Who is afraid of data centers? With Mike O’Rielly, MPORielly
Nobody wants data centers near where they live: they use too much power, they bring few jobs, and they are tied to an AI that many people do not understand and fear. Yet we will use AI, and we need data centers to run it. The question is not whether we build them, but where and who gets to decide.
In this Sparring Partners podcast, I speak with Mike O’Rielly, Principal at MPORielly Consulting and FCC Commissioner from 2013 to 2020, after 20 years working on tech and telecom policy on Capitol Hill.
Mike argues that hyperscalers are losing the PR war to political pressure. As usual, our conversation ranged widely:
Why a moratorium on data centers only delays the problem
Empty factories as data center sites
Should operators build their own data centers?
Why AI regulation in Washington is stuck
Satellite as the fourth mobile network: Dish all over again?
Renewables: the US fight is over subsidies
Latency: most data centers can go almost anywhere
AI may not push traffic or uplink up as much as feared
Open versus closed AI models: we need both
You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
4 Oct 2026
Does everybody need fiber? Rural broadband in the US. With Claude Aiken, Nextlink Internet
For years, the assumption in the US – and not just in the US – was that broadband means fiber, and anything else is second class. In rural areas, that assumption is running into two hard limits: the cost per passing keeps rising as density falls, and Starlink and Amazon Leo now set the price and speed baseline in the hardest-to-reach locations.
In Sparring Partners, I speak with Claude Aiken, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Nextlink Internet, a rural operator that runs fiber, fixed wireless and mobile across 12 states. Claude was previously President and CEO of WISPA and spent a decade at the FCC, so he has seen rural broadband from the operator, industry and regulator sides.
We don't agree on everything, but we agree that headline speed is the wrong thing to chase. Here is what we covered:
Why the US chose facilities-based competition, and what it costs
How LEO turned a geography problem into a capacity and economics problem
Where fiber, fixed wireless and satellite make sense and where subsidizing fiber is no longer a financially sensible option
Why reliability, price and service matter more to subscribers than gigabit speeds
Whether mobile can replace fixed broadband in rural areas
Whether connectivity should be treated as a right
You can follow Claude on his new Substack, Deployment Capital. Highly recommended.
You can watch the video of this podcast and read the transcript on Sparring Partners’ Substack
More on Senza Fili at https://senzafili.com
26 Sept 2026
Open-sourcing Open RAN. With Arpit Joshipura, The Linux Foundation
Does Open RAN need further opening? Can open-source facilitate and accelerate the adoption of Open RAN? Yes and yes. The OCUDU project was established on these premises to address common challenges that Open RAN deployments face.
In Sparring Partners, I speak with Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT at The Linux Foundation, about how we need to move beyond open interfaces (which remain an essential starting point) to open-source RAN platforms that OCUDU builds with open-source software.
You may already know this, but Arpit went further and explained what specifically OCUDU does that was missing:
Help open the CU and DU
Deepen vendor disaggregation
Create a more efficient and accessible testing platform
Smooth the path to 6G
Facilitate the adoption of agentic AI and transition to autonomous networks
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