The top trends shaping the future of mobile networks

Mobile networks have become the backbone of communications for people and businesses worldwide. Thanks to this communication infrastructure high speed internet connections are easily available for everyone. These networks help businesses thrive and create new opportunities. And also, we get to expand technologies in entirely new areas.

There’s still a lot more to desire in and around mobile networks. Their development continues at a rapid pace and it will bring a lot of changes in the not so distant future. Some of these changes are even happening right now.

Let’s explore several interesting trends that are shaping up in the world of mobile networks. They feature new developments for the networks themselves and technologies that will greatly benefit from mobile infrastructure and thus could potentially be a driving force in future changes and developments.

Case in point – the Internet of Things

IoT has a lot of potential to live up to. It will mean that billions of devices and sensors will surround us practically everywhere. The vast majority of them will rely entirely on wireless connections to function and bring their data to data centers or edge servers. There’s even an entire category – cellular IoT – technologies that connect physical objects to the internet via cellular networks. It’s poised to be quite a big category, especially as IoT projects become more and more popular all around the world.

IoT devices can use regular mobile networks like 4G, 5G, etc. The problem is capacity. Even while 5G is slated to be able to work with up to 1 million devices under a base station, that would require meeting a lot of specific conditions which makes the proposition theoretical at best.

So, chances are, IoT will have to rely on specific wireless networks to handle all of the devices. And there are already such projects out there which offer just that. One of them is the Helium Network which is based on the LoRaWAN technology. It’s built specifically for low-powered IoT devices and provides them with a low-latency, high-speed connection. And it also covers our next trend.

Decentralized networks

Currently most mobile networks are privately owned and centralized. This means one company gets to decide how the network is developed. It gets to decide all of the rules, security features, even who gets to use it. That’s the benefit of owning the entire thing.

Decentralized networks are a bit different. Helium is exactly that – there’s no single owner. Instead, people and businesses are the network. They can increase its capacity and coverage as they see fit by adding Helium hotspots everywhere they want (in accordance with local regulations, of course). This means Helium will keep going for as long as there’s internet available.

Another benefit of decentralized networks is their open nature. Open source technologies increase trust and allow such a network to rival big carriers. And there are also other benefits like better security thanks to technologies like the blockchain.

Blockchain is our hero

The blockchain technology became famous thanks to cryptocurrencies. While it is very useful for financial services, it is practical for a lot of other projects. Among them are mobile networks. Thanks to a blockchain networks can guarantee the authenticity of data and provide an extra layer of security. It also ensure complete transparency and no data can be modified or removed without trace.

The blockchain also encrypts the data and makes it safer. It’s key to build a truly decentralized mobile network. In the Helium Network for example, there’s also no way to add fake data for the locations of hotspots as there’s a special algorithm in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. So everyone can be certain that the locations are real and thus plan accordingly. Another benefit of the blockchain is that hotspots can’t identify individual packets which increases the privacy even more.

5G has a lot to prove

Back to more consumer-oriented networks. Here we have 5G. It came to forefront with massive expectations. So far work has been focused on the infrastructure development and build. But it is time for 5G to actually start bringing these promises for added value to reality.

5G is already making changes to the world of mobile networks. It changes the mindset from big cell towers towards the use of small cells and more of them. It also shows that wireless networks can and will be faster and able to handle more data and devices. The huge competition in this area also drives other innovations which will be of benefit to all participants. Like this next trend.

Machine learning and AI

The gist of everything so far is that mobile networks are getting bigger and bigger. Proper management of these assets will be key for their sustainable usage and growth. As such automation and AI get an increasingly more important role in this area. Machine learning tech will be able to make the networks more agile and adaptable to changes in real time.

This will increase efficiency depending on usage and will lower each cell’s capacity when there’s less strain. Thus energy consumption will be better optimized. Operators will also have the ability to add real-time security features and rely on AI to predict possible peak load times. Predictive maintenance will reduce network downtime and costs.

Virtualized networks

This is another key trend for the future of mobile networks. This will mean that more than one mobile operator will be able to use the same hardware infrastructure and offer a completely separate service. In turn two or more telcos can share the same infrastructure and split the costs. This will increase competition for customers and lower prices while improving the overall service for users.

Of course, it’s not so easy. Telcos which own networks would much rather prefer that their network is used only by them and their customers. So, regulator pressure is happening to change this, but it’s going to take time.

Another variation of virtualized networks is the way they work. Most classic networks need proprietary hardware and software to run and carriers have to update everything by even going to each base station. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time and money. A virtualized network uses more common hardware and cloud-based software. Thus maintenance and updates are much simpler and cheaper. A lot of the work is truly virtual and you only need to go physically to a base station when there’s a physical issue.

As we can see, the future of mobile networks is certainly very interesting. We are poised for dynamic and big changes ahead and luckily all of them seem to be bringing a lot of positive effects for everyone involved. Hopefully they will materialize the way we all expect them to.