The field of wireless communications has traditionally been defined by what seems like unending exponential traffic growth. History suggests this trend is unlikely to continue in perpetuity, at least with the current set of applications, with recent evidence pointing to moderating traffic growth. In this article we evaluate the implications of the peak smartphone era for those designing wireless networks, within the context of the next-generation of wireless broadband technologies. Firstly, three potential future demand scenarios are identified ranging from a return to exponential traffic growth (optimistic), through to continued moderation in growth (realistic), and even a scenario of declining traffic (pessimistic). Secondly, we compare the emerging properties of the 6th generation of cellular technology ("6G") envisioned by IMT2030, and two new Wi-Fi standards, including IEEE 802.11be ("Wi-Fi 7") and IEEE 802.11bn ("Wi-Fi 8"). Finally, an alternative vision for the future of wireless broadband is proposed focusing on enhanced coverage, reduced deployment costs, and improved energy efficiency. Four key recommendations include (i) neutral hosts for superior indoor coverage, (ii) ensuring spectrum sharing and intelligent handover/roaming integration between cellular, Wi-Fi and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), (iii) strong support for infrastructure sharing and national roaming in rural and remote areas, and (iv) efficient (re)organization of existing spectrum allocations.

Object detection models commonly focus on utilizing the visible spectrum via Red-Green-Blue (RGB) imagery. Due to various limitations with this approach in low visibility settings, there is growing interest in fusing RGB with thermal long wave infrared (LWIR) (7.5 - 13.5 µm) images to increase object detection performance. However, we still lack baseline performance metrics evaluating RGB, LWIR and LWIR-RGB fused object detection machine learning models, especially from air-based platforms. This study undertakes such an evaluation finding that a blended RGB-LWIR model generally exhibits superior performance compared to traditional RGB or LWIR approaches. For example, an RGB-LWIR blend only performed 1-5% behind the RGB approach in predictive power across various altitudes and periods of clear visibility. Yet, RGB fusion with a thermal signature overlayed provides edge redundancy and edge emphasis, both which are vital in supporting edge detection machine learning algorithms. This approach has the ability to improve object detection performance for a range of use cases in industrial, consumer, government, and military applications. Finally, this research additionally contributes a novel open labeled training dataset of 6,300 images for RGB, LWIR, and RGB-LWIR fused imagery, collected from air-based platforms, enabling further multispectral machine-driven object detection research.

How cost-efficient are potential infrastructure sharing business models for the 5G/6G era? How should telecommunications regulators formulate a national policy to improve mobile broadband connectivity? These are significant questions that need to be addressed if we are to deliver universal, affordable broadband and achieve Target 9c of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Techno-economic assessment is a fundamental technique engineers use for evaluating new communications technologies. However, despite the techno-economics of the fifth cellular generation (5G) being an active research area, it is surprising there are few comprehensive evaluations of this growing literature. With mobile network operators deploying 5G across their networks, it is therefore an opportune time to appraise current accomplishments and review the state-of-the-art. Such insight can inform the flurry of 6G research papers currently underway and help engineers in their mission to provide affordable high-capacity, low-latency broadband connectivity, globally. The survey discusses emerging trends from the 5G techno-economic literature and makes five key recommendations for the design and standardization of Next Generation 6G wireless technologies.