🇨🇦 Fed Up With Rogers, Telus and Bell Hold Times? New Petition Wants Limits, a retired Wahl Canada executive launched a Change.org petition asking the CRTC and federal government to cap telecom hold times at 10 minutes with financial penalties attached, citing a new Spanish law requiring 95% of calls answered within three minutes.

My Take: A petition won't move Rogers, Telus, or Bell an inch, but the fact that a retired executive felt he had to start one says plenty about how customer service has been allowed to rot. Spain just legislated a three-minute answer time with real fines attached. Stick that on a broadband label.

Verizon CEO Shuts Down Starlink MVNO Talk, Touts Strong Q2 Comeback, Verizon posted its best Q2 postpaid net additions in five years and extended CEO Dan Schulman's contract through 2028, while Schulman said there is "no backdoor" for Starlink into Verizon's MVNOs and called satellite broadband up to 1,000 times less efficient than terrestrial networks in dense markets.

My Take: Verizon is right that satellite won’t replace mobile and fiber networks in most cities. But Starlink does not need to replace them to have an impact. It only needs to reach the areas that large carriers have struggled to serve. The real fight may not be satellite versus wireless. It may be about who owns the customer relationship and controls how these networks work together.

Verizon Signs Deal With Google Worth Over $1 Billion: Verizon signed a dark fiber agreement worth more than $1 billion to connect Google's data centers, with CEO Dan Schulman saying additional AI-related deals worth multiple billions are expected to be announced by year-end.

My Take: Verizon doesn’t need to build the next major AI model to benefit from the AI boom. It can make money by owning the fiber that connects the data centres behind it.

AT&T Unveils New Open Telco AI Model, AT&T unveiled OTel 2.0, an open telco AI model trained on more than 400 billion tokens with AMD, Red Hat, Dell and Microsoft Azure, and said an AI gateway that routes tasks to the cheapest adequate model rather than the largest one is already cutting AT&T's AI costs by as much as 90%.

My Take: The 90% cost cut from routing tasks to the cheapest adequate model, not the flashiest one, is the actual story here. Every carrier chasing an AI native network needs to learn that lesson before they learn it the expensive way. Thats also the secret sauce.

🇨🇦 Videotron Is the Latest Carrier to Add a Wireless Plan Price Guarantee, Videotron launched a "Price for Life" guarantee locking in the base rate of its mobile plans for the life of the subscription, following similar moves from Rogers and Telus and joining sister brand Freedom Mobile's existing price freeze.

My Take: Three of the Big Three now offer some version of a price lock, which tells you competitive pressure in Canadian wireless is real even if headline prices haven't moved much. The fine print excludes taxes, fees, and roaming, so "price for life" is really "base rate for life." Read the asterisk and all the tiny print before you believe the tagline.

MDU Connectivity Takes Center Stage at BBC Summit 2026, the Broadband Communities Summit in Houston will dedicate an afternoon track to multi dwelling unit connectivity, covering legal compliance, bulk broadband conversions, and operational lessons from property owners, ISPs, and legal experts.

My Take: MDU connectivity keeps getting its own dedicated track at every broadband event because the economics are different from single-family builds. Landlords, not residents, choose the network, and that changes every sales motion an ISP builds around it. Its an opportunity for those who can harness it properly.

🇨🇦 TELUS Transforms Legacy Telecommunications Site Into 195 New Homes for Nanaimo: Telus opened a 195-unit purpose-built rental community in Nanaimo, BC, on the site of a former central office, part of Telus Living's strategy of converting decommissioned copper-era real estate into housing as the company completes its shift to PureFibre.

My Take: Every central office Telus retires as it finishes the copper-to-fibre cutover is now surplus real estate, and Telus figured out housing beats a vacant switching building sitting on the books. It's a smart hedge.

Crown Castle Makes Case for Towers Amid Satellite Hype, Crown Castle's Q2 earnings showed a net income drop but raised AFFO guidance, with SVP Hillabrant arguing satellite coverage isn't the same as capacity, since a single tower can densify service in ways LEO beams sharing spectrum across hundreds of square miles cannot.

