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If you’re a fiber owner, you should really care about this.

The Common Ground Alliance publishes something called The DIRT Report - The Damage Information Reporting Tool. According to their website, it’s a secure web application that enables stakeholders to submit data on underground facility damage and near-miss events. The objective of DIRT is to collect data to understand where, how and why these events are occurring.

Here’s some of what’s in the 2025 Report.

51% of the damage is to Telecom infrastructure. Critical infrastructure.

The causes? Missed notifications. Locate errors. Improper practices. The main offenders? Backhoes, Hand Tools and Directional Drills.

What the report doesn’t outline is the cost of both the actual damage and the resulting economic collateral fallout, estimated to be at least 29x the cost of the actual repair.

If you’re following me on LinkedIn, you’ve seen me beat the drum for Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing. This is exactly the use case it’s meant to address, among others.

Imagine if you were alerted when there was activity, permitted or not, before it started, or soon after it had. What if you could stop the rogue backhoe or the permitted drilling operating in the wrong location before it was too late - damaging not only telco infrastructure, but also possibly water, pipeline or other underground assets?

I’m working with FiberSense in North America - a provider of DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) solutions. I’m also a consulting member of FOSA, the Fiber Optics Sensing Association.

FiberSense is fully “as a service”-based. It’s not about selling “the box”, it’s about AI, the data and the outcomes, including a 24/7 NOC and the ability to interdict on your behalf.

The business case is compelling, and the outcomes are proven and real - especially on critical links. It also drives additional infrastructure value that can be monetized.

Contact me to learn more. Oh, and see the NCTA article about protecting critical infrastructure below. It’s a cross-border problem.

Thanks, and enjoy Issue #132!

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AT&T and Ericsson push ISAC into 5G instead of waiting for 6G, AT&T's Rob Soni said the demo proved a 5G waveform can handle integrated sensing and communication, detecting drones up to 6 kilometers away on mid-band spectrum, and both companies want to commercialize a limited version before 6G standards even land.

My Take: ISAC could be one of the first 6G ideas to create real value before 6G arrives. Turning existing cell towers into a wide-area sensing network could give operators a meaningful role in drone defense and public safety, not just another reason to sell faster connectivity.

🇨🇦 Canadian firm pitches battery free "Smart Dust" sensing for denied environments, EPIC Semiconductors unveiled a distributed sensor fabric of sub millimeter, battery free nodes designed to sense continuously without radio transmissions, wiring or maintenance, aimed at defence, infrastructure and manufacturing customers who can't sustain conventional electronics.

My Take: Worth watching because the underlying problem, sensing in places where batteries and antennas don't survive, is genuinely unsolved, but the marketing is years ahead of the silicon.

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Uber lobbies against robotaxi-only rules it can't win under, Uber is pushing DC and New Jersey to require robotaxis share a platform with human drivers, arguing one AV displaces roughly four drivers, while Waymo calls the approach regulatory capture aimed at protecting Uber's driver network from a technology it lost the race to build.

My Take: Uber's own product chief admitted it, they're not trying to win the autonomy race anymore, they're trying to own the rules everyone else has to play by. That's a smart hedge if you can't build the tech yourself, but it's still regulatory capture with better branding.

Free Starlink Wi-Fi on planes was too good to last, Copa Airlines and Frontier are the first carriers to charge most economy passengers for Starlink access, breaking what had widely been assumed was a contractual requirement that airlines offer the service free, with premium and elite passengers still getting it complimentary.

My Take: Starlink changed the expectation for inflight Wi-Fi, but airlines are now trying to turn that better experience into a new revenue stream. The risk is that they recreate the same friction Starlink was supposed to remove. The winners will be airlines that see connectivity as part of the seat, not another add-on. Free Wi-Fi may cost millions, but it can also strengthen loyalty in a way that another paid option cannot.

🇨🇦 The Dolby Atmos in your Cadillac was coded in Markham, Ontario, GM's Canadian Technical Centre develops the software that syncs Dolby Atmos spatial audio with each vehicle's specific hardware and cabin dimensions, work that also produced the company's SuperCruise autonomous driving system.

My Take: Ontario's auto sector story isn't only about assembly lines anymore, it's increasingly about who writes the code that makes the hardware worth buying.

A California permitting gap means some Waymo rides are free right now, Waymo needs two separate approvals to launch commercially, a DMV permit to operate driverless and a CPUC permit to charge fares, and in cities like San Diego it's been running fully autonomous public rides for free for months while the fare permit sits with regulators.

