxing. So getting there is hard. That's a hard—I mean, that's like a—we talk about it casually, but that was like a ten-year journey and something I'm still working on, you know.

(Tony Speller at 00:43:38) Yeah. Yeah. It takes time there, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) Yeah. Future of telecommunications and infrastructure—what will Comcast look like in the next ten years?

(Tony Speller at 00:43:51) Well, that's a, you know, that's always a tough question. But what I will say is that, you know, I believe, you know, one, we continue to be a leader in the industry. I think you're going to continue to see us work on product convergence, having our smart products continue to work together to have more convergence there. I think what you'll see from us is that we're going to continue to expand our network with the massive amount of rural broadband that we're building out right now. I think our reach is going to just continue to be much greater. And then I also think you'll continue to see us be a leader in Comcast Business as well, because Comcast Business is a big part of what we do. You know, making sure that we're providing our customers with the best business products as well. And so I would say, you know, if I had to sum it up, you know, I would say we're going to continue to stay on the edge as a leader in broadband, but also not just delivering broadband, but delivering broadband with product and features that are unmatched from the competition. And then, you know, utilizing our things like our wireless, like our Xfinity Mobile, because the thing that sets us apart is not just mobile. You know? I mean, we've got the best network. Our customers can do things like power boost on the network with wireless. And, you know, we've got a lot of great things that are happening. And so I think you're going to continue to see us lead, and, you know, I expect there's going to be a lot of competition out there like there is now. But I think what gives us the edge is all the things that we talked about today here, the innovation and AI capabilities and how we service customers and continue to, you know, stay out front on technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:07) Yeah. Well, I'm rooting for you guys. So the most frustrating thing for me, Josh, is when I call support and I can't understand them.

(Intro Narrator at 00:46:17) Yeah, man. I hate that. That's why

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) I like US Cloud. Not only is it better, faster support, but all the engineers are US-based engineers, and it's also a lot cheaper. Ninety-four percent of US Cloud's clients report saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. So now you'll just have to figure out what to do with all that extra money. If it were me, I'm responsible, so I'd reallocate the money to improve my team. Josh, what would you do?

(Intro Narrator at 00:46:43) I'd probably just buy more guitars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) More guitars. Visit uscloud.com to book a call and figure out how much your team can save. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.