Ninety percent of service-provider professionals surveyed by Ciena expect high-capacity network services for artificial intelligence workloads to contribute to revenue growth over the next three to five years.
The study surveyed 1,200 professionals working for telecommunications providers, wholesale fiber operators and regional service providers across 12 countries, including Australia, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore.
The survey was conducted by Censuswide from July 13 to July 23, 2026, with 100 respondents in each market.
Network upgrades seen as urgent
Fifty-six percent of respondents described high-capacity AI network services as their primary source of expected net-new revenue.
At the same time, 88 percent expressed a strong sense of urgency around optical-network upgrades needed to support premium enterprise AI connectivity. Forty-eight percent described the upgrades as critical, while 39 percent said they would be needed within the next 12 to 18 months.
Only 11 percent said routine network upgrades would be sufficient.
Ciena also asked respondents about managed optical fiber network services, or MOFN. Ninety-six percent expected these services to generate revenue from connecting distributed AI compute clusters over the next three years, while 51 percent identified MOFN as their primary vehicle for data-center interconnect services.
AI inference and distributed compute reshape demand
Forty-nine percent of respondents said growth in AI inference data centers would create new data-center interconnect opportunities. Ninety-four percent considered partnerships with cloud and neocloud providers important to capturing GPU-as-a-service revenue.
The survey also found that 39 percent expected edge-hosted services such as localized AI inference and GPU-as-a-service to contribute more than 20 percent of enterprise revenue over the next three years.
More than half of respondents said they had launched or expected to launch commercial quantum-safe encryption services within 12 months.
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