Cytranet’s Doug Roberts on the Next Phase of Business Connectivity: More Fiber, Smarter Networks, and AI-Ready Infrastructure
In a year when “AI readiness” is suddenly part of everyday business vocabulary, the less flashy foundation underneath it all—reliable connectivity—has started getting the attention it deserves. Cytranet, a business internet provider focused on fiber-based connectivity and enterprise networking, says it’s seeing a noticeable shift in what companies are asking for: not just faster speeds, but more resilient design, clearer performance guarantees, and connectivity built for data-heavy workflows.
Doug Roberts, Cytranet’s Chief Technology Officer, describes the moment as a practical wake-up call.
“Businesses used to talk about bandwidth like it was a nice-to-have,” Roberts said. “Now it’s tied directly to uptime, customer experience, security posture, and whether you can actually use the tools you’re paying for—especially AI services and cloud platforms. People are moving from ‘How fast is it?’ to ‘How dependable is it, and can it scale without surprises?’”
That shift, he argues, is one of the most newsworthy changes in the broadband and business internet space right now: demand is consolidating around reliability and architectural discipline, not just speed tests.
From “best effort” to engineered outcomes
Roberts says many organizations are learning—sometimes the hard way—that a single fast connection isn’t the same as an engineered network.
“Speed is easy to market. Consistency is harder,” he said. “Engineered outcomes come from the details: path diversity, how you handle congestion, how you monitor performance end-to-end, and how quickly you can remediate when something breaks.”
He points to fiber connectivity as a baseline that more companies now view as non-negotiable, particularly those with multiple locations and cloud-first operations.
“Fiber gives you a more stable physical medium, and it’s easier to build symmetrical services on top of it,” he said. “That matters when you’ve got constant upstream traffic—video meetings, backups, cloud synchronization, sending data to analytics platforms. The upstream side is where a lot of businesses feel pain first.”
AI workloads are changing what “good internet” means
One of the clearest accelerants, Roberts says, is the rapid adoption of AI tools. Even companies that aren’t building their own models are sending more data to cloud platforms and expecting immediate results.
“AI is pushing traffic patterns in new directions,” he said. “It’s not just people browsing websites. It’s API calls, dataset transfers, real-time analysis, and a lot of machine-to-machine chatter. The internet connection becomes part of the user experience in a very direct way.”
He adds that the network requirements often show up as latency sensitivity and jitter tolerance rather than raw megabits.
“If your staff is using AI-assisted tools in the middle of workflows—support, design, development—you notice delays fast,” Roberts said. “A connection that looks fine on paper can still feel ‘slow’ if it’s inconsistent.”
The edge of the network is getting more strategic
Roberts also sees a broader rethinking of where compute should live. As companies use more cloud services, they’re also trying to minimize avoidable distance between users, applications, and data.
“There’s a lot more interest in proximity—where your workloads run relative to where your people and customers are,” he said. “That’s why you see renewed focus on datacenters, on regional connectivity, and on building efficient routes between locations.”
But he cautions that “datacenter strategy” isn’t only for large enterprises.
“Even a mid-sized organization can benefit from thinking like an enterprise,” Roberts said. “Do you have a primary and secondary path? Are you relying on one carrier? Do you have a real failover plan? Those questions used to feel like overkill. Now they’re mainstream.”
A more mature conversation about redundancy
During the interview, Roberts returned repeatedly to redundancy—not as a buzzword, but as a practical design goal.
“The best time to plan for an outage is before you have one,” he said. “We’re seeing more customers ask for diverse routes, dual connections, or multi-site architectures. They want to understand what happens when a fiber cut occurs, or when a core provider has an issue.”
He framed it as a sign of maturity in the market.
“For a long time, redundancy sounded expensive,” Roberts said. “Now people compare it to the cost of downtime: lost sales, missed deadlines, reputational damage, and the operational chaos of a day without connectivity.”
How Cytranet approaches monitoring and accountability
If customers are demanding more consistent performance, providers have to prove it. Roberts says network observability—monitoring, alerting, and diagnosing issues quickly—has become as important as installing new fiber.
“You can’t improve what you can’t see,” he said. “We invest in visibility across the network so we can detect abnormalities early and fix them faster. Customers don’t just want reassurance; they want accountability.”
Roberts said Cytranet increasingly works with customers on understanding their applications and traffic patterns, not just delivering a circuit.
“Two companies can buy the same bandwidth and have totally different experiences,” he said. “It depends on how their network is configured, what they run in the cloud, how they secure their traffic, and how their internal Wi‑Fi and switching is set up. The provider’s job is to help make the whole system work, not just hand off a connection.”
What businesses should ask before buying connectivity
As business internet options multiply—fiber, fixed wireless, hybrid setups—Roberts encourages buyers to get specific in their questions.
“Ask about route diversity. Ask how support works after hours. Ask what your SLA actually covers,” he said. “And ask how performance is measured. Is it just best effort, or is it designed with real metrics and remediation processes?”
He also recommends treating internet upgrades as part of broader operational planning.
“Connectivity isn’t a line item you revisit every five years anymore,” Roberts said. “It’s now an enabling layer for security, cloud adoption, remote work, and AI. If you’re planning growth, you should plan the network at the same time.”
An optimistic outlook grounded in infrastructure
Despite the challenges—construction timelines, supply chain realities, rising expectations—Roberts sounded optimistic about where the market is headed.
“What’s encouraging is that the conversation is getting more practical,” he said. “Businesses aren’t just chasing the biggest number. They’re building for resilience. And when you build the right foundation—fiber connectivity, smart routing, strong monitoring—you’re not just faster. You’re ready for whatever the next wave is.”
In an era where digital tools promise transformation, Cytranet’s message—delivered through its CTO—lands as a reminder that progress still depends on the basics: a dependable network, engineered thoughtfully, with enough headroom for what’s coming next.
