Geographical Study of Telecommunication Networks in the 21st Century: Current and Future Approaches

Abstract

The purpose is to identify existing approaches and outline the contours of future approaches to the geographical study of telecommunication networks. Materials and methods. The information base is one domestic and seven international bibliographic databases. The methods are comparative analysis and the author's semantic search algorithm based on machine learning. Results. One hundred and sixty-four articles were identified. According to the types of telecommunication networks, preference was given to the study of fi beroptic networks and much less attention was paid to cellular, postal, landline telephone, satellite and telegraph networks. The analysis of publications allowed us to identify ten existing approaches: comparative-geographical, streaming, route-geographical, spatial-diffusion, regional, geopolitical, geolocation, geographically-blocking, constructively-geographical and geographically-delaying. Based on the prospects for the development of geography and telecommunication networks, an assumption is made about the possibility of the appearance in the future of three new approaches – economic-geographical, geographical-grid-convergent and artificial-geo-intellectual. Conclusions. It is possible that in the future there will be a consolidation of all approaches into a single methodology aimed at the geographical justification of the deployment of 7G networks.