Cytranet CTO Doug Roberts on the New Network Upgrade Businesses Didn't Know They Needed

On a Tuesday morning video call, Doug Roberts didn't talk about "the future of broadband" the way most people do. There was no obsession with speed-test screenshots or grand claims about being the fastest. Instead, the CTO of Cytranet kept returning to something far less glamorous and far more telling: predictability.

"The question we get now isn't 'How fast is it?'" Roberts said. "It's 'Will it stay fast when our business is actually working?' AI and cloud tools are pushing companies to demand answers to that."

That shift-connectivity moving from a background utility to a board-level concern-is what Roberts considers the most newsworthy development in business internet right now. In Southern California and Las Vegas, where Cytranet is expanding fiber connectivity for business and enterprise customers, he says companies are rethinking the network in the same way they think about cybersecurity and power reliability: not optional, not negotiable, and definitely not something they want to gamble on.

AI Is Making Ordinary Businesses Act Like Data Companies

Roberts is quick to point out that "AI company" is no longer a useful label. In his view, almost every business is becoming data-driven by default-some consciously, some accidentally.

A logistics firm adopts AI to optimize routes and warehouse picking. A healthcare group uses AI-enabled transcription and analytics. A professional services team leans on AI to process documents and accelerate research. A retailer uses computer vision to reduce shrink and improve inventory accuracy.

Each example is different, but Roberts says they share one trait: they create continuous data movement and a steady dependency on cloud compute.

"AI changes the traffic pattern," he explained. "It's not just people browsing the web. It's datasets moving, systems syncing, monitoring running all the time, logs flowing, backups pushing upstream, and real-time tools that don't tolerate jitter."

In other words, AI doesn't merely add "one more application." It changes the baseline.

The Hidden Bottleneck: Upload and Stability

If there's one misconception Roberts thinks is still widespread, it's the idea that business internet is mostly about download speed. That mentality, he says, is inherited from consumer internet marketing. Modern business workloads don't look like Netflix.

"Upstream is where you feel it," Roberts said. "Backups, cloud replication, sending large files, pushing media, syncing data between sites, security telemetry-if the upload side is weak or inconsistent, the business slows down in ways that aren't always obvious at first."

The first sign is often operational friction: cloud backups that stretch into the workday, slow synchronization between sites, choppy voice quality during peak usage, or an IT team forced to schedule routine tasks after hours because the connection can't handle load during business time.

Then, as AI becomes more embedded, the tolerance for that friction disappears.

"AI makes instability show up faster," Roberts said. "Teams start noticing that performance is great until it suddenly isn't-and that unpredictability is what businesses hate."

Data Centers and Cloud On-Ramps Are Now "Main Street" Topics

Roberts has also noticed a change in language. More businesses are talking about data centers-sometimes without even realizing they are.

Five years ago, most non-technical organizations didn't care where their compute lived. Today, they care because latency, reliability, and throughput affect real outcomes: how fast systems respond, how quickly data moves, how stable real-time tools remain, and how smoothly AI-enabled workflows operate.

"People are learning that the internet isn't one thing," Roberts said. "There's the general public internet, and then there's clean connectivity into where your workloads run. The more a business depends on cloud and AI, the more it starts caring about how direct and stable those paths are."

This is where fiber investment becomes more than a "faster pipe." It becomes the connection between the business and the compute ecosystems it relies on-whether that's cloud infrastructure, colocation, or other data center environments.

Why Cytranet Stays Business-Only

Cytranet's approach is shaped by a decision Roberts describes as intentionally limiting: the company focuses on business and enterprise connectivity only and does not offer residential service.

That specialization, he says, is why Cytranet can keep its network and operations aligned with the expectations businesses have when connectivity goes down.

"Residential service is built around household patterns and mass-market scale," Roberts said. "Business connectivity is different. Downtime can stop sales, customer support, operations, security systems-everything. We don't want to split priorities. We want to build for business consequences."

It's a philosophy that shows up not just in engineering, but in the mindset around support and responsiveness. Roberts believes that when a provider treats business internet like "just another subscription," customers feel it most during the moments that matter: outages, degradations, and the messy real-world events that happen to every network.

Southern California and Las Vegas: Growing Demand Meets Old Assumptions

Roberts described Southern California and Las Vegas as two regions where business demand is rising quickly-especially among organizations that rely on cloud tools and data-heavy operations-while broadband options can still be shaped by legacy assumptions in certain corridors.

In Southern California, businesses are scaling across multiple sites, relying on cloud-first stacks, and pushing more traffic than older infrastructure models anticipated. In Las Vegas, Roberts points to the city's evolving mix of industries that now require enterprise-grade reliability: healthcare, logistics, professional services, education, and public-sector needs that depend on stable connectivity.

"The expectation is changing everywhere," Roberts said. "These markets aren't just consuming data. They're producing it, analyzing it, and making decisions from it. That raises the bar."

The New Buying Behavior: Businesses Want a Network They Can Forget About

When asked what "good" looks like in this new era, Roberts didn't describe an extreme speed target. He described a feeling customers want: normal days.

"A good network is one you don't talk about," he said. "It's boring in the best way. It supports what you're doing, it scales when you need it, and it doesn't become the reason projects slow down."

That's why, in his view, the most important trend in business connectivity isn't bigger headline numbers. It's the growing demand for infrastructure that behaves consistently under real-world load-especially as AI pushes more businesses into data-heavy patterns.

"AI is the spotlight," Roberts said. "It's showing companies what they've been living with. And a lot of them are deciding they don't want to live with it anymore."

In the middle of an AI boom that often feels abstract and software-driven, Roberts' take lands as refreshingly concrete: the businesses that benefit most from AI won't just be the ones that adopt the newest tools. They'll be the ones with connectivity sturdy enough to use those tools every day-without thinking twice about whether the network will keep up.

PO Box 230801
Las Vegas NV 89105

Cytranet is a leading provider of voice, data, cloud, and managed IT services in the US. Supporting over 1,000 businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies of all sizes, Cytranet is the most experienced provider of technology services in the region. Based in Las Vegas, NV, we offer single-source solutions that support the latest in Data, Voice and IT Services. We serve our clients' local to global locations. Our technology experts design, deliver and manage end-to-end solutions... phone service, fiber internet, networks, equipment, data centers, monitoring, and support.

This release was published on openPR.