6G Still Taking Shape, but Preparations Need to Start Now, Experts Say
The U.S. is right to start thinking now about 6G, which will likely be commercialized starting in 2030, said Dean Brenner, a former top Qualcomm executive who chairs the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council, during the Fierce Wireless 6G Evolution Summit Monday. Brenner noted TAC is the first formal U.S. government effort to get a handle on 6G.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
6G “is on a whiteboard right now; it’s whatever we all want it to be,” Brenner said: “We know the end result … will be better, faster wireless connectivity. Because of COVID we know that people around the world are demanding this.” Brenner noted that with 3G and 4G, industry didn’t really focus on how it would be used, but that changed with the development of 5G.
With 6G, so far, there has been focus on both the technology and potential use cases, Brenner said. One big question is “what can 6G do to help close this digital divide, the haves and the have-nots, both in the United States and around the world,” he said. A lot of work remains on 5G, he said. We will “need new spectrum,” he said: “What is that spectrum going to consist of? How is the new technology going to be able to take advantage of it? What kind of a timeline will be necessary?”
6G will mean autonomous networks, powered by AI and machine learning, said Dimitra Simeonidou, director of the Smart Internet Lab at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. 6G will require “a true network of networks architecture,” she said. It will combine wired and wireless, terrestrial and nonterrestrial and legacy and future networks, she said. “Let’s not take wired out of the 6G story,” she said.
6G will mean better use of the cloud, AI and network disaggregation, said Ronny Haraldsvik, Cohere Technologies senior vice president-business development. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), used in cellular networks, has been used for more than 20 years, he said. OFDM “did not encompass, or even contemplate this fast move to cloud, multi-cloud, the emergence of satellite communications, and so forth,” he said: “At very, very high speeds OFDM has issues.”
“Now that we have 20 years of experience with OFDM, I think we all realize that we can do better, and that’s why this conversation has started,” Haraldsvik said: “Think about it -- 5G is nothing more than 4G with massive MIMO on top of it and some advances in latency and the radio access network.”
Each time we move to new generation of wireless, new players join the conversation, Brenner said. “One of the things that’s been very noticeable about 5G is there have been many more players who have been very involved at an earlier stage,” he said. Wireless companies “can’t just get together and design technology for big factories -- we need the big industrial players to be involved,” he said. The auto industry has been similarly engaged, he said, and the number of industries involved will likely grow with 6G.
“It would be shortsighted for us, as an industry, to specify 'X' performance for everything about 6G across the board, or to say it only needs to work in THz [spectrum], or only needs to work in a certain environment,” Haraldsvik said.
Operators have invested billions in 5G spectrum and are ready to see returns on their investments, said Bill Lambertson, IBM vice president-cloud, 5G and edge. “Technologies really need to be secure, open, hybrid, in multi-cloud environments,” he said. “Operators need to be able to deploy network workloads everywhere … whether that’s on public cloud, on private clouds or on the far edge of clouds,” he said.
Providers need to be able to use AI at scale, Lambertson said. Finding “new ways of working is very, very critical,” he said. A network has to be “highly automated at scale and secure,” he said: “It has to put the user in control of their own experience.” Better energy efficiency “will become the norm” as we move into 6G, he said.