The Five Nine

This week, we sat down to unpack one of the biggest emerging concepts in the broadband space – the open access network. 

Open access, like any broadband network, is no cakewalk and comes with its own share of challenges. But it also presents underrated opportunities for the industry, particularly in the United States where the model is less often used.  

Utopia Fiber and Gigapower are two of just a handful of o...

Guest host Liz Coyne wrangled an exec from Nokia Bell Labs to talk about the company’s recent mission to the moon. The mission came as Nokia Bell Labs celebrated its 100th anniversary but the landing didn’t go quite as expected.  

Nokia’s Thierry Klein, President of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia, tells Liz all about why the company is aiming for the moon in the first place, what it learned from t...

This week, we delve back into the intersection of AI and networking, and more specifically what enterprises need to know and prepare for as AI moves to the edge.

Just how distributed will AI really be? How will enterprises decide what workloads go where? And what should they be thinking about and planning for to make the AI-driven future a reality?

We sat down with GTT SVP of Product Engineering to sift through these thorny questio...

The Fierce Network crew made it back safe and sound, for the most part, from Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona. But the show, which is essentially the official start to the year in telecom, gave us a lot to think about. We spent the week digesting what all the announcements from the show mean for the industry and now we're looking forward to what the rest of 2025 has in store for operators. Here’s what we have our ...

The hotels are booked, the bags are packed and at the end of this week, the flights will be boarded. But what will we find when we get there? That’s the question we’re going to tackle today and the answers just might surprise you.

With me are Fierce Network’s editor-in-chief Liz Coyne, executive editor Monica Alleven, Senior Reporter Dan Jones and our Research guru Mitch Wagner.

This podcast is written and hosted ...

This week, we delve into the nitty gritty of one of the biggest turnaround stories in telecom in recent years: that of Frontier Communications.  

Frontier recently made headlines when Verizon agreed to pay $20 billion in cash to acquire the company as part of a bid to drastically expand its fiber footprint. That deal is now expected to close in Q1 of 2026. But while it’s flying high now, Frontier’s fortunes we...

This week, we explore the rise of sovereign clouds across the globe. 

You’ve probably heard of GDPR by now, or at least data privacy. And while sovereignty is sort of in a similar sphere, it’s more about data direction than privacy.  

We sat down with Vultr’s Kevin Cochrane to examine what sovereignty means, how it’s accomplished and the impact AI could have on the landscape. 

This podcas...

This week, we sat down to pull back the curtain on the idea factory chugging along behind the scenes at one of the largest hyperscalers: Google Cloud. 

CTO Will Grannis heads up Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, or OCTO, which is comprised of senior Google technology experts and former enterprise CTOs. Together, this team sifts through the company’s big ideas to figure out what will work and what won’t. ...

This week, we’re taking a look at what the future holds for operators when it comes to the mobile core.  

The march to the cloud has been a steady but rather slow journey for operators. And nowhere is this more true than for mobile core services. But that could soon change, thanks to a recent deal Alianza struck to acquire Metaswitch from Microsoft.  

Here’s what Alianza’s CEO Brian Beutler had...

In this episode of The Five Nine Podcast, host James Careless dives into the future of 5G technology with special guests Matthew Almand, Chief Technology Officer at Texas A&M University System, and Thierry Chau, Vice President of Market Development at CommScope.

Texas A&M University System is gearing up for a full-scale 5G transformation across its flagship and regional campuses, and Matthew shares the challenges of support...

This week, we’re taking a look at what the recent U.S. election means for telecom and tech policy in the years ahead.  

Donald Trump just won a second term in the White House, but this go around could be very different from the first thanks in part to the entrance of new key characters - like Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy – into the equation.  

To sift through the implications of another Trump term on telecom and tech policy a...

This week, we’re venturing into the thorny territory that is cloud security.  

In a newly issued security report, Google Cloud noted that new tools are lowering barriers to entry for malicious actors, and will make it easier for them to launch attacks in the year ahead. The report also noted that something as seemingly small as a compromised identity can have an outsized impact on an enterprise given the widespread use of integrate...

This week, we’re returning to the intersection of AI and network transport.  

We recently spoke with Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson about how AI is impacting the network, demanding ever-larger pipes for data transport and training. That’s, of course, a boon for a company like Lumen, which has now signed partnership deals with cloud companies and AI pioneers Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google. 

And yet, AI itself is rapidly evo...

This week, we're getting a behind the scenes look at the private networks that power our ports and industrial campuses and keep us connected both underground, in the subway, and inside stadiums. As consumers, we're used to being connected to sprawling cellular networks from the likes of AT& T and Verizon in the U. S., BT, and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. SK Telecom, Telstra, Vodafone, you know, all those big operators.

But priva...

This week, we’re turning our attention to automation, and, more specifically, why exactly it hasn’t taken over yet.  

Fully autonomous networks are something of a holy grail for telcos and data center operators alike. And yet, progress has been slow at best. As AT&T CTO Jeremy Legg said in June of this year, “We’re a ways away from autonomous networks. But there are points within networks that are being made autonomous.” 

But w...

This week we’re going back down the AI rabbit hole, but we’re venturing down a new tunnel to talk about something called data curation. 

Though AI is still a developing technology, it’s well enough known at this point that models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. But for enterprises looking to fine tune publicly available models, it can be a challenge to make sure they’re making the right data available. Why? Well, t...

This week, we’re diving into the wonderful world of artificial intelligence, taking an in-depth look at how to balance risks inherent in the technology with the high expectations generated by a now years-long hype cycle. And we couldn’t have a better guest to explore the topic with.  

Christopher Savoie is the co-inventor of something called the adaptive agent oriented software architecture. And what the heck is that? Well, it’s th...

Description: This week, we’re putting data centers under the microscope – but not from the perspective you might think. As a B2B news outlet, we normally cover data centers from an insider viewpoint. But with AI helping drive a massive data center expansion effort, we wondered: “how do communities feel about all these big buildings coming to town?”

So, we reached out to two local officials to tell us what they’ve heard from residen...

This week, we sat down with Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson to delve into how AI is changing not just the network, but the culture inside telecom companies.

Just a few years ago, you’d have been forgiven for viewing Lumen as something of a company on the outs. Though company executives talked for years about transforming from a traditional telecom to a technology company, Lumen’s strategy was – to put it kindly – an enigma to a...