As we enter mid-2025, it's interesting to take a fresh look at the landscape for power utilities and the communication networks they use. Coming away from several days at the UTC 2025 Telecom and Technology Conference in Long Beach, California, it struck me that the trends we saw just a year ago are even more in focus.

Earlier this year, I blogged about the increasing demands on the power grid and how communication networks can help power utilities ensure reliable, secure service delivery. Adding power generation and distribution capacity is a significant undertaking, and utilities should complement it with a communication network that monitors, controls and secures the grid with ease.

In life, we sometimes face choices where neither option is perfect and both require trade-offs. Imagine you're choosing between two cars: one is a fuel-efficient compact car with excellent mileage but low horsepower, and the other is a powerful sports car that delivers thrilling performance but consumes far more fuel.

The demand for bandwidth has been a constant drumbeat for decades, and the rise of AI is putting it front and center once again. Optical technologies will play a key role in data center interconnect for tasks like training machine learning models, as well as interconnect to edge clouds and on-premises servers that for latency reasons, need to do inferencing locally.