Yawning about 6G?

Most people outside the communications industry will be unaffected and largely unconcerned about Mobile World Congress happening. But even many who are in the computing and software industries might not have to be too interested.

Yes, every next-generation mobile platform has featured higher capacity (speeds, bandwidth) and lower latency. Sometimes that really makes a difference, enabling new and compelling features. Text messaging doesn’t take lots of bandwidth, but it arguably was a “killer app” for 2G. Steaming video enabled by 4G networks might be in the same category.

Most observers might agree that proposed 3G apps actually did not emerge until the time of 4G. But most assessments of new killer features or apps since 4G have yet to emerge. 

We might note that the hoped-for advances often happen only in every other generation of networks, as hyped apps for any particular generation take longer to be commercialized than was hoped. 

That has led to some thinking that “every other generation” of mobile platforms is consequential (in terms of killer features and apps). So 2G and 4G were more consequential, 3G and 5G less so, with perhaps some expectation that 6G could be the platform that is more important than 5G. 

Platform	Theoretical Peak	Real-World Speed	Latency	The Pitch	What Actually Mattered	Verdict
2G	0.3 Mbps (EDGE: 384 Kbps)	0.05–0.1 Mbps	300–1000 ms	"Digital" wireless; wireless internet on your phone	SMS texting — arguably the most transformative app in mobile history. Basic WAP browsing (barely usable). MMS.	Genuine Leap
3G	7.2–21 Mbps (HSPA+)	0.5–3 Mbps	100–500 ms	"Mobile broadband" — internet everywhere, video calling	App stores became viable. Google Maps (basic). Email on the go. Social media feeds (early Twitter/Facebook). The original iPhone ran on 2.5G/3G.	Partial Win
4G LTE	150–1000 Mbps	10–50 Mbps	30–70 ms	"True broadband speeds" — replace home internet, HD video everywhere	Streaming video (Netflix, YouTube) became genuinely good. Uber/rideshare apps. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Video calls (FaceTime, Zoom). Hotspot as home broadband backup.	Genuine Leap
5G (sub-6 GHz)	1–10 Gbps	50–300 Mbps	10–30 ms	"Connected everything" — AR, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, remote surgery	Faster hotspot. Marginally better congestion in stadiums/airports. No killer app has emerged for consumers after 5+ years.	Mostly Hype
5G mmWave	4–20 Gbps	1–3 Gbps (indoors: near zero)	1–5 ms	"Gigabit wireless" — fixed wireless broadband replacement	Fixed wireless home broadband in specific markets. Dense venues. Not useful for mobile users — signal doesn't penetrate walls or travel more than a few hundred feet.	Mostly Hype
6G (proposal)	1 Tbps	???	<1 ms (theoretical)	"Holographic communication," digital twins, connected senses, brain-machine interfaces	Unknown. Researchers candidly admit there is no identified 6G killer app.	Mostly Hype

But we might also be at a point where speeds and feeds simply matter less, as the value of the mobile access connection is less driven by bandwidth and latency, and more by device and app capabilities. 

Perhaps it always is true that the value is driven by “what the platform enables” rather than “bandwidth” the platform supports. That has been true, arguably, for decades, as broadband internet access has gotten better.  

But we might also be at a point where, generally speaking, the networks support “more than enough” bandwidth, and “better than required” latency for most useful consumer or business use cases.

Who "Needs" 6G to be Revolutiionary?

By about 2030, standards bodies and suppliers will have gotten quite a ways down the road of preparing the next generation of mobile networks to succeed 5G. There will be claims about how “revolutionary” it might be, as we heard about 3G, 4G and 5G before. 

So "who" in the value chain gets most "value" from such claims about "revolutionary new features?" Consumers, app suppliers and users perhaps will benefit, but incrementally, in the form of higher speeds and lower latency.

Infrastructure suppliers and service providers, on the other hand, "need" to make such claims. Without dramatic new features, it is hard for infra suppliers to sell new networks. Without the promise of important new features, service providers will have a hard time convincing regulators to grant spectrum to build the new networks.

In other words, 6G will largely be "nice to have" for consumers and app providers. The promise of 6G progress will be "must have" if the networks are to be built.

There will be requirements for additional spectrum, as always has been the case when a mobile next-generation network has launched. The issue is how much new spectrum might be required. 

And even if the general rule is that users consume more data, and therefore use more bandwidth, over time, there are some questions about the degree to which mobile operators will need to spend heavily on new spectrum, though governments who make money selling spectrum will prefer higher amounts and costlier prices. 

Mobile service providers obviously will want to limit their investment in new spectrum resources. Keep in mind that they have other avenues for doing so. They can create smaller cells; they can use more-efficient radios and network elements; better air interfaces and reclaim spectrum supporting older networks that are decommissioned (2G and 3G being the best examples at the moment). 

But offloading demand to fixed networks has become a huge tool as well. 

