Cytranet’s Doug Roberts on Why Fiber Is the Foundation of Everything Coming Next
There’s a quiet confidence in the way Doug Roberts talks about the internet. Not the kind that comes from hype or buzzwords, but the kind that comes from having spent years in the trenches of network infrastructure, watching the industry evolve in real time. As CTO of Cytranet, Roberts has a front-row seat to one of the most consequential shifts in business technology in decades — and he’s not shy about what he thinks it means.
We sat down with Roberts to talk fiber, AI, and what businesses should actually be thinking about when it comes to their connectivity.
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**The conversation around broadband has changed a lot in the last few years. What are you seeing on the ground?**
“It’s a completely different conversation than it was even three years ago. Businesses used to think about internet connectivity as a utility — something you just had, like electricity. You plug it in, it works, you don’t think about it. What we’re seeing now is that mindset shifting in a real way. Companies are starting to understand that the quality of their connectivity directly affects their ability to compete. It’s not background infrastructure anymore. It’s a strategic asset.”
Roberts points to the rise of cloud-based operations, remote and hybrid workforces, and increasingly, AI-driven tools as the forces pushing businesses to take a harder look at what their networks can actually handle.
“When you’ve got teams running video calls, pulling data from cloud platforms, and now layering on AI applications that are doing real-time processing and moving large datasets — the tolerance for a slow or unreliable connection basically drops to zero. We’re hearing from businesses that were perfectly fine on their old connections two years ago, and now they’re hitting walls they didn’t expect.”
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**Fiber keeps coming up as the answer to a lot of these problems. Is it really that different?**
“Night and day. I know that sounds like a sales pitch, but it’s genuinely just physics. Fiber doesn’t degrade over distance the way copper does. You get symmetrical speeds — meaning your upload is just as fast as your download — which matters enormously for businesses that are pushing data up to the cloud, not just pulling it down. And the reliability is in a different category entirely.”
He pauses for a moment, then adds: “One of the things I always tell people is that latency is the silent killer of productivity. You can have a connection that looks fast on paper, but if the latency is inconsistent, everything feels sluggish. Video calls drop. Applications time out. People just assume their computer is slow. Fiber solves that problem at the root.”
Cytranet has been expanding its fiber footprint aggressively, and Roberts says the demand is coming from all directions — small businesses, mid-sized companies, and larger enterprises that are rethinking their wide-area network strategies entirely.
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**Let’s talk about AI for a minute. How does connectivity tie into what businesses are trying to do with AI right now?**
“This is what I find most exciting about where we are right now. AI is not a software problem — it’s an infrastructure problem. People think about AI as something that lives in an app, but the reality is that AI workloads are incredibly data-hungry. Whether you’re talking about a business running inference on customer data, using AI for operations, or connecting to large language models through APIs, all of that is generating network traffic that didn’t exist before.”
Roberts leans forward slightly. “And it’s not just the volume of data — it’s the sensitivity to latency. If you’re running an AI application that’s supposed to give you real-time insights or automate a customer-facing process, a lagging network connection breaks the whole experience. The AI can be brilliant, but if the pipe feeding it is unreliable, none of that intelligence gets delivered on time.”
He sees fiber connectivity as the foundational layer that makes AI adoption actually work in practice, not just in theory.
“We’re at this interesting inflection point where a lot of businesses are investing in AI tools and then discovering their network wasn’t built for what those tools actually need. That’s a gap we’re helping close.”
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**What about data centers? There’s been a lot of news about massive investments in data center capacity. How does that affect what Cytranet does?**
“The data center boom is real, and it’s directly connected to everything we’ve been talking about. As more compute moves into the cloud and as AI infrastructure scales up, the demand for high-capacity, low-latency connections between businesses and data centers goes through the roof. You can’t have a world-class data center ecosystem without world-class connectivity feeding it.”
Roberts explains that Cytranet’s network is designed with data center interconnection in mind — making sure that businesses can reach the compute and storage resources they depend on without bottlenecks getting in the way.
“We think about our role as being the bridge between where businesses are and where their data lives. That bridge needs to be fast, it needs to be redundant, and it needs to be built for where things are going — not just where they are today.”
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**What’s your advice for a business owner or IT leader who’s trying to figure out if their connectivity is actually ready for the next few years?**
“Honestly? Start by asking what your business looked like two years ago versus today, and then think about where it’s going to be two years from now. If you’ve added cloud applications, if you’ve got people working remotely, if you’re starting to experiment with AI tools — your network needs have probably already outpaced what you originally set up. Most people don’t realize that until something breaks.”
He also pushes back on the idea that better connectivity is a luxury reserved for large enterprises.
“This is something I feel strongly about. Small and mid-sized businesses are often the ones who need reliable, high-performance connectivity the most, because they don’t have the IT resources to troubleshoot problems constantly. They need it to just work. And fiber gives them that. It levels the playing field in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
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Roberts wraps up the conversation with something that sticks: “We’re in a moment where the decisions businesses make about their infrastructure today are going to determine how competitive they can be for the next decade. Connectivity isn’t the whole story, but it’s the foundation everything else is built on. Get the foundation right, and everything else gets a lot easier.”
It’s the kind of straightforward, no-nonsense perspective you’d expect from someone who’s spent a career making complex networks actually work — and it’s hard to argue with the logic.
