Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Pandemic-era shortages are still fresh in many minds. As consumers, we remember empty shelves and long lines driven by panic buying and stockpiling. In telecom, the story played out differently but with the same root cause: factory shutdowns interrupted chip fabrication just as demand for networking and optical equipment surged.

Operators today are navigating unprecedented complexity—rising costs, accelerating customer expectations, and increasingly dynamic networks. In this recent video interview, my colleague Kevin Wade and I explore why AI‑driven automation has shifted from a “nice‑to‑have” technology to a core business requirement for telecom operators and beyond.

For decades, telecom network operations have depended on traditional OSS tools – complex, services-heavy platforms that take years to modernize and even longer to deliver measurable business impact. This year at MWC, the leading OSS vendors showcased a variety of new AI extensions for their portfolios and marketed them as the fastest path to autonomous network operations. They are not.

While the race to expand networking infrastructure to support AI applications continues on land, the same expansion is occurring undersea. Subsea cables spanning Earth’s oceans must evolve to keep pace.

As digital transformation accelerates, the underlying infrastructure supporting your enterprise or service provider network faces unprecedented pressure. The exponential growth of data, driven by cloud computing, 5G, and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), demands a fundamental rethink of how you approach connectivity.

In the telecom industry, leaders are under pressure to deliver more—more capacity, more agility, more reliability—while managing rising complexity with fewer resources. The network is the circulatory system of the modern telco, yet it’s still often operated like a patchwork of manual roads, each requiring constant human intervention. This model worked when traffic was predictable and growth was linear.

Imagine pulling up to a gas pump, inserting your credit card, and having the display on the pump say “denied”. You call your credit card company, and they say, “Oh, we don’t know, maybe it’s the merchant’s fault, or the card reader is bad…, we can look into it and get back to you in a few weeks.” Most of us would be pretty upset with that response.

Everywhere around us, technology is evolving at lightning speed, yet the networks which underpin these capabilities often lag behind. This gap creates vulnerabilities that can impact everything from energy grids to emergency services. Forbes recently explored this urgent issue in an article featuring insights from our CEO Bruce McClelland, who shared an informed perspective on why modernization is essential, not optional. I encourage you to take a few minutes to read the full article.

The accelerating demand for artificial intelligence and cloud-based applications is fundamentally altering how organizations approach physical infrastructure. As data center construction shifts toward rural geographies in search of affordable power and real estate, the connectivity binding these facilities together has become a critical bottleneck. Network architects and CIOs are currently facing a complex decision matrix regarding Data Center Interconnect (DCI) deployment.

Technical debt refers to the future costs and limitations incurred when organizations opt for short-term solutions over robust, long-term scalable architectures. For the middle mile, technical debt often manifests as equipment or network designs that restrict long-term flexibility, scalability, or interoperability.