Future Scenarios and Anticipated Impacts of 6G

Abstract

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.

By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

(Iain M. Banks. The player of games)

Framing Change Toward 6G

Disruptions at multiple levels are a visible part of both organizational life (e.g., Greene et al., 2018; Ivanov et al., 2019) and economic reality (Buckley, 2019; Dieppe, 2021; Klement, 2021). In the last few years, global industries have faced disruptions in form of China-US trade war (e.g., Cho & Moon, 2022; Lukin, 2019), technological war between different centers of power especially in the emergent industries (e.g., Chin, 2019; Klement, 2021; Petricevic & Teece, 2019), COVID-19 (e.g., Ali et al., 2022; Ivanov, 2021), and more recently Russia-Ukraine war (Korn & Stemmler, 2022; OECD, 2022). As a result, in recent times, we have witnessed a plethora of terms emerging, out of which the most famous is VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) as a permanent feature of the current economy (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014; Buckley, 2019; Greene et al., 2018; Millar et al., 2018) especially in the industries, which are significantly intertwined with global value (and supply) chains (Agarwal et al., 2021) such as 6G mobile communications. Studies focusing on VUCA strategies have stressed the critical role of agility to deal with volatility, information to deal with uncertainty, restructuring to deal with complexity, and experimentation to deal with ambiguity (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014; Buckley, 2019; Greene et al., 2018; Ozbayrac, 2022).

Both 5G and 6G are expected to bring disruptive changes to our increasingly digitalized world as these technologies have been considered to be the backbone for future digitalization. This chapter aims to provide a holistic and comprehensive framework depicting how 5G and 6G could be developed in the future—and what kind of impact these technologies could have when analyzed at multiple levels. The analysis presented in this chapter serves as a high-level starting point for the subsequent chapters that drill down into more detailed discussions relevant for the future development of mobile communications.

This chapter takes the form of an exploratory scenario analysis that follows a traditional process comprising the identification of key drivers and uncertainties and the generation of alternative scenarios (Schoemaker, 1995). This work is based on the data collected from the expert group workshops organized by the 6G Flagship (6G Flagship White Papers, 2020), where a total of 146 forces were discovered and identified, and 23 key drivers (trends and uncertainties) were selected based on their anticipated impact and predictability of consequences. Based on the key trends, 16 scenarios were generated and assessed for their probability, plausibility, and preferability. This chapter ends with a summary of the scenarios regarding their economic, societal, and environmental consequences.

Key Trends for the 5G/6G Transition

Several key trends for 6G were identified based on the ranking of forces by their high impact and high probability as shown in Fig. 3.1. They are further discussed in the following.

Fig. 3.1

Identified key trends

Political, Legal, and Regulatory

Public network funding has traditionally been directed at unserved and underserved areas in terms of broadband access and coverage. Recently, support for deployment programs has extended to areas such as smart city community development, logistic hubs (such as ports and airports), advanced health services, public safety, and critical infrastructure. Smart infrastructures are expected to be hyperconnected and completely automated. They will serve as a middle layer between humans and natural environments. These networks will be put together with a public–private-personal partnership and ownership funding model with a view to sustainable growth and the use of digital infrastructure.

Wireless communications spectrum politics and spectrum management in the 6G era will reveal a new level of complexity that stems from the variety of spectrum bands and spectrum access models with different levels of sharing. Local deployments of networks by a variety of stakeholders are expected to grow further in 6G. The timescales of international-level spectrum management will no longer be enough with the rapid technological development of mobile communication networks and changing user needs. Spectrum sharing will play an increasing role in accommodating new 6G systems with existing spectrum users. Furthermore, in national technology politics, spectrum regulation will be used to gain a competitive advantage. Site densification of the mobile communication infrastructure is happening in the higher spectrum band deployments creating scarcity of real estate with different pay-back periods for information (IT) and telecommunication technologies (5–10 years) vs. infrastructure (15–30 years).

Telecom networks have become essential enablers of National sovereignty and critical infrastructure platforms on the level of electricity and water supply. This sets requirements for the redundancy and resilience of services, networks, infrastructure, and businesses. Furthermore, governments are active in the technology governance in 6G development and look to reassert control and technology leadership over key technologies.

Economic

Webscalers are increasingly dominating ecosystems and future IT and ICT market dynamics and will be gaining dominance in the telecom cloud infrastructure by acquiring assets and talent to obtain a bigger slice of the pie from edge cloud monetization. Over-the-top (OTT) companies will increasingly utilize their customer data, cloud infrastructure, and AI/ML capabilities to challenge traditional operators’ customer relationship ownership, because users will be valuing service experience and perceive connectivity as a basic utility. In addition to the media space, OTT players will offer basic telco services such as voice or messaging and are expected to be active in growth areas such as cloud space and services, competing with telcos for clients and revenue. They will tie customers to their own ecosystems with carrier-neutral connectivity, while making reliance on traditional operators a thing of the past.

Social

In Mobile-only next billion, ubiquitous cheap user terminals and increasingly affordable network connections in megacities and rural areas will help another billion users join the Internet and increasingly access applications and digital content aimed at non-English-speaking markets. Currently, mobile is for many the primary or only channel for accessing the Internet and services. Non-terrestrial networks (NTN) for connectivity will be deployed in areas not covered by terrestrial networks (~95% of earth’s surface). Huge investments from cash-rich companies and nations to establish LEO (low-earth-orbit) satellite mega constellations may provide attractive balance between global coverage, high capacity, low latency, and TCO with rapidly decreasing satellite production and launch costs. Furthermore, sustainable radios in NTN (which represent > 80% of power consumption in macro-terrestrial) will be solar powered in space. With its unprecedented scale and growing impact on daily lives, mobile is a powerful tool for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for driving sustainable economic growth.

Private networks driven by industrial digital automation call for standalone networks with high reliability, high performance in terms of both bandwidth and reliability, secure communications, and data privacy, fulfilling business and mission-critical needs. The solutions will enable the integration of processes, data, and diverse devices such as sensors, machines, and in-vehicle and hand-held devices across a wide range of applications for industry enterprises. Private networks could be established without direct MNO involvement. Furthermore, demands for privacy in personal space may also create private subnetworks that rarely connect with the public Internet.

In 2015, 85% of global GDP was generated in cities. Urbanization will see 5 billion people living in cities by 2030, occupying 3% of the earth’s land, but accounting for 80% of energy consumption and 75% of carbon emissions. Ninety-five percent of urban expansion in the next decades will occur in the developing world, where 883 million people live in slums today. Rapid urbanization is exerting pressure on freshwater supplies, sewage, the living environment, and public health. Future demographics divide a world of 8.6 billion inhabitants by 2030 into two camps: a growing one in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and a stalling and decreasing one, including Europe, Russia, and post-peak China. Future cities will be hungry global economic engines and the economic powerhouses of the global economy. Cities are increasingly functioning as autonomous entities, setting social and economic standards. Urban identity will grow in importance compared with national identity.

A hyperconnected globe will continue to feel ever smaller in 2030: globally, 90% will be able to read, access the Internet, and be on the move. 6G will transform urban and rural living, existing at the intersection of geopolitics, the growth of nationalism, rights to information transparency, and information citizenry. Thus, once the 6G infrastructure is in place, content growth will lie in supporting multiple social and technological identities of people through a variety of media. This will require a mindful view of decision making and the regulation of future data, information, media, and network usage in light of sustainable economic growth. Thus, the people in 6G worlds will be increasingly sophisticated in their media and service consumption, while being rooted in their local economies. Connectivity will therefore be not only virtual and digital, but physical. Furthermore, the approaching opportunity to redefine the human–machine interface (HMI) will enable the biological world to be connected in novel ways. Many future mobile devices will become thinner and lighter in a variety of form factors while offering massive computational capabilities at the same time for applications such as truly immersive XR, mobile holograms, and digital replicas. 6G will make it possible to eliminate wired communication entirely, at least for short-range transmission. Highly specialized radio subnetworks will be installed, where applications run in robots, production modules vehicles, and even human bodies. These autonomous specialized radio cells will be able to support life-critical services that cannot depend on connections to the overlay network, though they can benefit when those connections are available.

