There’s a growing polarization of views in the mobile infrastructure and standards area. On the one hand, we have a group who say that 6G will be the “next wave” in mobile infrastructure, creating a burst of telco spending on network equipment. On the other, there’s an increasingly vocal group who not only don’t see such a burst, but don’t really see 6G, or any other “Gs” at all. Can we get to the bottom of the story by looking at telco comments over the last six months? Let’s see, and you can also find some interesting comment in this Light Reading story.
I have 88 telco comments on mobile evolution made to Andover Intel since 2024, with 81 telcos who have made comments on 6G in the last six months. Of the latter group, 12 say that 6G will create a burst of spending, 38 that there will be a bubble of spending, 23 who see no significant change in spending, and 8 who don’t think there will even really be a 6G or any such organized phasing of mobile standards for decades, at least. Why the division?
The biggest factor is the drivers behind any new investment. All of the 12 who see a 6G burst believe that low-latency applications will generate a “significant” or even “vast” new pool of telco revenue. Another 31 think that “some” new low-latency opportunity will emerge, largely from our “bubble of spending” group, and the rest say that they believe there will be no real new service opportunities emerging from 6G at all. The group who sees no actual, meaningful, new mobile standards generations at all believe that no such opportunity will ever emerge.
The problem here is that even those who believe in low-latency services don’t see it being a major market. They point out that consumers, who make up the majority of mobile spending, have never shown any willingness to pay much for any incremental service improvements. Most won’t pay for additional bandwidth, and many are abandoning unlimited plans for metered service to lower their costs. The prevailing view is that consumers will take what’s offered for no cost, which begs any telco business case unless you believe in subsidization via ads, which few telcos do.
The next factor, which operates on both the bubble and nothing-new-from-6G groups, is whether anything else could justify a mobile refresh of any sort. Most see nothing other than technology improvements that could be linked to cost reduction. The majority of the bubble group believe that such improvements are viable, and in fact could provide a bridge to the time when low-latency applications would gain traction after 6G rolls out. Maybe even before; most AI RAN proponents (19 of the group think it’s worth looking at, though only 5 think it’s definitely a reasonable direction to take) believe AI is the path to operations efficiency and would also pave the way for edge hosting. They see AI RAN deploying before 6G. Another 18 think AI RAN might be a part of 6G, but even this group is concerned about costs.
72 of the operators in the 6G comment group say that they believe the primary requirement for 6G is to prove an ROI for any investment, and 66 say that they don’t believe that any significant investment could generate enough ROI, so the goal has to be to minimize any 6G costs. Target bubble thinking, not burst thinking, in short.
The Light Reading piece notes some differences in the views of US telcos versus those in the EU, and perhaps also those in Asia/Pacific. My comments validate this to a variable extent. It’s true that US telcos are more likely to be influenced by vendor positioning, which of course favors anything that results in more spending. However, they are still largely cautious; only 1 of the 12 burst-thinking telcos are from the US. Asia/Pacific telcos have, in general, higher demand density than any others in the world, and thus get a higher return on infrastructure spending and value cell capacity and efficiency more. The EU, which has more competition than other geographies, is the home of the most skeptical telcos. There may be a link there to the move to get an EU commitment to telco subsidies from OTTs, of course.
I think that what this shows overall is that 5G had a major impact on telco thinking, and a largely negative one. A few telcos characterize 5G as “the death of the Field of Dreams”, and most telcos seem to embrace the thought if not the exact terminology. They were caught up in what was clearly a vendor-induced hype wave, which resulted in a huge ROI shortfall and a more cautious attitude. However, a slight majority (49 of 88) telcos have, over time, said that they believed that some credible new revenue source was essential for their business, and I think that leads to the size of the “bubble” group; they want to believe but were 5G-bitten and so doubtful of 6G. They’re also doubtful of things like Open RAN, V-RAN, and AI RAN, but to return to a historical analogy of a past blog, to a Titanic survivor in a lifeboat, any light looks like a rescuer coming because the alternative of no-rescue is simply too dire.
There’s a risk here, of course. Being too willing to believe in baseless hype is never a good strategy, but being closed to real opportunity is no better. The challenge is to recognize what real opportunity is, and what 5G has done is debunk the notion that visible market consensus in a hype-and-click-bait age is rarely real consensus. What is? That’s the challenge facing all these telco evolutions.
People talk and listen and see with biological equipment. Thus, they’re prepared to exploit network services that rely on those senses. Unless you believe in remote touch and smell, we have to move beyond sense-exploiting if we need new service opportunities, which means we need to develop an ecosystem to build up applications that exploit those senses in a different way, and that use a service like low-latency connectivity to do that.
Here’s my view. 6G can’t be good, but it can be bad. Other “Gs” are even worse, because as long as there’s a formal body with Field-of-Dreams historicity, vendors will use it to try to push the same sort of hype that gave us the 5G disappointment. It’s those vendors who’s pursuit of profit drives them to innovative thinking that we’ll have to rely on to give us a telecom future, so we have to drive them to do that by shutting off the Gs once and for all. Telco service standards cannot save telecom, but false hope could kill it.
