In my blog yesterday about the future of operator network services and infrastructure, I mentioned the possibility (well, maybe “hope” would be more accurate) that the 6G initiatives might address some issues in a useful way. Since we’re at least five years from a solid idea of what 6G is going to do (we might get an idea of what it’s targeted at in three years, but not how it will deploy), can we even see a glimmer of direction? I got some views from both operators and vendors, and (of course) I have my own. Here’s what comes out of that mix.
Among operators, the big requirement for 6G is simple; it has to be more technologically evolutionary than revolutionary. Operators are almost universal in their belief that 5G didn’t return on the investment it demanded. The majority (just shy of three-quarters) also express reluctance to accept any promise of new revenue to offset costs, which means that they expect 6G “transformation” to be accomplished with a lot less hardware deployment than 5G.
Among vendors, you get almost the opposite picture, which isn’t much of a surprise. They want 6G to be a true infrastructure revolution. One vendor eagerly told me that “6G will transform every device that touches a network.” You can almost see them counting the prospective money. The thing they believe is that it’s all about speed and latency. “We will offer terabit service; we will offer latency measured in single-digit microseconds.”
Build it and they will come meets build it on the cheap.
There are some “technical” goals that both camps accept, and they’re mostly related to cost reductions that satisfy the operators but focus on something other than capex, so they don’t hit vendors’ bottom line. One example is energy efficiency, another is reductions in network complexity. There’s also interest in RF efficiency to get more from available spectrum, which could lower the cost of achieving some of the feature/function goals.
A couple of smart people in both the operator and vendor camps offered what I think is the most realistic summary of 6G goals. To paraphrase, 6G has to prepare the network for the evolution of applications and experiences that businesses and consumers will want or need going forward, so the network will not create a barrier to their growth. This means that the network will have to anticipate these new requirements in a way that fosters early adoption and experimentation, but does not impose a high “first cost” on operators, an impact that could delay or even stop deployment.
These smarties think that what’s likely to happen is an advance into 6G in phases, each phase offering a useful step that manages cost but introduces new capabilities to encourage application development. One very interesting comment these people offered was that private 6G and FWA may end up being the keys to 6G success. The reason is that many of the features of 6G would logically develop from applications with a very limited scope, more suited to private wireless, and would expand to wider geographies only if they were proved out in the early private missions.
Again, paraphrasing: Low-latency applications are real-time applications, and these are today almost totally limited to plant and campus distances, supported by WiFi and wired connections. One goal of 6G is to be the sole accepted solution to real-time low-latency missions, which we’d call IoT missions. To make that happen, it has to go into the plants and campuses, and displace local connection options there, rather than depend on new wider-ranging and as-yet-undeveloped applications that WiFi and wires can’t serve.
The first phase of 6G, say this group, has to focus on efficiency and on this private-mission goal. They see early private 6G utilizing current 5G spectrum, but using a simplified network model versus 5G, and relying more on machine learning to make components of the service work autonomously. As these applications expand, the literati think they’d likely open new spectrum at the high end of the mid-band, in the 20-24 GHz piece of the 14-24 GHz range. This spectrum has potential as a private resource, in part because the shorter wavelength doesn’t propagate as far, and carving out something in this range for local exploitation has less impact on future exploitation of the mid-band by operators.
The simplified model this group is thinking about is about building wireless networks with fewer boxes, meaning eliminating things in 6G that were really introduced in 4G and continued in 5G. One proposal many make is to completely rethink the concepts of the IP Multimedia Subsystem. Anyone who’s looked at an IMS diagram recognizes that there are more different boxes in it than in the whole of the rest of IP networking. The group believes that the nIMS (as one calls it) should be viewed as a mobility-capable overlay on a standard data infrastructure, one that is provisioned to have the capacity needed and that therefore has little reason to manage it.
One goal of nIMS is to make it possible to deploy private 6G at the plant/campus level, using resources enterprises either have (current local-edge process control servers) or can acquire and manage in the way they’re used to handle compute. Think of it as running on Linux blades, and the only new thing needed is the radio setup. Some of the thoughtful group think that any specialized features might also be hosted in a router blade, and that in particular, any User Plane functions of nIMS should be router/switch features and not custom devices.
To facilitate the expansion of the private 6G model, the group think that spectrum policy is critical. They recommend a chunk of the top end of the 14-24 MHz spectrum be allocated for government/utility use in smart cities, with priority given to any municipality with at least 100,000 population. Since smart cities are one of the specific 6G application targets, this would encourage development of 6G solutions rather than force cities to use an earlier alternative. They also say that 6G should run within any 5G spectrum available, public or private, which would mean it could in theory be used with existing radios if 5G were already deployed.
The big points this group makes are related. First, you have to make 6G start small, with minimal “first cost” and that cost focused on preparing for a private 6G application-driven evolution. Second, you have to ensure that every step in the process is aimed at just getting you to the next step by opening new benefits gradually, as the service opportunities justify. Operators in this group agree that it’s first cost, the cost of an initial deployment, that matters, and that by targeting limited mass-market deployment early on, you could manage their first cost and risk.
But, of course, you don’t address the vendor problem of wanting a boatload of money, nor do you eliminate the risk that the gradual roll-out doesn’t generate any validating missions, and that 6G then never does anything revolutionary at all. But better to fail on the cheap than to fail expensively.
