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Broadband / Telco

🇨🇦 Bell Internet Customer Says Their Bill Keeps Rising and They’re Not Happy - According to their post, the customer’s 3 Gbps fibre plan went from $105 plus tax in January of this year to $132 plus tax on the latest December 2025 bill. The bill increases started in January, then in May, June, July and now December. They also clarified that the plan wasn’t a promotional offer ending, noting they’ve had the same service for some time.

My Take: People feel trapped. Prices go up, but the experience doesn’t. That’s the kind of thing that drives churn, and brand damage - although I don’t think that’s concern #1. On the other hand, if consumers read the 6pt font on the promotion when they signed up, it likely stated that Bell has the right to increase prices whenever it wants. Read the fine print.

🇨🇦 A new era for Bell Fibe TV: Stream live and on-demand - no hardware, no hassle - Starting today, Bell customers in Ontario and Quebec can stream Fibe TV without the need for a set-top box. Devices from Samsung, LG and Roku now compatible with Fibe TV app

My Take: No more set-top box. No more truck roll. Easy and quick upsell. More margin for the provider. Less stuff to support. Easier to bundle more things and ultimately offer more customer choice.

🇨🇦 Bell collects $24,000 in damages from copper thief - On Jan. 2, 2024 a criminal stole copper from a Bell installation in Chicoutimi, Que. that caused 94 customers to lose telecom service for 36 hours. On Nov. 26 of this year, the company garnered a judgement against the person, who had been convicted of a crime. The Court of Quebec awarded Bell $19,000 in compensatory damages and a further $5,000 in punitive damages.

My Take: Funny that a financial penalty may be more impactful than jail time.

🇨🇦 Bill 40, the Protect Ontario by Securing Affordable Energy for Generations Act, is now the law of the land. - At a time when Ontario's economy is under attack, Ontario's plan now codifies and adds "economic growth” as a principal objective of Ontario’s energy agencies, including the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and the Ontario Energy Board (OEB).

My Take: Part of Bill 40 changes the game for data centre builds in Ontario by making grid connection a policy decision, not just an engineering queue.

Here’s what it means in plain terms:

• Big data centres can now be treated as “specified load facilities,” which means they can be put under special connection rules set by regulation. Those rules can include approvals the province requires before a utility is allowed to connect you.

• Ontario is explicitly moving toward prioritizing the projects it thinks deliver real benefits, not just power demand. The government’s own framing is jobs, strategic value, and domestic data hosting and sovereignty.

• It also gives the system teeth: if a data centre is connected and later it turns out the required conditions weren’t met or were breached, the utility has to follow a prescribed process and take actions set out in regulation. In other words, “connect and forget” is no longer guaranteed.

• The criteria can be broad. The Act explicitly states that the requirements can include criteria tied to economic development and job creation, as well as other measures the government considers necessary.

• There’s a grandfathering line in the sand: if your connection request was submitted before June 3, 2025, this specific section doesn’t apply the same way.

Overall, Ontario’s basically saying “we’re not giving out scarce grid capacity on autopilot anymore.” If you’re building a big data centre, you’re going to need more than a technical plan. You’re going to need a value story around jobs, strategic benefit, and a clear reason Ontario should prioritize your load.

In world first, Australia bans social media for children under 16 - Australia on Wednesday became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, blocking access to platforms including TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook. Ten of the biggest platforms were ordered to block children from midnight (1300 GMT on Tuesday) or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (U.S.$33 million) under the new law, which drew criticism from major technology companies and free speech advocates, but was welcomed by many parents and child advocates.

My Take: This is Australia telling tech companies they don’t get to grow by ignoring kids anymore. The real test is whether they can keep under 16s out without turning the internet into an everywhere ID check, because trading social media harm for a privacy mess isn’t much of a win.

