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Two reports caught my attention this week. OpenVault released its 2Q2026 Broadband Insights report, and Parks Associates and Plume released Owning the Broadband Subscriber Experience in the AI Era.

OpenVault shows what’s changing inside the network. Parks Associates and Plume show what those changes mean for customers, support costs, churn and ISP strategy.

I thought I would compare them to see what common threads emerged and how they each supported the other’s findings.

No surprise, broadband is moving from a speed business to an experience business - or maybe it is a surprise if you’re a Service Provider still hellbent on selling speed.

Some stats.

OpenVault reports upstream usage grew 19.2% year over year in Q2 2026, compared with 6.1% downstream growth. That’s the third straight year of accelerating upstream demand. Cloud synchronization, security cameras, connected devices and AI workflows are driving the increase.

Parks adds the customer side. Fifty-nine percent of US internet households used AI tools in Q1 2026, up from 40% in 2024. Data tied to AI apps grew about 2,000% among AI-using households.

The important part isn’t only volume. AI agents upload data, call APIs, sync with cloud services and run tasks in the background.

💡 A brief outage no longer only causes buffering. It causes failed work. Reliability matters.

The old asymmetric broadband model is starting to look dated.

Upstream’s share of DOCSIS traffic rose from 5.7% to 8.2%. The downstream-to-upstream ratio fell from 16.6:1 in 2019 to 11.2:1 in 2026. Fiber households also use 60% to 75% more upstream data than DOCSIS households.

Customers won’t ask for symmetry by name. They’ll notice failed video calls, delayed cloud backups, unreliable security cameras and AI tasks that don’t finish.

💡 More download speed won’t solve most of the problems customers still experience.

Average downstream speed reached 609 Mbps, while downstream usage growth slowed to a multi-year low. Total consumption still rose to 711 GB per month. Demand isn’t disappearing. It’s changing.

💡 Upstream performance, latency, consistency, Wi-Fi quality and application outcomes are becoming more important than another jump in advertised download speed.

💡 Residential broadband is also becoming business-critical infrastructure.

Nearly 39% of US households use video conferencing on a typical workday. These homes now expect office-level reliability from a residential service.

That creates a clear opportunity to treat remote-work households as a distinct segment. Their needs depend on upload demand, cloud usage, connected devices, latency sensitivity and peak-hour performance.

💡 The customer also sees the entire experience as one product.

They don’t separate the access network, router, Wi-Fi, device, application and support channel. The Service Provider often does.

Parks reports that 56% of households experienced at least one service problem. Wi-Fi dead spots reduced NPS by 27 points. Poor customer service reduced it by 28 points. Service problems tripled churn risk.

AI has two roles in all of this.

It increases network complexity. It also gives operators better tools to manage that complexity. Service Providers need more upstream headroom, along with systems that detect problems, optimize Wi-Fi, automate fixes and give support teams better context.

There’s also a clear financial case.

💡 Poor customer service produced 37% churn intent, compared with 5% among customers reporting no problems. A TELUS digital-care deployment achieved 91% engagement, projected more than 500,000 avoided support calls each year and improved productivity by up to 60%.

OpenVault focuses on upstream capacity, congestion and network performance. Parks and Plume focus on orchestration, personalization, security and customer care.

Together, they point to the same outcome.

💡 Broadband is moving from Quality of Service to Quality of Outcome.

Quality of Service asks whether the connection was online and delivered packets.

Quality of Outcome asks whether the video call stayed stable, the camera remained connected, the backup finished, and the AI task completed.

The winning Service Prover model brings all of this together:

Upstream growth will separate the Service Providers selling speed from those delivering a reliable connected-home experience.

QUICK HITS:

QUICK HITS:

Copper Theft Drove 59% Surge in US Network Infrastructure Attacks in 2025, NCTA data shows attacks on US communications infrastructure jumped 59% in 2025 to 18,000 incidents, blamed largely on scrap-metal theft, with California leading at over a quarter-billion dollars in economic losses and Los Angeles the single worst city at 1,131 incidents.

My Take: The fix is closing the secondary metals market loophole that makes stripping a cable profitable. And Fiber Sensing.

ITU and FCC Both Move to Shore Up Submarine Cable Resilience, the ITU's new International Advisory Body report calls permitting delays the biggest bottleneck in submarine cable deployment and repair, while the FCC overhauled its cable licensing framework to require direct oversight of landing-station equipment and tighten national security review of ownership and supply chains.

My Take: The ITU worries about how fast cables get built and fixed, the FCC worries about who's allowed to touch them, and both conversations are really about the same thing: subsea cable stopped being telecom infrastructure and became critical AI infrastructure when hyperscalers started laying their own routes. Whoever controls the landing station now controls a chokepoint that matters more than the cable itself - and should secure the asset with Fiber Sensing.

NTSB: Unmarked Gas Line Behind Fatal Dallas Apartment Explosion, a preliminary NTSB report found the gas line that caused a May 28 explosion killing three people in Dallas's Oak Cliff neighbourhood was not marked by locators, despite contractor Engineering and Consulting Services Southwest filing a Texas 811 locate request seven days before the incident. Atmos Energy is now facing a lawsuit from a resident who was severely burned.

My Take: A properly filed 811 ticket followed by an unmarked line is the exact failure mode that damage prevention programs exist to catch, and it still didn't work here. Three people are dead because a locate request turned into paperwork instead of paint on the ground. Could Fiber Sensing have prevented this? Possibly, if there was fiber in the area, the drilling would have been detected, and mitigated.

