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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.
A key theme here is the fast-evolving model for #neutralhost mobile for small cells and network capacity in-fill in cities. An NH is a 3rd party wholesale provider which enables multiple tenant 4G/5G mobile providers - generally MNOs, but also potentially including private networks as well.
A few years ago when I was running NH workshops with Peter Curnow-Ford we identified this area of metro infill as one with potential, but limited actual deployments.
There are numerous challenges - MNOs ideally don't want separate deals with each city authority, while cities don't want multiple MNOs independently requesting 100s of sites with associated street clutter, road closures and soon. Authorities also want to both make money from access to assets such as lampposts, and to improve connectivity for citizens and businesses as fast as possible.
One option floated was for authorities to build out their own private 4G/5G networks, then allow MNOs to roam onto them, or use some sort of MOCN network-sharing arrangement. But MNOs each have different coverage / capacity holes, different spectrum bands, different customer groups - and also worry about security, ability to manage radio units, do carrier aggregation and so on. The idea of a single cell network in its own spectrum, with multiple MNO tenants is appealing, but sometimes unworkable. (It might work OK in villages or indoors, though).
What's happening is that another model is evolving. Local authorities like city councils are contracting with several infrastrucure specialists - companies like Cellnex UK , Freshwave, Ontix, BAI Communications and Shared Access to run (essentially) small-cell as a service offers. These act as intermediaries, allowing local authorities to create standard contracts, and for MNOs to have standardised processes for getting access at each site.
It reduces the frictions and costs of the paperwork - and also allows for infrastructure-sharing to evolve over time where it makes sense. Coupled with vRAN or open RAN it can put some of the electronics into central facilities, reducing street-side box numbers. And it means MNOs can get coverage in their preferred locations, with backhaul/fronthaul and power supplies simplified.
The competitive infraco/towerco angle, rather than exclusive area concessions, allows MNOs to choose the provider that is the best fit - and without needing different processes in each city.
It's not quite what I expected NH models to look like - and they may differ in the US or across Europe - but it seems to make good sense here in the UK.