Editor’s note: I’m in the habit of bookmarking on LinkedIn, books, magazines, movies, newspapers, and records, things I think are insightful and interesting. What I’m not in the habit of doing is ever revisiting those insightful, interesting bits of commentary and doing anything with them that would benefit anyone other than myself. This weekly column is an effort to correct that.
Treading the narrow path
Like it or not, it’s time to start talking about 6G in earnest, including but not limited to spectrum (or lack thereof), standards, use cases and how those are aligned in a way that delivers value and makes money. In many ways, 6G looks evolutionary in deployment (a good thing, too), and potentially revolutionary in capability. But this isn’t a binary; there’s hopefully a narrow path that balances what’s financially feasible and solves real problems versus what’s technologically possible and a study of how to do something without figuring why it needs to be done.
My colleague Kelly Hill took this up in a recent webinar — available on demand here — that convened a panel of industry experts to talk through 6G priorities, as well as lessons the industry learned from the standardization, commercialization and current reality of 5G that can be applied forward to the next generation of cellular. It’s important to note: we’re halfway through 5G assuming a 10-year cycle (which is wrong), and we still have a big opportunity space with the transition to 5G Standalone and the diffusion of 5G-Advanced capabilities. That said, 6G is coming and the target is 2030, sooner if history is instructive given we saw pre-standard 5G deployments in late 2018. As an aside, if you forced me to guess, I’d guess the first cut at 6G will be a fixed wireless access service using the upper mid-band. Why? Stationary data transmission is easier than mobile data transmission and FWA is the “new” 5G service that’s actually growing operators’ subscriber base and ARPA while expanding addressable market by taking on traditional home broadband providers.
But don’t take it from me. Here’s how Paul Harris, principal wireless architect in the CTO Office at VIAVI Solutions, addressed the evolution/revolution question. “I think that there’s going to be a bit of both when it comes to evolution and revolution,” he said. “And I think even more so there maybe needs to be a balance here that needs to be still an opportunity to look for what’s next. Look for where we can find those value adds for delivering new networks. What things will people actually see as a valuable addition or businesses, what things can be monetized, i.e. what are people willing to pay for that we don’t currently do today?”
There needs to be balance because a number of operators have very clearly, publicly discussed the general hesitancy around rushing into the next generation when there’s still a long runway for the current generation. To say nothing of business clarity, fatigue around return on invested capital, and the question of spectrum, which carries heavy financial and political weight.
The $85 billion question
To set the stage on spectrum, think about 6G as including FR1 frequencies up to 7.125 GHz, FR2 from 24.25 GHz to 52.6 GHz, then FR3 (this is what’s new) from 7.125 GHz to 25.5 GHz. This is being referred to as the upper-mid band. There’s also more specialized interest in sub-THz frequencies for ultra-high capacity, very short-range data transmission which could support wireless data exchange within a data center, for instance, or maybe even to dump a huge amount of telemetry from an asset (like a plane) to an edge compute node very, very quickly.
Identifying candidate frequencies in the upper-mid band is one thing. Operators gaining control of those airwaves is another matter. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission lost spectrum authority in March 2023 with a partial restoration under the Biden administration and full restoration in July with the passage of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. To unpack that a bit more, the bill directs the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and the FCC to identify at least 800 megahertz of spectrum within 1.3 GHz to 10.5 GHz for auction with target proceeds set at least at — this might be a good time for a heavy pour of a dark liquor, maybe like a Michter’s 10-year single barrel, and have a seat — $85 billion.
ATIS’s Next G Alliance Managing Director Jaydee Griffith put it this way: “That’s one key thing that’s important to recognize in the One Big Beautiful Bill as well, is that there are some metrics around doing economic analysis on basically how to…maximize revenue generation from some of these auction proceedings. So that does raise some concerns about spectrum affordability as Congress looks to add money to the treasury to pay for other government expenses. But at what point could that impact other things?”
Put simply: operators have a finite amount of money; overspending on spectrum means underspending on deployment which can lead to promises not delivered to a market that’s arguably still jaded by what 5G has actually delivered. And from the perspective of a country that also wants to pat itself on the back for achieving supremacy in vital technology domains like AI and communications, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to identify that as the goal then try to drain the coffers of public firms to fund the types of “other government expenses” we’re all reading about.