Buried Utility Damage Hit Record High in 2025, CGA Reports, the Common Ground Alliance's DIRT report found 2025 buried utility damage reached its highest CGA Index score since 2022, with telecom and cable facilities accounting for 51% of all reported strikes and failure to call 811 before digging remaining the leading cause. Excavators in CGA's voluntary Damage Prevention Institute cut their damage rate over 11% since 2023.

My Take: Telecom and cable eating half of all reported utility damage says more about how much more fiber is now in the ground than it does about the copper thieves from the earlier story. The 11% improvement among excavators who actually opted into a best-practices program is the real headline, since it proves the fix exists - it's just not mandatory.

QUICK HITS:

QUICK HITS:

QUICK HITS:

San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Pull 13 "Nudify" Apps, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters demanding Apple and Google remove 13 AI apps that generate non-consensual nude images within 28 days or face civil penalties under California's deepfake law, saying both companies likely made millions in fees from the apps despite policies banning such content.

My Take: What?

AWS Billing Bug Sends Some Customers Multi-Billion-Dollar Invoices, a technical glitch in AWS's billing subsystem inflated unit prices across services by millions of times, sending some customers bills running into the billions of dollars, including a charity nonprofit that normally pays under £1 a month for one app. Amazon corrected the error and is reissuing invoices based on actual usage.

My Take: There are some funny pictures of people’s bills if you search online.

Ted Gioia: Netflix's Stock Collapse Signals the End of "Audience Capture", writer Ted Gioia argues Netflix's stock wipeout, after a weak Q2 earnings call and a decision to withhold viewership numbers until 2027, reflects the failure of an industry-wide strategy of cutting content investment while raising prices, pointing to falling second-season viewership and Meta's first-ever user decline as signs the same reckoning is spreading.

My Take: Milking a captive audience only works as long as the audience believes it's actually captive, and Netflix just found out its subscribers have somewhere else to go. Every company that adopted the same playbook- less content, higher prices- better hope their numbers look better than Netflix's when investors start asking the same questions. Does anyone stick around for a 6-month delayed Season 2 anymore?

McKinsey's State of the Consumer 2026: Resourceful, AI-Driven, Health-Obsessed, McKinsey's 2026 consumer survey across five markets found shoppers increasingly using AI for purchase decisions, with 28% of Gen Z shopping via AI versus 16% of boomers, alongside a broader "resourceful consumer" trend where 82% hold onto products longer and 69% repair rather than replace, even among higher-income households.

My Take: The biggest shift is that companies may no longer be marketing only to people. They are also marketing to the AI systems helping those people make decisions. Scary.

Samsung Hikes Foldable Prices as Memory Chip Costs Squeeze Margins, Samsung unveiled a wider Galaxy Z Fold8 at $1,899 and raised prices on the Fold8 Ultra and Flip8 by $100 to $2,099 and $1,199, respectively, powered by Gemini AI, as rising memory chip prices squeeze its mobile division margins even as they boost its semiconductor business. Analysts expect Samsung's mobile unit could post its first-ever quarterly loss.

My Take: $2,099 for a phone. Crazy.

Guardian Investigation: Amazon Pressured Suppliers to Raise Prices Elsewhere, internal Amazon emails and court documents reviewed by The Guardian show the company pressured suppliers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target and Best Buy whenever they undercut Amazon by even a penny, with examples including a table lamp jumping from $24.99 to $39 at Walmart and an ice-cream maker pulled from Best Buy before tripling in price on Amazon.

My Take: Amazon’s low-price promise looks different if suppliers are being pushed to raise prices everywhere else. That is not the same as winning through better service or lower costs. It may be using market power to limit how aggressively competitors can price.

Hidden Aftermarket Car Alarm Leaves Millions of US Vehicles Hackable, UC San Diego researchers found the KARR Security System, an aftermarket alarm dealer-installed in more than 2 million US vehicles, shares a single hardcoded authentication key across all units, letting anyone in Bluetooth range unlock a car, disable its ignition, or track its location, with about half of affected owners never having requested the device. A firmware patch is available.

My Take: When dealerships add connected hardware, they should be responsible for telling buyers, providing updates, and removing it when it is no longer needed. Security cannot depend on owners finding and fixing a product they never chose.

My Take: Only 15 of the 37 majors recoup their full cost within a decade. Look at Education..

IMDb: 7.9/10

JMDb: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿/10 (It was.. OK.. )

The Invite understands something most relationship comedies dodge: the scariest part of a long marriage isn't the big betrayal, it's the accumulation of small unspoken resentments nobody ever names out loud. Joe and Angela host an ordinary dinner party that turns into an unofficial audit of everything their relationship has quietly avoided, and Olivia Wilde stages it with real patience, letting silences and side-eyes do as much work as dialogue.

Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton play Piña and Hawk with unnerving calm, like two people who've already had every conversation Joe and Angela are terrified to start. Their confidence becomes a kind of pressure, pulling confessions out of the hosts almost against their will. Rogen is genuinely good here, playing a man watching his own denial collapse in real time, which lands funnier and sadder than it sounds.

The film's real subject is honesty, and how exhausting it is to keep avoiding it. By the final act, the dinner party has stopped being a metaphor and started being the marriage itself, laid bare on the table next to the cheese board.

Sharp, uncomfortable, and quietly moving - but missing a bit of a point.

Jason’s Industry Insights is produced by Verity Aptus.

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