On February 10, NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association announced that Mike Romano would be its new CEO. Yesterday, Telecompetitor interviewed Romano about his position, NTCA’s priorities, and the biggest challenges facing rural broadband.
Asked about NTCA’s priorities under his leadership, Romano said the NTCA board has identified Universal Service as its “north star.”
“It’s something that every NTCA member — every core ILEC member — leverages to do all the cool things they do in their communities,” Romano said. “The ability to make sure that continues to be a system upon which they can rely to innovate and to invest and to deliver service day after day is a central focus of ours — it has been and will be going forward.
Romano said broadband mapping is another vital issue for the NTCA board: “It’s better than it’s ever been and it’s not good enough, all at once,” Romano said. “This is cyclical. People say, ‘Let’s just get everybody something,’ and then, several years later, there’s this realization: ‘We got them something, but it wasn’t really what they needed.’”
Embracing change, pushing for innovation, helping members help themselves
Romano said he has been focusing on a three-part platform as he prepares to lead NTCA and talks with the association’s staff, board, and members: embracing change, pushing for innovation, and helping members help themselves.
- “Embracing change is a mindset. We can’t wish change away in Washington or the rest of the world. We’ve got to be ready to take it on.”
- “Pushing innovation is the way you respond to that [change]: Let’s figure out a way to continue to do what we’re doing and build upon that.”
- Helping members help themselves means focusing on the tools, educational opportunities, and benefits NTCA can put into place “to position our members as well as they can to succeed in an evolving and dynamic marketplace,” Romano said.
BEAD, AI, and Universal Service
Last month, Telecompetitor interviewed current NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield on three major topics: (1) the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, (2) artificial intelligence (AI), and (3) Universal Service. We asked Romano for his thoughts on the same topics as he prepares to take the helm at NTCA.
“BEAD is moving from a phase where everybody was fighting over the rules and how the money would be distributed to what’s going to be more of an accountability and implementation phase,” Romano said, adding that he is primarily focused on accountability.
Romano noted that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s [NTIA’s] Benefit of the Bargain funding round was intended to benefit American taxpayers.
“The benefit of the bargain has to be delivered to the consumer,” Romano said. “So now the benefit of the bargain perspective needs to shift to the consumer, who’s the intended beneficiary of the dollars being spent. People always cry about waste, fraud, and abuse, and money going to the wrong places. If we don’t get this right, there’s potential for waste, fraud, and abuse in this program if people don’t do what they said they were going to do.”
Romano said NTCA has been a strong advocate of testing various networks’ performance and making the results public. “Let’s see what [speed] consumers are getting on these networks that the government has paid for.”
Regarding AI, Romano highlighted NTCA’s AI summit last month. “The participation was way beyond what we expected when we were first thinking about it,” he said. “It speaks to that innovation push in our membership, and the ability to share stories among different members who are doing different things in different ways.” Romano said NTCA plans to continue the conversation about AI at the RTIME conference in Orlando next week.
“On the Universal Service Fund, where to begin?” Romano joked. “The biggest thing we struggle with on Universal Service is the lack of awareness that it is an ongoing mission. It’s not just about getting people connected — it’s about making sure they stay connected.”
As the country approaches near-100% broadband connectivity, Romano said the focus should change from creating networks to sustaining them. Like Bloomfield, Romano criticized the recent announcement that Universal Service won’t be available for BEAD builds.
“There will be some [areas in which] somebody gets a grant where they don’t need Universal Service because the grant makes it economically [viable] to serve there,” he said. “I can’t say everywhere in the U.S. needs ongoing Universal Service support. But, by the same token, you can’t turn that around and say just because somebody got a BEAD grant in one place [and doesn’t need Universal Service], nowhere needs Universal Service.”
A rural broadband SWOT analysis
Asked for a brief strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of the rural broadband industry, Romano offered these thoughts:
Strengths: “The first is community commitment. [Rural providers] are folks who have shown time and again that they show up and want to keep showing up. While a lot of competitors might be interested in showing up, whether they keep showing up is a big question mark sometimes,” Romano said. “Local presence goes along with that — the ability to be in the community, to run into your customers in church or in the supermarket. Local hands to fix things that go wrong is a real strength as well.”
