The content team at Channel Partners tracks stories of interest to the technology advisor and wider channel communities. Anyone selling communication and connectivity solutions will want to stay abreast of these developing stories or catch up on ones they have missed. All links are valid as of May 6.
Secret Relationships Between VARs and TSDs
Big value-added resellers are starting to treat the TA model like a real business line, rather than a side hustle. That’s good news for the technology services distributors (TSDs) who got them there, as well as a test of whether those TSDs can hold on to them. Value-added resellers are diving into the commission-based technology advisor sales model as hardware margins dry up, OEMs evangelize recurring revenue, and clients demand best-of-breed vendor solutions. Read the Channel Dive story.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s Think Keynote
The AI era is widening the gap between winners and laggards, and the delta is not only determined by who has the most AI but also how deeply AI is embedded into business processes. That’s according to IBM Ceo Arvind Krishna at the day 1 keynotes from IBM Think 2026 in Boston. Krishna’s talk kept coming back to the operating model change that helps organizations move past experimentation and pilots and into end-to-end workflows where AI changes decisions, cycle times and outcomes. Read the SiliconAngle story.
What T-Mobile Stopped Telling You About Q1
Companies do not retire disclosure when business is accelerating. They retire it when they fear the optics. T-Mobile's Q1 2026 investor factbook is the first one in a decade without postpaid phone net adds, prepaid net adds, fiber net adds or total broadband net adds in the standard tables. The official rationale is alignment with cable peers and a maturing convergence story. Light Reading’s Roger Entner has a different take – see it here.
Lumen Takes AI Networking Ambitions Global with $475M Alkira Purchase
Lumen is scooping up multi-cloud networking company Alkira, betting $475 million that the combination of the latter’s software brain and its network brawn will accelerate Lumen's quest to become the programmable network of choice for the AI era. Read the Fierce Network story.
FCC Overhauls Satellite Spectrum Rules; SpaceX, Amazon Will Benefit
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is doing away with its equivalent power flux density (EPFD) rules, which restrict the degree of signal interference caused by non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellites. Going forward, the FCC said satellite operators will be able to negotiate appropriate interference protections through voluntary, private agreements, with the understanding that these negotiations be conducted in good faith. SpaceX and Amazon are set to benefit from the updated regulations that raise the upper power limits on their low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Read the Telecoms story.
Cable One Sees Inconsistent Competition From Starlink
Cable One shed more broadband subscribers than expected in the first quarter as churn remained low and as the operator continued to face off with pesky fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) competition. Cable One, which operates in largely rural areas, is also seeing competition from Starlink, but the pressure it is receiving from the satellite broadband service provider has been far from uniform. See the Light Reading story.
AI Inference Strains Enterprise Infrastructure—F5 Says Telcos Can Help
Enterprises have gone beyond AI pilots and proofs of concept and are deploying AI at scale, creating management complexity greater than most organizations anticipated. F5's 2026 State of Application Strategy report finds that organizations face challenges routing traffic between models based on application requirements, securing traffic and governing AI in production, Shawn Wormke, F5 SVP of product management, told Fierce Network.
Cloud’s Big 3 Spent More Than a Billion a Day on AI in Q1
Amazon, Microsoft and Google combined to spend $110 billion in capital expenditures as the buildout to handle high-capacity AI workloads during the three months ended March 31. AWS parent company Amazon led the pack with a reported $43.2 billion in capex, primarily to meet customer demand for generative AI. Google reported $35.7 billion in capex, mostly on infrastructure to support AI across the company. Microsoft’s quarterly capex was $31.9 billion, two-thirds of which went toward GPUs, CPUS and other short-lived assets. Read the Channel Dive story.
Claude Mythos Preview and Cybersecurity’s New Rules
Anthropic last month unveiled Claude Mythos Preview, a powerful AI model that can autonomously identify software vulnerabilities across complex systems. What was expected to be a major industry milestone instead came with an unusual caveat: Anthropic would not release the model for public use. The decision to restrict public use reflects a deliberate tradeoff between capability and control. TechTarget has a deep dive on Mythos and what it means.
Anthropic Mythos and the Growing Gap Between Risk and Response
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview is getting a lot of attention, and it should. Early results suggest it can surface high-severity vulnerabilities across widely used systems and open-source software at machine speed and scale, including issues in widely deployed open-source libraries and core infrastructure components. While that is meaningful, it reflects an evolution of something that security teams already deal with, and it does not capture the more important issue at hand. theCUBE Research analysts dig into Mythos.
Celebrating the 2026 IBM Partner Plus Awards Winners
At IBM Think 2026, IBM announced the winners of the 2026 Partner Plus Awards, representing outstanding partners from around the world. This year, IBM introduced seven new award categories, reflecting the continued evolution of the IBM Partner Plus program and the expanding opportunities for partners to deliver exceptional value. See the winners on the IBM website.