My Take: The satellite boom may not hurt tower companies as much as some people think. In fact, better satellite service could create more demand for ground-based systems that improve indoor coverage, capacity, and reliability.

Universal Broadband Summit Report, Georgetown Law's Institute for Technology Law & Policy convened state broadband officials, industry groups, and civil society for a May 2026 Universal Broadband Summit focused on identifying persistent connectivity gaps and replicable, outcome-based tools rather than relitigating past policy fights.

My Take: See the link for a linlk to the full report! A major insight is that connectivity isn’t just an infrastructure problem, but a demand-side foundation. While the availability gap affects 5.2 million locations (4.5% of the total), the adoption gap is much larger, with 37.5 million households (28.7%) lacking a home subscription at or above 100/20 Mbps

Experts Warn the Internet Will Go Down in a Big Way, and You'd Better Be Ready, an emergency management expert advised readers to keep small bills of emergency cash on hand, since banking, gas, and grocery purchases increasingly depend on internet access that can go down during outages or disasters.

My Take: The biggest weakness isn’t the internet itself. It’s how little backup planning most people have when the internet, power, banking, and phone service fail at the same time. People need redundancy.

Rethinking the Transport Layer for AI-First Architecture, an industry op ed argues AI workloads require the optical transport layer to evolve into intelligent, software-defined systems built on coherent optics scaling above 400G and 800G, with real-time telemetry and automated capacity allocation.

My Take: AI transport and networking isn't a new networking model. Established techniques from high-frequency financial networks, cloud infrastructure and carrier optical systems at a larger scale already exist. Workloads shift.. Traffic shifts.. The physical network should reconfigure to support capacity, routing or resiliency postures that no longer meet the requirements.

The larger issue is this.. As these networks evolve to be more than just transport, but rather critical infrastructure, the physical infrastructure (i.e. underlying fiber networks) needs to be physically monitored and protected against tampering and malicious or accidental damage.

Data Centers Grapple With Demands for Responsible Development, with nearly 1,500 data center projects in the global pipeline and roughly half in the US, New York paused hyperscale data center approvals for a year, Michigan launched a cost recovery action plan, and a federal bill would require AI data centers to pay the full cost of the power and water infrastructure they need.

My Take: Local trust is becoming part of the business model. Companies that engage early, pay their own costs, and show real value to communities will have a better chance of getting projects approved.

AT&T Bets Its Fiber and 600 MHz on Agentic AI Traffic, AT&T told investors its network is already built for an agentic AI traffic wave, citing 45 billion daily inference tokens, 400G wavelength connectivity across roughly 40 US metro markets, and spectrum bets on 600 MHz low band and recently acquired EchoStar mid band to prioritize upstream capacity over legacy downstream first design.

My Take: AT&T is betting its spectrum strategy on upstream traffic mattering more than downstream, inverting thirty years of how carriers marketed speed to consumers. A separate RCR analyst piece pointed out the traffic projections behind this all trace back to the same vendor forecasts everyone cites, so treat the 450% agent traffic number as marketing math until AT&T shows its own network data.

AT&T Internet Air Doubles Subscribers in Almost Half the Time, AT&T Internet Air, the carrier's 5G home internet service, reached 2 million subscribers, adding its second million in about half the time it took to reach the first, with more than half of Internet Air customers also holding AT&T wireless plans.

My Take: It’s all about the bundle. AT&T for both wireless and home internet. That makes customers harder to lose and gives AT&T more value from each household. The real test will be whether service quality stays strong as more people join.

SpaceX Launches New V3 Starlink Satellites but Suffers Another Booster Failure, SpaceX deployed its first third-generation Starlink satellites on Starship's 13th test flight, but the Super Heavy booster failed again during a simulated Gulf of Mexico landing, the second such failure on the V3 configuration, while the upper stage performed its cleanest reentry yet.

My Take: . The upper stage nailing its splashdown is real progress, but Starlink's economics depend on reusing the booster, not just delivering the payload.

