The 6G mess is getting out of hand

Journalists and analysts turn Nostradamus at this time of year, concocting predictions that have usually been forgotten by the time Mobile World Congress (MWC) spins around in February or March. Over the next few weeks, readers of the telecom trade press can expect to see a lot more about such familiar topics as 5G evolution (yawn), private networks (sigh), the metaverse (seriously?), open RAN (why?) and the public cloud (yikes).

And then there’s 6G. The mobile standard that succeeds the one currently being deployed certainly won’t appear in 2023. Based on the industry’s usual upgrade cycle of roughly 10 years, most soothsayers don’t think 6G will be a commercial reality until 2030, or thereabouts. But it’s become an increasingly vigorous workout for the telco exec’s mandibular muscles at cocktail parties (such as the Light Reading one in New York this week, pictured below), and the chatter about 6G will take up even more conversation time next year. Much of it will not be very positive.

If it is not already broken, the whole Gs cycle looks dangerously close to it. Regular improvements to network technology – termed “Releases” by the 3GPP, an international umbrella group of regional standards bodies – are not very marketable, even if they hold attractions for telcos. Occurring less frequently, but coinciding with an extra-special Release, a G is more an Olympics-style technological event, a rare opportunity to make a lot of noise and drum up industry and government support.

Yet marketers overpromised on 5G, which has been given a bad rap by the mainstream media because, in its present form, it looks no different from 4G. Without it, networks and in-use spectrum bands would eventually become overloaded and your average smartphone-thumbing tweenie might not be able to stream TikTok videos in high definition on the number 77 bus to Wandsworth. But telling someone they could be denied a product or service they currently enjoy is not much of a consumer pitch. (Buy more expensive wheels or never drive again?)

Some telco execs, too, are evidently tired of flinging money at equipment that doesn’t bring additional customers or boost revenues. Basestations need changing every now and then like a pair of jeans as they start to wear out, but fewer operators want a whole new wardrobe of expensive clothes when the dance is slowing down. Maria Cuevas, BT’s networks research director, recently used the “if” word when talking about 6G. If it does happen, she does not want it to be a “massive step change” or “full replacement cycle.”

From the wacky to the prosaic

People involved in the Gs must play Nostradamus themselves, predicting what society’s telecom needs and interests will be not in the next few months but several years from now. Increasingly, it looks like an outdated, bonkers approach to invention in such a fast-changing, technology-obsessed world. It hardly smacks of the DevOps philosophy (quick response and adaptation) that telcos say they admire.

Ideas about 6G range from the wacky to the prosaic. The former includes visions of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), whose most extreme example in science fiction was Clint Eastwood piloting a fighter plane with the power of thought in the 1982 movie Firefox. Ericsson and the University of Surrey have notions of providing connectivity for the senses of taste, touch and smell.

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