Abstract

The ongoing 5G evolution transforming network from connectivity driven to service dominant logic will impact the stakeholder roles, ecosystem and business models. Systemic change will lower the barriers to entry and expand the ecosystem to new roles such as local operators, edge cloud services providers and resource aggregators and agents. Spectrum regulation has traditionally acted as a gate keeper of the mobile service provisioning, and lately national authorities have reacted via allocating new frequency bands and considering novel flexible spectrum administration and management methods and tools. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the most recent spectrum regulation decisions for mobile communication networks and shows how local licensing, spectrum sharing, and unlicensed commons approaches work as novel business model antecedent. The study analyzes key spectrum antecedents for the open ecosystemic business model value configuration.