5G in Rural Forest enables Real Time decision support and new Remote Operation solutions

A lot of attention has traditionally been given to digitalization of smart cities and urban areas. However, bridging the digital dive for the rural areas has become necessary to exploit the full economic growth from new technologies since many industries also belong to the countryside. This paper introduces novel insights into use cases from the forest industry and the perceived impact from innovations activated from technologies such as the fifth-generation mobile technology (5G) and Internet of Things (IoT). An agile methodology is followed developing the forest use cases to handle the risk and uncertainty within this domain. After interviews with stakeholders from the forest value chain we found that digitalization of the forest value chain is necessary. We also found three distinct use cases with different scenarios where premium cellular network (5G) connection can make an impact. The potential impact dimensions were identified and operationalized in three groups: business, user/society, and environment. Our findings will set the scene for the forthcoming specification of the use case requirements and the validation of Proof of Concept’s (PoC’s) during the next step in our agile methodology. Our work is funded through Horizon Europe program COMMECT and PoC’s trial results from the Norwegian forest living lab will be published at a later stage.