The firm's study, 'North American Fiber Broadband Report: FTTH Review and Forecast 2026-2030,' indicates that nearly $200 billion will be spent on fiber over the next five years, highlighting a significant investment in fiber-to-the-home services.
The opportunity is to have more devices that are smart, adopting AI and [highlighting] the evolution of the original cloud AI with complementary support happening at the edge. We are able to grow the performance of platforms. Two things are converging: from one side, AI models are working with better performance [with a] reduced number of parameters, [and] at the edge, you can see more and more inference happening.
Wholesale access has been inherently supported by the Broadband Forum's network architecture over the past 20 years, and this project takes the best practices from copper‑based broadband to reshape and evolve them for fiber and cloud networks.
Long-range radio waves can pass through obstacles more easily, which makes them perfect for monitoring expansive factories or outdoor infrastructure. A recent report by Fabrity highlighted that these systems use very little power. This allows sensors to operate for 5 to 10 years on a single battery. Using such tech means you do not have to install expensive wiring across your entire site.
Ninety-five percent of intercontinental internet traffic travels through undersea fiber optic cables. Not satellites, not some ethereal "cloud" floating above us. Cables. Physical, tangible lines of glass fiber, thinner than a garden hose, laid across ocean floors by specialized ships. There are roughly 550 active or planned cable systems worldwide, according to TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, and they represent the actual, material backbone of the global internet.
Across 2025 as a whole, the company tracked more than 180 significant disruptions, with the final quarter dominated by cable damage, power problems, and routine operational failures. There was just one confirmed government-directed shutdown during the period. Tanzania saw a sharp drop in internet traffic on October 29 as violent protests broke out during the country's presidential election, with traffic falling by more than 90 percent. Traffic returned briefly before declining again, and routing data pointed to throttling rather than a clean shutdown.
Ookla said the growing use of ChatGPT and other AI tools places much more demand on mobile networks than the typical activities of browsing social media and the web, watching videos, texting, and making the occasional phone call. As a result, more speed and expanded capabilities will be necessary. The report said advanced AI capabilities like AI-enabled glasses will put a particular strain on upload connections in the future.
If platforms and solutions are not developed and put in place, according to "Quantum Threat: The Trillion-Dollar Security Race is On," there will be no protection against the breaking of public-key encryption in use today. This is ominously referred to as "Q-day." Q-day is coming. The report maintains quantum computers will be able to "perform certain calculations, particularly those required to break today's complex encryption standards, at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than any supercomputer imaginable."
Edge computing is a type of IT infrastructure in which data is collected, stored, and processed near the "edge" or on the device itself instead of being transmitted to a centralized processor. Edge computing systems usually involve a network of devices, sensors, or machinery capable of data processing and interconnection. A main benefit of edge computing is its low latency. Since each endpoint processes information near the source, it can be easier to process data, respond to requests, and produce detailed analytics.
Light-based internet provider Taara, which spun out of Alphabet's "moonshot" incubator last year, just launched Taara Beam to provide 25Gbps connectivity within cities over invisible beams of light - line of sight permitting. Unlike last year's Taara Lightbridge, which connects communities separated by water and mountains at distances up to 20km (over 12 miles), the shoebox-sized Beam can be mounted to street poles and roof tops for city-wide connectivity at distances up to 10km. The 8kg (less than 20 pounds) device typically consumes about 90W.
Qunnect and Cisco have unveiled what they say is the first entanglement-swapping demonstration of its kind over deployed metro-scale fibre using a commercial quantum networking system. The demonstration combined Qunnect's room-temperature quantum hardware with Cisco's quantum networking software stack. The net result of the project is regarded by the partners as being able to bring practical quantum networks closer to scalable deployment, validating a spoke-and-hub model for scaling quantum networks through commercial datacentres.
