Telecommunications 📞

The evolution of telecommunications networks that we’ve known in the past decade reflects the importance of technology in the telecommunications industry. As 3g technology came to consumers, people staring browsing the web, 4g introduced live video on mobile networks and higher bandwidth. Today 5g takes a step forward and underlines the presence of technology in telecommunications.

This article will dive deeper into what the telecommunications industry is all about, why it relies on technology, and how it implements it.

What is telecommunications?

The telecommunications industry revolves around 3 main topics. Goods and services in telecommunication form the first one, it’s the mobile phones and the routers we use, the unlimited data plan you might pay. A large part of the industry is to deliver customers a working telephone, television, and internet connection. This Includes more traditional services like wired cable and cable TV.

The second topic is geared towards organizations. The point is to maintain networks and provide different industries with the means they need. This can be through the implementation of new norms or standards in the industry to facilitate the transformation of information. The sector is also responsible for hosting a lot of services. Some services are also reserved for businesses that need a lot more bandwidth than consumers and require special installation with, of course, special prices.

Lastly, the industry needs to develop new technologies to meet the needs of its customers. This can be seen in the different generations of mobile telecommunication services, 2g, 3g, 4g, and 5g. Carriers are deploying several new technologies to allow faster data transmission and better Internet access to make them more competitive

Each one of these benefits widely from technology as it improves their efficiency. The industry is now focusing on 5g networks, cloud infrastructures, and other types of connectivity particularly some that would consume less power.

Why does it use technology?

The industry relies on technology for several reasons, we’ll look at them in this section.

• Faster Communication

The main demand from consumers is the need for higher bandwidth. Recent developments with fiber optics and 5g follow that idea. The industry however keeps innovating in this sector to reach even higher speeds.

This includes the development of new standards across the industry and new ways of doing things. As most carriers deal with multiple cities, countries, and other carriers, the development of new standards can require a lot of time.

• Bigger Capacities

As telecommunications networks grow in size and bandwidth, more users join the network, this means that the network has to manage more users and different connections while also increasing the bandwidth for each one of these users.

AI allows companies to better manage their complex systems while making them capable of handling more users, more connections, and in general more data transfers. The technology ensures that the infrastructure powering our networks remain usable even during peak activity.

• More Security

As more data passes through each part of the network, any security issue on the network could compromise thousands if not more users. Technology and the new standards it introduces make for better security.

This ensures that no unauthorized access is given and that the user's data is protected. This is one of the reasons why 5g is being implemented, it provides much higher security standards than previous technology.

How do we leverage technology in this industry?

As we now understand why the telecommunications industry relies on technology, we’ll look at how it implements the tech.

• Live Video

Amid the COVID 19 crisis, live video feeds became an important concern. To connect people around the globe, the industry came up with more resources for its networks, making the bandwidth higher and allowing people to video call in the process.

We’ve also seen the rise of new companies in the business, or at least ones that were less well known, Zoom for example blew up and took over the classic skype alternative.

• Free Internet Calls

Technology has also allowed the implementation of free internet calls. The most famous company used to be Skype, nowadays people mostly use Whatsapp to communicate and call each other globally.

The implementation of such technology was entirely possible by the increased bandwidth that internet providers gave us. Once more, this means larger infrastructures that can withstand more users and higher data transfer rates.

• AI

Artificial Intelligence has provided some of the increase in bandwidth by ensuring better management of a network’s resources. As people connect and disconnect very frequently from it, optimizing the flow of information to make sure that every resource on the network is used at full capacity can be extremely complicated.

By analyzing how users use the network, means, how frequently they connect, how they connect, and for how much time, we can create algorithms that find the best ways to allocate the resources to each user.

The industry is quite recent when compared to more traditional fields such as construction, however, its importance is not negligible at all. The industry has made itself irreplaceable to most modern countries, organizations, and users. Our entire civilization heavily relies on telecommunications, technology, therefore, provides the boost in performance needed to adapt to such a large scale utilization.