Juha Remes reflects on the matter in the third part of his 4-part blog series.

The new cars are mainly networked. Almost all cars already have a built-in interface with communication networks. A lot of different types of technical and related data on the movement of cars are constantly collected. As cars become electric, they have become wheeled information system infrastructures, small industrial production facilities. Car systems need to be updated remotely, and updates can’t just be done during maintenance.

The largest upgrade packages for cars may already exceed 20 GB and are constantly growing with the development of cars. These upgrades will have to be made over the network to cars, greatly increasing the need for telecommunications. Inside the cars there are also numerous entities, the construction of which is the responsibility of subcontractors. These subcontractors also need analytics on their own part, as well as connections with the outside world, such as equipment suppliers in factories. Now the data travels to the centralized data centers of manufacturers. Data centers are increasingly built on the infrastructure solutions of global cloud service operators around the world. A huge amount of data travels thousands and even tens of thousands of kilometers to centralized clouds and back.

The whole of society is becoming electrified at a rapid pace, and dataisation is taking place at many times higher speed. Some household appliances require a constant cloud connection to the manufacturer to work. Examples of these include e-printers and e-copiers that do not print unless there is a network connection to the cloud. The selling price of these devices is very affordable or “almost free” when purchased from a store, but they include a fixed monthly or annual charge or a separate cost for, say, dyes. This ensures business continuity for the manufacturer and a smooth transition of operating cash flow from the CAPEX world to the OPEX world. In traditional one-time sales, we move from digitalization to a recipe for success to continuous invoicing and long-term customership.

A step towards a growing telecommunications crisis

When everything is pulled together; Is we going to have a telecommunications crisis, alongside the energy crisis? Will telecommunications networks withstand the demands of the future and will there be enough capacity?

In Finland, the backbone networks of telecommunications are  based on the backbone cables of 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps telecom operators. The capacity of the backbone networks is sufficient to reflect the needs of consumers. However, the prospects for the future are worrying, given the needs of businesses and, in particular, industry. The five-generation coverage in Finland is quite good, but it is proportional to the current telecommunications needs. With 5G, the speed of wireless transmission will increase, and at the same time the density of devices and industrial use cases with their new challenges will also increase.

The activities of telecom operators have been strongly based on the “consumerized” business over the past three decades. Simply put, we are talking about a subscription store, where the device is identified in the operators’ networks with the help of a SIM card. There are different types of tags in it and the SIM can be a logical programmatic implementation built into the device or a physical smart card. SIM is always a component connected to subscription management, the basis of the entire core of telecom operator activity. The connection and invoicing of the device to the authorisation network is carried out through the subscription management. Each interface is given network credentials, which makes it possible to take advantage of telecommunications.  Billing is based on subscription-specific CDR (= Call Detail Record) files, which are used to track the use of data in the subscription and movement on the network of other telecom operators. If your home provider does not have network coverage available, roaming is used. Roaming, or ‘roaming’, is based on framework contractual agreements between operators.

The contract model is based on a global telecommunications infrastructure that enables the movement of equipment from one region to another, e.g. from one country to another. The agreement provides for a trade in telecommunications between operators, which defines the criteria for compensation for the costs incurred in transmitting traffic between operators. In pricing, a distinction is made between rising and falling telecommunications. The market prices of these may vary “like an exchange” in global telecommunications trading between operators. If there is over-demand for some telecommunications connections, the overflowing traffic will be recycled through alternative routes. At the same time, the communication delay increases. Cost optimization and automatic traffic routing can significantly change the flow of data depending on the market and usage situation.

Automatic routing is based on routing rules in thousandths of a second. The rules react to overload, cheaper pricing, fault situations, network entitlements and peaks in demand between different data connections.

Data traffic is primarily offered on a subscription basis, where the connection has a basic speed and the maximum amount of data allowed. For the most part, the speed of subscriptions or data brokerage volumes are limited on a pricing basis. In addition to the connection-based restrictions, the actual speed of the junction depends on the traffic volumes in the area where it is located. The more data traffic there is in the same area, the smaller the traffic relay band obtained by the connection decreases. The operation has been optimized so that more data traffic flows to the subscriptions (download) than to the exit (upload). In addition to subscription management, there are “customer dedicated” connections, in which case, for example, a predefined capacity is reserved for the subscriber from the telecommunications cable. Typically, the client must be able to assess their own data traffic needs as a risk of oversizing or underestimating.

In the history of wireless communications, in thirty years we have gone through four generations of cellular networks. The use of networks has been based on consumer subscription requirements and business users have almost invariably been a group of consumers combined with the company’s pricing package.

Five generations of cellular networks are going to change everything. A breakthrough is made in solving the needs of companies. Telecommunications will change in terms of data volume and speed-related interface structure in the new era of network technology. New usage needs require lag-free and completely error-free communication. The requirement may be a guaranteed uniformity of speed, both for the transmission and also for the receipt of data. Always. The requirement may apply to a huge number of devices, even in a very small geographical area, i.e. a significant number of traditional “subscriptions”. These related devices are no longer used by humans, but can be very complex devices or simple sensors. New types of authorisation models and “new types of identity and access rights” models are needed. The idea of multi-factor authentication or two-factor authentication or,  for example, entering a PIN code finds itself in a new situation, how the device is able to carry out the required action.

The current telecommunications infrastructure does not allow for this near future. Now data moves endlessly in industrial production from various devices to the cloud and back, thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers away. Traffic routing can recycle data with different optimized routing automations in very different ways depending on the load on the networks. These qualitative requirements do not travel between operator networks dynamically with current technology.

Forecasts will increase the number of devices entering wireless networks by up to ten times more than humans. This increase in the volume of telecommunications is rapidly clogging up telecommunications networks, and technical limits are being met with numerous new implementations. Telecommunications networks cannot meet routing challenges, and even if capacity is increased, there will eventually be a data connection shortage and a telecommunications crisis. We are repeating the challenges of electricity networks in telecommunications. The need for data arises from two-way network traffic, with extensive features, while in electricity distribution consumption is mainly one-way for the time being. The properties of electricity can be changed quite easily with transformers to suit each customer. Data needs a seamless, qualitative connection to the entire transmission chain.