Infra Suppliers and Mobile Operators Might Need 6G More than Users

We can expect to continue hearing quite a lot from suppliers and service providers about the speed, capacity advantages and compelling new use cases for 6G mobile networks. There are obvious reasons for such claims. 

Simply put, every internet access network has required more capacity over time, and mobile services are not exempt from this need. But there are other reasons for the chatter. 

Suppliers have to convince their customers to replace the existing platform (5G) with the next-generation platform. 

Service providers, on the other hand, have to convince regulators to release new spectrum to support the "revolutionary" new networks. 

And claims about important new use cases are typically part of the argument, aside from the virtually-certain improvements in speed (bandwidth or capacity boosts of 10 times have been normal for each mobile platform since the time of 2G) and lower latency. 

Still, at some point, quantifying the value of a new high-speed network for a single user is a challenge. Beyond a certain point, and that point is nearly always far lower than many expect, faster speeds do not provide any measurable improvement in application performance. 

That noted, It's also impossible to calculate the return on investment of an application that has not yet been invented or is not yet possible because the networks will not support it.

Before 4G, no one could have predicted the rise of on-demand ride-sharing. And while mobile video streaming had been noted as a 3G network innovation, those networks did not generally have the capacity to support such apps at scale. So capacity sometimes does matter.

Still, ride-sharing might have blossomed more because of the use of smart phones, plus GPS, rather than "more bandwidth" as such. 

And while 4G bandwidth improvements did make video streaming usable in nearly all cases, one also has to point to the value of social networks and entertainment as the drivers of value for consumers. And it has generally proven difficult to predict which innovations will emerge at scale for any given next-generation mobile network.

Text messaging emerged for 2G networks almost by accident, for example, as the text capability was developed as a user service after the new Signaling System 7 was adopted for network operations.