17 May marks another World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. A timely moment to reflect on how far telecommunications has come, and where it is heading next.

For decades, telecommunications networks have connected people, communities and economies. With the emergence of 6G and next-generation wireless systems, this infrastructure could take on a far broader role: not only connecting people and objects, but sensing the world around us.

This emerging capability is known as Integrated Sensing and Communications. In mobile networks, wireless signals constantly interact with the environment as they travel through the air, reflecting, scattering and bending before reaching a receiver. Every raindrop, water-surface movement, vehicle and changing landscape leaves a subtle signature on these signals. These signatures can be used to turn the network itself into a large-scale sensing system capable of observing changes in the physical environment while preserving privacy. This is what we call network sensing.

At the Global Big Data Technologies Centre (GBDTC) at the University of Technology Sydney, we have been pioneering network sensing for almost a decade. Over the past three years, we have worked closely with NSW State Emergency Service and TPG Telecom to explore how mobile networks can help monitor rainfall and water flows, with the resulting intelligence feeding into a digital twin designed to visualise and predict floods and storms.

Our successful demonstration of the technology in 2025 showed remarkable accuracy and generated a strong interest across industry and government. Thanks to the leadership of NSW SES Commissioner Mike Wassing and his team, discussions are now progressing with Federal Government stakeholders to develop a pathway for deploying this technology across NSW and beyond. The goal is clear: to make our communities safer, our infrastructure smarter, and our economy more resilient.

At the Connectivity Innovation Network, we have also been supporting this broader evolution of telecommunications infrastructure. One of the projects funded through CIN, the Wireless Rain Gauge, has developed a low-cost, sustainable approach to rainfall monitoring that uses existing communication signals. With this innovation, the days of worrying about debris, sensor maintenance, reading accuracy and manual data collection may soon become a thing of the past. A field trial is planned in Lismore later this year.

Looking ahead, we see mobile networks evolving from pure connectivity infrastructure into intelligent instruments of awareness that can sense the pulse of the physical world in real time, helping us see earlier, decide faster and respond better.