Thursday Roundup: Ripple Fiber, Blue Planet, Nokia, Telefonica, Databricks

A bit of FTTx and a bunch of AI:

Ripple Fiber has officially launched its first customers in the state of Washington. They have turned up service in Ocean Shores along the state’s southeastern coast. Next on tap will be Federal Way as the $250M project in King County and Grays Harbor County continue to roll out. Ripple’s footprint now reaches 10 states.

Ciena’s Blue Planet division and Telefonica Deutschland have been busy testing the use of AI agents. The initiative looks to accelerate 5G network slicing service design, and this proof of concept demonstrated a reduction in time from weeks to minutes. The collaboration is built on Telefonica Deutschland’s Multi-Domain Service Orchestration platform and integrates Blue Planet’s AI Studio. The idea is to support engineers throughout the service lifecycle.

And Nokia had two AI-related announcements this week. Teaming up with Databricks they completed a proof of concept demonstrating a unified, cloud-agnostic data platform. They are looking to support AI-driven autonomous networks. The idea is to make it easier for those siloed systems that telecom often has to leverage a common AI infrastructure. Meanwhile with Amazon’s AWS they have expanded collaboration to leverage AWS’s AI and cloud services within Nokia’s Autonomous Network Fabric. The combination “delivers intent-based service orchestration across multi-domain, multi-vendor networks; provides 360-degree observability with AI-powered anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and closed-loop resolution; and offers a single source of truth for network topology and resources.” That’s quite a mouthful.

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