“This is something we’re looking at at the Next G Alliance as we look to support NTIA, and the FCC, and the administration, in how we can identify the spectrum. What are some ways the spectrum, and some of the spectrum maybe a little contentious as it’s currently used by [the Department of Defense] and other federal stakeholders, around spectrum sharing that may be able to make things a little bit easier. But I think the spectrum…can be really tough. And by 2030, that time frame, I think it’s doable, but it isn’t going to be an easy path.”
If that price tag is directionally indicative of what will happen in the 6G era, at least in a very major global market, what does that mean for operators with largely stagnant revenues? It means 6G needs to very much not be a major exercise in infrastructure deployment; re-use is a phrase I’ve heard from a number of senior execs. In practice that would mean putting 6G equipment on existing 5G sites which implies the need for antenna and other underlying technologies, both hardware and software, that would allow a 6G radio transmitting in the upper-mid band to roughly serve the same area as a 5G radio transmitting in the C-Band, or other “mid-band,” frequencies. In any case, if governments optimize spectrum auctions for maximizing revenue, operators will optimize deployments for minimum viable spend. I doubt the intersection of those curves is 6G as a ubiquitous connectivity medium for broad innovation.
“FR3, at least from what I’ve been hearing, holds the promise of an overlay with FR1,” according to Anton Monk, senior vice president of strategy with Cohere Technologies. But, “You have high frequencies, not necessarily super high frequencies, just above 7 GHz; that leads to higher Doppler. If you want it to be an overlay and support mobile traffic, you have to deal with it…You still have larger delay spreads. So the question is, to what extent does 3GPP, or to what extent are they willing to, focus on performance benefits for FR3 versus the path that you’ve heard from a number of operators, particularly European operators?”
Some European operators, Monk said, “are saying, ‘Look, we don’t want to spend any more money on this.’” But to achieve 6G as an overlay, “You do have these more complex channels. I think there’s no questions really about that. The question is to what extent will 3GPP be willing to consider new innovations? I mean, that’s the heart of this evolution versus revolution. Revolution requires hard choices, infrastructure spending, hardware changes…It’ll be challenging.”
On the one hand, we’re talking re-use of infrastructure, on another we’re talking about re-use of a time/frequency scheduling paradigm. In addition to hearing a lot about re-use, we’ve also been hearing a good deal about multi-access radio spectrum sharing (MRSS), including from the chair of the AI-RAN Alliance who sees spectrum sharing as a necessary predicate of 6G. “We are entering an era where spectrum sharing, massive bandwidth and ultra-dense deployments make…conventional, manual network management completely impossible,” according to Alex Choi. More here. And there’s no way I’m going to meaningfully get into the idea of 6G as AI-native and still get this published before the weekend so mental note to go deeper in a future entry of this column.
Static standardziation vs. dynamic delivery
What else, what else…on the standards side, and a lesson learned from 5G that could be usefully applied to 6G, is around optionality. Non-standalone 5G gave operators an easier evolutionary path from 4G in that it allowed them to re-use (that word again) the 4G EPC; it also represented a bit of a velvet ditch in that it was hard to get out of because it was comfortable enough from a capabilities perspective. Thus we’ve seen a slow move to 5G Standalone which opens up some of the really interesting capabilities. For 6G, the consensus seems to be to remove the option. Standalone 6G only. But is there a bit of tension brewing as Open RAN continues its rise? Open RAN, and the attendant O-RAN Alliance specifications, are all about interoperability that accommodates optionality. Lots of folks will tell you this idea of radio system disaggregation will be baked into 6G. Sure, but how? Well, 3GPP and O-RAN Alliance hosted a joint workshop earlier this year to get the ball rolling on how to address this tension. If 5G contained too much optionality, and Open RAN is all about optionality, how do you craft standards that do what they’re supposed to do without over-standardizing or kneecapping the still-nascent impact of Open RAN? Interfaces can be open without making everything optional. Profiles and conformance are how you keep openess from becoming entropy. Another tough question, another narrow path.
Monk pretty well summed it up, with particular emphasis on the foundational role of standarrdization, and echoed rising industry discourse around the relevancy of Gs if the point really is embracing constant improvement as a function of software. “Is 6G just going to be 5G Advanced Pro? Why would you need another G if that’s the case? That’s a long-term question. There’s going to be a 6G; why should there be a 7G or an 8G? You don’t have Gs in the internet world. You have continuous innovation. But that requires a change in thinking…Let the market evolve on its own. That’s the ultimate truth-teller…This is the bigger question of where does academic research go? Where do startup capabilities go when it’s getting harder and harder to get new, call it revolutionary change or continuous innovation, into the standard?”