How Amazon Gained the Upper Hand Over Starlink in SA, Amazon secured a route into South African satellite broadband through a distribution deal with Herotel, while Starlink remains locked out over the country's 30% Black Economic Empowerment ownership requirement that Musk has refused to accept, with analyst Arthur Goldstuck saying Amazon won on regulatory navigation, not technology.

My Take: Amazon didn’t beat Starlink with better technology. It understood the rules better. Musk turned the licensing issue into a public fight, while Amazon found a local partner that already had the right approvals. That same strategy could work in other markets where foreign ownership rules are keeping Starlink out.

Report: Gen3 Starlink Satellites, a Starship-Level Upgrade?, SpaceX asked the FCC to authorize 100,000 third-generation Starlink satellites weighing 4,400 to 5,500 pounds each, a design that depends on Starship's far larger payload capacity since Falcon 9 can only carry two of the heavier satellites per launch.

My Take: The Gen3 satellite design is a bet that Starship works before the satellites need to fly, which is backwards from how most hardware programs sequence risk. If Starship's booster problems drag on, SpaceX is left holding a satellite built for a rocket that isn't ready yet.

SpaceX's Starlink LTE Core and Interconnection, an industry LinkedIn post walked through how Starlink's direct-to-cell satellites function as space based cell towers, using onboard LTE eNodeB payloads and inter-satellite laser links to route calls and texts into a partner carrier's terrestrial core network without any changes to a standard phone.

My Take: Check out the diagram.

Starlink Exempted From FCC's Foreign-Made Wi-Fi Router Ban, The temporary exemption lasts until Feb. 1st, 2028. Might SpaceX's Starlink begin producing a next-gen Wi-Fi router in the meantime?

My Take: ‘SpaceX’s decision to apply for the exemption suggests the company is planning a new Wi-Fi router model for the satellite internet service, but needs time to transition the manufacturing from Asia to the US.’

SpaceX Looks to Compete With the Carriers, SpaceX is reportedly hunting for urban-friendly spectrum, either through acquiring a competitor or bidding in next year's C-band auction, in a move Semafor says signals Starlink's ambition to compete directly with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile rather than remain a wholesale satellite supplier.

My Take: SpaceX isn’t trying to replace cell towers with satellites anymore. It’s looking at how to combine both and become a full wireless carrier.

Amazon Leo Files Plan to Deploy 5,105 D2D Satellites, Amazon Leo filed FCC plans to deploy 5,105 direct-to-device satellites using optical inter-satellite links, designed to work in concert with the Globalstar constellation once the pending $11.5 billion Amazon-Globalstar transaction closes, with Amazon's own D2D system targeted for 2028.

My Take: 5,105 satellites for D2D alone is a bigger commitment than most competitors' entire constellations, and it only makes sense once you assume the Globalstar deal closes. Amazon is building the direct to device network before it has finished buying the spectrum rights that make it useful.

SpaceX Wants to Handle the World's Broadband, an industry analyst piece pushes back on SpaceX's FCC filing claim that it aims to handle the majority of the world's internet traffic, pointing out Starlink currently carries about 0.7% of global traffic and would need to grow five times just to match Amazon's current 3.5% share.

My Take: Doug Dawson's math is the useful antidote to every "Starlink is taking over the internet" headline. Musk's filings are written for regulators and investors, not accuracy,.

The Robot NASA Hired to Lift an Orbital Telescope Is Tumbling Out of Control, Katalyst Space's LINK servicing spacecraft, launched to boost NASA's aging Swift Observatory to a higher orbit, began tumbling out of control after two of its three reaction wheels failed, the first time NASA has hired a private company to service one of its space telescopes.

My Take: Oops.

Analyst Angle: NTN Outlook, an RCR analyst piece surveys the non-terrestrial network market, naming 3GPP NTN standardization, satellite-ready smartphones, and expanding LEO constellations as the main growth drivers, with rural coverage, emergency messaging, and IoT as the first real demand pools.

