Jensen Huang’s Resignation as CEO Creates Uncertainty for Nvidia and Opportunities for Competing AI Chip Suppliers
Introduction:
Jensen Huang’s abrupt resignation as Nvidia’s President and CEO on November 12, 2026, creates uncertainty for the world’s leading AI semiconductor company and potentially far-reaching consequences for the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and spent 33 years transforming it from a graphics processor supplier into the dominant provider of accelerated computing platforms powering today’s AI infrastructure buildout.
Huang was much more than Nvidia’s CEO. He was the AI industry’s chief cheerleader, dealmaker and ecosystem architect. Through his technological vision, industry relationships, investments and strategic partnerships, he helped establish Nvidia at the center of an extensive network of AI developers, cloud service providers, semiconductor companies and data center operators.
“My management style is what made it possible for the company to grow,” Huang told Bloomberg News’ Emily Chang in a recent interview. “I wanted an organization that was able to adapt to change, both in inventing change for itself and the rest of the industry, as well as reacting to change that’s coming toward us.”
Nvidia’s board appointed longtime CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO while beginning a search for a permanent successor. Although the company says its operations, customer commitments and product roadmap will continue without interruption, the sudden departure of the executive who personally drove much of its strategy raises questions about leadership continuity, customer confidence and the future direction of its AI ecosystem.
Huang’s exit could reverberate across the global tech sector, well past Nvidia’s position as the primary silicon supplier for the AI era. As an active strategic dealmaker, Huang has leveraged the company’s resources to strengthen critical supply chain bottlenecks and back next-generation AI startups. Furthermore, he remains one of the sector’s most visible evangelists, championing accelerated computing and enterprise AI adoption while countering alarmist views on existential safety risks. The most important potential consequence is competitive: uncertainty surrounding Nvidia could encourage customers to accelerate diversification of their AI accelerator suppliers, creating opportunities for AMD, Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Broadcom, Cerebras and Huawei’s Ascend AI processors in China.
Nvidia’s Leadership and Ecosystem Advantage:
Nvidia’s competitive position is based on considerably more than the performance of its GPUs. The company has developed an integrated computing platform combining:
- GPU accelerators: High-performance processors designed for parallel computing workloads, including AI model training and inference.
- NVLink and NVSwitch: High-bandwidth interconnect technologies that allow multiple GPUs to operate as tightly coupled computing systems.
- InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet: Networking platforms connecting large numbers of GPUs across AI data centers via the company’s acquisition of Mellanox (announced March 11, 2019; completed on April 27, 2020).
- CUDA software ecosystem: A programming platform, libraries and development tools that support a large community of AI developers and applications.
- Complete AI computing systems: Integrated combinations of GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage and software designed for large-scale AI infrastructure.
This combination of hardware, networking and software has created substantial customer dependence on Nvidia’s technology. Replacing Nvidia GPUs is not simply a matter of purchasing competing accelerator chips. Customers must also consider software compatibility, application optimization, networking architecture, performance, power consumption and the cost of migrating existing workloads.
Huang was instrumental in building this integrated ecosystem and cultivating the relationships that helped make Nvidia the preferred AI computing platform for many of the industry’s largest customers. His departure raises critical questions about whether the AI industry will continue its unprecedented circular financing deals.
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Will Nvidia’s Circular AI Financing Continue Without Jensen Huang?
The diagram above shows how Nvidia sits at the center of a complex web of circular investments, hardware purchases and services relationships. Broadcom is another important participant, but the central question is whether Nvidia’s financing strategy will retain its momentum without Huang, who personally championed the initiative. Nvidia announced in August 2026 that it was partnering with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish financing platforms intended to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. Huang described the initiative as a way to turn AI computing infrastructure into an investable asset class. However, Bloomberg subsequently reported that the initiative had not produced financing deals after months of activity, with some customers and financial partners seeking stronger financial backing from Nvidia. The uncertainty surrounding Huang’s departure therefore raises questions about the initiative’s future.
Will Nvidia’s new leadership maintain Huang’s aggressive approach to financing the AI ecosystem, including investments and financial commitments that help stimulate demand for Nvidia’s own products? Or will the company become more conservative in allocating capital and assuming financial exposure?
The implications extend beyond Nvidia. As the Bloomberg graphic illustrates, AI infrastructure investment increasingly involves interconnected relationships among chip suppliers, cloud providers, AI developers and financial institutions. If Nvidia reduces or restructures its financial commitments, the consequences could affect AI infrastructure deployment, customer purchasing plans and competing semiconductor suppliers. Ultimately, the question is whether the AI industry’s closely interconnected investments and financing model can sustain its momentum without the executive who was its most prominent champion and dealmaker.
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Potential Opportunities for Competing AI Chip Suppliers and Platforms:
Jensen’s exit also raises the question if Nvidia can maintain the same pace of technological innovation, strategic deal making and ecosystem development under different leadership? A sudden leadership transition at a company as strategically important as Nvidia could prompt some customers to reassess their dependence on its products. Large cloud providers and AI developers have strong incentives to maintain alternative accelerator platforms, reduce supplier concentration and negotiate more favorable computing costs. Several AI chip competitors warrant particular attention.
1. AMD: Direct Competition in AI GPUs
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is Nvidia’s most direct competitor in the market for general-purpose AI GPU accelerators.
AMD’s Instinct accelerator family, supported by its ROCm software ecosystem, offers an alternative platform for AI training and inference. AMD has been working to improve accelerator performance, memory capacity, interconnect capabilities and software compatibility to compete more effectively with Nvidia.
The principal opportunity for AMD is to attract customers seeking a second source of AI accelerators or greater negotiating leverage in purchasing decisions.
However, AMD must demonstrate competitive performance, reliable software support and the ability to deliver complete systems at scale. Nvidia’s established CUDA ecosystem remains a significant competitive advantage.
2. Google: Tensor Processing Units
Google’s Tensor Processing Units are custom-designed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) developed to accelerate machine learning workloads.
Unlike general-purpose GPUs, TPUs are designed around Google’s particular AI computing requirements and software environment. They are deployed within Google Cloud and support Google’s own AI models and services, as well as external customers using its cloud infrastructure. Google’s TPU platform provides an alternative to Nvidia GPUs for selected workloads, particularly where customers can optimize their software and applications for Google’s architecture. Google could benefit if customers increasingly seek alternatives to Nvidia’s GPU platform, although its opportunity is primarily tied to its own cloud and AI ecosystem rather than unrestricted sales of standalone accelerators.
4. Broadcom: Custom AI Accelerators and Networking Silicon
Broadcom is arguably one of Nvidia’s most important competitors in the broader AI semiconductor market, although it competes differently from AMD.
Rather than selling general-purpose GPUs, Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI accelerators (ASICs) for hyperscale customers. Its XPU platform combines custom compute silicon, high-speed SerDes, advanced packaging, memory interfaces and networking technologies.
Broadcom’s partnerships with major AI infrastructure customers are particularly significant:
- Google: Broadcom has been a key technology partner in Google’s custom TPU development.
- Meta: Broadcom is collaborating on Meta’s MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator) custom AI silicon, including a multi-generation deployment roadmap.
- OpenAI: Broadcom and OpenAI announced a collaboration in June 2026 to develop custom AI accelerators optimized for large language model inference, with planned deployment at gigawatt scale.
Broadcom’s competitive significance extends beyond individual chips. Its Ethernet networking and connectivity technologies also support the construction of large-scale AI computing clusters.
As hyperscalers increasingly develop their own AI accelerators to reduce dependence on Nvidia GPUs, Broadcom is positioned to benefit from the shift toward custom silicon.
5. Cerebras Systems: Wafer-Scale AI Computing
Cerebras Systems takes a substantially different architectural approach to AI acceleration.
Its Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) integrates an exceptionally large number of processing cores, memory and interconnects onto a single silicon wafer. This architecture is designed to reduce communication bottlenecks associated with distributing AI workloads across large numbers of conventional processors.
Cerebras offers integrated AI computing systems rather than simply selling accelerator cards. Its technology targets large-scale AI model training and inference, with particular emphasis on high-throughput, low-latency inference.
Cerebras has attracted significant attention through commercial relationships with major AI developers, including OpenAI.
Although Cerebras does not yet have Nvidia’s breadth of software ecosystem, installed base or general-purpose GPU market presence, its wafer-scale architecture represents a credible alternative for selected AI workloads.
Its potential competitive advantage is architectural differentiation rather than direct replication of Nvidia’s GPU platform.
6. Intel: Gaudi AI Accelerators and Data Center Computing
Intel is another potential competitor, although its position in AI accelerators is less established than AMD’s or Broadcom’s.
Intel’s Gaudi 3 accelerator was designed for generative AI training and inference, featuring high-bandwidth memory and integrated networking capabilities. Intel has promoted Gaudi as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs, emphasizing performance, power efficiency and total cost of ownership.
Intel also brings an extensive data center processor business and established relationships with enterprise customers and server manufacturers.
However, Intel has faced challenges establishing Gaudi as a widely adopted alternative to Nvidia’s dominant GPU platform. Its ability to compete will depend on future accelerator products, software development, customer adoption and execution of its AI semiconductor roadmap.
Intel should therefore be considered a potential challenger rather than an established competitor on the same footing as AMD or Broadcom.
7. Huawei: China’s Domestic AI Accelerator Alternative
Huawei’s Ascend AI processor family is an important alternative for Chinese AI developers and data center operators. U.S. export restrictions have already encouraged China’s domestic semiconductor industry to develop alternatives to advanced Nvidia accelerators. Huawei is positioned to benefit from this trend through its Ascend processors, computing systems and associated software ecosystem.
Huang’s departure could add another element of uncertainty to Nvidia’s long-term position in China. However, Huawei’s opportunity is driven primarily by China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency objectives, domestic procurement policies and U.S. export controls—not simply Nvidia’s leadership transition. Huawei must still address performance, manufacturing capacity, software compatibility and the ability to support large-scale AI deployments.
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In addition to the above AI chip suppliers, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta hyperscalers are developing their own custom AI accelerators, while Marvell is an important custom-silicon and connectivity supplier.
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Major AI chip companies and competitive market positioning:
The following table distinguishes companies selling merchant AI accelerators from those developing custom silicon primarily for their own cloud or AI infrastructure.
| Company | AI chip / platform | Niche and technological strengths | Market presence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | Blackwell, Rubin GPUs; Grace CPUs | GPU acceleration, CUDA software, NVLink, InfiniBand, Spectrum-X Ethernet; integrated AI factories |
Dominant market leader
Broadest commercial AI accelerator ecosystem |
| AMD | Instinct MI350/MI400; ROCm | General-purpose AI GPUs, HBM, chiplet architecture, open software ecosystem |
Major challenger
Competing for hyperscaler, enterprise and HPC deployments |
| Broadcom | Custom XPUs, networking ASICs | Custom AI accelerators for hyperscalers; high-speed SerDes, Ethernet switching and connectivity |
Major competitor
Important supplier to hyperscalers developing custom AI silicon |
| TPU | Custom ASICs optimized for AI training and inference; tightly integrated with Google Cloud and AI software |
Major alternative
Significant internal deployment and external cloud availability |
|
| Huawei | Ascend processors; Atlas systems | AI accelerators, integrated computing systems and domestic Chinese semiconductor ecosystem |
Major China-market player
Important alternative amid U.S. export restrictions |
| Intel | Gaudi; Xeon | AI accelerators, CPUs, memory and data-center platforms |
Challenger
Established semiconductor presence, but limited AI accelerator traction relative to Nvidia |
| Cerebras Systems | Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) | Wafer-scale integration, massive on-chip parallelism, high-bandwidth memory and specialized AI inference systems |
Specialist competitor. Differentiated architecture for large AI workloads. Full-year 2026 core revenue outlook of $940 million to $960 million.
|
| Amazon | Trainium, Inferentia | Custom ASICs for AI training and inference; integration with AWS infrastructure |
Significant captive platform
Expanding AWS alternative to Nvidia |
| Microsoft | Maia | Custom AI accelerator architecture for Azure workloads |
Emerging platform
Strategic internal development and deployment |
| Meta | MTIA | Custom accelerators designed for Meta’s recommendation, ranking and generative AI workloads |
Emerging platform
Large internal deployment opportunity |
| Marvell | Custom AI ASICs, optical DSPs, interconnect silicon | Custom compute silicon, high-speed connectivity and optical networking for AI data centers |
Important infrastructure competitor
Benefits from hyperscaler custom silicon investment |
Sources: Frontier Tech Intelligence, ChatGPT
Editor’s Note: Not every company listed above is a direct merchant-chip competitor to Nvidia. Some are building captive platforms, while others supply the technology that enables those platforms.
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Will Nvidia Customers Diversify Their AI Accelerator Suppliers?
The key question is whether Nvidia’s leadership transition will materially change customer purchasing decisions. Nvidia’s board has expressed confidence in the company’s existing management team and technology roadmap. Colette Kress is an experienced executive who has served as CFO since 2013, and the company has emphasized continuity in its operations and customer commitments. Nevertheless, the loss of Huang’s leadership creates uncertainty that competitors could exploit.
AI infrastructure investments involve long planning cycles, substantial capital expenditures and commitments to particular hardware and software platforms. Customers making multibillion-dollar investments need confidence that their suppliers will maintain technological leadership, product availability, software support and long-term strategic relationships. Consequently, even if Nvidia’s engineering organization and product roadmap remain intact, some customers could accelerate qualification and deployment of competing accelerators.
