6G Expected to Address Challenges 5G Won't Be Able to Solve
5G is happening, but more slowly than hoped, especially for companies that will use the new generation of wireless to transform their business, said Andreas Mueller, Bosch chief expert-IoT communication technologies, Wednesday during day two of New York University’s in-person and virtual Brooklyn 6G Summit, also sponsored by Nokia. Other speakers said industry is already looking to 6G.
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Companies have been slow to move their factories and other business assets to 5G, Mueller said. 5G has been the subject of a “classical hype cycle,” he said. “That’s true for 5G in general, but even more true for 5G for the vertical industries,” he said: “The more inflated expectations, promises 5G will be the Holy Grail for everything … people expected that from the very beginning, but of course that’s not the case.”
5G is happening but “for the vertical industries , we are still lagging a bit behind,” Mueller said. “It still will happen. It just takes a bit more time. Relax, sit back,” he said: There has been “some disappointment, disillusionment, but the good news is, from my perspective, the worst is over. … It’s very hard to say where we are exactly. It’s always easier to say afterwards.” 5G chipsets still don’t offer all the features customers want, he said.
Lots of 5G smartphones are in the market but not as many industrial robots, Mueller said. “Costs are still an issue,” he said. “It’s easy to have a use case, it’s more challenging to have a business case, but I think that’s the normal development -- prices will hopefully drop,” he said. “We also need more integrated end-to-end solutions,” he said: “It’s important to be realistic in the promises so we don’t get this disappointment afterwards.”
The metaverse, a theme much discussed at the conference (see 2210250066), and more specifically “immersive, multisensory experience,” will drive the move from 5G to 6G, said Douglas Castor, InterDigital senior director-future wireless research and innovation. “Fundamentally, as humans we’re social creatures, we thrive on socialization -- it’s important to our physical, our emotional health,” he said. “How do we get the remote, digital experience to be more similar” to meeting in person? he asked: “That’s what’s going to be adopted and be very successful.”
“Spectrum sharing is something that we really did not consider by design in 5G, and as a consequence we have spectrum sharing techniques that are very rudimentary, very inefficient and very static,” said Puneet Jain, Intel senior principal engineer: “That has led to really inefficient use of spectrum. That has to change in 6G.” The wireless industry needs a way to seamlessly integrate wireless with technologies already used by companies, he said. “Without that, adoption is not going to happen,” he said.
“6G is going to fix everything 5G couldn’t do. Right?” asked Venkatesh Ramaswamy, Mitre Labs chief technologist: “That’s what everybody is saying these days.” One thing we know is “6G is going to be the internet of everything -- in addition to voice and video, we’re going to have all these devices that have to be connected all the time, anywhere, in any conditions.”
Educating the FCC
Industry has a big role in educating the FCC on “the trends of how technology is developing,” said Joel Taubenblatt, Wireless Bureau acting chief. “Conferences like these and other opportunities for folks from the government to learn about the evolution of technology, what’s in the near future, what’s on the horizon, what types of requirements will that technology need in terms of bandwidth, capacity ... are extremely important as the FCC does it’s thinking about what steps to take next,” he said.
“It’s important for us to hear about what problems are occurring today in 5G,” Taubenblatt said: “What are folks observing; are there challenges with the way that the regulatory framework is working today? … Does the regulatory framework that we have today meet the networks that are being developed for tomorrow?”
The digital divide remains, said Robert Jakubek, UScellular vice president-engineering and network operations, noting the carrier is active in rural markets. Walking around New York “there’s wireless everywhere, of many different technologies, but you get into many of the rural communities you end up in situations where there really isn’t good wireless service,” he said.
If 6G starts in 2030 as widely predicted, Jakubek said, his team will start to focus on it in 2028. “A lot of my world today is really focused in on the 5G environment,” he said. “You go to war with the army that you actually have” and UScellular is moving to 5G with the spectrum it has, starting with 600 MHz, he said. “We were very aggressive in getting 5G low-band out,” he said: “We started deploying millimeter-wave very quickly” and are now “shifting a lot of that focus to the mid-band because mid-band is an incredibly valuable piece of spectrum.”
Deploying a 5G stand-alone core, voice over new radio, 5G-advanced, “all these things are moving forward for us as we are moving towards a 6G environment,” Jakubek said.