Mother Earth, Motherboard

A few weeks ago, I returned to sunny Honolulu for TeleGeography’s annual telecom trends workshop at PTC.

As usual, Brianna Boudreau explored global pricing trends, and Jon Hjembo shared insights from the data center world.

A bit unusual was the name of my segment: Mother Earth, Motherboard. This title was actually inspired by an article written in 1996:

This clip explains the vision.

Running with this theme, I also used AI to create an image for each section of my presentation:

Global Climate Change looks particularly intimidating, so let's jump there. (You’ll find my slides from Cycles of Renewal and A Resilient System over here.)

Global Climate Change

Evolution

How AI is going to impact international networks is a hot, hot topic these days.

And the truth is, no one really knows what AI will mean for long-haul networks. No one can tell you it will lead to X percent more bandwidth growth over X years—that is unknown at this stage.

What we can do is discuss how AI works and what could influence the pace of bandwidth growth, such as:

• Model training locations
• Inference locations
• Distributed training and federated learning
• AI-based data compression and traffic routing improvements
• Spatial temporal load shifting
• Legal issues