LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS
including network automation, optimisation and self-healing tech support.
“Everybody’s still trying to figure out what impact it (AI) will have,” observed Jeff Heynen, Vice President of Broadband Access and Home Networking at the Dell’Oro Group. While “there’s no question that network automation is adding more intelligence all the way out from the network to the home,” he said, AI’s potential impact is much harder to predict. Nevertheless, AI is all the rage in North American cable circles these days, as it is throughout the broader telecom business. Indeed, the examples are starting to abound of U.S., Canadian and Mexican operators diving headlong into AI. Take Comcast, for instance. Typically the industry leader in introducing new technologies, the continent’s biggest cableco is now rolling out a new AI-based product to support edge caching for its tens of millions of commercial customers. Speaking at the SCTE, A Subsidiary of Cable Labs’ TechExpo conference in Washington, D.C. last fall, Comcast Executive VP and Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi offered a brief overview of the new product. Called AI Edge, it’s designed to be a low-latency, high-capacity offering for edge caching.
Given initiatives like these, industry experts credit Comcast with helping to jumpstart the cable industry’s AI evolution. “Comcast is putting a lot of resources behind it (AI) to make it work,” noted Guy Sucharczuk. “Once the big guys are building a path, it’s a lot easier for the smaller guys to follow.” Indeed, some of those smaller guys are following already, if not leading the charge. Besides such other large operators as Charter and Mediacom in the U.S., several mid-sized and even smaller operators are kicking the tyres on AI. In Mexico, for example, Izzi Telecom has been tinkering with AI for the past couple of years. After testing the technology thoroughly, the operator rolled it our first internally to its customer support operations and then gradually expanded it to cover direct customer care last year. Pleased with the initial results, Izzi has now introduced AI to the company’s business side, including its finance, sales, and logistics units. “We have 13 (AI) projects this year,” smiled Israel Madiedo, Innovation & Technology Director for Izzi. “This year we’ll do testing and deployments on the network side hand-in-hand with specific use cases,”
Back in the U.S., mid-sized broadband providers like Ritter Communications are taking a somewhat more nuanced approach with the technology. Instead of developing its own AI tools like some of its larger counterparts, Ritter is relying on Microsoft’s Copilot technology to help with research, organisation and collaboration. “Primarily we’re taking advantage of what our vendors are bringing to us,” said Ritter CTO Victor Esposito. “We’re at a scale where it doesn’t make sense to develop an AI model, we’re not big enough. So, while we’re not going to develop it (AI), we definitely want to use it.” Other mid-sized and even smaller North American operators are turning to AI as well. For instance, SCTE Corporate Member OpenVault, a leading vendor in the field that works mainly with small and mid-sized providers, says most of its customers have already embraced its initial AI product. Known as Help Desk, the product utilises AI technology to aid tech support workers in answering customer questions and
Volume 48 No.1 MARCH 2026
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