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Broadband / Telco

🇨🇦 Jason’s Canadian SMB Survey: I scanned over 100 ISPs in Canada, excluding Tier 1 providers. What I found confirmed my suspicions - there’s a massive opportunity to increase revenue through unique services beyond just connectivity. Furthermore, there is a huge market gap that seems ripe for those who figure out how to partner to capitalize on it. While every provider is looking to expand their residential base, they should consider how to monetize more lucrative commercial customers who are already on-net, near on-net, or accessible through other interconnect options.

Here are some of the findings;

• 52 of the 97 Canadian ISPs I analyzed sell nothing but bandwidth to their commercial customers. No cloud. No security. No managed services. Just pipes, and maybe voice and low-level Managed WiFi.

• MSPs with no infrastructure and no local relationship are winning the business that ISPs are leaving on the table.

• While these ISPs focus on selling bandwidth, MSPs are walking in the door and selling everything else. Cloud. Cybersecurity. Compliance. Managed infrastructure and others.

• 1.08 million Canadian SMEs are underserved by every MSP and SP in Canada.

• The real opportunity is in micro businesses, rural operations, and industrial SMEs. The segments with connectivity and IT needs, but NO ONE is showing up with the right bundle.

• The challenge for most is that they are B2C businesses and not set up to support the requirements of the B2B market structures. From Sales, marketing, solution development and support, B2B requires different skill sets than traditional B2C businesses.
  

Want to learn more? 

Expect massive consolidation in the FTTH market in 2026 - Fiber-to-the-home builders want to avoid overbuilding because the returns aren’t worth it. Instead, fiber broadband companies are showing strong M&A intent. Analysts in the FTTH business also abhor overbuilding, much preferring the consolidation trend

My Take: I thought the FBA said overbuilding actually enhanced markets? Maybe if you’re second in.. but 3rd? No way it works. Probably a lot of Utility telcos who’d love to shed some fiber.

MWC 2026: Google Cloud targets telco networks, operations and more with AI - Shifting from a telco to techco has been big talking point for telcos and hyperscalers alike for over 10 years. Google Cloud says transformation is happening thanks to AI. The hyperscaler is working with Mas Orange, Vodafone, DT, DigitalRoute, One New Zealand and Nokia’s network-as-code platform

My Take: The risk for telcos is that the more they rely on these platforms, the harder it becomes to control their own networks and extract from them, as needed, over time.

🇨🇦 Bell Canada and Telus reach agreement over network-sharing impasse - Bell Canada and rival Telus Corp. have reached an agreement over the latest impasse in network sharing, a detente in what has been a bumpy first year of regulator-imposed access to competitors’ fibre internet.

My Take: No one will ever know what really went on, but perhaps they both got tired of running to air their dirty laundry in front of the CRTC,and everyone else.

🇨🇦 Telus, Rogers have most reliable cell networks, Bell has fastest 5G downloads: report - The annual study by Opensignal, which collected data from Oct. 1 to Dec. 29 of last year, graded the Big 3 providers across a variety of categories measuring customers' cellular connectivity experiences.

🇨🇦 Bell announces 5G+ Advanced, paving the way for 6G - 5G+ Advanced offers speeds that can reach up to 4.3Gbps

My Take: Most reliable. Fastest.. yadda yadda.. and then Bell announces 5G+ Advanced. Why not 5G Pro or 5G++, like they did with C and PoE? Anyway, 3800MHz spectrum stuff that only works on a handful of phones - Apple: iPhone 17e, iPhone 17 series, 16 series, Samsung: Galaxy S25, S24 series; Flip and Fold 7, Flip and Fold 6, Google: Pixel 9 and 10 series

Ericsson has pinned its 6G hopes on AI's rising 'uplink' demands - Humanoid robots, smart glasses and other AI gadgets may send more traffic than they receive, says Ericsson. But persuading telcos to invest will be a challenge.

