InterGlobix Magazine’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Jasmine Bedi, spoke to Ben Edmond about what opportunities and challenges lie ahead for the connectivity industry as well as how and why the customer profile is changing—and what implications that has for operators moving forward.
You founded the company now known as Connectbase in 2015, after two decades as an operator at Xspedius, Global Capacity, and FiberLight, where you led long-haul builds funded by prepayment at capital scale. What opportunity did you see?
Nobody used to put a network person in the siting meeting. For 20 years, connectivity was assumed. You picked a site for power, land, and tax, and someone would eventually pull fiber to it. What changed is not that connectivity got harder—it’s that the timeline stopped tolerating “eventually.”
When it comes to economics, I like to be deliberately precise. Long-haul fiber represents somewhere between one and three percent of AI infrastructure capital expenditure. It sounds unimportant, but it’s exactly the opposite. Long-haul fiber, the smallest line item, is what gates the other ninety-seven percent. You can have the silicon and the megawatts and still not have a working campus because you can’t reach it on diverse paths at the interval you need.
There’s a lot of talk in our industry about what the actual bottleneck is when it comes to providing for AI’s demands. What do you see as this bottleneck, and is there a reason we haven’t yet been able to solve it?
Honestly, I think the standardization of serviceability data is still our biggest bottleneck—and it’s an uncomfortable answer, because I’ve spent a decade building the alternative. After thirty years in this industry, I’d say that most of it comes down to culture, not engineering. We’re improving. We’re just not improving fast enough for the demand showing up now.
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ABOUT BEN EDMOND
Ben Edmond is responsible for leading Connectbase’s strategy, culture, and operations. Prior to founding Connectbase, he served as Chief Revenue Officer at Global Capacity, where he was responsible for all aspects of the company’s customer go-to-market strategy and execution. With 25 years of experience in the fiber, telecom, and networking industries, Edmond has broad expertise in the areas of executive leadership, strategy, product, customer experience, sales, marketing, and operations.
