Five generations of mobile networks have connected more than five billion people and reinvented the industry's technical foundations roughly every decade. Yet beneath this record of achievement lies a structural paradox: operators have progressively outsourced the software, platforms and AI inference layers that govern their own networks—building the pipes through which others capture value. As the industry moves toward sixth-generation networks (6G), Dr. David Soldani's new white paper, Operator-Controlled 6G: From Connectivity Infrastructure to Guaranteed Digital Services, argues that 6G is the last near-term opportunity to reverse this trajectory. The architectural decisions made in the 2026–2028 window will determine whether the industry's default 6G model is operator-controlled or vendor-dependent.
The paper does not propose incremental improvement. It demands a structural reordering of five fundamental operator priorities, grounded in twenty years of vendor-driven evidence and validated by Rakuten Mobile's operational deployment:
The paper introduces the 6G Control Compact: a three-layer ownership taxonomy that allocates architectural sovereignty according to strategic value. Operators must own the control plane, AI substrate and data layer; federate capabilities across peers and hyperscalers under governed API contracts; and consume commodity functions as-a-service. This is not abstract principle. Rakuten Mobile operates the world's first national-scale, fully cloud-native, fully Open RAN network (with every function from radio unit to core running as containerized software on commercial off-the-shelf hardware orchestrated by Kubernetes) and reached full-year EBITDA profitability in FY2025. The Control Compact encodes this model as the 6G industry default.
ARPU in leading markets has remained flat in real terms since 4G LTE, even as data traffic has grown by orders of magnitude. The paper's Guarantee Economy framework breaks this pattern through five outcome-priced service tiers; each with enforceable SLOs, penalty clauses, and real-time closed-loop AI assurance:
Three revenue engines reinforce each other: the Guarantee Economy, Programmable Network APIs (CAMARA / GSMA Open Gateway), and NaaS. Cumulative ARPU uplift accrues only when all three are operationally live.
The paper translates strategy into a concrete, deployment-grounded roadmap:
The paper is explicit about urgency: the AI platform consolidation underway in the hyperscaler ecosystem is actively extending into the telecoms stack. The public cloud providers each position the hyperscaler as the primary AI and orchestration layer, reducing operators to spectrum license holders. 6G is the last near-term window to establish operator-controlled architecture as the industry default. The paper issues seven stakeholder-specific calls to action—for operators, vendors, hyperscalers, regulators, standards bodies, academia and investors—making clear that the operator-controlled 6G network is not a unilateral achievement: it requires coordinated action across the entire ecosystem.
Dr. David Soldani is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a senior technology leader at Rakuten Mobile Inc., Tokyo. His research spans agentic AI for network operations, cloud-native Open RAN, zero-trust architectures and AI-native 6G solutions. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and holds leadership positions in key industry and standards initiatives.
Read the white paper: Operator-Controlled 6G: From Connectivity Infrastructure to Guaranteed Digital Services—also available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15553
Connect with Dr. Soldani on LinkedIn to follow his ongoing research on 6G, agentic AI and cloud-native telecom networks.
