- The rollout of 5G has been slow and disappointing, and the promised benefits have not been delivered.
- However, with 5G advancements finally arriving, there are bright signs ahead.
- Discussions about 6G are well underway, but it is likely to be several years away from becoming a reality.
At this point, it seems fair to say that the arrival of 5G has been a bit of a disappointment.
A few years ago, telecommunications carriers and technology companies were heralding the arrival of 5G and touting its potential: 5G will have high capacity and low latency. It will benefit autonomous driving and connected homes. 5G will make it all possible.
And that didn’t happen. At least, it hasn’t happened yet.
The rollout of 5G has been slow and at times chaotic: rolling out a new network standard is a tightrope walk that requires buy-in from governments, standards bodies and other stakeholders.
Still, there is reason for hope: At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in late February, many companies discussed new 5G technologies, including 5G Standalone and 5G Advanced, which could eventually lead to 6G.
More advanced 5G technology is coming
5G didn’t take off because carriers didn’t have access to key bands of spectrum to begin with, leading them to roll out versions of 5G using hybrid systems piggybacking on 4G LTE.
The promise of 5G Standalone is even more exciting. It’s a truly independent 5G network, meaning it runs on its own technology, unrelated to 4G. In simpler terms, it’s the version of 5G that was once promised.
The concept of 5G Standalone is not new, but it has taken a long time to come to fruition, mainly due to the technical challenges of building a wide-reaching 5G Core. 5G Standalone could allow 5G to evolve as intended.
Another technology, called 5G-Advanced (sometimes called 5.5G), is effectively an advancement over 5G, promising faster data speeds, lower latency and other improvements.
“We’re right on the cusp of 5G-Advanced,” Alex Sinclair, chief technology officer at mobile networks lobbying group GSMA, told Business Insider. “We expect it to be finalized later this year.”
Telecom operators and technology companies are actively discussing 5G-Advanced, with Huawei calling its version 5.5G, which is actually just a marketing term for the same technology.
Sinclair said the 5G-Advanced specification is expected to be finalized in the first half of this year. Huawei said at MWC that its version of 5G-Advanced will be “commercially available” in 2024.
New ideas will make 6G a reality
It could be another six or seven years before this standard comes to fruition in any meaningful way, reaching the promised land of lightning-fast movie downloads and reliable surgical robots, which is why a lot of the talk of 6G at MWC seemed a little premature.
Anshel Saag, principal analyst at Moore Insights & Strategy, called Qualcomm’s Giga MIMO technology — an antenna array designed to boost 5G data capacity while expanding signal coverage — an interesting approach to moving the industry forward.
“This provides additional performance spectrum that we may need when we get to 6G in the next six to seven years,” Sugg said.
Sugg said the industry is in a situation where 5G networks are “not delivering on the promise that was set five years ago” and that he believes Qualcomm’s approach could be the “right path” to 6G.
That’s still a long way off. For now, Sag said companies should focus on deploying 5G Standalone because the benefits of 5G-Advanced won’t be worth anything without a fully standalone network. Sag described 5G-Advanced as “an incentive to get to standalone 5G faster.”
“I think it’s a little bit strange that we’re talking about 6G now when standalone 5G hasn’t even been fully deployed yet,” Sugg said. “I think standalone 5G will be what people have come to expect from 5G.”