5G to 6G — Mind the Gap
Mobile Networks, those we know with a Number and a G aka 2G, 3G… 5G have been a continuous evolution from one to the other since the 1980s. Those who are familiar with the way this industry works, would probably agree with me that every time we finish designing a generation we start building the requirements for the next generation to come. In this case that would be 6G.
Are we ready for a new generation?
There’s much being discussed right now about the need to start shaping a new generation as an evolution of the current one, 5G. We’re not going to give reasons in favour or against the natural course of research and technology, since it’s only natural that we evolve technology.
The industry is already looking into important research areas within the telecoms industry: from understanding the future network architectures such as service orchestration and automation of services, to starting to dig deeper into security and reliability of networks. Furthermore, some researchers are looking into more technical areas such as antispoofing, radio wave propagation, and photonic devices.
There is still plenty to be discovered in understanding the role of satellites in 5G let alone 6G, and the relationship between cloud and edge. Finally, with the global Carbon Neutrality Net Zero Emissions target there is more research and collaboration needed to understand how the telecoms industry will innovate in order to meet these sustainable goals.
These are all areas of evolution of Mobile Networks, which don’t necessarily fall under the label of a new generation, however are extremely important research challenges that will mark the evolution of 5G and the whole telecoms sector.
So are we ready for a new generation?
1. Diversification, Interoperability, New Architectures & Softwarisation
The entire industry is devoting efforts to make the Telecommunications industry more diverse and interoperable. The fact that 5G brings virtualisation to the table makes it possible, however the telecoms industry is no expert in software and there is still a lot of work to be done to reduce the complexity of the Mobile Network.
It’s not about doing anything very different, we’re just disaggregating the pieces that before were all together. It’s about treating these different pieces as independent software components and introduce new protocols, standards and interfaces so that the pieces all work together. To create pieces that can work with each other, the software industry has years of experience working in Microservice architectures, Open protocols and Open standards. We still need to embrace that in telecoms. The next few years to come we will see an explosion of software solutions that address interoperability and automation through open platforms.
2. Resilience and Security
We covered the topic of Cybersecurity in a separate article, but it’s worth mentioning that this will be one of the most important topics in Telecoms for the next 10 years. We haven’t paid enough attention to Security before, and opening up the supply chain creates more threats and risks. Zero Trust seems to be a good approach, but there is still a lot of research to be done in this area. We’re interested to see the approach large Telecom Service Providers will take to the new Telecoms Security Requirements, and how equipment Vendors will incorporate software development security policies as part of their product development.
3. Universal coverage
Aside from the technical challenges to make networks interoperable with the use of open interfaces and standards, there’s this new discussion around business models and flexible platforms to accelerate deployments and make connectivity available where it is needed. There are still many barriers to deploy networks in the streets, and indoor coverage is still a topic of much discussion in all Telecoms forums.
The Neutral Host model is gaining popularity, and with it the “Network of Networks” and new as a Service models. All this is great, but we need to fix technical problems such as security and interoperability before we can convince large service providers to open up their networks. It’s interesting to see the industry working on initiatives to create multi-operator networks, as a technical solution to the adoption of neutral host models.
There’s still much work to be done to fully realise what 5G was supposed to revolutionise, and we’re glad to see where the emerging technology is taking us.
Before we start talking about increasing capacity by 1000 times, supporting zillions of devices, there are all these still very challenging and important elements to building networks that require our full attention.