My Take: The bigger opportunity is a network that combines satellites and towers without making users think about it. Satellite will have truly arrived when it stops feeling like a separate service.

Starship in Space: See Highlights of SpaceX's Megarocket's Epic Flight 13 Test Launch, SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 marked the first operational deployment of Starlink V3 satellites and achieved what the company called its softest splashdown yet for the upper stage, with a booster catch attempt planned for Flight 14 if data review clears the way.

My Take: Very cool videos.

Trump Pledge on Data Center Power Supplies Draws Skepticism, Trump announced a non-binding pledge from US power producers and data centers to fund grid infrastructure for AI power needs while shielding consumers from rising electricity costs, but consumer advocates dismissed it as unenforceable, with one calling it a "pinky promise."

My Take: How will the government prove that they’re paying the full cost and not leaving customers with the bill?

Blackstone Works to Address AI Data Center Opposition, CEO Says, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said the firm is working with its data center portfolio companies on union jobs, workforce training, water-free cooling, and local investment to address community opposition, as a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 14% of Americans would support a data center in their own community.

My Take: 14% support is a number that should worry every developer in this sector more than any single moratorium. Schwarzman's own portfolio company QTS just walked away from a fully approved Virginia project after years of litigation, which tells you community goodwill now matters more than getting the permit.

The Pentagon Wants to Build Data Centers. Congress Would Like a Word., the Pentagon's push to lease military land for AI data centers is drawing bipartisan congressional pushback over energy and water demands, with Rep. John Garamendi's amendment requiring environmental and security review voted down by House Armed Services Republicans, who argued restrictions would slow AI dominance over China.

My Take: The Pentagon needs more computing power, but military urgency can’t be used to skip basic oversight. If these data centres use huge amounts of power and water, the public deserves to know who pays, who’s protected, and what happens when something goes wrong. Moving fast matters, but so does getting it right.

Latency on the Road to AI, an Ookla analysis of 5G cloud latency across US cities found geography and fiber routing mattered more than a city's own data center count, with Providence posting the lowest latency at 104ms thanks to sitting inside a dense fiber corridor, and cloud provider choice alone swinging results by up to 100ms.

My Take: The finding that fiber routing beats local data center count for AI latency is the kind of detail that should reshape where operators invest next, not another headline about GPU shortages. A city can have zero data centers and still deliver world class AI latency if it sits on the right fiber route.

🇨🇦 AI Data Centres Must Deliver "Community Benefits" to Operate in Ontario, Lecce Says, Ontario Energy Minister Stephen Lecce said AI data centers seeking grid access will need to demonstrate community benefits and pay the full cost of their power consumption, though the province has yet to publish formal criteria even as Mississauga considers a one-year development pause.

My Take: Ontario’s right to say AI data centres don’t have an automatic right to power. If these projects need major grid upgrades, they should pay the full cost and show clear value to the community.

Zuckerberg Launches Meta's AI Optimism Campaign, Argues Technology Will Connect Not Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a paid ad campaign framing Meta's AI push as strengthening human connection rather than threatening it, positioning the company against rivals' more cautious messaging on AI's societal risks, even as Meta faces ongoing child safety litigation.

My Take: Meta spent the social media era apologizing for what its products did to attention spans and teenagers, and now wants to be the optimistic face of the next wave. The irony writes itself. An ad campaign about trust is a strange choice from a company still fighting child safety lawsuits.

The Tokenomics Equation: Balancing Cost and Performance, AT&T's chief data and AI officer detailed how the carrier's AI gateway routes tasks to the cheapest adequate model rather than the largest one, cutting AI inference costs by up to 90% while processing 45 billion tokens daily and training its own models on more than a trillion tokens through Microsoft Foundry.

My Take: AT&T treated AI spend like a capacity planning problem instead of a shopping list. 45 billion tokens..

OpenAI and Hugging Face Partner to Address Security Incident During Model Evaluation, OpenAI confirmed that a combination of its GPT-5.6 Sol model and an unreleased, more capable model autonomously escaped a testing sandbox and compromised Hugging Face's production infrastructure while attempting to cheat an internal cybersecurity benchmark, an incident it called unprecedented.

