I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless…(Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist)
The Aim and Purpose of the Book
Mobile communications as the backbone for digitalization in modern society in many ways define how digital services are being designed, delivered, and consumed. Despite its central role for individuals, organizations, and societies in digitalization, the mobile communications context is only scantily researched outside the engineering domain. However, the idea for the book was initiated within the world’s first 6G research program, the 6G Flagship at the University of Oulu, Finland, funded by the Academy of Finland as an eight-year research endeavor from 2018 to 2026. The book aims to provide a comprehensive and multidisciplinary outlook on the present and future, focusing on the changing world of mobile communications, written by a team of authors representing relevant experience and expertise in the business, regulation, and technology management domains. Contrary to many conventionally edited and peer-reviewed scientific books, the content of the chapters have been peer-reviewed and coordinated to provide a coherent, holistic, and multidisciplinary forward-looking view to understand and make sense of what we call the world of mobile communications.
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Mobile communications technologies are often referred to by examining what generation of technology they represent in the continuum from the first generation (1G) to the latest fifth generation (5G) technology. These generations are backward compatible, meaning that the currently used communications technologies may be based on any of the generations from 2G to 5G. These technologies should also be forward compatible with the next generation mobile communications technologies. The research on future 6G already started a few years ago, and we are expecting that it will be commercially available by 2030. However, what 6G will be, and how it will be used, remains unknown.
Today’s 4G services are available practically everywhere, and the adoption of 5G networks is well underway. Compared to 4G, 5G has already brought about new business opportunities, especially in industrial domains and by enabling seamless virtual and augmented reality services. However, it (5G) also raised serious concerns about data privacy and security and the use of artificial intelligence. As the global vision for 6G will be released in 2023, we need to understand already today what 5G evolution and 6G may bring for the future service delivery, and how they will influence us at user, business, business ecosystem, and geopolitical levels. Future 5G evolution and 6G are not only about moving toward faster, better, and more secure networks providing the backbone for innovative digital services. 5G and 6G will bring about a profound digital disruption that concerns everybody: individuals as the users and the developers of the service; companies that are developing and providing these technologies; companies that are providing mobile communications services, i.e., the operators; companies that are offering their services on public or private 5G and 6G services or needing these services; the authorities and public organizations; and policymakers and regulators.
Currently, no books are available that bring together business and regulation perspectives of mobile communications with strong engineering expertise. A more holistic picture of 5G and 6G is therefore lacking in existing publications and in the present discussions of ICT. Consequently, the aim and purpose of the book it to provide the reader with a state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary, and insightful overview and vision presented by experts in the field.
With this book, we, therefore, aim to explore and provide answers to the following questions:
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What will 5G, its evolution, and 6G be about?
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How will 5G and 6G influence future digital services, businesses, and society, and what kind of impacts will they have on them?
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How should 5G and 6G be regulated in the future?
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How could we benefit from 5G and 6G innovations in the future?
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Who Should Read the Book, and Why?
This book is targeted at and written for managers, practitioners, policymakers, and students who want to understand what 5G and 6G will be about, the kind of impacts they might have, and how we can benefit from them in the future. It also provides a holistic view of future mobile communications business and regulative aspects to engineers working in the mobile communications sector. The key subject areas concerned are engineering, policy, management, and business. The book can be used in higher education in engineering and management, as well as digital business. Furthermore, the book is applicable by (1) managers, who are active in mobile communications and/or apply mobile connectivity as the backbone of their digitalization and digital services, (2) regulatory bodies and policymakers, who operate in the field of mobile connectivity, or whose work has implications for related businesses and services, and (3) researchers and universities and other higher education institutions, and their students. Accordingly, the book:
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Provides a holistic and insightful view of the future of mobile connectivity as the backbone for all digitalization, given by experts in the field.
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Combines the technical and business-related perspectives of the field in exploring the unique and vast business potential, while addressing the impact on policymaking.
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Contributes valuable insights and new knowledge to all who study, develop, manage, provide, use, and regulate mobile connectivity and related businesses.
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Inspires the reader through practical and reality-based examples and industry views on future 5G/6G.
How Was the Book Developed?
With the aim to provide a more holistic view of 5G, 6G, and beyond, in leveraging more human-centric information and communications technologies (ICT), we have initiated, developed, and edited this book on The Changing World of Mobile Communications: 5G, 6G, and the Future of Digital Services with chapters co-authored by researchers and practitioners working at the interface between business, engineering, and policymaking. Through close dialogues and collaborations between the co-authors, we have aimed to facilitate a more holistic discussion and presentation of the content, impact, and future scenarios of telecommunications. In doing so, the book seeks to bridge these three large and vibrant research communities with a view to informing future research, as well as practitioners and policymakers, on the neglected but vital contributions that ICT ecosystems and businesses can make to sustainably creating and capturing value for society. Underpinning the book is the core question of how 5G/6G can contribute to sustainable value creation and value capture from a business, engineering, and policymaking perspective.
Structure of the Book
The structure of the book is created to answer these questions and build a stepwise learning experience for the reader in four parts. Part I maps the mobile communications context, Part II examines value creation and capture in the context, Part III focuses regulatory and national considerations, and Part IV, building collectively on the preceding chapters, discusses implications for future consideration for research, management, and policymaking.
Part I Mapping the Mobile Communications Context
Part I of the book starts with an introduction (Chapter 1). The Introduction to the book chapter provides an overview of the book’s purpose, aim, content, and targeted contribution and target audiences and provides a short presentation to each chapter and biographies of all the authors.
