Based out of London, England, and co-founded by Kourosh Ghaffari and Michelangelo Valtancoli, Waves connects entrepreneurs from all backgrounds with other entrepreneurs who share similar interests.

Broadband Breakfast interviewed Ghaffari to learn how Waves came to be and where he sees it going.

Geared toward early-stage student entrepreneurs, members of the “Wave community” are grouped into “waves,” or people with similar entrepreneurial aspirations. Then they are given curated content, weekly calls, and daily chats for free.

‘Micro communities that are personalized to you’

Waves currently has a few “Wave” groups made, but is rapidly growing its membership as new members joining are put on a waitlist until the right “Wave” comes along for them to be put in. After three weeks, members are switched out into new Wave groups to continue socializing and connecting with new entrepreneurs that can grow their knowledge.

For example, EdTech entrepreneurs will be connected with others who have knowledge in EdTech. Virtually all communication is done online using popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Zoom, Slack, or Google Hangouts as the pandemic continues despite rising vaccinations.

“After testing Waves on nearly 600 users in just four months, we have closed out testing round,” said Ghaffari. Waves is now focusing on developing its business model to include business to business (B2B) clients who want to activate and engage their users, he added. Waves already booked its first client and is post-revenue heading toward profitability, he said.

Started a podcast

Ghaffari said he and Valtancoli started a podcast called “Almost Founders” that shares “practical content about early-stage entrepreneurship with a successful founder every week.”

The two co-founders saw their podcast community grow to a few hundred members, and wondered how they could keep listeners and supporters in more manageable groups. This is to keep from losing people during high growth periods.

He and Valtancoli found that groups of 10 people were the ‘goldilocks’ size to keep people involved on a personal level of connection while still having a big enough network to reach out to.

But the decision may not be as clear-cut because connectivity has to be there to make a virtual work environment work, say observers, and some don’t have those advantages.

“They do not have the same job opportunities as those who do have access to broadband,” said Shelly Steward, director of the future of work initiative at the Aspen Institute during a virtual summit on Tuesday.

“If we want telework to be the future, this is critical to the process.”

Covid-19 provided an opportunity for companies to take the risk and redefine employees’ positions in order to provide the flexibility needed to work from home. “It was a forced experiment,” said Steward.

Steward said there are both benefits and challenges to digitizing the workforce. She said that telework allows for less routine and mundane work and that employees have said they feel safer and are more likely to be prepared if something comes up.

Resilience, Steward explained, was the benefit of digitalization. More money and time has gone into training and preparing employees for any kind of disruption, so they can continue to work. If there’s a natural disaster, another pandemic, or just a day-to-day life crisis, they will be prepared.

Michael Bailey, vice president at the Washington Department of Revenue, said during an event on the hybrid workforce at the summit that resilience was not “just in people but the organizations themselves.”

Companies were pushed to become flexible and accommodating in the process of shifting as many people as possible to home-based telework during the crisis.

However, during this shift, they were able to see the possibilities of positions remaining at home. Workers began to prefer working from home, emissions and office costs were reduced, and many people were able to better balance work and family roles.

“People will change their habits, and some of these habits will stick. There’s a lot of things where people are just slowly shifting, and this will accelerate that.” economist Susan Athey told the Washington Post last March.

However, Steward emphasized that “one size does not fit all.” She explained that many workers severely struggled this past year with professional isolation and may not approve of continuing this format. Inequalities can be exacerbated, Steward explained.

“During the first six months of the last year, 2020, we have seen an increase of 62% in Wi-Fi data usage,” said Oz Yildrim, executive vice president and general manager of Airties’ Americas Business Unit.

Yildrim said that before the pandemic, there were significant differences in weekday versus weekend broadband usage, but with so much of the world telecommuting during lockdowns, this difference has disappeared.

“We used to see 6.5 gigabytes [of] data usage during weekdays and 80 gigabytes during weekends,” he said. “Now, every day is the same and we are averaging around 11.5 gigabytes of data usage per day.”

