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Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reason. That’s what makes this sting, says Jack Raynor, president of NetExperience.

Contributed by Jack Raynor, President, NetExperience

This month, Cambium Networks eliminated 53.6% of its global workforce and placed its UK subsidiary into administration, according to the company’s own SEC filing.

Administrators are now searching for buyers for parts of the business, and the company has said it expects the remaining entities to be wound down. For the partners, resellers, and operators who built businesses on Cambium hardware, the practical questions are immediate. Who supports the deployed base? Where do firmware and security patches come from? What happens to margin if a forced re-platform lands on their own timeline and their own budget?

There’s no satisfaction in watching this play out. Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reasons: competitive pricing, solid performance, and a workable margin. That’s what makes this sting: it wasn’t a bad decision. It’s the risk that comes standard with any single-vendor architecture, regardless of which vendor is chosen.

Related news
Sept. 17: Cambium Networks enters administration

That’s the part worth sitting with. This isn’t really a story about one company’s balance sheet. It’s a recurring pattern. In 2020, pandemic-era supply shocks stranded operators standardized on hardware from vendors with concentrated manufacturing. Today, AI-driven demand for memory is pushing component costs and lead times up industry-wide, squeezing margins operators thought they’d locked in. A vendor’s financial distress is just the latest variant of a risk that has always been present: when a network depends entirely on one company’s continuity, one company’s roadmap, and one company’s supply chain, risk management has effectively been outsourced to someone else’s balance sheet.

The instinctive response is to migrate to another proprietary platform. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying problem: it relocates the same single point of failure to a different vendor’s name. The network is still betting on one company’s solvency, one company’s release calendar, one company’s supply relationships. If this year has proven anything, it’s that “established vendor” is not the same as “safe vendor.”

This is precisely the scenario the OpenWiFi Project was built to address. Rather than bundling hardware, firmware, and controller into one vendor’s decision, OpenWiFi decouples them: certified white-box access points validated across multiple ODMs and silicon vendors, an open, community-governed management protocol (uCentral), and a choice of commercial or private-cloud controllers that can be swapped without touching a single access point. If one hardware supplier exits the market, tightens supply, or runs into financial trouble, the fleet isn’t stranded, because no single company was ever the whole architecture.

For Cambium’s current customers, that flexibility may run deeper than a future buying decision. It’s worth examining, pending the necessary technical and legal groundwork, whether currently deployed Cambium access points could run OpenWiFi firmware. If so, and with Cambium’s cooperation, affected operators would only need to choose an OpenWiFi-compatible controller, not replace hardware already sitting in their sites. That path isn’t confirmed, but it deserves a look before anyone assumes a full rebuild is the only option.

That’s a materially different risk profile than choosing between competing closed platforms. It doesn’t eliminate business risk; it distributes it, the way any resilient supply chain distributes single points of failure, so one company’s setback doesn’t become every customer’s unplanned capital expense.

None of this is said with any pleasure about what Cambium’s employees and partners are going through. Job losses and forced re-platforming decisions are genuinely hard, and they deserve real support, not a sales pitch dressed up as sympathy. But the industry has now watched this pattern repeat across a pandemic, a component shortage, and now a vendor’s insolvency. Each time, the operators most exposed were the ones with the least architectural flexibility.

As the industry absorbs this news, the more useful question isn’t which vendor to move to next. It’s whether that next platform decision recreates the same dependency or removes it. Open, disaggregated architectures like OpenWiFi won’t prevent the next disruption; nothing can promise that. But they change what a disruption costs: a supplier swap, not a forced, unplanned rebuild.

Jack Raynor served as chair of the TIP OpenWiFi Project and currently sits on the OpenLAN Project Steering Committee. He is president of NetExperience, a founding member of the OpenWiFi community. He welcomes questions and discussion at Jack.Raynor@NetExperience.com.

