Mitch Wagner

For 30 years, network traffic followed a rhythm you could set a clock by. A lull in the morning, a peak through the business day, demand falling off in the evening. And it flowed overwhelmingly in one direction: down, toward users pulling web pages, video, and files. Networks were engineered around both assumptions. AI is breaking them. For example, MetTel has seen double-digit traffic growth for eight to nine years, but lately the shape of that traffic has changed. The familiar daily curve is leveling out.

There's a storm coming and it's headed for telephone companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble in August 2025, a caution that was followed by warnings from the Bank of England, International Monetary Fund, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Given the risk of a bubble and its potential collapse, how are communica

The 5G hype of the mid-2010s is downright embarrassing to think back on. 5G was predicted to unlock an instant revenue gusher for telephone companies, while consumers' lives would be transformed by high-speed, low-latency connections that enabled self-driving cars, the metaverse and remote-control surgery. Of course, the reality has been different. Consumers don't care about 5G. They don't even know if their phones are 5G-enabled.

You didn’t need testing equipment to measure the state of Purdue University’s Wi-Fi network. You just needed to look on Reddit, where complaints were flying. That was the situation Ian Hyatt walked in to when he took a job as CIO of Purdue University three years ago.

A director at the US National Science Foundation has harsh words for the country’s telecommunications companies: We’ve lost the 5G race. But the Next-G game is just getting started, and US companies can win by playing to American strengths, said Sudharman Jayaweera, a program director at the National Science Foundation. In addition to telephone companies lagging, no US vendor has significant market share in the 5G infrastructure equipment market, which is dominated by Huawei, ZTE and other companies, Jayaweera said. The US lags in both research and true 5G networks.