Yildrim also emphasized that Wi-Fi usage went up by four percent during work hours and that reported Wi-Fi issues increased by 70%. He said that in his opinion, the next step in meeting this level of demand would be implementing 6E technology — the next generation Wi-Fi that will exist on the 6 GigaHertz (GHz) band, instead of the standard 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz – in consumer infrastructure.

Mike Talbert, associate fellow with Verizon global network and technology, noted that while he agreed with Yildrim’s assessment, he added that expanding the spectrum would also play a crucial role in meeting consumer demand. Talbert pointed out that everything from lightbulbs to doors to washers and driers is connected to Wi-Fi, and that this trend of connectivity is only going to increase in the wake of the pandemic.

Both Talbert and Yildrim wanted to make it clear that the wants and needs of every consumer are different and that broadband providers would need to be able to address this diversity of demand in terms of the types of services they provide.

Yildrim said that it is not even enough to recognize what consumers’ needs are today and that broadband providers need to be actively trying to assess the needs of tomorrow.

“We didn’t have that many peloton devices connected to our networks two years ago—so we don’t know what’s gonna come, but we know these services will have different requirements.”

The future of work for many will likely be a hybrid of working-from-home and in-person, said panelists during a Washington Post Live event, sponsored by Dell Technologies, which aired Tuesday.

Many employees of Dell Technologies have been working a remote, in-person hybrid schedule for years. Dell implemented the blend of remote work in 2009 and today 65 percent of its workforce utilizes the alternative schedule.

The decision made years ago was a cornerstone of the company’s culture and caused the company to increasingly attract talent, said Kristi Hummel, senior vice president of Human Resources at Dell.

Upon making the transition, many executives worried it would be difficult to maintain company culture, especially among new hires, said Hummel. Dell has done an excellent job of focusing on outcomes and productivity levels, instead of where and how the work is done, she said.

The office atmosphere of 2021 and 2022 will be part of a larger change in companies, predicted Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant said the shift to virtual work will be a cause to create more collaborative virtual work spaces.

“People will not be sitting in cubicles alone and offices will become more collaborative spaces, with more team rooms and private rooms, for private conversations and calls,” said Grant.

Companies will start to think more creatively about where they want to locate their offices and headquarters, Grant said. “2020 was the year of forced rethinking, and 2021 is the year of proactive rethinking,” said Grant, adding that companies need to plan for their operations to be deliverable over virtual platforms.

According to Zoom’s Chief Operation Officer Aparna Bawa, the web-based video conferencing tool is developing new features and enhancing existing assets to adapt to the burgeoning work-from-home market.

The platform still has limitations, such as being unable to transmit human senses, such as touch, smell, and taste, but Bawa has confirmed that the company is working on creating some of these features. Zoom engineers are working to implement noise tonalities, music features, and even a ‘handshake’ feature.

For the new world of work to become a reality, it is up to companies to unlock the most productivity from their workforces, remotely, concluded Susan Lund, partner at McKinsey Global Institute.

In oral arguments in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, the court intends to resolve a split among the circuit courts as to whether the Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies broadly to calls made on many types of dialing equipment – or is limited to calls made on equipment from the early 1990s.

If Facebook prevails, TCPA litigation is likely to be significantly curtailed. The matter builds upon the July 6, 2020, decision in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants Inc. in which, by a 7-2 vote, the court said that because the TCPA’s exception for collecting government debts violated the First Amendment, the TCPA was preserved with the exception excised.

See “Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments About Robocalls Over the Telephone,” Broadband Breakfast, May 6, 2020.

Discussion about limits on the number of automatically dialed phone calls

Panelists at a November 19 event of the Federal Communications Bar Association generally came down on the side of the autodialers: They agreed that there should not be a broad frequency limit on calls.

