Photo credits: Fiber Broadband Association
By Matt Cimaglia
This week in Orlando, Michio Kaku stood in front of a few thousand fiber broadband executives and told them their industry is the nervous system of the next economy. He meant it more literally than most of the audience registered.
The setting was Fiber Connect 2026, the Fiber Broadband Association’s 25th anniversary conference, and the morning was the inaugural session of the AI & Emerging Technology Infrastructure Summit, a new program the FBA built specifically to put fiber at the center of the quantum and AI conversation. Booking Kaku for the keynote was a statement of intent. The conference exists because the people who build the country’s optical networks understand that what runs on those networks is about to change, and that the conversation needed a venue.
I was there to talk about the quantum node economy. The conversation that morning kept returning to a point the broader market has not absorbed. Quantum technology is going to matter, and not in the narrow sense of computing. Quantum sensing is already in your MRI machine, your GPS, and the ATM you used yesterday. Quantum networking is the connective tissue that turns sensors and computers into an economy. Free-space and satellite links will carry some of that traffic. Fiber will carry most of it.
