A week that starts with three job openings that never got posted and ends in a Houston convention hall where the industry quietly admitted the build isn't the hard part anymore. Drew walks through what happens when you hand a hiring plan to a bot named after a president, and what happens when two thousand creators all hit upload in the same ballroom.
Then two takes on the Broadband Communities Summit, before and after: the agenda that celebrates raising the money while skipping the affordability gap, and the two days in Houston that made the case for connectivity, devices, education and workforce development as four legs of the same stool.
The three staffers Drew didn't hire, and what that says about your job.
Social Fest 2026 and why two thousand phones uploading is a capacity problem, not a coverage problem.
What's missing from the Broadband Communities Summit agenda: affordability, spectrum, and LEO.
Two days in Houston: the second digital divide, the long tail nobody funds, and Pharr's 13,100 subscribers.
I was about to hire three staffers to go pull data off all 254 county websites in Texas. Instead, I built a bot named it George Washington and told it to spawn as many agents as it needed. Next thing I knew, I had Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln working for me. I had the data in less than 24 hours. That job never needed to exist in the first place. This podcast is generated by telepost.ai. Using my words, my voice, and my ideas, check out Telepost and make sure to tell a friend. I'm Drew Lentz, and this is the Waves Weekly Rundown, my week in connectivity radios, and the people trying to make both of them useful. Four stories today, the three people I almost put on payroll and what that says about your job, what breaks when 2,000 creators all hit upload in the same ballroom, and then Houston, twice my outlook heading into the broadband community summit, and what two days on that floor actually left me thinking about. Here's the part people miss when they argue about whether AI is going to take jobs. It doesn't take the job. It makes the job never exist in the first place. And that puts you on one side of a fence or the other. Either you're the person making other people's roles unnecessary, or you're the person whose role never gets posted.
So let me tell you how this actually happened. I was in a morning meeting about a political website I'm working on, talking with a political consultant. I told him it'd be really helpful to pull data from all the counties in Texas. Texas has 254 of them. He said, sure, we can find the funding, put it together, find a staffer or two to go gather that data. And I said, okay, but then we also need someone to normalize it because it's going to come back as PDF, HTML, CSV, whatever each county happens to publish. Then I got home. A friend had just told me about Grokbots, so I built one, named it George Washington, and gave it the exact same charge I'd given the guy who was going to find me the staff. General, go to all two 54 county websites, look for this data, bring me this data. Then I spawned a second one, and obviously that one was John Adams. I told John, when the general is done, normalize everything as he uploads it into this Google Drive. Then I went back to George and gave the important command, spawn as many agents as you need, and that's where the rest of the presidents came from. It understood exactly what it needed to do to satisfy the requirement. It was also genuinely fun. Now what did that save? Not just three salaries. It's the insurance, the payroll, the taxes, but honestly, the money wasn't the point. The point was time. I didn't have to train anybody. I didn't have to show them what to do. I didn't have to watch them get the data wrong and then go back and fix it. It was going to take 24 hours just to write the job description. I had the data and was back on the core project inside that same window. It reminded me of something that happened while I was driving. I've got a Ford Lightning, the right lane was closing, and the guy in the left lane kept speeding up to match me every time I did. So I tapped the accelerator, popped out in front of him, and was gone. It was nothing. He was in a gas vehicle, and I had that power sitting right there. That's what these tools feel like when you know how to use them. And here's the uncomfortable bit. I believe the promise that AI would level the playing field. What I didn't account for is that the people who were already really good were going to get so much better. The Texas Project is my evidence. The difference wasn't budget, it wasn't headcount, it was knowing what to reach for. So learn the tools that exist right now, not the ones you read about last year. Find one or two friends using them in ways you hadn't thought of. Get genuinely good at one thing until it's your superpower. And the next time you're about to write a job description for multi-step data gathering, try spawning some agents first. Two
