To 6G or Not 6G?

My take on 6G, thanks to an in-depth workshop with Disruptive 6G’s Dean Bubley and the Queen of Telco AI, Charlotte Patrick , and a crew of very smart, nice and questioning people from the industry last week in London.

My big question going in was “will there be a 6G?” as my instincts were that it doesn’t really make sense. Customers aren’t clamoring for it (or even quite a lot of 5G). If asked if they want 6G, operators look at you like an athlete offered a right knee replacement when they’ve just started recovering from having the left one done.

Naturally, if you ask the experts, you will get a complicated answer to this question, which is what we explored at the workshop. So after much frowning, pen chewing, and asking dumb questions, here is what I think.

In short, what the world needs is a more reliable model of mobile connectivity, whether 5G, 4G, WiFi or satellite or whatever. That could be 6G, if 6G is a signal of a new and better experience – kind of ‘one G to rule them all’. This is broadly the view of William Webb . Geoff Hollingworth and the crew at #6Greset. The challenge of this eminently sensible theory is that it is likely to fluster all the main industry stakeholders as it quite radically changes the structure and model of the industry.

Secondly, there’s lots of possible technical enhancements, some based on AI, which could make it all cheaper, running more efficiently with automation, and achieving a better use of resources. This is desirable but it’s not really a ‘G’ if your definition of a G is something that creates a notably better experience that customers care about – it’s mainly managing stuff better. Cheaper is not to be sniffed at as a benefit either- but as welcome as it is, it isn’t necessarily a transformational experience.

Lastly, there are lots of fancy use cases and applications, slicing, sensing, and industry specific applications. The challenge to this is that some of these may take-off one day, but many of are at best speculative, apply to specific niches rather than the mass of network customers, or help operators solve a specific challenge (like sensing a military radar in the same spectrum). Do you really need a major new industry standard for that?

So my recommendations for the industry are:

·        Don’t call anything 6G unless it drives a tangible beneficial change in experience. Remember: 80% of traffic goes via WiFi already, and fewer customers are shouting for faster, although they do want reliability / ubiquity

·        Don’t bloat any standard with unnecessary stuff, go faster and add things in as you go (Dean estimates the vast majority of the 5G standard has not been adopted)

·        Ideally, make it “one G to rule them all” – something that pulls together cellular, WiFi, satellite and all the rest

Whether any of this is what will happen is another good question. Standards processes are rolling at 3GPP, ITU and elsewhere, all the network equipment makers will be understandably keen to get the next cycle of investment rolling. And sufficient capital investment to update infrastructure is important. You only need to look at the UK’s water industry to see what happens when it stagnates.

Plus someone in Marketing is bound to ask “can’t we call this 6G?” soon.

And as Dean points out, there are lots of things that can go wrong, such as Geo-political fragmentation of standards.

So what should you do about 6G? I’d call it a watching brief - and it is certainly something you should be trying to influence to be useful (Dean is a good person to ask "how?").

You can never rule out a surprise. Who knows what Gen AI and Quantum might spark, for example? In the meantime, 5G has still got an awful lot of hype to live up to, and most operators are unlikely to rush to spend more on new networks in the next few years (although they will invest in network automation and AI).

Throughout all the previous Gs, the big investments made most sense when the network development successfully connected a transformational device (smartphone) with a transformational service (the Internet plus apps). Beyond making what we have better with the available resources, perhaps the question we should be thinking most deeply about is what might be the next such alignment of transformational innovations. Right now, that is not clear.