Networking Field Day 40, hosted by Tom Hollingsworth, takes place April 8–10, 2026, and focuses on how AI is transforming modern networking, data center design, and cloud infrastructure. Over three days, companies including Nokia, Lightyear, Cisco, Arista, Upscale AI, Netris, Selector AI, and Net...

Telemetry has become a critical component of modern networking, but organizations need better ways to harness the growing volume of data. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, Tom Hollingsworth is joined by Scott Robohn, Jason Gintert, and Pete Welcher to discuss how telemetry provides r...

In this presentation, Andy Lapteff, a network engineer turned product marketing manager at Nokia, introduces the company's shift from its iconic mobile phone legacy to its current role as a leader in mission-critical network infrastructure. He highlights Nokia's historical reputation for reliabil...

The rise of AI has driven the emergence of multiple new network domains, each with distinct roles, architectures, and performance requirements. This presentation explores these new networks and their roles. Patrick McCabe, representing Nokia, builds on the premise that AI is a permanent fixture i...

Get an inside look at how Nokia Validated Designs (NVDs) streamline AI-ready data center and networking deployments through proven architectures, rigorous validation, and real-world performance insights. We'll highlight several of our latest AI-focused NVDs, show how partners are extending them, ...

Ethernet continues to evolve to meet the performance and scaling demands of modern AI networking architectures, progressing from RoCEv2 toward innovations driven by the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC). This presentation discusses these requirements and introduces UEC Specification 1.0, with a foc...

Explore the essential management considerations for building and operating multi-tenant AI data center networks. Attendees will learn why abstraction is critical to achieving the scale, speed, and consistency required for AI infrastructure. The presentation will demonstrate how event-driven autom...

AI networks require purpose-built hardware platforms designed for different roles across the infrastructure. This presentation outlines the hardware platforms positioned for these roles highlighting how each supports performance, bandwidth, and operational needs. This preso will have a focus on w...

Buying and managing enterprise network services has barely changed in decades--carrier portals, spreadsheets, blind renewals, and invoices that never match the contract. Lightyear is building an AI software platform that modernizes the enterprise telecom lifecycle, automating and optimizing for y...

Buying and managing enterprise network services has barely changed in decades--carrier portals, spreadsheets, blind renewals, and invoices that never match the contract. Lightyear is building an AI software platform that modernizes the enterprise telecom lifecycle, automating and optimizing for y...

As AI training and inference scale, the network must function as an extension of the compute fabric. This session explores the architectural requirements for high-performance AI data centers. We will examine the shift toward deterministic networking to mitigate tail latency and fabric congestion,...

As AI training and inference scale, the network must function as an extension of the compute fabric. This session explores the architectural requirements for high-performance AI data centers. We will examine the shift toward deterministic networking to mitigate tail latency and fabric congestion,...

As AI training and inference scale, the network must function as an extension of the compute fabric. This session explores the architectural requirements for high-performance AI data centers. We will examine the shift toward deterministic networking to mitigate tail latency and fabric congestion,...

Aviz Networks introduces the AI Networking Operations Center (NOC), a vendor-neutral, agentic AI platform designed to transform traditional network management. Unlike tools that merely append a Large Language Model (LLM) to an existing product, Aviz provides a private, secure, and interoperable f...

Aviz Networks introduces the AI Networking Operations Center (NOC), a vendor-neutral, agentic AI platform designed to transform traditional network management. Unlike tools that merely append a Large Language Model (LLM) to an existing product, Aviz provides a private, secure, and interoperable f...

Brendan Gibbs and other leaders from Arista outlined the company's comprehensive strategy for AI infrastructure. The presentation highlighted Arista's Etherlink portfolio, which is optimized for 800G connectivity and anchored by the EOS operating system. Gibbs emphasized that a well-optimized net...

Optics have been critical for network switches especially at 800 Gbps and evolving to 1.6T from cost, density, power efficiency and performance perspective. Arista has been driving major innovations in optics to power networking for AI applications. In this section, we will cover the optics lands...

Monitoring and managing complex AI infrastructure requires moving beyond traditional networking tools that treat the environment as a black box. Praful Bhaidsana explains that the industry has long suffered from a mean time to truth problem where network operators are blamed for issues they canno...

We go deep into the fabric of the AI cluster. We'll discuss why Ethernet has become the definitive backplane for AI workloads. We'll explore hardware innovations in power efficiency and the protocol optimizations--like Dynamic Load Balancing (DLB) and advanced congestion control--that keep data m...

Upscale AI was founded in 2025 and quickly emerged from stealth to become a unicorn following $300 million in seed and Series A funding. The leadership team consists of industry veterans from major firms like Cisco, Broadcom, and NVIDIA, focusing on a clean sheet architecture designed to solve th...

Upscale AI, founded in 2025, recently emerged from stealth as a unicorn following $300 million in combined seed and Series A funding. With a team of industry veterans, Upscale AI is focused on building a clean sheet networking architecture specifically for the backend and lean front-end of AI cl...

Upscale AI argues that traditional cloud and front-end networks, which are largely based on a client-server architecture, are fundamentally ill-suited for the unique demands of AI workloads. While standard web traffic is connection-oriented and tolerant of latency, AI clusters rely on collective ...

Upscale AI posits that traditional data center networking is a round peg in a square hole for AI, as existing infrastructures were designed for general-purpose web traffic rather than the massive, synchronized communication required by billions of parameters and trillion-token models. By focusing...

Upscale AI distinguishes between two critical domains: scale-up networking, which creates a large compute environment within a rack where multiple GPUs see a flat, unified memory, and scale-out networking, which connects these domains through memory copy operations. The presentation highlights th...