IBC
article here
6G is coming and promises massive improvements in efficiency across society. But beyond those with vested interests, 6G may not justify either hype or investment. Adrian Pennington reports.
As the telecoms industry inexorably turns its attention toward 6G, the narrative feels familiar. A new generation of technology promises a leap forward in capability, a seismic wave of transformative applications that even in its initial phases will “provide immediate operational and economic benefits.”
But the real story behind 6G may be less about technological revolution and more about operational reality and a less than enthusiastic response to another round of hefty investment.
“Manufacturers would like 6G to be ‘5G on steroids’ because that justifies selling more equipment,” argues telecoms consultant William Webb. “But most operators would prefer 6G not to happen. The last thing they want is another massive 5G-style capital spend that doesn’t increase revenue.”
Webb ran R&D at UK regulator Ofcom between 2003-2007, is a former president of the IET, and co-founded IoT developer Neul which was acquired by Huawei for $25m in 2014. He now consults via his company Commcisive and authored the book ‘The 5G Myth’ which warns that the industry is sleepwalking into repeating past mistakes.
“Equipment manufacturers – companies like Ericsson, Nokia, and to a lesser extent Samsung and NEC, are primarily pushing for 6G,” he says. “Much of the 6G material circulating comes either directly from them or indirectly via research institutions they help fund, such as the 6G Flagship in Finland. Academics often derive significant funding from these vendors, so research tends to align with those interests.”
None of this is unusual since generational shifts in mobile technology have historically been vendor-led. What’s different this time is the financial backdrop.
“Operators are still working to monetise their 5G investments,” Webb says. “Many of the high-profile 5G use cases like autonomous vehicles, remote surgery and hyper-connected smart cities have yet to scale commercially. Consumer revenues have remained largely flat. Enterprise 5G has proven more complex and slower moving than anticipated.”
Nonetheless, the industry is headed down the road to making 6G a reality. The standardised timeline will see the first 6G specifications, under 3GPP Release 21, finalised by Q4 2028. New spectrum has been identified for 6G use leading to the first anticipated commercial 6G deployments in 2030.
5G claims recycled for 6G
When the drum was being banged for 5G, all manner of applications were dangled in front of telcos that, the marketing said, couldn’t be achieved without it. These included being able to share video from sports venues, HD streaming to mobile, cloud gaming, volumetric holograms and 5G as a replacement for DTT.
In 2019, mobile operator EE was boosting 5G rollout from 2022 as enabling “truly immersive mobile augmented reality, real-time health monitoring, and mobile cloud gaming.”
A report that same year by Ovum, commissioned by Intel, said 2025 would be the ‘tipping point’ for 5G in entertainment and media. By 2028 it forecast that 5G M&E experiences will generate $1.3 trillion in revenues.
Back then BT Sport was experimenting with sports AR for the home and telcos like Orange in partnership with France Télévisions were trialling 8K live streamed virtual reality from Roland Garros. These markets never got off the ground.
Now “wide-area mass-market mixed reality” and a “high-fidelity mobile holograms” are being touted as applications for the next decade – only with 6G.
Recent tests lead Nokia to claim that 6G’s potential isn’t theoretical but “alive, tangible, and undeniable”.
Mobile data growth hype
One of the central justifications for generational change has been exponential traffic growth. Industry forecasts from bodies such as the GSMA predict significant increases in global mobile data over the next decade. It expects volumes to reach up to 3,900 exabytes per month by 2040 (equating to 140–360GB per mobile connection per month).
Webb points out that such historical projections have often overshot reality by substantial margins. He says the GSMA is incentivised to project growth because that strengthens their case for more spectrum and investment.
There is evidence to suggest that mobile data growth is beginning to level off in mature markets. Telecoms analyst Tefficient tracked trends over the decade to 2024 and found mobile data usage growth decelerating in a clear majority of countries including UK, Netherlands and Germany.
“This deceleration trend is bad news for mobile operators, and it appears to have a negative impact on the ARPU development,” it concluded. “Demand for additional mobile data is now weaker than ever.”
Reaching the same conclusion Webb says the developed world has largely reached the point of sufficiency. “Data rates beyond 10Mbps on mobile and around 50Mbps on broadband for most homes and 100Mbps for virtually all homes will not make any meaningful difference to most end users – and we have these rates now where we are appropriately connected.”
Most of the recent rises in data use have come from streaming video but Webb contends our usage is plateauing here too. “People are already watching as much video on their phones as they realistically can in a day,” he says.
Notably, there has been no “5G effect”. Webb says: “The introduction of 5G has not led to more mobile usage than would have been predicted had it not been introduced.”
Current 5G networks frequently deliver peak speeds around 200Mbps, while average user consumption remains a fraction of that. “There’s enormous headroom. It’s not as though networks are at capacity and crying out for a dramatic leap forward.”
Predicting the AI surge
There’s currently a lot of talk about AI surging network capacity. Nokia, for example, says the transition to 6G will coincide with an “unprecedented increase in mobile data driven by the AI supercycle”. It suggests that wide area network traffic could grow by as much as 700% by 2034, driven largely by the rapid expansion of AI workloads. Nokia also estimates that AI could represent 30% of all global traffic by then.
