Tag Archives: AI

AI and BEAD Non-Deployment

Yesterday, President Trump signed an Executive Order that gives the federal government the sole authority to regulate AI. The EO provides three justifications for asserting federal authority.

United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.  But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative.  First, State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes that makes compliance more challenging, particularly for start-ups.  Second, State laws are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.  For example, a new Colorado law banning “algorithmic discrimination” may even force AI models to produce false results in order to avoid a “differential treatment or impact” on protected groups.  Third, State laws sometimes impermissibly regulate beyond State borders, impinging on interstate commerce.

Within 30 days, the U.S. Attorney General is required to establish an AI Litigation Task Force with the sole responsibility to challenge State AI Laws. It seems likely this will result in a series of federal lawsuits trying to preempt any State AI regulations.

Of concern to the broadband world is that the EO includes specific language that singles out BEAD grant funding. The EO says:

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Commerce, through the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, shall issue a Policy Notice specifying the conditions under which States may be eligible for remaining funding under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program that was saved through my Administration’s “Benefit of the Bargain” reforms, consistent with 47 U.S.C. 1702(e)-(f).  That Policy Notice must provide that States with onerous AI laws identified pursuant to section 4 of this order are ineligible for non-deployment funds, to the maximum extent allowed by Federal law.  The Policy Notice must also describe how a fragmented State regulatory landscape for AI threatens to undermine BEAD-funded deployments, the growth of AI applications reliant on high-speed networks, and BEAD’s mission of delivering universal, high-speed connectivity.

In case you are wondering the extent of State AI regulations, the following map comes from BCLP, which is accompanied by a description of existing and pending AI regulations, by State. As this map shows, over half of the States already have some form of AI regulation, and only three states don’t have existing or pending AI regulations.

It’s been clear that NTIA has been seeking a mechanism for denying non-deployment funds, which are the portion of the $42.5 billion in BEAD that is not being spent on infrastructure. Current estimates are that non-deployment funds will be more than $21 billion. These funds are supposed to be distributed to States under the IIJA legislation. This EO gives NTIA the grounds for denying non-deployment funds for a lot of States.

If you read through the existing AI regulations, most are of two types. Many States have enacted legislation that makes it illegal to use AI to defraud people, adding AI to laws that already forbid using emails, telephone calls, and other forms of communication. There are also States that have legislation that tries to protect citizens privacy. There are a few States with other restrictions.

State Broadband Offices in States that have AI regulations do not have the power to overturn AI regulations, and State legislatures must act if they want to cancel AI regulations to preserve non-deployment funds. That may be a futile effort, because my best guess is that we haven’t seen the end of attempts to deny non-deployment funds and that this is only the first volley. For what it’s worth, there is opposition to overturning State regulation of AI in Congress, but it would be extraordinary for this Congress to override an Executive Order with legislation.

Misaligned Priorities

We have several sets of broadband priorities at odds with each other in the country. The federal government is on a big push to move all transactions with the government to digital. The example that got a lot of press was when FEMA said it would only communicate with disaster victims through emails and its online portal. But government agencies across the board are pushing folks online to communicate.

The government is also clearly supporting an AI revolution where AI is supposed to revolutionize the way we work and live. According to federal government rhetoric, we are a little bit ahead of the Chinese in terms of AI development, and politicians seem to support the idea of doing whatever is needed to make sure that the U.S. wins the AI race.

At the same time that we are prioritizing AI and moving everything online, we seem to be deprioritizing broadband. NTIA cut the BEAD program funding in half to save money, at the expense of building new networks that would provide solid infrastructure for the next fifty years. The Administration outright killed the Digital Equity Act, which had the goal of getting computers into people’s hands and training them how to use them.

These goals are clearly at odds with each other. Consider the Digital Equity funding. There is a huge lost opportunity cost for not giving people the tools to enter the digital world that the government wants. What is the cost to society for people who aren’t given the tools to enter the digital world? Digital equity folks can rattle off tons of stories of folks who were given help with broadband who then went on to work in a tech field, start a business, become teachers, or otherwise thrive and contribute to society.