thousand people in a ballroom all pressing upload at the same moment. That's not a Wi-Fi problem the way most people think about Wi-Fi problems. SocialFest 2026 is coming to the Rio Grande Valley with the creator Keith Lee as the keynote, and that announcement tells you almost everything you need to know about the network that has to carry it. A creator crowd does not use Wi-Fi the way a conference crowd uses Wi-Fi. If the people designing that room treat it like any other three-day event, they're going to have a bad weekend. You design for coverage and capacity, but mostly capacity. Coverage answers whether there's signal in the corner of the ballroom, capacity answers, whether 2,000 phones can all push video out at once, which is exactly what a room full of creators is there to do. And the RF environment isn't going to sit still. Devices enter, devices leave, and the environment breathes all day long to accommodate them. So if you've got a system that's constantly optimizing itself, be ready for the moment that optimization starts serving the network instead of the users. Changing channels, changing power, changing settings on the fly during the most important minutes of the whole event. Now, who gets the phone call when it goes sideways? Unfortunately, it's the event director. People assume the event director coordinates everything. So the complaint lands there first, whether or not that person has any control over the access points in the ceiling, which means it's on the event director to have an IT team standing by that can handle that kind of load before the doors open, not after. Pass point earns its keep here. People walk into the room and their phones connect automatically on credentials they already have without hunting for an SSID or guessing which network has better signal. At a festival that matters twice over because onboarding is the first thing an attendee touches, and the help desk line is the first thing that tells you the network is failing. Who pays for all this? It depends. Sometimes the festival springs for it. If they don't have the money, it usually falls to the venue or the convention center. Last year it was the city of Mission. The honest answer is nobody has a standing budget line for event Wi-Fi, which is exactly why the question gets settled late. And then there's six gigahertz. Ask what percentage of the phones in that room could already use it, and the answer is probably all of them. This is a crowd that thrives on the newest hardware, whatever shipped most recently. The part that may not support it is the building. That's where the spectrum problem actually sits, in the ceiling, not in the attendees' pockets. Some of that is budget, some of it is where the gear sits in its life cycle, and a good deal of it is that nobody's had a compelling reason to change. So the gear in the room stays a generation or two behind the gear the audience walks in with. If you're a venue that hosts events where the latest tech is the entire featured use case of the people attending, maybe that's the thing worth focusing on when the refresh comes around.
On the program for a two-day broadband conference, the word Spectrum appears exactly once as a cable company's name. That's what jumped out at me reading the agenda for the Broadband Community Summit in Houston. It's a show that's been around more than 20 years, and it celebrates raising the money and building the networks while skipping the questions that decide whether any of it mattered. Day one is getting the money and building it, voices from the states on funding milestones, public-private partnerships, a lot of private investment, Bastrop County Monahans, the Texas Broadband Workforce Grant folks. Plenty of talk about acquisitions, and there has been some genuinely cool movement in that space this year. Day two turns into whether what got built actually works and who's checking. There's a USDA session on RUS compliance called Built to Last or Built to Pass, and a panel that asks in its own bullet points whether performance testing sample sizes reflect true network health. That's the part that gets me. Field sampling, speed tiers, coverage maps. Those are the same things that have been broken for a while. The industry is finally grading its own homework and it's grading with the same ruler that was broken in the first place. Then there's the affordability gap and it's missing. Look at the bottom-up stories on that agenda. Every one of them is a fundraising story. Bastrop County won $47 million. Monaghan's raised $625,000 locally through a Chamber of Commerce fundraiser. Bastrop County Cares is entirely volunteer-led, with a retired geologist credited as a GIS volunteer. Not one of those is a story about what actually changed in the household afterwards. There's a lot of backpatting. People are happy they raised the money and happy they built the network. But who's monitoring what that money did for the community? In my part of South Texas, affordability is still the number one reason connectivity isn't happening. People can't afford it. And when you have groups like SpaceX telling the FCC that no more subsidies are needed because coverage is ubiquitous, that's an issue. It may well be ubiquitous. It may also not be affordable. A Ferrari is a great car. Not everybody can afford one. The other thing is that the last mile has moved indoors. It's no longer can we get it to the house? It's what happens once it's inside the home, the MDU, the apartment complex. And that indoor last mile is a radio problem, which is why the near silence on radios matters. No spectrum policy, no CBRS, no 6 gigahertz, nobody talking about Wi-Fi 8. One radio