Analyst firms may be issuing premature reports on 6G, and talking heads pontificating on the metaverse-defining properties of 6G are everywhere, but so what? Who will even know what the metaverse is by the time the next cellular generation rolls around?
As fun as it is to obsess over the next big thing, that successive specification is still a long, long way away. So, dear cellular operator, it is best to dismiss 6G from your mind, and focus on the standard at hand, 5G.
There, doesn’t that feel better?
Despite all the hype building up around an as-yet undefined technology of 6G, which is at least seven years away from a widespread commercial rollout, the next quinquennial period for telco technologists should be bursting with 5G.
We’re only just starting on deploying true 5G — standalone (SA) 5G that is, which doesn’t use 4G LTE as its control plane to manage connectivity, radio resources and more. This will actually start to deliver on long-promised high-speed, low-latency communications to compatible SA devices.
Combined with that is the ongoing cloudification of the 5G radio access network (RAN). Analysys Mason recently predicted that capital expenditure (capex) on virtualized RAN (V-RAN) — a.k.a cloud RAN — would increase to $37.7 billion by 2028.
The analyst firm also said that some macro V-RAN deployments should be able to start to support open RANs (O-RANs) by 2025. While, this is likely not as fast as some O-RAN vendors would like, some major mobile operators now are starting to trial, test and even install small macro O-RAN networks.
This move to a virtualized radio world will increase over the next five years. Particularly if Intel and other chip designers have any say in the matter. Intel is the king of x86 processors used in most vRAN deployments today. There is, however, a tussle developing between Intel and some other chip designers (Marvell, the AWS chip unit, etc.) that prefer the ARM architecture, and cite its energy-efficiency and cost savings versus a solely x86-based system.
Whichever silicon server design mobile operators eventually choose to use. It’s clear that many operators want to break out of the grip of the telco hardware mafia and open themselves up to a wider choice of suppliers.
Don’t forget 5G-Advanced
There’s another element to remember before we go completely OCD over 6G. Before that new standard even appears on the horizon, there’s a major stage of 5G that needs to be rolled out ahead of it.
Release 18 of the 5G standard is called 5G-Advanced by the 3GPP. The body has said that the final freeze date for the specification is expected by March 2024. So we could start to anticipate commercial software and hardware that uses the new standard out on the market by the very end of 2025 at the earliest, or — more likely — in the spring or early summer of 2026.
5G-Advanced will “inject more intelligence into the network, utilizing machine learning (ML) to adapt to its environment,” Nokia wrote in a white paper on the forthcoming standard. At this early stage, bringing more AI-driven self-optimization network features to the 5G landscape will be important to operators.
For enterprises looking to deploy more automation and robotics features in factories, even more precise millisecond timing will be a key aspect of 5G-Advanced. Nokia wrote that 5G-Advanced will guard against the degradation or loss of satellite GPS signals by providing timing and location signals directly from the cellular network.
The forthcoming spec will also update the 5G IoT Reduced Capability (RedCap) — a.k.a 5G NR-Light — standard that was introduced with Release 17. The updated 5G-Advanced blueprint will further reduce the bandwidth required for the 5G IoT devices.
Naturally, vendors will get over-heated about the extended reality (XR) updates in 5G-Advanced. You’ll never find a virtual anime graphic that cellular peddlers didn’t love! It’s probable, however, that WiFi will eat 5G’s lunch when using XR indoors.
While 5G-Advanced is still two or three years away from its moment in the spotlight. It’s a lot closer to commercial launch than 6G, which, let’s not forget, won't start to arrive in commercial cellular networks until 2030.
That’s seven years away! So, stick to your darn knitting.