The disparity between these policies makes no sense to me. It looks to me like the Digital Equity Act was killed for the simple reason that it had the name ‘equity’ in its title. But digital equity never had any of the connotations that politicians classify as DEI. Digital Equity has always been an effort to help people learn more about and master computer technology and broadband. It makes no sense not to have digital equity as a goal if we want everybody to be able to use AI or communicate with the government online.

The BEAD grants were trimmed back for one reason only – to save money. The new Administration sent folks into every nook and cranny of the government to find ways to save money. On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing, and I have to think that many of the cuts to government expenses are good in the long run. But BEAD was never about spending money. BEAD is an infrastructure bill. There are reams of economic studies that show that spending money on infrastructure always returns more to the economy than the cost.

Just in my part of North Carolina, there are a bunch of counties where all of the BEAD awards went to satellite broadband. Set aside that Western North Carolina is mountainous and heavily wooded, and there will be homes that won’t be able to get adequate broadband from the satellites. Set aside that many of these counties have low overall incomes and many folks won’t be able to afford the satellite broadband.

The bigger issue is that building fiber is about a lot more than just bringing broadband to homes. When counties get a fiber network, they can start to get creative to find ways to leverage a new network to improve the local economy. Satellite broadband is finally starting to deliver the broadband that the average home needs to join the modern world. But satellite broadband isn’t going to support schools. It’s not going to enable a county to attract a new factory. Satellite is not going to enable a county to seek ways to improve cellular coverage. Fiber is the infrastructure needed to help the overall community, while satellite broadband just helps customers who can afford it.

I know this is probably coming across as another rant, but I know I’m right. BEAD and the Digital Equity Act were tools that could have made a big difference in rural communities. I’m pretty sure that by killing broadband programs that AI will not be coming to the rural counties in Western North Carolina. Folks here are going to fall through the cracks because they will be unable to communicate with FEMA and other government agencies. It feels like the government is making a conscious decision to exclude Western North Carolina. I don’t think this is deliberate, but unfortunately, by pursuing misaligned priorities, that’s exactly what is happening. The current government is making far too many decisions in a vacuum without considering the bigger picture.

Where is Congress?

One of the things that mystifies me this year is how many federal elected officials have disappeared in terms of supporting broadband. For example, there has been little talk of elected officials openly trying to stop NTIA from gutting the BEAD grant program. There’s no news about trying to force NTIA to go ahead and award grants from the Digital Equity Act. This may be happening behind the scenes, but there’s no big public news about supporting better broadband.

This is not intended as a political blog. I am truly puzzled by this big change. I fully understand that politics in DC is a mess right now. But the sudden indifference to broadband is a huge shift from just the recent past. Broadband has always been one of the few topics that has had bipartisan support from rural legislators, because they all knew that this was important to their constituents. Over the last five or ten years, I’ve heard from dozens of County governments who have said that the lack of good broadband was the number one issue for their constituents.

That message has always carried upward to federal legislators, particularly in the House of Representatives. Over the years, I’ve talked to a number of House members, or their staffs, who wanted to know more about the broadband market in their district. I can’t think of an ISP preparing to ask for a broadband grant that was unable to get a letter of support from their House member. And House members always turn up for ribbon cuttings for the launch of a new broadband network. Getting better broadband in rural communities has always been big local news, and elected officials have always participated in trying to get better broadband and celebrating it when it shows up.

The most visible political support for better broadband has come at the County level, and I know many County governments are confused and dismayed by the sudden retraction of the BEAD grant program. A lot of County Boards put a lot of effort into the BEAD process, because BEAD grant scoring rules in a lot of states rewarded ISPs that got real commitments from local politicians instead of the more common generic letter of support. County Boards were led to believe that they had some say in choosing the ISPs they wanted, since BEAD scoring gave extra points for such effort. A lot of County Boards even made tentative grant awards as matching for BEAD using local or ARPA funds, because that supported the local ISP they favored. Unfortunately, the sudden push to award BEAD to the lowest bidder means a lot of those local grants will go unused, and the ARPA funds will evaporate.

