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Despite press releases, the government won’t do the heavy lifting to create 6G
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Analyst John Strand points out that Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Huawei, along with 3GPP and the ITU, will be responsible for 6G standardization and research and development.
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Meanwhile, many countries will be trying to get 6G rolling.
Call them volunteers: “There are a lot of countries that dream of being leaders in 6G,” Strand Consulting CEO John Strand told Fierce in response to news that the US and Sweden are collaborating on 6G. But when it comes to next-generation wireless, he noted, it’s businesses that will actually do the heavy lifting in the “real world.”
The list of 6G hopefuls includes “countries such as Germany, the UK, the US, India, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Romania, and most recently Sweden,” Strand said. “After President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, China and Russia declared themselves 6G leaders,” he added, adding that the European Union also has big 6G ambitions.
But in the real world, countries will have little influence over the next generation of mobile phone standards.
“Politicians who want to present themselves as leaders of their countries in the digital world are free to put their names on these press releases,” Strand said. “Personally, I think a lot of these people demonstrate a lack of insight into what’s going on in the real world.”
6G in action
Strand noted that the actual work to create new mobile phone standards, and next-generation G, is being done by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), as well as companies such as Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei.
Government agencies are in charge of standards work, as well as the backward-compatibility elements of new standards, while companies “spend billions of dollars on research, but they also spend a lot of money acquiring companies that develop new technology,” Strand said.
“These companies are not only developing new standards, but also acquiring patents related to patents they already own — the magic words here are ‘essential patents,'” Strand said. That means companies have a vested interest in making sure “the next standards are based on technology that they have developed and patented,” Strand noted.
After all, all the fuss about 6G is the same as what happened with 3G, 4G and 5G. But at the end of the day, it’s companies, not governments, that are in control.
