The European Vision for the 6G Network Ecosystem

The 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association (6G-IA) (working under the EU’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU)) has recently published its latest vision for 6G[1].

As I set out in my book “The 6G Manifesto”, there are two 6G camps, simplistically one that argues for 5G-on-steriods and the other that argues for minimal-software-only upgrades. The 6G-IA is very much in the 5G-on-steriods camp. Perhaps this should be no surprise, its membership is predominantly manufacturers and academics, with just a few MNOs. Indeed, it is at the extreme end of the camp, arguing, for example:

“Regarding peak data rates, most stakeholders seem to agree that a value of up to 1 Tbps should be targeted, while only one stakeholder adopted a more modest target of 200 Gbps. The ITU has adopted the smaller value for the IMT-2030 recommendations. Regarding average user data rates there were ambitious stakeholders targeting up to 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps, and more modest ones targeting 1 Gbps. The ITU recommendations have opted for an even lower value of up to 500 Mbps.”

It states that the use cases include collaborative robots, immersive cyberspace, digital twins and physical awareness. It believes 5G has been a success, saying “we are convinced that the new opportunities enabled by 5G are heading to the right direction and simply need further development”.

Beyond the obvious unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of the industry, the slow-down of data growth and the financial concerns of many in the eco-system, there are many issues. For example:

·         The table of the performance requirements for each of the key applications shows a maximum data rate of 250Mbits/s whereas the target is 1Tbits/s - 4,000 times greater. Similarly, almost all applications have latency requirements above 10ms whereas the target is 0.1-1ms.

·         While there is much lip-service to sustainability and energy-efficiency, the document broadly admits that it has no idea how to deliver or measure this and that it is unlikely to happen anyway because it will impose costs on users.

·         While it talks a little about multi-network integration it says nothing about Wi-Fi, concentrating instead on cellular, NTN-enabled satellites and cellular-based IoT solutions.

·         It says that each operator will need at least 500MHz more spectrum (so around 2GHz in total) and suggests the 7GHz and 14GHz bands as a source of this (the entirety of both bands would be needed to deliver 2GHz of bandwidth). It says nothing about the coverage issues associated with using such bands.

·         It lists as key technologies THz frequencies and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) both of which will be very expensive to deploy.

·         It sets out many challenges but is very weak on how these might be resolved.

And, above all, it is not a vision for the network ecosystem, as the title suggests. It is instead a view on what 6G might be but says nothing about how the ecosystem can benefit from it, in particular not considering the business case for any operator or private network deployer.

It is a clear sign that the two camps still exist, and do not appear to be moving closer to each other at all, if anything they are diverging. The MNOs have a lot of work to do if they want to avoid being saddled with a 6G solution that they neither want nor can afford but nevertheless are pressured into deploying: clearly their current efforts are insufficient.

[1] https://zenodo.org/records/13708425