One of the most perplexing aspects of cutting BEAD funding is that the federal government is making a massive push for AI. Bringing AI into everyday life can only happen if everybody has access to good broadband. I’m truly perplexed how the government and the tech companies that are supporting them are for AI but not for spending the BEAD funding that is already in the pipeline.

A good compromise to support AI would be to let States have some or all of the non-deployment funds. It looks like that is going to be roughly half of the $45 billion allocated to BEAD. States could do a lot with that money if they were free to use it in ways they choose. It might make sense at this point to redistribute the non-deployment funds – the allocation of BEAD funds to States was based on faulty FCC maps and clearly gave some States too much money, and others not enough.

Lack of any vocal bipartisanship for broadband probably also doesn’t bode well for other needed legislation, like reforming the Universal Fund. I’m not hopeful that much will change with the BEAD funding or USF reform unless federal politicians speak up and remind NTIA and the administration that good broadband is essential for the American economy and a future that includes AI.

AI and the FCC

In July, the White House released Winning the Race, America’s AI Plan, that described the administration’s view of the role that government will have in the future of AI. Under the section titled Recommended Policy Actions, the White House envisions the following role for the FCC:

Led by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its obligations and authorities under the Communications Act of 1934.

I’ve been thinking about this directive since the report was released, trying to envision exactly what it means, particularly the reference to the Communications Act of 1934. There are already a handful of ways that the FCC has gotten involved with AI:

  • Addressing AI-generated Robocalls: The FCC has issued rulings clarifying that AI-generated voice calls fall under existing robocall restrictions, requiring prior express consent from the recipient. The agency has also levied fines against companies using AI-generated robocalls.
  • Political Advertising and Transparency: The FCC has proposed rules to mandate disclosures when AI is used to generate content in political advertisements broadcast on radio and television.
  • Spectrum Management and Innovation: The FCC is investigating how AI can be leveraged for better spectrum utilization and management. This includes exploring using AI to analyze spectrum usage data, potentially leading to more efficient allocation and sharing of wireless frequencies.

All of these efforts seem to fall within the FCC’s regulatory authority, which stems back to the Communications Act of 1934. But it’s hard to envision an FCC role beyond issues that it already regulates.

Subsequent to the announced AI plan, the Administration announced that the FCC is also being tasked to review State regulation of AI, and Chairman Brendan Carr announced on July 24 that it’s possible the FCC would preempt state AI regulations. This announcement perplexes me, because I can’t think of any authority that would allow the FCC to preempt State AI regulations.

The only way for the FCC to preempt state regulation of AI is if the FCC asserts federal regulation over AI. That would be contrary to the overall philosophy of the current FCC, which changed the tenor of broadband regulation starting when the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai made it clear that the FCC has no role in regulating broadband and made it clear that broadband is not a telecommunications service. The FCC even went so far as to hand off some remaining broadband regulations to the FTC. Chairman Carr has openly agreed with this interpretation of the FCC’s authority over broadband.

Since the FCC has elected to not regulate broadband, I don’t see how it can regulate AI. The only tie between AI and the FCC is that AI rides fiber connections to get to and from data centers and customers. As such, AI is a service that uses broadband, but is clearly not broadband. The best analogy to AI from a regulatory perspective is that it is essentially the same as cloud services like Amazon AWS that ride fiber paths. I can’t recall any discussion ever of FCC authority to regulate cloud services.

To further confound the issue, the long-standing arrangement between States and the federal government is that States are free to regulate anything that the federal government chooses not to regulate. The recent AI report makes it clear that the Administration doesn’t think AI should be heavily regulated, even though some in Congress have some different ideas on the question.

The Chairman’s announcement makes it clear that the FCC is going to try to preempt state AI regulations that the federal government doesn’t like. But it seems certain that any attempt by the FCC to do so will end up in protracted legal battles. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington D.C. have passed or introduced AI legislation – so the FCC will have a tall task, and a lot of states willing to push back on any FCC attempt to preempt state legislatures.

