Metro Connect USA 2025: 12 things we learned

Digital Bridge CEO Marc Ganzi’s Metro Connect keynote packs the room every year. After extolling AI potential in 2024, this year Ganzi chose to focus on the risk of insufficient power reaching the areas data centres will be built.

“We have a power distribution and transmission problem,” he told the delegates, focusing specifically on the issue of moving the power to where it is needed – actual generation is less of an issue.

While sounding an optimistic note in general, Ganzi also focused on other potential roadblocks for data centre buildout, one being a shortage of key industrial equipment to actually build the facilities. “If you decide to go build a data centre tomorrow and head to Germany to order turbines from Siemens, they’ll tell you, ‘See you in 2029,’” he said. “This is one of the biggest problems we have.”

Read more: Marc Ganzi: ‘Power, not GPUs, is our biggest challenge’

TD Cowen's State of the Market session, delivered this time by Gregory Williams, is another regular fixture at Metro Connect, and this year it was a tale of two sectors.

On one hand, the fibre sector is booming, and the growth is across the board. End user connectivity and nationwide coverage rates are both increasing, with up to 10 million homes being passed by the end of the year. And on the wholesale side, AI and data centre connectivity demands are driving extra fibre mileage, as is demand from wireless carriers, who are increasingly reliant on fibre connectivity to weave their networks together.

The tower sector, on the other hand, is struggling. Tower stocks fell 21% in 2024 after an additional drop of 20% in 2023. According to Williams, this is due to stubbornly high interest rates, as well as a decline in international tower deals involving US companies and a general rethinking of the wisdom of high investments in consumer 5G services.

Read more: Metro Connect 2025: Fibre frenzy takes centre stage as tower sector falters

At Capacity Middle East earlier in February, Meta’s Amar Khan warned the industry not to get too carried away with huge AI deployments – clients need smaller-scale hosting too.

This was echoed at Metro Connect. While meeting AI need is important, there is a gap in the US market in the 10 – 50 MW range, according to panelists discussing how to meet data centre demand, which offers a potential competitive advantage to providers willing to step in. Demand in this tranche is also being driven by clients like universities and healthcare providers, for whom security and reliability of data hosting is more important than cloud-based flexibility.

Expanding the coverage, reliability and resilience of fibre connectivity is a big topic for digital infra –and an area that is attracting a lot of capital. But has the connectivity speed delivered along them now maxed out?

A common theme from various speakers at Metro Connect this year was that for fixed line connections, consumers and providers are approaching the point of ‘enough’ – who needs a 10 Gbps connection? According to speakers such as Alianza’s Dag Peak, it is more important to deliver connection to more people, with more redundancy, and offering more value across these connections – for example, TV and home automation delivered through broadband infrastructure.

AI use cases for telcos are a common theme of industry conferences (to take just four examples here). Most of them have focused on either streamlining customer service or driving operational efficiency in areas like billing or CRM. But an interesting one revealed at Metro Connect this year came from Alianza, who has developed an AI agent to combat the vital issue of telco fraud.

As has been extensively covered, fraudulent calls and messages delivered over telco channels is enormous – up to $25bn in the US alone. However, current measures have not worked because you cannot tell intent of a bad actor until they act. Alianza’s AI agent addresses this problem by detecting likely patterns of scammer behaviour, allowing calls to be blocked, rerouted or warned about before they reach vulnerable consumers.

Squaring the triangle of clean, affordable and reliable power generation for data centres is a continual problem for operators, and GPC Infrastructure’s CEO Jim Summers discussed the potential of on-site gas generation as a long-term alternative to grid power for operators.

Given the well-publicised difficulties with power transmission in the US, and the large lead times and yet unproven performance of small modular reactor generation for DC needs, Summers believes on-prem natural gas generation could be an answer. But will the market and investors – particularly funds with large non-US representation, who are generally more sensitive to ESG requirements – be willing to accept this on a large scale?

 

Lots of capital is coming into digital infrastructure right now – but not a lot of people are.

