Despite press releases, governments won't be the ones doing the hard work of creating 6G
Analyst John Strand notes that Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei, as well as the 3GPP and ITU, will do the standardization and R&D for 6G
In the meantime, many countries will try to make 6G waves
You could call them wannabes. Responding to the news that the U.S. and Sweden are collaborating on 6G, Strand Consulting CEO John Strand told Fierce "the number of countries that have a dream that they will become leaders on 6G is very long." But he noted it is actually companies that will do the heavy "real world" lifting when it comes to the next generation of wireless.
The list of 6G hopefuls includes “countries such as Germany, U.K., U.S.A., India, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Romania and most recently Sweden,” Strand said. He added "After Xi's visit to Moscow, China and Russia proclaimed that they will be leaders on 6G" and beyond that the European Union has great ambitions around 6G.
In the real world, however, countries won’t have much impact at all on the next generation cellular standard.
“It's free for politicians who want to appear as people who make their nations leaders in the digital world to put their names on such press releases,” Strand said. “Personally, I think many of these people expose their lack of insight into what's happening in the real world."
The actual work of 6G
The actual work to create new cellular standard – and the next G – is done in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as well as at companies like Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei, Strand noted.
The agencies handle the standardization work and also handle the backward compatibility element of the new standards. Meanwhile, companies “spend billions on research, but also spend a lot of money on buying companies that develop new technology,” Strand said.
“These companies not only develop the new standards, but they are also the ones who take out patents, patents that are linked to the patents they already have – here is the magic word ‘essential patents,'" he said. That means companies have a vested interest in ensuring "that the next standards will be based on the technologies they have developed and patented,” Strand noted.
The long and the short of it? All the noise about 6G is "identical" to what happened with 3G, 4G and 5G. But in the end, it's companies, not governments, at the wheel.