The Human Touch

Recently, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience. This sounds a lot like communications with customers I’ve seen over the years from all of the big ISPs – I can think of dozens of company messages telling customers that a big ISP cares about customer service.

What’s different about Mr. Sampath’s email is that he also included an email address where customers can contact him directly if they are having a problem that is not getting resolved. I have to assume this will use a different email address from the one he uses for normal emails, because it seems likely that his inbox will quickly fill with customer complaints.

This reminded me of an experience I had back in the early 1980s when I worked at Southwestern Bell. The company had an executive telephone hotline that was supposedly a direct line to the President for customers who knew the special number. Calls to this number were recorded and landed on the desk of somebody who happened to sit close to me. I would often overhear some of the complaints that came to the executive line, and they were the normal things you would expect – overbilling, botched installations, etc. Employees around the company responded quickly to every referral from the executive hotline.

I have to think that Mr. Sampath is doing something similar and has recreated the executive hotline using an email address. If Verizon customer service is indeed getting better, I assume anybody who makes a valid claim to that email will get some attention from elsewhere in Verizon. If that doesn’t happen, this will quickly be chalked up as another big company public relations ploy rather than an actual aid for frustrated customers.

I have to wonder how well this idea will work with such a gigantic company with coast-to-coast customers. I know at Southwestern Bell that no employee wanted to get the internal message from the executive suite that they had messed up. Will that work for a much bigger company?

People who run smaller ISPs, or other small businesses that deal with the public, will laugh at this article, because fielding customer issues is a daily part of every executive’s work day. It’s something that nobody loves doing, but it comes with operating a business. Every ISP hopes that employees can satisfy every customer so that the top guys never hear about problems. But the folks at Southwestern Bell many years ago figured out that there had to be a way for customers who aren’t satisfied with the routine solution to have an outlet to be heard.

This story has me thinking about how important the human touch is with customers – having a real person to talk to who can solve a problem. That question was prompted for me when I noticed that Verizon is touting that it has incorporated AI into the customer service process. I have to wonder if AI will be used to tackle problems sent to Mr Sampath’s email.

While big companies can pretend otherwise, we have not yet reached the time when an AI can provide the same quality response as a real person. My gut tells me that it will be a huge mistake for the big ISPs and carriers to take the human touch out of customer interactions. If so, that’s good news for the smaller companies that compete with big ISPs. I foresee that small ISP advertising will emphasize that customers can always talk to a real person.

 

AI Hype Begins

It didn’t take long after the widespread introduction of AI into the business environment for a carrier to claim it is using AI better than the competition. Masha Abarinova wrote an article in Fierce Networks that quotes Comcast as saying it is using AI more effectively than its fiber competitors.

The article covers a discussion with Elad Nafshi, the chief network officer for Comcast, who brags on the ways Comcast is already using AI more effectively than fiber-based ISPs. She quotes Nashi as claiming that Comcast has embedded AI that is “literally feet away from a customer” with real-time pattern detection capabilities that give Comcast the ability to pinpoint interference in the network.

I can already anticipate the fiber ISP retort to this claim, with fiber ISPs saying they don’t need a last-foot AI capability because fiber doesn’t have any interference since it has the same quality of service from end-to-end in the network.

I’ve been waiting for this first shot across the bow and suspect that Comcast’s claim will set off a chain of industry players claiming their flavor of AI is better than the competition. These claims are mostly hype and are aimed at Wall Street analysts and not at the general public. The biggest companies in the industry never miss a chance to claim they have an advantage. It’s easy at this early stage of AI to make this kind of claim since nobody can tell how much of such a claim is hype versus reality. Throw around enough buzzwords, and nobody can challenge such a claim.

A more interesting observation in the article quotes Nafshi as saying that general AI use among customers has not resulted in increased network traffic. He noted that while customers are using ChatGPT and OpenAI, the interactions between customers and the clouds are mostly passing text, which is not data intensive.

This differs a lot from what other industry players have been claiming about the future of AI. The article cites AT&T’s prediction that its network traffic will double by 2028 due to AI. Zayo cited an expected huge growth in network traffic as the justification to buy the fiber networks from Crown Castle.

