• Zayo ‘breaks ground’ on ‘built-for-AI’ routes
• Starlink gears up for next-gen LEO launches
• New owner reverses Vodafone Spain’s decline 

In today’s industry news roundup: Zayo has started building three “purpose-built-for-AI, long-haul dark fibre routes” in the US; Starlink is set to add even more satellites and capacity to its constellation; Vodafone Spain’s new owner, Zegona, says the operator’s broadband and mobile customer bases have turned a corner and are now growing; and much more!

US long-distance network operator Zayo has started building three of its new “purpose-built-for-AI, long-haul dark fibre routes” that are designed to provide network capacity between AI datacentres, and has completed the upgrade of its North American “core network” so it can offer end-to-end 400 Gbit/s wavelength services. The operator says its new builds are “designed not just for today’s needs, but for where AI demand is headed next”. The routes are: Chicago to Columbus (385 route miles), “with connectivity to all major datacentres in both metros”; Chicago to Minneapolis (521 route miles), which features “ultra-high fibre counts and direct connections to Zayo’s AI-optimised corridors, including Chicago to Columbus and Zayo’s Spread networks [which run between Chicago and New York]”; and Phoenix to Tuscon (123 route miles), which will connect key datacentres “in one of the south-west’s fastest-growing AI corridors”. The builds are part of Zayo’s commitment made in January this year to build more than 5,000 fibre route miles in the US “to meet the growing demands of AI workloads”. Commenting on the construction of the new routes, Bill Long, chief product and strategy officer at Zayo, noted: “AI requires scale at an order of magnitude greater than any technology we’ve seen before. As the only provider to build long-haul infrastructure at scale in the last decade, Zayo is uniquely positioned to deliver on this need in a way that no one else in the market can. We’re not just building the infrastructure AI requires today, we’re powering connectivity between these key AI corridors, and the communities along the way, for years to come,” he added in this announcement. One company that might question some of those claims is Lumen Technologies, which is also building new routes and adding capacity across the US to hook up datacentres. The race to build such new datacentre interconnect (DCI) capacity is one of the trends examined in TelecomTV’s latest free-to-download DSP Leaders report, Trends in Telco AI Infrastructure. 

Elon Musk’s low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite network operator Starlink, which is part of the billionaire’s SpaceX business, is gearing up to launch its first third-generation satellites (GEN3) that will each be capable of delivering more than 1Tbit/s of downlink and 200 Gbit/s of uplink capacity, more than 10 times the downlink capacity and 24 times the uplink capacity of its second-generation ‘birds’. Starlink noted in this lengthy update that it now has more than 7,800 satellites in orbit with a combined aggregate capacity of more than 450 Tbit/s, and more than 6 million paying customers for its service, which delivers broadband speeds that are making satellite broadband services increasingly competitive with terrestrial fixed and wireless broadband offerings. According to Starlink, the median downlink speed for its more than 2 million users in the US, as of this month, is almost 200 Mbit/s, with peak-hour latency of just 25.7 milliseconds, while even its lower-speed tier service delivers 100 Mbit/s downstream and 20 Mbit/s upstream (in most areas). The company continues to add more second-generation satellites, with more than 5 Tbit/s of cumulative capacity being added on average each week. Then, during the first half of 2026, SpaceX will use its Starship rockets (currently still in test phase) to add 60 Tbit/s of capacity on each launch (more than 20 times the capacity being put into orbit with each launch currently). It’s going to be hard for the likes of Amazon’s Project Kuiper LEO constellation, which has only recently started putting its satellites into orbit, to compete. 

Zegona Communications, which acquired Vodafone Spain for €5bn in May 2024, has heralded a “transformational year” in which it has reversed the fortunes of the Spanish telco, which had been losing customers and flailing financially under the ownership of Vodafone Group. Zegona has published Vodafone Spain’s fiscal first-quarter results for the three months ending 30 June in its regulatory news section, which shows that the “customer base [is] back to growth for the first time in years”. The operator added 39,000 mobile contract customers (not including pre-paid) in the quarter to take its total to almost 10.1 million, while its fixed broadband customer base edged up by 7,000 customers to 2.57 million. First-quarter revenues were down by about 2% year on year to €895m, but earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) increased by 7% to €442m thanks, in part, to the cost reduction programme initiated by Zegona. The operator has also, under its new ownership, struck fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) joint ventures with both Telefónica and MásOrange – see this announcement and this announcement – that mean it can now market its fibre broadband services to 15.8 million premises across Spain. As a result of these measures, Zegona claims the value of the operator has increased from €6.1bn when it closed the takeover deal in May last year to €10.4bn now. And Zegona’s share price on the London Stock Exchange has almost trebled in the same time, rising from 254 pence on 31 May 2024 to 750 pence today. 

Oxio, which is positioning itself as a telecom-as-a-service (TaaS) platform, says it has now activated more than 2 million connections in North America on its wholesale network. The company, which raised $40m in 2022 to build its platform in the US and Brazil, stated in this announcement that the “milestone” signals the “growing demand for TaaS, as businesses and brands across diverse sectors, including retail, fintech, media and entertainment, machine-to-machine (M2M), and celebrity, look to build, launch and scale custom connectivity offerings”. Nicolas Girard, Oxio’s CEO and co-founder, stated: “Surpassing 2 million activated lines across North America is another major achievement for Oxio as we continue to expand our global footprint. This growth showcases the rising number of brands leveraging connectivity as a strategic business lever that enables new revenue, deeper loyalty, and stronger retention. We’re democratising telecom infrastructure, making it more open, accessible, and flexible than ever before, and these numbers are proof of that transformation in motion.” The company began running its cloud-native platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this year and connected its core platform to AT&T’s network late last year.  

Here’s a case of the ‘enemy within’ that security experts are so often warning about. While US telcos have been grappling with the unwelcome attentions of foreign cybercriminals in recent years, with Salt Typhoon the most notorious and damaging, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) has issued this announcement to note that a former army soldier, 21-year-old Cameron John Wagenius, has pleaded guilty to “conspiring to hack into telecommunications companies’ databases, access sensitive records, and extort the telecommunications companies by threatening to release the stolen data unless ransoms were paid.” It added: “According to court documents, between April 2023 and 18 December 2024… Wagenius used online accounts associated with the nickname ‘kiberphant0m’ and conspired with others to defraud at least 10 victim organisations by obtaining login credentials for the organisations’ protected computer networks. The conspirators obtained these credentials using a hacking tool that they called SSH Brute, among other means. They used Telegram group chats to transfer stolen credentials and discuss gaining unauthorised access to victim companies’ networks.” And here’s the clincher: “This activity happened while Wagenius was on active duty with the US Army.” 

– The staff, TelecomTV