My Take: Uplink is the trend everywhere. If uplink traffic grows significantly, networks may need more distributed computing and edge infrastructure to process data closer to where it is generated.. and people need to justify 6G..

FCC greenlights Charter’s $34.5B Cox merger - “By approving this deal, the FCC ensures big wins for Americans,” said Carr in a statement. “This deal means that jobs are coming back to America that had been shipped overseas.  It means that modern, high-speed networks will get built out in more communities across rural America. And it means that customers will get access to lower priced plans.  On top of this, the deal enshrines protections against DEI discrimination.”

My Take: All good for competition, so it seems.

MWC 2026: AI and the push to restore ‘respect' for the telco - AI needs the network — and hopes are high it belongs to telcos in the run-up to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Metcalfe's Law "on steroids" acts as somewhat of a reference point for the demand that AI will put on telco networks . Wide area networks are turning into giant distributed data centers, and that's where Nokia sees its advantage

My Take: The age-old problem - CSPs companies built the networks that power the internet, but captured very little of the value created on top of them. AI is giving them another chance to move up the stack, especially if edge computing becomes critical for new applications. The challenge is that big tech already controls most of the software and cloud infrastructure where the real money is made. Focus on commercial. That’s where respect can be earned.

Optimum offers super cheap fiber broadband to lure subscribers - Optimum is trying to entice new broadband customers to its Optimum Fiber service with a $25 per month offer. Lower prices might stem subscriber losses for cable companies. But there's concern among analysts about price wars

My Take: In 2000, international long-distance rates were about $0.12/minute. In 2023, about $0.015/minute. By 2025, effectively $0. Their plan for a land grab over 5 years is a massive competitive race to zero. Plans like this diminish the value of service for everyone and will ultimately put people out of business.

🇨🇦 Ontario Secures Groundbreaking National Energy Corridor Agreement - Today, the Ontario government announced a historic effort to connect and strengthen Canada’s electricity systems by launching a first-of-its-kind interprovincial-territorial partnership to build transmission infrastructure needed to power the country’s next generation of growth. The landmark agreement, initiated by Ontario, will bring together British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Yukon, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories to advance new electricity transmission projects and strategic interties across Canada.

My Take: So, what about Quebec? Too powerful (no pun intended) and control issues? Overall, it’s great that these fragmented system who send energy south will spend time interconnecting to keep energy north of the border. It will help accelerate modernization and likely support some of the massively power-hungry Data Centre projects.

🇨🇦 CTA co-hosting conference on Canadian telecom issues in May - “What we’re trying to do is bring together both Canadian and international industry and experts as well to discuss the Canadian telecommunications sector, the status of the industry, some of the challenges and pressures it’s facing, and some of the policy priorities, and how all those things look together,” Eric Smith, senior vice president of the CTA tells The Wire Report.

My Take: It’s free. Limited space. I’ll be there - and if that’s not enough incentive to show up, I don’t know what is.

MWC 2026: Mplify's new mission focuses on NaaS and the 'AI internet' - Mplify Alliance is reframing its work around network-as-a-service and AI workloads. Automation APIs, common data models and MCP servers are central to its strategy. The group is positioning operators for what it calls an emerging 'AI internet,' not best‑effort networks

My Take: If you don’t remember, these guys used to be called the MEF Forum but changed their name back in 2025. Kind of like Prince, but they chose a name rather than a symbol. This explains their motives best: “The group has steadily layered in IP services, wavelengths, SD‑WAN and SASE, using open APIs to automate how services are ordered, provisioned and managed across providers,” with “across providers” being the key word. This is also why some LEO companies are claiming MEF-compliance so as to be included in the LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestrator.)

