Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) Impact on Mobile Telco Traffic Is Showing; Upgrades at the Real Edge Will Be Needed

As 2025 closes out, mobile telcos face significant investment strain on their finances, but they still need to focus on the fundamentals of connectivity to ensure their networks can handle the opportunities that the “AI super-cycle” are presenting. Investment will be needed across a range of fronts—from data centers, fiber-optic backbone, and core network upgrades—but also at the edge, and not just computing but the “real edge”—the cellular base station.

Mobile telco data plans have continued to offer increasingly generous monthly data plans. As a result, data throughputs continue to ramp up. For example, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in Australia have reported that monthly data throughput has jumped from 13.6 Gigabytes (GB) to 18.8 GB per user Year-over-Year (YoY). Even emerging markets are demonstrating strong data throughput per month. For the same period, Malaysia’s data throughput jumped from 22.4 GB to 24.3 GB. This is being reported in multiple markets. Remarkably, mobile data traffic YoY growth is now showing an upswing. Ericsson’s Mobility Report, based on 3Q 2025 actual data, showed an upswing in Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ) growth of 5%; 2Q 2025 also showed similar QoQ growth. Historically, the percentage rate of growth had been on a steady decline from 1Q 2020.

It is not just higher resolution video graphics and virtually 100% adoption of smart phones, tablets, and connected laptops by the wider population that is driving data traffic growth, but also due to the increase in Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting from traditional chatbots to agentic agents (capable of performing multi-step tasks). More complex compute-tasks such as photo-realistic image and video manipulation, as well as compute tasks requested on smartphones would require processing at a data center. As a result of these innovations, AI will have a number of impacts on the CSP:

• New Connection Types: Including AI glasses, AI-enabled vehicles, and AI-enabled robots.
• Average Online Time Is Expected to Grow 1.2X: Growing from 6.4 hours to 8.1 hours per person.
• AI Will Generate More Compute Tokens: Potentially between 1.5X and 5X more by 2030.
• The Ratio of Download Versus Upload Traffic: Expected to shift from 15:1 in 2020 to 7:3.

How do CSPs handle these shifting trends? 5G-Advanced supports throughputs up to 10 Gigabits per Second (Gbps) on the downlink and 1 Gbps on the uplink, as well as further reduced latencies (down to 4 Milliseconds (ms)) and improved reliability (99.999%), which will benefit AI-supported applications, but CSPs do need to focus on a key part of their network.

“That asset” is the cellular antenna sitting on top of each base station. Equipment vendors such Ericsson, Huawei, and PROSE Technologies have come under pressure to handle an ever-greater range of cellular connectivity scenarios. Mobile telcos have been upgrading their passive antennas to more complex 32T32R and even 64T64R Massive Multiple Input, Multiple Output (mMIMO) antennas, but there are a number of additional innovative antenna solutions coming into the market such as:

• Extremely Large Aperture Array (ELAA) Antennas: The number of Antenna Elements (AEs) in ELAAs has ramped up from 192 to 384 AEs. The innovation envelope is being pushed further by vendors such as Huawei, which has announced a High-frequency Active Antenna Unit (HAAU) that has 1,024 to 2,048 AEs per ELAA. ELAAs are valuable because the network can adjust the phase of each antenna's signal and thereby allow for the superposition of RF transmission at the end user's location, resulting in a substantial data throughput boost.
• Holographic Beam Forming (HBF): ELAA antenna technology can be further complemented by orchestration technology. Coordinating hundreds to thousands of antennas across a swath of cell towers becomes substantially harder. This is where HBF steps up, effectively enabling a cluster of antennas to work like a coverage “hologram.” Instead of updating cellular connection info on a sequential basis, all the antennas can share updates simultaneously. This parallel processing helps networks handle massive data flows more efficiently. This spread of ELAA AEs, which can operate in “high,” “medium,” and “low” spectrum bands, can help balance out traffic loads and coverage across a range of urban environments. The network effectively becomes a “single network,” rather than a collection of cells.
• Maximizing Vertical and Horizontal Coverage: In addition to handling large clusters of data-hungry end users armed with smartphones, CSPs will need to handle novel User Equipment (UE) such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and smart city Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Furthermore, cities expand not just horizontally, but also vertically, with skyscrapers going beyond 20 to 30 floors to over 100. While indoor small cells and Distributed Antenna Solutions (DASs) address some of the skyscraper residents’ requirements, outdoor base stations also have a role to play. CSPs are deploying 180º beam antennas, rather than the usual 120º antenna.
• Agentic AI Radio Access Network (RAN): AI is gaining traction in the RAN and antenna domain. The purpose of AI RAN is to deliver “intent-driven” experience optimization, improve service availability, and support the scale-up of new services. Several infrastructure vendors have developed orchestration solutions that can deliver an on-demand service orchestration and network capability flexibility. End users could be supported with differentiated allocations of spectrum (130 Megahertz (MHz), 190 MHz, 260 MHz) that offers standard, premium, and ultra-high throughput scenarios.

The cellular base station antenna is a vital network asset for CSPs. The range of cellular coverage and capacity-dependent devices will only expand—from UAVs to smart city monitoring terminals to AI glasses. CSPs will need to ensure that the antennas they deploy continue to deliver on: 1) enhanced capacity; 2) improved and more versatile scenarios of coverage; and 3) reduced impact on the environment through better use of materials and energy consumption.

The outlook for base station antenna deployments is still robust, despite the rapid build-out over the past 20 years. The passive antenna market experienced a 7% decline in 2023, but the market made a recovery in 2024, with an estimated US$3.6 billion in sales. The market is expected to show growth out to 2029, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 1.3%.