Maria Popo is the president and CEO of SCTE, a subsidiary of CableLabs, and the first woman to hold the top job at the cable industry's standards and training body. A self-described lifelong learner who started as a customer service rep and trained at a trade school, she rose through technical and executive roles at 3M, 3Com, Ambit Microsystems, Foxconn and Ubee Interactive - where she helped bring the first generations of cable modems to market - before earning a master's in Learning Design and Technology at Stanford. She now runs SCTE's global network of 60-plus chapters, retooling how the broadband industry trains and certifies its workforce for the AI era.
Polaris Wireless is a Silicon Valley company that pinpoints where a mobile phone is - not just on a map, but on which floor of a building. Founded in 1999, it pioneered software-based Wireless Location Signatures (WLS) and high-accuracy 3D / z-axis location, technology used by wireless carriers and public safety agencies so that when someone dials 911 from the 30th floor, responders know which floor. With 90+ patents and 50+ deployments worldwide, Polaris turns radio noise into vertical certainty for E911, IoT, smart cities and enterprise applications.
ProTelesis Corporation is a San Diego-based managed services provider (MSP/MSSP) born from the 2019 merger of two California telecom heavyweights - Protel (a leading Mitel Blue dealer) and Xtelesis (a leading Mitel Orange dealer). The company has evolved from a traditional phone-system business into a full-stack technology partner delivering managed IT, cybersecurity, unified communications, cloud, structured cabling, and managed detection and response. With offices across California, the Pacific Northwest, Utah, and Bangalore, it supports thousands of clients and hundreds of thousands of endpoints, with a focus on biotech, defense, and growing small-to-midsize businesses.
Sonic is the largest independently owned internet service provider in California, founded in 1994 in Santa Rosa. It builds and runs its own fiber-optic network, selling fast, flat-priced gigabit and 10-gigabit home and business internet with no contracts, no data caps, and a privacy stance that has earned it a perfect score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After more than 30 years serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic began its first out-of-region expansion in 2026, lighting up fiber in Los Angeles and Dallas.
TEECOM is a technology planning, design, and engineering firm that makes technology work in buildings. Founded in 1997 and led by founder David Marks, the remote-first company partners with architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) teams to design the unseen layer of modern buildings - structured cabling, networks, audiovisual, acoustics, security, wireless, distributed antenna systems, and emergency responder radio. With 150-plus engineers, designers, and subject-matter experts, TEECOM has delivered integrated technology systems across more than 28 countries for clients like Salesforce.
teleSys Software is a San Mateo boutique telecom firm that has quietly kept the world's phone calls and texts connected since 1997. It builds carrier-grade signaling software - the invisible traffic-control layer that routes 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks - including Diameter Signaling Controllers, SS7/SIGTRAN transfer points, signaling firewalls, and 5G SCPs. Its MACH7 product line runs in 400+ installations across 100+ operators worldwide, serving more than 500 million subscribers through the major Tier 1 carriers.
TeraHop is an optical solutions provider building high-speed optical transceivers and modules for AI clusters and data centers. Operating from Singapore, San Jose, Thailand and a new Texas plant, it ships 400G, 800G, 1.6T and emerging 12.8T-class optics. As the international-facing arm of Zhongji InnoLight - the world's largest optical-transceiver maker - TeraHop pairs high-volume manufacturing with R&D partnerships across NVIDIA, Marvell and Corning, and in 2025-2026 raised roughly US$517M with backing from Abu Dhabi's ADIA and Singapore's Temasek.
TextNow is a Waterloo-born wireless company that gives people phone service for free by letting advertisers, not subscribers, foot the bill. Started in 2009 as a way to dodge texting fees, it has grown into the largest provider of free mobile phone service in the United States, offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data over a nationwide 5G network through its app-based MVNO. With roughly 10 million monthly active users and revenue north of $100 million, TextNow built a real telecom business on a simple bet: communication should be a right, paid for by ads rather than by the people who can least afford a phone bill.
Vianet Communication is one of Nepal's leading internet and TV service providers. Founded in 1999, it pioneered fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) internet in the country in 2011 and launched one of Nepal's first IPTV services in 2016. Headquartered in Lalitpur, the company serves roughly 260,000 fiber customers across 24 cities, holds about 10% national market share as the third-largest ISP, and in 2023 launched Nepal's first 2 Gbps XGS-PON multi-gig internet service.
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.
MarketSpark is a Bannockburn, Illinois company that replaces aging copper phone lines (POTS) for large enterprises with a managed, carrier-agnostic wireless service. As traditional carriers decommission their analog networks, MarketSpark keeps fire alarms, elevator phones, fax lines, alarm panels and voice lines working using cloud-managed 4G LTE/5G hardware, real-time monitoring and remote diagnostics - serving hundreds of America's largest enterprises across tens of thousands of locations.
Nagish is a New York-based assistive-technology company that uses proprietary AI to caption phone calls in real time, converting speech to text and text to speech so people who are deaf or hard of hearing can make and receive calls independently and privately - without a human relay operator. Its name means 'accessible' in Hebrew. The company is one of the few firms certified by the FCC to provide telecommunication relay services and offers its consumer app for free.
Qunnect is a New York-based deep-tech company building hardware that turns ordinary telecom fiber into scalable quantum networks. Its room-temperature, field-deployable devices distribute entangled photons over existing infrastructure - no cryogenics or vacuum chambers required. The flagship Carina product suite powers real-world quantum testbeds in New York and Berlin, and is sold to customers across finance, energy, telecom, and defense.