Webb remains unconvinced. “There’s evidence that AI may actually reduce network traffic,” he says. “Typing a query into ChatGPT and receiving text back consumes far less data than scrolling endlessly through TikTok.”
Where AI will play a starring role is in making network operations more efficient. Research from Tata Consultancy Services shows that nearly half (48%) of telco operators globally have already started enterprise-wide deployment of AI.
Chatbots are replacing call centre staff while algorithms can help detect fraud or highlight failing equipment before it breaks. These are useful cost-reductions but overall AI’s impact on telecom networks is modest.
“The real AI revolution is happening in data centres, with companies like Amazon Web Services, not in the telecoms stack itself,” Webb says.
False promise of integrated sensing
One of the advanced capabilities being baked into 6G is Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) which in simple terms means 6G won’t just connect sensors to the network but will act as a sensor itself.
“This will imbue the network with a digital ‘sixth sense’ that can extend our human senses to every point the network touches,” states Nokia in phrasing that seems to suggest it will give us superhuman power.
South Korean telco SKT was demonstrating integrated sensing technologies at MWC26 and Türk Telekom with partner InterDigital claimed a breakthrough in proving how cellular and Wi-Fi networks can combine as complementary sensing technologies. Potential use cases include the detection and tracking (of presence, motion and objects) without visual sensors.
There’s a practical application for military or police in drone detection, for example, or for civic authorities monitoring autonomous vehicles but Webb thinks the arguments don’t add up.
“One network delivering both connectivity and sensing sounds attractive and could offer efficiency gains, but we already have a technology that is better suited to sensing and that’s radar,” he says. “Radar (or lidar) operates on extremely short timescales – microseconds – whereas cellular transmissions work in milliseconds. That’s a thousandfold difference.”
To make ISAC work properly, you’d need to re-engineer radios to transmit and receive simultaneously, which is both difficult and expensive.
“You’d likely end up with a mediocre radar system that doesn’t perform well enough to justify the cost. For enterprise buyers, that raises a familiar question: is this a commercially viable capability – or a research project?”
Rather than ultra-high peak speeds or immersive virtual worlds, Webb argues that what customers would most value from investment is seamless, universal coverage.
“I want my phone to work perfectly underground, on planes, in rural areas, in crowded venues and indoors. I don’t want it to barely work but to handle a video call flawlessly without manual Wi-Fi logins or network switching.”
Technically, this is achievable by integrating an array of existing communications systems including satellite and even multiple different cellular networks.
Yet this would require cooperation between cellular standards bodies, Wi-Fi organisations such as the IEEE, and global regulators including the ITU – organisations that don’t naturally collaborate.
“Nor is integration necessarily in the commercial interests of equipment vendors,” Webb says. “It would also require rethinking cellular as just a data pipe – like broadband – rather than a voice system anchored to phone numbers.”
Alongside better coverage, a priority for operators is to lower operational costs (with greater automation and fewer network engineers), and reduce power consumption (since electricity is now over 20% of operating costs).
“There’s a tension in the standards process,” Webb says. “Vendors dominate technical specification work within standards bodies, but ultimately, they must produce something operators are willing to deploy. What we’re seeing now is that battle playing out. The emerging shape of 6G is therefore as much a commercial negotiation as a technological one.”
6G FOMO
Nokia states that “on day one, 6G will provide a multitude of 5G services in more efficient, secure, resilient and sustainable ways,” but no mobile generation lights up with a flick of a switch.
6G is being built on the shoulders of 5G and in particular 5G-Advanced. Patent developer InterDigital, another company with a vested interest in 6G, says 3GPP Release 20 serves as the “pivotal link” between 5G-Advanced and 6G.
“Many of the innovations that will eventually rely on 6G capabilities will first be developed and tested on 5G networks,” says Johan Lundsjö, Research Director Communication, Ericsson Research. “5G is where we experiment, learn, and create new services that will later evolve to take full advantage of 6G’s enhanced capabilities.”
Spectrum sharing between 5G and 6G will allow both systems to operate efficiently side by side. At MWC, Ericsson and Apple demonstrated 5G and 6G spectrum sharing. With semiconductor maker MediaTek, Ericsson also showed how the low latency features of 6G could deliver AI-enhanced XR.
At a time when geopolitics is splintering, not uniting, there is also concern at government level that their country not fall behind rivals when it comes to the latest tech. That holds true for AI and robotics, where multinationals and militaries are scrambling to gain an edge, as it does for 6G where significant early rollouts are expected in China and the Gulf states, as well as Japan, South Korea, the US and India.
It means there is additional pressure on national carriers to invest in spectrum and kit out their infrastructure.
The key question is not whether 6G will arrive, because it most certainly will, but whether it will solve problems that genuinely matter. The lesson from 5G is not that generational shifts fail. It is that expectations can run ahead of commercial reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment