Can’t get there from here: 6G requires 5G SA

Despite the palpable disdain that has recently grown around 5G in the tech press and the futuristic love for 6G — which Fierce reminds y’all is still six years away — the successor cellular standard will rely on a major piece of standalone 5G (5G SA) technology to operate.

Operators, you’ll remember, have been crying about the costs to implement 5G SA for a couple of years. Carrier executives have already told Fierce that they don’t want the same kind of capital expenditure burden for 6G, so the new standard will use the 5G core to route traffic around the network and handle user authentication and more.

“It will be the same core network for 5G and 6G, and 6G will only come with the [5G standalone] option, there will be no [other] option for 6G,” Ericsson’s Peter Linder, head of thought leadership in North America for the company, told Fierce at a company event in Boston last week. “The sooner you get to SA in the core, the sooner you get to 6G,” he said.

The 5G core underpins the 6G

But there is a hitch. Not many operators outside of China have moved to nationwide 5G SA yet. In fact, China is the only nation that has switched fully to 5G SA so far.

Joe Madden, principal analyst at Mobile Experts, noted at the same Ericsson event that only T-Mobile offered 5G SA “nationwide” in the U.S., while AT&T and Verizon are still only deploying 5G SA across limited areas. Instead many operators are relying on 5G radio access network (RAN) network with a 4G non-standalone (NSA) core to handle creating data sessions and managing users. So, they can’t get to 6G or even the next 5G standard from where they are today.

This reliance on 4G-based core NSA 5G is even more true in Europe and parts of Asia (except for China, as I noted previously).

5G slicing

Key 5G services, including network slicing, which enables an operator to dedicate a certain area of bandwidth to a particular task, are also not possible without a 5G core.

Notably, T-Mobile has started deploying network slicing at some sporting events. Verizon has also been holding network slicing tests for first responders in Arizona.

Despite all of the talk around 6G, there is much work to be done with 5G SA on the ground before 6G can actually come into existence.