Marja Matinmikko-Blue

This paper aims to understand the value-added services that the future 6G-enabled metaverse can and will bring to hospitals. This is important since most studies on 6G and the metaverse are heavily driven by technological solutions. Adopting a qualitative research approach, this paper collects experts’ opinions on the usage scenarios of the 6G-enabled metaverse in hospitals. Six use cases within hospital contexts have been identified from open-ended interviews. The analysis of each case reveals that 6G, as a general-purpose technology, offers the necessary capabilities to support the development of the metaverse in hospitals. The metaverse-enabled services are expected to design future smart hospitals and improve work processes and resource allocation in hospitals, while also promoting preventive healthcare and training and enhancing the quality of care in emergency, treatment, and rehabilitation. Consequently, the development of both metaverse and 6G will progress in tandem, hand in hand, offering local services in hospitals. From a value perspective, this paper contributes to the development of the 6G and metaverse in the hospital vertical by understanding the needs, capabilities, and key values of the future 6G-enabled hospital metaverse.

The emergence of the 6G ecosystem is another tipping point for policy and regulatory orthodoxy. Against the backdrop of the US offering overall the best conditions for innovation, policymakers in Europe must recognize the need to change their analytical and planning structures. Telecom regulators need to break out of their sectoral silos. Fortunately, many are ready to do so, and 6G provides the opportunity. 5G, and even more so 6G, IoT, cloudification, edge computing, etc., are gamechangers, and digital platforms have taken over a growing share of interpersonal communications, while most traditional telecom companies have been reduced to providing connectivity. We are therefore right to ask ourselves what we want to regulate and, above all, why. Are we regulating in the right place? By what means? In this chapter, we analyze regulatory developments in Europe, North America, and Asia and draw conclusions on how Europe's competitiveness and innovative strength can be improved with better interlinking of industrial policy, innovation, and regulation.

This chapter examines future scenarios of 6G at different levels of analysis. The chapter starts by identifying and assessing 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 may 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. The chapter concludes by presenting the future of mobile connectivity and its potential outcomes at the societal level.

Local 5G/6G mobile communication networks can be deployed by different stakeholders to serve a variety of user groups with different needs. The legal framework influencing local 5G/6G network deployments and operations, the EU Digital Legal Framework, has been recently developed and adopted by the EU, influencing network deployments, and impacting new stakeholders’ ability to become accepted and legitimate members of the mobile ecosystem. This chapter identifies and discusses relevant EU legal acts and presents the EU legal initiatives in the context of local mobile communication networks. It reviews previous research from the legitimacy challenge perspective and adds to a better understanding of how regulation currently delimits the emerging business models of the local 5G/6G networks. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the analysis for regulators and firms deploying local 5G/6G networks.

This chapter aims to academically highlight the link between 6G mobile communications and the transition to sustainability. Using both theoretical arguments and practical examples, the current chapter applies a multi-level perspective (MLP) to the sustainability transition to highlight the specificities of niches, socio-technical regimes, and exogenous socio-technical landscapes of 6G technology in relation to the sustainability transition. Moreover, the current chapter is one of the rare studies that focuses on the larger picture in the 6G and sustainability debate by highlighting specific UN SDGs which can be achieved by the sustainability transition and the role of both endogenous and exogenous factors using an MLP lens. Finally, this chapter offers specific theoretical, practical, and policy implications.

This chapter introduces the evolution of mobile communications. As the mobile communications’ context is expected to become increasingly platform-based and ecosystemic, it is important to distinguish relevant perspectives and map the developments in the field. This chapter provides an outlook from the first (1G) to fifth (5G) generation of mobile communications by looking at technology and standardization, relevant regulatory developments and contents, 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 1 to 6G.

This chapter adopts a futures research approach and applies causal layered analysis to present 6G visions specifically focusing on the 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 and transformed futures beyond 6G mobile communications. The chapter concludes with policy implications for developing global mobile communications.

This chapter discusses the research, managerial, and policymaking-related future opportunities and implications that stem from the discussions presented in the preceding chapters. With a focus on overarching themes that concern everyone, the paper presents research questions to direct future research, advises managers in themes that may become of increasing interest in future 5G and 6G, and summarizes key concerns for policymaking that should be considered to reach a global 6G and beyond world.

This chapter explores the opportunities for value creation via the services enabled by the fifth (5G) and sixth (6G) generation of mobile communications. The chapter starts with a discussion on value creation in general and discusses value creation at service, platform, and ecosystem levels of analysis. We present the 5G and 6G usage cases as starting points and highlight the drivers of value creation and the key services enabled by the mobile communications technology generations. In 5G, the focus is on deployments of public commercial networks, public commercial virtual networks, neutral hosts, private local networks operated by MNOs, private local networks operated by others than MNOs, and public network integrated non-public networks. In 6G, the focus is on new capability usage case candidates that will be represented by immersive communications, connecting intelligence, sensing for sustainability, and connecting the unconnected.