My Take: Waymo’s delay shows that the next stage of autonomous driving will be shaped as much by regulation as by technology. Building a robotaxi that can drive is only part of the challenge. The harder test is proving it can operate safely inside the messy reality of cities, emergencies, and human behaviour. California may be moving slowly, but these are exactly the questions that need answers before robotaxis become part of everyday transportation.

🇨🇦 Bell collects over 70% of federal phone line spending, again, Ottawa spent $172.8 million on phone lines in 2024-25, with Bell taking home $122 million, Telus $41.9 million, and Rogers just $1.6 million, continuing a pattern that has held for years.

My Take: This kind of concentration in government contracts doesn't happen by accident; it happens because incumbency and existing infrastructure relationships are hard to dislodge. Every year, someone points this out, and every year, the split barely moves.

iOS 27's public beta puts a rebuilt, agentic Siri in front of everyday users, the new Siri AI can hold an ongoing conversation, search across Mail, Messages, Notes and Calendar, take actions inside apps, and understand what's on screen, though the advanced on-device features are limited to iPhone 17 Pro and Air models and won't launch in the EU right away.

My Take: Apple is years late on the agentic assistant race, but shipping it to the public beta pool first is smart, it turns millions of iPhones into a live test bed before the September release. The EU carve-out is the more interesting story long-term, since it's another example of regulation shaping the rollout order of AI features rather than the features themselves.

Nearly 6 in 10 young women get health information from influencers, not doctors, Pew found 57% of women 18 to 29 get health and wellness information from social media influencers, 10 points higher than young men, with women about twice as likely to often encounter beauty and alternative medicine content specifically.

My Take: The biggest lesson is not that young women trust influencers too much. It is that influencers are filling a communication gap left by the healthcare system. That creates real value, but also real risk. When health advice, personal identity, and product marketing appear in the same post, it becomes much harder to separate support from sales.

A new sodium battery design charges in 4 minutes without degrading, Chinese researchers solved sodium metal batteries' longstanding dendrite problem with a tough gel electrolyte, reaching a full charge in 4 minutes, retaining 90 percent capacity after 2,000 cycles at a slower rate, and running over 6,000 hours without failure.

My Take: Sodium is cheap and abundant in a way lithium and cobalt never will be, so every real fix to the dendrite problem is a step toward batteries that don't depend on a handful of mining regions. This is still lab scale, but the durability numbers are the ones that matter for actually reaching commercial products.

Scientists built a diving suit that lets cyborg cockroaches work underwater, the 3D printed suit generates its own oxygen and feeds it through tubes to the insect's breathing holes, letting remotely guided Madagascar hissing cockroaches operate underwater for up to three hours, following the same lab's cyborg roaches already used in Myanmar earthquake search and rescue.

My Take: The pitch here is really about power, not water resistance. A cyborg insect runs on its own muscles instead of a battery pack, which is exactly the constraint that's kept tiny search and rescue robots from working long enough to matter in a real disaster.

🇨🇦 Northern Ontario wildfires give Toronto the world's worst air quality, IQAir ranked Toronto worse than Kinshasa and Delhi as smoke from 835 active fires across Canada, most in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario, combined with a heat warning near 33 degrees, in what one University of Toronto researcher called the first time he's seen severe heat and wildfire smoke hit the city simultaneously.

My Take: A researcher who studies this for a living, saying he's never seen a heat and smoke stack like this in Toronto before, is the detail that matters here. This is stopping being a "northern communities" story and becoming a story about the country's largest city, which changes who pays attention to it.

My Take: “Eight of the top 10 countries in the ranking are current or former communist states, led by Slovakia (93.5%) and Romania (92.8%).”

IMDb: 6.5/10

JMDb: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿/10 (lethal ambition.. interesting)

How to Make a Killing is a black comedy with a sharp premise and an identity crisis.

Glen Powell plays Becket Redfellow, a disowned outsider who decides the shortest route to a $28 billion inheritance runs through his wealthy relatives. Powell’s charm keeps the film moving, even when Becket’s murderous campaign feels playful rather than dangerous. Margaret Qualley brings bite, while Ed Harris and Bill Camp give the absurd family feud weight.

Director John Patton Ford builds a stylish world of greed, entitlement, and casual cruelty. Yet the satire rarely cuts as deeply as the body count suggests. The film wants viewers to condemn obscene wealth while cheering for a man driven by the same obsession.

Despite its uneven tone, How to Make a Killing remains entertaining thanks to clever setups, performances, and wicked energy. It is not a ruthless masterpiece, but it delivers a polished, amusing lesson in lethal ambition.

Jason’s Industry Insights is produced by Verity Aptus.

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