6G More Likely an Evolution Than a Revolution, Experts Say
6G will offer some changes for telecom networks, with more focus on software and AI, but it’s more likely to be evolutionary than revolutionary, experts agreed during Wireless Communications Alliance’s virtual 6G conference Thursday. The questions about 6G have started earlier than for earlier generations of wireless, said Prakash Sangam, principal at Tantra Analyst. “The natural question everybody has is ‘is it too early to talk about 6G?’” he said: “What can 6G do that 5G and 5G-advanced can’t?”
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Samsung Research U.K. is hiring staff for a team to figure out what 6G is and what it can do, said Dan Warren, director-advanced network research. One question is whether the network designed for 5G is “as optimized as it can be” and “as optimizable as it can be,” he said. “It’s only a revolution if everybody within a community feels it,” he said.
For years, providers have been trying to figure out how to grow in a saturated consumer market, Warren said. “It’s either a rapid race to the bottom on pricing or you’ve got to find new opportunity” and “the next really big potential number of connections that you can go after,” he said. That’s what providers have been trying to address from 4G into 5G and “and now onwards into 6G because we haven’t got the answer right yet,” he said. 6G has to offer more than just a tenfold increase in speed and 10-fold reduction in latency, he said.
From a cynical perspective, 6G is about fulfilling “the promises 5G made -- things like ubiquitous connectivity, truly knowing how to utilize millimeter-wave bands and above,” said Ian Wong, Viavi Solutions director-RF and wireless. Wong hopes 6G will be more energy efficient and “provide really good ubiquitous service on the top of that.”
Wong doesn’t expect a “fundamental paradigm shift” between 5G and 6G. “We will have new spectrum” and “do a much better job of utilizing that spectrum,” he said. There's “potential for revolution” in areas like using machine learning to automate the network and reduce costs, he said.
“We see 6G as a unification of a lot of moving pieces,” said Ben Coffin, Keysight Technologies marketing manager-advanced wireless. You would expect the focus to be on new spectrum bands being made available, including use of the sub-THz bands, but “we see 6G as a lot more than that,” he said. “We see it as figuring out how to integrate AI and how to use optimizations throughout the network, looking at how do we take on new network architecture ideas and being able to combine things in 5G, 5G-advanced,” he said.
There will be improvements to the air interface, better network flexibility and capacity increases with 6G, Coffin said: “With every G we anticipate some of that.” One big change may be a focus on software and AI optimization “from the design of the network to the actual execution,” he said.
Former FCC engineer Michael Marcus said achieving the speeds targeted by 6G will require bigger bandwidths. If the FCC can open up a 20-30 GHz band above 100 GHz “it’s not just more spectrum, it’s spectrum that is fundamentally different than 4G and 5G spectrum because of the data rates and the latency that would be possible,” he said, saying most users don’t need those high rates. “Not all spectrum is the same -- big hunks open up new opportunities,” he said.
Spectrum above 100 GHz is being targeted, but Marcus warned that in that range “passive uses are much, much more common.” While 17% of spectrum there is allocated to passive use, it’s located in about a dozen bands “that chop up the spectrum.” More attention needs to be focused on sharing those high-frequency bands, but some federal agencies oppose any work in that area, Marcus said. There are technology and policy problems that must be resolved “if we’re going to get the large bandwidths above 100 GHz,” he said.