• Comcast appoints co-CEO, touts AI gains
• Optus suffers another emergency service outage
• Cisco boasts quantum networking advances

In today’s industry news roundup: Comcast reveals its succession plan and provides an update on its use of AI; Optus suffers yet another emergency service outage that will impact the telco’s reputation; Cisco is touting software developments that will enable quantum networking; and more!

Just days after reports emerged that Comcast is prepping major cuts at its broadband and pay-TV operations as part of its efforts to centralise operations and cut costs, the US cable communications, media and entertainment giant announced that its president, Mike Cavanagh, will become co-CEO alongside Brian Roberts staring at the beginning of next year. Roberts, who has been CEO since 2022, will continue as co-CEO and chairman. Cavanagh “is the ideal person to help lead Comcast as we manage the pivot we are making to drive growth across the company. Mike and I work seamlessly together, and I am thrilled to be partnering with him as co-CEO and with the rest of our talented management team, for years to come.” In the second quarter of this year, Comcast lost 201,000 domestic Xfinity broadband customers, taking its total down to just a few thousand below 29 million, and it also shed 25,000 business broadband customers, taking that total to 2.55 million. It’s also losing domestic pay-TV customers – its total slipped by 325,000 to 11.77 million in the second quarter. Its mobile services business (Xfinity Mobile), though, is still doing well, adding 378,000 customers in the second quarter to take the total to almost 8.53 million. Comcast generates most of its sales from its “connectivity and platforms” operations, which generated revenues of $20.4bn in the second quarter, up by 0.7% year on year. Comcast is currently preparing to spin off most of its NBCUniversal cable network operations, including MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network and the Gold Channel, into a new publicly-traded company to be called Versant. 

Still with Comcast… Like every network operator and communications service provider in the world, the US broadband giant has also been busy with AI. The US giant says it is “embedding AI deeper into its broadband infrastructure than ever before” with a major deployment of AI-powered network amplifiers that “bring real-time decision-making capabilities to the edge of the network – just feet from homes and businesses – enabling smarter connectivity for millions of Xfinity and Comcast Business customers”. The amplifiers “are capable of self-monitoring, self-healing, and self-maintenance, transforming the edge of the network into a hub of actionable intelligence that is being used today to deliver a better broadband experience,” stated Comcast in this announcement. Elad Nafshi, chief network officer of connectivity and platforms at Comcast, stated:  "We’ve pushed AI closer to our customers than any other provider to build the most intelligent broadband network in the country. This marks a pivotal shift from centralized AI systems to distributed intelligence at the edge, enabling our network to make real-time decisions that optimise each customer’s experience – whether they’re streaming, gaming, or working from home." The operator noted that when unexpected spikes in data traffic occur, its Octave platform – an in-house developed, AI-enabled telemetry system – “uses AI to automatically boost capacity to areas where it is needed most. Every 60 minutes, AI analyzes 10,000 data points on 30 million network devices to enhance in-home WiFi performance. During extreme weather events AI tools help to accelerate recovery efforts by detecting mass network outages faster and identifying areas where technicians can safely do the work to restore services,” Comcast stated. And you can find out more about how the US cable operator uses AI to restore service when commercial power outages impact its customers in this separate announcement.  

Things are going from bad to worse for Australia’s Optus, which, only days after contending with the fallout of a network outage that impacted triple-zero calls and which was linked to four deaths, suffered another emergency call service outage in an area covering 4,500 people south of Sydney. Reuters reports that the Australian government has called the outage an "absolutely shocking failure" and has said it will seek answers from Optus’s owner, Singtel. 

In an effort to provide the quantum computing sector with scale, Cisco Systems says it has developed software that enables distributed quantum computing. “Today’s quantum computers are stuck at hundreds of qubits when real-world applications need millions. We can either wait decades for perfect quantum processors, or we can network existing ones together now,” stated the vendor in this blog.  The company has released three “research prototypes to advance Cisco’s quantum networking strategy”. They are: Quantum Compiler, which Cisco describes as “the industry’s first network-aware, distributed quantum compiler enabling quantum algorithms to run across multiple networked processors. As part of this, we are also announcing an industry-first compiler supporting distributed quantum error correction”; Quantum Alert, which is an “application demo for eavesdropper-proof security with guarantees from physics, not promises from classical software”; and Quantum Sync, a “decision coordination application demo that uses entanglement to enable correlated decision-making across distributed locations for classical use cases.” All three applications “run on a unified quantum networking software stack, which is the vital infrastructure that makes quantum computers work together instead of alone,” added Cisco, which made a top-five appearance in our recent ranking of quantum-safe networking vendors – see IBM, Nokia top quantum-safe networking ranking

– The staff, TelecomTV