QUICK HITS:

• 🇨🇦 The new alliance positioning Edmonton as a Canadian defence hub

• Celona CEO on top markets, robots and the appeal of private 5G

• Ericsson Demonstrates 5G Core SaaS Milestone at MWC 2026

• AT&T claims 50% of Nokia gear has been ‘ripped’ from its network

• Global telecom coalition issues new 6G security principles focusing on quantum safety, AI integration

• NVIDIA and Global Telecom Leaders Commit to Build 6G on Open and Secure AI-Native Platforms 

Regulatory Reviews

Click on the link below for the detailed reports, with a summary contained in each. Still working on getting better summaries..

CANADA (2026-02-27 to 2026-03-05)

UNITED STATES (2026-02-27 to 2026-03-05)

UNITED KINGDOM (2026-02-27 to 2026-03-05)

Fiber Optic Sensing

I’m putting this section on pause while I figure out what to put in here. I’d like to start posting use cases, business cases and real deployments.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep posting this infographic every week until it sinks in and you all realize the opportunity and application.

What’s Happening In Space?

FCC Chair to Europe: If You Restrict US Satellite Providers, We'll Ban You Here -'New barriers are emerging that constrain US businesses operating abroad,' Brendan Carr says. The FCC is now soliciting public comment on 'satellite market access reciprocity.' 

My Take: Everyone wants sovereign priority, don’t they? What are they going to do, turn off Starlink and Leo?

The “Internet of the future” has a very literal dark side: nearly 2,000 observations reveal that Amazon’s satellites shine brighter than promised - A new study of nearly two thousand observations has found that Amazon’s growing “internet from space” constellation is significantly brighter than astronomers consider safe for research.

My Take: “In their normal operating mode, 92% of the spacecraft were brighter than the threshold that international experts suggested to avoid interference with professional research, and about a quarter were bright enough to be seen without a telescope under good conditions.” I know. Let’s send Greta into space to fix it.

McKinsey - Issue Brief: Satellite connectivity - As LEO consumer broadband and D2D connectivity push satellite capacity into the telecom mainstream, telcos must decide where to compete, partner, or ignore.

My Take: Satellite is quickly becoming part of critical global infrastructure and into a strategic communications network for industries, governments, and militaries.

MWC26: Starlink preps new D2D constellation - its next generation of satellites, simply called V2, will be capable of delivering mobile broadband data speeds of up to 150 Mbit/s using globally harmonised S-band spectrum and capabilities that give the V2 satellites a 100x data density compared with the current D2D constellation, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s VP for satellite engineering, told MWC26 attendees during a keynote speech. 

SpaceX Makes 'Starlink Mobile' Official, But It's Not Competing With Carriers - “What’s our overall vision here?” Nicolls asked. “It’s where Starlink Mobile is a key component of a hybrid network that includes terrestrial and satellite capabilities. Satellite is complementary to terrestrial networks; it cannot provide the data density that terrestrial networks have. But it can augment terrestrial networks in the places where terrestrial networks cannot reach. Or when terrestrial networks need additional capacity.”

MWC 2026: Can Elon Musk’s Starlink Mobile defy physics? - AT&T, T-Mobile and others say satellites can’t match terrestrial capacity or indoor coverage. Bottom line: For now, satellite is a rural complement – not a mobile network killer

My Take: No, this won’t put every mobile carrier out of business. There’s one major issue: indoor coverage. Others, of course, like handset usability. The question around funding cellular expansion remains - if this is a “good enough” solution.. See Carlos Placido’s take on this. No sense reinventing the wheel 😉 It’s a significant announcement that many have been waiting for.

🇨🇦 TELUS and AST SpaceMobile Partner to Bring Space-Based Cellular Broadband Connectivity to Every Corner of Canada - TELUS and AST SpaceMobile will deliver satellite-powered text messaging, voice calls and data to expand coverage nationwide using everyday smartphones

My Take: Bell and Telus in the AST SpaceMobile camp. Rogers is aligned with Telus. Where does that leave Terrestar? Check out the comments on my thread on this topic on LinkedIn. Pros and cons for each approach.