This would not necessarily mean abandoning Nvidia. A more likely initial response would be supplier diversification, with AMD GPUs, Google TPUs and other specialized accelerators deployed alongside Nvidia systems where technically and economically appropriate. The transition toward multi-vendor AI computing could also increase interest in software portability, open programming frameworks and more interoperable data center architectures.
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Conclusions:
Jensen Huang’s resignation does not eliminate Nvidia’s substantial technological advantages, established customer relationships or extensive CUDA software ecosystem. The company retains a strong engineering organization, an experienced executive team and a broad portfolio of AI computing products.
However, Huang’s departure removes the individual who was arguably the most influential executive in the AI infrastructure industry. His combination of technological vision, dealmaking, industry relationships and strategic leadership was central to Nvidia’s rise and its position at the center of the global AI ecosystem. The immediate issue is whether Nvidia’s customers and strategic partners will maintain confidence in the company’s future direction. If uncertainty persists, competitors could benefit as hyperscalers, AI developers and enterprise customers seek greater supplier diversity.
AMD has the clearest opportunity to gain external GPU accelerator business, Google can expand its TPU-based AI computing services, and Huawei has an opportunity to strengthen its position in China’s domestic AI accelerator market.
The ultimate competitive test will not be whether Nvidia can continue selling GPUs without Jensen Huang. It will be whether the company can retain customer confidence, sustain its technology and software leadership, and preserve the strategic ecosystem that he spent 33 years building.
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Addendum: Two competing approaches to AI-RAN implementation:
1. Nvidia and Nokia: GPU-centric RAN
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Nvidia and Nokia are promoting GPUs as the computing engine for AI-RAN.
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Nokia is designing future RAN products around Nvidia GPUs, including execution of demanding Layer 1 (Physical layer) processing functions.
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The objective is to use accelerated computing for both conventional RAN processing and AI workloads, potentially improving spectral efficiency and enabling shared infrastructure.
- This represents a departure from Nokia’s previous reliance on Marvell custom silicon for Physical layer processing.
2. Ericsson: Custom ASICs and CPU-based vRAN
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Ericsson favors its own purpose-built ASICs for demanding Layer 1 RAN processing.
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Its separate virtual RAN strategy uses Intel x86 CPUs for most Layer 1 functions, with hardware acceleration for forward error correction (FEC).
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Ericsson is also exploring software portability to AMD and Arm-based CPU platforms.
- Ericsson argues that its custom silicon offers cost, performance and technological independence advantages over adopting Nvidia GPUs throughout the RAN.
Marvell deserves particular attention. It was Nokia’s custom silicon partner, and its technology remains relevant to existing Nokia RAN deployments. Even Nokia’s AI-RAN trials with Virgin Media O2 reportedly used Marvell Layer 1 silicon rather than Nvidia GPUs.
Attribution: ChatGPT was used extensively for research, technical analysis, and drafting, including an assessment of competing AI-RAN architectures, Nvidia’s GPU-centric approach with Nokia, and alternative custom-silicon and CPU-based RAN strategies pursued by Ericsson and its technology partners. The author reviewed, revised, and fact-checked all the material and is 100% responsible for its content.
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References:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-ceo-transition
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026000082/nvda-20261111.htm
https://www.reuters.com/business/view-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-steps-down-2026-11-12/
https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/mi350.html
https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/reference/gpu-arch/mi350.html
https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/intro-to-tpu
https://www.broadcom.com/products/ai
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/processors/ai-accelerators/gaudi.html
https://www.huawei.com/en/technology-insights/industry-insights/outlook/5g
Custom AI Silicon: OpenAI, Anthropic, Hyperscalers, Huawei and the Battle with Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom
Google’s TPU Business Outpaces Rivals as Hyperscalers Accelerate Custom AI Silicon Strategies
2026 OCP Summit: Full-Stack AI Networking Silicon from Nvidia/Cisco and Broadcom; Ethernet vs InfiniBand Interconnects
Huawei’s Ascend Silicon Roadmap Extends From AI Chips to Cluster-Scale Infrastructure
AI-RAN Push: NVIDIA, Nokia, and Operators Drive Towards Distributed Compute Platforms
Cisco’s Silicon One G300 as the dominant AI networking fabric, competing with Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 series
Critical Network Outages: Why Isn’t Redundancy Working? Part II.
Introduction:
Part 1. of this two part series examined the November 13th FAA telecommunications outage at length & briefly described the November 12th Microsoft global cloud disruption. Although the incidents involved different systems and have not been shown to share a common cause, both raise a fundamental engineering question:
Why did existing infrastructure and recovery arrangements fail to maintain essential services?
The answer may involve more than insufficient backup capacity. Network resilience depends on the independence of redundant facilities, the ability to detect and isolate failures, automatic restoration, and realistic testing under adverse conditions.
Redundancy Is Not the Same as Resilience:
A network can have multiple connections and still contain single points of failure. Two fiber routes may share a conduit, bridge crossing, central office or power source. Two data centers may depend on the same control plane, identity service, software release or configuration system. These are examples of common-mode failures: one event or underlying dependency disables resources that were assumed to be independent.
True route diversity requires physically separate paths, diverse points of presence and, where appropriate, different supporting infrastructure. Cloud resilience similarly requires more than distributing servers across locations. Critical dependencies and management systems must also be considered.
The key question is not how many redundant components an operator owns, but whether those components can continue providing service when the primary system or a shared dependency fails.
A Telecommunications Case Study – Comcast’s Santa Clara, CA Outage:
A July 2024 IEEE Techblog article documented a prolonged Comcast outage in Santa Clara, CA, associated with a physical fiber cut and reported vandalism. Service was unavailable for approximately 17 hours. That incident, which negatively impacted this author, raised a basic question: why wasn’t traffic rerouted automatically around the damaged fiber?
Telecommunications networks have several established protection and restoration approaches. These include 1+1 protection, 1 protection, self-healing rings and mesh-network restoration. Depending on network design, these mechanisms can switch traffic to an alternate path when a link or facility fails. However, protection mechanisms are effective only when alternate paths are genuinely diverse, sufficient capacity is available, and switching and restoration procedures work as intended. A physically diverse route that shares a vulnerable conduit or aggregation point may provide little real protection.
–>That Comcast outage illustrates why network operators should document not only their redundancy architecture but also the actual restoration performance experienced during outages.
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Image Generated by ChatGPT
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Resiliency Recommendation for Network Operators:
Telecommunications providers, cloud operators and organizations supporting critical infrastructure should address several priorities:
- Eliminate common-mode failures. Identify shared physical routes, power systems, facilities, software dependencies and control-plane components that could disable supposedly redundant resources.
- Provide independent alternate paths. Ensure that backup connectivity is physically and logically diverse, adequately provisioned and available during peak demand.
- Test automatic failover. Verify that traffic switches successfully under realistic fault conditions, including fiber cuts, equipment failures, power loss, configuration errors and loss of control-plane functions.
- Test recovery under load. A backup system that works in isolation may fail when it suddenly receives the traffic of an entire failed region. Capacity planning must account for this scenario.
- Improve fault isolation and graceful degradation. A localized failure should not cascade across unrelated services. Architectures should limit failure domains and preserve essential functions when full service cannot be maintained.
- Exercise disaster-recovery procedures. Regularly test recovery plans, including manual intervention, alternate communications, restoration sequencing and coordination among network, cloud and customer operations teams.
Accountability and Operational Transparency:
For critical infrastructure, operators should provide meaningful post-incident reports explaining the failure, its scope, the role of backup systems, why automatic recovery was insufficient, and what corrective actions will prevent recurrence.
Regulators and public-sector agencies should also evaluate resilience based on demonstrated performance—not simply on the existence of documented backup plans or redundant equipment.
The FAA outage is particularly consequential because communications failures can affect the safe operation of the national airspace system. The Microsoft disruption demonstrates how dependence on centralized cloud services can affect organizations across industries and geographic regions.
Conclusions:
Redundancy is a design feature. It’s an operational result which must be proven to prevent the next network outage from being catastrophic. Multiple servers, fiber routes, data centers and backup systems provide little assurance unless they are sufficiently independent, have adequate capacity and can maintain essential services when primary resources fail.
The ultimate test of a resilient network is not whether it has backup infrastructure, but whether that infrastructure actually works when needed. Operators must demonstrate this through rigorous failure testing, realistic disaster-recovery exercises, transparent post-incident analysis and measurable improvements in service continuity.
The FAA and Microsoft incidents—and the earlier Comcast outage—should prompt a broader reassessment of whether critical network and cloud infrastructure is as resilient in operation as its architecture claims.
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References:
https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?id=T-REC-L.Sup35-201706-I%21%21PDF-E&lang=e&type=items
https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?id=T-REC-L.Sup25-201604-I%21%21PDF-E&lang=s&type=items
IETF RFC 9522 – Overview and Principles of Internet Traffic Engineering (2024)
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9522.html
IETF RFC 9855 – Topology Independent Fast Reroute Using Segment Routing (October 2025)
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9855.html
NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 – Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems
https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/34/r1/upd1/final
IETF – Problem Statement for Network Resilience (November 2, 2026)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zhao-opsawg-network-resilience-ps/
Critical Network Outages: Why Isn’t Redundancy Working? Part I.
Telecom network outages: causes, effects, and remedies for telecom providers & IT enterprise
Comcast frequent, intermittent internet outages + long outage in Santa Clara, CA with no auto-recovery!
Ookla: AI platform reliability decreases as outages surge
Critical Network Outages: Why Isn’t Redundancy Working? Part I.
Introduction:
Today’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) nationwide U.S. flight departure halt, attributed to an unspecified “telecommunications problem,” Microsoft’s global cloud disruption yesterday, and other prolonged telecommunications outages highlight serious questions about the resilience of critical network infrastructure, the effectiveness of automatic failover and service restoration, and the adequacy of disaster-recovery capabilities.
These incidents involved different systems and should not be assumed to share a common technical cause. However, both illustrate the consequences when essential network services become unavailable and recovery is neither immediate nor seamless.
FAA – Telecommunications Failure Disrupts the U.S. National Airspace System:
On November 13, 2026, the FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop for all departing flights following a telecommunications outage affecting air traffic control operations. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the communications issue was impacting all 22 U.S. Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs), and FAA technicians were investigating. The FAA’s preliminary statement described the problem as a temporary telecommunications outage and said the ground stop was imposed for safety reasons.
The 22 ARTCCs are a critical part of the U.S. National Airspace System. Unlike airport control towers, which manage aircraft movements on runways and in the immediate vicinity of airports, ARTCCs manage aircraft during the en route portion of their flights, primarily at higher altitudes between airports. They coordinate aircraft separation, traffic flows, handoffs between control sectors and the safe movement of aircraft through the national airspace system. A communications failure affecting these centers can have consequences well beyond the geographic location where the original problem occurred. ARTCCs depend on reliable communications with aircraft, other control facilities and supporting systems to manage traffic safely. If controllers cannot reliably communicate with aircraft or coordinate traffic handoffs, the FAA may have to reduce traffic volumes or suspend departures to maintain safe operating conditions.
The disruption was substantial. According to FlightAware, more than 1,000 flights were canceled and nearly 10,000 delayed. Reuters reported that 4,042 flights were airborne and destined for U.S. airports when the FAA issued the ground stop. The disruption also affected international operations, forcing cancellations of some flights originating in Canada and Europe.
FAA Flight Control Center
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The nationwide ground stop prevented additional aircraft from departing while the FAA investigated the problem and worked to restore communications. Thousands of aircraft already airborne were allowed to land, while flights still on the ground could not take off. Inbound international flights were to be handled on a case-by-case basis. The FAA was not ordering aircraft already in the air to land immediately; rather, it was restricting new departures to avoid adding traffic to an airspace system experiencing serious communications problems.
The FAA’s action was only the second nationwide ground stop of departing flights since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The previous occurrence was in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for less than two hours following a failure of its NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system. That incident involved a different system and failure scenario and should not be confused with the November 2026 telecommunications outage.
The Critical Question: Why Didn’t Redundancy Prevent a Nationwide Disruption?
The central engineering issue is not simply why the telecommunications system failed, but why the failure resulted in a nationwide ground stop. The incident raises several important questions:
- What telecommunications infrastructure and services were affected, and how did the problem propagate across the ARTCC network?
- Were independent primary and alternate communications routes available to the affected centers?
- Did the outage involve a common network, switching facility, software platform, power source or other shared dependency?
- What backup communications systems and failover procedures were in place, and why were they unable to maintain sufficient service to avoid a nationwide suspension of departures?
- Were alternate facilities or operating procedures available to isolate the failure and maintain at least limited air traffic operations?
These questions cannot be answered conclusively until the FAA provides a detailed technical explanation. As of the initial reports, the precise cause had not been established publicly. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication at that time of a malicious attack, while emphasizing that the cause remained under investigation. The possibility of a problem involving an update to the private communications network supporting FAA operations was raised in subsequent reporting, but should be treated as preliminary until confirmed by the FAA and its contractors.
FAA Modernization: Acknowledged Problems, but Resilience Remains Essential
The November 13 incident occurred as the FAA is undertaking a major modernization of its aging air traffic control infrastructure. The Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) initiative includes replacing legacy telecommunications infrastructure, modernizing voice switches and radio systems, and upgrading other critical air traffic control technologies.