Smart Home Market Milestones - Over the past decade, the connected lifestyle has taken hold of consumers who are seeking greater convenience, safety and security, connection with others, remote work abilities and savings on energy, water, and insurance costs. In the US, internet households have more than doubled the number of connected devices in their home, from an average of 8.4 to more than 17 connected devices across connected consumer electronics, smart home, and connected health devices.

My Take: The smart home isn’t stuck, it’s growing up. The next phase isn’t about more gadgets, it’s about making things simpler, more reliable, and clearly worth the money. AI will help, but only if it reduces friction, and the real winners will be the ones that make the smart home feel effortless.

The Complete Guide To Radio Frequency Over Fiber Systems - Radio over fiber transports RF signals via optical fiber, enabling low-loss distribution for wireless networks, radar systems, and radio astronomy applications.

My Take: RF over fiber lets you place antennas where you need them and keep the brains somewhere else. But it’s not magic, it’s analog, so the winners will be the teams who can keep the signal clean at scale while everyone else learns the hard way that fiber doesn’t automatically solve RF problems.

Ciena’s optical orders soar – so do its supply issues - Ciena faces optical supply issues as hyperscaler demand keeps growing. Corning is another vendor that’s spoken out about supply constraints. However, Ciena’s optimistic hyperscaler revenue will start flowing in ‘26

My Take: This is the same story we’re seeing everywhere in the AI buildout.. the bottleneck isn’t just GPUs, it’s the plumbing. If optics, fiber and photonics are constrained, then all the “AI factory” plans slow down because you can’t connect data centers and clusters at the scale they’re targeting.

Verizon's new wireless rates spark price war worries - Wireless price cuts rolled out this week suggest just how aggressive new Verizon CEO Dan Schulman could be in the fight to win back postpaid customers.

My Take: Verizon looks tired of waiting and decided to cut prices to pull customers back. That can work, but in a market this mature it’s risky. If it turns into a price war, customers win, margins shrink, and Verizon only benefits if it can lock people into bundles and keep them from churning.

Ookla: FWA speeds for the big 3 all went down this year - Fixed wireless access (FWA) speeds for major operators declined across the board during the second and third quarters of 2025, according to a new Ookla report. But how much of that is seasonal or due to network congestion is tough to say.

My Take: FWA is still a solid product, but this is what scaling looks like when spectrum is the limit. So whether the issue is due to summer foliage or congestion, you can’t grow forever on fixed spectrum, and sooner or later you have to add real capacity or the experience slips.

Largest Outages of 2025: A Downdetector Analysis - In 2025, digital services proved both indispensable and fragile. This year’s largest outages were defined by platform-level disruptions, particularly across video, gaming, and communication platforms, that impacted millions of users. However, given how many individual platforms rely on the same few cloud providers and core systems, the role of centralized infrastructure also played a key role, demonstrating how a single point of failure can still cause disruption to cascade across multiple services simultaneously.

My Take: Ookla’s Downdetector data shows the biggest outages of 2025 weren’t random one-offs, they were platform failures that rippled everywhere. When AWS went down on Oct. 20, it triggered about 17 million user reports over more than 15 hours. PlayStation Network followed in February with roughly 3.9 million reports over a full day, and Cloudflare’s November outage logged about 3.3 million reports in just a few hours.

Boring redundancy and graceful failover. That’s what you want when the inevitable outage hits.

Twenty-thousand leagues under the sea – why sub-sea cable is king - Nearly all international internet traffic – from cloud workloads to streaming video – voyages along a handful of submarine fibre-optic cable highways. These undersea trunks connect continents, power the internet, and underpin the so-called AI ‘supercycle’ – they also make terrestrial cross-border links look like country tracks.

My Take: Almost all international internet traffic rides on subsea fiber cables, not on satellites or terrestrial links. It explains why that famous “99% of global traffic goes under the ocean” stat is actually believable. If you care about AI scale, cloud resilience, or national security, you should care about who controls the cables and where the choke points are.

Quintillion cable outage stretches into the seventh month - Due to lingering sea ice, repairs are not possible until late summer, early fall. In the meantime, businesses and private customers as well as telecommunications companies have adapted to different ways to connect to the internet during the ongoing outage and the customer base moved on from what claims to be more resilient internet options.

