Signals Flash! Our Way Too Early To Discuss 6G, But We'll Do It Anyway, 6G Flash

Random Thoughts Following the Brooklyn 6G Summit

11/08/2023 | 19 pages

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In this Signals Flash, we provide our commentary and key takeaways from the Brooklyn 6G Summit, which we attended last week. The event, which is sponsored primarily by Nokia and hosted by NYU Wireless, brings together leading operators and technologists from across the globe to discuss all things 5G, 5G-Advanced and 6G.

Key Highlights

That Was Then, This Is Now.  We revisit what was said at the first 3GPP 5G Workshop back in September 2015, compare that original vision with what has transpired over the last several years, and then use that insight to think about what might happen with 6G.

Too Flexible With An Early Drop Miscalculation.  Some of the 5G shortcomings can be traced back to the breadth of solutions and use cases the standard tried to address, not to mention the early drop of Release 15 (5G NSA), which one could argue was a short-term benefit with long-term negative consequences.

One If By Industry.  Two If By Geopolitics. The industry solidified on a single wireless standard with 4G and continued that trend with 5G. There is, however, interest [entirely outside of the industry] to have more than one 6G standard, largely because of geopolitics. We argue it is unnecessary, not to mention impossible, especially if bifurcating intellectual property into two distinct and entirely separate groupings is a desired objective.

Timing is Everything.  We offer a few suggestions for how 6G can succeed where 5G currently struggles. It isn’t so much the technology itself, but the marketing of the technology and the realization that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Out With The New.  In With The Old. 6G will inevitably build on 5G, but the question remains how much gets reused versus completely replaced, both in the air interface as well as with respect to the core network.

AI/ML.  Interesting concept to apply AI/ML to the air interface, but it will be interesting to see how it gets standardized.

Odds And Ends.  We include some additional tidbits from presenters that we felt were interesting, but which didn’t fall into one of our other buckets.