Cytranet’s CTO Doug Roberts has spent most of his career thinking about what happens between “click” and “it loaded.” Lately, he says, that gap is getting smaller—on purpose.
In an interview this week, Roberts described a year of steady, practical upgrades across Cytranet’s network and datacenter operations, driven by a simple reality: businesses are using more bandwidth than ever, and the reason isn’t just more video calls. It’s AI.
“People think AI is something that happens in the cloud and that’s the end of it,” Roberts said. “But the truth is it changes everything around it—how much data moves, how quickly it has to move, and how predictable the experience needs to be. And that’s the network’s job.”
Rather than chasing headlines about the biggest models or flashiest demos, Cytranet has been focused on the plumbing: fiber connectivity, scalable business internet, and the kind of uptime that matters when companies are moving core workloads off older on‑prem infrastructure.
### Fiber that behaves like a utility
Roberts said one of the most newsworthy shifts he’s seeing is that fiber connectivity is no longer considered a “nice to have” for mid-sized companies. It’s increasingly treated like electricity: assumed, essential, and expected to be stable.
“A few years ago, a lot of organizations were asking, ‘Can we get fiber?’” he said. “Now it’s, ‘What happens when it’s down, and how fast can you fail over?’ The conversation moved from access to resilience.”
That focus has pushed Cytranet to keep tightening the parts customers don’t always see: redundancy planning, diverse routing, and performance monitoring that can spot trouble before it becomes an outage.
Roberts is careful not to oversell the idea that any network is immune to disruption. Construction accidents happen. Weather happens. Equipment fails.
“The difference is whether a single incident becomes a customer-impacting event,” he said. “If a backhoe hits a line, do you have a second path? Do you have the ability to reroute cleanly? And do you know it worked before you need it?”
### Broadband expectations are rising—so are workloads
While fiber headlines often focus on speed, Roberts emphasized consistency.
“Speed tests are useful, but businesses live in the real world,” he said. “It’s jitter, latency, packet loss—those are the things that make an application feel ‘broken’ even when the bandwidth number looks great.”
He pointed to modern collaboration tools, cloud ERPs, and security platforms as drivers of always-on connectivity demands. But he repeatedly came back to AI as the big multiplier.
“AI isn’t just one application,” he said. “It becomes a layer in other applications. A CRM adds AI. A support platform adds AI. A monitoring tool adds AI. Suddenly, you’re not just moving files—you’re moving context, logs, prompts, embeddings, all the supporting data.”
For some organizations, that means sending more data to cloud providers. For others, it means bringing compute closer—especially when data governance, latency, or costs push them away from moving everything off-site.
### Datacenters as a business strategy, not a backup plan
Roberts said Cytranet is seeing renewed interest in colocation and hybrid architectures that blend cloud services with private infrastructure in a datacenter.
“The pendulum is swinging a bit,” he said. “Not away from cloud, but toward intentional design. Companies are asking, ‘What belongs in cloud? What should stay private? What needs to be near our users or near our data sources?’”
One of the surprises, he added, is how many organizations are revisiting their assumptions about cost.
“A lot of people learned that cloud is incredibly powerful, but it’s not automatically cheaper—especially at scale and especially for steady workloads,” Roberts said. “When you combine that with AI and larger datasets, the economics change fast. Datacenters and colocation become part of a sensible plan again.”
He also noted that the conversation has matured around security. Instead of simply asking whether a vendor is “secure,” customers are more often asking about segmentation, monitoring, and recovery.
“It’s not just perimeter security,” he said. “It’s how you isolate systems, how you log, how you detect, how you recover. And connectivity plays into that. If your business internet is unstable, your security tools can’t see clearly.”
### Making business internet feel boring—in a good way
When asked what success looks like for a network operator, Roberts didn’t mention flashy milestones. He described something closer to invisibility.
“The best compliment is when customers don’t have to think about us,” he said. “They’re running payroll, taking orders, supporting customers, training an AI model—whatever it is—and the connection is just there. It’s stable. It’s fast. It’s predictable.”
That “boring” reliability, he argued, is becoming more valuable as businesses depend on real-time systems. The shift to cloud-based phone systems, remote work, and security stacks delivered as services means there’s less tolerance for connectivity hiccups.
“If your internet drops for a few minutes, it’s not just email,” he said. “It’s phones, authentication, point-of-sale, monitoring—everything piles on. And in many organizations, that becomes an immediate revenue event.”
### AI changes the edge
One of the more forward-looking parts of the conversation was Roberts’ view of where AI workloads will live.
“We’re going to see more distributed compute,” he said. “Not everything will happen in a handful of giant clouds. Some inference will happen closer to where data is created—factories, offices, healthcare settings, retail.”
That trend, he said, makes fiber connectivity and low-latency business internet even more critical. If AI is helping make decisions in real time, the network becomes part of the application.
“You can’t separate them,” Roberts said. “If a system needs an answer in 50 milliseconds, the network path matters. Where the datacenter is located matters. The number of hops matters. And the ability to route around problems matters.”
### What he wants business leaders to ask
Roberts offered a small piece of advice for executives and IT teams evaluating connectivity and infrastructure: ask questions that reveal the operating reality, not the marketing promise.
“Ask about redundancy,” he said. “Ask where your traffic goes. Ask what the failover looks like, how it’s tested, and what kind of visibility you’ll have. And ask how support works at 2 a.m. when something breaks.”
It’s the sort of answer you’d expect from a CTO, but it also reflects the broader moment. As AI expands what businesses can do, it’s also raising the baseline for what they need. Faster links, steadier performance, and more deliberate infrastructure choices are becoming the difference between “we tried it” and “we can run it.”
For Roberts, that’s the quiet news: the network isn’t a background utility anymore. It’s a competitive advantage.
“Connectivity used to be an IT concern,” he said. “Now it’s a business outcome. And the companies that treat it that way are the ones that will move fastest.”