A September 2026 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, Air Traffic Control Systems: Ambitious New Modernization Effort Needs to Improve Cost and Schedule Planning (GAO-26-107992), describes both the scale of this effort and the challenges facing the FAA. By May 2026, the agency had replaced 2,560 of 5,170 aging copper communications wires with high-speed fiber-optic cables—approximately half of the planned replacements. The report also identifies significant cost-estimation and project-scheduling weaknesses that could delay modernization and prolong reliance on outdated systems.
Modernization is clearly necessary, but replacing aging copper lines with fiber and upgrading equipment are not sufficient by themselves to guarantee network resilience. The architecture must also provide physically and logically diverse communications paths, independent backup facilities, automatic failover, effective fault isolation and tested disaster-recovery procedures.
The FAA’s previously implemented backup arrangements for its NOTAM system should not be confused with backup communications for the ARTCC network. They address different systems and failure scenarios. The November 13 incident requires a separate examination of the communications architecture, route diversity, failover procedures and operational readiness supporting all 22 centers.
Ultimately, the question is whether the FAA’s communications infrastructure was engineered to withstand the failure of individual links, facilities or shared network components—and, if so, why those protections were insufficient to prevent a nationwide ground stop.
As of the initial reports, the precise technical cause had not been established publicly. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication at that time of a malicious attack, while emphasizing that the cause was still under investigation. Subsequent reporting raised the possibility of a problem involving an update to the private communications network supporting FAA operations, but that explanation should be treated as preliminary until confirmed by the FAA and its contractors.
The FAA has been undertaking a major modernization of its aging air traffic control infrastructure, including replacing older copper communications lines with fiber and upgrading radio systems. The November 13 incident underscores why modernization must address not just equipment age and capacity, but also network architecture, physical and logical route diversity, automatic failover, fault isolation and disaster recovery.
The FAA has been working to modernize aging air traffic control infrastructure. A September 2026 Government Accountability Office report, Air Traffic Control Systems: Ambitious New Modernization Effort Needs to Improve Cost and Schedule Planning (GAO-26-107992), describes the scale of the modernization challenge and the risks of continued reliance on outdated systems.
The FAA’s previously implemented backup arrangements for its NOTAM system should not be confused with backup communications for the regional air traffic control centers. They address different systems and failure scenarios. The November 13th incident requires a separate examination of communications architecture, route diversity, failover procedures and operational readiness.
Microsoft: A Global Cloud-Service Disruption:
A day earlier, on November 12, Microsoft experienced a widespread disruption affecting Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Outlook and other applications dependent on its cloud infrastructure. Microsoft reported that a significant number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable. The remaining infrastructure experienced increased load, complicating recovery as affected servers were returned to service. The disruption continued across regions and affected businesses, government organizations and other customers. This raises a different but equally important question: how could a cloud platform operating at Microsoft’s scale lose enough server capacity to cause prolonged disruption across multiple services and regions?
Cloud infrastructure is designed to distribute workloads across servers, availability zones and geographic regions. But distributing workloads does not automatically guarantee resilience. Shared software, configuration changes, dependencies, authentication services, traffic-management systems or common operational procedures can create failure domains that extend well beyond an individual server or data center. Microsoft’s incident also demonstrates that restoring infrastructure is not necessarily the same as restoring service. Recovery must account for traffic redistribution, overloaded surviving systems, dependency failures and the possibility that returning capacity to service may itself destabilize the environment.
The Common Question: Where Was the Effective Backup?
The FAA and Microsoft incidents are not evidence of the same underlying failure. They do, however, expose a common issue: the difference between having redundant infrastructure and maintaining uninterrupted service when something fails. A network may have multiple links, servers, data centers or geographic locations and still be vulnerable if those resources share a common failure point. Backup capacity is useful only if it is sufficiently independent, operationally available and capable of taking over under real-world failure conditions.
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Part 2 will examine why redundancy can fail, the engineering principles required for genuine network resilience, and what telecommunications providers, cloud operators and critical-infrastructure organizations should do to improve service continuity.
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References:
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107992
Telecom network outages: causes, effects, and remedies for telecom providers & IT enterprise
Ookla: AI platform reliability decreases as outages surge
MWC26 Doha Recap: Strong Turnout; GSMA-ITU Letter of Intent; Open Questions Remain
Introduction:
MWC26 Doha closed on Nov 10th with over 10,000 attendees from 100 countries and territories, 195 speakers, about 100 exhibitors, sponsors and partners, and 42 partnerships and announcements signed in the Announcement Lounge. It was also the first MWC to run alongside an ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-26). Held every four years, ITU PP-26 serves as the highest decision-making body to determine ITU’s strategic and financial plans, elect its leadership, and set its overall direction. Together, the two events united industry leaders, policymakers and innovators to explore critical digital issues transforming society.
Sianne Ryder, CEO, Events and Industry Services, GSMA Ltd, said:
“This week at MWC26 Doha, policymakers and regulators sat side by side with industry leaders and innovators to debate, connect and shape MENA’s digital future. Co-locating with the opening days of ITU PP-26 created something unique: a place where those setting the global digital agenda could engage directly with the operators, technology companies and investors bringing it to life. The result was sharper conversations, stronger connections and a clearer path from policy to progress. We look forward to seeing the partnerships forged in Doha deliver impact across the region and beyond. Thank you to everyone who joined us – and especially to our hosts at MCIT.”
Photo Credit: GSMA
The GSMA’s closing press release is full of impressive statistics and signed agreements. This IEEE Techblog post separates what was announced from what was demonstrated, and asks what evidence is still missing.
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Open, trusted AI for telecoms”: a non-binding letter and unproven models
The GSMA-ITU Letter of Intent
The most widely publicized conference deliverable is the GSMA-ITU letter of intent on “trusted, open AI for telecoms.” According to RCR Wireless, it is non-binding, and neither organization has disclosed funding, staffing, deadlines, governance or licensing terms. RCR reports that the framework builds on the GSMA’s Open Telco AI program. It covers telco-grade AI for network operations and standards, telecom-specific data assets, and training, deploying and evaluating the OTel open model family. RCR frames the underlying motivation as reducing operators’ dependence on a few large AI providers.
The letter also formalizes existing ties. The ITU already hosts AI challenges developed with the GSMA, ETSI, IEEE and others, and the letter sits alongside, but separate from, the ITU’s OTAI initiative on AI agent interoperability. How the two efforts will be coordinated is not stated.
The first workstream covers telco-grade AI for network operations, infrastructure and standards. The second covers telecom-specific data assets, and the third covers training, deploying and evaluating the OTel open model family. They also plan to align technical standards, open data interoperability and evaluation frameworks. The stated aim is “secure, transparent and high-precision AI across global networks.” The wrap-up MWC26 Doha press release gives no performance data, datasets or timelines for this GSMA-ITU collaboration.
GSMA also announced a collaboration with Khalifa University and AMD on radio frequency foundation models. Built around the GSMA’s Open Telco AI program, it reaffirms that network operators shouldn’t depend on a handful of large providers for AI intelligence.
Open Telco AI models: what the evidence shows
The models behind the initiative are where measurable claims belong. For OTel, RCR notes that OTel 2.0 passed 30 million downloads by October, though downloads don’t measure deployment. It also reports that AT&T’s roughly 90% benchmark figure is vendor-reported, the OTel paper describes the resource as English-only and mainly text-based, and its main evaluations use unseen portions of its own corpus rather than fully independent benchmarks. “Open-weight” means the weights can be downloaded and adapted, which is not the same as open source. GSMA and ITU sign letter of intent on telecom AI +2
RFGPT. The most technical announcement at the show was an operator evaluation initiative for RFGPT from Khalifa University, GSMA and AMD. RFGPT is an RF foundation model that combines wireless signal understanding with natural-language interaction, hosted on AMD compute with API access. Operators can request a two-week trial. The six evaluation areas include identifying technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE, 5G NR, UMTS and DVB-S2, recognizing modulation schemes, analyzing wideband multi-signal environments, assessing coexistence and interference, estimating WLAN and NR user density, and interpreting 5G NR parameters such as SSB patterns and CSI-RS and SRS configurations.
The release describes capabilities and potential uses. It gives no accuracy figures, training-data description, signal-to-noise conditions, or comparison with conventional RF analysis tools. Useful questions for the evaluation include how it compares with established signal classifiers, how often it gives confident wrong answers, and what operator data leaves the network when a hosted API is used.
“Open” and “trusted,” in a geopolitical context
The AI collaboration is unfolding amid a policy dispute. RCR notes that Open Telco AI’s participants include China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, and that Huawei is a sponsor and data contributor. Huawei was also the event’s headline sponsor and gave a keynote titled “The Infrastructure of Intelligence.”
Meanwhile, PP-26 continues. The conference runs about three weeks, with delegates from ITU’s 194 Member States, so MWC overlapped only its opening. A CircleID analysis describes a US proposal on ITU Resolution 214 that would replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence,” remove references to shared concerns, and prohibit ITU work supporting AI governance, regulation and ethics. The outcome isn’t known yet. Separately, Malaysia’s communications minister described AI as creating a “compute divide” between developed and developing nations. “Trusted” will be easier to assess once governance, licensing and supply-chain terms are published.
ITU meeting in Qatar to address digital opportunities and challenges – Developing Telecoms +2
Agentic AI: governance language, no deliverables yet
The Agentic AI Summit description says it would examine the balance between autonomy, trust, safety and human oversight. That describes a topic rather than an outcome. For network operations, autonomy claims are easier to evaluate with a stated autonomy level, the actions agents may take, how policy is enforced, and failure behavior. I did not find those details in the materials reviewed.
6G: what “already underway” means
The Future Networks Summit description says the 6G transition is already underway through intelligent, programmable and interoperable 5G networks. Network APIs, automation, edge, private networks and satellite integration are real and progressing, but they are 5G-Advanced work. Readers should look for which specific features, and in which 3GPP release, are meant when “6G” is used.
Satellite and NTN: organizer statistics
The Satellite & NTN Summit description says 2026 is “go time” for D2D, the Middle East has 11 D2D partnerships between satellite companies and telcos, and 500-600 million people have no coverage. It also cites consolidation moves, including Amazon/Globalstar/Viasat and Space42/Equatys. [verify each; the page gives no sources] A partnership is not yet a commercial service. Spectrum, device support and regulatory approval will determine which ones become products. (For the U.S. side of this story, see my earlier posts on SpaceX’s 800 MHz spectrum and Starlink Mobile.)
One concrete demo
Ooredoo Qatar, Ericsson, Eonetics, Hikvision and GSMA Fusion linked a tethered drone in Melbourne with the GSMA Pavilion in Doha, more than 12,000 km away. The distance makes a good headline, but long-haul IP connectivity is not a property of 5G itself. The release gives no latency, throughput, uplink performance, drone-to-core architecture or setup time, so the demo shows feasibility rather than performance.
Independent coverage
Post-event coverage so far largely restates the GSMA release. Examples include Fast Company Middle East, IndexBox and TelecomTV, which labels its item “Via GSMA.” Huawei’s account is a vendor release. Reporting on measured performance, stage discussion and attendee reaction was limited in what I could find.
Evidence we’d like to see
- The full text of the GSMA-ITU letter, with scope, governance and licensing.
- Independent benchmarks for OTel and RFGPT against conventional tools.
- Latency and throughput data from the emergency-response demo.
- Operator evidence of agentic AI in production, including guardrails.
- The 3GPP features behind “6G is already underway.”
- The final outcome on ITU Resolution 214 at PP-26.
Much of the post-event coverage repeats the GSMA’s numbers. One Gulf Business piece carries “brand-view” in its URL path, and the Huawei item is a vendor announcement. Independent reporting, such as measured performance, attendee skepticism and what was said on stage, was scarce in what I could find.
End Note:
GSMA, ITU and IEEE will host a webinar on November 18 introducing the AI Agents for RAN Challenge, which uses the Giulia simulator.
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References:
https://www.mwcdoha.com/agenda
https://rcrwireless.com/20261112/ai/gsma-itu-letter-of-intent-telecom-ai
Analysis: Taara Demonstrates 14-km Free-Space Optical Link with AT&T and Nokia
Introduction:
Taara, an independent private company spun out of X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, and a developer of high-speed, high-capacity wireless optical communications, announced an expansion of its commercial activities targeting enterprise and federal government customers in the U.S. IEEE Techblog has written about the company previously (see References below).
Following a successful deployment with AT&T at the world’s largest soccer event at at MetLife Stadium, NJ, Taara demonstrated its Lightbridge Free Space Optics (FSO) system at Texas Tech University. The demonstration illustrated how narrow, invisible beams of light can deliver high-capacity connectivity where rapid deployment, security and operational flexibility are important for mission-critical applications.
Conducted in collaboration with AT&T and Nokia Federal Solutions, the demonstration carried data across a 14-km path between a university rooftop and a mobile cell site, known as a cell on wheels (COW). The demonstration was presented to enterprise, state and federal government stakeholders as part of Texas Tech University’s Critical Infrastructure Telecom Ecosystem Incubator.
The significance is that high-capacity optical connectivity can be established without installing fiber along the entire route or obtaining licensed radio-frequency spectrum. However, free-space optical communications have distinctive propagation and availability limitations that must be considered when evaluating their use in telecommunications infrastructure.
Free-Space Optical (FSO) Communications Explained:
Free-space optical communications transmit data using highly focused beams of invisible near-infrared light through the atmosphere rather than through a physical optical fiber. The basic architecture consists of two optical terminals, each containing an optical transmitter and receiver. The transmitting terminal converts electrical data into modulated optical signals, which are directed toward the receiving terminal. A photodetector at the receiving end converts the optical signal back into electrical data. Unlike conventional fiber-optic communications, the optical signal travels through an unguided atmospheric path. This eliminates the need to install physical cable between the two endpoints while retaining the potential for very high data rates and low latency.