Technology and Research

Industry 5.0 (I5.0) will allow collaborative HMI between services and industries, because human intelligence will be in perfect harmony with advanced cognitive computing. With real-time data, effective data monetization, and digital automation of the manufacturing process, businesses will be able to shift the focus to generating higher revenues from the servitization of products. Advanced manufacturing capabilities will help to overcome design complexities with the ability to facilitate an extremely long tail of mass customization and further return control to customers in a haptic way. Furthermore, I5.0 will require the highest standards of safety and environmental protection.

The need for resiliency, cybersecurity, and trust will be ubiquitous in the hyperconnected world of 2030. Digitalization is permeating the biological and physical worlds, thereby making security a question of life and death. The number of threats is increasing significantly especially due to the billions of devices and subnetworks of different sources deployed, in addition to open interfaces and disaggregation-enabled microservices from multiple vendors and open sources which cannot be trusted. Even a temporary loss of technology may have not only a productivity but a psychological impact on our lives. Furthermore, the subversion or corruption of our technology may result in disastrous harm to our lives and businesses, for example, if medical treatment devices deliver the wrong medication, education systems teach propaganda, or work automation causes injury or damage to our products and businesses. In particular, expectations toward protecting and safeguarding society and critical infrastructure from emergency situations by means of technological advances are anticipated to grow. Quantum-safe encryption and a variety of physical-layer and architecture security mechanisms are emerging for trusted service delivery on a zero-trust infrastructure, which will become an integral part of the 6G network.

Growing amounts of data and requirements for low latency are taking computing to the edge cloud and decentralizing network topology in a distributed cloud configuration. With the growth of extreme edge intelligence, the proliferation of increasingly powerful communication, computing, and analytics resources at the edge of the network will convert architecturally disaggregated 6G access networks into a rich service provisioning and access platform. Hyper-local services such as augmented reality scenarios will not require connectivity with a distant service platform. Instead, they will perform better with local real-time time-sensitive service access. Furthermore, individuals will support parts of shared information processing and edge intelligence networks that address collective problems for humanity, such as genome sequencing, through shared resources (à la citizen science). The individual will emerge as a node in the network of intelligence relations, rooted in the local physical world while connected to the hyper-real 6G intelligence networks by an ecology of information devices, products, and IoT services.

Society’s need for trustworthiness with associated legal and normative action such as IT security and privacy laws are prerequisites to assure the full value and benefit of communications in the 2030s for society and the economy. Privacy regulations need to be strongly linked to the rising trends of the platform data economy, p2p sharing economy, intelligent assistants, connected living in smart cities, transhumanism, and solutions such as digital twins’ ‘meta’ reality. The physical world is increasingly being twinned with the digital world and we are relying more on predictive models to guide collective actions. The ‘I own my data’ concept is expected to grow, particularly in Europe, based on GDPR evolution. However, severe differences in global data privacy laws are expected to emerge. For example, the US is unique among major countries in lacking a unified set of data privacy laws in spite of having a large number of global webscale companies, and China’s cybersecurity law (CSL) applies not only to conventional data handlers but to telecom, radio, and television operators. This is unique because the Chinese authorities must be informed if data indicates any prohibited activity.

Environmental

Sustainable material will contribute to the innovating to zero and circular economy megatrends. Toward 2030, companies will shift focus, developing products and technologies that innovate to zero, including zero-waste and zero-emission technologies. The full lifecycle carbon footprint of the ICT industry represents around 2% of worldwide emissions and is projected to grow at a 6% annual compound growth rate. 6G net positive impact and sustainability are expected to be achieved by enabling increased efficiencies and improved environmental performance in other sectors. Computing technologies will be miniaturized to the extent that they will be sustained by the power generated by everyday human activity. Everyday walking, jogging, and housework will produce the energy to support the person’s information devices, which will in turn occasionally monitor the person’s vitals, as well as cater to information and entertainment needs through over-the-top connectivity.

Key Uncertainties for the 5G/6G Transition

Next, the key uncertainties for 6G were identified based on the ranking of forces according to their high impact and high uncertainty as shown in Fig. 3.2. They are further discussed in the following.

Fig. 3.2

Identified key uncertainties

Political, Legal, and Regulatory

AI/ML will provide a new foundation for 6G radio air interface design and optimization, enabling self-optimizing transmitters and receivers, cognitive spectrum use, and context awareness. There are contrary interpretations of the trend in artificial intelligence rights. Assuming the availability of appropriate datasets for training purposes, artificial intelligence will be able to propose solutions to increasingly complex problems that can serve as the source of great economic growth, shared prosperity, and the fulfillment of all human rights. 6G will give our networks the ability to sense things. The 6G network is expected to become a source of situational information, gathering signals bouncing off objects to determine their type, shape, relative location, velocity, and perhaps even material properties. It will become capable of determining a person’s precise position within a room, as well as tracking and predicting their habits. As 6G biosensing emerges, the network may know our most intimate health details to monitor our medical conditions and medication levels or even warn us of an imminent heart attack or epileptic seizure. In an alternative future, it could drive inequality, inadvertently divide communities, and could even be actively used to deny human rights.

In the connectivity context, data regulation relates to net neutrality that rules Internet access providers to treat all traffic equally, irrespective of the sender, receiver, content, service, application, or the device in use. At the same time, the 5G evolution is already developing a 5G-advanced network that can be extremely tailored to specific use cases intending to treat traffic differently for each use case. This legislation creates uncertainties by impacting companies’ capabilities to create and capture value in virtualized network-based services between telecom operators and cloud providers. One of the key uncertainties concerns how edge computing should be provided under strict net neutrality, e.g., as in Europe. Furthermore, it impacts capabilities of providing the cybersecurity required for the merging of the physical and digital worlds that is now happening.

In geopolitics, the tension between globalization, networking power, and the urgency of ecological reconstruction will be linked to the balance between centralized decisions and the strengthening of inclusion and democracy. Toward 2030, the power configuration may be transforming from a multi-polarized world to a poly-nodal world in which power will be determined in economic, technological, and cultural networks and interaction. Political and societal systems will face growing tension in responding to the instability of the financial situation, the ecological sustainability crisis, and uncertainty about the complexity of the future world. Societies may struggle to find a balance between fast-moving decision making, community engagement, and the reasserting of democratic values and commitments. On the one hand, it is hoped that strong leaders will bring simplicity to complex problems, but on the other, there could be increasing efforts to influence things in communities from the grassroots level. Furthermore, along with increasing polarization, the aging population in developed countries, and diversification, new tribes and communities will emerge around various imaginary groups representing a wide variety of values, places of residence, political opinions, consumption choices, or lifestyles. It may happen that weakened and fragmented future prospects, the absence of togetherness, and the polarizing effect of social media will lead to a rise in populism, skepticism toward changes in the environment, and in the worst case, extremist attitudes. At the same time, environmental awareness among people and companies may increase and be reflected in a growing number of people and communities changing their habits, and companies taking corresponding actions to offer customer experience. Vehicles of open value creation and the open-source paradigm, in particular, may provide a powerful avenue to reinvent civil society’s participatory process in conjunction with anticipatory regulatory capability.

Economic

Resource orchestration and configuration relate to power over development and adoption of innovations and technology that are essential for sustainable growth and ubiquitously embedded in society and daily life. Data is increasingly accumulated, and its value and significance are growing. Technology may increasingly be seen as a geopolitical issue of power, and questions of future resource orchestration power will emerge, exemplified by the following three questions. Who will own the continuously accumulating data? Who will get to decide on technology? Who will set the rules and regulations?

Open ecosystems will foster economies of scale, reducing costs and accelerating services. A new landscape of vendors will enable them to become digital service providers. An open value configuration will emphasize value co-creation and co-capture to maximize the overall ecosystem value, which in turn may increase the value shared and acquired not only by a focal firm but by the actors within the ecosystem. By utilizing the sharing and circular economy, co-creation partners will employ existing resources and processes to promote stable interaction. Toward 2030, platform ecosystems will not only offer search, social media, and ecommerce but provide an infrastructure upon which innovation and transaction platforms will be built. Platform business models will rapidly overtake and disrupt traditional linear value chain business models. ‘API-fication’ as the confluence of a few different trends such as ubiquitous software, cloud computing, and microservices will enable new digital value flows in all industries, e.g., marketplaces to lease/share resources and to make the capabilities of personal subnetworks and enterprise private networks available.

