Exploring the transformation of global telecommunications in the age of artificial intelligence and distributed cloud systems

The telecommunications sector is undergoing a massive churn (Maier & Reisslein, 2018; Hassan et al., 2019; Nguyen & Hoang, 2021). In the current Internet era, several traditional telecommunications paradigms are being redefined. This essay aims to unravel the transformation of global telecommunications in the context of the recent developments in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence systems and distributed cloud systems. Telecommunications services, with a worldwide value pegged at US$1.74 trillion, are at the crux of a digital revolution driven by unprecedented data demand. Telecom revenues are experiencing double-digit growth as society turns towards an era of the consensus economy and streaming video. Telecom services are thus in the process of breaking throughput speeds that will fundamentally change notions of telecommunications. These networks have now also become inextricably aligned with a variety of other industries, including digital health, education, transport, cybersecurity, and energy, among others. Consequently, global investments are being made to transcend traditional quality performance metrics and to explore novel use cases through laboratory experimentation.

Telecommunications has its roots in the invention of time, space, and speed, particularly as embodied by the electric telegraph (Foukas et al., 2017; Taleb et al., 2017). However, telecommunications networks have not grown in a linear capacity throughout the preceding two hundred years. At various stages, telecommunications have been driven by various forces including academia, states, and market-driven factors. Contingent upon the geopolitical events of the time, these forces have worked in conjunction with one another, or at times, to the detriment of one another. Such examples include the relationship between the Internet and the requirements of the military-industrial complex, or state-managed utilities and openly competitive and deregulated markets.