I was recently reading the preliminary specifications for 6G, which led me to wonder why the cellular industry is willing to make a huge investment in a new technology that is likely not going to drive a lot of new revenue opportunities. I’m admittedly not a wireless guy, so perhaps I’m missing something. But consider the claims being made for 6G.
Faster Speeds. 6G will support peak data rates at speeds between 50 and 100 Gbps. Is there really a market for faster cellular speeds? Are cellular customers crying out for faster speeds than can be supported by 5G (supposedly 10 Gbps)? What’s not said is that the highest speeds touted by the specification can only come through deployment of superhigh spectrum, which also comes with severe distance limitations outdoors.
Lower Latency. The 6G spec targets latency between 0.1 and 1 milliseconds, which is better than the 4 millisecond goal of 5G. But are there many customers willing to pay extra for that level of low latency?
Enables Immersive Communications. 6G is said to enable technologies like immersive eXtended Reality (XR), remote multi-sensory telepresence, holographic communications, haptic sensors and actuators, and multi-sensory interfaces. While these all sound supercool, and will certainly have proponents, is there enough revenue opportunity from these technologies to justify a massive upgrade of cell towers? Over the last five years, we’ve seen Meta completely fail to convince the world to use the metaverse using fiber connections. Technologies like smart glasses have been a total flop.
These technologies all require significant bandwidth, implying that we’d have to bring cell towers closer to users. Are cellular carriers suddenly going to invest in the small cell network that largely never materialized with 5G? Cellular carriers love the advantages of small cells, but they don’t want to pay for the fiber connectivity needed to support towers everywhere.
Connections for Smart Machines. This means things like autonomous factories and robots. 5G promised smart factories, and there have been some built – but there was not nearly enough revenue from these to support the huge investments in ubiquitous 5G. It’s a very different technology to broadcast 5G inside a factory than from every cell tower. Maybe I have a faulty crystal ball – does anybody see the country swarming with robots in the next decade?
Ability to Connect to Massive Numbers of Devices. This was the big hope for 5G. Cell carriers thought that every car would have a separate cellular subscription. They assumed that farms would be using massive numbers of cellular sensors. They assumed that our homes would be filled with smart appliances and devices connected to 5G.
But this didn’t happen. Iain Morris, the International Editor of Light Reading, recently published an article that cautioned that cellular carriers will be repeating their past commercial failures if they pin their hopes on 6G capturing big revenues from IoT.
The article reminded me of some of the early predictions related to IoT. Dave Evans of Cisco predicted in 2015 that the world would have 50 billion IoT devices by 2020. According to the recent Ericsson Mobility Report, the world had 22.3 IoT devices at the end of 2025, massively short of the 2015 prediction. It’s still an impressive number, since it means there are now almost three IoT devices for every person on earth. But as Morris points out, very few of these devices use 5G. WiFi and other technologies like Loran have captured the IoT market.
The issue that killed the IoT market for 5G hasn’t changed for 6G. It’s still far too costly to use cellular technology to monitor devices that only periodically connect to the Internet. And that is before considering the cost of a cellular subscription.
What’s most troublesome to me about the advent of 6G is that it will be accompanied by the sunsetting of 4G. In the U.S., that is going to mean that rural cellular coverage is going to shrink to a tiny percentage of what is covered today as I discussed in a recent series of blogs. 5G has proven to be a wonderful urban technology. 5G was a mandatory update for cellular companies since 4G was unable to support the increasing numbers of urban cellphones, particularly when customers increased the use of cellular data. But I’m having a hard time seeing the same need for the expensive upgrade to 6G. I know cellular carriers must be quietly having this same conversation.
“Cellular carriers love the advantages of small cells, but they don’t want to pay for the fiber connectivity needed to support towers everywhere.”
Recalls how about 10 years ago, small cells were seen as an enabler of FWA, putting radios on existing poles. Then it was pointed out that it would require so much fiber backhaul it offered no real cost benefit over FTTP. But consider there can be fiber on the poles in rural areas to support dedicated Ethernet for business class customers that could support FWA.
I believe that the ultimate goal is to have everything, everywhere connected by wireless which will one day lead to a seamless network that we live in.
I believe 6G is as much about making a new thing that needs to be funded than anything else. a ‘grow or die’ scenario.
I think there are broader wants by cell carriers to essentially eliminate wifi. not to kill it, but to have their own paid networks be so ubiquitous that traditional ISP tasks and in-home wifi become rare. To some degree they’ve already done this, there is a growing trend among young adults to only have cell service and run everything off a phone connection.
The IoT thing I think is a hard hill to climb. catm and similar ‘in the margins’ IoT cellular connectivity is great for mobile applications, but it’s expensive for on-prem or campus level IoT when solutions like lorawan, zigbee, and just wifi can be had for no re-occurring costs.
Frankly, 5G is quite good when it’s deployed well. ie, the right build for the expected connections, high quality backhaul etc. It’s not so good when spread thin in rural environments and made to support cellular FWA.
We have quite a number of verizon and tmobile ‘5G’ services for MSP customers, mostly as backup circuits but sometimes as the primary. These tend to be fast, good services when they launch and then 1-2 years later they are struggling with capacity. This is why the cell companies want 6G, it’s not to support already solid mobile solutions, it’s to creep into other market segments on the backs of government desires to have good mobile coverage.