Pulse Survey at Yotta 2025 Reveals Openness
to New Internet Connectivity Strategies

Betting on the Sky

When the team asked attendees whether satellite Internet would be as common as fiber by 2030, 65% said yes, and more than half (60%) went further, predicting the first Internet Exchange (IX) would be operating in orbit within the decade. This may have been a strange question to some, but it highlights a serious point: space is no longer a gimmick. It’s becoming a genuine part of the network equation. With low-Earth orbit constellations shrinking transmission times from hundreds of milliseconds to just a few dozen, and new optical systems like the European Space Agency’s OFELIAS project experimenting with laser-based data transfer, satellites are stepping out of the role of “last resort” connectivity. They’re evolving into the next tier of the global digital backbone – capable of adding performance, not just coverage.

With the results of the survey, it’s clear to see that industry is warming to the idea that space really is the next frontier. The same engineers once skeptical of anything outside fiber trenches can today be found talking about orbital relays and inter-satellite laser links with genuine excitement. Instead of talking about how satellites can compete with terrestrial networks, they are interested in how the two could co-exist. In regions where laying cable is expensive or impossible, space has always levelled the playing field. But for enterprises with distributed operations or global AI workloads, it could soon become a seamless extension of terrestrial infrastructure. Call it “wireless fiber in the sky”, the “dawn of orbital Internet,” or simply “space laser connectivity” – either way, the odds that the next major interconnection point will be circling above us are getting better by the day.

We Can’t Gamble with Latency

In Vegas, where split-second decisions can make or break fortunes, it was fitting that 61% of attendees believed connectivity would soon be priced on latency rather than bandwidth. That’s a radical departure from the way the Internet has operated for decades, where performance was measured in megabits and gigabits and priced accordingly. But as industries shift toward AI inference and real-time data transfer, latency has become the new benchmark of business. Whether it’s an AI query happening at the edge, autonomous vehicles reacting to sensor data, or surgical robots guided remotely, the margin for delay has all but evaporated entirely. Every millisecond matters. And if latency matters, so does geography. Enterprises are now buying proximity, precision, and consistency, and the conversation has shifted from “How much data can we move?” to “How fast can we boomerang it to where it needs to go and get it back in time for our applications to work?”

This is already reshaping how networks are built and how their economics work. Data center operators are racing to reduce physical distance between compute nodes, interconnection platforms are re-architecting for ultra-low latency routing, and enterprises are investing in edge locations purely to shave milliseconds off round-trip times. Bandwidth is no longer king, because it alone doesn’t determine value when performance is measured in time. If the Internet’s early years were about connecting as many people as possible, the next decade will be about connecting everything as fast as physics and geography will allow. And much like the blackjack tables at the MGM, winning will come down to timing, strategy, and maybe even a little bit of luck.

Reading the Room

Looking at the results of our little “pulse poll”, what really stands out is a palpable change in mood. In the industry today, there is an interesting blend of excitement and unease – a sense that we are entering uncharted territory. The public Internet can barely keep up with the demands of modern enterprises, yet no one's quite ready to give up on it. The cloud is becoming more patchwork in nature, but also more powerful. Satellites are shifting from a backup solution to a foundational backbone. And latency, once an engineer’s obsession, is suddenly a boardroom metric. These contradictions mirror where digital infrastructure stands today: a system under pressure, evolving faster than the business models, regulations, or standards that govern it. The people my team spoke to weren’t cynical. They were pragmatic, aware that the future of connectivity will depend on collaboration across every layer of the stack: physical, virtual, and even orbital.