Speed will be critical to 6G, but not the kind measured in download and upload rates. Instead, a White House official argued, the velocity has to come in the standards-setting sphere.
“We need to be positioned, before 6G comes out, to be in a leadership position,” said Caitlin Clarke, a special assistant to President Biden and senior director for cyber and emerging technology on the National Security Council, in a panel on White House 6G policies and initiatives at 6GWorld’s conference here. “We need to think about where we need to be now, before the technology is in place.”
Clarke did not specify the country that the U.S. and its allies needed to get ahead of, but she didn’t need to before an audience of industry and policy types already mindful of China’s efforts to advance 6G.
“There is too much subsidy,” she said. “There is not an even playing field.”
Opening doors to a more secure future
But while Washington can’t match Beijing’s telecom-subsidy budget, it can use its leverage in standards bodies to make 6G not just more secure but also more open than 5G, and therefore more open to innovation in the U.S. and allied countries.
“Define what security means in 6G, so we are not chasing it after the fact,” she advised in what sounded like a reference to the rip-and-replace struggles of U.S. operators with Huawei network gear deemed untrustworthy by the FCC. “6G needs to be open from the get-go, so we can have more players in the technology.”
Another speaker on the panel, Thomas Rondeau, principal director of the Defense Department’s FutureG Office, picked up on that security theme by noting how often DoD deployments overseas require using existing wireless infrastructure.
Open RAN, which could ease deploying new networks from scratch, would be “a great start,” he said. But the DOD’s ambitions go beyond that to “open-source the entire thing” with its Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) initiative for 5G networks.
“We’re going to out-innovate our adversaries, because that’s what we do best in this country,” Rondeau said.
The third speaker on the panel, Cohere Technologies Chairman and CEO Ray Dolan, further amplified that message of openness and innovation.
“It’s that collective R&D intensity that can work well,” he said, adding that opening networks should be a 5G priority too. “Don’t wait for 6G to be open.”
He also suggested that virtualizing 5G networks will ease the path to 6G by reducing the need for costly network-gear investments, something carriers have already fretted about.
“6G cannot be another massive hardware upgrade,” Dolan said. “Allow the continued virtualization of the network to drive through 6G and beyond.”
Carriers’ concerns
But the ensuing conversation among those three panelists, moderated by Open RAN Policy Coalition Executive Director Diane Rinaldo, offered reminders that the short-term motivations of operators may not appear to align with these longer-term priorities.
Rondeau warned against sales pitches for open networks that boil down to little more than “China bad,” while Clarke said arguments for Open RAN need to account for operator anxiety over costs.
She suggested security as a counter to that concern – “here’s a technological solution that can help you be more secure” – adding that government funding for Open RAN upgrades could further loosen that sticking point.
Dolan predicted that even before 6G, Open RAN can wring greater efficiency out of existing spectrum by including more processing power in each radio.
“Let’s make the existing spectrum even more effective,” he said. “That’s what open does.”
As Clarke did not need to invoke China by name at the start of the panel, Dolan didn’t need to remind attendees that Congress’s ongoing failure to renew the FCC’s spectrum-auction authority consigns discussions of future spectrum bands into the realm of wish-casting.
Rondeau, meanwhile, put in a plug for network self-determination as a core feature of Open RAN that countries tempted by cheaper, closed platforms should weigh heavily.
“It’s about your sovereignty over your own future,” he said. “You need to have control of that network.”
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