US Mobile is a New York-based mobile virtual network operator that lets customers build their own wireless plans and switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile on a single line. Branded internally as Warp (Verizon), Dark Star (AT&T), and Light Speed (T-Mobile), its 'Teleport' multi-network technology and eSIM-first approach have pushed it toward a self-styled 'Super Carrier' that now also bundles Starlink home internet. Founded in 2015 by Ahmed Khattak, it has grown from a niche unlocked-phone reseller to roughly a million customers.
Tomer Aharoni is the co-founder and CEO of Nagish, a New York startup using AI to caption phone calls in real time so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can place and receive calls by typing and reading, with no human operator in the loop. The idea began with a phone ringing during a class at Columbia and a question he couldn't shake: how do you take a call if you can't hear or speak? Nagish (Hebrew for 'accessible') is now FCC-certified, offered free to users through federal subsidies, and has raised $16 million. Aharoni builds the product hand-in-hand with the Deaf community and is now pushing into AI sign-language translation.
Allied Telesis is a global networking infrastructure company that designs, manufactures, and supports wired and wireless products - switches, routers, firewalls, wireless access points, transceivers, and the software that manages them. Founded in Japan in 1987, it builds resilient, standards-based networks for governments, schools, hospitals, transportation systems, and smart cities, with a focus on automation (its Autonomous Management Framework), reliability, and supply-chain security.
Huawei is a Shenzhen-based technology company and the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment. Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, it now spans carrier networks, enterprise ICT, cloud computing, digital power, and a consumer business that builds smartphones, wearables, and the homegrown HarmonyOS operating system. Despite years of U.S. sanctions, the company posted roughly 880.9 billion yuan in 2025 revenue and pours over a fifth of that back into R&D.
Millicom, operating under its Tigo brand, is a Luxembourg-headquartered telecommunications and digital services group that connects more than 46 million customers across nine Latin American markets with mobile, fiber-cable broadband, pay TV, and Tigo Money mobile financial services. Listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TIGO, the company describes its purpose as building the digital highways that connect people, improve lives, and develop communities.
Plume is a Palo Alto-based software company that turns home and small-business WiFi into a managed, self-optimizing service. Its cloud platform - delivered through internet service providers rather than direct to consumers - uses machine learning to continuously tune connectivity, secure connected devices, and layer on consumer apps like parental controls, motion-sensing, and guest access. Built on the open-source OpenSync framework, Plume powers tens of millions of locations and more than a billion connected devices worldwide for operators including Comcast, Charter, Liberty Global, and Vodafone.
Verizon Communications is one of the largest telecommunications carriers in the United States, delivering wireless service, fiber and broadband internet, and managed enterprise networking to consumers, businesses, and government. Formed in 2000 from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, the company runs one of the country's most extensive 5G and fiber-optic networks and reported roughly $138 billion in revenue in 2025.
Webex is the collaboration platform born from one of the web's first conferencing companies and now run by Cisco. It bundles meetings, calling, messaging, webinars, contact center, and a line of conference-room hardware into a single suite, layered with AI for transcription, real-time translation across dozens of languages, and agent assistance. It serves enterprises, governments, schools, and hospitals that need secure, large-scale communication for distributed teams.
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Sath Sivasothy is VP of Sales and Marketing at Vyrian Inc., a Houston-based electronic components distributor and government defense contractor he co-founded in 2011. With a background in electrical engineering and over two decades in the semiconductor and electronics industry - including a stint as a Product Development Engineer at Texas Instruments and a run as VP of Sales at Silicon Valley burn-in testing firm CEIBIS Inc. where he doubled gross sales to $7M in 24 months - Sivasothy has built Vyrian into an Inc. 5000 multi-year honoree with 130+ employees across 12 global offices.
Alfonso Villanueva is the EVP, Chief Transformation Officer and Interim CEO of Verizon Consumer Group - the largest consumer wireless carrier in the United States. A former McKinsey Senior Partner and PayPal EVP, he joined Verizon in November 2025 at the invitation of new CEO Dan Schulman, his former PayPal colleague, to lead a sweeping $5B+ operational transformation. With roots in strategy consulting across Asia-Pacific and two decades of experience in telecom, media, and technology, Villanueva brings a rare blend of corporate venture expertise, AI-driven data strategy, and global transformation leadership to one of America's biggest companies.
Alvin Nicolas is a technology professional at Webex, Cisco's enterprise collaboration platform headquartered in San Jose, California. With a career spanning telecommunications giants including MCI WorldCom, Microsoft, and Yipes Enterprise Services, Nicolas brings deep networking expertise to one of the world's leading collaboration and video conferencing platforms. He is associated with the AI Titans initiative at Webex, reflecting the company's aggressive push into AI-powered communications and collaboration tools.
Keith Southard runs Allied Telesis, the San Jose-headquartered networking company building switches, routers and software-defined infrastructure used everywhere from US military bases overseas to smart-city deployments. He took over as CEO of Allied Telesis Capital Corporation in 2008 and has stayed at the controls ever since, quietly steering a 1,900-person company through the awkward transition from hardware vendor to network-automation outfit.
Yuxing Li is listed as an Interim CEO connected with Huawei, the Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications and consumer electronics giant. Based in Redwood City, California, Yuxing sits at the intersection of two of the most scrutinized technology ecosystems in the world: Silicon Valley and Shenzhen.
Astranis builds small, software-defined geostationary communications satellites - about the size of a washing machine - that deliver dedicated broadband to underserved regions and governments. Founded in 2015 in San Francisco, the company designs, manufactures and operates its MicroGEO platform entirely in-house at Historic Pier 70.