I’ve blogged several times recently about the issues facing network operators, and the remedies that they might be considering. Operators have been telling me about these problems for almost exactly twenty years now, which raises two questions. First, why don’t we hear them raising them more publicly? Second, why hasn’t something been done? We have a development that touches both these questions, and it’s worth taking a closer look.
A 6G conference is probably the last place you’d expect to hear a plea for sanity, and apparently most of the attendees weren’t eager to either hear sane things or deliver them. However, any 6G initiative fails if the network operators won’t deploy it, and those operators were the ones that Light Reading quotes as making that plea for sanity. AT&T in particular was quoted: “We’re getting a little bit worn out with the economics of the industry. The capital investments, they have to be logical. We have to have clear line of sight to the consumer use cases.”
I agree, of course, and I also agree with AT&T’s assessment that “[t]he most likely use cases in the consumer world are extended reality, the metaverse.” The problem is that neither AT&T nor any other operator I’ve chatted with has any clear idea of what that would mean, much less what would be required to create the use case. A non-operator attendee suggested “Once you build the roads, there will be applications that run on top,” but it’s pretty obvious that operators like AT&T aren’t feeling like building real roads to hopeful destinations.
Another non-operator, Qualcomm, thinks that the enterprise is the real hope for metaverse-linked services. That’s the view of all 44 of the operators who commented on the metaverse (in its various forms) to me. Interestingly, the article and my commenting operators also demonstrated the same confusion; some think that augmented/extended reality (AR/XR) is the actual driver and some think that the metaverse, meaning the modeling of an artificial reality synchronized in some way to aspects of the real world, is the brass ring.
If you parse all this out, the point that becomes clear is that not only is 6G a technology in search of a valuable mission (as was 5G), but so is metaverse, XR, and pretty much everything else. The problem, I think, is that from the dawn of IT, our ability to connect experiences to users was the limiting factor in the creation of new applications and new business cases. Five years ago or so, we ran out of experiences to connect, meaning that the problem we have now isn’t one of linking users/workers to stuff, but creating the stuff they want to link to. The fact is that not only does this mean new network services can’t be quickly pressed into service, their characteristics can’t be reliably defined because we don’t really know what we’d do with them.
This is important. The problems operators had, and are still having, with 5G can be traced to it, and so can the declining profit per bit. Value and price correlate, and when users of the network (business or consumer) value not the network connection but what they’re connecting with or receiving, there’s an inevitable commoditization. AT&T is right, the vendors and pundits and editors are wrong. You can’t build a road to nowhere and hope somewhere crops up as a result.
The fact that I’m citing things from a 6G conference is perhaps the big problem here. If what we have is an experience-generation problem, or perhaps a metaverse-generation problem, then that’s not the place to address it. The right people from the essential stakeholders aren’t even there. The topics weren’t framed to cover the problem of creating a metaverse, only those related to connecting one.
It’s also time to stop spouting platitudes. B2B is a metaverse opportunity? Sure, and in fact almost all the B2B target applications for a metaverse are already implemented by somebody, but they’re implemented using local specialized controllers and not hosted and connected services. To say that there is opportunity here is to say that just making a service available would automatically displace the current on-premises implementations. Why? Do we believe it would be cheaper? That kind of thinking is why the cloud got into trouble this year.
I don’t think, based on my interactions with enterprises, that many businesses doubt that the next frontier in business cases for IT and network enhancements are related to real-time information delivery, tight coupling between an experience and a user/worker. XR is a mechanism for providing that, by allowing an experience application to directly link to our vision, the most powerful of our senses. Metaverse and modeling is a mechanism for providing that by creating a model of a real-world system that can be manipulated by software and visualized if useful via XR.
What experience? OK, that’s something that’s far from settled, and yet if we don’t know what XR is showing us and what the metaverse is modeling, we don’t know anything about how we have to connect the pieces and the users. Wouldn’t it be sensible to figure out some requirements before we start talking about service features and ROI?
The Light Reading piece raised a critical point in its last paragraph: One of the last speakers “asked for a show of hands from people who wanted to use a 6G network (close to half) and then how much would be willing to pay extra for it (far fewer).” What is the ROI on something that doesn’t make you any money because nobody wants to pay extra for it? Answer: it’s negative. What CFO will promote a project whose admitted impact is to sink cost with no incremental return? You can probably figure that one out. AT&T’s comments show they did.
Cost is why we can’t expect to simply convert today’s industrial-metaverse, local-controller, wired-connection applications to edge computing and low-latency networks. Cost is why we can’t expect consumers to buy a thousand-dollar XR goggle set when there’s nothing except gaming they could expect to do, and why they won’t pay for premium gaming connectivity when even XR games aren’t exactly growing on trees. And cost is why we don’t have companies rushing out to build applications that require XR goggles that hardly anyone has.
There are some things we can “know” or at least suspect regarding connection requirements. One thing is that the majority of metaverse-and-realtime application traffic is made up of control messages that are very small, so the “telemetry” piece of the application doesn’t require much bandwidth but does require higher reliability and lower latency. The second thing is that the XR or “visualization” stuff, particularly the stuff that’s linked to “social” metaverse applications, would likely have greater bandwidth requirements, but even there what’s needed to control an avatar or visualize the current position of one is far less than needed to deliver a 4K video experience. The final thing is that latency is an issue for only as far as control-loop traffic has to be passed, which means that if we’re looking for wide-area service opportunities, we have to be thinking more in terms of applications that require widely distributed elements. Industrial applications aren’t likely to fit this model because the processes themselves are localized.
I can see applications that would evolve to be a driver of 5G or 6G, providing that the features of the services fit the profiles of need, and that the components of the applications and not just their connectivity were available to exploit. Evolution takes time, and it also takes primitive organisms that can do the evolving. We probably have time to create a useful 6G model by 2030, but do we have the starting elements? Not yet, I think, and so we should be doing conferences on those elements now, and let 6G wait till we really understand what it has to do.
