Project Spark is designed to fundamentally reshape how high-capacity services in the UK are built, priced and delivered, supporting the next wave of digital infrastructure expansion.
The firm's study, 'North American Fiber Broadband Report: FTTH Review and Forecast 2026-2030,' indicates that nearly $200 billion will be spent on fiber over the next five years, highlighting a significant investment in fiber-to-the-home services.
Put together, the two companies pass ~7.1 [million] locations in 26 states. The two companies overlap in only three counties in Texas (109k locations). Texas and Illinois will have the largest footprint for the combined entity. Cable and Fiber will cover an almost equal share of locations for the combined company.
Openreach has constructed a digital twin of the UK's transportation corridors, integrating data for 35 million homes and businesses with national road, rail and waterway networks and its existing fibre infrastructure.
The message that we will carry to [Capitol Hill] is one of affordability, and it's not only affordability for customers. It's a need to keep the cost of providing broadband and video affordable. We spend a lot of time talking about permitting - right-of-way access barriers - and for good reason. Those are the types of pain points that can really kill the momentum for broadband deployment in your communities.
Google Fiber, now just GFiber, will merge with Stonepeak's Astound Broadband to create a new network provider. Stonepeak will hold a majority ownership stake, while the existing GFiber executive team will run the company. According to the pair, the move gives GFiber the external capital and necessary focus to drive its next phase of expansion, allowing it to buildout its fiber footprint across the US.
Eight of the municipal networks studied beat their local provider competitors in median upload speed. Sherwood Broadband - in the town of the same name in Oregon - was the only one to beat its local competitor in median download speed.
Ninety-five percent of intercontinental internet traffic travels through undersea fiber optic cables. Not satellites, not some ethereal "cloud" floating above us. Cables. Physical, tangible lines of glass fiber, thinner than a garden hose, laid across ocean floors by specialized ships. There are roughly 550 active or planned cable systems worldwide, according to TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, and they represent the actual, material backbone of the global internet.
Long-range radio waves can pass through obstacles more easily, which makes them perfect for monitoring expansive factories or outdoor infrastructure. A recent report by Fabrity highlighted that these systems use very little power. This allows sensors to operate for 5 to 10 years on a single battery. Using such tech means you do not have to install expensive wiring across your entire site.
GFiber has always been about pushing the boundaries of what's possible for internet speed and service. This partnership with Astound and Stonepeak is the next step in our decade-long mission to redefine what customers can expect from their internet provider. It's a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service.
If anything happens to them, or to the gas interconnector, the economy wouldn't last ten days. So are you saying we shouldn't cooperate with Britain to protect the gas interconnectors with the United Kingdom? That we should just ignore it? Are you saying we should ignore all of our European partners and protecting undersea critical infrastructure, such as subsea cables, such as the interconnector with France that will be completed in the next year?
Wholesale access has been inherently supported by the Broadband Forum's network architecture over the past 20 years, and this project takes the best practices from copper‑based broadband to reshape and evolve them for fiber and cloud networks.
Across 2025 as a whole, the company tracked more than 180 significant disruptions, with the final quarter dominated by cable damage, power problems, and routine operational failures. There was just one confirmed government-directed shutdown during the period. Tanzania saw a sharp drop in internet traffic on October 29 as violent protests broke out during the country's presidential election, with traffic falling by more than 90 percent. Traffic returned briefly before declining again, and routing data pointed to throttling rather than a clean shutdown.
Owned and operated by AVX Networks, the project will extend high-capacity submarine fiber connectivity originating from Huntington Beach in Orange County, delivering reliable broadband access to approximately 3,700 to 4,400 year-round residents across roughly 1,200 housing units on Catalina Island, where a significant portion of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino. The new infrastructure will enable expanded telework, telehealth, and educational access, helping residents overcome geographic isolation while supporting workforce mobility and long-term economic participation.
Light-based internet provider Taara, which spun out of Alphabet's "moonshot" incubator last year, just launched Taara Beam to provide 25Gbps connectivity within cities over invisible beams of light - line of sight permitting. Unlike last year's Taara Lightbridge, which connects communities separated by water and mountains at distances up to 20km (over 12 miles), the shoebox-sized Beam can be mounted to street poles and roof tops for city-wide connectivity at distances up to 10km. The 8kg (less than 20 pounds) device typically consumes about 90W.
As I discovered while researching my latest novel, subaquatic sabotage could be easily carried out and we are woefully underprepared The events of the past few weeks - including ­Donald Trump's threats to ­Greenland, the US seizure of a Russian-registered tanker after its encroachment on Irish waters and the severing of ­telecoms cables in the Baltic - have all come together to highlight one of the great vulnerabilities of contemporary Ireland: the fragile cables that connect us all.
Qunnect and Cisco have unveiled what they say is the first entanglement-swapping demonstration of its kind over deployed metro-scale fibre using a commercial quantum networking system. The demonstration combined Qunnect's room-temperature quantum hardware with Cisco's quantum networking software stack. The net result of the project is regarded by the partners as being able to bring practical quantum networks closer to scalable deployment, validating a spoke-and-hub model for scaling quantum networks through commercial datacentres.
Edge computing is a type of IT infrastructure in which data is collected, stored, and processed near the "edge" or on the device itself instead of being transmitted to a centralized processor. Edge computing systems usually involve a network of devices, sensors, or machinery capable of data processing and interconnection. A main benefit of edge computing is its low latency. Since each endpoint processes information near the source, it can be easier to process data, respond to requests, and produce detailed analytics.
Ookla said the growing use of ChatGPT and other AI tools places much more demand on mobile networks than the typical activities of browsing social media and the web, watching videos, texting, and making the occasional phone call. As a result, more speed and expanded capabilities will be necessary. The report said advanced AI capabilities like AI-enabled glasses will put a particular strain on upload connections in the future.
NMSurf is one of the largest fixed wireless providers in New Mexico, serving the central and northern area of the state. La Bajada was previously served by a 3-Gig microwave middle-mile connection. But, Catanach said, the bandwidth was becoming insufficient. New microwave licenses are hard to come by in New Mexico, he added, because the state itself claims many licenses for radio communications.
Cisco aims to "build high-fidelity quantum networks to unlock the potential for large-scale quantum data centers," Kompella told Telecompetitor in an interview. The company is working closely with IBM on the research, with IBM's role focused primarily on the computing side, while Cisco tackles the networking side. Quantum computers use concepts of quantum physics. They're more powerful than traditional non-quantum computers, known in quantum jargon as "classical" computers. But, as of today, there is no way to network quantum computers.