My Take: This is what “single point of failure” looks like when the infrastructure sits under sea ice. One cable break can drag on for months, and the backup options usually don’t match fiber performance. It’s not just inconvenient; it changes how businesses, schools, healthcare, and public services function day to day. “Broadband” in the Arctic is an infrastructure survival problem, not a speed problem.

Accelerating broadband innovation and synergy, together - To thrive in the modern connected home market, Broadband Service Providers (BSPs) must differentiate service offerings, develop new revenue streams, and carefully consider the end-user’s experience.

My Take: The connected home is getting messy fast, and broadband providers can’t keep winning by just selling more speed. Homes are full of devices doing very different things, so the real problem is protecting the experience in real time, not just upgrading access. Broadband Forum’s answer is open standards plus open source, with projects like OB-STEER that let networks dynamically steer sessions and traffic at the edge so things actually work when it matters. Reading into it, it looks like a standardized SD-WAN type of solution.

The New FOA Installation Standard - This standard focuses on the processes for installing a fiber optic project and provides guidance on the design, installation and management of the project. It was created from the inputs of those in the industry, especially the FOA technical advisors, who are highly experienced in both doing the work involved and teaching it to others.

My Take: I didn’t know we needed one. There’s a link to the document, if you’re so inclined.

Nvidia made 6G sexy, but network 'sensuality' is the star - Looking at integrated sensing and communication in tomorrow's networks (which has nothing to do with skin scans)

My Take: ISAC (integrated sensing and communication) is the “new value prop” people can actually explain.. Radios that can sense objects and environments, so the network becomes a kind of distributed radar layer. That could unlock new services, but it also drags in privacy, security, and trust questions fast.

Simplicity, service, scale – Vodafone IoT preps for global ‘hyperscale’ - Vodafone is operationalising its hyperscaler ambition in IoT, putting the US and the wider Americas at the heart of a new growth phase. Dennis Nikles, newly-appointed MD for the region, explains how deeper MNO partnerships, platform investment, and a drive to simplify complexity are reshaping the company’s strategy.

My Take: Taking on the Americas with one platform, one view, fewer carrier headaches, and predictable service. Vodafone’s “hyperscale” pitch is really a bet that in a messy, low-margin market, simplification is the product.

Charter CEO: Residential wireless backup is on the way - Charter plans to launch wireless internet backup for residential broadband, said CEO Chris Winfrey at UBS. It’s an interesting move given how Charter has downplayed fixed wireless competition. Winfrey also said the industry should consider “how to cooperate” with satellite

My Take: Not rocket science, but nice to have. The real meat for me in there is the statement arounf SPs working wth LEO providers on more than D2D, with a focus on B2B services, backup and otherwise. I spoke with many operators about this last year, and the common comment was the ability to white-label LEO services under the SP brand. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon…

Connected Nation’s BEAD Tracker - The Connected Nation BEAD Tracker compiles and aggregates data directly from published state BEAD final proposals. It will be updated with new data as final proposals are finalized. Currently, 54 final proposals are included. Check back again to see revised metrics and additional functionality.

My Take: Nice dashboard. I wish there were one for all the programs in Canada! Link to the dashboard is in the article.

Could a new GAO ruling put BEAD in a tailspin? - In a new twist to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has determined NTIA’s June 6 restructuring notice is subject to congressional review.

My Take: BEAD’s biggest enemy is not fibre vs. wireless. It’s policy whiplash. If the rules keep changing or get stuck in review, the $42.45B will eventually get spent, but we will waste years getting there. Who came up with this program anyway? So complicated and convoluted.

