Millennial Users in a 5G context

The Millennial generation born between 1982 and 2004 constitute the biggest generation ever worldwide. It is the first generation with a tight digital life and at the same time also an understanding of what was before. It is expected that the Millennial generation can have specific requirements for future digital networks and services according to their skills, knowledge and expectation levels.

This paper presents a picture of the Millennial generation and discussions of their requirements to the upcoming 5G networks. The paper looks at the Millennial generation at a general level (through literature) and presents empirical work with focus groups run to discuss specific 5G network issues.

The literature study presents the Millennial generation as a diverse group of individuals who are used to working, playing and just being online all the time. Millennials are at the leading edge of the social phenomenon of being on social media. They are leading in the use of Internet, mobile technology, social media, etc. and use the technology to construct personalised networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups. 81% of Millennials are on Facebook. The Millennials are careful in terms of who can be trusted online, just 19% of Millennials say that most people can be trusted (much higher numbers for other generations). However, the Millennials have also been hit hard by economic recession and generally poor economy conditions, but in spite of this they are optimistic, ambitious and have a strong desire to make it to the top of their professions.

Two focus groups were held in order to elucidate the expectations to and requirements of 5G. As part of the focus groups, small movies were shown presenting the visions and use cases of 5G to support the attempt to conceptualize what 5G would mean to them, the recurring ideas centred on the personal utility they would derive from 5G, the cost of accessing the service and the security implications of the network. In addition, they discussed scenarios of possible use cases, security and adoption challenges surrounding the use cases. Hence, one would say that these Millennials had an idea about the 5G concept but were yet to be convinced on what and how they could benefit from it. They did not see a need for 5G in the visions presented but were rather satisfied with the level of connectivity lying in 4G.

The paper concludes that Millennials have expectations that 5G will happen as a natural development and progress. They do not see themselves to have an interest or pay for all implementations of all 5G use cases but only for the ones with direct relevance for them. Also, privacy and security is a key factor that they expect to be managed in some way. Early characteristics of the generation following the Millennials, the Centennials are included.