How AI Accelerates Fiber Network Value

How AI Accelerates Fiber Network Value

This week, Peter Cresse, President of Entropy, a technology consulting firm founded in 2003, joined Fiber for Breakfast and took us through an informative session on how AI accelerates fiber network value. Cresse explained that AI models have changed the landscape and that AI is a new workflow. He covered three main areas where he sees the value of fiber, including the data, the network, and the AI fiber home.

Watch this full episode of Fiber for Breakfast here.

Cresse noted that money has been invested in AI models since 2017 and that data has transformed from “big data” to what he describes as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) data. RAG data is a type of data that can be fenced off to create a better prompt retrieval, augmented generative data, and can be put into vectors. He claims this innovative data type created a great opportunity because the output of the model and data creates better decisions and better documents. He said, “we’re not in a revolution for AI, we’re in a transformation.”

As data continues to be formed at an incredible rate, Cresse believes RAG data is one of the most exciting things. The point is, he explains, “is that data together with big, massive data from the internet and other sources come into a massive infrastructure in the middle, and that infrastructure has changed and grown up on these various models (foundation, learning, or machine learning model).” Cresse stated that machine learning is part of AI, but we’re on to the next stage of Large Language Models (LLMs) and reasoning models. It will provide great output and that output is not just to create fancy documents or cool pictures, it’s really to create everything in the process of decisions. That’s the transformation that’s happening in AI; it’s the growth that his firm is seeing, as well as the growth and opportunity we’ll see in fiber today.

AI and fiber are perfect partners. As AI grows, greater fiber capacity is needed, and then with greater fiber capacity, AI can scale exponentially. Cresse says that in the next year or two, the infrastructure being built will need to support an explosion in the AI fiber home. As an example, Microsoft committed $80 billion to AI data centers in 2025 and is now tooling up Three Mile Island for the nuclear power. However, there’s something else that is happening at the data centers as it relates to AI and it has a lot to do with power and chips.

Everyone of us are AI creators because we’re participating with data for our own models like telehealth. Cresse sees telehealth as one of the great growth areas that holds the biggest promise for the AI home. He concludes by saying, AI acceleration means billions of dollars of investment which provides a major opportunity for fiber for a very long time. “Make no mistake, fiber is the best medium for AI, because it’s true all the way down from the data center, to the access network, into the subscriber home.”