6G Discussions Starting, but 5G-Advanced Still in Early Stages
6G is coming, but 5G Americas is sticking with that name for now, President Chris Pearson said Monday during Fierce Wireless’s virtual 5G Blitz Week. Other speakers said 5G-advanced is getting increasing attention as standards develop. “I am not ready to change our name,” Pearson said: “We have a lot of great technical innovation [to come] with 5G-advanced; let’s keep our eye on the ball.”
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We’re still “at the early stages” for 5G-advanced, said former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. O’Rielly said he's most excited about the potential for AI and machine learning for use in managing networks and in how networks are used. “Everyone is talking about AI and where it may go,” he said: “It could be the infancy of a whole new generation of communications going forward.”
5G-advanced will mean moving from the industrial IoT to massive IoT, said Mike Bimm, global head-telecom, media and technology architecture at software company ServiceNow. Bimm expects more focus on reduced capability (RedCap) technology. Service providers are interested in specialized IoT devices, whether for a smart electric grid, surveillance or traffic management, he said. RedCap allows “more bandwidth, more capacity” in IoT devices while cutting power and other costs, he said.
The metaverse and extended reality require advanced sensors and devices, along with capacity, and RedCap will help cut costs, Bimm said. O’Rielly said RedCap is important for wearable devices. RedCap also means lower bandwidth, he said: “Instead of needing 100 MHz channels, you could do 20 -- that can really be important.”
The starting point for 5G-advanced will be 3rd Generation Partnership Project's Release 18 “and onwards,” said Ravi Sinha, Reliance Jio director-5G product and technology development. Sinha predicted leading use cases will include digital twinning, the metaverse and massive IoT.
6G discussions are early, speakers said, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t start now. “Industry did such a good job of moving 5G and ramping up 5G that moving to the next step should not be something that we really fear,” Bimm said. Policymakers should remain focused on 5G since it still has a “very good runway,” O’Rielly said.
6G won’t really start until 2030, but specs will start to appear in Release 21, Sinha said. Other countries are putting “billions and billions” of dollars into planning for 6G, he said. These nations want early insights into the radios and other assets that will be needed and the services that 6G will provide, he said. He expects the first networks billed as 6G to launch in 2026.
Speakers agreed millimeter-wave bands will be part of 5G. The first uses have been fixed wireless access (FWA), Sinha said. Technologies like beam forming will mean better range for high-band transmitters, up to nearly 1,000 feet, he said. This year and next “will be the really good years for FWA, as well as millimeter wave,” he said.
“The market hasn’t been too kind” to investments made so far, but carriers “definitely see the future for millimeter-wave in their network architecture,” O’Rielly said: “These are things that have to mature over time and find the right circumstances.”
5G is one of the fastest growing technologies in the history of wireless, growing twice as quickly as 4G, said Arvin Singh, head-5G solutions engineering at Verizon. “It needs to scale faster than any previous generation of mobile technologies we’ve seen,” he said. There are already more than 215 5G networks, surpassing more than a billion connections worldwide, with 6 billion expected in 2030, he said. The growth has been “explosive,” he said.
Verizon considers FWA its “nationwide broadband strategy” and already reaches about 30 million households and 2 million businesses, Singh said. Verizon adds 1,500-1,800 route miles every month with more than 52,000 miles deployed, he said. More than 50% of Verizon’s cell traffic is carried on the fiber network, and it’s moving commercial traffic to its cloud-native 5G core, he said.
Verizon is ready to move to a 5G stand-alone network, taking control functions, signaling and data transfer off its 4G network, Singh said. “What would come next is things like network slicing, voice over [new radio], moving away from voice-over LTE,” he said. 5G-advanced is starting, but will take several years to deploy, he said.