Taara Lightbridge supports bidirectional transmission of up to 20 Gbps over distances of up to 20 km, according to the company’s published specifications. Its lightweight terminals can be installed on rooftops, towers and other elevated structures with a clear line of sight.
Image Credit: Communications Physics article “Towards high-capacity and robust free-space optical communications,” by Jian Wang, Jinfeng Liu & Chengkun Cai
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FSO technology is particularly attractive for:
- Wireless backhaul and fronthaul connectivity for cellular networks.
- Temporary high-capacity connections for major events and emergency deployments.
- Enterprise and campus network extensions.
- Connectivity between data centers and other facilities.
- Physically diverse network paths that reduce dependence on a single fiber route.
AT&T’s 80,000-Spectator Deployment at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey:
An important commercial example involved AT&T’s deployment of two Taara Lightbridge links at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The installation connected more than 80,000 spectators during a major international soccer event. According to Taara, the links were installed in a matter of hours and delivered up to 20 Gbps during the event.
Importantly, the deployment combined the optical links with a millimeter-wave radio backup. Taara reported 99.999% availability for the combined hybrid connection. This distinction is important. The five-nines availability figure applies to the combined optical and millimeter-wave arrangement, not to the standalone optical link. The deployment illustrates the value of combining different transmission technologies to improve network resilience. AT&T is also evaluating Taara links for broader network applications.
Advantages of FSO Compared with Fiber and Radio:
FSO offers several potentially important advantages for telecommunications operators and enterprise network providers.
Rapid deployment: Unlike fiber construction, FSO does not require trenching, cable installation, or lengthy rights-of-way negotiations along the transmission path. This can be particularly valuable for temporary installations, disaster recovery and locations where fiber construction is difficult or expensive.
High capacity: Optical wavelengths provide substantial bandwidth potential. Taara specifies up to 20 Gbps bidirectional throughput for Lightbridge, making it relevant to high-capacity wireless backhaul applications.
No licensed RF spectrum: Because the transmission uses optical rather than radio-frequency signals, FSO does not require licensed RF spectrum. This can be advantageous in congested wireless environments.
Low latency: Optical propagation through air is close to the speed of light in vacuum, avoiding the additional propagation delay associated with optical fiber. Actual end-to-end latency also depends on terminal electronics and network equipment.
Physical network diversity: An FSO link can provide an alternative physical path alongside fiber infrastructure. This can reduce dependence on a single cable route, provided that the optical path itself is sufficiently protected and does not share the same physical vulnerabilities.
FSO’s Risks and Technical Limitations:
Despite its considerable potential, FSO is not a universal replacement for fiber or conventional wireless transmission. Its principal weakness is that the optical signal must propagate through an uncontrolled atmospheric environment. Taara’s own specifications acknowledge 90% average availability at 10 km for its Lightbridge system. That is a substantial limitation for a standalone carrier connection. Several engineering challenges affect link reliability and availability:
1. Atmospheric attenuation and weather
Fog is one of the most serious challenges for terrestrial FSO. Water droplets scatter and attenuate near-infrared optical signals, potentially reducing received optical power below the level required for reliable communications.
Heavy rain, snow, dust and other atmospheric conditions can also degrade performance. Atmospheric turbulence can cause fluctuations in signal intensity, beam distortion and variations in received optical power.
Taara’s own technical FAQ acknowledges these limitations. Its published averages indicate approximately 95% annual availability at 5 km and 90% at 10 km for Lightbridge links. The company also reports that fog causes significantly greater attenuation than is typically experienced by millimeter-wave systems.
These figures demonstrate why advertised maximum transmission distance should not be confused with guaranteed service availability.
2. Line-of-sight requirements and physical obstruction
FSO requires a clear optical path between the two terminals. Buildings, trees, construction equipment, vehicles and other physical obstructions can interrupt the connection.
Unlike radio systems that may support non-line-of-sight propagation through reflection or diffraction, a highly directional optical link generally cannot maintain its connection when the direct path is blocked.
Consequently, careful site surveys, rooftop placement and protection of the optical path are essential.
3. Pointing, acquisition and tracking
Because the optical beam is highly directional, the transmitting and receiving terminals must remain accurately aligned.
Wind-induced movement of towers, rooftop structures, mounting equipment and other mechanical disturbances can cause pointing errors. Building movement and thermal expansion can also affect alignment.
Automatic acquisition and tracking mechanisms are therefore important components of practical FSO systems. Maintaining alignment over long distances is a significant engineering challenge.
4. Availability and network redundancy
FSO should not automatically be treated as a fiber replacement for applications requiring continuous connectivity.
Operators need to engineer around atmospheric outages and physical obstructions through redundant paths, adaptive transmission rates, backup radio links or alternative fiber routes.
Taara’s AT&T stadium deployment provides a useful example: combining FSO with millimeter-wave radio backup allowed the network to achieve the vendor-reported five-nines availability figure.
For mission-critical applications, the relevant engineering metric is not simply peak throughput. It is sustained throughput and service availability under actual operating conditions.
5. Security considerations
The narrow, highly directional optical beam can make interception more difficult than with broadly propagated wireless signals. FSO also avoids the licensed RF spectrum and radio-frequency interference issues associated with conventional wireless links.
However, optical transmission should not be equated with inherently secure communications. Physical access to the optical path, endpoint compromise, deliberate obstruction and attacks on network equipment remain relevant security considerations.
Encryption, authentication, access controls and network monitoring are still necessary.
Taara’s Next Technology Development: Integrated Photonics and Optical Phased Arrays:
Beyond its deployed Lightbridge technology, Taara is developing a more compact integrated-photonics platform called Taara Photonics.
Introduced in February 2026, the platform moves important optical communication and beam-control functions into a small silicon-based photonic module. Its central technology is an optical phased array (OPA) containing more than 1,000 miniature, software-controlled light emitters.
By electronically controlling the phase of the emitted light, an OPA can steer and track optical beams without relying on conventional moving mechanical components.
Taara’s first product based on this platform, Taara Beam, is specified for up to 25 Gbps bidirectional throughput over distances of up to 10 km. The approach could eventually reduce terminal size, complexity and deployment costs while enabling more flexible optical wireless network architectures.
However, integrated photonics and electronic beam steering do not eliminate the fundamental atmospheric propagation challenges of FSO. Fog attenuation, turbulence, physical obstructions and link availability must still be addressed.
It is also important to distinguish this newer platform from the Lightbridge equipment used in the 14-km Texas demonstration. The Texas demonstration does not establish the operational performance or weather resilience of Taara Beam.
Wireless Telecom Industry Implications:
Taara’s demonstrations illustrate the potential role of wireless optical communications as another component of high-capacity telecommunications infrastructure.
FSO is particularly attractive where fiber construction is prohibitively expensive, deployment schedules are demanding, or an additional physically diverse connection is needed. It can complement fiber and millimeter-wave radio rather than compete with either technology in every application.
The technology could also become relevant to data-center interconnection, where increasing traffic volumes and the need for additional network capacity are creating demand for alternative connectivity solutions. However, practical deployment will depend on distance, atmospheric conditions, site geometry, redundancy requirements and total cost of ownership. The most important consideration for network operators is whether FSO can deliver sufficient sustained capacity and availability at a competitive cost under the specific environmental conditions of each deployment.
The company’s hybrid approach is probably the correct commercial direction, but it also suggests that FSO’s role is to complement fiber and RF, not replace them.
Conclusions:
Taara’s 14-km demonstration with AT&T and Nokia illustrates the growing potential of free-space optical communications to provide high-capacity connectivity without the construction costs, delays and physical constraints of fiber deployment. Taara appears to have made meaningful progress in equipment design, photonics integration, link planning and network redundancy. Its deployments deserve serious attention, rather than dismissal based on the failures of the earlier FSO industry from 1998-2002.
FSO is particularly attractive for wireless backhaul, temporary high-capacity links, enterprise connectivity and network-route diversity. However, impressive peak data rates and transmission distances do not establish carrier-grade reliability. Atmospheric attenuation—especially from fog—line-of-sight obstructions and precise beam-alignment requirements remain significant engineering challenges.
Consequently, FSO is best deployed with appropriate redundancy, including fiber or millimeter-wave backup where uninterrupted service is required. Taara’s newer integrated-photonics and optical phased-array development could make optical wireless terminals smaller, less mechanically complex and easier to deploy. But it does not eliminate the fundamental limitations of atmospheric optical transmission.
We believe that FSO is a promising complementary technology for expanding high-capacity network connectivity, not a universal replacement for fiber. Its commercial success will depend on demonstrating sustained throughput, predictable availability and competitive total cost of ownership under real-world operating conditions.
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References:
https://x.company/blog/posts/taara-graduation/
https://www.taaraconnect.com/post/introducing-taara-photonics-and-beam
https://support.taaraconnect.com/en/faq/design-specs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-026-02947-3
Taara Lightbridge Pro: an ultra reliable wireless optical communications system for 5G mobile backhaul
Google X spin-out Taara and Digicomm International partner to offer high speed wireless communications
2021 Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) Highlights and Links to Videos
Broadband Forum Advances Subscriber Session Steering for Dynamic BNG Resource Optimization
Attribution:
Ken Pyle, Broadband Forum Marketing Director, provided the author with references which he used to write this article. ChatGPT helped with organizing the piece AFTER the author completed his own diligent research.
Introduction:
As broadband networks evolve toward disaggregated, cloud-native architectures, service providers need more flexible ways to manage subscriber sessions and allocate network resources. Traditional broadband architectures typically associate subscribers with specific Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs), limiting operators’ ability to dynamically balance traffic, optimize resource utilization, or respond to changing service requirements.
The Broadband Forum (BBF) is addressing this challenge through Subscriber Session Steering (3S), an architecture that enables service providers to dynamically select and manage the network gateways serving individual subscribers or groups of subscribers. The objective is to optimize network performance, improve resource utilization, reduce energy consumption, and support differentiated broadband services without interrupting active subscriber sessions.
At its November 2–5, 2026 Fall Member Meeting in Denver, CO the Broadband Forum’s Network Architecture Work Area approved WT-474, Subscriber Session Steering, and advanced it to Final Ballot. Publication as Technical Report TR-474 is expected before year-end 2026.
Subscriber Session Steering Explained:
Subscriber Session Steering provides dynamic, policy-driven selection and management of subscriber sessions across available service gateways. These include BNGs and Access Gateway Functions (AGFs).
Unlike static subscriber-to-gateway assignments, 3S enables individual subscribers or entire subscriber groups to be moved between network resources based on traffic load, service requirements, Quality of Service (QoS), network availability, maintenance needs, and energy consumption.
The architecture is designed to perform these changes without interrupting ongoing subscriber sessions.
Two important functional elements are:
- User Plane Selection Function (UPSF): Determines the appropriate BNG user-plane instance for a subscriber or subscriber group based on network conditions and service-provider policies. It provides the selection and coordination function for subscriber-session placement.
- Traffic Steering Function (TSF): Implements the traffic redirection needed to move subscriber sessions and associated traffic flows to the selected user-plane instance. The TSF can be deployed at different network locations, including within an Optical Line Terminal (OLT).
Together, these functions enable dynamic binding of subscriber sessions to available BNG user planes. This is particularly relevant to Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS), which allows BNG control-plane functions to manage multiple independently deployed user-plane instances.
The architecture also supports cloud-native BNG implementations in which user-plane functions can be deployed, scaled, consolidated, or deactivated as network demand changes.
2024 Broadband Forum Innovation Demonstration: Multi-Vendor Subscriber Session Steering:
The technical feasibility and operational benefits of 3S were demonstrated during the Broadband Forum’s November 2024 Innovation Demonstrations, involving three vendors: Adtran, BISDN, and OutSys.
The demonstration combined disaggregated BNG architecture, cloud-native user planes, traffic steering, and Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring to dynamically optimize network resource utilization.
Key contributions included:
- BISDN: Supplied BISDN Linux, an open-source network operating system running on the aggregation switch, and the UPSF based on the Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Subscriber Session Steering (OB-STEER) project. Its BNG micro-user planes were cloud-native and deployable in Kubernetes-based x86 infrastructure.
- Adtran: Integrated the TSF into its SDX 6330 PON OLT. Under UPSF direction, the TSF dynamically redirected subscriber sessions and associated traffic flows between BNG user-plane instances. Locating traffic steering in the OLT enables redirection closer to the access network, including when an OLT uplink or aggregation switch fails.
- OutSys: Provided Quality of Experience Delivered (QED) probes and reflectors, based on Broadband Forum TR-452, to monitor service quality across BNG user planes. Its QED Analyzer, integrated into Nokia’s Altiplano framework, used network measurements and subscriber counts to support closed-loop resource optimization.
The demonstration illustrated an energy-saving scenario. When traffic and subscriber counts on a particular BNG user plane fell below a predefined threshold, and measured service quality remained satisfactory, the automation system moved active subscribers to another user plane. The underutilized instance could then be shut down.
This approach reduces the number of running BNG micro-user planes and their associated energy consumption in x86-based Kubernetes clusters while maintaining acceptable subscriber service quality.
The demonstration also showed the resilience benefits of OLT-based steering. If an uplink or aggregation switch fails, subscriber traffic can be redirected through another OLT uplink toward a different network path.