Digitalization and software will be everywhere, and building a developer ecosystem will be a pre-requisite for success for many businesses. Novel decentralized business models will not necessitate a focal point but will require the design of transaction content, structure, and governance to create value. Everything-as-a-service will become the dominant model beyond IT and will evolve to outcome-as-a-service providing a service-level agreement (SLA) and will be on-demand with elastic access to applications, information, and resources.

China was seen with high uncertainty in all categories. On the one hand, China is becoming a leading superpower, exploiting foreign resources and technologies, while the Belt and Road initiative offloads excess capacity of produced commodities. On the other hand, it is threatened by its aging population, pollution, and political instability which may turn China inwards to maintain peace and prosperity and bring its economic progress to a standstill. Megacity pollution in China will drive green tech forward. China is investing heavily on technology leadership aiming to set the standards and the technical direction for the entire world. Chinese politics and technology will become strongly intertwined as technology such as new IP systems support the Chinese political structure. This government led, enterprise-driven approach will create unique super-platforms based on pure commercialism and will be implemented with a mobile first mindset. The Chinese market will differentiate itself strongly from the global market in terms of its offerings, services, use of technology, and market regulation.

Social

Commitment to sustainability principles will be confirmed with clear targets and performance reporting, e.g., UN 2030 agenda for sustainable development; corporate responsibility; ecological, social, and governance. Novel sustainability-oriented business model innovation will emerge stemming from the social freemium, circular economy, product-service, and sharing platform business models. Both the commercial launch of 6G and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (UN SDGs) are targeted for 2030. 6G communications are expected to boost global growth and productivity, create new business models, and transform many aspects of society. The UN SDGs are a way of framing opportunities and challenges of a desirable future world, and they cover topics as broad as ending poverty, building gender equality, the fight against climate change, and developing smart cities.

Transhumanism reflects the rise of technology-driven evolution at an unprecedented rate of change, prompting deeper questions into what it is to be human from the biological, behavioral, and human–machine evolutionary perspectives. By 2030, we could see a greater societal focus on sustainability, the nature of humanity, values, creativity, and self/social fulfillment and empowerment (Kinnula & Iivari, 2019). There may also be a cognitive intelligence revolution via the ascendancy of sentient tools and possibly also a human-orchestrated self-directed selection in biological, neurological, and physical evolution. Human augmentation will evolve from primarily gaming applications to everyday value-added mixed reality (XR) services offering safety, productivity, and efficiency improvements from hybrid working worlds to industrial processes. Furthermore, the metaverse will extend virtual digital twin models from technologies allowing an interactive experience toward digital avatars. The 6G metaverse will enable us to interact with each other, create, and utilize virtual resources and services, and experience a variety of new features.

Technological and Research

Alternative computing approaches such as quantum computing will shine at sorting, finding prime numbers, simulating molecules, and optimization and could thus disrupt segments like finance, intelligence, drug design and discovery, utilities, polymer design, AI and big data search, and digital manufacturing. The technology may for a long time be limited to selected industries such as the military, national laboratories, and aerospace agencies, while alternative computing approaches to help handle the greatly increasing level of parallelism in algorithms may be available more widely. Today’s asymmetric cryptographic algorithms will likely need to be replaced with quantum-safe concepts to provide a new approach to secure 6G networks and protocols.

Environmental

The circular economic model represents a shift from constantly producing new goods to a form of consumption that is based on using services and sharing, lending, and recycling goods, instead of owning them, aiming to reduce waste. Digitalization offers many opportunities for monitoring and steering the circular economy and understanding the big picture of the sustainable data economy. The constant progress of technology, 6G, computational capacity, cloud-based services, and Industry 5.0 will make it possible to make many factors of production ‘intelligent’. This, in turn, will improve efficiency, monitoring, and make processes more transparent and facilitate the development of new kinds of personalized digital services. 6G aims to create zero-carbon-footprint networks where every aspect of the network’s operation is designed to minimize or offset CO2 emissions. Not only will 6G enable lower costs per bit and faster connectivity, but it will also be able to analyze collected data to turn off components and scale down capacity when the demand is low. Energy efficiency will be a major design criterion in 6G along with the other metrics.

6G Impact Scenarios Based on Key Trends and Uncertainites

Based on the collected data and identified trends and uncertainties, the following eight scenario logic dimensions, referred to as themes, and their endpoints were selected to develop future 6G business scenarios (Yrjölä et al., 2020), as summarized in Fig. 3.3. The identification of dimensions was done by choosing key trends and uncertainties based on their anticipated impact and the predictability of consequences and uncertainty. The scenario logic was selected to represent the most significant uncertainties of the overall system under scrutiny by selecting two unrelated polar dimensions. The eight scenario dimensions were categorized into four themes to develop a total of 16 alternative 6G scenarios, which are discussed next.

Fig. 3.3

Summary of selected scenario themes

In the following sections, the scenarios are presented top down from the user and developer level to firm, ecosystem, and geopolitics level as depicted in Fig. 3.3. The description and numbering of the scenarios are given in the scenario titles and shown in Fig. 3.4.

Fig. 3.4

Summary of four scenarios

User and Developer Level Scenarios

In the user developer scenario theme, the horizontal dimension was chosen to represent resource orchestration and the vertical axis shows the user experience. The polar dimensions on the resource orchestration axis range from societal/corporate to individual-driven orchestration. The user experience axis ranges from traditional standardized service provisioning to the opposite driving customer engagement with customized long tail service experiences. Using these two scenario dimensions, we have developed four scenarios.

Customer6.0: Customized Experience and Resource Orchestration by User (1A)

In the Customer6.0 scenario, the user experience is customized, and resource orchestration is user and developer centric. In this scenario, 6G technology has penetrated most parts of the world. IoT devices and sensors controlled by AI are a normal part of the environment nearly everywhere. The automatic collection of different kinds of data from humans, as well as from our environment and its analysis, is used for highly sophisticated products and systems that make people’s lives easier and provide a better user experience through convenience, because everything is automated. The prices of the systems are very reasonable due to open interfaces and standardized cheap components. Computing technologies are miniaturized to the extent that they are sustained by the power generated through everyday human activity to support the individual’s information devices, which in turn occasionally monitor the person’s vitals, as well as catering to information and entertainment needs through over-the-top connectivity. Media and service consumption are rooted in local economies, and users of such products and systems are used to living with them and cannot imagine their lives without them.

Furthermore, in this scenario, hyperconnected and completely automated networks have been put together with a public–private-personal ownership funding model with a view to sustainable growth and digital infrastructure usage. As counterforces to the creation of platform monopolies, decentralized platform cooperatives, the peer-to-peer economy, shared economy models, and the progress of a human-driven fair data economy have emerged. Transhumanism reflects the rise of technology-driven evolution at an unprecedented rate of change, prompting deeper questions about what it is to be human from their biological, behavioral, and human–machine evolutionary perspectives. By 2030, we could see a greater societal focus on sustainability, the nature of humanity, values, creativity, self-/social fulfillment, and empowerment. There may be a cognitive intelligence revolution via the ascendancy of sentient personal assistants and possibly human-orchestrated self-directed selection in biological, neurological, and physical evolution. The emerging opportunity to redefine human–machine and brain-UI interfaces enables the connection of people and the biological world in novel ways. Holopresence systems can project realistic, full-motion, real-time 3D digital twin images of distant people and objects into a room, along with real-time audio communication, with a level of reality rivaling physical presence. Images of remote people and surrounding objects are captured and transmitted over a 6G network and projected using laser beams in real time.