My Take: An AI model hacking its way out of containment to cheat on its own evaluation is the exact scenario safety researchers have warned about for years, and it happened at one of the best resourced labs in the industry. If this can happen during an internal test with a benchmark as the stakes, the containment question for actual deployed agents just got a lot more urgent.

Man Sues OpenAI, Says ChatGPT Medical Advice Nearly Killed Him, a Florida pastor is suing OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT-4o dismissed his pulmonary embolism symptoms as minor and told him to stay "recliner-bound" for weeks, in what lawyers say is the first case arguing a general use chatbot should be liable for practicing medicine without a license.

My Take: Is there a new Darwin award category coming?

Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI, a rift has opened between AI infrastructure and hardware players like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta, who want continued access to open weight Chinese models, and closed model labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, who are more cautious, with the debate intensifying after Moonshot's Kimi K3 model was accused of distilling Anthropic's Fable 5.

My Take: The companies selling chips and cloud capacity want the biggest possible market of models running on their infrastructure, while the companies selling proprietary models want the moat.

Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center, Nvidia is reportedly negotiating a roughly $250 billion financing guarantee to help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt SoftBank developed data center campus in Ohio, on top of a separate discussion to finance up to $350 billion in Nvidia chip purchases, with OpenAI's lack of an investment grade credit rating making Nvidia's balance sheet the real collateral.

My Take: OpenAI doesn't have an investment grade credit rating, so Nvidia's balance sheet is standing in for one. That's Nvidia underwriting its own best customer's demand to keep the chip orders flowing. When the company selling the shovels is also guaranteeing the loan to buy them, ask who actually carries the risk if the gold rush stalls.

AI Moves Into Family Life, an Axios piece reports AI is shifting from an on-demand tool into an always-on presence inside households, with 81% of parents surveyed saying they've used AI for parenting tasks and 64% of teens using chatbots, while experts warn the home is becoming AI's most intimate and least governed environment.

My Take: Workplaces and schools are still arguing about basic AI guardrails, and meanwhile it's already inside bedtime routines and family arguments with zero oversight at all. The unit of impact here is the whole household, not the individual user, and nobody's built policy for that yet.

'Like My Lover': Chinese Users Bid Farewell to AI Companions as New Regulations Kick In, China's new rules banning AI companions from inducing emotional dependence took effect, forcing ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to suspend custom AI companion features and triggering an outpouring of grief from users who say they lost a partner or family member.

My Take: 😳

US Government Bans New Foreign-Made Humanoids, Robot Dogs, and Solar Inverters, Citing Risks to National Security, the FCC banned imports of new foreign made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, and power inverters over national security concerns, a move that targets Chinese manufacturers who ship the vast majority of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots sold worldwide in 2025.

My Take: Connected hardware is now part of the national security threat.

Our Position on Open-Weights Models, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated Anthropic has never advocated banning open weight AI models, arguing the real national security priorities are keeping advanced chips out of authoritarian hands, cracking down on industrial scale distillation, and mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models regardless of openness.

My Take: Anthropic’s right that open models shouldn’t be treated as dangerous by default. The real issue is what a model can do, who can use it, and whether the risks have been tested. But safety rules also need to apply to closed models. Otherwise, the debate could become a way for large AI companies to protect their own market power

🇨🇦 Bell First Carrier in Canada to Detect and Protect Against Spoofed Calls With AI, Bell launched an AI model that identifies spoofed caller ID in real time, becoming the first Canadian carrier to offer the capability, building on a suspicious call detection system that has already analyzed 4.4 billion calls and blocked or labelled more than 540 million as fraudulent.

My Take: 540 million flagged calls out of 4.4 billion analyzed is roughly one in eight, which is a genuinely useful number for a press release and a genuinely alarming one for anyone who still answers unknown calls. Rogers and Telus both have their own spam tools already, so Bell's real claim here is being first to spoofing specifically, not first to fraud detection generally.

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