Category: Communicate

Communicate covers the issues enterprises face in the selection, implementation, and management of business communication and collaboration technology, software, and services.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Trade Wins in H1 2026 as 5G SA and Mid-band Shape Real-world Performance

by John Marcus, posted in Communicate
John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services.

Summary Bullets:

• AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon each improved in H1 2026, with distinct strengths across speed, reliability, and calls.

• Enterprises should evaluate 5G SA maturity, uplink capacity, and location-specific consistency—not just peak download speeds.

US mobile performance improved across the board in H1 2026, according to Ookla’s “State of the Mobile Union” reporting, drawing on RootMetrics testing. RootMetrics technicians ran over 3 million real-world tests from January to June 2026, driving 243,000 miles across all 50 states and 125 major metro markets to evaluate AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Continue reading “AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Trade Wins in H1 2026 as 5G SA and Mid-band Shape Real-world Performance” →

Google Cloud Summit Sydney: Putting Agentic AI into Action

by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, Communicate, Secure
S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

  • Enterprises are deploying AI agents leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions and achieving positive business outcomes.
  • Google Cloud offers the full AI stack, and its sovereign cloud and cyber solutions are especially crucial for enterprise customers.

AI agents are no longer an idea. They are now being deployed by enterprises to improve internal workplace productivity and external customer experience. At Google Cloud Summit Sydney (held on June 25, 2026), more examples of agentic AI in operations were presented, moving from deterministic AI chatbots to more autonomous systems. Bunnings, a home improvement, gardening, and hardware products retailer in Australia, upgraded its Buddy AI chatbot that helped customers with product search to an AI agent that takes customers’ descriptions of their projects and fills the shopping carts with the products that they need. Bunnings indicated an uplift of conversion rates and basket sizes when customers engage with Buddy. Similarly, Woolworths supermarket has an agentic AI powered Olive assistant that is able to build shopping baskets from recipe photos and assist with proactive meal planning. These two examples demonstrate how AI agents trained with proprietary knowledge (e.g., Bunnings’s DIY catalog and Woolworths’ recipe catalog) can deliver greater customer outcomes.

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Beyond Subsea: Why Australia’s Next Fiber Race Is on Land

by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

  • Australia’s digital infrastructure race is moving onshore, with long-haul fiber becoming as important as international subsea connectivity.
  • Vocus and Telstra are expanding their terrestrial network to meet growing AI, cloud, and hyperscaler demand across key intercity corridors.

Over the last decade, Australia’s digital infrastructure strategy has largely centered on subsea cable investment, from new builds to strategic consortium partnerships. These new international systems have expanded capacity, improved network resilience, and strengthened Australia’s connectivity to the world. However, as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes data traffic patterns, investment is shifting from beneath the ocean to fiber corridors underpinning Australia’s AI future.

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Racing to AI: Tata Communications Accelerates Its Connectivity Position to Singapore

by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

  • Tata Communications is strengthening its global network to create an AI-ready digital corridor linking India with Singapore.
  • As AI workloads grow, the India to Singapore route is becoming one of Asia’s most strategically important connectivity corridors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping one of Asia’s busiest digital corridors. As AI workloads, cloud adoption and investment by hyperscalers accelerates across India and Southeast Asia, demand for high-speed, low-latency connectivity is rising just as rapidly. Tata Communications’s latest investment in new subsea cable infrastructure between India and Singapore is more than another cable announcement; it reflects a broader strategy to build an AI-ready digital corridor linking India’s emerging data center hubs with the Southeast Asia’s largest cloud ecosystem. With these investments, Tata Communications seems to be quietly assembling one of the region’s most comprehensive AI connectivity platforms.

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EU Proposal for MSS Spectrum Seeks to Balance Bloc’s Commercial and Sovereignty Aspirations

by Ismail Patel, posted in Communicate, Internet of Things, IT Leader, Network
I. Patel

Summary Bullets:

  • The EU’s MSS 2 GHz proposal strengthens regulation, security, and competition, but implementation through 2027–2029 will be phased, not immediate.
  • Small spectrum block sizes favor IoT, messaging, emergency services; large-bandwidth applications face bottlenecks.

When the European Commission unveiled its plan late last month to reassign the 2 GHz mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum at EU-level, it initiated more than a regulatory proposal. With the dust now settled on the announcement, it is clear that this represents a geopolitical and commercial realignment. Signals in the market suggest the framework is firming up around core principles: sovereignty, security, restricted eligibility, spectrum caps, and wholesale access. But beneath those pillars lies a battlefield of interests that will define not just who wins licenses, but which services Europe values the most – IoT or in-flight broadband, messaging or full-fledged device-to-device (D2D) connectivity.