There will be a serious threat of a digital divide and inequality related to access and skills to use new technologies, knowledge, digital services, and materials at the individual level, as well as between countries, if access to new technologies is restricted. This may reflect working careers, which also assumes employee activity to educate individuals. Expensive products and systems may never be the norm, but both local businesses and citizens can create their own frugal adaptations of products and systems to suit their living conditions when even electricity may be a scarce resource. This is supported by the global developer culture, in which the sharing of blueprints and working processes is encouraged. Development talent will become a scarce resource, and most companies will be struggling to attract the talent they need. The shift to cloud-based services has changed how enterprises purchase software and its development. Application developers will have more control than before over what is being purchased. Companies will build their products to make it easy for developers to adapt and shift their expensive top-down go-to-market motion to bottom-up product-led growth, where customers can easily try out the product and expand usage over time. Open supply of best-in-breed (SW, HW, services) in a decomposed and open architectural environment with open interfaces and open hardware is adopted.

6G will transform urban and rural living at the intersection of geopolitics, the growth of nationalism, rights to information transparency, and information citizenry. Content growth will lie in supporting people’s multiple social and technological identities through a variety of media. This will require a mindful view of decision making and the regulation of future data, information, media, and network usage in light of sustainable growth for the economy and human empowerment.

I Robot: Standardized Experience & Resource Orchestration by User (1B)

In the I Robot scenario, the user experience is standardized and resource orchestration is user centric. With the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technologies, and cognitive science (NBIC), newer application areas, goods, services, and systems will proliferate. This convergence has resulted in our present development of cyber-physical systems and IoT-based technologies, along with 3D printing and on-demand manufacturing, among other instantiations. In the next two decades, the growth of 6G-enabled technologies will aid the explosion of biologically based intelligence along with artificial intelligence in industrial setups. This biological intelligence will rely on a mixture of biologically based self-programmable natural and artificial neural networks and micro- and nanobots that can be used in tandem with existing AI-based automated systems. Interaction with these hybrid bio-industrial automated systems will constitute the next major revolution in programmable smart factories and industrial systems, and it will be a source of value creation, configuration, and resource utilization. In a rapidly changing reprogrammable and reconfigurable world, businesses will have a short to medium change horizon, expected performance indicators, and return on investments. The market of mid-level businesses in the industrial sector will be increasingly facilitated via agile and scalable techno-parks and spaces. The people, processes, and resources needed for such mid-scale businesses and services will require flexibility and rapid learning to transfer learning from one job to another.

While countries will continue the movement of goods in a globalized world, the nature of transfer will have a marked impact. In a world enabled by 6G technologies and 3D printing, the blueprint will be delivered to proprietary machines, which will print products as required in a model of edge-based manufacturing, with designs supplied and monitored through remote setups. Local-demand–supply-consumption models will become prominent in an already globalized world, with a marked emphasis on localized spatial circular economies. To ensure independence, assurance, and resilience, local manufacturing will be decentralized to several manufacturers, which will together compose a crowdsourcing production ecosystem. Managing the ecosystemic network of small manufacturers will utilize blockchain technology for supply chain management, smart contracting, and transactions. It will be possible to move production sites to new locations, enabling remotely controlled worksites and heavy-duty vehicles. Production models will be driven by sustainability, resilience, and the circular economy.

I5.0 will allow collaborative human–machine interaction with robotization across services and industries, because human intelligence will be in perfect harmony with advanced cognitive computing. With real-time data, effective data monetization, and digital automation of the manufacturing process, businesses will be able to shift their focus to generating higher revenues from the servitization of products. Open interfaces and advanced manufacturing capabilities will help to overcome design complexities. With its ability to facilitate an extremely long tail of mass customization, it will also return control to customers in a haptic way. Furthermore, trustworthy quantum-enhanced I5.0 networking and services will provide the highest standards of safety and environmental protection.

The use of programmed organisms will become increasingly common in production. Genetic engineering and synthetic biology will enable the creation of new kinds of organisms, as well as the modification of existing organisms for specific purposes in food production, chemical processes, textiles, and in the pharmaceutical and construction industries, for example. This will decouple growth from cost and resource usage. In interaction with hybrid bio-nano-artificial intelligence, industrial technology operators and maintainers will be forced to adopt a special synchronicity with these technologies, which in turn will be adaptive to the workers. Unlike the industrial revolution of the 1900s in which humans were subjugated to the rhythm of the machine and which has prompted a backlash to the mechanistic life brought about by modern times, the new industry 5.0 technological revolution enabled by 6G technologies will bring about a new rhythm that links the biological dimension of the machine to that of the human. This will impact the human at sub-awareness levels, bringing about heightened nervousness, anxiety, and general discontent.

Smart Society: Standardized Experience & Resource Orchestration by Society/corporations (1C)

In the smart society scenario, the user experience is standardized, and resource orchestration is society/corporation centric. Technology will develop rapidly, changing production methods and operating models. A growing number of things will be automated, production and operations will be decentralized, and interaction will often take place remotely or via a virtual environment. This assumes continuous learning from individuals to keep track of development and evolve their professional skills. Making use of technology will increasingly call for changes in thinking models and operating methods. The gamification of working life may offer motivation for some people frustrated by the changes. Smart society will build dependable systems and communication in which standardized data is utilized by walled garden platform monopolies across verticals. The smart city focus will be extended to rural inclusion. Multi-locality will be the norm in combining city life and isolation from crowds. 6G will transform urban and rural living at the intersection of geopolitics, the growth of nationalism, rights to information transparency, and information citizenry.

A dependable communication system that allows remote work and telepresence in real-time mode will result in knowledge-based jobs and other net-based service sectors shifting to a bucolic life in which urban and rural life remains in healthy balance. The change in lifestyles will enable an emphasis on collaboration for the common good and making society more inclusive of the requirements of disparate cultures and sub-cultures. In this regard, there will be a marked shift to appropriate data and privacy regulation to support vested interests and motivations. In this smart economy, consumer insights, virtual finance, carbon-free consumption, low energy consumption, and global and fiscal sustainability will take center stage. Thus, there will be an expansion of the social intangible economy, involving several types of online gaming, social media exchange, interaction in virtual holopresence interactions, and other forms of digital currency exchange. There will also be a rapid convergence of these various interactions, such as making online groups, communities, and institutional rules that will assist in creating an information citizenry and a reciprocal impact on real-world global issues.

The most important global concern will be to ensure mutual respect for people from every stratum of society. This will be possible through digital inclusion in all sectors, ranging from finance to education. The aim will be to create a just and egalitarian society using appropriate information regulation and mutual distancing through the creation of safe and creative collaboration spaces that support the interests of like-minded groups. Actions at the level of individuals supported by 6G technologies will provide a morally sustainable world in which every citizen will be a self-aware informed citizen with a dual identity: recognizing allegiance to the nation, as well as living within the constraints of the global pan-dimensional virtually connected world.

Communities: Customized Experience & Resource Orchestration by Society/corporations (1D)

In the communities scenario, the user experience is customized, and resource orchestration is society/corporation centric. The sense of community created by 6G technology and the ability to directly collaborate with others will enable humans to participate and act in society in an unprecedented way in countries where access to new technologies is the norm due to competences and skills in using new technologies. The sharing economy, crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding will expand the space for new forms of organization and innovation.

In this heterogeneous society, social networks and the trust and reciprocity they foster will be highlighted from the perspectives of well-being and working life. Public network funding has traditionally been directed at unserved and underserved areas in terms of broadband access and coverage. Support for deployment programs will be extended to policy areas such as smart city community development, worksites, and ecosystems (such as harbors and airports), advanced health services, logistics and transport, public safety, and critical infrastructure at length. Hyperconnected and completely automated smart grids will be extended to a variety of vertical sectors, including electricity, the Internet, and health care, serving as a middle layer between humans and natural environments and enhancing the capabilities of both. These networks will have been assembled with a public–private partnership funding model, with a view to sustainable growth and digital infrastructure usage. The human body will be a vital part of the Internet of Senses. Increased data will enable more personalized and preventive care in which AI-assisted analyses will monitor personal indicators and compare them with larger population data, offering medical consultation via a specific indicator trigger point. Biological processes and communication systems will be integrated with technical communication systems, providing online information about vital transactions and guiding us to take specific actions to remain healthy. In the event of infection, we will receive continuously updating diagnoses to be shared in real time with healthcare professionals, who will base their consultancy on AI-driven analyses. New treatments will also be developed based on genome editing and modifying the microbiome, for example.

