SD-WAN

In 2024, the U.S. cable sector generated $568.7 billion in total economic output and supported 1.3 million jobs across the country. This footprint spans broadband networks, video programming, construction, manufacturing, and a broad vendor ecosystem. It underscores why cable remains a central pillar of Americaโ€™s connectivity and media economy even as consumption shifts to IP and streaming. Cable broadband providersโ€”led by Comcast, Charter Communications (Spectrum), Cox, Altice USA (Optimum), Mediacom, Cable One (Sparklight), and WOW!โ€”accounted for $366 billion in total economic impact and nearly 888,000 jobs.
Telefรณnica reports โ‚ฌ77 billion invested over ten years to expand sustainable, resilient connectivity, with SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure) as the strategic anchor. The operator now serves nearly 350 million accesses, has passed 81.4 million premises with FTTH, and runs one of the largest ultra-broadband footprints globally, second in scale only to China. Spain is Telefรณnicaโ€™s showcase for fiber-led modernization. Dense FTTH has enabled a managed copper switch-off, which simplifies operations, cuts energy use, and improves service quality. The operator targets net zero by 2040 – ten years ahead of many international timelinesโ€”and reports a 52% reduction in CO2 emissions across the value chain from 2015 to 2024.
African AI Compute Is Moving Local. Telecom operators and digital infrastructure players are racing to stand up AI-grade capacity on the continent as demand, latency, and data-sovereignty pressures converge. MTN Group is negotiating with US and European partners to co-invest in AI-ready facilities and offer capacity to enterprises across multiple African markets. Cassava Technologies is accelerating its sovereign cloud strategy with five AI-focused facilities slated across key African markets in the next 12 months. Earlier this year, Cassava partnered with Nvidia to launch an AI data centre in South Africa powered by the chipmakerโ€™s GPUs, establishing a reference for accelerated infrastructure on the continent.
Ericsson is embedding an agentic AI framework into its NetCloud platform to accelerate self-healing, intent-driven operations across private 5G, Wireless WAN, and SASE. Ericsson is evolving its AI assistant, ANA, from a prompt-based helper into a multi-agent system that can interpret high-level intents, plan workflows, and coordinate specialized agents to act across the enterprise networking stack. Ericssonโ€™s rollout will be staged. A troubleshooting orchestrator is planned for Q4 2025 to handle high-frequency pain points such as offline devices and degraded radio conditions, with a projected reduction in downtime and support cases by more than 20 percent.
DE-CIX India has become the first internet exchange in India to integrate Starlinkโ€™s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, marking a strategic advance in non-terrestrial network (NTN) capabilities. With 25โ€“220 Mbps throughput and low latency, Starlink’s interconnection via DE-CIX enables local breakout, cloud on-ramps, and SD-WAN optimization across hard-to-reach regions. As regulatory approvals move toward completion, satellite connectivity shifts from pilot to production-ready, opening new paths for mobile backhaul, enterprise WANs, and e-governance.
Low Earth orbit broadband is bifurcating into Western- and China-led ecosystems, with strategic consequences for telecom and cloud connectivity worldwide. Starlink’s scale in the West is meeting a fast-maturing Chinese counterweight centered on state-backed constellations and a growing commercial space sector. The result is a split that will influence landing rights, equipment supply, data sovereignty, and service availability across regions. Three forces are converging: mass-production launch capability, maturing inter-satellite optical links, and rising demand for resilient, low-latency backhaul. Governments are also reclassifying satellite broadband as critical infrastructure, accelerating public funding and procurement pipelines. Demonstrated high-rate laser crosslinks indicate a credible trajectory toward in-space backbones that rival Western systems.
Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS 12.1 Orion steps into this gap with a quantum-ready roadmap, a unified multicloud security fabric, expanded AI-driven protections and a new generation of next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) designed for data centers, branches and industrial edge. The release also pushes management into a single operational plane via Strata Cloud Manager, targeting lower operating cost and faster incident response. PAN-OS 12.1 automatically discovers workloads, applications, AI assets and data flows across public cloud and hybrid environments to eliminate blind spots. It continuously assesses posture, flags misconfigurations and exposures in real time and deploys protections in one click across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Even the most polished network plans can collapse during deployment due to a hidden gap between design and reality. Traditional planning tools operate in silos and rely on outdated assumptionsโ€”like accurate GIS data or up-to-date inventory. In todayโ€™s multi-layered networks, thatโ€™s no longer enough. This article explores why static planning falls short, how real-time inventory like VC4โ€™s Service2Create bridges the gap, and what operators need to ensure their rollouts succeed the first time.
AI promises major gains for telecom operators, but most initiatives stall due to outdated, fragmented inventory systems. Discover why unified, service-aware inventory is the missing link for successful AI in telecomโ€”and how operators can build a smarter, impact-ready foundation for automation with VC4’s Service2Create (S2C) platform.

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