6G must be indoor-primary and have a Wi-Fi candidate technology

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I'm giving a lot of thought to #6G design goals, priorities & technology / policy choices. Important decisions are coming up. I'll be exploring them in coming weeks and months. Two important ones I see:

- 6G / #IMT2030 must be "indoor-primary"
- There must be a IEEE / Wi-Fi Alliance candidate tech for 6G

The first one is self-evident. The vast bulk of mobile use - and an even-larger % of total wireless use - is indoors. It's inside homes, offices schools, factories, warehouses, public spaces like malls and stadia - as well as inside vehicles like trains. Even outdoors, a large % of usage is on private sites like industrial complexes or hospital campuses.

Roughly 80% of mobile use is indoors - more if you include wireless streaming to smart TVs and laptops/tablets. By the 2030s 6G era, there will be more indoor wireless use for #industrialautomation, #gaming, education, healthcare, #robotics and #AR / #VR / #metaverse and so on.

This implies that economic, social, welfare and cultural upsides will be indoor-primary. 80%+ of any GDP uplift will be indoor-generated. This suggests 6G tech design & standards - and associated business models and regulation - should be indoor-oriented too.

The IEEE / #WiFi idea follows on from this. The default indoor wireless tech today is Wi-Fi. There is a lot of indoor cellular use, but currently 5G is supported poorly - and certainly not everywhere.

While 5G and future 6G indoor #smallcells, #neutralhost and repeaters / DAS are evolving fast, *nobody* expects true ubiquity. Indoor cellular will remain patchy, especially multi-operator. And many devices (eg TVs) don't have cellular radios anyway.

This means that WiFi - likely future #WiFi8 and #WiFi9 - will remain central to in-building connectivity in the 6G era, no matter how good the tech for reconfigurable surfaces or other cellular innovations become.

IEEE decided not to pitch WiFi6 formally for 5G / IMT2020, but instead just show it surpassed all the metrics. But "we could have done it if we wanted" isn't good enough. There are no government-funded "WiFi Testbed Programs" or "WiFi Innovation Centres of Excellence" because of this lower visibility.

Governments are ITU members and listen to it. If policymakers want the benefits of full connectivity, they need to support it with spectrum, targets and funding, across *all* indoor options.

And if the WiFi industry wants full / easy access to new resources, it needs to be an official 6G / IMT2030 technology. It needs access to IMT licensed spectrum, especially for local licenses with AFC.

This idea will be very unpopular among both cellular industry (3GPP pretends it is the "keeper of the G's") and the WiFi sector, which sees it as a lot of extra work & politics.

But I think it's essential for IMT2030 to embrace network diversity, plus ownership- & business-model diversity as central elements of 6G.