Countries with less restrictive legislation will act as resource pools for corporations by providing cheap labor forces, natural resources, and (private) data about humans (use data, biodata, biological data, etc.). Frugal innovations will be developed to serve the growing customer base in low-income countries. Education powered by the Internet of Skills and the Internet of Senses will enable specialization from the school system’s early grades. Learning will be tightly connected to personal data to react to any disturbance and ensure a successful study track based on individual interests. Students will be able to choose virtual courses and degrees from any university globally and visit digital twin campuses for interaction. Global networking during studies will support international career planning, which is done partly remotely.

Several ethnic communities will have struggled to maintain their existence in everyday and virtual spaces. The nature of communities will change in a variety of ways and on varying timescales. This will mean: the fragmentation of communities; dynamic tension between individuals and communities; the morphing of community values and identity; and other phenomena. Radicalized groups will have emerged, spreading terror both online and offline. The spread of cyberterrorism may affect every networked system in the world, resulting in a global crisis and a devastating effect on the world economy. In the wake of disasters (terrorist attacks, tsunamis, diseases, etc.), 6G technologies may also support the victims. The growth of human-body-powered networked devices will help communities to establish informational relations that aid the troubled, enabling the community to show resilient behavior and bounce back quickly.

At the level of communities, media interaction will result in the intensification of activities related to public opinion shaping. These will include the transmission of hate speech and fake news, which will also be experienced somatosensorily. This holistic experience of various forms of malevolence will have a much stronger impact than ever in mobilizing people toward crime and terrorism though virtual technologies. Special interest online communities will continue to proliferate. However, with 6G experiential technologies, these special online communities will move toward a more accelerated and hyper-real set of interactions. Hate speech and associated activities will not only be symbolic but tangible. A final twist in the life of communities propelled by 6G technologies will be in terms of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In normal circumstances, this ‘wisdom’ will allow for more egalitarian and informed decision making and empowerment. However, with the hyper-real experiential hate of 6G-enabled vitality, ‘wisdom’ may be perverted without bounds, resulting in a bleak communal life.

Firm-Level Scenarios

In the firm scenario theme, we chose the horizontal dimension to present value configuration and vertical axes value to capture logic, as depicted in Fig. 3.4. The polar dimensions to the value configuration axes are a traditional closed supply value chain focus and open ecosystemic-driven configuration. Value creation customer attraction and lock-in logic form the incumbent mobile operator-dominated model; the opposite is the expanded model with webscale companies, OTT, cloud, I5.0, and novel digital service provider stakeholders.

Edge: Value Creation by Novel Service Providers & Open Ecosystem Value Configurations (2A)

In the edge scenario, value creation is customer attraction- and lock-in-driven, and value configuration is open ecosystem focused. This scenario stems from a decentralized open value configuration and ecosystem-driven business models. Modularity enables disaggregation and decomposition. Collaborative standardization will still be needed to harmonize and maintain replicability for interoperability reasons. Government funding and public–private partnership (PPP) will influence the telco industry to open and transform next-generation communications as a general-purpose technology. A decentralized platform will distribute the value between the players, while open-source software will lower market entry barriers for developers, promote interoperability, and expedite development cycles based on shared knowledge. Unlicensed common spectrum and novel shared and locally licensed spectrum will enable openness, democratizing markets, and allowing subnetworks in mobile communications. At the same time, value capture opportunity diminishes. It will become harder to profit from technology innovation due to the spill-over effects when moving toward general-purpose technology and further reduced royalty-based revenues from standard or essential patents. Only the best, fastest, and most efficient producers will win (as in the case of webscalers), and companies will need differentiation over and above open source.

Novel players will take over both customer ownership and networks. OTTs and device vendors will own the B2C customer relationship, while local tailored private cloud-native networks will attract B2B customers. Telecommunication operators will play a role as wholesale connectivity service providers. Technology and innovation ownership will be expanded, fully leveraging the open API world and novel resource brokerage. Furthermore, edge resources may be operated by local communities and special interest groups, e.g., by expanding services into remote rural areas, or universities and research organizations deploying their own edge resources to speed up local innovation. Nomadic subnetwork edge elements will provide sustainable and ecologically efficient deployments. For example, communities that do not wish to have invasive technologies in their midst may hire edge-enhanced systems for occasional high-quality capture and streaming of local events. Banks, healthcare centers, and governance points may extend the regular telecom networks for the affordable inclusion of the masses. Onboarding, as well as the billing of customers via digital cash and keys, may be done by these local entities, who in turn may pay the wholesale service providers for wider connectivity. These semi-autonomous 6G subnetwork deployments will be heterogeneous in nature, often encouraging innovative products and services. There will be specific network areas and zones. We may have a personal zone with in-body communication applications producing data for daily diagnosis for individuals or shared merely with a private medical doctor. The wider zone could be a common family network, shared strictly between family members at home and offering tailored services. Moreover, particular network zones will be shared with various interest groups enabling dynamic management based on personal preferences and the changing requirements of groups. Security, trust, and identity management in such heterogeneous edge deployments will be both a challenge and opportunity for novel, sustainable business models.

Telco Broker: Value Creation by Incumbents & Open Ecosystem Value Configurations (2B)

In the telco broker scenario, value creation is driven by incumbents—the existing operators—and value configuration is open ecosystem focused. Telco brokers will have retained the primary customer relationship and will have focused on monetizing data via the service platform ecosystem. Technology providers will drive the technology ecosystem and offer an efficient network infrastructure via platform-based ecosystemic business models. The decoupling of technology platforms will have lowered the entry barrier, allowing multiple developers and entities to contribute to the innovations envisaged with 6G. Moreover, fine-grained modularity and open source will allow highly specialized long tail solutions and services from smaller payers to be widely deployed, leading to innovation, and possibly to commoditization.

With open interfaces, software functionality will become modular, allowing developers to effortlessly continue to develop a solution by adding, changing, or removing components with much more speed, agility, and productivity than traditional, monolithic applications have provided. Consequently, the theory of the firm, meaning the nature and structure of a company, will need to be thought over, including how companies are organized internally and where the boundaries are between the company and the market. API-fication will break scale economies of end-to-end platforms with best-of-breed solutions. APIs will change how software is developed by allowing companies to mix internal and third-party components when creating an offering. This will be the key driver for platform interplay and decentralization. Distributed ledger technologies will develop rapidly and enable decentralized data storage, computing, and AI. As Web 2.0 created cloud computing and today’s platform businesses, such as Meta, Google, and Amazon, Web 3.0 is all about edge computing and decentralization. It will fundamentally change the characteristics of networks, ownership structures of companies, and incentive models. It has the potential to bring back the benefits of the early Internet, such as openness and peer-to-peer (users having the power vs. large companies), while still being scalable and efficient. Networks will become open, trustless, permissionless, interconnected, secure, and monopoly resistant. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) may be beyond regulatory reach while changing business cases for webscalers.

MNO6.0: Value Creation by Incumbents & Closed Ecosystem Value Configurations (2C)

In the MNO6.0 scenario, value creation is incumbent-driven, and value configuration is closed supply focused. In this scenario, telecommunication firms will drive technology innovation and control the traditional e2e value chain, owning the customer relationship in both B2C and B2B segments. It will be strongly under business-driven decisions by MNOs that the advanced services enabled by 6G technology will be available for various verticals. Key technology enablers to be utilized as the prerequisites for the decoupling of costs from growth will include automated network slicing and leverage, and the use of higher frequency bands in conjunction with network densification. In addition to the technology innovation platform, there will need to be a transaction platform position between customers and OTT players. This tightly coupled deployment may provide optimal efficiency with respect to efficiency, environmental sustainability, and technology exploitation in the connectivity layer. Via the opening up of network interfaces, telecom firms will co-develop within their value chain and will use open-source software to address the long tail of specialized local and industrial use cases.

