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A busy Bell week dominates: the swipe-and-go firings heading to court, Brand Finance naming them Canada's most valuable telecom while they cut investment, Ziply growing under BCE ownership in the U.S., and Adam Scott giving an unusually candid speech at the Telecom Summit. Also: Lumen's first new long-haul route in decades (driven by AI east-west traffic), FCC pole rules finally taking effect, $73M for rural NB, and the quantum network test over live NYC fiber.

There are 10 stories this week!

🇨🇦Telecoms wrestle with spending decisions, regulations as annual conference kicks off - The head of Canada’s telecom industry group says recent regulatory decisions have aimed to solve non-existent problems and added unnecessary burden at a time that the sector faces an “inflection point.”

My Take: “Canadian Telecommunications Association president and CEO Robert Ghiz warned Tuesday that if the direction of the CRTC doesn’t change, it will lead to “structural” underinvestment by companies that build and manage telecom networks, slowing down the adoption of new technologies.”

QUICK HITS:

New electrical-domain strain sensing from Yokohama that could make field deployment far more practical, plus Comcast returning to the FCC because Appalachian Power is still ignoring the February ruling.

There are 2 stories this week!

Fiber-Optic Sensor Reads Strain Through Electrical Signals, Skipping Optical Analyzers, researchers at Yokohama National University demonstrated a polymer optical fiber sensing method that detects strain and displacement by reading interference patterns directly in the electrical domain, eliminating the need for expensive optical spectrum analyzers and opening a path to faster, more compact strain monitoring systems.

My Take: The cost and complexity of interrogation hardware have always been a quiet barrier to wider deployment of fiber sensing. Moving the readout to the electrical domain is the kind of simplification that makes field deployment actually practical rather than just theoretically elegant.

Attending ITW this year? Come and see me at Booth #627!

Resilience is no longer a nice-to-have - visibility across infrastructure is becoming a priority and necessity for sovereign and secure infrastructure.

Someone digging where they shouldn’t be, while not following processes. Or a ship anchor dragging across a cable that carries 99% of the world’s internet traffic.

Critical infrastructure is everywhere: underground, underwater, connecting cities, countries and continents. But the monitoring? It’s barely evolved in decades.

Book some time to learn more and see the technology in action.

Comcast Claims Utility Is Violating FCC Pole Replacement Order. Months after winning a landmark FCC ruling that it only needs to pay incremental pole replacement costs for pre-existing safety violations, Comcast is back at the FCC, alleging Appalachian Power Company continues to charge between 20% and 100% of full replacement costs, roughly $1,600 to $8,000 per pole.

My Take: You win the ruling, and then you still have to fight the battle pole by pole. This is the real texture of broadband deployment, and it explains why timelines and cost estimates always slip. The FCC's Rapid Broadband Assessment Team is being tested in real time here.

Court vacates the digital equity rule, NTIA launches Spectrum.gov for 6G transparency, the new BEAD guidance that quietly benefits Starlink, and the White House using AI to speed federal permitting.

There are 4 stories this week!

Court Vacates FCC's Digital Equity Rule, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit unanimously struck down the Biden FCC's 2023 digital discrimination rule, finding the agency overstepped its authority by prohibiting disparate-impact discrimination and extending oversight to entities only tangentially related to broadband, with the FCC now required to restart rulemaking under narrower constraints.

My Take: The rule was never enforced before being vacated, which tells you something about how much practical protection it actually provided. The bigger question is what happens to BEAD's non-deployment equity programs now that the legal framework underpinning them has been unwound.

Starlink is taking 20% of subscribers from cable, HughesNet has 681K subscribers (down 57% since 2020), AST is absorbing a Blue Origin failure and staying on track for 45 BlueBirds, and the carrier D2D joint venture.

There are 9 stories this week!

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to form JV for satellite dead zone coverage - AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are forming a joint venture to eliminate wireless dead zones using satellite-to-phone technology. Instead of relying only on cell towers, phones will be able to connect directly to satellites when users are outside normal coverage areas. The carriers plan to pool spectrum, create common technical standards, and work with multiple satellite providers instead of locking into one partner.

My Take: What looked like a futuristic backup feature is quickly becoming the next layer of the mobile network. The bigger story is that SpaceX pushed America’s biggest carriers into cooperating, which almost never happens unless the threat is real.

