6G Forum panelists warned against overpromising when it comes to 6G
The notion that 5G is laying the foundation for 6G, with 5G-Advanced acting as a steppingstone, is widely accepted, and RCR Wireless News has covered this topic in depth here and here. At the 6G Forum, though, panelists furthered this conversation by sharing lessons learned in 5G that they believe will — or at least should — inform the development and deployment 6G systems.
1. Avoid architectural fragmentation
Narothum Saxena, who is the vice president of technology strategy and architecture at UScellular and an NGMN Alliance board member, cautioned against introducing the potential for architectural fragmentation, which could impact network and device compatibility, performance and security. “There were a plethora of architectural options that we went through with 5G,” he explained. “The risk is that we will fragment the market and slow down the adoption of new technologies.”
For 6G, then, it might be wise to focus on just a few architecture options with a limited set of key connectivity options. Saxena noted, too, that of the many architectural options considered for 5G, the only two implemented were the Non-Standalone (NSA) option 3x and Standalone (SA) option 2x.
2. The technology should be cost effective and simple
Saxena also pointed out that while 5G Standalone focused on cloud-native technologies to enable getting to market “faster, cheaper and operationally simpler,” the ecosystem is still “maturing and stabilizing,” and there remains a lack of “compelling” use cases for 5G SA deployments. “Something to keep in mind as we move to the next G, is we need to make sure the technologies are cost effective and operationally simpler,” he said. In other words, 5G introduced this critical goal of keeping thing cheap and simple, but it hasn’t really been achieved yet, and so these things must remain a priority moving forward and will be key to the success of 6G.
3. But it’s also critical to think beyond the tech
According to Ian Hood, the CTO and chief strategist at Red Hat, one of the “big misses” in 5G was that the industry focused too much on the mobility aspect and not enough on what runs on top of this technology in terms of the applications that it enables. “The fully software-define, cloud native environment with data and AI at the heart… enables you to put applications wherever you like,” he stated. “Really, it’s about transforming the entire business that the operation has with data-driven decisions, upskilling their teams … and look at solving… their business challenge with technology above and beyond the mobile piece of the equation. We spent a lot of time on the highway; we didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the services that run on top of it.”
4. Don’t overpromise
Lastly, all of the session panelists warned against overpromising when it comes to 6G, each commenting that the hype around 5G didn’t do anyone any good. “5G has been a very ambitious technology … we were saying the technology can do this, the technology can do that, which was true, technically speaking, but it wasn’t pragmatic,” said Jean Schwoerer, the senior expert of future networks Orange. “The technology itself is not enough, we need to understand the actual value of a new technology, who will use it [and] for what.”
As the only vertical industry representative on the panel, Bosch’s 6G Project Director Andreas Mueller agreed that the company didn’t exactly get what it was promised with 5G. “Indeed, there is a mismatch between the broad ambition that we had for 5G… and the reality today. The monetization of 5G, and I guess this goes for almost all the players along the value chain, is behind the original expectations.” As a result, he argued, we should learn from the mistakes of the past and better manage 6G’s hype cycle.
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