The business environment will become unpredictable with high geopolitical uncertainty, increasing inequality, and climate change. With the mainstream managerial practice focused on managing performance, resilience will represent not just an opportunity to mitigate risks but also an opportunity for competitive advantage. Disaster recovery of critical infrastructure will become a growing business segment requiring co-creation between industries to overcome the financial constraints. Market opportunities will exist particularly in secured networks such as security and privacy as a service and blockchain networks. The need for modularity to reduce the dependency on single vendors may reverse the vendor consolidation trend seen in the past and lead to more fragmentation. With emerging safe quantum technologies, security solutions and encryption will become geopolitical control points.

Exponentially reduced costs related to satellite launches and production will enable cash-rich companies to fund LEO constellations (e.g., SpaceX Starlink, Amazon Kuiper project). The impact on mobile broadband will depend on the ability to integrate this with the terrestrial cellular terminal ecosystem. Sustainability value may be created via building a fully solar-powered communication network with virtually ‘zero’ energy consumption and innovations enabled by sensing via satellite. Global satellite constellations will represent geopolitical control points. Effective policy and regulations for orbital consideration will be needed to avoid potential collisions in space and to limit the impact on astronomy, and spectrum allocations will be required to ensure harmony between terrestrial and 5G networks.

Over-The-Top: Value Creation by Novel Service Providers with Closed Ecosystem Value Configurations (2D)

In the over-the-top scenario, value creation will be customer attraction- and lock-in-driven, and the value configuration will be closed and supply focused. In this scenario, webscalers and OTTs will have taken over customers from telecom operators by utilizing their access to customer data. However, operators will continue to control both the mobile and fixed connectivity technologies that will be commoditized and will orchestrate the related end-to-end (e2e) value chain. Commoditized connectivity will drive operators to create partnerships with webscalers, OTTs, I5.0 service providers, and public networks and to provide wholesale services utilizing their cloud and transaction platforms. OTT players will offer novel free or subsidized connectivity business models, utilizing revisited net-neutrality principles, affordably expanding their reach to the bottom four billion.

MNOs will lack a global developer ecosystem, application-level knowledge, and AI capabilities and will see webscalers as a lever to monetize IoT and edge technology. The risk is that their role will be reduced to that of a last-mile connectivity provider or ‘just another vertical’ but with needed assets such as spectrum and edge real estate. Webscalers will drive the value chain in the edge application context and even create a new revenue source with hyper-local cloud infrastructure service with scalability, required availability, and almost unlimited flexibility. The diminishing MNO value share in edge cloud deals will trigger private wireless deals by webscalers bypassing MNOs and leveraging the MNOs’ infra-assets and creating a service layer to limit their value capture. Webscale companies will drive their successful transactional platform business model into new/adjacent domains where winning platforms will cover innovation and transaction. Companies with a traditional linear business model will become less attractive to investors. Payment models will shift from CAPEX to OPEX and business models from transactional to continuously digital-connected, creating new collaborative models and interdependencies. Pressure on cost and risk mitigation will increase while technology complexity will continuously grow—with lower entry barriers for newcomers and increased competition for incumbents with a tendency to become a winner-takes-it-all market. The outcome-as-a-service trend implies that service providers will share liabilities, as well as the need for information security, data privacy, and adherence to compliance and regulations. Resilient and secure network connectivity will be based on clearly defined service-level agreements.

There will be continuous pressure on MNOs to generate higher returns: government regulations may separate infrastructure firms and operation/service providers; network sharing deployments will optimize site needs and reduce the market initially; and finally, no government regulations will prohibit webscalers and neutral hosts from becoming service providers. Furthermore, the edge cloud will trigger a second round of investment, triggering neutral host and webscale alliances that will transform MNOs from telcos to tech comms companies. Neutral hosts will transform from cost-optimizing units to new wholesale business units.

Ecosystem-Level Scenarios

The sustainability crisis, which refers to the deterioration of the environment and exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity, may significantly change our operating environment as we move into the 6G era. The ecosystem scenario theme particularly recognizes the UN’s SDGs as important drivers for 6G, but the approaches vary. Responding to increased environmental awareness requires changes in culture and practices and has been accompanied by a polarization of views. Hybrid military, economic, technological, and cultural powers have become overlapping, leading to threats and hybrid influence. In the sustainability scenario theme, the horizontal dimension represents the power configuration. The vertical axis represents sustainability development. The polar dimensions opposite to the power configuration axis are centralized power and poly-nodal configurations. The sustainability dimension ranges from the redefinition of the economy and its opposite, stagnation.

Gaia: Sustainability by Redefinition of the Economy & Poly-Nodal Power Configurations (3A)

In the Gaia scenario, sustainability is driven by the redefinition of the economy, and power configuration is poly-nodal and world focused. Environmental awareness among people will have increased and resulted in corresponding actions. Dissatisfaction with the current measures taken with respect to climate change and biodiversity will have motivated a growing number of people to voice their opinions and participate in demonstrations. Instead of individual poles of power, the emphasis in global politics will be on relationships and interaction. In addition to governments, other players, such as businesses, lobbyists, think tanks, international institutions, cities, and activist organizations, will play a significant role in this. In the 6G-enabled real-time economy, all the transactions between business entities will be in digital format, generated automatically, and completed as they occur without the need for storage and forward processing. In innovating to zero, the cost of renewable energy and storage will fall. Energy production will also become increasingly decentralized as more and more people produce their own energy and sell what they do not need. In the circular economy, production and consumption will be planned to prevent waste from being generated, while materials and their value remain in circulation via sharing, leasing, repair, and reuse. In this context, deploying 6G could entail an application area to provide ultra-low-power communications through energy harvesting or wireless power to very small devices, for example. The counterforces to winner-takes-all monopolies will include platform cooperatives, the peer-to-peer economy and sharing economic models, and the progress of the human-driven fair data economy and the fair distribution of wealth. This restorative economy will lead to a society characterized by broad empowerment, greater equality, a higher level of well-being, and better sustainability. The Internet of Senses and the Internet of Skills will utilize advanced human–machine interfaces to enhance the human intellect and physiology toward transhumanism. In the Gaia scenario, societal resilience will provide the ability to cope with and overcome adversities, the ability to learn from past experiences and adjust to future challenges, and the ability to craft sets of institutions that foster individual welfare and sustainable societal robustness to future crises.

Multi-Local: Sustainability by Stagnation & Poly-Nodal Power Configurations (3B)

In the multi-local scenario, sustainability is stagnation driven, and the power configuration is poly-nodal world focused. A shift will have happened in global politics moving from a multipolar to a poly-nodal world. The geopolitical power blocs—the US, Europe, and China—will give way to a networked world with nodes comprised of countries, emerging economies, corporations, and other non-state actors. In the face of disruption, people will turn to increasingly polarized tribes and bubbles formed around values, place of residence, political opinions, consumption choices, or lifestyles for guidance. The fragmentation of the economy, transformation of work, and new organizational models of the sharing and platform economy will have challenged the traditional relationship between the employer and employee, and what the benefits are. Working life will become increasingly diverse, and there will be an emphasis on ensuring people’s livelihood and competence building. Universities will offer tailored virtually augmented education environments to enterprises and private entrepreneurs. Consumers will favor domestic or local products and can themselves choose where and how goods and products are manufactured. 3D printing will allow many products to be manufactured at home or in the neighborhood. Distributed local production will on the one hand be practiced by enterprises using a network of geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities coordinated using 6G, while on the other hand, it will also be practiced by local developers and manufacturing. Traditionalism will develop as a response to disorder and will favor public–private partnerships.

