Future Scenarios for Local Area Access: Industry Structure and Access Fragmentation

Indoor deployments of wireless access points will likely be required to fulfill the future traffic capacity requirements. Considerable uncertainty exists, however, about the technologies utilized to provide local area access, as well as the roles of different actors in the value network providing mobile services. We apply Schoemaker’s scenario planning method to identify and analyze the key uncertainties and to construct four alternative and plausible future scenarios having different implications to local area access technologies and business models. The results are valuable in designing wireless technologies and standards for the future, as well as in pointing out the role of local area access provisioning as a potential control point in the mobile services business.