I’ve been scratching my head for several months trying to figure out how AI might create the predicted explosive growth. I’ve yet to see anybody describe the specific AI traffic or functions that could double the traffic for a company like AT&T.

Network traffic is growing for other reasons. Ericsson recently predicted a 16% annual growth in cellular traffic. Numerous predictions for home and business broadband have predicted growth rates of 10-12% annually. Something drastic and new would be needed to double overall traffic on AT&T by 2028.

What’s the Future of Keyboards?

My consulting firm does surveys and I want to highlight the results from a recent survey. This was a random survey with statistically valid results surveyed a cross section of the community, so the results are reasonably believable.

We asked survey respondents the number of hours per day they use a cell phone and computer or tablet. The following chart shows the response by age:These results are not as accurate as studies that require people to keep a usage log, and the above numbers tabulate the number of hours people think they use devices. Note that these statistics come from just one survey.

These results reinforce a  few things I’ve been reading from various studies. Those over 65 are still using devices for fewer hours per day than younger age groups. 18 to 34 years old are using devices more than older folks, on average.

The response that I want to highlight is the big shift in usage of those under 34 to using cell phones instead of computers. Just a few years ago, our surveys showed an even split of device use for this age group. Going back a few more years and usage would have been weighted to using computers.

Unfortunately, our surveys don’t reach those under 18, but everything I’ve been reading says that teens and younger kids have migrated to cell phones to a greater degree than shown by this survey for 18-34 year olds. Kids are not just using cell phones – they are talking to them and rarely use a phone’s keyboard.

That’s the phenomenon that makes me ask if we are seeing the beginning of the end for typing into computers. I’ve been reading science fiction my whole life, and a constant prediction of the future has always been communicating with computers by voice.

The recent advent of AI is likely to increase this trend away from typing. I’ve been promised a good computer assistant since I used Ask Jeeves in 1996. No good software has ever come along that isn’t more work than doing things myself, but with AI that is likely to change soon.

There is no denying that younger folks are already making the transition away from typing and now prefer the smart phone. Friends of mine with younger kids say they complain loudly about having to use a keyboard. I’m clearly old school. I spend four hours or more a day writing and a lot of time working on complicated spreadsheets. My brain is completely trained on using a keyboard for those functions, and I’m not sure I’d want to try to transition to talking. But I love voice-to-text on my phone and I see the appeal to use voice for other functions.

It’s not hard to envision a reasonably near future where people will transition more from keyboards to talking. The future choice will not be between computer and cell phone, but a choice of the best screen to use for various functions. Unless we finally get functional glasses or holograms that can display anywhere we go. Give me the whole package and maybe I’m ready to talk.

AI in Telecom

NVIDIA recently issued its third annual State of AI in Telecommunications report. The company manufacturers many of the cards used in AI data centers, so the company is clearly focused on AI adoption. NVIDIA issues similar reports for other industries.

The 2025 report is the result of a survey that NVIDIA administered to 450 telecom professionals across the globe. The respondents represented a global mix of telecommunications companies, including network operators, system integrators, internet service providers, network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and more. Sixty percent of respondents were executives and directors of companies. The report doesn’t tell us anything about the companies included in the survey but does note that NVIDIA has mostly been concentrating on cellular carriers.

The reason that is important is that I found this survey when somebody online mentioned this report when saying that most telcos have adopted or will soon be adopting AI. The NVIDIA report is fairly careful to say the results represent the views of the 450 respondents, but even NVIDIA occasionally slips up with global statements such as, “97% of telcos are adopting AI. Nearly half are already deploying it”.

Here is how NVIDIA claims AI is being used in telecom:

  • 37% are using AI in network operations and planning.
  • 44% are using AI to optimize the customer experience.
  • 58% are using AI to increase employee productivity.
  • A smaller percentage of respondents are using AI for improved security, customer retention, energy conservation, regulatory compliance, marketing optimization, retail operations, and logistics.
  • 21% say AI has helped them increase revenues by more than 10%, with another 24% saying revenues have increased 5-10%.
  • 11% claim that AI has helped them reduce costs by more than 10%, while another 26% say costs are down 5-10%.
  • 43% say that finding AI experts has been the key obstacle to further AI adoption.