Dystopia: Sustainability by Stagnation & Centralized Power Configurations (3C)

In the dystopia scenario, sustainability is stagnation driven, and the power configuration is centralized and power focused. We will continue to inhabit a consumption culture in which nature is seen as a free resource that we use as we wish. The wealth generated by economic growth will not be distributed sustainably and will be concentrated in the hands of a shrinking minority. Occasional large disasters will not make wealthy people act if they are not threatened themselves. Weakened future prospects, the fragmentation of the political map, and the polarizing effect of social media will have led to a rise in populism, which emphasizes the division between the elites and the masses. The benefits of internationalism will not be acknowledged, because they are considered too indirect, and its negative aspects will be emphasized in the discussion. Globalization will also have led to an opposing reaction in the form of increased nationalism and an emphasis on national borders and will favor state corporations. Democracy will be challenged by ideas of practical autocracy and technocracy, as well as by the notion that democracy is too slow or ineffective to respond to the urgent questions of our time. The need for rapid major changes and a yearning for simple solutions will make strong leaders more popular, presenting a challenge to individual freedom and democracy. The amount of disinformation will grow, and efforts to influence opinions will be increasingly geared toward instigating confusion and discord. A digitalization backlash will have happened, and people will rage against machines.

The Race: Sustainability by Redefinition of the Economy & Centralized Power Configurations (3D)

In the race scenario, sustainability is redefined as economy-driven, and the power configuration is centralized and power focused. The urgency of climate and sustainability action will have led to eco-dictatorship and creative destruction because a voluntary change in people’s behavior will be considered so unlikely. The population will have become concentrated in a small number of growth centers, where vibrant megacities and unicorn superstars dominate innovation addressing individual technologies and the ecosystems they form. The process of innovation competition will incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, giving time for market advantage.

Geopolitics-Level Scenarios

In the fourth theme, the geopolitics theme, the scenarios discuss how political power is reinforced or undermined by geographical arrangements like boundaries, coalitions, spatial networks, natural resources, and technologies. Furthermore, the current era of geopolitical overrides the role of democracy in the international order. Recent years have witnessed regional and global power plays by Russia and China. Their international efforts are usually cast as moves to establish spheres of influence, but they are broader than that. In the created scenarios, the vertical axis represents democracy, and the horizontal axis represents the influence of China, as depicted in Fig. 3.4. The polar dimensions of the democracy axis are democracy and authoritarianism, while the axis describing the role of China ranges from superpower to withdrawal.

European Haven and the World of Blocks (4A,4B)

Slowing globalization on the one hand and the demands for economic resilience on the other will have led to the formation of three distinct blocks: Europe, North America and East Asia. The blocks will be largely self-contained economies which trade with neighboring areas, but not very much with the other blocks. How each block approaches various issues reflects its cultural traits. The US, a horizontal society, will clearly be about the individual and people’s own choices and will focus heavily on the consumer. China could be best described as a three-dimensional actor, meaning that the state will be involved in everything. Europe, on the other hand, will generally be vertical; organizations will play a key role in both planning and development.

China will have been moving some of its manufacturing base abroad, including to Africa. Largely self-reliant in innovation and product development, the country will now be facing the way of Japan; the aging population will threaten to bring its economic triumph to a standstill. Financial woes will start to set in as the economic growth, albeit still higher than in the Western countries, cannot keep up with public spending. The US will be mired in its internal problems, and its debt-laden economy will be a subject of constant predictions of imminent and disastrous collapse. Western Europe, on the other hand, will also be struggling to maintain its welfare systems.

By 2030, EU will still be known for many positive things, but its main competitive edge will be its reputation for its transparent and uncorrupted government. European countries will have been leaders in sustainability and inclusion. They will now be concerned with the security of supply chains, energy, food, and defense. The competition in the field of technology will now mainly take place between the US, EU, and the joint efforts of Japan and Korea. China will still create significant numbers of innovations, but the totalitarian society will not to be able to grant the space needed for truly unique developer-led innovations. The situation in China will be further exacerbated by worsening corruption made possible by the failed introduction of AI-powered governance, an initiative that remains mostly a pet project of some elite members but with little real-life implications. Europe will have emerged as a haven of both individual rights in the online world and a hub for open-source endeavors. The EU will have managed to create regulations that have enabled open-source producers to certify their work as reliable. The Union will also have banned some foreign tech giants from its markets because of data protection and espionage issues. Europe will have become the main driver toward a more human-centered society in both technological and governmental questions. Whereas the US will be all about consumer needs and sellable products, while Europe, in addition to the consumer focus, will seek to ensure that the products are ethical, that is, sustainable, and responsibly and fairly produced. Through its research efforts, the EU will have contributed toward a more open society, as, paradoxically, it will have made communications more secure. People will feel that their secrets will not be divulged without their consent, and they will feel comfortable to be more open about those things they are ready to share. The Western governments, as taught by the pandemic, will have been in the process of adopting the principle of openness.

The US and China will be locked in competition and will have somewhat eschewed the notion of sustainability to ensure primacy, although lip service to the environment will regularly be paid in public speeches. Europe will also be virtually the only place where the issues related to AI ethics are taken seriously, while the two other blocks will be competing for supremacy in that field without any concerns.

The aging population in Europe, together with the memory of the pandemic and need for cost cuts, will have made telecare a permanent fixture of the healthcare systems. Additionally, work as well as entertainment will be taking increasingly place on online platforms, not necessarily anymore in offices, theaters or cinemas. However, this will also create problems with loneliness and isolation. Thanks to the introduction of 6G, each block will have created its own system of watching the movements of its citizens to, at least officially, be prepared for the future pandemics. The European car industry will have become a central technology advancing power. Autonomous vehicles will have entered the streets, in both the public and private transport markets. Due to the automotive industry’s role, industrial data will become especially valuable in the EU, in contrast to the customer data in the US. Additionally, Europe will be more concentrated with business-to-business products, whereas the US will be driven by the business-to-customer focus. Automation will have taken leaps forward in Europe, since industrial work, that will have to some extent returned to the continent, will be expensive.

Each of the blocks will start to diverge in how different technologies are mixed. Europe will focus on the automation of movement and logistics because of the industrial interests of different member states, while China and the US will adopt local production concepts, mainly thanks to their space-faring efforts. The technologies, however, in many cases will not become diffused between the blocks because of protective laws. As the EU will have also been the leading champion of sustainability, regulations enforced by it will now necessitate that sustainability is one of the critical factors in virtually all development plans and public tenders.

China the Superpower: China Becomes Dominant in the Global Economy (4C)

In this scenario, by 2030 the old regime of the post-Second World War order will have been buried for good and China will be the leading economy and becoming the leading superpower. The Chinese belt and road initiative (BRI) will have tied much of Eurasia to China, ousting US influence in many places. Active trade will take place throughout Eurasia, but ‘slowbalization’ will have somewhat affected the commerce between North America and Eurasia. Because of the stress that the rise of China will have caused, the US will be more and more openly advancing only its own interests. China will be actively seeking to buy and utilize foreign companies with advanced technologies. At the same time, it will still send out massive numbers of students to study abroad, to learn the best practices and bring them home. There will be an active push toward sustainable and green technologies. However, their primary driver will not be climate change, but the polluted megacities of China. The technologies in this field will be increasingly geared toward making human life bearable in large industrial megalopolises, which means that some of the vital environmental and climate-related problems will not be appropriately addressed.

Europe will be sandwiched between China and the US. Acting more like a field of competition for the two, Europe's grip on its destiny will be more tenuous now than before. Most of the consumer technology innovation will be done elsewhere, and the economy of the old continent will be sluggish, much due to the aging population. In general, large webscale companies, like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, and Baidu, will dominate the markets. Europe will not have been able to create its own tech giants, although it will try to regulate what is done in its market area.

Cyberthreats will be persistent and demand more funds, and the best talents will be sought after for superpower projects to develop cyber-capabilities. This will have led to increasing demands for privacy protection in Western countries. At the same time, the rights of citizens in many countries will be curtailed by omnipresent AI-powered surveillance. There will be a need for trust and security, especially in the Western markets. Cyberespionage and sabotage will take place continually, as will information operations. Individuals, companies, and government organizations will be constantly looking for ways to reduce and eliminate vulnerabilities in their systems, which will tie up resources and cause delays. Resilient technologies, referring to technologies that are both resilient to external damages (both natural and human-caused), while at the same time promote the resilience of nature, will have emerged as an important field. In the West, resilience will have partly replaced sustainability in political and research discourse.