This limit was suggested in a recent proposed regulation of the Federal Communications Commission that was intended to clarify some of the many and convoluted exemptions of the TCPA.

Leah Dempsey, senior counsel and vice president federal affairs of ACA International – which represents collection companies – said her members advocating against any limits on the amounts of calls.

Because of restrictions by other regulatory agencies overseeing telemarkers, having a broad frequency limit would lead to unintended consequences, she said.

Mark Stone, FCC deputy bureau chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, said he agreed: The quantity of calls was not “probative as to whether or not it [was] an autodialer.”

The TRACED Act is causing problems for collection company phone calls

Dempsey also mentioned some challenges the TRACED Act poses for a company’s ability to make calls subject to the TCPA. A lot of the industry has been seeing their calls blocked, and according to an industry survey, a lot of the calls were being blocked by either the carrier or a third party. She suggested that if callers were going to be notified of blocks to their calls notification would need to be timely—ideally within 24 hours.

She explained that sometimes legitimate calls aren’t being signed because they haven’t implemented the STIR/SHAKEN framework for cryptographically signing computer-generating phone calls. Many problems also arise from third party call labeling services partnering with carriers.

Finally, Panelists also talked about the reassigned numbers database. Ten years after its establishment, the issue is still a mess, said panelists.

Under TCPA, callers need prior express consent under the called party. There are several items of ambiguity here, such as what “call party” means under TCPA.

Additionally, when callers perform their due diligence to get consent but then find that by the time they place the call, the phone number they’ve called is no longer assigned to the same consumer. There’s been debate about who is liable at that point, panelists explained.

Of the courts that have examined this issue, most have decided that it is the caller’s responsibility to ensure the call party was the correct one. However, the D.C. Circuit Court disagreed, creating a conflict to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

Panelists at the FCBA event supported the FCC’s new national reassigned numbers database designed to help callers compile the data they need to avoid making erroneous calls. That said, Dempsey said if the database doesn’t work, she hopes to get more clarity on the issue overall.

Hogan Lovells Partner Mark Brennan and Eckert Seamans Cherin and Mellott LLC Partner Robert Gastner moderated the event.

O’Rielly predicted that industries that do not require employees to be present in person would mostly continue to telework, and therefore workers would have to transition to working from home permanently.

“We’re going to move towards that,” he said. “We’re going to be set up and have an established facility within your own domain to be able to handle such a circumstance.”

Broadband is more important than ever, and O’Rielly claimed that the FCC has recently taken steps to ensure that the internet is accessible to as many people as possible.

However, he said, the problem is still dire.

“If you accept it at face value between 18 and… 20 million Americans do not have broadband of the 25/3 speed availability,” he said.

The agency has approved the disbursement of $16 billion of funds for underserved communities through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The money will be distributed through a reverse auction in October.

When asked if telecom companies could effectively deploy 5G across the country, O’Rielly was hesitantly optimistic.

“Could it be built? Yes,” he said. “Can it be done fast? No.”

He said that when it came to the rollout of such services in a widespread fashion, measured action was the best policy because funding is scarce and the projects take time.

“People don’t like to hear that. They want to hear in two years you’re going to solve 20 million folks that don’t have access today,” he said. “It’s not probably in the cards, and they just don’t like to hear that.”

Despite the pandemic and its complications, O’Rielly said, the future is bright for telework, although it will take time.

In a conversation with App Association President Morgan Reed, the commissioner highlighted some of the ways that students without high-speed broadband access at home have adapted in the past. The App Association also goes by the name ACT.

“Before this pandemic, we would have seen them sitting out in the library parking lot to catch a free Wi-Fi signal or doing their homework with a side of fries at a fast-food restaurant that offers a free signal,” she said.

Rosenworcel said that such resources could go a long way, especially while the ongoing pandemic makes connectivity increasingly essential.

“We’ve got to double down on the solutions that will make sure that every student everywhere is connected,” she said.

