From Vision to Practice – Insights from Nordic-Baltic 5G applications across sectors

Abstract

This report builds on the findings of the Nordic-Baltic 5G Monitoring Tool (N-B 5G MT) project ‘Analytical Report’, which focused on mapping 5G activities in the Nordic-Baltic region and analysing their roll-out status. In this follow-up report, we delve deeper into actual 5G applications across different verticals (i.e. sectors), including healthcare, transportation/mobility, industry and media/broadcasting. The report identifies challenges in each sector, such as funding constraints in healthcare, technical hurdles in transportation, market immaturity in industry, and infrastructure investment needs in media, highlighting the complex landscape of 5G deployment. Key cross-cutting challenges include uncertain business cases due to lack of clear benefits and empirical validation, financial barriers from high deployment costs and insufficient early-stage funding, technical and infrastructural limitations, especially in rural areas, regulatory constraints including spectrum allocation and data privacy, security and privacy concerns necessitating a comprehensive approach for compliance, acceptability and usability issues that require simplifying 5G for broader adoption, and collaboration challenges highlighting the need for forums, dialogue sessions, and partnerships to facilitate idea exchange and project advancements. Overall, the report emphasizes the need for a systemic approach to addressing these challenges. This includes clarifying the business value of 5G; fostering ecosystems for collaboration; and ensuring that policy and regulatory frameworks support the innovative, equitable deployment of 5G technology. Overcoming these hurdles will require concerted efforts from all stakeholders, including governments, industry and the wider community. Only then will the transformative potential of 5G for society be fully realized.