Importantly, the demonstration brought together components from three vendors using Broadband Forum standards and Open Broadband software, illustrating the potential for multi-vendor implementations.
WT-474: The New Subscriber Session Steering Technical Report:
The Broadband Forum’s WT-474 project formalizes the 3S architecture and its operational requirements. According to the Forum’s September 2026 technical overview, TR-474 will define:
- Subscriber Session Steering use cases.
- The overall 3S architecture and functional requirements.
- Operational workflows for dynamic subscriber-session selection and movement.
- Informational models describing the entities and relationships involved.
- Data models needed to support implementation and management of the architecture.
The specification addresses the selection, balancing, and management of subscriber-session mappings to service gateways. It is intended to support dynamic network optimization based on access conditions, service requirements, and operational events.
An important aspect is the ability to steer individual subscribers or groups of subscribers without interrupting active sessions. This supports service-aware network resource allocation rather than treating all broadband subscribers identically.
The forthcoming TR-474 [1.] is also designed to work independently or in conjunction with other Broadband Forum disaggregation and cloud specifications.
The related Open Broadband OB-STEER project provides reference software implementations of key architectural components, including UPSF-related functions. Its purpose is to support rapid prototyping, evaluation of specification changes, and potential interoperability testing as commercial implementations emerge.
Note 1. At the Fall 2026 BBF Member Meeting, WT-474 was approved and sent out for Final Ballot. TR-474 is expected to be approved before the end of 2026. Once approved, it will be sent to ITU-T for consideration as a new recommendation.
Broadband Industry Significance:
Subscriber Session Steering extends broadband network resource management beyond conventional load balancing. Its significance spans several areas:
Energy efficiency: Operators can consolidate subscriber sessions onto fewer active BNG user-plane instances during periods of lower demand, allowing underutilized resources to be deactivated. This can reduce power consumption in cloud-native broadband infrastructure.
QoS and differentiated services: Subscribers can be assigned to network gateways and paths that better match their service requirements. High-value customers and latency-sensitive applications, including gaming and cloud services, can potentially be directed toward higher-capability network resources.
Wholesale and open-access broadband: 3S enables a Broadband Service Provider’s subscribers to be moved to different portions of a wholesale network. This flexibility can support more efficient use of shared infrastructure and new wholesale service models.
Network resilience and maintenance: Subscriber sessions can be redirected in response to equipment failures, network congestion, or planned maintenance. Dynamic placement also provides opportunities for predictive maintenance and more flexible network upgrades.
Cloud-native and disaggregated BNGs: By supporting dynamic subscriber placement across independently deployed user planes, 3S complements CUPS and cloud-native BNG architectures. Operators gain greater flexibility in scaling network functions and utilizing distributed computing resources.
Multi-vendor interoperability: Standardized architecture, requirements, workflows, and information and data models provide a common basis for implementations from different suppliers. The 2024 demonstration involving Adtran, BISDN, and OutSys provided an early example of how these components can work together.
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From Broadband Forum Marketing Director Ken Pyle:
“Another important point is that 3S enables an access provider to automate and adapt the path to wholesale handoffs while preserving a clear operational boundary: subscriber steering is managed locally, while the wholesale partner controls service termination beyond the handoff.”
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Conclusions:
The Broadband Forum’s Subscriber Session Steering initiative addresses an important requirement for the next generation of broadband networks: dynamically matching subscriber sessions to available network resources according to service needs, network conditions, and operational objectives.
By formalizing the 3S architecture in TR-474, the Broadband Forum is establishing a framework for more flexible BNG resource allocation, energy-efficient operations, improved resilience, and differentiated broadband services.
The 2024 multi-vendor demonstration showed how UPSF, OLT-based traffic steering, cloud-native BNG user planes, and QoE monitoring can work together to achieve these objectives. The forthcoming TR-474 will provide the technical requirements, architecture, workflows, and models needed to advance this approach toward interoperable industry implementations.
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References:
https://www.broadband-forum.org/events/fall-2026-member-meeting-roundup
Broadband Forum new work areas to enable broadband services & apps
Broadband Forum SDN/NFV Work Area launches four new projects at Bangkok Q4-2023 meeting
Broadband Forum and LAN Laboratory Expand Certification Program to include XGS-PON
Broadband Forum’s vBG network spec targeted at SD-WANs; led by ONUG
Inside TM Forum’s Catalyst project “Living Networks – Phase III”
VodafoneThree to study a new UK–Norway submarine cable system with route diversity
Disclaimer:
ChatGPT was used to assist with research, technical analysis, and drafting. The author reviewed and edited the material for accuracy and final content. He also provided additional information, quotes and images.
Introduction:
On November 10th, VodafoneThree (UK) [1.] announced a feasibility study for a proposed submarine telecommunications cable connecting mainland Scotland, the Shetland Islands and Norway. The proposed UK–Norway digital corridor is intended to strengthen international connectivity, improve geographic route diversity and enhance the resilience of critical digital infrastructure supporting businesses, public services, defense, data centers and other essential services.
Note 1. VodafoneThree was formed as a merger between Vodafone UK and Three UK. It became 100% owned by Vodafone Group Plc following full acquisition completion in July 2026.
The study, expected to begin in summer 2027, will examine potential cable routes from Shetland to Norway, possible landing locations in the Bergen region and the delivery partnerships needed to develop the connection. It builds on VodafoneThree’s earlier feasibility work on an additional submarine cable connecting Shetland with mainland Scotland.
Importantly, this is a feasibility study, not an approved, financed or under-construction cable project. The final route, landing locations, cable specifications, equipment suppliers, financing and deployment schedule have not been established.
The proposed corridor could strengthen the security, resilience and capacity of the UK’s digital infrastructure, supporting defense, critical national infrastructure and essential services. Analysis commissioned by VodafoneThree estimates it could protect up to £6.6 million of UK economic activity for each day of severe disruption affecting multiple existing routes where traffic cannot be rerouted. This highlights the value of geographically diverse subsea infrastructure: an alternative northern route could bolster resilience as government identifies coordinated disruption to critical undersea infrastructure as a growing national security risk. The proposed route could deliver up to £8.2 billion in economic value over the next ten years, according to research conducted by consultancy firm WPI Strategy and commissioned by Vodafone Business.
Photo Credit: VodafoneThree
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Executive Quotes:
Protecting our network of undersea cables is vital to keeping our country safe. Our adversaries are increasingly targeting our critical national infrastructure, including the cables that carry data and enable internet traffic and financial transactions. This is a very welcome step that could not only improve connectivity and boost our economy, especially in Scotland, but strengthen the UK’s national resilience, prevent disruption, and keep us all safe
UK Defense Secretary, Wes Streeting MP
Reliable international connectivity is vital to the UK’s defence, strengthening our resilience to disruption and enhancing the security of the critical infrastructure on which our economy and public services depend. Norway is a strategically important partner, with a shared commitment to protecting infrastructure across the North Atlantic. A new digital corridor would strengthen the physical links between our countries, add vital route diversity and support secure, resilient connectivity for critical infrastructure on both sides of the North Sea. It could also unlock investment in data centres and AI, creating skilled jobs and wider economic opportunities. This study will help establish the economic and strategic case for the route and identify the partnerships needed to deliver it
Nick Gliddon, Business Director, VodafoneThree
ITU’s Global Submarine Cable Resilience Recommendations:
VodafoneThree’s announcement comes at an important time for the submarine cable industry. In July 2026, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved a comprehensive set of global recommendations for improving submarine cable resilience. These recommendations provide a useful framework for evaluating the proposed Scotland–Shetland–Norway corridor and its potential contribution to international network resilience. On July 10, 2026, the ITU International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience approved its final report, International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience – Report of the Working Groups 2026. The Advisory Body was established jointly by the ITU and the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) in November 2024.
The effort brought together 175 experts representing governments, regulators, submarine cable operators, telecommunications companies, industry organizations, academia and international organizations. Its work was organized into three Working Groups addressing different but complementary dimensions of submarine cable resilience.
The resulting recommendations are nonbinding global guidance intended to inform government policy, industry practices, investment decisions and international cooperation. They are not mandatory technical standards or certification requirements.
The Advisory Body was established jointly by ITU and the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) in 2024.
Source ITU
There are three ITU working groups involved:
| Working group | Technical focus |
|---|---|
| WG1 | Timely cable deployment and repair |
| WG2 | Risk identification, monitoring and mitigation |
| WG3 | Connectivity and geographic diversity |
Working Group 1: Timely Deployment and Repair:
WG1 addresses regulatory, logistical and operational obstacles that delay submarine cable deployment and repair. Its recommendations seek to reduce the time required to install new infrastructure and restore connectivity following cable damage.
Key recommendations include:
- Streamline permitting and regulatory approvals: Establish transparent, predictable permitting requirements and timelines. Reduce regulatory barriers involving customs, cabotage, ship and crew clearances, and emergency repairs.
- Designate government coordination contacts: Establish a single point of contact (SPOC) to coordinate submarine cable deployment and repair approvals across government agencies.
- Improve regional cooperation: Encourage regional cable protection committees and other cooperative frameworks to harmonize regulatory practices and share industry best practices.
- Expand global repair capabilities: Increase the availability and geographic diversity of repair vessels, spare parts and maintenance resources, particularly in remote and underserved regions.
- Develop rapid-response capabilities: Consider shallow-water repair teams equipped with remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for near-shore incidents.
- Promote shared repair infrastructure: Encourage shared vessels, spare-parts pools, maintenance agreements and strategically located repair hubs.
- Improve public-private coordination: Establish operational contacts, 24-hour escalation procedures, joint exercises and information-sharing arrangements between governments and cable operators.
For the proposed Scotland–Shetland–Norway corridor, these recommendations are relevant to permitting in multiple jurisdictions, access to repair vessels in the North Atlantic and North Sea, maintenance agreements and emergency restoration planning.
Working Group 2: Risk Identification, Monitoring and Mitigation:
WG2 addresses physical, environmental, operational and security threats to submarine cable infrastructure. Its recommendations recognize that cable damage is not limited to deliberate attacks. Fishing activity, ship anchoring, seabed conditions, earthquakes, underwater landslides, climate change and maritime congestion all create risks.
Its 14 recommendations cover several important areas:
1. Risk assessment and information sharing
Governments should develop national submarine cable risk strategies based on reliable data concerning cable locations, vulnerabilities, faults and outages. Industry and government should improve information sharing while protecting sensitive infrastructure information.
2. Standardized incident reporting
WG2 encourages voluntary, standardized reporting of cable faults, outages, repair delays and other incidents. Anonymized information shared among governments and industry organizations could improve risk analysis and identify recurring vulnerabilities.
3. Legal frameworks and enforcement
Governments should establish clear legal and operational frameworks for cable protection, implement applicable international treaty obligations and strengthen enforcement against intentional or negligent cable damage. Improved coordination with law enforcement and maritime authorities is also encouraged.
4. Maritime safety and route protection
Recommendations address maritime training, accidental anchor deployment, marine spatial planning and improved nautical charting. Digital navigation and updated cable-risk information can help ships and maritime operators avoid damaging existing infrastructure.
5. Redundancy audits and stress testing
Cable operators should conduct audits and stress tests to evaluate network redundancy and the ability to maintain connectivity during multiple failures. Decommissioning decisions should also account for their impact on remaining network diversity and resilience.
6. Landing-station and outside-plant security
Cable landing stations (CLS) and associated outside-plant (OSP) infrastructure require appropriate physical and cybersecurity protections. Recommendations also address data security, monitoring and early-warning capabilities.
7. Investment in cable protection
WG2 encourages investment in physical protection measures, including appropriate cable burial and armoring. Route-specific risk assessments should determine the level of protection required.
These recommendations are particularly relevant to VodafoneThree’s proposed feasibility study. The route assessment should examine seabed conditions, fishing and anchoring activity, maritime traffic, environmental hazards, cable burial requirements and the security of landing stations and terrestrial connections.
Working Group 3: Fostering Connectivity and Geographic Diversity:
WG3 addresses the investment, economic, regulatory and network-architecture requirements for improving global connectivity and geographic diversity.
A major concern identified by the ITU is the concentration of submarine cable infrastructure along a limited number of geographic corridors and chokepoints. Countries and regions dependent on only one or a few cable systems are particularly vulnerable to disruptions.
Its recommendations include:
- Blended financing and investment: Encourage financing platforms and partnerships that support submarine cable projects in underserved regions, including Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and remote coastal areas.
- Early coordination among investors and operators: Involve governments, financing institutions and cable operators during the design process to identify investment opportunities and reduce project risks.
- Public-private partnerships: Encourage partnership structures that make strategically important cable routes economically viable when private investment alone may be insufficient.
- Insurance and risk mitigation: Develop insurance mechanisms that improve project financing and reduce investment risks.
- Predictable regulatory frameworks: Establish clear licensing and permitting processes to reduce uncertainty, costs and deployment delays.
- Access to landing stations: Encourage nondiscriminatory access consistent with national regulations and security requirements, enabling competing carriers to obtain capacity.
- Branching-unit planning: Consider incorporating branching units into initial cable system designs to facilitate future connections and improve regional connectivity.
- Anchor tenancy: Encourage government or other institutional commitments to purchase minimum capacity on new systems where this helps make investment viable.
- Route diversity guidelines: Promote industry best practices for evaluating geographic diversity and resilience requirements, including exposure to environmental and human-caused hazards.
WG3 is particularly relevant to the proposed UK–Norway corridor. The feasibility study should determine whether the route provides genuinely independent international connectivity or introduces additional capacity along existing vulnerable corridors.