QUICK HITS:

TELUS's three-site BC sovereign AI cluster is the headline, alongside Google/SpaceX orbital data centre talks, Canada's grid pressure, Vancouver's water concerns, and Telehouse liquid cooling in Toronto.

There are 7 stories this week!

SpaceX and Google in Talks to Explore Data Centers in Orbit, Google confirmed it has been in discussions with SpaceX and other launch providers regarding future deployments for Project Suncatcher, its orbital AI compute initiative, which plans prototype solar-powered satellites equipped with Tensor Processing Units with a 2027 launch target.

My Take: Orbital data centers are still a capital-intensive, unproven bet, but the fact that Google, Anthropic, and others are taking SpaceX's pitch seriously says more about the terrestrial AI compute crunch than it does about orbital infrastructure being cost-effective anytime soon.

QUICK HITS:

Anthropic's dreaming feature, Cloudflare's 1,100 layoffs at record revenue, Canada's AI chatbot ban debate, and the Musk/Altman trial's most revealing testimony yet.

There are 6 stories this week!

QUICK HITS:

Spotify Wants to Become the Home for AI-Generated Personal Audio, Spotify launched a beta CLI tool allowing AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to generate private "Personal Podcasts," custom audio briefings created from user prompts and saved directly to the listener's Spotify library alongside their music and regular podcasts.

My Take: Spotify is making a smart move by owning the playback layer for AI-generated audio rather than trying to own the generation layer. The CLI tool requirement will limit adoption for now, but the underlying idea, your AI agent creates the podcast and it lives in your existing library, is where this is going.

Do City Delivery Drones Make Sense? No One Knows, But They're Flying Over NYC, drone delivery services are operating in New York City as an experiment, but no consensus has emerged on whether the economics, noise, safety, or airspace management challenges can be solved at scale for urban environments.

My Take: The story is less "does this work" and more "who owns the airspace above our cities." That regulatory question will determine the industry's trajectory more than any technical breakthrough.

Hackable Robot Lawnmowers Unlock a New Security Nightmare, security researchers have demonstrated that consumer autonomous lawnmowers can be remotely hijacked through firmware vulnerabilities, raising fresh questions about IoT device security as autonomous outdoor equipment proliferates in residential and commercial settings.

My Take: A hackable robot lawnmower is funny until it's not. The real issue is that IoT security doesn't improve as devices become more autonomous. It gets significantly worse.

Rising Fuel Prices Making Return-to-Office Mandates Harder to Defend, with fuel costs climbing, analysts and HR professionals are noting that mandatory office attendance is becoming an increasingly difficult sell for employees who bear commuting costs, adding economic friction to already contested return-to-office policies.

My Take: Bell's "swipe and go" firings are this week's exhibit on what happens when RTO policy meets a workforce that spent three years building remote-first routines. Fuel prices just add another variable to an already unstable equilibrium.

Suckerfish are diving headfirst into unsuspecting manta rays' rear-ends - It's not clear if the fish are motivated by food or fear. But it could be 'very uncomfortable' for the rays

My Take: Thank you to a loyal reader for submitting this story. If you come across any odd stories, please feel free to send them to me!

QUICK HITS:

My Take: I guess people are being fired for buying IBM now 😁 Look at the criteria in the top right corner.

IMDb: 7.2/10

JMDb: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿/10 (precious? Who says precious?)

The Four Seasons is exactly the kind of intelligent adult comedy Netflix rarely greenlights anymore — and all the more precious for it.

Tina Fey, Tracey Wigfield, and Lang Fisher have reimagined Alan Alda's beloved 1981 film as a sharp, emotionally layered series that earns both its laughs and its aches. The ensemble is nothing short of sublime:

Steve Carell brings trademark wounded subtlety to the divorcing Nick, while Colman Domingo is simply revelatory, magnetic, funny, and quietly devastating in equal measure. The structure, four seasonal getaways, eight episodes, gives the story room to breathe without overstaying its welcome.

Yes, some couples, particularly Fey and Will Forte's Kate and Jack, feel underwritten. And the series leans gentler than Fey's sharpest work. But The Four Seasons understands something rare: that long love is its own drama, and it's worth watching unfold.

Jason’s Industry Insights is produced by Verity Aptus.

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