6G fragmentation may have just gotten a little closer

The US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Japan this week announced the new Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT) to focus on topics “such as telecommunications supply chain diversification and open network architectures.” But the move may also increase the chances that any future 6G standard will fracture among international superpowers.

That kind of fragmentation would represent a major blow to large wireless network operators and equipment suppliers. The economies of scale derived from a single, global standard – like 5G – would be lost in a future international market split among several different flavors of 6G technology. Vendors would be forced to pick and choose from among those flavors, and their sales would be limited as a result. And that would probably force them to raise prices on their equipment for their wireless network operator customers.

There is precedent for such fragmentation in the global cellular industry. Anyone familiar with the acronyms CDMA, GSM and WiMAX knows this. But the 4G LTE standard, released roughly 20 years ago, helped unify the world’s cellular network operators and equipment vendors around a single technology. And the industry doubled down on that approach with 5G.

Thus, a fragmented 6G future is clearly a concern for most players across the global telecommunications marketplace. “I think it’s incumbent on all of us then to see what we can do to get this message across above the engineering layer and try to get the economists to be really aware of the damage that could be done if we saw a fragmented standard,” Adrian Scrase, CTO at global standards association ETSI, said earlier this year, according to Mobile World Live.

The issue will be a topic of discussion later this year at the World Radiocommunication Conferences (WRC-­23), where international policymakers will begin discussing how they might harmonize global spectrum allocations for 6G.

But it will be the 3GPP that will face the issue head on. The group is the international standards body primarily responsible for cellular networking technologies, and it played a leading role in creating the globally deployed LTE standard. The association recently updated its voting rules in order to prevent Apple and other big companies from gaining too much power.

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