In this exclusive Broadband Nation interview, Alejandro Piñero from Fierce Network Team speaks with Kate Fegley-Lummus, Marketing Project and Partner Manager at Superior Essex, about the company’s role in advancing broadband connectivity across the U.S. Superior Essex is a prominent fiber optic cable manufacturer, producing BABA-compliant products in Texas and partnering with ISPs and state broadband offices to bridge connectivity gaps nationwide.
Kate, who shifted from NASCAR to telecom, shares how she’s led the company’s strategic alignment with BEAD and other federal funding programs, ensuring their cables are compliant, accessible, and impactful.
Throughout the interview, Kate discusses Superior Essex’s support for workforce training by supplying fiber optics to technical schools. This initiative addresses the growing demand for a skilled broadband workforce as deployment ramps up. Kate highlights the company’s commitment to U.S. jobs and manufacturing, with new self-certification initiatives and BABA-compliant product lines aimed at reducing friction in broadband projects.
Tune in to discover how collaboration, compliance, and community are driving broadband innovation with Superior Essex at the helm!
Alejandro Pinero:
All right. Welcome, everyone, back here at Broadband Nation. I’m Alejandro Pinero from the Fierce Network team, and I’m joined by Kate Fegley-Lummus. She is the marketing project and partner manager at Superior Essex. Kate, thanks for joining us today.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
Thanks for having me.
Alejandro Pinero:
Awesome. All right, well, let’s start at the top. Before we talk about all the wonderful things that you guys are working on, tell us a little bit about Superior Essex.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
We are a fiber-optic cable manufacturer based out of Atlanta, Georgia, proudly made in the United States out of Brownwood, Texas. We have locations in Hoisington, Kansas as well, and employees all over the country.
Alejandro Pinero:
Excellent. Well, listen, Kate, a lot of talk this week about BEAD, as you’d expect. We’re entering now a critical stage, almost there with the funding process and getting some projects into the ground.
I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your role specifically at Superior Essex in getting these projects into the ground and throughout the whole process of the BEAD applications.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
I am new to the telecommunications world about two years ago now, and came from NASCAR, out of all places, for 13 years.
Alejandro Pinero:
Oh, wow.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
So jumped ship over to the corporate world and attended a trade show just like this, and it happened to be a broadband one. They said pick a session, any session, and went to the one on BEAD and went down a rabbit hole on all things BEAD and became the BEAD expert now for our company.
So a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of different information with all the different grants that come out prior to BEAD. So you got your Capital Projects Fund and your RDOF and Middle Mile, all the ones that were the lead-up to what is BEAD, and tracking the different application processes, tracking when the portals open, and then of course the much anticipated when will the money finally drop for BEAD and what states are going to come first?
So it’s a lot of tracking, and I don’t think people anticipated that in the beginning, but they shifted my role over to handle just that because it does encompass $100 billion-plus by the time it’s all added up, and that’s pre-match money that has now just seemed to skyrocketed as we continue on.
Alejandro Pinero:
Yeah, that’s quite the rabbit hole you’ve encountered.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
Yeah. I don’t know why I chose that rabbit hole, to be honest.
Alejandro Pinero:
You mentioned, of course, Superior Essex, a fiber optics company, but naturally, to connect everyone and meet that ambitious goal of connecting everyone in the United States, surely it’ll be a thing of cooperation, right? A project that brings everyone together.
Can you expand perhaps on your role and what you’re thinking about as you hopefully get more of these projects on the ground and connecting everyone? Even though perhaps you’re not directly the company putting the fiber, et cetera, but you must be talking to all sorts of different folks about it?
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
The first thing that I feel like every state broadband office said was, “We have to find a way to get the dollar to go so that everybody gets internet.” So internet for all, right? And the only way to make that happen is for us to work together.
And being not the largest fiber-optic cable manufacturer, our approach is to really be that good partner, to be the person that works with the ISPs, to be the person that works with the state broadband offices to make sure that collectively as a whole, we can get to that, because it’s going to take all of us to get to that, right?
So for instance, today they talked about workforce being one of the top concerns. Well, we don’t employ the contractors, we’re not an ISP, we just manufacture the cable. However, the states are having work to bring in new employees into the workforce, but they have to train them.
So what we’re doing is providing that fiber-optic cable to the different trade schools, to the different tech schools so they can learn how to splice the cable so that they can be familiarized with the different counts, right?
And so while we’re not directly employing that workforce, we are helping to get that workforce trained because we’re 200,000 tech short heading into the broadband deployment. So again, it’s about working together and finding ways to be able to expand the dollar that seems next to impossible as the prices keep going up and… But at the end of the day, if we all work together and we get creative, I think that there’s those ways that we can get to 100%.
Alejandro Pinero:
Now, I noticed in your stand here at Broadband Nation, you have a BABA-compliant, made in USA front and center, you mentioned it at the top here.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
Yes.
Alejandro Pinero:
So could you talk us through more of that BABA compliance role, what some of the hurdles have been and how the preparation’s been and perhaps even around those waivers, anything you can tell us to share about that?
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
I think that we all struggled with the different waivers that have come out. I mean, I feel like you had to read through a million pages to get to the end result. And for us, there were no waivers for the fiber-optic cable side of things.
So we’ve worked with the NTIA, and I feel like I’ve gone back and forth on countless email chains, but there’s the self-certification process that is getting ready to come out per will earlier today.
We have completed all of that. So proud to say that we are self-certified at this point and should be on that list. If we’re not, I feel like there’s probably bigger problems, but we should be self-certified on there, provided all of that. We have the compliance letter that goes out as well. And through our website we have a BABA-compliant BEAD webpage dedicated just to that with the products that are just BABA-compliant.
So we went in as a company and changed our part numbers to have BABA-compliant part numbers, which our sales team was not super stoked about, because of course there was a lot of numbers that had to be changed. But it was really the best way for us to make sure that what is being ordered specifically for the BEAD and for some of the other grants that BABA is required, that there’s no miscommunication, there’s no, “Oh, I wasn’t sure.” It’s a BABA part number was ordered, therefore it will be a BABA-compliant cable that goes out.
Alejandro Pinero:
I think just telling to people here it’s been far from simple, but it seems like you guys have cracked it.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
It is not simple, and it does help that we do only have the fiber-optic cable. There’s other companies that have 1,000-plus SKUs that they have to worry about, but at the end of the day, it’ll be a good thing for everyone. We’ll have jobs, keep jobs here in the US, and we are proud to have a product that’s made in the US. So we fought that battle and now I think we’re on the upward swing and ready to go for when everything does deploy.
Alejandro Pinero:
Well, Kate, this is I guess when I do some pun about NASCAR and we’re racing to the goal of connecting everyone, but I’ll stop short. But thank you so much for joining us today and for being here at the show. It’s been great to see what you guys are up to and hear all the good news.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
Absolutely. We’re excited to start the engines of getting the broadband deployed.
Alejandro Pinero:
There you go. Excellent. All right. Thank you, Kate.
Kate Fegley-Lummus:
Thank you.
