210 exabytes per month moved across mobile networks in Q1 2026, a 22% year-over-year increase that is straining an architecture built around shared radio access, centralized cores and session-preserving tunnels.
100.64.0.0/10 carrier-grade NAT lets operators place hundreds or thousands of users behind one public IPv4 address, so a website often sees a shared, shifting identity rather than a single subscriber.
GTP tunnels keep sessions alive as phones move between cells, but routing through only two or three national breakout points can make users in different cities appear online from the same distant location.
10 to 30 milliseconds of healthy 5G radio delay is often outweighed by the longer trip through carrier cores and remote servers, which is why stable 40 Mbps can outperform bursty 300 Mbps connections.
75% of mobile traffic is already video, while uplink volumes are now growing faster than downlink for most operators, pushing carriers toward edge computing and 5G standalone to reduce those routing penalties.