6G is, for the moment, still a promise. If the Mobile World Congress 2023 fueled high hopes for the sixth generation of wireless communications, the Barcelona event that opened on Monday is tempering that optimism a bit.
More than a decade ago, the industry began speaking of 5G as a revolution for mobile telephony. The annual tech fair organized by GSMA has championed this leap in connectivity, placing it at the center of debate. Yet, even as more operators have normalized commercial use, the industry still encounters challenges in deploying this technology. By the end of last year, global connections reached 1.9 billion, far from the 5.9 billion projected for 2027, a gap that raises questions about the pace of rollout and uptake.
Vaunted as the coming wave, the 5G hype was sometimes disproportionate. Executives have admitted that expectations outpaced practical results, and many of the applications anticipated for 5G have not taken hold as quickly as hoped. Acknowledgments from key players emphasize the mismatch between optimistic forecasts and real-world demand, underscoring a need for clearer math when forecasting adoption and impact.
The promise of 6G is clear: a tenfold increase in data transmission speed, dramatically reduced latency that enables near real-time responses, and greater efficiency across the network. This vision aims to unlock a world with deeper interconnectivity and a stronger presence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and the Internet of Things a term coined in the late 1990s that continues to evolve with each generation of wireless technology.
Industry collaboration on the horizon
Several telecommunications operators present at the MWC 2024 have taken a candid look at how 5G was managed and have called for closer cooperation to accelerate the rollout of 6G. Ericsson from Sweden and Nokia from Finland are among those leading the charge. Both companies participate in AI-RAN, a collaboration announced on the first day of the congress with the objective of strengthening the use of more powerful wireless networks. Major players like Samsung from South Korea, Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile from Germany, as well as Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Arm and SoftBank, are also involved in this combined effort to push the frontier of wireless infrastructure.
The deployment of 6G infrastructure also poses technical challenges that divide experts. One widely shared view is that more spectrum is essential to let the network flourish, as stated by Eiman Mohyeldin, head of global Spectrum Standardization at Nokia, during the conference. Electromagnetic waves, or radio waves, are the backbone of wireless communications. Yet within the industry there are voices arguing that increasing the available frequencies is not the only path forward; some believe that using current frequencies more efficiently and optimizing resource management could yield substantial gains without expanding the spectrum further.