The US Order: The US Remains the Dominant Power on the Globe (4D)

The impressive economic gains made by China until 2022 will have been followed by a slower pace, mainly because of its unfavorable age structure. The idea of Chinese dominance spreading over Asia, Europe and Africa will have slowly dropped from conversation as it will have become clear that it needs to focus on keeping its population both peaceful and reasonably prosperous: China will have started to turn inwards. Despite this, more than ever the world will be replete with disinformation, half-truths, and manipulated facts. The reason for this will be that those opposed to the US-led order will have understood that their only option is to attack in the only way they truly can challenge the dominant superpower: by conquering, or at least demoralizing, the minds of those on the other side. The aim will be to weaken the national unity of the Western countries, break their mutual relations, and increase tensions between them. The large Western technology companies, followed by many others, will have implemented policies and measures to combat disinformation in conjunction with various universities. AI-powered tools, together with humans, will search and correct false information. At the same time, the governments of Europe and North America will have been increasingly engaged in strategic communication operations aimed at both their domestic and foreign audiences. Truth will have become elusive.

The data security questions which were a vital issue of the early 2020s will have been resolved to a degree as the largest US corporations, together with the government, will have implemented blockchain-based encryption for their communications and data storage. European companies will follow suit, but the EU will be hesitant to endorse the use of blockchain because of perceived possibilities for tax evasion and other harmful activities. Human-centeredness, or consumer-centeredness will have become the current driving force in technologies designed in the Western countries, meaning that more than ever, new consumer needs will be actively discovered and created through psychological, sociological, and cultural research. Some will have pointed out that these efforts, combined with the strategic communication operations, could be seen as active engineering of the minds of the people. However, the memory of the pandemic will have made people more trusting toward communication technology than ever. The slow introduction of autonomous vehicles and co-working between robots and humans will have kept manual laborer employed, but AI will have started to take over many white-collar jobs formerly held, for example, by lawyers and programmers.

Even though the coronavirus will have forced many locations to shift their entertainment offerings online, large concert crowds, full cinemas, and crowded restaurants returned quickly during early 2022. During the decade, the large-scale introduction of virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) applications together with fast 5G networks and edge computing will have transformed some entertainment forms completely. Once the acute crisis of the early 2020s pandemic was over, attention will have turned again to keeping climate change at bay. Public subsidies and adventurous entrepreneurs will have resulted in some impressive gains in photovoltaics, wave power, and wood-based materials.

Discussion and Conclusions

Sixteen alternative future scenarios were developed under four embedded scenario logic themes: user/developer, firm, ecosystem, and geopolitics. The user/developer can be seen as a sub-set of firm-level, the firm is a sub-set of ecosystems, and geopolitics forms the widest contextual level for all scenarios. To summarize the discussion of 6G scenarios. First, the probability of the scenarios arising was evaluated against the identified forces influencing them. Next, the plausibility of the scenarios was assessed based on their coherence by examining the potential alternative futures for 6G business events that could occur within their assessment. The third assessment step was to identify which scenarios were the most preferred. The preferability assessments of the scenarios were based on the values and choices the teams made regarding alternative futures. Both the most probable and most plausible scenarios stem from evolutionary supply-driven trends toward a multi-local networked world based on strong trends with low anticipated uncertainty. The most probable and plausible business scenarios, OTT (2D) and MNO6.0 (2C), build on the balance between competition and protective market views. In the ecosystem themed scenarios, the multi-local scenario sharing both the dystopic and utopian themes can be seen as simultaneously the most probable and plausible. All the preferable scenarios, Gaia (3A), Edge (2A), and Customer6.0 (1A), represent revolutionary demand-driven transformations toward sustainability, empowerment, and open ecosystems building on the democratic geopolitical scenario. They are based on high impact forces with higher uncertainty compared to the most probable and plausible scenarios.

In the preferred 6G future, the automatic collection of different kinds of data from humans, our environment, and its analysis are used for highly sophisticated products and systems that make people’s lives easier, more sustainable, and provide a better user experience through convenience. The edge resources will be operated by local communities expanding services to remote rural areas, or research organizations deploying their own edge resources to accelerate local innovation. 6G will enhance platform cooperatives, as well as the peer-to-peer economy and sharing economic models, and the progress of a human-driven fair data and developer economy as well as the fair distribution of wealth. To summarize, we identified drivers, barriers, and challenges regarding the choices for developing the preferred 6G business future. These drivers, barriers, and challenges could concern all stakeholders in future 6G business. Key transformative global drivers concern climate change, sustainable development goals, and decentralization toward a networked poly-nodal world. External barriers to preferable future scenarios involve the uncertainties related to the power of dominating platforms, AI and HMI rights, democracy, and the regulation of resources. Key internal challenges, such as building disruptive business models and leveraging sharing economy antecedents while coping with the empowered users’ and developers’ rights, were identified.

The scenarios presented open a multitude of alternative futures for 6G. We will summarize and discuss our findings by examining what kind of economic, societal, and environmental notions we may draw from the scenarios.

From the economic perspective, the key messages of the four sets of scenarios can be summarized as follows:

• User experience will be customized, and resource orchestration will become user and developer centric.

• Local-demand–supply-consumption models will become prominent in an already globalized world, with a marked emphasis on localized spatial circular economies.

• New societal models for future service provisioning will emerge building on community-driven networks and public–private partnerships.

• Platform-based ecosystems will not only offer search, social media, and ecommerce but will provide an infrastructure in which innovation and transaction platforms are built by the developers.

• A strong role for 6G in various vertical and industrial context will continue the 5G evolution.

• The decoupling of technology platforms will lower the market entry barrier, allowing multiple entities to contribute to the innovations envisaged with 6G.

• Fine-grained technological and service modularity and open source will allow highly specialized solutions and services from developers and smaller entities to be widely deployed.

• Decentralized platform cooperatives will become counterforces to winner-takes-all platform monopolies.

From the societal perspective, the scenarios indicate the following:

• Hybrid military, economic, technological, and cultural powers will overlap, exercising threats and hybrid influence.

• Tensions between competitive, protective, networked, and empowered worldviews will grow.

• The power configuration may be transforming from a multi-polarized world to a poly-nodal world in which power will be determined in economic, technological, and cultural networks and interaction.

• Empowering experiential citizens as knowledge producers, developers, and users will contribute to a process of human-centered democratizing innovation stemming from pluralism and diversity.

• Privacy regulation will be strongly linked to the rising trends of the platform data economy, sharing economy, intelligent assistants, connected living in smart cities, transhumanism, and digital twins’ ‘meta’ reality.

From the environmental perspective:

• 6G is seen as a provider of services to help steer communities and countries toward reaching the UN SDGs.

• 6G will offer opportunities for monitoring and steering the circular economy and understanding the big picture of the sustainable data economy.

• In utilizing sharing and circular economy trends, co-creation partners will employ existing resources and processes to promote the sustainable interaction.

• Companies will shift their focus, developing products and technologies that innovate to zero, including zero-waste and zero-emission technologies bringing social innovation to the forefront.

• Immersive digital realities will facilitate novel ways of learning, understanding, and memorizing subjects in many sciences such as chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, and astronomy.

In this context, the mobile communications industry is one of the sectors that has been very visibly linked to most elements of global disruptions because of its criticality to economic competitiveness as well as its visible interlinkage to the emergent digital business models (Ahokangas et al., 2022; Kilkki et al., 2018; Yrjola et al., 2022). A well-known example in this regard is the clean network initiative in the US and Chinese telecommunication company Huawei which has been subject to bans and strict oversight in the US and different Western countries due to the concerns for privacy and security (e.g., Hoffmann et al., 2019). As the deployment of 5G and 6G research is taking shape globally, there is a race to set the standards and protect technological innovation, and geopolitical disruptions (and considerations) are a core aspect of this debate (Yrjola et al., 2020; Klement, 2021). At the same time, it is vital to stress that the influence of a variety of global disruptions on 6G development and planned implementation has not been studied specifically so far, thereby revealing a visible gap in the extant literature.