Don’t expect a revolution with 6G, says ETSI boss

Jan Ellsberger, ETSI’s new director-general, doubts 6G will mark a radical break with 5G but downplays talk the global standard is in danger of splitting.

First-borns are supposedly insecure screw-ups, victims of the parental blundering that Philip Larkin wrote about in one of his most famous poems. With the subsequent offspring, the mistakes are said to be fewer and the product more stable. This is almost how parts of the telecom industry have come to think about the various generations of mobile technology birthed by the world’s standards bodies. Odd generations are the experimental screw-ups. Even generations work.

It seems to hold true. The barely remembered 1G was essentially a practice run for the voice-based 2G, perhaps the most successful of all the Gs so far. Then came the multi-billion-dollar wastrel of 3G, the first attempt to transfer the Internet experience to mobile gadgets. Telcos nearly bankrupted themselves on spectrum licenses, gadgets were unusable and networks disappointed until 4G provided a fix. 5G is the lost generation, wandering and purposeless.

If the pattern were to last, it would augur promisingly for 6G. Just as 2G took mobile voice into the mass market, and 4G cleaned up after 3G’s data communications mess, so 6G could learn from 5G’s mistakes and succeed where that has failed. Right? The trouble is that no one can really say (at least, not succinctly) what 5G was designed to achieve, other than being a supercharged version of 4G. This differentiates it from 1G, the original mobile voice standard, and 3G, the first real mobile data effort.

Evidence of a 5G identity crisis can be found in the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s ruminations on a proposed merger between Vodafone and Three. According to third-party feedback on aspects of the deal, 5G “standalone,” the version with the boost of a new core network, “remains a nascent technology that has yet to develop widespread use cases,” it said in a detailed paper. Consumers might not be able to tell the difference between that and 4G, wrote the CMA.

Build it and they will come

Yet starting with a use case for 6G and working backwards through the technology specifics would be wrong, says Jan Ellsberger, appointed director-general of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) earlier this year. Now just several months into the top job at ETSI, which feeds regional 6G submissions into the 3GPP umbrella group, Ellsberger reckons history is a useful guide in this area.

“With 3G, we actually had the experience of how wrong it is to try to pinpoint a silver-bullet application that drives the technology development,” he told Light Reading. “3G was, in the early days, designed to provide video telephony. That was the first 3G release. But video telephony was a failure in the market, and it was Internet connectivity instead that was the key application. The industry learned that we should not try to identify use cases that drive the technology development. It is rather the other way around.”