This has been an issue for some time, and a panel discussion at Metro Connect focused on some specific experiences and examples of how companies are dealing with it. AT&T’s Kate DeLoach talked about the company’s focus on upskilling existing employees through rotational assignments early in people’s careers, and Broadstaff CEO Carrie Charles recommended looking to adjacent industries like the renewables sector to find suitable candidates.

But the work to make digital infra an attractive place to work needs to start before that. In another panel discussion focused on digital infrastructure deployment, Wichita University was highlighted as making good progress in matching its students to companies already on its campus.

Another important issue, according to panelists, is how – and if – companies should handle bringing their staff back to office-based work. “If you're bringing employees back to the office for collaboration, then make sure collaboration is happening,” said Uniti’s Jennifer Ragsdale. “If people are just sitting in the office on Teams calls all day, they’re going to question the real reason behind the mandate.”

Read more: Metro Connect 2025: Addressing the digital infrastructure skills gap

 

The fibre boom was a common theme at Metro Connect 2025, and a panel on how FTTH operators can drive growth arrived at the conclusion that FTTH is moving at full pace – and telcos and cable companies are aggressively building out fibre too.

Panelists shared their progress in deployment and where they expect to be in a year’s time. Greenlight Networks’ Mark Murphy spoke of plans to increase passings by 50% in 2025, and Lazard’s Garrett Baker estimated the US is only around halfway through its overall fibre deployment. However, FTTH specialists are facing competition from telco rollours – with Murphy giving Frontier’s presence in Rochester, NY as an example.

Read more: Metro Connect 2025: FTTH operators tackle growth, competition & convergence

There is a tendency to talk about fibre buildouts to data centre and fibre buildouts to pass homes as two separate focus areas.

But one interesting aspect brought up in a panel dedicated to data centre fibre provision is that when large-scale dark fibre is run out to new data centre builds – and data centres need a lot of redundancy here – it offers an opportunity to ‘peel off’ and reach rural communities along the way more efficiently than creating links specifically to serve these areas.

 

If an ISP gets its market strategy and product positioning right, the growth can be stratospheric. However, as a fireside chat on blitz-scaling an ISP highlighted, it is possible to do it too fast.

ISPs need to keep an eye on their KPIs – if one is growing as a much faster rate than the others, this could be a sign that the growth is unsustainable and it’s time to rein it in before service bottlenecks start to annoy clients.

Adding MVNO services was highlighted as a particular risk for adding unnecessary complexity, as well as ill-planned acquisitions. In general, the session’s participants agreed that any big change to the business needs to be aligned with the overall goals of the company and what it is trying to do.

This is a hard discipline for any business to master, but the panelists’ message was clear – slow means smooth, and in the long run smooth means fast – and sustainable.

Two separate panel discussions took place on financing the two big growth areas of digital infra – data centres and fibre – and the conclusions for each were predictably different.

On the fibre side, convergence and competition were the watchwords, with a positive investment outlook generally. Increased telco participation in fibre laying is putting pressure on prices, with the expectation than most of the US will be a three-player market at least. With fibre the most fragmented digital infra market in the US, the panelists agreed that consolidation will happen – the question is when.

On the data centre side, the main discussion topic was the range of investment sources and fund types for DC buildout. With the demand profile for data centres at a generational high, new funding sources like private credit and asset-backed securities are flowing into the sector, and the numbers involved are enormous - $25bn capital raises are likely, according to the panelists.

 

The fate of the $42bn BEAD program following the change of administration is understandably of great important – not least for the various state broadband offices that have more or less finalised their plans for spending the money.

A panel dedicated to upcoming federal broadband funding (not just BEAD!) looked at the issues and how they are affecting everyone in the chain, both the broadband offices themselves and also the telcos, connectivity providers and suppliers further down the line.

The general vibe was one of waiting for greenlights. Many states have providers literally waiting to get their shovels in the ground, but as the NTIA’s BEAD budget was not approved prior to the start of the Trump presidency, nothing can happen until this approval is granted.