Verizon’s Lamont Copeland on assigning modalities to missions and modernizing TDM in bites
Verizon’s Lamont Copeland recently spoke to RCR Wireless’ Sulagna Saha at the Defense Communications Forum, arguing that if you design a military network correctly from the start, security doesn’t have to be an add-on. Instead, it’s a byproduct of how you’ve tied the network modalities, the applications, the data, and the end users together. The trick when it comes to defense is doing that across the messy reality of a modern military base.
During the session, Copeland walked through how Verizon approaches multimodal network design for the Department of Defense, the trade-offs involved in assigning specific modalities to specific use cases, and the very unglamorous work of dragging legacy infrastructure into a more secure, modernized state. The conversation kept coming back to one theme — that security, performance, and mission outcomes are functions of the same design choices, not separate workstreams.
Integrating end-to-end security and multimodal networks
Copeland’s core pitch is that security gets built in when networks are designed around the actual mission rather than retrofitted afterward. That means actively tying applications, system data, and end-user requirements to the underlying technology choices from day one.
The relevant modalities are broader than they used to be. Wireline still covers the bulk of base infrastructure — including fiber, Ethernet, and the legacy TDM services that are now being modernized out. Wireless handles connectivity for users on the move. And, space and satellite are increasingly part of the equation, particularly for the harder-to-reach environments where tactical communications need to function. “How do those things all apply to what the expectations are of those end users and what the needs are the applications?” Copeland asked, framing the design problem as one of matching modality to mission.
Once those pieces are stitched together, a centralized management wrapper goes on top to monitor users, devices, and data natively across the whole stack. That’s where a lot of the protection actually lives — in understanding how every component connects to every other component, and being able to see it.
Assigning network modalities to specific use cases
The more interesting part of the presentation was Copeland’s walk-through of how different modalities get assigned to different workloads on a single base. He pointed to a specific deployment Verizon had been asked to handle, where the work involved standing up private network, wireline, and SD-WAN services in tandem.
AR/VR training, for instance, sits on a private network. The goal there is to guarantee performance and segment the sensitive training data away from everything else on the base. Telemedicine runs over the standard wireline network across the base itself, while the macro wireless network handles connectivity out to the edge — getting doctors in touch with personnel in the field, or supporting users moving between facilities. Smart warehousing gets dedicated fiber, because moving large data sets, inventory systems, and extensive blueprints quickly is its own problem with its own bandwidth profile.
Sitting above all of this, SD-WAN and VPN services handle traffic prioritization, splitting and isolating access based on what each application actually needs. And as Copeland noted, satellite is increasingly being pulled into that same central management point. “There are always talks about wireline and wireless, but we’re seeing satellite as being part of this network modality, be able to figure out, how do we then provide those additional services and protect that too.”
Managing threats and prioritizing mission traffic
The flexibility SD-WAN provides is around resilience. If a particular network gets attacked or compromised, traffic and use cases can be shifted across modalities based on what’s still trustworthy. That movement has to be governed by something, though, and Copeland tied it directly to the concept of operations.
“You got to build in, and this is that management view that you have to have of understanding the one here is the full portfolio and the in the full layout of what we’re protecting, what we’re supporting, and the people that we’re supporting, building that into then, how do I then build an operational plan, security plan, to be able to then move traffic, move users, move things accordingly to each one of those network technologies, and then quickly mitigate so quarantine and then mitigate those different things.”
Prioritization matters here, and it cuts in two directions. There’s prioritization at the user level — power users versus everyday users, and people who need access to specific sensitive data. And there’s prioritization at the mission level, where even within a single user profile, certain traffic needs to take precedence. Matching profiles to mission priorities, and then mapping that to the right modality, is what makes the whole thing work under pressure.
Overcoming technical debt and budget constraints
So what stands in the way? Base modifications almost never happen in greenfield environments, which means there’s a substantial amount of technology debt to navigate before anything new can go in. “We’re never going into just a greenfield environment. You’re going into a place where, you know, there are a lot of technology debt that we’re going to have to work through.”
A lot of that debt is just inventory — locating and consolidating legacy hardware spread across facilities that may span a wide geographic range. And the technology choices themselves have to be made against real budget constraints. As Copeland put it, “as much as we love the new technology that’s out there, and all the different things and whiz bang capabilities that we have to be able to support the the mission needs there, so you know, have to fit into these budget constraints.”
TDM is the obvious example. It can’t be ripped out wholesale, so it has to be modernized in steps, with wireless and satellite folded in gradually rather than dropped on top. The metaphor Copeland reached for was eating an elephant — one bite at a time, modernizing TDM, then layering in wireless, then satellite, then integrating the whole set across a base.
What’s changing, in his view, is how those conversations start. The traditional model is requirements-driven — the government specifies exactly what it wants, industry delivers against the spec. Copeland argued for moving toward outcome-based partnership conversations instead. “You’re expecting x. Here are the different options that we can do, and let’s work together to figure out what’s the best way, which fits into the user needs and then the budget needs.” It’s a small framing shift, but for a sector still working through decades of accumulated infrastructure, it’s probably the more honest way to plan modernization.
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