PODCAST: ATIS on how open-access accelerates fiber broadband build-out scale

Susan Miller, CEO of ATIS
Susan is President and CEO of ATIS and has been in this role since 1999. Under her leadership, ATIS redefined how ICT business priorities are identified and how technical and operational solutions and standards are developed. Before she was appointed President, she served as the Association’s Vice President and General Counsel. In that capacity, she played an integral role in setting the direction and ultimate evolution of the organization as it is today. Before joining ATIS, Susan practiced telecommunications law at Weil, Gotshal and Manges. In addition to her role at ATIS, Susan has served in several other roles, including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Board of Directors; the International Engineering Consortium Advisory Council; member of the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC); and the Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Oklahoma State University. In 2011, Susan made Billing and OSS World’s List of the 25 Most Influential. Previously, she was recognized by FierceTelecom as one of the “2010 Top Women in Wireline.” She has also served on the U.S. delegation to the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and ATIS’ delegation to the Global Standards Collaboration. Susan is a graduate of Dickinson College and Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.

Scott Baker, chair of ATIS’ OANF and Corporate ServiceNow Platform Architecture at AT&T Technology Services
Scott Baker has worked at AT&T since 2008. When Baker joined AT&T in 2008, he initially managed network monitoring and development teams before pivoting into architecture full-time. He spent several years as a solution architect, building complex solutions to improve AT&T’s end-to-end tech stack supporting its enterprise products. Around 2018, he moved over to ServiceNow Architecture as the lead ServiceNow architect for AT&T. In conjunction with its ServiceNow roadmap, AT&T’s involvement in TMForum standards grew. When AT&T began the project that would become Gigapower, Baker got involved in Open Access for the first time, where his role was both to oversee how ServiceNow was used within the architecture and, given his TMForum experience, to assist in developing how AT&T would employ TMForum standard interfaces in Open Access. Since that time, he has been an active participant in TMForum, including the Wholesale Broadband Project, and advocating for enhancing and broadening the standards. He continues to work with the AT&T Open Access team to evolve the standards as we’ve expanded to multiple OAP partnerships.

Sajan Parikh, Vice Chair of OANF and the CTO of COS Systems
A 17-year telecom industry veteran, Parikh works across fiber and fixed wireless networks, large-scale systems architecture, and the operational realities of running and scaling service providers. He has worked directly with network operators, retail service providers, municipalities, utilities, and infrastructure-backed fiber platforms. Over the course of his career, he has led greenfield builds, brownfield transformations, and both pre- and post-acquisition technical consolidations. His experience includes converting traditional retail ISPs into wholesale and open-access models and designing the systems required to support them. He has deep hands-on experience implementing TM Forum APIs in production environments, with a focus on interoperability, automation, and operational scalability. His work spans wholesale ordering frameworks, provisioning orchestration, service location data architecture, and multi-tenant OSS/BSS design. He is known for translating real-world operational constraints into practical system architecture that works at scale. As Vice Chair of the ATIS Open Access Network initiative, Sajan brings a practitioner perspective to standards development. He is focused on addressing the lack of consistency that forces open access deployments into bespoke, high-cost integrations. His goal is to help establish clear, pragmatic standards that reduce friction and enable repeatable, scalable shared infrastructure models across North America.