AIDA's approach to IT infrastructure prioritizes availability through redundancy, with each vessel operating two physically separated data centers in different fire zones to ensure critical services remain operational.
Both are using wireless as a broadband retention tool: a customer with both internet and mobile from the same provider is much harder to lose to a fiber overbuilder. Charter added 428,000 Spectrum Mobile net lines in Q4, pushing mobile service revenue up 13.1% to $973 million. Comcast had its best wireless year ever, adding 1.5 million net lines for the full year and ending 2025 with over 9 million total lines.
Oak Hill Capital is buying Hunter Communications, Oregon's largest privately-owned fiber-optic internet provider, from Grain Management for an undisclosed sum. Hunter Communications has more than 3,000 route miles of fiber infrastructure, and Grain Management initially invested in the company in 2020. Much of Hunter Communications' growth in terms of markets served and products offered happened under the ownership of Grain Management.
Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare says it has identified an issue that caused outages for the social media platform X, some multiplayer games and ChatGPT, among others. Cloudflare said on its status page earlier Tuesday that it was aware of and investigating an issue that was impacting multiple customers. There were reports of widespread 500 errors, as well as Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing.
"I think this is a secular growth trend for many years," Hotard said. "The reason I say that is if you look at what we are doing in AI today, we are largely using LLMs for language-based applications." "Autonomous vehicles are still in the early days of penetration. Augmented and virtual reality, smart glasses. Very low penetration. Robotics. Very low penetration. There's so many applications to come that I think we are very much in the early days," he continued.
Steve Riley, head of IT operations and service management at Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, gave ZDNET a tour of his racing team's state-of-the-art technology campus in Brackley, UK, and reflected on the impact digital and data have on the sport. "Technology is more crucial in Formula One than ever," he said. "Any sort of manufacturing function in an F1 team many years ago wouldn't necessarily be quite as reliant on IT services as they are today."