Comtrend Launches Mobile Solution to Help Rural Providers "Own the Bundle" and Compete in the New Era of Connectivity - At the center of this effort is LaunchMyMVNO, Comtrend's new solution built in partnership with OXIO that enables providers to offer branded mobile service under their own name. Designed to eliminate the high cost, complexity, and technical barriers that once kept smaller providers out of the mobile market, LaunchMyMVNO gives rural ISPs a fast, low-risk way to add mobile to their portfolio and compete head-to-head with national carriers—all while keeping revenue local.

My Take: Hey Comtrend. Sponsor my newsletter.. aside from that, I think this is pretty innovative, if it works. Retention-based bundles are important in rural markets. If Comtrend and OXIO make MVNO simple and profitable, it gives local ISPs a real way to fight back instead of watching the nationals take the relationship.

Could this work in Canada? Canada’s MVNO market is more controlled than the U.S. The CRTC allows MVNO access only to regional carriers and facilities-based players, not to true “light” or resale-only MVNOs. That means a product like LaunchMyMVNO wouldn’t be plug-and-play for small ISPs the way it is in the U.S. Regulatory limits, wholesale pricing, and spectrum rules all matter a lot more here. 🤔

Fiber Sensing

Sensor Tech Evolving - Combining Fiber Optic and Infrared for Condition Monitoring - This frontier of sensing is not just about gathering more data; it's about fusing light and heat to deliver a complete, predictive picture of operational integrity, securing the future of the world's most vital industrial assets.

My Take: This isn’t about piling on more data. It’s about combining the right signals so you can spot problems early without stopping operations. If fiber and IR work together the way they should, condition monitoring stops being optional and starts acting like a nervous system for critical infrastructure.

EU invests €5 million to detect earthquakes with fiber optic cables...- With Europe facing more extreme weather, ageing infrastructure and rising demand for early-warning systems, authorities need broader and more continuous information than existing sensors can provide.

My Take: Europe already has millions of Km of fiber in the ground and under the sea. If those cables can double as sensors, Europe gets a massive monitoring network without building a whole new one. This is about using what’s already there to improve early warning and protect critical infrastructure adjacent to power lines, pipelines, and transport routes.

The State Of Fiber With Mike Render: Progress and Prospects for Fiber Broadband

Mike focuses during minutes 20 to 22 on exciting emerging applications for fiber, including distributed fiber optic sensing, that will drive both the demand and functionality beyond traditional broadband. Fiber can benefit our entire infrastructure. Give it a watch and listen!

Data Centres

AI Data Centers Just Sent This Other Metal to a New Record High - The price of silver broke a record this week, exceeding $60 an ounce. The white metal has more than doubled in value this year, from about $30 an ounce to over $63 today.

My Take: This is a good reminder that AI isn’t just a software story. Data centers need huge amounts of power and infrastructure, and all of that runs on copper. As AI builds accelerate, they’re stressing already tight copper supply, pushing prices higher. The AI race is starting to look less like a chip problem and more like a raw materials problem. How long before copper thefts hit the Data Centre space? Fiber sensing for perimeter and infrastructure security, anyone?

Oracle denies report on OpenAI data center delays - Oracle denied on Friday a media report that it was delaying OpenAI-related data centers, following investor worries over its debt-fueled AI infrastructure buildout.

My Take: “Concerns about the ability to build data centers due to construction delays, power availability and other practical factors are becoming a much bigger factor than the expected demands for AI capabilities,” Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, said.

Where Sovereignty Meets Speed: The Rise of Sovereign Clouds and Edge Data Centers - Centralized cloud regions once dominated digital infrastructure, concentrating compute, storage, and networking into large campuses. This worked when latency mattered less and geopolitical concerns were minimal, offering scale, cost efficiency, and operational simplicity. Today, AI and national regulations are shifting priorities toward sovereignty and speed, giving rise to sovereign clouds and edge data centers.

My Take: The old cloud model is starting to change. It used to be simple.. build huge centralized regions and scale everything from there. Now, AI, sovereignty rules, and latency are forcing the stack to be split into layers. Big regions handle training and storage, sovereign clouds handle control and regulated data, and edge data centers handle fast, local AI close to where people and machines actually are. What opportunities will come of that?

