By: Pipeline Magazine

January 2026 didn’t feel like the start of a new year. It felt like the moment the entire industry work up and collectively decided the future was no longer optional.

Nearly 80 major news announcements landed in our inbox in just the first few weeks. The themes were unmistakable: networks becoming programmable platforms, Wi-Fi leaping toward 8, hollow-core fiber ready for AI-scale distances, agentic AI shifting from pilot to production at enterprise scale, sovereign cloud and quantum infrastructure taking real steps, and the market still consolidating aggressively. This wasn’t incremental progress. This was the industry hitting full throttle.

Pervasive, Programmable, Intelligent, and Monetizable Connectivity

The real story of January isn’t any single launch—it’s the unmistakable shift in how operators and vendors are thinking about networks.

A landmark partnership between Bharti Airtel and Nokia exposed Airtel’s full pan-India 5G network assets—AI, edge, slicing, and more—through Nokia’s Network as Code platform and developer portal, creating a subscription-based API ecosystem that lets third parties build directly on operator infrastructure for the first time at a national scale. This is the moment operators stop being bandwidth providers and start becoming platform companies.

In Tokyo, a field trial on SoftBank’s live 5G Standalone network combined L4S, Configured Uplink Grant, Rate-Controlled Scheduling, and slicing to achieve roughly 90% wireless latency reduction—enough to deliver stable, continuous XR streaming on smart glasses over cellular in real urban conditions, as demonstrated by SoftBank, Ericsson, and Qualcomm. That’s not a lab result; it’s commercial viability.

The industry’s first all-in-one bidirectional testing and certification solution for hollow-core fiber came from VIAVI, using 8100 Series OTDR modules and custom ReportPRO algorithms to measure and certify links with up to 30% lower latency, 70% reduced chromatic dispersion, and 65% lower attenuation—exactly what hyperscalers need for long-haul AI interconnects without constant regeneration.

Singapore’s first 50 Gbps XGS-PON fibre broadband trial was launched by Singtel, explicitly designed to support the next wave of residential and business use cases: ultra-immersive AR/VR/MR, low-latency cloud gaming, and AI-driven smart homes and offices that are expected to become mainstream within 3–5 years. The message is clear—10 Gbps is no longer future-proof; 50 Gbps is the new baseline.

The Wi-Fi 8 ecosystem got its strongest early push at CES 2026 when MediaTek unveiled the Filogic 8000 family, bringing multi-AP coordination, dynamic spectrum efficiency, enhanced long-range modes, and latency optimizations ready for dense AI scenarios across gateways, smartphones, IoT devices, and laptops, with early support from Deutsche Telekom, ASUS, HP, and others.

Broadcom raised the bar again with the BCM4918 accelerated processing unit and dual-band BCM6714/BCM6719 Wi-Fi 8 devices, combining on-device neural acceleration, real-time telemetry, built-in security, and up to 25% power savings through eco-modes and digital pre-distortion—enabling true agentic residential experiences with self-healing networks and intelligent QoE management.

Nokia quietly resolved its video patent dispute with Hisense through a multi-year license agreement covering TV implementations—royalties flowing, litigation ended, and the first direct licensing deal between the two parties.

Keysight achieved the first end-to-end live NR-NTN connection in n252 S-Band using Samsung’s next-generation modem chipset, a critical milestone for satellite-cellular convergence under 3GPP Release 19.

A beam-steering transmitarray antenna system in D-band was validated by Anritsu and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, proving stable high-capacity wireless links suitable for future 6G backhaul, industrial applications, and defense use cases. 

An integrated Air-Space-Ground-Intelligence Emergency System was deployed by CTE CC and ZTE in partnership with China Telecom, raising the bar for disaster-response connectivity.

Intra-Asia Marine Networks was established by NTT DATA to build and operate a new large-scale submarine cable linking Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan—expanding intra-Asia hyperscale backbone capacity.