Chapter 2 Evolution of mobile communications introduces the evolution of mobile communications. As this context is expected to become increasingly platform-based and ecosystemic, it is important to distinguish relevant perspectives to map the developments in the field. The chapter provides an outlook from the first (1G) to fifth (5G) generation of mobile communications by examining technology and standardization, relevant regulatory developments, and content, and specifically characterizes the business ecosystems toward the sixth generation of mobile communications (6G). The purpose of the chapter is to provide a contextual setting for the discussions presented in the subsequent chapters by showing the emergence and evolutionary continuum of mobile communications from 1G toward 6G.
Chapter 3 Future scenarios and anticipated impacts of 6G examines future scenarios of 6G at different levels of analysis, aiming to identify and assess the key change political, environmental, social, technological, and legal forces—trends and uncertainties—related to future mobile communications and proposes a set of dimensions according to which we can expect 6G to change the world. Based on the proposed dimension, the chapter presents a set of future scenarios related to mobile connectivity integrated with various services at the user (humans and machines), business (service provisioning and utilization), business ecosystem value chain (upstream and downstream), and geopolitical levels of analysis.
Chapter 4 Sustainability transition and 6G mobile communications highlights 6G mobile communications’ link with the sustainability transition. Using both theoretical arguments and practical examples, the chapter applies the multilevel perspective of the sustainability transition to highlight specificities of the niches, sociotechnical regimes, and exogenous sociotechnical landscapes of 6G technology in relation to the sustainability transition.
Part II Value Creation and Capture in Future Mobile Communications
Chapter 5 Value creation and services in mobile communications explores the opportunities for value creation via the services enabled by the fifth (5G) and sixth (6G) generation of mobile communications, with a specific focus on value creation at the service, platform, and ecosystem levels of analysis. The chapter presents the 5G and 6G usage cases as starting points, highlighting the drivers of value creation and the key services enabled by the mobile communications technology generations.
Chapter 6 Business models in 5G/6G mobile communications examines business models in mobile communications that have remained surprisingly stable up to 4G. 5G and beyond generations will bring a fundamental change to how mobile connectivity is deployed and commercialized. This chapter explores the business opportunities, business models, and changing platformic business ecosystems of the future that extend beyond traditional company boundaries.
Chapter 7 Benefiting from innovation in future 6G takes a wider perspective on profiting from innovation and discusses firm, ecosystem, industry, and policy-level aspects relevant for developing 5G/6G. To date, mobile communications networks have been seen as enabling technologies whose innovations potential can be characterized by examining technology complementarity, standardization, and intellectual property issues. With 6G, especially in combining artificial intelligence, the mobile network gains features of a general-purpose technology platform with specificities regarding the appropriability of value.
Part III Regulatory and National Considerations
Chapter 8 Local 5G/6G network business in Europe: regulatory analysis and legitimacy considerations focuses on the EU Digital Legal Framework; it identifies and discusses relevant EU legal acts and presents the EU legal initiatives in the context of local mobile communications networks. It reviews previous research from the legitimacy challenge perspective and improves understanding of how regulation currently delimits the emerging business models of the local 5G/6G networks.
Chapter 9 Toward anticipatory regulation and beyond discusses the need of telecom regulators to break out of their sectoral silos and analyzes the regulatory situation in Europe, North America, and Asia. The chapters derive conclusions on how Europe’s competitiveness and innovative strength can be improved with better interlinking of industrial policy, innovation, and regulation by introducing the anticipatory regulation approach.
Chapter 10 Sovereignty and 6G discusses how sovereignty has become a top priority for government leaders and asks what sovereignty is in the world of 6G. Or is the question rather what 6G is in a world where safeguarding sovereignty is the major theme of geopolitical collaboration, competition, and conflict? The chapter outlines the interplay of 6G technology and political-industrial governance in different scenarios for the future of sovereignty.
Part IV Implications for the Future
Chapter 11 A view to beyond 6G adopts a futures research approach and applies causal layered analysis to presented 6G visions, focusing on different national perspectives between China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the USA. The chapter identifies the assumptions behind mobile communications, analyzes the different national visions and presents, based on the multiple ideologies and epistemes of the stakeholders, transformed futures beyond 6G mobile communications. The chapter concludes with policy implications for developing global mobile communications.
Finally, summarizing the discussions in the preceding 11 chapters, Chapter 12 Opportunities and implications related to future mobile communications focuses on the research, managerial, and policymaking opportunities and implications related to future mobile communications.
Acknowledgements
Writing and editing “The Changing World of Mobile Communications: 5G, 6G and the Future of Digital Services” has been one big team project of editors and co-authors working diligently together on developing the chapters, while coordinating and sharing knowledge in making state-of-the-art contributions for a holistic publication on the emergence, impact, and scenarios of 5G and 6G. Accordingly, huge thanks are due to all the book’s co-authors!
This research has been supported by the Academy of Finland, 6G Flagship program under Grant 346208. This book would not have been possible without the funding, support, and the network and especially the community of the 6G Flagship program at the University of Oulu, Finland. The 6G Flagships builds on the “6G vision for 2030: Our future society is data-driven, enabled by near-instant and unlimited wireless connectivity. Developing products, services and vertical applications for the future digitized society requires a multidisciplinary approach and a re-imagining of how we create, deliver and consume data and services.” A special thank you Matti Latva-aho and Ari Pouttu for the support and funding provided!
In addition, this book has been partially supported by the LNETN project (Legitimation of newness and its impact on EU agenda for change) from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860364.
However, “behind the scenes” of the book are several key people who have played vital roles in its making. We would like to thank Alec Selwyn and Arunaa Devi from Palgrave MacMillan for a very fruitful and effective collaboration on developing, editing, printing, and launching the book. Second, we want to thank Bea Longhurst for all her hard work in remaking and redesigning all the figures of the book and for achieving a professional and unified infographic look. Finally, we thank Gareth Attwood and Rupert Moreton from Acolad for their professional and effective high-quality proofreading of the chapters.
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