# 6G to Take the Digital Divide by Storm: Key Technologies and Trends to Bridge the Gap
###### Abstract  
The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has shed light on the urgency of bridging the digital divide to guarantee equity in the fruition of different services by all citizens. The inability to access the digital world may be due to a lack of network infrastructure, which we refer to as _service-delivery divide_, or to the physical conditions, handicaps, age, or digital illiteracy of the citizens, that is mentioned as _service-fruition divide_. In this paper, we discuss the way how future sixth-generation (6G) systems can remedy actual limitations in the realization of a truly digital world. Hence, we introduce the key technologies for bridging the digital gap and show how they can work in two use cases of particular importance, namely eHealth and education, where digital inequalities have been dramatically augmented by the pandemic. Finally, considerations about the socio-economical impacts of future 6G solutions are drawn. 6G; digital divide; NTNs; AI; XR; MEC; affective computing; BCI; D2D; use cases +
Footnote †: journal: Future Internet  
approach in the recovery plan for Europe following the COVID-19 crisis: enhanced quality of life for citizens, long-term economic growth, lower resource consumption, increased resilience and fairness of society. Statistics and forecasts are shown in Figure 1 prove that the digital divide problem is very striking and multi-dimensional. Indeed, the likelihood that people have access to the Internet is influenced by the level of economic and cultural development of the country in which they live; besides, the generation gap impacts the digital divide; even the gender is a factor of diversity when looking at the number of people open to digitization. Whatever the reason that causes the impossibility or unwillingness of some people to _live connected_, today, the digital divide represents a real obstacle to the recovery that the world needs following the COVID-19 pandemic, which has befallen the global population some time ago and which is still conditioning our lives. Although some countries were more digitized than others, similar disparities in Internet access for households with a higher level of poverty and rural areas were reported worldwide and even before the pandemic began [6]. This led us to consider the reassessment of numerous aspects concerning the enforcement of information and communications technologies (ICT) in various areas of society, including work, education, and health. Unfortunately, none of the existing solutions has been proved to be an effective response to the digital divide problem, being too focused on specific demand or introducing high costs for its development. For this reason, in this paper, we investigate how the problem of the digital divide can be mitigated by looking to the future, specifically to the sixth generation (6G) and rising technologies, being the latter not just a mere exploration of more spectrum at high-frequency bands [7] rather a new paradigm for ubiquitous, pervasive and high-speed Internet connectivity. Furthermore, 6G could represent the turning point as it will allow the achievement of a high level of automation in the execution of various services and the extension of coverage of cellular networks. This is the reason why this work refers to 6G technologies, classified as _evolutionary_ and _evolutionary_, wherein the former has already emerged with the fifth generation (5G), but is not yet widespread on the market [8]. In more detail, we provide three main contributions to this study. First, in Section 2 we discuss the evolution of the digital divide concept and the challenges that can be addressed by the technological development; differently from [9], which focuses on the specific issue of coverage of remote areas, our study proposes a multi-dimensional discussion, by further distinguishing between _service-delivery divide_, from a network-oriented perspective, and _service-fruition divide_, from an individual-oriented perspective.