- The "killer app" is back! This time, AI is the culprit
- According to folks we talked to at Fiber Connect, AI is going to be either a boon, bust or a big nothing burger for the fiber industry
- Regardless of what happens, it certainly energized the big get-together in Orlando this week
FIBER CONNECT 2026, ORLANDO, FLORIDA — For decades, telecom has waited for a so-called “killer app” to justify the next wave of network investment — from email to video (cat videos!) to cloud.
Here at Fiber Connect in Orlando, many executives say that app has finally arrived in the form of AI. Some call AI the long‑promised demand engine, while others argue it’s not an app (which we know, of course), but something bigger — a force that can reshape the entire network, rather than something that runs on top of it.
To get a range of perspectives on which direction AI will we asked everyone we ran into if they thought AI was the killer app — and if so, why.
Here is a rundown of what they said:
Yes – We finally found the killer app
"AI is the app that requires a game fight, yeah, and nobody could envision what AI could do, and with the amount of cycles it was going to provide and require, and so we just talk about it as not connecting people, but it's connecting machines that connect people ... and, as a whole, that kind of blows your mind." — Cheri Beranek, founding CEO, Clearfield
Read more from our interview with Beranek: Clearfield’s CEO: AI is here but execution will decide who benefits
“AI is absolutely transformative, and I think we don't even know the ways in which it's going to change everything we do in the future. ... There's no question this will be the game changer that we'll be talking about for the next few years." — Sarah Davis, VP of market development at Fidium Fiber
"Two people I talked to last week said AI, the killer app, is here. Finally, after all these years, we figured out what it is, and it's AI." — Greg Wilson, CEO, Ripple Fiber
Read more from our interviews with Davis and Wilson: AI is reshaping fiber demand but operators still face this basic hurdle
Nope – AI is not the killer app.
"Human Impatience is the killer app. ... Do you need 1 gig or 2 gigs all the time? No, but ... but having a progress bar slowly going from 7% to 8% ... immediately makes a huge difference in the user experience. I think peak speeds are really important to human impatience, right? I think [I read] a piece in Forbes magazine where they basically said the human attention span has gone down from 12 seconds to eight seconds, like over 20 years. If you look up the attention span of a goldfish, it's nine seconds." — Stefaan Vanhastel, VP of marketing and innovation for fixed networks, Nokia
Read more from our interview with Vanhastel here: Nokia bets on agentic AI to move telco automation from experiment to execution
Maybe - It depends on who's answering
"The first thing is defining what AI means to an operator — what your subscriber defines it as. ... And then the definition from what that guy at the small end, the municipal end, is gonna say, compared to an AT&T, it's gonna be totally different. ... I think there's three stages: What it means to your network today, and what it will mean to the future network, the optimized network, because... let's be honest, the subscriber experience is not fiber. The subscriber experience is Wi Fi." — Craig Thomas, CEO, Broadband Forum