Pentagon details cyber, space ‘first mover’ role in Iran operations - Space and cyber forces moved first in preparation for U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, underscoring how military campaigns now begin in orbit and online before aircraft launch or missiles fire.

My Take: The real power in future conflicts may belong to whoever controls the networks and satellites that everything else depends on… and who has the big “OFF” button.

QUICK HITS:

• Vodafone to use Amazon sats for cell backhaul in remote parts of Europe, Africa

• Iranian Hackers Are Using Elon Musk’s Starlink To Stay Online

• Starlink’s $39 Deal Lures New Customers With 6-Month Discount
  

Data Centres

Amazon cloud unit's data centers in UAE, Bahrain damaged in drone strikes - "These strikes ​have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water ​damage," AWS said.

My Take: Sink them, bury them, or arm them with anti-missile systems. As DC’s take on critical data functions, protecting them from attacks from above needs to be considered. Maybe we’ll start to see some underground and hidden data centres.

🇨🇦 CPP Investments and Equinix to Acquire atNorth for US$4 Billion - atNorth’s portfolio includes eight operational data centers alongside several sites under development across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, as well as plans for further expansion, with 1 GW of secured power and a considerable amount of additional future capacity planned. Designed to meet increasing demand for AI and high-performance computing, several of the company’s facilities are liquid cooling-enabled to support high-density workloads.

My Take: Owning the infrastructure that AI runs on could prove far more lucrative and viable long-term than betting on which AI model wins.

QUICK HITS:

• TransAlta, CPP, Brookfield ink MoU for 230MW Alberta data center project

Enabling AI

OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic - President Trump ordered the U.S. government to stop using the artificial intelligence company Anthropic's products and the Pentagon moved to designate the company a national security risk on Friday, in a sharp escalation of a high-stakes fight over the military's use of AI.

ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295% after DoD deal - Meanwhile, U.S. downloads for OpenAI competitor Anthropic’s Claude jumped up by 37% day-over-day on Friday, February 27, and 51% as of Saturday, February 28, after the company announced that it would not partner with the U.S. defense department. Anthropic said it was not able to agree on the deal terms over concerns that AI would be used to surveil Americans and be used in fully autonomous weaponry, which AI is not yet ready to do safely.

My Take: I think you’d have to be living under a rock not to know about this and the ensuing backlash against OpenAI. Have I cancelled my OpenAI subscription yet? No. Maybe I should.. Anyway, here’s a generated summary for you, if you need to come up to speed:

For the past few months, the US military has been navigating a messy breakup with one AI company and a rushed courtship with another, and the fallout is still unfolding.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, had been the Pentagon's primary AI partner in classified operations. Their $200 million contract came with two conditions that Anthropic refused to budge on. Claude couldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, and it couldn’t be used to power autonomous weapons systems that operate without human oversight. Anthropic's position was straightforward: today's AI isn't reliable enough for those use cases, and mass surveillance of citizens is a violation of fundamental rights.

That arrangement worked until January 2026, when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo demanding that all Pentagon AI contracts adopt blanket "any lawful use" language. For most AI vendors — Google, xAI, OpenAI — this was no problem because their contracts didn't carry Anthropic's specific restrictions. For Anthropic, it was a direct ultimatum.. remove the restrictions or lose the contract.

Anthropic refused. The Pentagon set a deadline. When it passed without agreement, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Anthropic's products, and Hegseth designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk, a label previously reserved for companies from hostile foreign states like China and Russia.

Within hours, OpenAI announced it had signed its own Pentagon deal for the classified deployment of AI. The timing was the problem. That same morning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly stated he shared Anthropic's position on restricting military AI use. Then his company took the contract anyway. The backlash was immediate. Anthropic's Claude shot to the top of the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. A "QuitGPT" movement gained over a million participants. Even OpenAI employees were reportedly furious.

