Ofcom and UK MPs Support IET Call for New Approach to 6G Mobile

Senior Government MPs and Ofcom have backed a call by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) for the development of future 6G based mobile broadband technologies to prioritise societal benefits, instead of the usual focus on delivering “ever higher data [speeds] and ever higher spectrum bands.”

It’s traditional for the R&D of a new mobile technology to start just as the latest standard (5G) begins its deployment. But one issue with the race to 6G is that the latest 5G standard can already harness an extremely wide range of radio spectrum frequencies, which doesn’t leave as much room for practical advancement.

Equally, a lot of 5G mobile operators have broadly stuck to harnessing spectrum in the more traditional sub-6GHz bands, which is despite the technology being able to harness well into the millimetre wave area (e.g. 24-30GHz). Part of the reason for this is that mmW signals are so weak that they only really make sense if you build a dense urban network, which is very expensive, or for use on fixed wireless links to premises (a niche pursuit for most mobile operators).

All of this raises a challenge when it comes to developing a future 6G standard, since merely adding ever higher spectrum bands (e.g. Samsung has talked about harnessing the Terahertz band for peak speeds of 1Tbps) won’t do much to improve the economic viability vs practical coverage side of things for mobile operators. Put another way, why bother with THz, and its many technical coverage challenges, if there’s only limited appetite for that in the real-world market.

Instead, the IET believes that the focus of 6G should be on tackling “societal challenges,” such as sustainable economic growth, pandemics and climate change. In the practical sense, we assume this could mean a greater focus on energy efficiency and getting as much performance as possible out of existing mobile bands, but the report itself – 6G for Policy Makers – isn’t that specific.

Key IET Recommendations

1. The traditional approach to a next generation mobile technology – seeking ever higher data speed in ever higher spectrum bands – is no longer sustainable. A new approach to mobile generation change is needed in which 6G breaks out of this unsustainable business model.

2. A high ambition should be set for 6G, inspired by societal challenges such as sustainable economic growth, pandemics and climate change. To this end, 6G needs an adequate pre-standardisation research phase.

3. 6G should be the catalyst to bring everything that needs to be modernised at the same time. The principle justification for inclusion should be the need to sustain interoperability or secure global scale economies through a coordinated introduction of common standards.

4. The research phase of 6G needs to be guided towards building a consensus on the most promising lines of research. This is to secure scale while keeping the door open for ‘left field’ breakthrough discoveries. A promising candidate is the Internet of Senses; arising from the fusion of the physical, digital and non-physical worlds. The research phase should be viewed as a competition of ideas with the standards body pulling the best ideas into standardisation.

5. 6G should be planned and implemented as a rolling programme of improvements well into the late 2030s to smooth out the investment profile.

Role of governments and regulators

6. 6G initiatives offer a good framework for governments to consider the long-term goals for their national infrastructure. It should embrace digital and communications infrastructures and a future converge, fixed mobile world, in which mobility will always be an important component.

7. Governments need to engage with industry from the outset to shape the right conditions to sustain long-term research and, eventually, new investments in upgrading national infrastructures.

8. A successful 6G mobile infrastructure will need a supportive 6G spectrum policy. This especially needs to drive far more effective use of bands below 6GHz that are particularly suitable for wide area coverage.

9. The competitive market and industry will inevitably look vastly different 10 to 15 years from now. The most impactful benefit of 6G to consumers, and national economies, will come from regulation and 6G technology innovation developing in sync.

Modernisation of the standard’s body

10. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards body must modernise to meet the challenges of the next 10 to 15 years. Its founding fathers, the regional standards bodies, seem best placed to do this. The General Assembly of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute should be encouraged to initiate some early thinking on what reforms may be needed to global standardisation, so that 6G builds upon current excellence.

We agree with the broad strokes of what is being said above, although without a united global approach this may quickly turn into little more than wishful thinking, with other countries typically opting to ignore any grander purpose in favour of pushing their latest technologies forward. Equally, we don’t want to see innovation being hamstrung by politics or the debate turned into a succession of hyperbole like thinking.

The risk is thus that the development of 6G may become split by alternative approaches, much as older mobile technologies often were and that tends to hurt interoperability. But at the same time, it’s still true to say that the old approach has perhaps run its course. The other problem here is that this debate really needed to start two years ago, not after the starting guns on 6G had already been fired (particularly in China and South Korea).

Last year the ITU-R said they expected to begin the early work of constructing a new standard for 6G in 2021 and this could be completed “as early as” 2028, with commercial deployments following by 2030 or later.