Cytranet’s Doug Roberts on the Quiet Upgrades Powering a Noisy AI Moment
In the public imagination, the AI boom is all chatbots and jaw-dropping demos. In the real world, it’s rack space, fiber routes, latency budgets, and the kind of incremental network upgrades most people never see—until something breaks.
Doug Roberts, CTO of Cytranet, has spent the last year thinking about that unglamorous side of the story: how businesses, carriers, and datacenters can keep up as AI workloads and cloud-hungry applications push networks harder than ever. In a conversation about what’s changing—and what’s surprisingly consistent—Roberts framed Cytranet’s current focus as a “back-to-basics” push that’s anything but old-fashioned.
“AI is raising everyone’s expectations,” Roberts said. “Not just for compute, but for connectivity. If you’re moving data between offices, cloud regions, and datacenters, you can’t treat your network like an afterthought anymore.”
### Fiber is back in the spotlight—because the bottleneck moved
A few years ago, “fast internet” mostly meant bigger download numbers for video calls and cloud apps. Roberts says the shift now is less about peak speed and more about consistency, symmetry, and predictability—especially for businesses connecting to multiple clouds or training and serving AI models.
“People used to ask, ‘Can you get me a gig?’” he said. “Now the question is, ‘Can you keep my latency stable? Can you give me clean paths to the places where my data lives? And can you do it in a way that doesn’t fall apart during the busiest hours?’”
Roberts pointed to fiber connectivity as the most dependable foundation for those demands, particularly in business internet deployments where uptime expectations are stricter and the cost of downtime is immediate.
“Fiber is still the workhorse,” he said. “But the way customers use it is changing. More companies are splitting workloads across environments—some on-prem, some in cloud, some in colocation. That makes the network the glue.”
### Datacenters are evolving—and so are the connections into them
If AI has a physical address, it’s in datacenters. Roberts says one of the biggest changes he’s seeing is how connectivity planning has become a first-order concern for companies moving into colocation or expanding their footprint.
“Ten years ago, you could pick a facility and assume connectivity was just there,” he said. “Now businesses want options: diverse paths, multiple carriers, and a clear understanding of how traffic gets from their users to their compute.”
He described a growing awareness of route diversity—ensuring that a single construction mishap or fiber cut doesn’t take out primary and backup circuits at once.
“A lot of redundancy plans fail because they’re redundant on paper, not in the ground,” Roberts said. “It’s not enough to have two circuits. You have to know where they run.”
### The new broadband conversation: from “best effort” to “business grade”
Roberts doesn’t dismiss broadband; he sees it as an important ingredient in modern network design. But he draws a line between what broadband is great for and what mission-critical operations require.
“Broadband can be an excellent secondary connection, and for some small sites it’s a practical primary,” he said. “But as soon as you attach revenue to that connection—point-of-sale, support centers, always-on SaaS—customers start asking for stronger guarantees.”
That’s where he sees businesses making more nuanced choices: pairing business fiber with a diverse backup, building SD-WAN policies that prioritize critical traffic, and designing around real-world reliability instead of advertised speed tiers.
“Uptime is a feature,” Roberts said. “And it’s one you only appreciate when you don’t have it.”
### AI is stressing networks in a different way than previous waves
Roberts described AI-driven traffic as both more intense and more bursty. It’s not just streaming a steady flow; it’s moving large datasets, syncing models, and pulling data from multiple sources at unpredictable intervals.
“Traditional enterprise traffic had patterns,” he said. “AI workloads can create sudden shifts. It might be a training job, a big data refresh, or a new application rollout. The network has to handle that without introducing jitter or congestion.”
He also noted that “AI at the edge” is becoming more than a buzzphrase. Even companies that aren’t building foundation models are adopting AI-enhanced tools that depend on reliable connections—voice analytics, fraud detection, real-time personalization.
“The appetite for near-real-time responses is growing,” Roberts said. “And latency isn’t just a gamer’s concern anymore. It’s a business KPI.”
### What businesses should ask for when evaluating internet and fiber
When asked what question he wishes every business would ask their provider, Roberts didn’t go straight to bandwidth.
“Ask about the path,” he said. “Where does your traffic go after it leaves the building? How many hops? Which peering points? What does failover look like in practice?”
He also emphasized clarity around service monitoring and response.
“Things will fail—cables get cut, equipment dies,” Roberts said. “The difference is how quickly it’s detected, how transparently it’s communicated, and how fast it’s restored.”
### A quiet kind of optimism
Despite the pressure AI and cloud growth put on infrastructure, Roberts sounded notably upbeat. Not because the work is easy, but because the industry is paying attention to fundamentals again.
“There’s a renewed respect for engineering,” he said. “You can’t ‘move fast and break things’ when the thing you’re breaking is someone’s ability to operate.”
He sees the current moment as a chance for companies to build networks that are not only faster, but more intentional—designed around real traffic patterns, real risks, and real business outcomes.
“Connectivity is becoming strategic,” Roberts said. “And that’s good news. When businesses treat the network as core infrastructure, everyone wins—customers, employees, partners, and the people trying to make AI useful in the first place.”
For most people, the story of better fiber routes and smarter redundancy won’t trend on social media. But if Roberts is right, those quiet upgrades are exactly what will keep the louder innovations running.
