Amirthalingam said he expects 6G to ultimately be driven by the “perfect storm” of “massive connectivity, bandwidth requirements and efficiency & AI coming in,” noting also that the standard is expected to offer seamless connectivity between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.

Addressing the Connectivity Innovation Network’s Beyond 5G Connectivity Summit he cautioned that anyone claiming to know the timing of its arrival and exactly what it’s going to look like is “making it up.”

Amirthalingam stressed the importance of spectrum for the standard, however. “We don’t even know what spectrum we’re going to use,” he said. “And the problem with all these things is that if you don’t get harmonisation of spectrum globally, you don’t have the economy scale on your handsets, and nobody can actually launch a viable network. So the ecosystem is quite important. When we talk about 6G, these are the practicalities people miss.”

The “US is pushing for 7GHz, it might be in 6GHz; 3GPP is considering all this and ITU-R is considering all that,” Amirthalingam said.

“A lot of people we speak to, the Tier 1 operators, the manufacturers of equipment, they’re all very circumspect about not rushing 6G,” he said, with questions yet to be answered about “spectrum, the ecosystem, the use cases.”

He said in the best case scenario he would expect to see the emergence of standards and details about 6G spectrum around 2028.

Amirthalingam also noted that after five years of 5G, “5G Advanced is coming” and will allow operators to “sweat the assets” they have already rolled out. Spectral effciency and uplink optimisation will be key elements, he told the conference.

“We need to actually get more bits into hertz,” he said. “And that efficiency part hasn’t quite been done very well in engineering and research in the radio access net- work.”

He added that “uplink is a very rare commodity,” adding: “But if you look at the use cases that are going to be coming up — AR/VR and — how do you actually interact, you’re going to have a lot of uplink demand.”

5G Advanced is “spectral efficiency, uplink optimisation, energy saving and sustain- ability without actually impacting performance,” he said. “So it’s not about turning off carriers willy nilly in the middle of the night, but rather actually anticipating, looking at traffic at a very micro level and use AI” to help telcos power up and down to save electricity without impacting customer experience.

In his address, he noted that so far monetising 5G has been challenging for some telcos. Amirthalingam cited a GSMA report that found 60% of European operators have negative ROIC. He said that 3GPP standards must continue to be the heart of the mobile ecosystem, and that what is developed for 5G Standalone will become the foundation for the future 6G standard.

Rohan Pearce