That requires evaluating seabed route separation, independent landing stations, terrestrial backhaul diversity and the ability to reroute traffic when other cable systems fail. Simply adding another submarine cable does not automatically provide meaningful network redundancy.
Taken together, the three ITU Working Groups provide a comprehensive framework covering cable deployment, operational protection, monitoring, repair readiness, investment and geographic diversity. VodafoneThree’s feasibility study offers an opportunity to evaluate these recommendations before the eventual cable architecture and procurement decisions are finalized. The company has not announced formal adoption of the ITU recommendations. Here’s the ITU-T G.971 functional block diagram of the entire cable system, including land and submarine portions:
Source: ITU-T G.971
Fiber-Optic Monitoring and Threat Detection:
Another important aspect of submarine cable resilience is the ability to detect and locate physical disturbances before they result in service interruptions. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) can turn optical fibers into distributed sensors, providing information about physical and environmental conditions along a cable route.
DAS detects acoustic and vibration-related disturbances that can be associated with nearby vessel activity, anchoring, fishing operations and other seabed events. DTS measures temperature variations along the fiber and can help identify certain environmental and cable-related anomalies.
Research conducted in Norway has demonstrated the potential of DAS for detecting and tracking vessels near submarine telecommunications infrastructure. A 2026 study using a fiber-optic cable in Trondheim Fjord reported ship detection at distances of up to 1.6 km from the cable, with localization results compared against Automatic Identification System (AIS) data.
These technologies could provide additional monitoring capabilities for submarine cable operators. However, detection is not equivalent to identifying hostile intent, and performance depends on the sensing system, fiber configuration, environmental conditions and signal-processing capabilities.
There is also an important ITU standards connection. ITU-T Recommendation G.979 (November 2025), Characteristics of Monitoring Systems for Optical Fiber Submarine Cable Systems, addresses monitoring-system architecture, equipment characteristics and monitored parameters. Its third edition includes generic monitoring requirements for sensing functionalities.
The proposed feasibility study should evaluate whether suitable fiber-optic monitoring and threat-detection capabilities can be incorporated into the eventual cable system, consistent with applicable ITU-T recommendations.
Multi-Vendor Optical Equipment Interoperability:
An additional consideration is whether the eventual submarine cable architecture will support multi-vendor interoperability among optical transmission equipment suppliers.
VodafoneThree’s announcement does not identify equipment vendors, open cable architecture requirements or multi-vendor interoperability as objectives of the feasibility study. Nevertheless, these issues should be considered before system architecture and procurement decisions are finalized.
Traditionally, many repeatered submarine cable systems have been supplied as integrated, turnkey solutions by a single vendor. This can create long-term supplier dependencies and limit equipment replacement and upgrade flexibility.
ITU-T G Supplement 41 (July 2024), Design Guidelines for Optical Fiber Submarine Cable Systems, describes different physical-layer compatibility architectures, including black-box transverse compatibility and configurations permitting equipment from different vendors to interoperate under defined interface and performance requirements.
ITU-T G.971 also addresses general characteristics of optical fiber submarine cable systems.
There are important engineering distinctions between these architectures. Multi-vendor compatibility at submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) and coherent optical transmission interfaces is more readily achievable than interoperability involving submerged repeaters, amplifiers and branching units, which are often integrated into a single-vendor wet-plant system.
The feasibility study should therefore evaluate:
- Standardized interfaces between SLTE and the submarine optical line system.
- Multi-vendor compatibility of coherent optical transmission equipment.
- Opportunities to separate wet-plant and dry-plant procurement.
- Common optical performance specifications and interoperability testing.
- Long-term supplier flexibility and future transmission-capacity upgrades.
An appropriately designed open submarine cable architecture could increase equipment supplier choice, facilitate future upgrades and reduce unnecessary vendor lock-in. Whether VodafoneThree will pursue such an architecture remains an open question.
Conclusions:
VodafoneThree’s proposed Scotland–Shetland–Norway submarine cable corridor is an opportunity to improve international connectivity while addressing broader submarine infrastructure resilience requirements.
The most important evaluation criteria extend beyond route capacity and commercial viability. They include genuine geographic independence, landing-station and terrestrial backhaul diversity, fiber-optic monitoring, repair readiness, cybersecurity and multi-vendor optical equipment compatibility.
The ITU’s July 2026 global submarine cable resilience recommendations provide a timely framework for evaluating these requirements. Complementary ITU-T Recommendations G.979, G Supplement 41 and G.971 provide relevant technical guidance on monitoring and optical-system compatibility.
VodafoneThree has not announced formal adoption of these recommendations or a commitment to open, multi-vendor equipment architecture. These should be considered during the feasibility and subsequent system-design stages.
Ultimately, the value of a new UK–Norway submarine cable should be measured not simply by the additional transmission capacity it provides, but by how much independently routed, secure, maintainable and interoperable connectivity it contributes to the wider international telecommunications infrastructure.
References:
https://www.vodafonethree.com/explore-uk-norway-digital-corridor-subsea-cable/ [Press Release]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42200624/ [2026 Norwegian research, Tracking Ships with Submarine Cables]
https://www.itu.int/hub/publication/s-iab-wg-2026/
https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.979/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.Sup41/en
https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.971/en
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FCC updates subsea cable regulations; repeals 98 “outdated” broadcast rules and regulations
Ethernet Advances Towards 400 Gb/s-per-Lane Signaling for AI Networks: IEEE P802.3dv, Copper and Optical Interconnects
Original Shared-Medium Ethernet LANs have evolved to High-Performance AI Networking Fabrics:
Ethernet originated at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973 as a local area networking (LAN) technology that allowed computers and peripherals to communicate over a shared coaxial cable. The original 3 Mb/s experimental Ethernet, developed by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs (RIP), used Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) to control access to the shared transmission medium. It’s primary purpose was to enable desktop workstations to share a printer.
Transforming that experimental technology into a working 10 Mb/s Ethernet implementation required substantial additional engineering. At Xerox, Ron Crane (RIP) and Robert Garner were key contributors to the 10 Mb/s Ethernet adapter developed for the Xerox Star workstation. Crane designed the analog front-end circuitry, including the receive clock-recovery phase-locked loop, and characterized the coaxial cable’s analog response and requirements, including transceiver tap placement. Garner designed the adapter’s digital logic and microcode. Their work was instrumental in the development of the DEC-Intel-Xerox (DIX) 10 Mb/s Ethernet specification, which subsequently provided the foundation for IEEE 802.3 10BASE5.
The original Ethernet LAN architecture has since undergone a major fundamental transformation. The introduction of switched, full-duplex Ethernet eliminated the shared-medium collision detection environment and made CSMA/CD unnecessary in mainstream deployments. Ethernet evolved from a 10 Mb/s LAN technology into a family of standardized physical-layer interfaces operating over copper and optical fiber, with switching architectures supporting increasingly sophisticated enterprise, carrier and data-center networks.
Today, Ethernet encompasses considerably more than its original LAN architecture. Although the IEEE 802.3 MAC frame format and associated link-layer functions remain foundational, modern Ethernet networks employ high-speed SerDes, advanced modulation and forward error correction (FEC), sophisticated switching fabrics, congestion management and optical interconnects. Ethernet framing transports IP packets and numerous other higher-layer protocols across these networks.
The latest transformation is being driven by the enormous bandwidth and low-latency requirements of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Distributed GPU systems require increasingly capable interconnections for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across networking. These requirements are pushing the industry toward 400 Gb/s-per-lane electrical signaling, higher-capacity optical interfaces and new approaches to copper and optical interconnects.
The IEEE 802.3 Working Group’s P802.3dv project addresses this next stage of Ethernet evolution, specifying physical-layer interfaces and management parameters for 400 Gb/s, 800 Gb/s and 1.6 Tb/s Ethernet based on 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling. The project illustrates how far Ethernet has evolved from its original shared-medium LAN roots—and how its standardized framing and interoperability ecosystem continue to support entirely new classes of high-performance networking fabrics.
The Ethernet Alliance, formed in January 2006, was established to accelerate Ethernet technology adoption, promote interoperability, and provide an industry-wide voice supporting IEEE 802.3 Ethernet development.
Why AI Networking Requires Higher Ethernet Bandwidth:
AI infrastructure is creating three distinct networking requirements:
- Scale-up: High-bandwidth, low-latency interconnections among GPUs and other accelerators within a system or closely coupled cluster.
- Scale-out: Networking among GPU servers and racks within large data centers, connecting compute, storage and other infrastructure.
- Scale-across: Interconnecting geographically or operationally distributed AI computing resources and data-center clusters.
These architectures require high-radix switches, increasingly dense electrical and optical interconnections, low latency and efficient utilization of available bandwidth.
Traditional Ethernet speeds and interconnect architectures are being challenged by the growing number of accelerators and the volume of data exchanged during distributed AI training and inference.
The transition to 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling is intended to increase bandwidth density while reducing the number of lanes, connections and associated infrastructure required to achieve higher aggregate data rates.
The challenge is not simply increasing signaling speed. Power consumption, signal integrity, latency, reach, thermal management and interoperability must all be addressed.
IEEE P802.3dv: Standardizing 400 Gb/s-per-Lane Ethernet:
The IEEE 802.3 Working Group approved the P802.3dv Project Authorization Request (PAR) on September 25, 2026. The project addresses physical-layer specifications and management parameters for:
- 400 Gb/s Ethernet
- 800 Gb/s Ethernet
- 1.6 Tb/s Ethernet
All three aggregate data rates are based on 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling.
The project scope includes electrical interconnects and single-mode fiber (SMF) optical interfaces with reaches up to 500 meters. The IEEE 802.3 400 Gb/s/Lane Signaling Study Group completed its charter following PAR approval and transitioned into the P802.3dv Task Force. This is an important standards-development milestone. However, P802.3dv remains an active standards project; its approval as a PAR does not mean the resulting technical specifications have been completed or approved. The work is particularly important to AI networking because it establishes a standards framework for higher-bandwidth Ethernet interfaces across electrical and optical media.
High-speed Ethernet switching and copper and optical interconnects are central to scaling AI data center networks.
Image generated by ChatGPT using AI image-generation technology.
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Electrical Signaling: PAM4/PAM6, Copper Channels, SerDes and FEC:
Moving to 400 Gb/s per lane creates substantial electrical engineering challenges. The TEF 2026 discussions included presentations from Broadcom, Synopsys, TE Connectivity, Amphenol and Huawei addressing 400G/lane signaling, copper interconnects, channel feasibility and system design.
- A central question is whether PAM4 modulation can continue to meet the requirements or whether higher-order modulation, including PAM6, offers advantages under particular channel conditions.
- PAM4 encodes two bits per symbol using four amplitude levels. PAM6 uses six amplitude levels, potentially increasing the number of bits transmitted per symbol but introducing additional challenges involving noise margins, receiver complexity and signal integrity.
At these signaling rates, performance depends on the entire electrical channel, including:
- SerDes transmitter and receiver design.
- Chip packages and host-board traces.
- Connectors and cable assemblies.
- Channel insertion loss and crosstalk.
- Equalization and clock recovery.
- Forward error correction.
Passive copper remains attractive because of its cost, power and manufacturing advantages, but reach becomes increasingly constrained as signaling rates increase. Active copper cables incorporating re-timers or drivers provide alternative approaches, although they introduce additional power, complexity and interoperability considerations.
The TEF presentations emphasized that 400G signaling requires a holistic system-design approach rather than simply increasing the operating speed of existing SerDes implementations.
Optical Infrastructure: IM-DD, Coherent Optics and Multi-Core Fiber:
Optical interconnects are essential as AI networks expand beyond the practical reach of electrical connections.
TEF 2026 addressed several competing and complementary approaches.
Intensity Modulation/Direct Detection (IM-DD):
IM-DD remains an important approach for short-reach optical interconnections. Its relatively straightforward transmitter and receiver architecture makes it attractive for high-volume data-center deployments. However, increasing bandwidth and reach requirements place additional demands on optical components, signal processing and power efficiency.
Coherent Optics:
Coherent transmission uses information encoded in the amplitude and phase of optical signals, enabling more sophisticated modulation and receiver processing. Although traditionally associated with longer-reach telecommunications applications, coherent technologies are increasingly being considered for high-capacity data-center and AI infrastructure interconnections. TEF discussions included coherent optics inside AI infrastructure and the future of coherent Ethernet.
Multi-Core Fiber:
Multi-core fiber offers another approach to increasing optical capacity and fiber density by transmitting independent optical signals through multiple cores within a single fiber. The TEF program addressed multi-core fiber technology, optical transceivers, connectivity, lane breakouts and polarity management. Commercial implementation will depend on compatible transceivers, connectors, testing methods and interoperability specifications. These approaches illustrate that AI networking will require multiple optical technologies rather than a single universal solution.
CPO, NPO and Pluggable Optics: Competing Architectures:
As electrical signaling rates increase, the location of optical conversion becomes increasingly important. TEF 2026 included discussions of several optical packaging architectures:
- Pluggable optics: Removable optical transceivers connected through standardized electrical interfaces. They offer serviceability and flexibility but require high-speed electrical connections between switching ASICs and optical modules.
- Near-Packaged Optics (NPO): Places optical engines closer to the switching ASIC to reduce electrical interconnect distances.
- Co-Packaged Optics (CPO): Integrates optical engines more closely with the switching ASIC package, potentially reducing electrical power consumption and improving bandwidth density.