session with Ruckus and my buddies at Cambium. And satellite gets two bullet points. One rural panel on alternative technologies, one on disaster resilience, two sessions on the single most threatening technology to everybody in that room because it doesn't just deliver connectivity, it moves the funding that all these projects run on. As a technology, LEO appears zero times on the program. The only Leo there is Leo Anderson from Paul Bunyan Communications on the esports panel. AI shows up only as OPEX and as load on the network. Nobody's selling AI to subscribers, and that restraint is actually notable given how loud it is everywhere else. So here's what I'd push for in Houston. Ask the keynote speakers whether they'll address affordability and not just coverage. Ask every panel what changed in the household after the ribbon cutting. Put the SpaceX subsidy filing to NRECA and NDIA while they're on stage. And if the stage is all finance, go talk tech on the show floor anyway. I came
out of two days at the broadband community summit convinced the conference isn't the one having an identity crisis. The industry is. And not because we don't know what we're doing. Quite the opposite. We've gotten remarkably good at the infrastructure problem we spent decades trying to solve. The questions still open have moved past it. We can find money to trench fiber, we can finance infrastructure, we can buy equipment, but who pays for the digital navigator five years later? Nobody's answered that. There is proof the second half works. In far Texas, the City Network hit operating breakeven in about two years at roughly 1,100 subscribers. It got there by pairing affordable service with adoption work, digital literacy training, and devices. The show itself almost seemed split down the middle. One side was all MDU, apartment owners, property managers, managed Wi-Fi, bulk connectivity, resident experience. The other side was municipalities, rural communities, nonprofits, and digital equity advocates still working on the most fundamental questions of getting people connected. Initially that felt scattered. By the end, I'd stopped reading it as a programming problem. The center of gravity is moving beyond infrastructure. Brandon Dinsmore of NDN Development Group put it simply, just getting connected doesn't quite solve all the problems. Stephanie Georges of Meraki Dignity Project took it a step further. Access doesn't create the possibilities. It's the solutions that leverage the technology that make things possible. Let me be blunt about that. A fiber passing doesn't change someone's life, but Wi-Fi signal doesn't change someone's life. A speed test definitely doesn't. What someone can do with that connection might. Heather Gate from Connected Nation made a point that stuck with me. We were at a conference called Broadband Communities. Walk outside and ask 10 random people about their broadband. How many even use that word? Ask about their internet and they know exactly what you mean. That sounds semantic. I don't think it is. Broadband described the infrastructure challenge. The people we're serving aren't thinking about infrastructure. They're thinking about whether their kids can do homework, whether they can see a doctor, whether they can start a business. And as the first divide shrinks, I think a second one is forming. Just because someone can use an iPhone doesn't mean they're digitally literate. Scrolling TikTok doesn't mean you understand cybersecurity or AI or online privacy. The first divide was about who could get connected. The next one is about who knows what to do once they are. So who funds the long tail, who teaches someone to recognize an AI-generated scam, who helps a senior citizen get to telehealth, who helps a small business owner figure out what AI could do for them, who stays. We aren't finished until we answer that. Laurel Leverier from USDA gave one of my favorite answers of the whole event. She described farmers and ranchers as completely technology neutral. They want all of it. Fiber at the house, wireless across the property, satellite where neither reaches. The farmer does not care about our technology argument. They care whether it works where they need it. I keep coming back to four things. Connectivity, because the network has to exist. Devices, because people need something useful to connect with. Miss one leg in the stool, gets unstable. Education is the one we've underestimated most. Connected Nation talked to me about programs putting younger people in position to be technology resources inside their own communities. Picture a teenager in a community center teaching an older resident how to spot an AI fake, and then the older resident teaches that kid how to write a thank you note. That's community, and it's a far more interesting outcome than a coverage map turning green. The thread running through all of this week is the same one. The build is the part we've gotten good at, whether it's a job description that never gets posted, a ballroom full of phones, or a network five years after the ribbon cutting. The interesting question is moved to what happens next, and nobody has a budget line for it yet.
If that's the kind of thing you want in your ears every week, follow the show so the next one turns up on its own. I'm Drew Lentsk. Go tap the accelerator.
