Call for Papers

Since telecommunication monopolies came to their end 20-30 years ago, the telecom industry has been going through rapid changes. The very definition of telecom, which was confined to carrying voice and limited data services until three decades ago, has indeed changed. Today, telecommunication is the fundamental pillar of the digital transformation that is affecting all aspects of our contemporary life. The telecom industry has had a profound impact on virtually all other industries today, and has changed our global society in unprecedented ways. Furthermore, it is merging with other industries, such as cable, computing, IT, entertainment, and others; and telecom firms are expanding across geographical boundaries. Telecom products and services have evolved, and the telecom market keeps expanding as technology continuously enables new services to be offered and new providers to enter the network-based markets.

More than one thousand telecom operators worldwide connect billions of people across the globe. These operators, along with their component/system vendors, and their customers are looking at a future where new business models, economic systems, and policies are necessary.

Traditionally, the focus of papers published in the IEEE Communications Magazine has been mostly on the technical aspects of this telecom evolution even though there is interplay between technologies and designs on one hand and societal, economic, and regulatory factors on the other. Telecom specialists tend to relegate these latter factors to others. As their industry is riding the wave of change in the 21^st Century, however, engineers and technologies need to get more involved in non-technical aspects of their industry. The purpose of this Feature Topic (FT) is to expand their horizon in this regard. This FT solicits articles that explore the myriads of issues concerning future telecommunication business models, corporate strategies, innovations in financing and economics, and policy and regulatory matters, including spectrum management and spectrum awards. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Telecom industry evolution and future
• Telecom finances: return on capital expenses, debt, and funding
• Economic theories for emerging technologies
• Techno-economics and new business models
• Telecom Corporate Strategies: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)
• Impact of spectrum and standardization on future telecom
• Evolving spectrum management and award mechanisms
• Telecommunications policy: evolving regulatory frameworks
• Competition (intra-industry and with new entrants)
• Incumbents vs. challengers
• Convergence (fixed and mobile vs. mobile-only or fixed-only)
• Telecom services and products: operator, vendor, and customer perspectives
  • Broadband, VoIP -VoNR, FTTH VoIP
  • Devices
  • Business-to-Customer: Video, Mobile money
  • Business-to-Business: security, cloud, videoconference and telework
• Deployment of new technologies (5G NR, FTTx, etc.)
• Impact of disruptive new technologies on the industry
• New markets for telecommunications operators
• Research and development in future telecom
• Managing innovations in telecom products and services
• Telecommunications and entrepreneurship

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully since they have been updated recently.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the "December 2019/The Evolution of Telecom Business, Economy and Policies" topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submissions Due: 16 June 2019
Decision Notification: 1 September 2019
Final Manuscript Due: 1 October 2019
Publication Date: December 2019

Guest Editors

Ahmed Alsohaily
Communications and Information Technology Commission, Saudi Arabia

Dean Brenner
Qualcomm, USA

Ivo Maljevic
University of Toronto, Canada

Wen Tong
Huawei Canada, Canada