Net4Future

Net4Future is a Structural Project coordinated by the University of Catania, focused on initiatives aimed at fostering a new regulatory framework to encourage innovation through the development of new network architectures and advanced digital services, innovative business models, and the proposal of new use cases.

During the first year and a half of the program, Net4Future developed a reference framework for innovations that will enable more intensive use of digital infrastructures across various sectors of the economic system and for different purposes. These include developing new network architectures and related services, minimizing energy intensity and CO2 production, identifying solutions to safeguard data privacy and security, and defining ways to achieve the targets set by the European Commission’s Digital Compass and the related Digital Decade 2030.

The project plays a pivotal role regarding the results achieved by other RESTART projects, interpreting and disseminating them inside and outside the scientific community with a coordinated and coherent vision.

On the market structure front, during the initial phase of the program, the project assessed the current state of telecommunications decline and developed innovative business models for some digital services that could be offered in the future (e.g., e-health and edge computing) to identify their innovation potential for revitalizing telecommunications in Italy.

Within the Strategic Foresight initiative, the Net4Future working group is engaged in defining a high-level vision of telecommunication systems. This is developed through strategic interviews and a qualitative-quantitative analysis from a multidisciplinary perspective to build utopian and dystopian future network evolution scenarios. The research focuses on various dimensions: market/economic models, regulatory frameworks, technical progress, and user expectations/perspectives.

In the last quarter, the Net4Future research group was assigned to coordinate Grand Challenge 0, aiming to develop predictive models to outline the possible future evolution of the telecommunications ecosystem in Italy and internationally.