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News

The UK’s largest fibre network operator is using AI tools to prevent thousands of full fibre broadband cancellations each month

Broadband engineers fast a myriad of obstacles when deploying fibre to customers’ homes, some of which can result in significant delays. When these issues occur, customers can feel left in the dark, unsure about the specific problems or when installation will ultimately be competed.

Now, Openreach says it is using two new AI services – Crystal Ball and Ask Me Anything (AMA) – to help keep customers better informed and improve satisfaction.

When an issue occurs during complex fibre installation, the AI-powered Crystal Ball pulls information from various sources, including notes from engineers, delay codes, survey outputs, and network topology, to predict the work required and whether it will take more or less than 10 days to complete.

This information is then communicated via text messages within 24 hours of an engineer’s visit, helping ISPs to keep their customers informed and manage expectations.

In tandem, Openreach’s generative AI AMA allows affected customers to ask questions about their installation processes and receive detailed information in response.

Combined, these tools help to prevent more than 3,000 cancellations every month, according to Openreach.

“When an installation hits a snag, the worst thing we can do is leave people guessing. Crystal Ball helps us explain what’s happened, what needs to happen next, and when we expect the job to be done. And we’re going a step further with Ask Me Anything, giving customers the opportunity to ask questions in their own words and get the information and reassurance they need,” explained Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach. “That makes life easier for customers and for the providers we work with. It means fewer people have to chase for updates, and more orders stay on track.”

Both Crystal Ball and AMA are part of Openreach’s wider CXone Proactive AI Agent platform, which it says is designed to make customer communications “more proactive, predictive and conversational”.

AI is increasing becoming a key part of the customer journey throughout the telecoms industry. In a recent survey of telco leaders across the UK and US, 64% said their organisation was already using AI to steer customer journeys.

In future, customer experience will continue to shift from reactive support towards proactive, predictive, and personalised customer journeys that address problems before customers need to chase them.

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Two regional fiber buildouts, some financial network infrastructure, and a bit of FTTx: … [visit site to read more]

Press Release

First transatlantic cable built by a single operator in a decade expands EXA Infrastructure’s transatlantic core as demand for fibre-pair capacity accelerates

EXA Infrastructure, one of the largest dedicated digital infrastructure platforms throughout Europe, today announced the launch of EXA Meridian, a new 6,552 km transatlantic subsea cable between New Jersey, U.S., and Brean, UK. Scheduled to be ready for service in 2029, EXA Meridian will become the ninth transatlantic cable in EXA Infrastructure’s portfolio, adding significant new capacity and route diversity between North America and Europe, two of the world’s largest digital markets. It will also be the first transatlantic cable built by a single operator in a decade.

Demand for transatlantic infrastructure is growing as AI, cloud, and distributed data centre architectures generate more traffic between North America and Europe. At the same time, the largest capacity buyers are increasingly procuring spectrum and complete fibre pairs rather than individual wavelengths. EXA Meridian is purpose-built for this market shift. Designed with 24 fibre pairs, EXA Meridian delivers over 500 Tbps of scalable, long-term capacity for Hyperscalers, Neoclouds, financial institutions, government and research organisations.

The project has now reached Contract in Force (CIF) with subsea telecommunications specialist Xtera, marking a significant milestone in its development. The agreement follows extensive planning and early engagement with the supply chain, drawing on EXA Infrastructure’s team experience in delivering complex subsea systems. Xtera will act as a key supplier to the project, which is being led and delivered by EXA Infrastructure, a leader in delivery of wholesale transatlantic capacity.

Unlike a standalone subsea cable, EXA Meridian will connect directly into EXA Infrastructure’s existing owned network. A new cable landing station in Brean will connect the system through diverse terrestrial routes to Slough and EXA Infrastructure’s pan-European backbone. This integration into the wider platform will give customers an enhanced network mesh with multiple options for moving large volumes of data between North America and European regions, with greater choice over routes, resilience, and geographic diversity.

