5G is getting more bad press, and 6G is generating more doubts. This raises two questions. First, what impact will this have on operator plans in 2026? Second, what impact will it have on vendors who hope to sell into telco infrastructure? Let’s try to address both.
To start with, I’m not going to suggest that mobile network standards don’t need to evolve. As both usage and technology advance, it’s essential to ensure that services remain optimum. 5G was necessary, likely even essential. However, since 5G’s value was primarily associated with optimizing services, it benefits operators and users in potentially multiple ways.
For operators, 5G improved cell density and capacity, which is essential in ensuring that infrastructure continues to support the continued expanse of cellphone usage, including the shift away from simple calling and texting to content delivery, social media, and web access in general. 5G has fulfilled this goal set, provisionally. The problem comes along in getting the user of the service to go along.
Why did there have to be user benefits? It’s complicated, but it starts with handsets. Users buy phones, and when mobile standards change, the old phones normally won’t support the full range of new mobile features the standards make available. Thus, you need phones to evolve for the first goal to be met. Eventually, phones would likely be upgraded as new phone capabilities unrelated to the service (like cameras or AI) come along. But…big but…you could probably accelerate this if the service shift, the new standard, created a user benefit. Thus, smartphone companies have an incentive to jump on any prospective service benefit, even if it’s tenuous. So do mobile infrastructure vendors, who accelerate revenues if they can get operators to move faster.
The tech media, of course, looks at this through the lens of clicks. If 5G is valuable to telcos alone, how many will click on a story on 5G? How many will click if the story promises transformational changes in mobile experience? You guessed which option is most clickable, I’m sure, and so did the tech media. Result: we pumped up expectations for 5G, expectations that were unlikely to be fulfilled. The result was a kind of PR blitz that moved things faster, at first, then faded as the disappointments grew. Everything has to be the single-handed savior of western culture or the last bastion of international communist conspiracy, or it’s not interesting, so we now question everything about 5G.
So what’s the answer? Two options present themselves.
Option one, rinse and repeat with 6G. 5G strategy served a lot of stakeholders well, so why not just do the same once more. The problem with this is that it’s going to be harder for the usual cry-wolf reasons. Most of what could be said are visible user benefits of 6G were the same ones 5G didn’t deliver. The fact is that 5G fell short on user benefits because the feature changes didn’t map to actual usage requirements. So what if you can double the speed of a connection? Do you play the video at twice the speed? Do you send 4K to a device that’s too small to allow the HD/4K difference to be even noticed? Most users don’t download that much, either, so speed isn’t a big issue. Latency is even less an issue.
Option two, align 6G features with usage value propositions. The problem with that is that unless you have new value propositions to align with, all you are doing is repeating the 5G problem. What are these new values? They’d have to fall into one of two categories. The first are things that current services cannot support, and the second that they’re things that are supported only in a limited way.
Missions in the first category are UFOs; since they’re not landing in your yard, you can assign them any set of properties that serve your purpose. They’re unproven, in short, however interesting they are. Missions in the second category represent “pent-up demand” which is great, but because their properties, and the service imperfections that limit them, would be visible, we should know what they are. Look around, and what do you see? One credible possibility, which is real-world, real-time work and life augmentation, what I blogged about yesterday. We do, in fact, have some applications of that already in trial, and even in deployment. The utility vertical tells me that they’re already using XR visualization to empower workers who adjust and fix things, to lead them to the correct thing to diddle with, and demonstrate the ideal diddle process. So we should know what’s needed, right? We should be creating pent-up demand.
But if we were, why isn’t Open RAN a big success? Why aren’t we seeing more and more vendors jumping in? Instead, we’re seeing them leave. We have 5G Advanced coming along, and 6G standardization, so we should have clear signs of standards evolution to support those new missions. Where are they? The thing is that pent-up demand can be pent up for more reasons than service deficiencies.
The challenge for Open RAN, 5G Advanced, and 6G is one of promoting the ecosystem, not just the service. You can’t sell parachutes to someone who’s not jumping out of an airplane. The thing about mobile services is that they evolved because people wanted to do, while on the move, the things they did at home or in the office, with fixed devices and wireline services. There was pent-up demand, and that’s the kind of demand that 6G needs to promote. And that’s a problem.
Telcos have no proven ability to promote any sort of demand. Telco infrastructure vendors have little ability to do that either. The ball is not only not in either of these courts, it’s not even in their area. The vendors who could develop this demand have every incentive to develop it in a way that totally eliminates the need for mobile service standards changes, or even infrastructure changes. Why? Because telecom is a glacier, and they want a comet. No fast-mover in a market is going to build a product or service strategy in a way that relies on a slow-mover to be realized.
This is not, in my view, a problem telcos can fix; past history demonstrates that. It must fall to vendors who could play in both the telco space and the consumer or applications spaces to do the heavy lifting, if anything is to be lifted. The big value of Open RAN could have been the expansion of this group of vendors, making ecosystem development more likely. That didn’t happen, but for those who want Open RAN, 5G Advanced, or 6G to actually make progress in 2026, making it happen should be the prime directive.
