Artificial intelligence (AI) places a major burden on upload connections for mobile phone users — and the three major U.S. carriers are not meeting the demand — according to a new report from Ookla.
Ookla said the growing use of ChatGPT and other AI tools places much more demand on mobile networks than the typical activities of browsing social media and the web, watching videos, texting, and making the occasional phone call. As a result, more speed and expanded capabilities will be necessary.
The report said advanced AI capabilities like AI-enabled glasses will put a particular strain on upload connections in the future.
Ookla noted what equipment providers Ericsson and Nokia are telling stakeholders about the coming AI-related demand:
- “The uplink traffic will increase significantly over the coming years and, indeed, is becoming telecom’s new ‘currency,’” Ericsson wrote. “This potential growth of uplink traffic underlines the importance of network capacity planning, spectrum allocation, and RAN [radio access network] feature developments.”
- “AI changes how traffic is generated, where it flows and when it peaks. It increases uplink use in the home, it injects automation and machine vision into industrial sites, and it multiplies east–west movement between data centers,” Nokia said in a company report.
It is vital to implement best practices for managing uplink connections, the Ookla report said. For U.S. operators, this means major changes are needed. In Ookla’s most recent analysis of Speedtest data, the three largest U.S. providers — AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon — allocated a much smaller percentage of capacity to users’ uplink connections than their counterparts in other countries. Chinese operators allocated the largest percentage.
Ookla noted that these carriers — which topped Ookla’s recent Mobile Experience Report — haven’t increased the percentage of network resources dedicated to upload connections, even though mobile upload speeds and capacity have risen noticeably since the beginning of the decade. If fact, some carriers have actually decreased that percentage.
