Cytranet’s Doug Roberts on Why Fiber Is the Backbone of the AI Era
There’s a quiet revolution happening beneath our feet — literally. Thousands of miles of fiber optic cable are being laid, upgraded, and activated across the country, and businesses that once settled for sluggish, unreliable internet connections are waking up to what true broadband can do for them. Doug Roberts, Chief Technology Officer at Cytranet, has been at the center of this shift for years, and if you spend even a few minutes talking to him, it becomes clear that he genuinely loves this stuff.
We caught up with Roberts recently to talk about where business internet is heading, how AI is changing the demands placed on network infrastructure, and why he thinks fiber connectivity is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity.
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“Bandwidth appetite has completely changed”
Roberts didn’t mince words when asked about the state of business internet today. “What a company needed from its connection five years ago is almost unrecognizable compared to what they need now,” he said. “We’re not just talking about more video calls. We’re talking about businesses running cloud-based operations, accessing large AI platforms, syncing massive datasets in real time. The bandwidth appetite has completely changed.”
Cytranet has been expanding its fiber infrastructure steadily, and Roberts says the demand signals from business customers have been the clearest guide for where to invest. “We follow the need,” he explained. “When we start hearing from businesses in a particular area that they’re being held back by their connection — that they’re losing productivity, losing bids, losing time — that’s where we go. Fiber isn’t just faster internet. It’s symmetrical upload and download speeds, it’s reliability, it’s low latency. Those things matter enormously for modern business.”
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AI Is Putting Pressure on Networks in Ways Nobody Fully Anticipated
One of the more fascinating parts of the conversation was Roberts’ take on how artificial intelligence tools are reshaping network demands in ways that even industry veterans didn’t fully predict.
“Everyone talked about AI in terms of what it would do for software and automation,” he said, leaning into the topic with obvious enthusiasm. “But the network implications are massive and they crept up on people. When you have employees using AI assistants, running inference tasks, uploading documents and data to cloud-based models all day long — that’s a sustained, heavy load on your connection. It’s not a spike. It’s constant.”
He pointed out that businesses using older copper-based or hybrid internet connections are starting to feel that pressure acutely. “We’ve had customers come to us after their existing provider basically couldn’t keep up. Their teams were using AI tools and the upload speeds were just strangling the workflow. Fiber solves that. When you have a symmetrical gigabit connection, those bottlenecks disappear.”
Roberts is also watching closely how AI is beginning to influence network management itself. “We’re using smarter tools internally to monitor our infrastructure, predict where issues might develop before they become outages, and optimize traffic routing. It’s early days, but the direction is exciting. Networks are going to get a lot smarter.”
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Datacenters and the Last-Mile Problem
The conversation naturally turned to datacenters — a topic Roberts clearly has strong opinions about. As AI computing demands have surged, datacenter construction has accelerated across the country, but Roberts argues that the focus on large-scale compute often overshadows a critical piece of the puzzle.
“Everyone is talking about datacenter capacity, and rightfully so,” he said. “But there’s a last-mile problem that doesn’t get enough attention. You can have the most powerful datacenter in the world, but if the businesses trying to connect to it are doing so over an inferior connection, you’re leaving performance on the table. The whole chain has to be strong.”
Cytranet’s approach, Roberts explained, has been to think about connectivity holistically — not just getting fiber to a building, but ensuring that the full path from a business’s internal network to the applications and compute resources they depend on is as clean and fast as possible. “We care about what happens end to end. That’s where the real value is for the customer.”
He also touched on the growing importance of redundancy. “Businesses can’t afford downtime anymore. When your operations are tied to cloud platforms and AI services, even a short outage has real consequences. We design our network with that in mind — multiple paths, failover options, proactive monitoring. Reliability isn’t a bonus feature. It’s the whole point.”
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Optimism About What’s Coming
For all the complexity of the technical landscape, Roberts came across as genuinely optimistic — not in a polished, corporate-speak kind of way, but in the way someone gets when they believe the work they’re doing actually matters.
“I think we’re at a really exciting point,” he said. “Fiber buildout is accelerating. Businesses are starting to understand that their internet connection is as strategic as any other infrastructure investment. And the tools available to us on the network side — the monitoring, the automation, the intelligence — are getting better fast.”
He’s particularly enthusiastic about what improved connectivity means for businesses outside of major metro areas. “There’s this assumption that great connectivity is just for big cities. We push back on that every day. A manufacturing company in a smaller market, a healthcare provider in a rural area, a logistics operation that’s not in a tech hub — they deserve the same quality of connection. And increasingly, they can have it.”
When asked what he’d tell a business owner who’s been putting off upgrading their internet infrastructure, Roberts didn’t hesitate. “I’d tell them the cost of waiting is higher than they think. Every month you’re on an inferior connection, you’re slowing down your team, limiting what your technology can do for you, and falling a little further behind competitors who made the move. Fiber is one of those investments where the ROI shows up fast and it keeps compounding. It’s not a hard case to make once people see it.”
It’s hard to argue with that kind of conviction — especially when the technology is clearly catching up to the promise.
