Robert Clark

There are a lot of unanswered questions about AI and telecommunications, but one thing is for certain—AI is going to change networks. For starters, inferencing traffic behaves differently. As a new Cisco report tells us, AI data flows are not at all like the "human-paced, bursty video streams" networks are currently optimized for.

Starlink has threatened to shun Australia's satellite mobile market if it is forced into a spectrum auction.

It is now five years since Starlink first began to offer commercial service and we are only now starting to see its ability to disrupt the telecom business. Unsurprisingly, it is the legacy GEO and MEO operators that have been the first to feel the impact, facing a competitor with vastly different service capabilities and cost points.

Australia's no. 2 carrier Optus is once again engulfed in a political storm after a catastrophic network outage. This time it is over the deaths of three people caused by the failure of its emergency call system in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

New Zealand broadband wholesaler Chorus has won the backing of the infrastructure commission for its network upgrade plan—but it still faces a battle for funding. The commission designated Chorus' rural fiber scheme as one of 17 priority projects in its draft National Infrastructure Plan.

The Australian government has topped up the national broadband network (NBN) project with an extra 3 billion Australian dollars (US$1.85 billion), promising to make the network all-fiber by the end of the decade.

Twenty-two percent of broadband customers in China have access to downlink speeds of at least 1 Gbps. China is progressing in fixed-line broadband as well as mobile, according to its latest government statistics. The country's three big operators reported 622 million fixed-line broadband users at the end of August, which is up 32.1 million from the start of the year. All told, of the 587 million Chinese broadband users, 94 percent are on 100 Mbps and above. The country's success in rolling out advanced infrastructure and racking up big subscriber adds is due to several factors, such as a su