Questions About 6G Raised at Webinar
Experts expressed skepticism Thursday about 6G and whether it will mean big changes beyond what can be done with 5G. The world should become more realistic about 6G, said Monica Paolini, consultant at Senza Fili, during a firm webinar.
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Most applications that are coming will run on Wi-Fi, not 6G, Paolini said. 6G won’t do anything that 5G can’t do, she said. Up to 80% of data traffic is on Wi-Fi, not wireless networks. “The amount of traffic that really requires mobility … is a very small amount of the traffic,” but it’s also “incredibly valuable,” she said.
“Do we really need” 6G? Paolini asked: “No. But it’s a good thing to have a better interface and a better technology, so I don’t see why not. We don’t need it tomorrow.”
“At the moment when we talk about 6G, we don’t really know what we’re talking about,” said Pasquale Cataldi, Innovation Lambda managing director. As an engineer, Cataldi said his first question is what problem we’re trying to solve: “We can then label the solution to that problem 6G, or whatever we want, but we should start with a problem.”
“The hype for 5G has worn off -- 5G is now pretty much just behind the scenes,” said Ernest Worthman of Worthman & Associates. “6G is going to be just an extension of that,” he said. 6G will be a “culmination” of all the wireless networks that will be developed, he said.
Worthman said how spectrum is managed is the key question. People say, “I’m going to use 6G to do this,” Worthman said. “You’re not going to use 6G to do anything -- you’re going to use spectrum to do what you want to do,” he said. Marketers say, “We’ve got 6G here, how do we market this?” he said: “You’re not going to market 6G. It didn’t work with 5G. … Nobody is going to care that this is a 5G network or 6G network. They’re going to care how is this spectrum going to solve my problem.”
“We do need spectrum,” Paolini said. “We cannot create new spectrum, but we can learn to share it in a more efficient way,” she said. We use spectrum “in a very inefficient way right now because we don’t share it,” she said.