Reinventing telecommunications infrastructure in the age of hyperconnectivity and artificial intelligence

It is generally accepted that today we indeed live in an age of hyperconnectivity, as expressed by many in key identified items such as "the world is flat", "the connected world" and "the Internet of Things". What is also generally recognized is that ubiquitous connectivity has seen the convergence of layers of communications, information and social media service infrastructures, driven by the consumer electronics industry's revolution through fast-advancing smart computing and communication device technologies. Wireless broadband access "last miles", complemented with fiber optic backhaul and increasingly wired "trunking", are becoming treated as mere extensions of the backbone, incorporating controlled and managed protocols/services. In turn, the telecoms industry is experiencing the need to reconceptualize, reinvent and re-deploy its decades-old purposes and roles (Costa-Perez et al., 2013; Dighriri et al., 2015; Liang et al., 2015).

At the core of both economic and social pillars underpinning nation- and state-building, promoting knowledge-based development and social cohesion in a democratically inclusive mindset, telecommunications infrastructures have witnessed major shifts in development, deployment and management models. Public sector agency, interest and responsibility, as the more visible part of these infrastructures' capital and operating modeling and layering, is no longer guaranteed, as growingly citizens and stakeholders expect shared risks, rewards and responsibilities with the public sector, which needs to take on 'leading by enabling' roles with respect to private-sector participation in telecommunications infrastructures' development, deployment and management. In turn, embracing and facilitating the concept and intention of the digital commons that underpins hyperconnectivity, as much as it drives its fundamental economic and social pillars, as we explore further in this work, is a new 'sine qua non' that becomes imposed in turn on the private sector as a 'user-pay' accountability element (Zaki et al., 2010; Zhu & Hossain, 2016).