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UK Plans Teen Social Media Ban, but the Action Raises Questions About Enforceability – and Privacy

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Communicate
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets

• Following the lead of other nations including Australia, the UK is getting set to restrict access to social media sites for minors 16 years and younger, starting in 2027.

• Comparable rules in other countries have proven to be difficult to execute, with teenagers finding workarounds. However, UK government officials say their efforts will leverage highly effective technology to enforce the ban, including biometric facial age estimation.

When UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to introduce legislation later this year that will bar teenagers and children from social media access, critics offered immediate comparisons to a similar action by Australia in 2025, which has largely been deemed a failure. Though initially Australia touted the fact that 4.7 million accounts held by children under 16 had lost access to social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, research shows that just months later, the ban had very little effect. A University of New Castle study of 408 12 to 17 year olds found that due to “limited implementation, incomplete compliance, and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions, the ban has been largely unsuccessful.”

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Google Cloud Highlights the ROI of Agentic Workloads During UK Summit

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Communicate
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• The Google Cloud UK Summit was held in June 2026, at Tobacco Docks, in London (England). The company will release Gemini 3.5 Pro and Gemini Omni, a multi-modal system, in late-2026.

• Google announced the UK availability of Gemini 3.5 Flash, through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and the Gemini Enterprise app.

Google Cloud held its UK Summit in London with the strategic intent of demonstrating the ROI of agentic AI. With more than 4,000 participants, it followed the thread commenced in 2025 (please see Google Cloud Focuses on Agentic AI During UK Summit, July 15, 2025), only this time the industry has moved decisively towards the implementation of the technology in practical cases. The company showcased its considerable presence in the UK, with a new data center that will be opening in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, later in 2026 as part of a GBP5-billion investment in AI programs in the country.

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Zoom Enhancements Help Move Work Forward but Fall Short in Other Areas

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
Close-up portrait of a man smiling, wearing glasses and a suit.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • Zoom hopes that this latest round of capabilities will help drive greater platform adoption and distinguish itself from rivals.
  • With respect to achieving those goals, the capabilities deliver Zoom a mixed report card.

Zoom announced a mix of capabilities encompassing mobile access for Zoom My Notes, improved agentic search for Zoom AI Companion and upgrades to Zoom MCP Server. Through the new capabilities, Zoom intends to achieve two implicit goals: to drive platform adoption by adding appealing functionality that aligns with recent market trends and to distinguish itself in a competitively dense field.

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What Was All That Back There, Then? Orange Business Announced 14 Offers at its March Summit

by John Marcus, posted in Big Data, Communicate
A man with dark hair and a slight smile, wearing a black jacket, against a light blue background.
John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services

Summary Bullets:

• In March 2026, Orange Business unveiled 14 innovations at its summit, a mix of new products, major upgrades, and strategic repackaging.

• The summit’s offerings position Orange to lead in secure, sovereign enterprise services, driving market differentiation and revenue growth.

Orange Business was not shy about showing its work at its customer summit in Paris this March. The event generated five separate press releases, and included references to “14 breakthrough innovations” in its launch announcement for a collection of “trusted AI, cloud and secure connectivity” offers. If you weren’t paying attention, you may be forgiven for wondering what was all that back there, then?

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RingCentral’s Expanded Partnerships with Cox and Spectrum Position Each for Growth in the Contact Center Space and Beyond

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
Close-up portrait of a smiling man with glasses, wearing a light-colored suit.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • RingCentral has expanded its partnerships with Cox Business and Spectrum Business by augmenting existing unified communications offers with contact center capabilities.
  • Now is an especially opportune time to expand the partnerships as organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections.

RingCentral has recently expanded its partnership with two service providers by supplying contact center capabilities for their portfolios. ‘Cox Business Contact Center with RingCentral’ and ‘Unified Customer Experience (UCX) with RingCentral’ from Spectrum Business both leverage RingCentral’s ‘RingCX’ platform, which is AI-driven and omnichannel capable. Both offers complement existing unified communications (UC) offers brought to market in conjunction with RingCentral based on its ‘RingEX’ platform namely, ‘Cox Business Connect with RingCentral’ and from Spectrum Business, ‘Unified Communications (UC) with RingCentral’. Spectrum Business sweetens the deal by blending in a sales-oriented add-on from RingCentral to its UC offer called AI Conversation Expert (ACE), which transcribes and analyzes sales calls and meetings to help close more opportunities.

Continue reading “RingCentral’s Expanded Partnerships with Cox and Spectrum Position Each for Growth in the Contact Center Space and Beyond” →