He said another strength is rural broadband companies’ “head start in terms of investing in their networks and having a track record of leading on innovation. The amount of investment in fiber and getting higher speeds to customers is remarkable. [Providers] saw that they had a window in which to bring these to customers, and they delivered.”
Weaknesses: “The areas [rural broadband providers] serve are the hardest to serve. They were left behind way back when telephony was the challenge. So that’s a challenge: How do you serve these despite the distances and density?”
Another weakness is what Romano called “shiny toy syndrome,” referring to consumers’ tendency to chase after the next best technology. “There’s always this notion of, ‘Hey, here’s this new thing that’s going to solve all our problems finally.’ That happens time and again. And it’s not to say that those things don’t deliver something, but they’re never the panacea that people think they’re going to be.”
Opportunities: “The opportunity is that we’re going to get to a point where everybody realizes, ‘Who’s delivering for me? Who has delivered, who will continue to deliver? Who has the best network, who has a culture of creativity and innovation?’ [The opportunity comes as] people turn away from that shiny toy and realize they’re better off going with [the provider] who’s delivered.
“I think that’s an opportunity for NTCA members to step back in and be the heroes of rural broadband,” Romano said.
Threats: Romano said rural broadband providers face “the same threats that any other broadband provider faces: competition and technology. Technology continues to evolve and enable different and better things over time. And that competitive presence is something every urban, suburban, exurban, and rural ISP faces.”
Romano also identified regulatory uncertainty as a threat. “This is a period where a lot of systems are going through change, and you see shifting political winds. The effects of regulatory uncertainty on a capital-intensive business in deeply rural markets can be pretty difficult to work through.”
Cause, connection, challenge
Romano said working with NTCA is “the coolest job in D.C.” He has stayed at NTCA “five times longer” than any other job he’s worked. He cites “cause, connection, and challenge” as the reasons why:
“The cause is amazing. The analogy I give is that, in high school, I worked paving potholes. And I got to see the fruits of my labor. Sitting in an office in D.C., there’s limited opportunity to see the fruits of your labor in the same way. [Working with NTCA] is the closest I’ve come to that, because you get to see what our members do, which is just amazing. And we help contribute to that.”
Regarding connection, Romano said NTCA is ultimately helping connect communities that have been neglected for far too long. “They may have been connected over the last 15 or 20 years, but, for their economic vitality, there has to be a reliable, robust connection there.”
The challenges facing rural broadband are “really interesting,” he said. For his first decade-plus at NTCA, Romano’s work focused on policy issues. In recent years, he said, “I got to work more on internal operations because I wanted a new challenge. Now, stepping into this [CEO] role, I get to refresh the challenge again.”
Meet Mike Romano, NTCA’s next CEO
Having worked with NTCA since 2010, Mike Romano is no stranger to the broadband industry. But his role hasn’t been as prominent as CEO Shirley Bloomfield. Telecompetitor asked Romano to tell readers who don’t know him a little about himself.
He has increasingly worked on operations with NTCA — and will do so even more as CEO. But Romano joked that he got his start in operations leading the Arlington, Virginia, Little League Baseball league when his sons were younger. His three children — two sons and a daughter — are now 22, 20, and 15 years old. He still helps manage his daughter’s travel soccer team.
Romano said that during the interview process for the CEO role — which he described as rigorous and competitive — the NTCA board asked if the CEO role would make it hard for him to strike a good work-life balance. “When I took my job at NTCA originally, my kids were six, four, and two months. At this point, the work-life balance is a lot easier. The 15-year-old isn’t even sure if I’m home unless she needs a ride,” he joked.
Romano also volunteers as a snowboarding ski patroller every other weekend on “a small hill” in Pennsylvania. “It’s a fun way to do something entirely different and work for another great cause with another really cool group of people.”
Mike Romano will become the new CEO of NTCA on March 15, upon the retirement of current CEO Shirley Bloomfield.