Seems between this and the next article, Data Center Interconnect becomes a more critical resource to build and manage.

Neocloud Providers Look to Network AI Data Centers - Emerging GPU-as-a-service vendors, driven by demand for agentic AI applications and physical AI, such as robots, require increasing amounts of compute power.

My Take: Neoclouds are learning that scaling AI isn’t just about buying more GPUs. It’s about finding power wherever you can, then stitching data centers together so they act like one system, and the companies that nail that will pull ahead.

Filings reveal details of plant that will power Meta data center - Meta’s massive AI-optimized data center will be powered by a 350 megawatt natural-gas power generation facility constructed by Will-Power.

My Take: Nothing to add…

Data center download: The biggest projects you missed - Synergy Research Group noted in September there is a known pipeline of 527 hyperscale data centers. But which companies are building these and where? Fierce did some digging and pulled together a recap of some of the larger projects that are currently underway.

My Take: The largest one was the Stargate data center project in New Mexico, backed by OpenAI, Oracle, and STACK Infrastructure. It’s a $165 billion build at full scale, designed to exceed 1 GW of power, which makes it the biggest data center project mentioned by a wide margin. That’s a lot of power.

What’s Happening In Space?

A SpaceX Starlink satellite is tumbling and falling out of space after partial breakup in orbit - An anomaly led to loss of contact with the satellite and "the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects."

My Take: “That description suggests that the Starlink satellite's propulsion tank may have ruptured or suffered some other type of damage”.. Why can’t they just say, “oops, we think a propulsion tank may have ruptured…”

Qianfan constellation: China's resumed launches bring global coverage closer - China’s Qianfan “Thousand Sails” LEO satellite constellation grows, now reaching a density that enables near-continuous global coverage during certain daytime periods.

My Take: Qianfan shows China is playing a different satellite game. It’s not about launching the most satellites first, but about reaching usable coverage fast and proving capacity where it matters. If this pace holds, Qianfan stops being a future competitor and starts being a real one. ☠️

Starlink satellite narrowly avoids close encounter with spacecraft from Chinese launch - SpaceX said a Starlink satellite came within 200 meters of a satellite from a Chinese launch, raising attention on satellite tracking and coordination in orbit.

Chinese rocket operator responds to SpaceX accusation over 'collision risk'; expert calls on Starlink to share info before frequent maneuvers

My Take: This isn’t a SpaceX vs China story (well, maybe it is…) It is a space traffic story. When a 200-meter near miss can happen because operators aren’t sharing the right data at the right time, the real risk isn’t one close call - it’s the next “conjunction” that spits debris everywhere. Here’s some more detail.

SpaceX says one of its Starlink satellites (Starlink-6079) came within about 200 meters of a spacecraft from a Chinese Kinetica-1 launch at roughly 560 km altitude, and that there was no coordination or deconfliction.

China’s side, via CAS Space and reporting in Global Times, says it uses space awareness checks to set launch windows, is looking into the details, and argues that if the close approach happened, it was around 48 hours after payload separation, meaning the launch mission was already over. Global Times also flips the blame and says Starlink should share maneuver info because Starlink satellites move often.

Tesla hints at Starlink integration with recent patent - “By employing polymer blends, some examples enable RF transmission from all the modules to satellites and other communication devices both inside and outside the vehicle.”

My Take: Tesla filed a patent application for a vehicle roof design that uses RF-transparent polymer materials, allowing antennas in the roof to communicate more cleanly with “external devices and satellites.” People are reading this as a hint that Tesla could eventually bake satellite connectivity, potentially Starlink, straight into the car instead of relying only on cellular networks. That’s friggin’ cool.

The 10 Most Expensive Satellites Currently In Orbit - Satellites are perhaps the most wondrous piece of technology mankind has invented. The idea of creating an artificial device and launching it into space to orbit our planet is simply amazing. It is also rather expensive.