Wi-Fi handles 70 percent to 80 percent of total smartphone data consumption, with the exact figure varying by region. Wi-Fi data consumption in the United States is about  85 percent to 90 percent, for example, while lower in emerging markets (around 50 percent to 70 percent), according to estimates fromCisco, Ericsson, and OpenSignal, for example. 

Year	Wi-Fi Data Consumption (EB/month)	Mobile Network Data Consumption (EB/month)	Percentage on Wi-Fi
2024	383	164	70%
2025	460	197	70%

Beyond the Wi-Fi role, technologists and operators have gotten better at using older platforms to ease the transition to a next generation of networks, even if that means not all the touted features are available. Network slicing on 5G networks requires “standalone” platforms that in many cases are lightly deployed at the moment, for example. 

On the other hand, the faster speeds and higher bandwidth, plus lower latency of every next-generation network already is producing commercial revenue in significant amounts, such as using 5G platforms to support fixed wireless for home broadband. 

That might not be among the futuristic capabilities 5G was supposed to provide, but it has created new revenue and product possibilities. 

So perhaps some skepticism about the market “need” for 6G, and the resources needed to support it, are reasonable. Already, 6G is touted as supporting a new array of sensory information such as touch, taste and smell. 

Some of us would be that if such innovations actually arrive, it will be about the time 7G arrives, as that has been the pattern for past next-generation network innovations as well: the promised futuristic apps need twice as long to reach commercial success as predicted. 

So promised 3G innovations don’t arrive until 4G; 4G innovations don’t arrive until 5G. That isn’t to deny the practical advantages for each next-generation network: more capacity and lower latency. 

But those improvements are akin to the need fixed network operators have to upgrade copper access to optical fiber; satellite providers to upgrade from geostationary platforms to low-earth-orbit constellations, all of which support higher capacity networks. 

Mobile networks will need to continue to evolve to support higher speeds. The “revolutionary new applications and use cases”  might ultimately be less important. 

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.

Do We "Need" 6G? Yes and No

By about 2030, standards bodies and suppliers will have gotten quite a ways down the road of preparing the next generation of mobile networks to succeed 5G. There will be claims about how “revolutionary” it might be, as we heard about 3G, 4G and 5G before. 

There will be requirements for additional spectrum, as always has been the case when a mobile next-generation network has launched. The issue is how much new spectrum might be required. 

And even if the general rule is that users consume more data, and therefore use more bandwidth, over time, there are some questions about the degree to which mobile operators will need to spend heavily on new spectrum, though governments who make money selling spectrum will prefer higher amounts and costlier prices. 

Mobile service providers obviously will want to limit their investment in new spectrum resources. Keep in mind that they have other avenues for doing so. They can create smaller cells; they can use more-efficient radios and network elements; better air interfaces and reclaim spectrum supporting older networks that are decommissioned (2G and 3G being the best examples at the moment). 

But offloading demand to fixed networks has become a huge tool as well. 

Wi-Fi handles 70 percent to 80 percent of total smartphone data consumption, with the exact figure varying by region. Wi-Fi data consumption in the United States is about  85 percent to 90 percent, for example, while lower in emerging markets (around 50 percent to 70 percent), according to estimates fromCisco, Ericsson, and OpenSignal, for example. 

Year	Wi-Fi Data Consumption (EB/month)	Mobile Network Data Consumption (EB/month)	Percentage on Wi-Fi
2024	383	164	70%
2025	460	197	70%

Beyond the Wi-Fi role, technologists and operators have gotten better at using older platforms to ease the transition to a next generation of networks, even if that means not all the touted features are available. Network slicing on 5G networks requires “standalone” platforms that in many cases are lightly deployed at the moment, for example. 

On the other hand, the faster speeds and higher bandwidth, plus lower latency of every next-generation network already is producing commercial revenue in significant amounts, such as using 5G platforms to support fixed wireless for home broadband. 

That might not be among the futuristic capabilities 5G was supposed to provide, but it has created new revenue and product possibilities. 

So perhaps some skepticism about the market “need” for 6G, and the resources needed to support it, are reasonable. Already, 6G is touted as supporting a new array of sensory information such as touch, taste and smell. 

Some of us would be that if such innovations actually arrive, it will be about the time 7G arrives, as that has been the pattern for past next-generation network innovations as well: the promised futuristic apps need twice as long to reach commercial success as predicted. 

So promised 3G innovations don’t arrive until 4G; 4G innovations don’t arrive until 5G. That isn’t to deny the practical advantages for each next-generation network: more capacity and lower latency. 

But those improvements are akin to the need fixed network operators have to upgrade copper access to optical fiber; satellite providers to upgrade from geostationary platforms to low-earth-orbit constellations, all of which support higher capacity networks. 

Mobile networks will need to continue to evolve to support higher speeds. The “revolutionary new applications and use cases”  might ultimately be less important.