The Five Nine

Is it possible to get fiber-like speeds without all the digging? This week, The Five Nine looks at wireless optical technology, using Google spinout Taara as a case study.

Taara CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy explains what it means to “solve for the monkey,” why wireless optical tech could make all the difference for data centers, and where the technology could go next. Hint: it involves robots.

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Fierce Network’s Diana Goovaerts explores how AI could reshape the telecom customer experience — moving operators beyond speed, coverage and reactive support toward more proactive, personalized and trusted service.

The Five Nine features interviews with MCE Systems’ Alan Minney and First Orion’s Josh Whitehurst on where AI may show up first for telecom providers, from outage notifications and device health to customer care, fraud prevention, trusted calling and smarter use of customer data.

The big question: Will telecom’s AI race be won by the operator with the flashiest chatbot — or the one that can quietly reduce friction before customers ever need to call?

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AI is moving fast in telecom — but turning demos into real network operations is another story.

In this episode of The Five Nine, AT&T’s Mark Austin and GSMA’s Louis Powell break down what it takes to build AI that actually understands telecom networks, from domain-specific models and agentic systems to guardrails, model routing, token economics and the hard reality of running AI at production scale.

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This week, we dig into why the AI infrastructure conversation is shifting from compute scarcity to the memory wall. As large language models get bigger and enterprises move from training to high-volume inference, memory, storage, networking and GPU utilization are becoming critical to AI performance and economics.

Featuring insights from Jason Hardy of NVIDIA and Val Bercovici of WEKA, this episode breaks down why inference workloads are fundamentally different from training, how agentic AI increases pressure on memory systems, and why idle GPUs can turn into a costly problem for enterprises building AI factories.

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Is your enterprise network truly ready for AI — or are GPUs getting all the attention? In this episode we break down why AI readiness depends on more than compute power, and why networking, private connectivity, latency, security, automation and network as a service are becoming critical to enterprise AI success.

Guests Brandon Ross of DE-CIX and Bill Long of Zayo explain how agentic AI, real-time inference, AI-powered customer care, analytics and large-scale data movement are changing what enterprises need from their networks. 

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In this episode of The Five Nine, host Diana Goovaerts explores what the future of the radio access network could look like as 5G matures, 6G takes shape and AI pushes telecom toward a new era of software-driven networks.

With insight from Ericsson North Americas CTO Joe Constantine, Mobile Experts founder and president Joe Madden and Samsung Electronics America’s Shamik Shah, this episode breaks down what AI-RAN really means, whether GPUs are actually needed in the mobile network, how 6G could become more of a software upgrade than a hardware refresh, and why Open RAN may be moving from industry hype to operational plumbing.

The conversation also tackles one of telecom’s biggest business questions: Can they escape the dumb pipe trap?

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AI is fueling a new fiber supercycle. See how data centers, broadband expansion, copper retirement and edge infrastructure are reshaping fiber demand and telecom investment through 2035.

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What does “sustainable” even mean when AI demand – and data center projects – are accelerating? In this episode, we unpack what sustainability means in the AI era, where power and water factor in and how data center sustainability is increasingly about more than just how electricity is being generated.

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Software is what makes a modern data center tick. But sorting through what goes where in terms of IT, OT and beyond can be tricky. We untangle this complex web and shine on spotlight on how AI is driving change in the systems that keep compute running smoothly. #AI #software #datacenters 

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When people picture a data center, they tend to picture compute servers, GPUs, watts and raw horsepower. But there is another side of the equation that decides whether that expensive compute power actually does anything useful: Storage. In this episode,  we'll tackle what storage is, what decisions make the biggest impact, key challenges and how to handle the current storage shortage. #AI #datacenters #storage #VASTData #HitachiVantara #EverPure

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