My Take: The most expensive satellite-like object ever put in orbit is the International Space Station (ISS). It has cost about $150 billion to build, launch, operate, and maintain over time. Although it’s not a “single satellite”, it’s the most expensive space asset ever assembled and kept in orbit. For now.

The Next Wave in Connectivity: Commercial Satellite D2D Takes Shape - 2025 marks a defining moment for satellite direct-to-device (D2D). D2D is evolving from a niche emergency service to a scalable communications model, linking smartphones, IoT devices, and businesses through satellites. While most of the conversation around D2D has so far centered on consumer applications, there is an emerging opportunity in the commercial sector that should also be acknowledged.

My Take: This market won’t be won by whoever brags about the fastest speeds. It’ll be won by the company that makes satellite “just work” in the background, turn on automatically, and cost about what businesses already expect to pay for the same type of connectivity.

Beyond the ground station: Why space data centers require a distributed RAID - Low Earth orbit is undergoing the fastest expansion in its history. However, the nature of the payload is changing. We are moving past simple “bent-pipe” communication relays — where a satellite simply receives a signal and beams it back to Earth without processing it.

My Take: Cloud storage systems use distributed RAID because it lets them grow easily, survive failures, and keep data available without relying on one expensive, fragile system. Why would space be any different?

Like Starlink's Early Days, Amazon Leo Won't Target Polar Regions At First - The company’s first-gen Leo service will deliver global coverage, except for the northern polar regions, similar to SpaceX’s early Starlink rollout.

My Take: Nanook of the North will have to settle for his sat phone a little longer. Unless he used OneWeb. I think they have polar shells

Solar storm could cripple Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, causing orbital chaos - Researchers describe our growing satellite networks as a “house of cards” vulnerable to edge-case failures like extreme space weather.

My Take: Yea, orbital chaos. He already had some earlier issues due to solar storms. Expensive ones.

It’s undeniable. Elon Musk won big from BEAD’s revised guidance - Elon Musk’s SpaceX has won big from the government’s revised BEAD guidance. They now lead the pack among all providers for locations to be served.

My Take: Someone to the math. They got 473k homes.

Tele2 IoT + Skylo Conquers the Arctic: Proving Satellite Connectivity is More Robust Than You Think - The Arctic Circle’s unforgiving vastness makes it an unlikely proving ground for cutting-edge IoT connectivity. Its landscape includes snow-dusted mountains, deep valleys, and endless wilderness.

My Take: If it works that well in the Arctic, it means industries that monitor equipment, track assets, or collect environmental data can stay connected almost anywhere without expensive gear or coverage gaps

Enabling AI

GPT-5.2 Prompting Guide - GPT-5.2 is our newest flagship model for enterprise and agentic workloads, designed to deliver higher accuracy, stronger instruction following, and more disciplined execution across complex workflows. Building on GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2 improves token efficiency on medium-to-complex tasks, produces cleaner formatting with less unnecessary verbosity, and shows clear gains in structured reasoning, tool grounding, and multimodal understanding.

My Take: As these models get smarter, the weak point is no longer the AI, it’s the person using it. GPT-5.2 can do a lot more, but only if you’re clear about what you want and how you want it done. OpenAI is basically saying that typing a vague prompt and hoping for magic is over, especially if you are using AI for real work, coding, research, or automation. Learn to use AI. Garbage in, garbage out.

Gemini 3 Flash: frontier intelligence built for speed - Gemini 3 Flash is our latest model with frontier intelligence built for speed that helps everyone learn, build, and plan anything — faster.

My Take: Good enough is good enough. Gemini 3 Flash is Google betting that speed and cost matter more than being the best at the benchmarks. If your model is “good enough” and it shows up by default in Search, phones, and developer tools, you do not need to win every benchmark to win the market.

OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT with faster AI images - ChatGPT now supports advanced image creation and editing through GPT Images 1.5, offering users faster visuals, photo uploads and intuitive text prompts across web and mobile.

