The halls of Fira Gran Via look as if they were built to house a fleet of zeppelins. Yet in these vast spaces dedicated once a year to MWC Barcelona, the mobile industry's epic annual get-together, it was hard to find much love for 6G, a technology due to fly in just five years' time, if the industry sticks to its normal upgrade cycle.
Seemingly never have mobile network operators (MNOs) had such a weak appetite for a forthcoming standard. Executives this year were happy to chat about AI, application programming interfaces (APIs) and even "standalone" (SA), a souped-up version of 5G. But at the mention of 6G, a few looked as if they had just crawled out of the Hindenburg wreckage.
It reflects the launch of 5G into a saturated global smartphone market without a new sales proposition. At best, 5G has provided additional capacity and slightly more efficient connectivity for data-congested networks. But in spectrum licensing and equipment fees, it has come at a huge cost while doing little or nothing to boost telco sales.
Attempts to charge a premium for a better network are usually aborted. In the UK, BT last year attached higher prices to 5G SA plans after launching the technology. This month, it became available to all new and upgrading customers with a compatible device. Until aliens land and need terrestrial connectivity during their stay on Earth, there are no unserved consumers. And non-smartphone-based 5G has not taken off.
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In that environment, no sensible telco wants to throw huge sums at a new generation when there is no obvious sales upside. And so the recurring message from the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), an international club of Tier 1 telcos, has been to demand from their vendors a 6G upgrade as low cost and hassle free as possible.
"The guidance that we've been giving the vendor community is you need to make it as software based as possible and vendor and platform agnostic so that we don't have to go forklift radios and make significant investments," said Jeanie York, the CTO of Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), at MWC Barcelona this year. "And I think there isn't one MNO out there, including VMO2, who hasn't sent that very strong message."
Mixed messages?
The last NGMN pronouncement on 6G came in a white paper published days before the start of MWC. Yet rather than simply calling for a software-upgradable 6G, as it had previously done, the organization envisaged scenarios in which a new air interface and even a new core network would exist. Some 40% of MNOs internally surveyed by the NGMN would apparently prefer a dedicated 6G core network.
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Is there a danger that any talk of a new air interface or core will seem confusing or contradictory to suppliers after the earlier messages about upgradability? Laurent Leboucher, the group CTO of Orange, and just-elected NGMN chairman, says a balance must be struck between making use of recently deployed 5G technologies and continuing to innovate.
"Of course, at some point there will be a need to add more spectrum, and there might even be a need to add more capacity on the hardware side," Leboucher said. "But I think it's not necessary to carve out everything in one big shift, where we give the impression to the industry that everything needs to be changed in one night, and that we need to build a completely new network." His own preference is for a process of "continuous innovation" that would mark a shift for standards groups used to overhauls at big intervals.
Yet despite multiple references to air interface and RAT (radio access technology) in the NGMN white paper, there are few telco executives publicly talking up interest in a successor to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the technology at the heart of 4G and 5G. Ericsson and Nokia, the big kit vendors outside China, have taken that on board, says Howard Watson, the chief security and networks officer of the UK's BT.
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"Nokia and Ericson absolutely are saying we are listening and let's effectively use 5G New Radio [NR] as the baseline," he said at MWC. Like various other telcos, BT has been lobbying for the release of spectrum in the upper 6GHz band to the cellular industry, a development that would obviously produce new hardware. "That will require more radios to be deployed, but let's keep the interface spec to the 5G NR spec," he added.
As for that core, some new capabilities will certainly be needed, according to Watson. "The new features of 6G are much greater spatial awareness and the ability to have devices charged from the network," he said. Integrated sensing and communications, arguably the most radical feature of 6G, would give networks a bat-like power to determine the shape and composition of objects within coverage. It could help with autonomous driving and have military applications. What's still unclear is how much today's networks would have to change – and whether there is any money in it for telcos.
'The world deserves innovation'
Ericsson's reaction to all this has recently involved presenting 6G as an "evolution" of today's mobile generation, not a dramatic overhaul. "5G and 5G-Advanced even more so will be cloud-based and will have new types of principles and be structured in a horizontal way, and 6G will be an evolution of that," said Börje Ekholm, Ericsson's CEO, just a few weeks ago. It will end the peaks and troughs of telco investment, he told analysts on a results call. "That means for us we are not going to see those cycles in the future," he added.
As pleasant as that may be for telcos to hear, circumstances are forcing Ericsson to adapt. Its annual sales have fallen 9% in the last two years, and its research and development budget now consumes 22% of revenues, up from just 14% in 2016, before Ekholm took charge. So far, virtualization has given IT companies only a marginally bigger role in network hardware, but analysts expect it to grow. There is no doubt the Swedish vendor would rather see customers buy 5G products it has already spent billions to develop than hold off until the next uncertain generation. Ericsson will hardly want to commit resources to 6G if operators subsequently underspend on it while voicing the same complaints heard today about poor returns on investment.
Still, arguing there should be nothing too new in 6G sounds tantamount to saying there is no need for innovation. The possibility that 6G closes the door on anything bar OFDM is a concern for Ray Dolan. Having previously worked on OFDM at Flarion Technologies, bought by Qualcomm for $805 million in 2006, Dolan today runs Cohere Technologies, a startup pushing orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), a potential OFDM rival.
"That would be a shame," Dolan told Light Reading at MWC. "OFDM was invented 25 years ago, and we had a small part in that. The world deserves innovation. We don't believe you need to design OFDM out. We just believe in bringing on innovation. If the innovation is profound, it will survive the politics of 3GPP. If the innovation is profound, it will get integrated in handsets."
The risk is that a more proactive and visionary China leaves other regions behind. "It wouldn’t surprise me if China proposes their version of OTFS because there is a lot of research being done and a lot of papers being written about OTFS in China," said Dolan. OTFS patents are being filed in China today, notes Ronny Haraldsvik, Cohere's senior vice president of business development, as Chinese companies seek to exert more influence over the 6G standard.
A telco revival would probably change the nature of the conversation about 6G. Proper sales growth has been absent for years, and 5G has failed to restore it. If AI, APIs or 5G SA features can make any kind of difference in the next two or three years, future editions of MWC Barcelona might not feel like quite such a 6G downer.
