Beyond Bandwidth: Cytranet CTO Doug Roberts on Fiber Built for AI, Resilience, and Real-World Business Impact

Cytranet's CTO Doug Roberts doesn't talk about fiber the way most people do.

Yes, he'll tell you about route diversity, redundancy, and latency budgets. But he's just as likely to talk about what fiber actually enables: a small business finally able to run cloud-based phone systems without call drops, a multi-site manufacturer keeping production data synchronized, or an AI team moving massive datasets without waiting overnight.

That everyday impact is why Roberts is enthusiastic about Cytranet's latest milestone: the company has begun lighting additional high-capacity fiber and expanding its on-net building footprint to support growing demand for business internet and data-center connectivity-particularly from organizations deploying AI workloads.

"We're seeing a different kind of pressure on networks," Roberts said in an interview. "It's not just 'my internet needs to be fast.' It's 'my internet needs to be predictably fast, symmetrical, low-latency, and it needs to stay up-because it's tied to revenue-generating operations and, increasingly, AI pipelines.'"

### AI is changing what "business internet" means

Roberts described a shift in the types of traffic customers are moving. Traditional business connectivity was often sized for general office use: web apps, email, video conferencing.

Now, he says, even mid-sized organizations are moving data more like large enterprises.

"AI makes network design less forgiving," he said. "If you're training models or doing inference at scale, you're moving datasets back and forth-between offices, cloud regions, and colocation environments. The difference between 'pretty good' and 'engineered' connectivity becomes obvious very quickly."

That's driven demand for higher upstream capacity-something Cytranet is targeting with fiber-based services designed for symmetrical speeds and consistent performance.

"Upstream is where a lot of the pain shows up," Roberts said. "People focus on download speed because that's how consumer internet is marketed. Businesses feel it when they're pushing data to backups, shipping files to customers, replicating servers, or feeding AI systems."

### More on-net buildings, fewer middlemen

One of the most tangible changes, Roberts said, is Cytranet's continued move to bring more buildings directly onto its fiber network.

"Being on-net matters," he said. "When you're relying on multiple third parties to bridge the last mile, troubleshooting takes longer and performance can be harder to guarantee. When we're on-net, we can engineer the whole path and support it end-to-end."

He emphasized that this isn't about chasing flashy speed claims, but about increasing reliability and reducing time-to-resolution.

"When something goes wrong, customers don't care whose network segment it is," Roberts said. "They care that their phones are down or their ERP system is lagging. The closer we get to full-path ownership, the more accountable we can be."

### Data centers are back in the spotlight-this time for AI

Alongside business connectivity, Roberts pointed to growing interest in data-center services and fiber connectivity into colocation environments.

"Data centers never stopped being important," he said. "But AI is shining a spotlight on where compute lives and how efficiently you can reach it."

He noted that not every organization wants to run GPU infrastructure on-premises, and not every workload is a perfect fit for a single public cloud.

"We're having more conversations about hybrid architectures," Roberts said. "Customers want the flexibility of cloud, the control of private infrastructure, and the ability to place workloads where they make the most sense-cost-wise and performance-wise. Connectivity becomes the glue."

That "glue," he added, has to be engineered with headroom.

"People underestimate how fast requirements grow once you start doing real analytics or AI," Roberts said. "Today's 1 gig is tomorrow's 'why is everything slow?' If you build with scale in mind, you're not ripping and replacing every year."

### Resilience is the feature customers notice most

Asked what customers are requesting most often, Roberts didn't hesitate: resilience.

"Speed gets attention, but resilience earns loyalty," he said. "Businesses have learned what downtime costs, and they're less willing to accept single points of failure."

He described a common pattern: companies adding diverse fiber routes, splitting critical services across multiple circuits, and treating connectivity as a core part of risk management.

"Redundancy isn't just for huge enterprises anymore," Roberts said. "A lot of smaller firms-medical offices, logistics companies, professional services-are building real continuity plans. They want failover that works, not failover that looks good on paper."

### Designing for the real world

Roberts also spoke about the practical challenges of building broadband and fiber networks: permitting, construction timelines, and the complexity of bringing service into older buildings.

"The unglamorous parts are the hardest parts," he said. "You can design a beautiful network on a map. Then you hit a building with limited riser space, or you need access coordination, or you find out the existing conduit is unusable. That's where experience matters."

He credited Cytranet's engineering and field teams with keeping projects moving while maintaining performance standards.

"Customers don't just want a circuit," Roberts said. "They want it delivered on time, tested properly, documented, and supported by people who know their environment."

### What's next: more capacity, smarter networks

Looking ahead, Roberts expects continued growth in bandwidth demand-driven by cloud adoption, richer collaboration tools, and AI.

He also expects networks to become more intelligent in how they respond to changing conditions.

"The future is not just 'bigger pipes,'" he said. "It's better visibility, better routing decisions, faster detection of issues, and more proactive support. Businesses want networks that feel dependable in the background."

When asked what he hopes customers take away from Cytranet's latest expansion work, Roberts kept it simple.

"We're building so customers can build," he said. "Whether they're scaling to multiple sites, moving into a data center, or adopting AI, we want the network to be the part they don't have to worry about."

In an era when nearly every business plan has become, in some way, a connectivity plan, Roberts' message lands with a certain clarity: the next wave of innovation won't just be about what companies can compute-but about how well they can connect.

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.