My Take: This update isn’t really about better looking pictures. It’s about making images a normal part of how people think with AI. When visuals are fast and reliable in the same place that ideas are generated, AI stops being something you use every once in a while and starts being something you use all day.

51% of US internet households now use generative AI tools for personal, professional, or educational purposes - “Consumers are clearly asking for AI that works for them, simplifying the home, improving entertainment experiences, and increasing transparency,” said Jennifer Kent, SVP & Principal Analyst, Parks Associates. “Our new Consumer Insights AI Dashboard gives companies an always-on view of where AI demand is strongest and where to invest next.”

My Take: The research shows 51% of US internet households now use GenAI for personal, work, or school tasks, and 71% are familiar with GenAI. ChatGPT leads consumer usage, but Gemini, Apple Intelligence, and Samsung Galaxy AI are gaining ground fast. Only 15% of households pay for an AI app today. Among those who do pay, 75% say they would also pay for a smart home AI service. What about the 85% who don’t pay? Someone has to support the platforms.

🇨🇦 Bell goes to university to boost Canada's AI smarts - Canada's Bell has done a deal with Queen's University that lays the groundwork for the construction of a new AI factory.

My Take: This is Bell tryng to turn AI in to infrastructure. Bell will design, finance, build, and maintain it, and tie it into its fibre network. They haven’t said when it goes live, how powerful it’ll be, or whether it will use Nvidia GPUs. The whole pitch is “sovereign AI,” meaning the compute and data stay under Canadian control. That part is important.

Nokia highlights AI’s (potential) bottleneck - It’s not often that the reading of a telecom industry press release results in a hearty chuckle – they mostly elicit groans of disappointment or tears of despair – but that’s what happened today when Nokia shared its latest missive, Demands of AI supercycle spur cross-industry consensus to evolve US and European network infrastructure - new study. 

My Take: “In Europe, 86% of enterprise respondents said networks are not equipped for widespread AI adoption, and many reported issues like downtime, latency, and throughput limits. In the US, 88% said they are worried network buildout will not keep pace with AI investment.”.. commissioned by a company that makes network stuff to solve the problem ;)

CoreWeave's slide accelerates fears of AI bubble - Once a darling of the artificial intelligence economy, CoreWeave is stoking fears the bubble could burst. The stock has lost $33 billion in value in six weeks as investors question debt-financed capital expenditures, the short seller who predicted Enron's fall expresses skepticism, all while management delivers shifting explanations for construction delays of a major AI data-center complex.

My Take: And headlines like this accelerate the FUD around AI bubbles. “Once a darling of the artificial intelligence economy, CoreWeave is stoking fears the bubble could burst. The stock has lost $33 billion in value in six weeks as investors question debt-financed capital expenditures, the short seller who predicted Enron's fall expresses skepticism, all while management delivers shifting explanations for construction delays of a major AI data-center complex. Shares are down 60% since June's dizzying high, leading to broader questions about the wisdom of circular deals, accumulating vast debt and relying on a small base of massive customers like OpenAI and Meta.”

50+ Expert Predictions: Ways to Drive Agentic AI, Data Governance, and Security in 2026 - In the 50+ expert predictions I captured for this article, you’ll see how AI impacts CX, DevOps, and C-level leadership, which will help drive the transformation. Other predictions on AI, data governance, security, and IT Ops outline what businesses must prioritize to enable compliant, safe, and ethical AI.

My Take: Quite the list that I have not digested.

This and That!

In world first, Australia bans social media for children under 16 - Australia on Wednesday became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, blocking access to platforms including TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook. Ten of the biggest platforms were ordered to block children from midnight (1300 GMT on Tuesday) or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (U.S.$33 million) under the new law, which drew criticism from major technology companies and free speech advocates, but was welcomed by many parents and child advocates.

My Take: The key point is that the responsibility sits with the platforms. They have to take “reasonable steps” to block under-16 accounts, not parents and not kids. It’s being sold as an online safety move, but it also opens a big fight over privacy, enforcement, and whether bans actually work when VPNs exist. If the model works, others will adopt it. If not, “oops!”

