Diana Gooaverts

Telecommunications companies are sitting on thousands of old central office (CO) facilities sprinkled across the U.S. that could be just right for serving latency-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. And it seems they’re waking up to this fact as they continue efforts to retire the old copper network gear previously housed in these structures. AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Frontier Communications and Ziply Fiber are among the operators which have started using their old COs for colocation and other cloud deployments. Lumen, meanwhile, is using COs for enterprise colocation.

More than a million residents in the southeastern U.S. started the week without fixed broadband and plenty more without cell phone service after Hurricane Helene brought never-before-seen levels of flooding to the valleys of Appalachia. Some operators on the extent of the damage and anticipated timelines for recovery:

The message that emerged from Comcast Converge was that everything the company does—mobile, video, sports streaming, security and, of course, broadband—relies on the performance of its network infrastructure. By extension (given the fact that no one has plugged anything into a router to connect to the internet in ages), that means Wi-Fi. The way Comcast is thinking about convergence is probably best exemplified with this statistic: The first NFL playoff game which was exclusively streamed on its Peacock service in January accounted for a whopping 30 percent of all US internet traffic.