If you listen to the hype about 5G, with its promises of self-driving vehicles and immersive virtual reality, it doesn’t take long to realize how much data the coming generation of wireless will require. But have engineers been so preoccupied with delivering low-latency networks to feed data-hungry applications that they’ve forgotten about the rest of our vast, tangled telecommunications network? 

That concern has sparked some researchers to start thinking about where all that data will go after it travels from your phone to the nearest cell tower.

The International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations that coordinates telecom infrastructure between countries, recently launched a new focus group to, in part, address an emerging imbalance in our wireless communications. The group, Network 2030—more accurately, the ITU-T Focus Group Technologies for Network 2030 (FG NET-2030)—will explore ways to close the growing gap between the fixed and mobile components of future communications networks.