These approaches involve different trade-offs in power consumption, thermal management, manufacturing complexity, optical alignment, serviceability and operational reliability. There is no reason to assume that one architecture will displace all others. The appropriate implementation will depend on network topology, port density, reach, cost and operational requirements. Interoperability between optical modules, switching systems and fiber infrastructure remains essential.
Interoperability, Testing, Power and Deployment Challenges:
Higher signaling rates and increasingly complex optical architectures make testing and interoperability more important. TEF 2026 included contributions from VIAVI, Keysight, Teledyne and other test-and-measurement companies. Important challenges include:
- Validating 400 Gb/s-per-lane electrical channels.
- Measuring signal integrity and FEC performance.
- Testing optical transmitters and receivers.
- Verifying interoperability among different vendors’ equipment.
- Characterizing CPO and NPO implementations.
- Addressing congestion management and lossless networking.
- Controlling power consumption and thermal dissipation.
The forum also addressed emerging low-latency networking mechanisms, including Link Layer Retry (LLR) and Credit-Based Flow Control (CBFC). Testing must extend beyond individual components to encompass the complete network system, including electrical channels, optical interfaces, switching equipment and operational behavior. This is particularly important for large AI clusters, where a failure or performance limitation in one part of the network can affect the utilization of many expensive accelerators.
Related development: The challenges of implementing lossless, high-bandwidth Ethernet for AI infrastructure are discussed in an earlier IEEE Techblog article, 1.6T Ethernet Packet Loss Problem Solved: PHY-Layer Buffer Exhaustion with MAC-Layer Credit-Based Flow Control. That article examines how OCP’s Ethernet for Scale-Up Networks (ESUN) specification uses MAC-layer Credit-Based Flow Control (CBFC) and Link-Level Retry (LLR) alongside IEEE 802.3 physical-layer technology.
Conclusions:
The Ethernet Alliance’s October 2026 Technology Exploration Forum demonstrated the breadth of engineering work required to advance Ethernet for AI infrastructure.
The transition toward 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling involves much more than higher-speed Ethernet ports. It requires coordinated advances in SerDes, electrical signaling, copper channels, optical transmission, packaging, switching architectures, FEC and test methodologies.
IEEE P802.3dv provides an important standards-development framework for 400 Gb/s, 800 Gb/s and 1.6 Tb/s Ethernet interfaces using 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling. However, achieving practical, interoperable implementations will require continued collaboration across the semiconductor, optical component, equipment, cabling and test-and-measurement industries.
Ethernet’s evolution from a shared-medium 10 Mb/s LAN into a high-performance networking ecosystem is a remarkable engineering achievement. Its next transformation will be measured not simply by signaling rates, but by the ability to deliver scalable, interoperable, power-efficient networking for increasingly demanding AI infrastructure.
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Sidebar: Ethernet Alliance and Its Liaison with the Networking Standards Ecosystem:
The Ethernet Alliance (EA) serves as an industry coordination and adoption organization, connecting Ethernet technology developers, equipment manufacturers, component suppliers and end users with standards-development organizations. It does not develop Ethernet standards or compete with standards bodies. Instead, it promotes standards-based technologies, facilitates industry collaboration, and supports multi-vendor interoperability demonstrations and education.
Its relationships with IEEE 802.3, the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and ITU-T Study Group 15 (SG15) address complementary aspects of Ethernet’s evolution.
IEEE 802.3 — Ethernet Standards Development:
IEEE 802.3 is the principal standards-development organization responsible for Ethernet MAC and PHY specifications. The Ethernet Alliance maintains a formal liaison relationship with the IEEE 802.3 Working Group, established in 2025. Peter Jones was appointed as the Ethernet Alliance liaison officer, with corresponding liaison coordination established by IEEE 802.3.
This relationship facilitates communication about emerging Ethernet applications, standards-development priorities, interoperability requirements and industry education. Recent cooperation includes the Ethernet Alliance’s TEF 2026 program, focused on Ethernet’s role in AI infrastructure, and IEEE 802.3’s Ethernet for AI (E4AI) assessment activities.
OIF — Optical and Electrical Interconnect Implementation Agreements:
The Optical Internetworking Forum develops Implementation Agreements (IAs) addressing interoperable optical and electrical interfaces, high-speed interconnects and networking technologies. Its work complements IEEE 802.3 by addressing implementation details and interoperability requirements across the broader networking ecosystem.
The Ethernet Alliance and OIF have collaborated on industry demonstrations, including joint demonstrations of Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) traffic. Their complementary activities help connect Ethernet standards and implementations with advanced optical and electrical interconnect technologies.
ITU-T Study Group 15 — Optical Transport Networks and Technologies:
ITU-T SG15 develops international Recommendations for optical transport networks and technologies (OTNT), including Optical Transport Network (OTN) architecture, interfaces, signal structures and transport-network management. Its work is particularly relevant to carrying high-capacity Ethernet client signals over optical transport infrastructure.
IEEE 802.3 and ITU-T SG15 maintain formal standards liaison activities covering Ethernet interfaces, optical transport mappings, fiber technologies and related specifications. Examples include coordination concerning 1.6 Tb/s Ethernet client mapping into OTN and emerging multi-core fiber technologies.
The Ethernet Alliance provides a complementary industry coordination and interoperability perspective. Its activities help communicate Ethernet requirements and implementation developments across the broader optical networking ecosystem.
Why These Relationships Matter:
The three organizations address different but complementary requirements:
- IEEE 802.3: Defines Ethernet MAC and PHY standards.
- OIF: Develops Implementation Agreements and promotes interoperability for optical and electrical interconnects.
- ITU-T SG15: Standardizes optical transport networks, technologies and associated international Recommendations.
The Ethernet Alliance helps connect these activities to industry adoption through education, technical collaboration and multi-vendor interoperability demonstrations. This coordination is increasingly important as Ethernet evolves to support 400 Gb/s-per-lane signaling, 1.6 Tb/s interfaces and large-scale AI networking fabrics.
End Note: The formal Ethernet Alliance (EA)–IEEE 802.3 liaison is documented, whereas the EA–OIF relationship is more informal – described through collaboration and interoperability activities.
Useful supporting references:
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References:
https://ethernetalliance.org/tef-2026-the-ai-future-ethernet/
https://ethernetalliance.org/who-we-are/
https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3dv/12772/
https://www.ieee802.org/3/400GPL/
https://ithistory.org/honoree/ron-c-crane [written by Alan J Weissberger]
https://ethernetalliance.org/voe-robert-garner/
https://www.oiforum.com/meetings-events/speaking-engagements-and-supported-events/
1.6T Ethernet Packet Loss Problem Solved: PHY-Layer Buffer Exhaustion with MAC-Layer Credit-Based Flow Control
2026 OCP Summit: Full-Stack AI Networking Silicon from Nvidia/Cisco and Broadcom; Ethernet vs InfiniBand Interconnects
Analysis: Ethernet gains on InfiniBand in data center connectivity market; White Box/ODM vendors top choice for AI hyperscalers
AI Compute Has a Switchboard Problem: Orchestration & Data Center Fabric Explained
The AI Infrastructure Build-Out: A $10 Trillion Bet on Compute, Power, and Networks
AI-Era Cloud Network Transformation: A Reference Architecture and Implementation Roadmap
OIF Launches 7 New Projects Targeting 448G Electrical Interfaces, 200G Bidirectional Optics and Coherent Link Security
Editorial Note:
ChatGPT was used to assist with historical background research, technical analysis, and editorial suggestions concerning OIF’s role in optical networking interoperability and its relationship with ITU-T. The author reviewed and approved all additions with modifications for technical accuracy.
Introduction:
The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has initiated seven new technical projects addressing the rapidly growing bandwidth, power-efficiency, optical connectivity and security requirements of AI infrastructure and next-generation data center networks. The projects were announced November 9th after the OIF Q4 2026 Technical and Market Awareness & Education Committees meeting, held November 2–5 in Bangkok, Thailand.
More than 200 representatives from OIF member companies attended the meeting. The seven initiatives span high-speed electrical interfaces, bidirectional optical transmission, external laser sources, pluggable module management and coherent optical security. Collectively, they address important interconnection challenges as AI computing architectures require increasingly high-bandwidth connections between processors, switches, servers and data centers. All seven initiatives are at project-start stage. No implementation completion dates or independently verified performance gains were announced.
OIF’s Role in Optical Networking Interoperability:
Founded in 1998 (this author attended the very first OIF meeting in September 1998), the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has played an important role in advancing interoperable optical networking technologies. Its work has evolved from DWDM optical transport interfaces to optical control-plane technologies, including the ITU-T Automatically Switched Optical Network (G.ASON) and IETF Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS), and now encompasses high-speed electrical interfaces, coherent optics, advanced optical packaging and link security.
OIF’s industry-driven Implementation Agreements complement formal standards developed by organizations such as ITU-T and IEEE. By bringing network operators, system vendors, optical component suppliers and test-equipment manufacturers together, OIF helps translate emerging technology requirements into interoperable industry implementations.
Seven New OIF Technical Projects:
1. Energy Efficient Interfaces (EEI) – 448G Retimed Transmit Linear Receive (RTLR)
This project will develop an Implementation Agreement (IA) for a 448 Gbps-per-lane electrical interface using a half-retimed architecture. RTLR combines a retimed transmit path with a linear receive path, offering another architectural option alongside fully retimed and linear interfaces.
The objective is to support higher electrical bandwidth while addressing power consumption, signal integrity and implementation complexity. It complements OIF’s expanding CEI-448G portfolio, which is intended to support the next generation of AI data center interconnects.
2. Bidirectional O-band Single-Mode Fiber (SMF) 200G/Lane
OIF will develop an IA for bidirectional optical connectivity operating at 200 Gbps per lane over O-band single-mode fiber.
Bidirectional transmission offers the potential to increase fiber utilization by supporting two-way communications over a fiber connection. This is relevant to AI scale-up architectures, where large numbers of high-bandwidth connections must be established between compute devices and switching infrastructure.
The project addresses the need for greater optical bandwidth density without proportionally increasing fiber infrastructure.
3. External Laser Small Form Factor Pluggable (ELSFP) IA 3.0
This project will develop the third revision of OIF’s ELSFP Implementation Agreement to address evolving requirements for external laser sources.
External laser architectures are important to co-packaged optics (CPO) and other advanced optical packaging approaches. Separating laser sources from optical engines can provide flexibility in thermal management, laser replacement and system design.
4. Type-3 Elongated ELSFP Supporting Electrical Power Class 8 (40W)
A related project will define an elongated Type-3 ELSFP variant supporting Electrical Power Class 8, rated at 40W.
This higher electrical power capability addresses the requirements of increasingly demanding external laser applications. It is important to distinguish the 40W electrical power classification from optical output power: the announcement does not specify 40W of emitted optical power.
Together, the two ELSFP projects reflect the importance of external laser technology as optical connectivity moves toward higher bandwidth density and more advanced packaging architectures.
5. MACsec Management for Pluggable Modules
OIF will develop an IA addressing management of Media Access Control Security (MACsec) functionality within pluggable modules.
MACsec, specified by IEEE 802.1AE, provides Layer 2 Ethernet link security, including confidentiality, integrity and data-origin authentication.
Bringing MACsec management into pluggable modules creates additional opportunities for consistent security configuration and management across optical networking equipment. This is increasingly relevant as high-speed optical links become integral components of distributed AI and cloud infrastructure.
6. CMIS Management Communication Interface (MCI) over USB
The Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) is widely used to manage optical and electrical pluggable modules and communicate their capabilities and operating status to host systems.
The new project will develop a USB-based Management Communication Interface for CMIS. This provides another mechanism for communicating with and managing pluggable modules.
Standardized module management is essential as networks incorporate increasingly sophisticated optical components from multiple suppliers. It can simplify system integration, diagnostics and maintenance while supporting interoperability across vendors.
7. ZRsec (FlexOsec) for Coherent Optical Interfaces
The final project will define a common implementation approach for FlexOsec Layer 1 encryption in ZR coherent optical applications.
ZR coherent interfaces have become important building blocks for high-capacity data center interconnect (DCI), allowing routers and switches to connect over single-wavelength optical links.
As these links carry increasingly valuable AI, cloud and enterprise traffic, standardized encryption becomes an important consideration. A common approach to Layer 1 security can help vendors develop interoperable coherent optical implementations with consistent security capabilities.
Comment & Analysis:
The Bangkok OIF meeting initiatives span several complementary technical domains rather than a single data rate transition.
- The EEI-448G RTLR effort adds another electrical interface option alongside conventional retimed and linear architectures. Signal integrity, component power and implementation complexity will determine its suitability in next-generation high-density network equipment; the completed specification and interoperability testing will determine practical operating boundaries.
- Bidirectional 200G-per-lane O-band optics could help engineers address fiber utilization in AI scale-up links, although the project announcement does not define a specific accelerator-fabric protocol or system deployment.
- The two ELSFP projects address external laser sourcing and electrical power delivery, considerations for advanced optical packaging architectures. Importantly, a 40W module electrical power class is not a statement of optical output power.
- Security and module management are becoming integral to interface standardization. MACsec management in pluggable modules addresses Ethernet link-level functionality, while ZRsec/FlexOsec targets encryption in coherent optical applications. CMIS communication over USB concerns management access rather than payload bandwidth.
