Speaking live from the 3GPP plenary meeting in Prague, Juan Montojo, Vice President of Technical Standards at Qualcomm Technologies, shares where mobile networks are headed as 6G development begins. Improving coverage, energy and spectral efficiency, and user experience are at the center of these early-stage efforts - all while reducing the cost to deliver data.
A defining feature of 6G will be the integration of AI. Unlike 5G, where AI was layered on after launch, 6G will build AI directly into the system. Montojo reflects on the 4G to 5G migration, highlighting lessons that will help 6G rollouts be more seamless, particularly the push for standalone deployment.
From Giga-MIMO and integrated sensing to next-gen satellite connectivity and improved localization, new technologies are already in early development stages. 3GPP standards will continue through the decade, with 6G specifications expected by 2029 and commercial deployments in the early 2030s. With foundational work happening now, Montojo emphasizes that this next generation will offer meaningful improvements for both users and operators.
James Careless:
You're listening to a sponsored episode of The Five Nine. Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of The Five Nine. I'm your host, James Careless. In this special edition of The Five Nine, I'm speaking with Juan Montojo, Qualcomm Technologies Vice President of Technical Standards. There's a lot going on in mobile communications, both with 5G today and 6G in the future. You heard that right? 6G is coming.
Juan Montojo is up-to-date on all these advances, and he's here to bring us up to speed. Juan, thanks for joining us here today.
Juan Montojo:
Thank you very much, James. Pleasure to be here.
James Careless:
Okay, to start with, tell us the difference between 5G, which I thought was pretty cutting edge and 6G.
Juan Montojo:
All right, it is actually a difficult question, because it is too early to tell what 6G is. It has to be yet defined. But indeed, right now, in 3GPP in the standards body that will develop 6G, we started working on requirements for 6G, and defining the scope of it.
The requirements will include those that come from the outside of the 3GPP itself, which is this ITU IMT-2030, as well as requirements that come from operators and verticals that are represented in 3GPP. While 6G has to be yet defined, we are seeing some things that are getting more and more emphasis, including, for example, improving user experience, lowering operators cost of ownership, therefore, things like, for example, improving coverage, improving device, as well as network energy efficiencies, also improving spectral efficiency, overall spectral efficiency, the cost to deliver bits per second, are all very important over 6G. And I'm pretty confident that 3GPP will deliver that worthwhile system.
James Careless:
You recently attended the Third Generation Partnership Project Plenary Meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. What were the highlights?
Juan Montojo:
So actually, I'm still there. I mean still in Prague. And this is why maybe there is a little bit of background noise, I'm in a public place at this point in time.
This plenary was important for two things. Actually define the scope for the 5G Advanced Release 20, which is the six release of 5G. 5G started with release 15, and now we are defining the scope of Release 20, as I just said. And also, it's the third release of 5G Advance, because we started counting 5G Advanced from release 18.
We work on the requirements and scenarios for 6G. These are the type of things that the operators, verticals, vendors want to see around 6G. And we started populating, indeed, the technical report for this. And finally, the last thing we did is, as I said, not just the requirements and scenarios, but we defined the technical scope for the work on 6G, which is due to start right after the summer, at the end of August this year. So it's been a pretty busy plenary, and we're very happy with the outcome of it.
James Careless:
So what's the role of 5G going forward? And can you talk about the migration process that's going to have to take place from 5G to 6G?
Juan Montojo:
Yes. Probably Release 20 is fair to say, still will be very relevant for 5G, 5G Advanced in particular, they are important projects. Some of them are bridging well with 6G, such as a number of projects on AI/ML, a couple of very interesting projects on satellite, including, for example, doing satellite voice in a better way, and also trying to remove the dependency on GNSS GPS positioning for establishing a satellite connectivity.
And then others, like integrated sensing and communications, those actually will be still developed in 5G. And then, on the migration, I think there are a lot of lessons learned from the 4G to 5G migration. As you may know, there were many options that were developed, actually standardized, studied then standardized, and then commercially developed. There was one option for non-standalone, another option for standalone. And actually, that has slowed down, a little bit, the deployments of 5G to the larger maximum extent, which is this standalone.
Having said this, 5G was already defined with forward compatibility in mind, much more than when 4G was defined 20 years ago. And in that sense, this migration toward 6G is going to be much more seamless than it was before.
James Careless:
Are there other things we can learn from the past transition that would also help us make the 5G-6G transition work more smoothly for people?
Juan Montojo:
The number one learning experience has been to develop standalone, and actually, to aim at the standalone deployments from day one. In 5G days, pretty much every operator started with a non-standalone, which effectively, things were anchored to a 4G carrier. And actually, just because they were anchored to a 4G carrier, there were a lot of things that were inherited from 4G. And actually, we were not able to fully exploit the benefits of 5G, just because 5G was an add-on, was a big, effectively, additional spectrum that was added on top of the underlying 4G.