Hacking group says it’s extorting Pornhub after stealing users’ viewing data - The hacking group Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, which includes members of a gang known as ShinyHunters, said it is attempting to extort porn site Pornhub, after claiming to have stolen personal information belonging to the website’s premium members. 

My Take: Does anyone care? It’s not like the Ashley Madison breach. Nothing illegal is going on other than the ShinyHunters' actions.

Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, judge rules - An administrative law judge has ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing that gave customers a false impression of the capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver assistance software, a pivotal development in a years-long case initiated by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

My Take: Tesla built massive demand by selling a story that sounds like the car can drive itself, even when it can’t.

Exclusive: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips - In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned.

My Take: China has been building their own EUV lithography machine, a tool used to make the most advanced chips.

Think of it like a super-high-precision printer. Instead of ink, it uses an extremely short form of light to draw tiny patterns on silicon. Those patterns become the transistors that power AI systems, smartphones, and modern weapons.

Older machines can’t print details this small anymore. Without EUV, you can’t make the newest and fastest chips. That’s why these machines are so important and so rare.

They are also very complex and expensive. One machine can cost more than $150 million, and only a handful of companies worldwide know how to build or operate them.

Control the EUV machine, and you control who gets to make the best chips - and who no longer needs to buy stuff from abroad.

Roomba maker iRobot files for bankruptcy, pursues manufacturer buyout - The company, which raised concerns about staying in business in March, filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware bankruptcy court as it grapples with increased competition from lower-priced rivals and new U.S. tariffs.

My Take: They were the leader. Followers learned from their mistakes and gaps. It’s a sign of how fast technology leadership can shift. I wonder who’s going to get all that data?

Tesla starts testing robotaxis in Austin with no safety driver - The removal of the human safety monitors brings the company a critical step closer to its goal of launching a real commercial Robotaxi service, and it’s a step that’s been years in the making.

My Take: “Kill the baby or the old woman.” I wonder if they’ve solved that dilemma yet.

Diagnostic dilemma: Man caught rabies from organ transplant after donor was scratched by skunk - The symptoms: The man received a left kidney transplant in an Ohio hospital, and about five weeks later, he began experiencing tremors, weakness in his lower extremities and urinary incontinence, as well as confusion.

My Take: Well, that just stinks.

Infographic Of The Week

My Take: “Across the 69 cities, only seven show a decline from 2020 to 2025—yet the drops are significant. Cairo has the steepest fall (-40.1%), while Tokyo (-13.1%) also declines despite Japan’s status as a high-income economy.”

Podcast Recommendation

AWS CEO Matt Garman Doesn’t Think AI Should Replace Junior Devs

The head of Amazon Web Services has big plans to offer AI tools to businesses but says that replacing coders with AI is “a nonstarter for anyone who’s trying to build a long-term company.”

Listen Here!

Movie/Streaming Recommendation

IMDb: 7.7/10

JMDb: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿/10 (“absolutely justifies the trip to IMAX” .. I didn’t see it in IMAX…)

Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is a slick, thunderously loud sports drama that treats the modern Formula One paddock as both a redemption arena and a marketing playground.

Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, a “greatest that never was” ex-driver lured back to save Javier Bardem’s moribund APXGP team, anchors the film with a lived‑in, weather-beaten charm that sells both midlife crisis and competitive obsession. The mentor‑protégé dynamic with Damson Idris’ volatile rookie Joshua Pearce gives the movie its emotional spine, even when the script leans on familiar comeback beats and manufactured rivalries.

Where F1 truly accelerates is in its racecraft: shot on live Grand Prix weekends with cars circulating real circuits, the film’s in‑car photography and trackside sound design create a tactile sense of speed that digital rivals lack.

It may be dramatically conservative, but as an experiential big‑screen spectacle, F1 absolutely justifies the trip to IMAX.

Until Next Time

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