An important aspect of these initiatives is their coverage of multiple layers of the optical networking ecosystem. The 448G electrical and 200G optical projects address physical-layer bandwidth scaling, while the ELSFP initiatives address optical source architecture and power delivery. CMIS and MACsec management address operational interoperability and Ethernet link security, while ZRsec/FlexOsec extends security into coherent optical transport. Collectively, these projects reflect OIF’s continuing role in coordinating industry requirements across electrical, optical and management interfaces.
Impact on the Optical Networking Industry:
The seven initiatives address several interdependent challenges facing the optical networking industry.
- Bandwidth scaling: The 448G-per-lane electrical interface project and 200G-per-lane bidirectional optical project address the need for higher bandwidth density in AI computing systems. As accelerator clusters grow, electrical and optical interconnects must support increasingly demanding traffic volumes without creating unacceptable power and latency penalties.
- Power efficiency and optical packaging: The two ELSFP projects highlight the importance of external laser architectures in advanced optical systems. Higher-power laser applications, co-packaged optics and increasingly dense optical engines require standardized interfaces and management capabilities. Power consumption and thermal management remain major engineering constraints.
- Interoperability and operational management: CMIS and MACsec management projects address the growing complexity of managing and securing pluggable optical modules. Standardized management interfaces can reduce integration difficulties and improve compatibility among equipment and component suppliers.
- Optical link security: ZRsec/FlexOsec extends the industry’s interoperability efforts into coherent optical link encryption. Security must evolve alongside bandwidth and reach rather than remain an afterthought in next-generation network architectures.
These developments reflect challenges discussed by OIF President Nathan Tracy and board member Cathy Liu of Broadcom in a February 19, 2026 Lightwave interview.
Mr. Tracy emphasized that AI and machine-learning operators face difficult trade-offs involving power consumption, transmission reach and the physical connections required between GPUs and other computing resources. He also noted that the industry must agree on electrical and optical interfaces, modulation approaches and latency requirements. The interview highlighted OIF’s ongoing work on CEI-448G, energy-efficient interfaces, coherent optics, CMIS and interoperability. It also emphasized that developing practical solutions requires collaboration among OIF, IEEE, the Ethernet Alliance and other industry organizations. The seven newly initiated projects represent concrete follow-on technical work addressing several of those challenges.
Conclusions:
OIF’s latest initiatives illustrate how optical networking requirements are evolving beyond simply increasing transmission speeds. AI infrastructure requires coordinated advances in electrical signaling, optical connectivity, laser technology, module management and security.
The 448G electrical and 200G bidirectional optical projects are particularly relevant to scaling high-density AI networks. Meanwhile, external laser source development and standardized module management address the power, packaging and operational challenges associated with increasingly sophisticated optical systems.
As coherent optical links become more integral to data center interconnection, strong security will be needed, especially standardized encryption and management capabilities.
As noted above, these seven initiatives are newly initiated technical projects, not completed Implementation Agreements or commercially deployed solutions. Their eventual industry impact will depend on technical consensus, specification development, multi-vendor interoperability testing and commercial implementation.
OIF’s work is important because it brings optical component suppliers, system vendors, network operators and test-equipment companies together to develop common technical approaches. In an AI infrastructure market increasingly constrained by bandwidth, power consumption, physical connectivity and security, that interoperability work is becoming essential to scaling optical networking.
Looking Ahead to 2027:
OIF’s 2027-Q1 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting will take place Feb. 22–26, 2027, in Charleston, South Carolina.
OIF is where the optical networking industry’s interoperability work gets done. With more than 25 years of effecting forward change in the industry, OIF represents the dynamic ecosystem of 180+ industry leading network operators, system vendors, component vendors and test equipment vendors collaborating to develop interoperable electrical, optical and control solutions that directly impact the industry’s ecosystem and facilitate global connectivity in the open network world. Connect with OIF on LinkedIn, on X, on Bluesky and at https://www.oiforum.com/.
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Sidebar: OIF–ITU-T relationship today (November 2026):
The OIF and ITU-T Study Group 15 (SG15) maintain an active, formal technical liaison relationship. They coordinate optical transport standards, interface specifications, management and interoperability—not by duplicating each other’s work, but by exchanging requirements, technical information and implementation experience. Current evidence includes SG15’s March 2026 liaison to OIF on timestamping accuracy with optical pluggables, followed by OIF’s June 2026 response. OIF is also listed as a liaison organization for current SG15 work on the G.709.1 and G.709.5 optical transport Recommendations.
SG13’s relationship with OIF is less direct. SG13 develops broader future-network architecture, AI-native networking and computing/network integration requirements. Those requirements feed into SG15’s optical-network work, including its ION-2030 framework. SG15 identifies OIF as a potential cooperating organization for optical transport and AI-related optical networking. Thus, the practical OIF relationship today is centered on SG15, with SG13 influencing the broader architectural and requirements environment.
OIF Implementation Agreements are industry-developed specifications intended to facilitate interoperable implementations; they are not ITU-T Recommendations. Liaison and technical coordination between the organizations help ensure that industry implementation requirements and international standards development remain aligned.
| Organization / area | Primary responsibility today | Relationship with OIF |
|---|---|---|
| OIF | Industry-driven implementation agreements and interoperability for optical and electrical interfaces, coherent optics, pluggable modules and related technologies | Develops specifications and implementation agreements; coordinates with standards bodies to promote interoperable implementations |
| ITU-T SG15 | Optical transport, OTN, optical access, fibers, components, physical infrastructure, transport control and management | Direct, active liaison. Exchanges technical liaison statements; OIF is identified in relevant SG15 standards work, including G.709.1 and G.709.5 |
| ITU-T SG13 | Future network architecture, AI/ML for networks, network softwarization, orchestration and computing/network integration | Primarily indirect coordination. Its future-network and AI requirements inform SG15’s optical-network work; current evidence does not establish the same level of direct OIF liaison as SG15 |
In summary, OIF remains an industry implementation and interoperability forum, while ITU-T SG15 provides the international standards framework for optical transport and infrastructure. Their relationship is complementary and active. ITU-T SG13 shapes the broader future-network requirements that increasingly influence this work.
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References:
https://convergedigest.com/oif-seven-projects-448g-ai-optics-zrsec-2026/
OIF Project Highlights: Interoperable 1600ZR+ & Retimed Tx Linear Rx Specs Energy Efficient Interfaces; Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) Whitepaper
Light Counting: optical transceiver sales surge; IEEE 802.3 and ITU-T optical transport standards explained/UEC addendum
Verizon’s $1 Billion Google Dark Fiber Deal Highlights Importance of Optical Networks
Analysis: Nokia’s strong growth in Optical Networks and AI network infrastructure
NTT’s IOWN is (finally) evolving to an All Photonics Network (APN); Physics based AI for enterprise OT
PsiQuantum Targets AI Data Center Networks with Silicon-Photonic Optical Switching
Industry Analysts: Important Optical Networking Trends for 2023
Brooklyn AI-Native 6G Summit Highlights: Verizon’s 7 GHz Field Tests with Ericsson, AI-RAN Demonstrations and Wireless AI Interop
Disclaimer: ChatGPT was used extensively to research the Brooklyn AI-Native 6G Summit, review technical presentations and company announcements, analyze the technologies and demonstrations discussed, and assist with drafting this article. The author reviewed, fact-checked, and edited the material and is 100% responsible for its content.
Introduction:
Verizon’s 7 GHz 6G field testing:
- China’s DeepSig demonstrated an over-the-air AI-RAN system using the open-source OCUDU RAN ecosystem and NVIDIA DGX Spark. Its demonstrations included neural receiver processing, ray-traced channel emulation and AI-based spectrum sensing. This was a meaningful integration demonstration, but publicly available information did not provide independent quantitative results for throughput, latency, spectral efficiency, power consumption or performance against conventional receivers. It therefore should not be interpreted as evidence of commercial readiness.
- InterDigital and Arizona State University (ASU) demonstrated research on interoperable AI-based channel-state-information (CSI) feedback. Their approach uses independently trained encoder and decoder models designed to interoperate without exchanging model parameters or requiring identical architectures. The prototype used an OpenAirInterface-based testbed. The researchers reported performance approaching jointly trained models.
–>This is a potentially important research direction: future wireless systems may need AI models from different suppliers to work together. However, the work remains limited in scope and does not establish a standardized interface or universal multi-vendor interoperability.
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Expanding on AI model interoperability (InterDigital / Arizona State University)
The InterDigital–ASU demonstration on interoperable AI-native Channel State Information (CSI) feedback deserves greater attention than it typically receives at such events. Their live prototype (“From Conventional CSI to Interoperable AI-Native Latent Feedback”) showed that an encoder and decoder trained completely independently—by different parties, without exchanging model parameters or requiring identical architectures—can still achieve performance approaching that of jointly trained models. The work was realized on an OpenAirInterface-based testbed, providing a concrete, over-the-air proof point rather than a purely simulation-based claim.
This matters because CSI feedback is inherently a two-sided AI/ML use case: the UE-side encoder and the gNB-side decoder will frequently come from different vendors in any realistic multi-vendor RAN. 3GPP’s ongoing AI/ML air-interface studies (beginning in Release 18) have already identified CSI compression/enhancement as one of the primary candidates for standardization precisely because of this cross-node dependency. Without well-characterized interfaces for the latent representation, model versioning, performance monitoring, and fallback behavior, operators risk recreating proprietary silos inside an otherwise open or disaggregated RAN architecture.
The technical problem is not merely “can AI compress CSI better?” A more important question if AI models from independent vendors interoperate reliably at scale? The InterDigital/ASU result is an early, encouraging data point that such interoperability is feasible. However, it remains limited in scope: it does not yet define a standardized latent-space interface, multi-vendor conformance testing methodology, or lifecycle management procedures. Those are the harder, longer-term questions that will determine whether AI-native features can actually be deployed across heterogeneous networks rather than remaining confined to single-vendor islands.
As AI-RAN concepts mature, progress on model interoperability—starting with CSI feedback and extending to other two-sided functions such as beam management or positioning—will likely prove as important as advances in model accuracy itself.
Physical AI and distributed infrastructure:
Another demonstration connected humanoid robots in Singapore with synchronized digital twins in Brooklyn. The project brought together Singapore’s Future Communications Program, NeuroRAN, Qualcomm Technologies, NVIDIA and MediaTek. Its workflow combined AI model selection, action generation, digital-twin validation and execution over a 5G/AI-RAN connection.
The demonstration illustrated how wireless connectivity, edge computing and AI orchestration could support remotely coordinated physical systems. However, the public description did not provide detailed measurements of end-to-end latency, synchronization accuracy, packet loss or operational reliability.
More broadly, the Brooklyn 6G Summit emphasized that AI-native networks will require coordination across mobile networks, cloud and edge computing, data-center switching, IP and optical transport. These infrastructure requirements are important, but the event did not establish a proven commercial business model for AI-RAN or AI-native 6G services.
Conclusions:
The Summit’s most useful contribution was to highlight both the opportunities and the engineering challenges facing AI-native 6G. Verizon’s 7 GHz trials exposed the propagation and coverage trade-offs associated with higher-frequency spectrum, emphasizing that future hardware architectures must evolve to overcome severe indoor building penetration limitations. DeepSig demonstrated an integrated AI-RAN research system, while InterDigital and Arizona State University explored a potentially important approach to interoperability between independently trained wireless AI models.
The Physical AI demonstration illustrated how wireless connectivity and distributed computing could support connected robotic systems. Ultimately, this 6G event underscored that scaling these technologies relies heavily on navigating broader, systemic bottlenecks. Chief among these is a shared sense of urgency regarding infrastructure power constraints, which threaten to restrict high-capacity AI-RAN and edge deployment at scale.
True commercial realization will not come from advancing computing, AI, or networking in isolation, but through their absolute, cross-layer convergence into a workload-aware, distributed infrastructure. These developments are worth watching, but they should not be confused with standardized, commercially deployable 6G technology. Significant work remains in radio performance, spectrum availability, AI model interoperability, network architecture, and deployment economics.
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Editor’s Note: This summary is based on publicly available Summit announcements, demonstration descriptions, the published agenda and post-event reporting. Presentation slides and full session recordings were not publicly available at the time of writing. Where detailed performance data were unavailable, claims are attributed to the participating organizations.
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References:
IEEE.tv — Brooklyn AI-Native 6G Summit
https://www.lightreading.com/6g/verizon-cto-assesses-7ghz-band-for-6g-after-first-call-in-the-field
Nokia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og3f2v_WTSk
Highlights and Summary of the 2025 Brooklyn 6G Summit
ATIS Proposes Wireless Physical-Layer Foundation Models for AI-Native 6G Networks
6G Architecture and Economics: Core Network Evolution, AI Integration and Business Case
IMT-2030/6G Spectrum Sharing: The Roles of WRC-27, NTIA and ITU-R WP 5D
Perspective & Analysis of ITU-R Workshop on IMT-2030 (6G) terrestrial radio interfaces: February 10, 2027 in Geneva, Switzerland
AI-Native 6G RAN in Practice: Research and Validation Insights from 6G-MIRAI-HARMONY
Warning: 6G core network must not repeat the 5G SA 3GPP architecture specs vs lack of interoperable standards
Sept 2026 3GPP meeting updates for 5G Advanced and 6G planning (with timeline for submisson to ITU-R WP 5D via ATIS)
FCC plans 6G spectrum auctions before IMT 2030 frequencies have been identified and without a 6G frequency arrangement standard
How NTIA “Call to Action for 6G Leadership and Security” might influence 6G/IMT-2030 standards and 3GPP specifications
Autonomous customer experience required for AI-Native 6G and distributed intelligence at the network edge