The deeper irony was hard to miss. OpenAI's published agreement contained essentially the same restrictions Anthropic had been blacklisted for demanding - no surveillance, no autonomous weapons. OpenAI argued the difference was in the approach, embedding protections through its technical safety stack rather than explicit contract language. Critics pointed out that the legal basis OpenAI relied on may actually permit the kind of surveillance Anthropic was trying to prohibit.

Altman later admitted the deal was rushed and "looked opportunistic and sloppy."

As of today, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is back at the negotiating table with the Pentagon, attempting to find a path back in. The Pentagon official he's negotiating with recently called him "a liar with a God complex" on social media. Amodei, in an internal memo that became public, suggested Anthropic was targeted because they hadn't offered Trump sufficient political praise.

Whether they reach an agreement or not, the episode has forced a public reckoning over a question the AI industry had mostly avoided: when a government demands that AI companies remove their own safety limits, who decides where the line is?

The AI Proficiency Report - Leaders think their AI deployments are succeeding. The data tells a different story.

My Take: It’s an easily accessible report. Take a peek. Some insightful and scary things in there. Generally, it’s a solution looking for a problem for many - “The biggest challenge in using AI isn’t learning how to prompt – it’s knowing what to use AI for. Across thousands of clients, we observe that even if employees know how to use an LLM, they bounce off when they can’t think of a use case for it”

From framework to scale: Accelerating autonomous networks at MWC 26 - Last year, we unveiled our Autonomous Network Operations framework — a blueprint for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to move beyond siloed automation toward self-healing, "zero-touch" networks. Today, we’re pivoting from networks that merely use AI for insights to intelligent agents capable of sensing, reasoning, and taking autonomous action.

Google Cloud and the rise of the agentic telco - Google helps telcos move beyond simple automation to an agentic era where AI autonomously manages networks and resolves customer issues before they even happen.

My Take: At MWC 2026, Google Cloud made its clearest statement yet about where telco AI is headed.

The pitch is Level 4-5 network autonomy - a network that senses problems, diagnoses root causes, and fixes itself before a subscriber notices anything is wrong.

The architecture behind it is worth understanding. Three components working together. A temporal network digital twin built on Cloud Spanner Graph (think a live map of your network that also remembers what it looked like five hours ago), federated graph analytics through BigQuery, and Graph Neural Networks trained in Vertex AI that mathematically track how failures propagate, and stop them.

Vodafone is using it to self-heal connections. Deutsche Telekom's MINDR framework runs multiple agents resolving issues across network domains simultaneously. One NZ is already rerouting traffic autonomously.

The strategic play here is bigger than network ops. Google is positioning itself as the intelligence layer across the entire telco stack, from core network to customer experience to identity services.

For Canadian CSPs, the gap between where Google's reference customers are operating and where most domestic providers sit is significant. The technology is real. The data readiness problem is real as well. Those two facts need to be held together.

🇨🇦 Amid the AI boom, some VCs see signs of a startup apocalypse - After Claude Code rattled software stocks, venture investors are trying to work out which of their portfolio firms will survive and which will fail

My Take: Venture capital firms are now looking at their portfolios and asking which startups actually do something AI can’t easily replicate? The move seems to be toward AI-native investments.

QUICK HITS:

• Anthropic’s Claude reports widespread outage

• I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests yet

• Claude Code rolls out a voice mode capability

• 🇨🇦 Bell Announces Federal Contact Centres Contract Powered by Genesys

• GPT‑5.3 Instant: Smoother, more useful everyday conversations

• Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite: Built for intelligence at scale

• 🇨🇦 Feds Hand Out $8.5M for AI

This and That!

Conference networking tips: 15 ways to stop wasting time and start building real relationships at every event you attend.

I've been to hundreds of conferences over 30 years, and I've watched most people make the same mistakes. In this video, I share my "Conference Commando" playbook for researching attendees before you arrive, skipping speaker lines, hijacking dinners, mastering the "Deep Bump," and following up before you even get home. Plus the 5 types of conference-goers you never want to be.