All of this may be true for the largest carriers around the world, but I can’t imagine it is true for the large number of smaller ISPs I know.

I’m curious how many smaller ISPs have done anything serious with AI. It’s hard for anybody to claim they don’t use AI since it is now seemingly built into every online tool in some manner. I’ve talked to a number of folks at ISPs who use AI to help write emails, memos, and reports.

I’d love to hear from folks at small ISPs. Is your ISP using AI for anything like what is described by NVIDIA? That might include things like using AI to chat directly with customers online or using AI to monitor network performance. Everybody I’ve talked to is curious about the potential of AI, but almost universally they aren’t ready to trust it in real-time applications. I’m curious if there is a quiet AI revolution going on at smaller ISPs that I haven’t heard about.

In a few years small ISPs might not have a choice. I have to think that in a few years that many of the software packages that come with network gear will include AI application to monitor performance or troubleshoot problems, but I haven’t heard any claims about that yet from vendors.

AI Impact on Power and Broadband

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process.

The big question that nobody seems to be able to answer is if AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer. It’s a reasonable question to ask because I seem to read weekly how AI is going to affect the way we communicate, and that seems likely something that will involve broadband.

An easier question to answer is AI’s impact on U.S. power consumption. It’s clear, at least for now, that AI and cryptocurrencies are fueling the construction of a lot of new data centers. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) report for 2024 predicts a big uptick in worldwide power demand coming from data centers. IEA estimates that worldwide data centers in 2022 used about 460 Terawatt Hours (TWh) of power and predicts that by 2026 demand from data centers will grow to between 620 and 1,050 TWh. That would be the equivalent of adding as much energy used annually by Sweden at the low end of the estimate or Germany at the top end. IEA says that data centers in the U.S. will grow from using 4% of generated powerin 2022 to 6% in 2026.

The impact on broadband usage is harder to pin down. AI will impact broadband usage is several ways. There is the middle-mile impact of supporting the many new AI data centers. There are two types of data going to and from data centers. There is traffic sent to and from users asking AI to respond to queries. That means a public-facing AI data center should be equally as busy as a data center that responds to Google searches today. The second big use of broadband comes from feeding the public-facing data centers with the massive amount of data needed to ’train’ the AI. A public AI data center imports piles of data scraped from websites and other sources. An AI data center will create a busy node on the Internet that will draw a lot of traffic.

The biggest uses of future AI will probably not be in the big public AI data centers, but from data centers dedicated to big corporate users. Big corporations like Bank of America are not going to use the big public AI data centers, but will create their own AI data center to crunch their own data. One can picture a large new stream of Internet traffic coming from the many branches of Bank of America to feed the company’s own AI data center.

Both kinds of data centers will create new demand for long-haul and middle-mile fiber networks. Companies are likely to place AI data centers close to the existing long-haul networks that carry traffic from city to city. Companies that operate fiber transport networks are expecting a lot of AI-related traffic. I remember seeing that one of the justifications for the recent upgrade in Zayo long-haul networks was to prepare for AI.

The impact on home broadband is harder to predict. It’s possible that AI will decrease the amount of bandwidth used at home. If I research a topic today to write a blog, I do a Google search and perhaps visit a half dozen websites looking for background information. If I instead ask an AI search engine to find what I need, I’m going to look at fewer web sites if I’m satisfied with the AI answer to my questions. A recent article in Scientific American suggests that Google might use 30 times more energy to answer my question using AI instead of its traditional search engine. But at my home computer, I will likely use less bandwidth to get the condensed response from the Google AI. Most of my interfaces with AI involve transmitting short questions to the AI cloud, and receiving relatively short responses.

This doesn’t mean that there won’t eventually be more data-intensive uses for AI in the home. It may be possible to use AI to create a truly smart home that takes care of our needs automatically. I’m still waiting for the big virtual input screen that floats in the air in front of me like I’ve been seeing in futuristic movies. But for now, for most users, it’s hard to think that AI will increase bandwidth usage at home.