What we are expecting is with a standalone from day one on 6G, we will have these benefits on 6G from the very start.
James Careless:
Now everybody's talking about AI these days. It seems to be absolutely everywhere. Brings up the logical question, what role do you expect AI will play in 6G?
Juan Montojo:
It is actually an interesting thing. AI for 5G, and there is a lot of it, there are, at least I can count, 4, 1, 2, 3 projects just in the radio groups for Release 20 5G Advanced on AI. There's AI for interface, there are AI for next generation radio, for network automation, and there is AI/ML mobility improvements.
One thing that is going to be different in 6G is, number one, AI will be there from day one. So it's as I said, it's been an add-on for 5G. Now we have it, we know what it does. And then we will have to see how we can benefit from it.
There are certain things that actually still have not been fully exploited. For example, what are the benefits that we can achieve on the protocol stacks? And those are things that we are expecting to start seeing on 6G proposals. And then, basically, it offers implementations that actually deliver a pretty good solution, a pretty good output for those things that we cannot analytically, effectively study. So things that can be analytically studied, I think we've proven that actually the traditional methods work very well. But those that are maybe data-driven, contextual-driven, probably are the ones that benefit the most on these AI/ML techniques.
James Careless:
Speaking again of AI, what do you think its impact will be on overall end-to-end wireless system design? And what will need to be standardized?
Juan Montojo:
On the end-to-end, certainly what we want is to build better systems. So one of the things is, I mentioned network automation, so things that will improve. And instead of having a set of parameters common in your network, and actually fairly static, and actually rigid, we are basically moving to something more localized, and that is optimal for the given conditions, whether it's because of the geography around cells, or network load, and other things.
People also did understand that we can do quite a bit of AI/ML by implementation. So what the standard will do is some sort of management, those models that AI/ML operation, it will govern the data. Actually, there are a lot of emphasis on how to basically collect data, how to, for example, enable inter-vendor collaborations, and how to, basically, define these standards-based mechanisms to control the models themselves to deliver data, whether it's to the devices or from the devices to the network.
And basically, on a myriad of, actually, use cases. Those good use cases are going to be, I think, studied in this first phase of 6G, where is the time when we are studying promising areas. And from there, we will see in the upcoming Release 21 release, the development of the normative phase of the standards for it.
James Careless:
On the radio access side of things, what exciting new technologies will come with 6G? What will be the things that will really wow us?
Juan Montojo:
I believe what we are going to do is we're going to see, as technology has evolved, there will be more sophisticated MIMO techniques, particularly important for mid-bands. And the MIMO techniques is multi-antenna, right? So the more antennas you put, the better forming games you can achieve.
As you move up in spectrum, and unfortunately, the only available spectrum for 6G is going to be higher than it was for 5G, is going to be then relying very heavily on these been forming benefits of this, what we call a Giga-MIMO, which is the next generation of massive MIMO, which actually was really introduced in 5G. Other things that I think we're going to see is much better coverage and much faster access to broadband.
Right now, you would actually enable going from deep sleep states at the device, to gigabit per second transmissions, much faster than you can do today. Network energy savings, also, has been very important. It was an add-on in 5G Advanced, on the 5G platform. And I think now, particularly because operator's request is a key technique that people want to see.
And then, again, AI/ML, I think we're going to see promising use cases as we start the studies on 6G. We're going to see how we can help. And then, the most of these studies are basically having scope for revisiting every single aspect of the system, from the fundamental physical layer, to the protocol and architecture. So I believe there is an opportunity to do, really, things better, less options, leaner, and then actually emphasizing two things, user experience, which is a key, so that actually people will be feeling the difference from the previous generations, as well as operator value, right, that value for the operators, which are, at the end of the day, the ones who pay the bills and deploy the networks.
James Careless:
Final question, and the one that I know that our listeners want to know about, when will 6G become a reality in our lives?
Juan Montojo:
Just think about, these things take time. Actually, 3GPP, the development started this year just launching the studies. So the studies are going to last roughly two years, because some groups start a bit earlier than others. And then you have a couple more years of normative phase, which is actually the outcome of the study will be converted into actually specifications that will actually yield the 6G standard. The 6G standard, right now, or specifications are expected to come sometime in 2029. And then you can expect, yeah, surely after that, maybe in the early 2030s, you will have already, 6G deployments, and the devices, and whatnot.
So 2030 would be for the final users, but we have upcoming now four or five years of a lot of work developing what 6G will be.
James Careless:
Amazing. Thanks Juan for telling us about 5G and 6G, and what is coming next in wireless broadband.
Juan Montojo:
My pleasure. Thank you very much, everybody. See you soon.
James Careless:
See you soon. I'm James Careless. Thanks for listening to this special edition of The Five Nine. We'll talk to you again next time.
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