My Take: With conferences ramping up, I thought this an interesting piece to share. Find out more! Also, check out Keith Ferrazzi’s book, “Never Eat Alone.”

🇨🇦 Bell invests $1 million in McKenna Institute to strengthen Canada's cybersecurity talent pipeline - The investment establishes a new partnership between Bell Cyber, Bell's national cybersecurity platform, and the McKenna Institute -- strengthening UNB and the Institute's roles as key drivers of cybersecurity talent development in New Brunswick, and Bell as a scaling partner investing upstream in education, skills development and workforce pathways that are critical to Canada's digital economy and national security.

My Take: How many more of these type of programs will we need to ensure we have the right resources working to secure our sovereign infrastructure?

AI fears temper interest as private equity firms weigh data company deals - The shares of competitor ‌Morningstar and data research firm Gartner have similarly fallen by 27.6% and 29.5% since early September, also raising investor interest in a potential sale in recent months, about a dozen bankers and investors said. But the sharp pullback in shares that make all three attractive takeover targets is also causing the private equity firms to reassess any potential deals, the people said, asking not to be named because the internal deliberations are private.

My Take: I guess the concern is that AI can replace some of the analysis typically provided by these companies - turning raw data into analysis.. but the raw data still needs to be collected.

🇨🇦 Province says it will finish Ring of Fire road 5 years ahead of schedule - That means construction is now expected to start in June of this year and roads in the area will begin opening in November 2030.

My Take: When the Province wants something done, they find a way.. Having said that, this is a hugely important project - now, moreso than ever.

Hacked traffic cams and hijacked TVs: How cyber operations supported the war against Iran - The most direct confirmation of a cyber operation playing part in the war came from the U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen. Dan Caine, who said that “coordinated space and cyber operations effectively disrupted communications and sensor networks” in Iran ahead of the attack, “leaving the adversary without the ability to see, coordinate or respond effectively.” 

My Take: Anyone surprised? Likely not.

Skyward - Stopping Lightning On Demand - We stop lightning strikes over high-risk areas to prevent catastrophic wildfires from starting. Skyward is the world’s first lightning prevention company protecting communities, business, and other values at risk.

My Take: hmmm... nothing good ever comes of messing with Mother Nature, but this seems kinda cool. If they could harness lightning, well, that would be something.

We now know why shoes squeak, and it involves miniature lightning bolts - Harvard engineers think they've found the reason basketball shoes squeak, and it's due to pockets of friction between the rubber and the court.

My Take: ..because I know you were concerned, and stayed awake at night wondering.

Infographic Of The Week

My Take: Maybe run the numbers again in April and see where ChatGPT sits. Surprised that TikTok is that much lower than Instagram.

Movie/Streaming Recommendation

IMDb: 4.8/10

JMDb: 🍿🍿/10 (Netflix owes me 2 hours)

Jess Varley’s The Astronaut is a compact, unnervingly intimate slice of sci‑fi horror that trades spectacle for dread—and mostly earns the gamble.

Kate Mara anchors the film with a tightly coiled performance as Sam Walker, a NASA pilot whose crash‑landing is only the prologue to a slower, stranger descent.

Sequestered in a luxe quarantine mansion by her powerful father (a granite‑steady Laurence Fishburne), Sam’s recovery curdles into a haunting as levitating objects, phantom sounds, and intrusive visions suggest that something came back with her—or that she may not have come back at all. Varley excels at atmosphere: glassy corridors, low‑rumble sound design, and patient camera moves build a persuasive unease.

The third act over-explains what the first hour elegantly implies, but the final choice Sam makes—between the human life she’s built and the alien truth of who she is—lands with a melancholy, lingering chill.

All those words to say it was a horrid movie. I’ll save you the trouble. She turns into an alien at the end and goes home with her real family.

..and when’s the last time Laurence Fishburn played a good guy?

Until Next Time

Jason’s Industry Insights is produced by Verity Aptus.

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