ISPs and AI

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked lately is what I think the impact AI will have on the broadband industry.

All of the big ISPs in the industry have actively been pursuing the use of AI. For example, AT&T Labs says it is investigating the use of AI to optimize the customer experience and auto-heal the network. Comcast says that it is using AI to help process petabytes of data every day. Comcast also worked with Broadcom to develop the first broadband chip for nodes, amps, and modems that bring AI into the network. Verizon is working on an AI solution to improve the customer experience in its IVR systems for customers calling the company. Charter is working AI into its customer interface. It’s also using AI to help customers generate commercials for advertising on the cable network.

Before talking about those uses, a basic primer on AI is needed. Most people are familiar with public AI platforms like Chat GPT or the Google Cloud Platform. No big corporations are using the open public versions of AI. Any data dumped into those systems is available to other users. Instead, corporations are buying and implementing private versions of AI that they train using their own data. One of the common issues with public AI platforms is that AI will hallucinate and invent an answer to a question. However, hallucination can be controlled in private networks where the user strictly controls the data.

All of the big ISPs, and seemingly most companies that field a lot of calls from customers, want to use AI to improve the customer experience. There are different approaches to using AI. One of the primary uses of AI is to eliminate customer menus where customers are asked to wade through a menu to choose who they want to talk to. AI can be used to interpret a customer request and direct the call to the appropriate place. AI can also be used to quickly pull all information about a caller to put it at the fingertips of a customer service rep. Maybe the most important feature of AI is that a customer conversation can carry across different customer service reps, meaning that a caller doesn’t have to repeat basic information every time they are transferred.

There are companies in the country that have completely automated AI to fully handle the customer interface, but it’s not likely that any big ISPs have gotten that bold yet. All of the feedback I’ve heard is that it’s still far too easy for an AI system to badly misinterpret what a customer wants. The same goes for attempts to fully automate an online chatbot. It doesn’t seem like anybody has come close to perfecting this yet, and doing it clumsily is frustrating for customers. But who knows, maybe in the future, most customer interfaces could be entirely handled by an AI representative.

Big ISPs are all investigating the use of AI in the network. The most obvious uses of AI is to interpret real-time network data to detect problems and analyze network quality. For many years, networks have used alarms to identify problems. One of the issues with an alarm system is that ISPs get constantly hit with minor alarms, and it’s not always easy to pick out the ones that matter. One of the hopes with AI is to look deeper at the performance of network equipment to identify problems long before an alarm is triggered.

ISPs are also starting to use AI for load balancing. It’s easy to think of broadband usage on a network as a steady state, but the reality is that usage spikes and dives erratically from second to second. AI can be used to examine usage on all segments of a network. For example, there are numerous paths from the network core in a fiber or cable network, and AI can examine all of them in real-time, as well as understand how usage spikes from neighborhoods can overwhelm other parts of the network.

The big temptation is to let AI take an active role in fixing problems. That idea makes a lot of network engineers nervous because AI is still nothing more than a series of algorithms created by programmers. It’s incredibly challenging for any programmer to create perfect programming, and the fear is having a network get out of control in a way that humans will have a hard time regaining control without shutting the network down. It’s not hard to envision an automated AI repeatedly magnifying and compounding a network problem.

The last use of AI by ISPs is to automate functions done by people. None of the big ISPs are talking about this because doing so sparks a lot of anxiety in the workforce. AI seems to be efficient at processing repetitive data or generating routine reports for management. It’s becoming obvious that other industries like banking and insurance companies have already been able to reduce some staff due to AI efficiencies. It’s likely that ISPs are already quietly reducing some clerical and middle-management staff due to AI. This is the part of AI that makes workers nervous. AI is more likely to replace white-collar workers and middle management than hands-on technicians. But this is going to be done quietly, at least until one of the big ISP CEO spills the beans on an investor call.

It’s going to be a while until any of these benefits move downhill to smaller companies. AI hardware and software is prohibitively expensive and smaller ISPs will have to wait until there are generic solutions offered by AI vendors.