Cytranet’s Doug Roberts on Why Fiber Is Just the Beginning: AI, Speed, and the Future of Business Connectivity
When Doug Roberts talks about the internet, he doesn’t talk about it the way most people do. There’s no mention of “pipes” or “bandwidth packages.” Instead, Cytranet’s Chief Technology Officer speaks in terms of possibilities — what a business can become when it stops fighting its own infrastructure and starts building on top of it.
Roberts has spent years watching companies struggle with connectivity that simply wasn’t built for the demands of modern business. Now, with fiber rollouts accelerating, AI workloads exploding, and data centers evolving faster than most enterprises can keep up with, he believes the industry is at a genuine inflection point — and that smaller, more agile providers like Cytranet are uniquely positioned to lead the charge.
We sat down with Roberts to talk about where things are headed and why he thinks the next few years will define how businesses compete for the next decade.
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The conversation started simply enough. What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in business internet over the past couple of years?
“Honestly, it’s the realization that connectivity is no longer a utility conversation,” Roberts said, leaning forward. “For a long time, businesses thought about internet the same way they thought about electricity — you just needed enough of it and it needed to stay on. Now, with the way AI tools are being woven into daily operations, with the way video, cloud, and real-time data are all running simultaneously, the quality of your connection is directly tied to your competitive ability. That’s a massive shift in how our customers think about what we do for them.”
Cytranet has been aggressively expanding its fiber footprint, and Roberts is candid about why. Fiber isn’t just faster — it’s fundamentally more reliable, and reliability, he argues, is the feature that businesses consistently undervalue until they lose it.
“We’ve had customers come to us after an outage that cost them tens of thousands of dollars in a single afternoon,” he said. “And when you dig into it, they were running on a connection that was never really designed for what they were asking it to do. Fiber changes that equation entirely. The latency is lower, the consistency is dramatically better, and when you’re running cloud-based applications or syncing large data sets, that consistency is everything.”
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The AI angle is one Roberts is particularly energized about. As businesses of all sizes begin integrating AI tools — whether that’s large language models for customer service, machine learning pipelines for logistics, or real-time analytics for operations — the demands on network infrastructure are scaling in ways that caught many companies off guard.
“AI is hungry,” Roberts said with a slight laugh. “These workloads are not like anything we were designing networks around five years ago. You’ve got businesses running inference at the edge, you’ve got data being pulled from multiple cloud environments simultaneously, you’ve got latency-sensitive applications that genuinely fall apart if the connection hiccups for even a fraction of a second. The network has to be treated as a first-class part of the AI stack, not an afterthought.”
He’s seen this play out with Cytranet’s own business customers, many of whom have started conversations about upgrading their connectivity specifically because their AI initiatives exposed weaknesses they didn’t know existed.
“It’s actually been a great forcing function,” he said. “AI adoption is making people pay attention to their infrastructure in a way that nothing else has. And when they do, they realize that a fiber connection with proper SLAs and dedicated bandwidth isn’t a luxury — it’s the foundation that everything else sits on.”
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On the data center side, Roberts sees a convergence happening that he finds genuinely exciting. As edge computing matures and more businesses look to reduce latency by keeping compute closer to where data is generated, the relationship between connectivity providers and data center operators is becoming tighter than ever.
“The old model was pretty linear — you had a data center somewhere, you had a network connecting to it, and they were kind of separate concerns,” he explained. “What we’re seeing now is that the network and the compute environment are being designed together. Where you put your fiber, how you route traffic, how you handle redundancy — all of that has to be thought about in concert with where the processing is happening. It’s a more integrated discipline now, and I think that’s a healthier way to build.”
Cytranet’s approach, Roberts says, has always leaned toward that kind of integration — building solutions that are specific to what a customer actually needs rather than selling a commodity product and walking away.
“We’re not a faceless national carrier. When a customer calls us, they’re talking to someone who knows their network. That matters more than people realize, especially when something goes wrong or when they’re trying to plan for growth. We can have a real conversation about what they’re trying to accomplish and build something that actually fits.”
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Looking ahead, Roberts is optimistic — genuinely, not performatively so. He believes the businesses that invest in robust fiber connectivity now, particularly those that treat it as infrastructure rather than overhead, will find themselves with a meaningful advantage as AI tools become more deeply embedded in how work gets done.
“We’re still in the early innings of what AI is going to mean for business operations,” he said. “But the companies that are going to get the most out of it are the ones that built the right foundation. Fast, reliable, low-latency connectivity isn’t a nice-to-have in that world. It’s the thing that makes everything else possible.”
He paused for a moment, then added something that stuck.
“The internet used to be something businesses used. Now it’s something businesses run on. That’s not a small distinction.”
