- Like some generations before, 6G’s biggest challenge may be marketing, not engineering
- Don’t assume AI is the biggest selling point when consumers are already worried about what AI is doing to society at large
- The real test: Can 6G avoid becoming another overhyped acronym?
Mention 6G to your neighbor or the clerk at the grocery store and you’ll probably get a blank stare. Or, better yet, they’ll give you something akin to how a waitress reacted last week when I tried to explain why it was necessary to take my coffee back to my hotel room in order to write about 6G: a mix between “Aww, how sad,” and “Really?”
Well, that was my interpretation based on a 20-second interaction at 6 in the morning. The point is, most people we meet on the street are not thinking about 6G. What they are thinking about is AI, which is great for 6G, since AI comes embedded at the get-go.
Cheers for 6G being AI native!
(Also, be careful what you wish for, as not everyone is enthralled with AI.)
What else is 6G going to bring?
Qualcomm hosted a bunch of analysts and journalists, myself included, for a really long, day-long 6G Leadership Summit at the company’s San Diego headquarters last week.
Qualcomm knows a lot about shaping each and every “G” in the cellular ecosystem, starting with 2G. Some of us were there to witness Qualcomm as it was smack dab in the trenches of the Wireless Holy Wars, which pitted the GSM camp against Qualcomm’s home-grown CDMA.
GSM ultimately won out in the standards realm, although I’m not sure you could ever really say Qualcomm “lost.” CDMA did pretty well for itself even if it didn’t become the worldwide standard.
In 6G, Qualcomm clearly knows where the industry is headed, which makes sense, given it’s been developing standards for as long as I can remember and its need for diversification has never been greater. There’s a clear engineering path to 6G commercialization by the end of 2029, with 2030-2040 mapped out as the decade for 6G.
A few things defining 6G are the aforementioned AI, more energy efficiency and sensing – the latter in the form of the all-so-easy-to-remember ISAC acronym, short for Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), which turns cellular networks into radar-like systems.
Qualcomm knows 6G
Listening to the educational sessions that Qualcomm presented last week, it became clear – in case there was any doubt – that engineering-wise, they know a lot about what 6G will deliver.
They also know what it’s not: 6G will not repeat the mistakes of 5G, including the 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) vs. 5G Standalone (SA) debacle.
At the same time, Qualcomm acknowledged what operators have been saying for a long time: 6G should build on the features and capabilities of 5G and be an evolutionary transition rather than a complete hardware refresh. In other words, don’t require heavy capital investments for very little ROI.
Qualcomm appears to be heeding that advice; these two bullets were tucked into one of the gazillions of slides:
- Retain proven 5G/5G-Advanced technologies
- Extend only where measurable gains in spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, or user experience are demonstrated
Are engineers good at marketing? Ask again later.
Qualcomm deserves credit for leading the way to 6G and there’s little doubt that it will be handsomely rewarded for its 6G leadership by way of licensing fees, as it will file and win many patents related to 6G, alongside its peers and rivals.
But engineers should not be put in charge of coming up with ways to sell 6G to consumers or even the enterprise.
Case in point: Network slicing.
That’s not something you put on billboards to sell to the masses. Nor is it an easy sell to enterprises that are unfamiliar with the technical nuances.
We don't need to scrap the whole standards process. Far from it. The industry needs standards for all kinds of reasons: roaming, interoperability, economies of scale and just plain keeping people sane.
Nor should operators bend 3GPP definitions for whatever fits their network strategy.
Some of us (cough, cough) have been around long enough to remember when AT&T deliberately branded its service as “AT&T Digital PCS” in 1996 when, in fact, it wasn’t doing anything with PCS spectrum. It was using TDMA on 800 MHz rather than the “true” PCS spectrum that was 1900 MHz, which is what Sprint PCS was using. (Of course, this was the first of many marketing hijinks that occurred over the years.)
The big question is: Can the wireless industry separate the standards from a consumer-facing approach and quit its reliance on the next “G” to shape its messaging? It seems like a no-brainer, especially when we’ve got AI.
How can wireless carriers break their reliance on the next "G" from 3GPP and find their own unique marketing messages?
Every AI program will give a different answer.
Whether it’s the right one, that’s up to human industry experts to determine. But one thing is for sure: The industry doesn’t need to abandon the next “G.” It just needs smart marketing minds to identify what really matters to consumers (and enterprises) and deliver what they want at affordable prices.
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