In addition to where students connect to Wi-Fi, the devices on which they are connecting should be noted, Reed said.

“What’s been fascinating is seeing how many of [my daughter’s] friends are logging on with their smartphone,” he said. “And how many of her friends are logging in with a tablet, something, anything that brings internet into their lives.”

The transition to remote education and employment has left many scrambling to continue their daily lives in areas across the country that do not have high-speed internet. The FCC has handed down millions in nationwide broadband infrastructure grants during the virus’s spread.

However, Rosenworcel emphasized that additional Congressional financial support was necessary.

“I’d also like to see, as we move forward, Congress continue to spend time and energy thinking about unlicensed spectrum because unlicensed spectrum is really going to power a lot of wireless activity in the future,” she said.

In addition to funding the expansion of wireless internet, Rosenworcel said, it is also crucial to free up the FCC to determine where resources are best allocated.

”My plea to Congress is make sure that you’re putting the appropriate resources into it.”

The session was moderated by Elizabeth Cuttner, attorney advisor in the FCC’s Competition Policy Division of the Wireline Bureau.

Matthew Collins, who has worked remotely for the Federal Communications Commission for the past year, shared three tips from his experience for how to remain productive during quarantine.

He said “getting in the right headspace for work” was the most important issue Collins identified. To do this, Collins recommended getting up often because it is easy to feel “chained to your laptop.”

“Going for a run can also be a great help.”

Second, Collins recommended “minimizing distractions.” “Find a spot in the dining room table” where you can work, Collins advised. Lastly try “setting boundaries.” Know when it’s time to “log on when it’s time to log on” and vice versa, Collins said. It’s easy to let things “bleed” between work and life. Especially in a society where you can get a message from a coworker in the late night. “Make it as much like working in the office as much as possible”

Rebecca Hussey of Crown Castle offered tips on “mentally prepping for telework.”

“If you’re like me, you may have thought to yourself, ‘what day is it?’” Hussey said.

She implored listeners to reflect on the time that they ordinarily would spend commuting to work. Are you using it to get ready for the day ahead, or “are you hiding under the covers asking yourself when is this madness going to be over?” Hussey suggested using that time “to set intentions for the day.”

Despite its tiresome repetition on blogs, actually dress like you’re actually going to work, Hussey implored. “Nobody needs to see their coworkers in an undershirt. Ever.” Hussey said that she was speaking from experience.

“In terms of morale,” Hussey recommended getting creative. One idea she suggested was “to schedule conversations or coffee with colleagues” via Zoom, something her organization has set up.

“Thirty minutes can drag on; 15 minutes seems to be just right,” Hussey suggested. Another idea Hussey recommended? “Virtual Power Point karaoke.”

“There are plenty of concerns” regarding privacy in this new space of telework, said Matthew Diaz of Ice Miller. Diaz swore that Ice Miller “is not a beer,” referencing his law firm’s unusual name.

Diaz recommended being mindful of sensitive business material while working at home. Apple has recently stressed to employees the importance of discretion surrounding working at home when it recently loosened the rules surrounding its notorious secrecy surrounding new product development.

Proprietary documents and gadgets should not be left on the table for children or spouses to peruse, Diaz said.

“It’s really easy for these hackers and scammers to socially engineer you,” Diaz added. Hackers are shifting from traditional email scams, such as the cliché of posing as a prince who is shipping diamonds from Africa.

“No longer is it the Black Panther” asking you for money in exchange for “parcels of land in Wakanda,” Diaz joked. Now, scammers are preying on the fear and the uncertainty of this situation by framing their emails as authoritative voices surrounding the coronavirus.

Diaz ended with three practical things you can implement to make sure your telework is more secure:

• First, use a virtual private network
• Second, make sure your router password isn’t easily guessable
• Third, have “two-step,” or multi-factor authentication.

“We have locks on our doors and windows,” Diaz said. Why not put them on our laptops and cell phones?