“Demand across the Atlantic is changing quickly. The largest customers are increasingly planning in spectrum and fibre pairs, and the capacity they will need towards the end of the decade has to be built now,” said Jim Fagan, CEO at EXA Infrastructure. “With a Ready For Service (RFS) date set for 2029, EXA Meridian will be the only cable with sufficient capacity to satisfy these large-scale demands.

“We have consistently committed to investing to meet strong demand. That means understanding where the market is going, securing the capital to act early and having the experience to execute when the opportunity arrives.

By integrating EXA Meridian directly into infrastructure that we own and operate across Europe, we can give customers greater route choice, resilience and accountability. It demonstrates the discipline behind our investment strategy and our confidence in continuing to build as commercial demand requires.”

EXA Meridian is already supported by significant anchor customer commitments, including leading Neocloud and Hyperscale players, providing strong commercial backing for the investment alongside tier-one suppliers secured to support project delivery. The system is targeted to be ready for service in Q4 2029.

How is the global submarine cable sector changing? Join industry leaders in discussion at Submarine Networks EMEA 2027, the world’s largest subsea conference

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EXA Infrastructure has plans for a new transatlantic cable system. Yesterday they launched EXA Meridian, which will connect the east coast of the US with the southwestern part of the UK. It will be the company’s 9th cable and will be built by EXA solo – no consortium needed. … [visit site to read more]

News

According to reports, the UK wireless network business has become insolvent after months of financial struggle

Cambium Networks, Ltd., the wholly owned UK subsidiary of Cambium Networks Corporation, has filed a Notice of Intent to appoint administrators, according to reports from ISPreview.

By appointing administrators, the company is legally protected from creditors seeking repayment of debts.

As part of the process, the administrators will seek sales of assets and business lines, with remaining entities in the group to be wound up through local processes.

Incorporated in 2011, UK-based Cambium Networks offers fixed wireless access (FWA), Wi-Fi, switching, and cloud management services to enterprises and ISPs. At its peak, the company’s products were used by over 10,000 network operators worldwide.

In the UK, the company was perhaps best known as a supplier of FWA-focussed altnet Airband, which was itself sold this month to rival altnet Voneus after an administration process.

Cambium’s financial struggles have been clear for some time, with the company’s stock price collapsing over the past four years from its peak in April 2021. Management attributed this slide to a softening of demand, stronger competition, and supply chain issues.

The company’s issues came to a head in March this year, when Cambium was delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange after delayed reporting and SEC filing compliance issues.

Even more recently, Cambium cut 260 jobs worldwide, representing around 54% of its workforce.

With the UK business now in administration, Cambium’s future will depend on whether buyers can be found for its remaining assets and operations, leaving the company’s customers, partners and employees facing considerable uncertainty.

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Cybastion, a US company that delivers digital and infrastructure solutions in Africa, reportedly plans to mobilise about US$300 million for several projects supporting Senegal’s digital transformation.

The funding will support initiatives in cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime, as well as data centre development, technology transfers and national skills development.

The programme will also involve Senegalese startups in the implementation of the projects in order to help the country strengthen the capabilities of young local companies and retain a larger share of the value generated by digital investments within Senegal’s economy.

A main aim, according to President Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye, is to deliver tangible economic and social benefits, including, as he puts it, “faster and more accessible public administrations, personal data better protected against fraud and cybercrime, skilled jobs for a trained and ambitious youth, and a digital business ecosystem capable of innovating and attracting new investment”.

As the Ecofin news agency points out, Senegal’s national New Deal Technologique strategy aims to accelerate the digitisation of the economy and public services and establish the country as a leading technology hub by 2034. However, this acceleration has also brought with it some cybersecurity issues.

In fact, this year saw the launch of a cybercrime reporting platform that allows users to report and track cybercrime incidents more easily. In addition, the country’s Telecommunications and Postal Regulatory Authority (ARTP) is expanding cooperation with international institutions and partners. The regulator aims to adapt Senegal’s regulatory framework to technological developments, particularly in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

Cybastion has had a busy few weeks in west Africa. Earlier this month it announced a major investment in Cameroon.