From the newsletter (September 29; sign-up or follow if you want it sooner): AI is fuelling a networking infrastructure boom, with Corning scaling fiber production to meet demand, while new deals across subsea, interconnection, terrestrial, satellite and sovereign networks show infrastructure remains the defining story of the ‘supercycle’ so far.
There’s a blow-by-blow account, linked below (here), about this AI ‘supercycle’ fever in telecoms right now – which spins out of AT&T’s new $3bn deal with Corning to shore up future fiber supplies. There is interest, of course, in AT&T’s strategy, somewhat different from supercycle suckers like Verizon and Nokia, and there are loaded comments in there, too, targeted straight at Starlink. But the story is as much about Corning itself, which is at the very heart of this AI networking boom, and which has a rush of such deals – including with Verizon, Zayo, Lumen, Meta, and Nvidia. The latter is so big that Corning has bumped-up production capacity 10-fold on certain lines, and said it will build three new factories and hire 3,000 new staff just to get the work done. But as the story tells, at a canter: the supply chain is being yanked at every networking layer in the stack. Worth a read.
But even now, at press, there is so much it leaves out. Most of the announcements today are about the same, more or less: more routes, more resilience, more capacity – with AI, increasingly, bolted on as justification. The straighter exception is news from Orange Business, which has been picked to provide the EU’s TESTA-EIRIS backbone for secure cross-border data exchange. Which is primarily about sovereignty and secure Euro infrastructure. The only AI reference is right at the bottom, and as much about broader product/platform positioning. (Note, Sean has a good piece from the Snapdragon Summit, which summarizes – and makes sense of – five hours of Qualcomm talks, which only make two passing references to 6G. Such a paucity of hashtag-hype nonsense seems like a recommendation.)
But Orange’s is another infrastructure story: secure private Layer 2/3 connectivity, VPN, cloud connectivity, multiple PoPs, 99.999% availability, NOC/SOC; yada yada. Otherwise, we have the usual geographic sprawl. RETN has added a sixth subsea route into Taiwan, while FLAG is expanding subsea India-Asia and trans-Pacific capacity. And DE-CIX is busy extending the interconnection map again, with ALPSiX launching in southern Austria and a proposed South Atlantic corridor with Cabo Verde Telecom. And layers-up, somewhere in orbit, Eutelsat is pushing its OneWeb satellite service into live rail connectivity in Poland and public-sector connectivity in Portugal, combining LEO with terrestrial networks – rather than pretending one technology does everything.
A footnote: Arelion says enterprise trust in network providers is getting in the way of AI and digital transformation projects. It’s only a survey, but food for thought.
