Generation gap: Will 6G find enough use cases to go where 5G hasn't?

The last few days, 3,000 delegates from 190 countries have been immersed in discussions at New Delhi’s swanky Bharat Mandapam convention centre to hammer out a global consensus on the standards that will determine the next big mobile technology: 6G (short for sixth generation), future spectrum bands, and use cases that will power the new technology.

But for users across the world, the question is why and what will the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly (WTSA), whose 10-day session ends on Thursday, offer through the new technology that would be different from 5G.

The promise is big: 6G will be 100 times faster than 5G, provide a 10th of its latency, will be more spectrum-efficient, enable haptic communication, integrate artificial intelligence in the network, and make satellite and terrestrial communication seamless. Latency is the time a data packet takes to travel from origin to destination. 

The enthusiasm for 5G was about massive capacity, low latency, and massive broadband. Now, 6G adds in three new dimensions: It will be a network driven by artificial intelligence (AI), it will have network sensing capability, and it will offer ubiquitous coverage.

Industry 4.0 to 5.0

Telecom companies, or telcos, admit that many of the use cases promised by 5G have not taken off as expected. Take, for instance, Industry 4.0. It was expected to usher in automation, machine to machine connectivity, and smart manufacturing through integration of sensors and devices. But most companies, due to lack of a clear cost benefit analysis, did not go beyond pilots.  

The hope is that 6G will resolve the issues with the newly packaged Industry 5.0. 

“The industrial use case we had expected in 5G has not been realised till now. The question is whether this will change in 6G, whether IoT (internet of things) and sensor device costs, which are high for B2B (business to business) operations still remain a challenge,” said Rahul Watts, chief regulatory officer of Bharti Airtel, while making a presentation in IMC.

In healthcare, the most advertised use case was remote robotic surgery. But high cost of equipment, lack of confidence that network latency will be stable despite distances, and lack of regulatory framework made it a mere showcase without any serious adoption so far. Ravi Gandhi, who heads regulatory affairs at Reliance Jio, concedes that though a lot was talked about 5G in healthcare, one has not seen any use case at scale.

The same goes for autonomous vehicles and sensors in vehicles to help drivers. So far, there have only been demonstrations. An agricultural revolution in India with sensor-powered farm machinery and fields powered by 5G to improve productivity are technically feasible, but stymied by the high cost of sensors, for which farmers found no real benefit.  

For home users, consumer electronics and white goods, such as air conditioners and  or washing machines, which can be controlled remotely, came to the market but failed to become mainstream because of their premium pricing.

Issue of spectrum

Of course, for 6G to deliver the goods, the key will be spectrum availability, on which the WTSA is grappling for consensus. In India, for instance, according to a study by IIT Madras for the Bharat 6G Alliance, the unprecedented data consumption in India can fill up 80 per cent of the capacity of the collective network of all telcos by 2027, though telcos say it will happen even earlier.

The study projects a sharp increase in data consumption as more and more subscribers hook onto 5G: From 30 GB per month per subscriber now to 50 GB in 2027 and 75 GB in 2030. GSMA’s Chief Regulatory Officer John Giusti cautions that India’s 5G speeds are already falling, having dropped 19 per cent from last year to 243 mbps now.

Telcos and Bharat 6G Alliance says to meet this huge demand more spectrum will be required not in 2030, when 6G is expected to roll out globally, but in 2027 for implementing 5G Advanced, an upgrade of the current 5G, and a continuum towards moving seamlessly to 6G. The anchor spectrum to power both will be the mid band 6 GHZ-assignment.

Global experts say the spectrum width requirement for 6G to be effective globally will be four times that of 5G. In India, on an average each operator got 100 MHz in the anchor band to power 5G. They will require a minimum of 400 MHz for 6G. To power 5G Advanced, the ideal requirement for each telco has been fixed at 200 MHz in the next two to four years.  

With four operators in India, this is a lot of spectrum. But telcos face tough competitors for the 6GHz band. The Broadband India Forum, which has global tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Cisco as members, is demanding that the 1200 MHz of spectrum in the band be de-delicensed and utilised to power the next generation of wifi broadband, which will be two and half times faster than the existing broadband.  They point to the United States, China, South Korea, and Brazil, which plan to do the same. In Europe a middle path has been found, where part of the band will be delicensed for wifi and the rest will be with telcos.

Telcos however have put a strong defence, saying that without this anchor band there cannot be any 6G. They say India, unlike the US, is saddled with limited spectrum but is dealing with a population 10 times that of the US. But the spectrum given to cover this large population is far less than in the US.

The other big part of the puzzle that needs to be put in place is applications to drive 6G. In 5G, monetisable use cases have proved to be a challenge. Of course, fixed wireless access, where last mile connectivity at home is through wireless, is now taking off in India as well as globally, with home subscribers having much higher ARPUs (average revenue per user) than from their mobile phones.

In 6G, the working group on technology for the Bharat 6G Alliance has earmarked areas for supporting immersive technology, such as holographic communications or launching  immersive gaming and virtual sports, which need more bandwidth than 5G.

Secondly, 6G, they hope, will make sensor technology far more attractive and provide accurate accident detection, health monitoring, and flood or fire detection, among others.  

The alliance has identified a new push for  industrial and transportation usage for 6G, which 5G has failed to cater to, whether it is mass use of robotics, autonomous vehicles, implantable sensors, and devices to help patients who cannot move.

Once again, hope rises as a new generation of telecom technology knocks on our doors. Will it live up to expectations? And will 190 countries be able to come to a common framework to ensure that 6G does that?