Having Learned Nothing From The 5G Hype Cycle, The 6G Hype Cycle Begins In Earnest
from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept
Fifth-generation wireless (5G) was supposed to change the world. According to wireless carriers and gear makers, not only was it supposed to bring about the “fourth industrial revolution,” it was supposed to usher forth amazing new smart cities and help with cancer treatment. Wireless giants routinely portrayed a world full of 5G powered robots giving tattoos or engaging in remote bananna surgery (?).
In the real world, 5G landed with a dud. While it does offer faster and lower latency connections, it was always more of a modest evolution than a revolution. And U.S. telecom being what it is (highly consolidated, barely competitive, poorly and inconsistently regulated), most U.S. 5G service wound up being slower and significantly more expensive than most European variants.
Now the wireless industry is starting to develop the 6G standard. 6G, like 5G before it, should improve network performance and speed, integrating some interesting network automation technologies while pushing into lesser used segment of spectrum. It will be less about developing new hardware transmission technologies, and more about interoperation and integrating new automation tech.
It hasn’t been clear that the wireless sector learned absolutely anything to the backlash to 5G hype. Ericsson, for example, has proclaimed 6G will create an “Internet of the senses” allowing consumers to “digitally transport themselves” all over the world. Samsung insists 6G will create “hyper connected AI experiences,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
With 5G investment pretty much crashing, you can tell that at least some people in the wireless sector have toned the bullshit down a little bit, with even AT&T executives mirroring my language about these standards being evolutionary, not revolutionary. Still, it’s pretty common to see wireless executives claiming that 6G will deliver things like “indoor service robots” and “extended reality experiences”:
“Young said 6G might support a variety of new applications and services, including indoor service robots, extended reality experiences, and digital twins for hazardous environments.”
Corporate speak is inherently meaningless, but there’s something about these untethered predictions that are always particularly amusing. Not just because these inventions often aren’t real; but because they don’t need 6G to exist in the first place. Most of the innovative use cases portrayed by industry in 5G and 6G would function equally well over a gigabit Wi-Fi connection.
Cancer treatments in hospitals probably aren’t going to even use cellular. There’s no reason a remote tattoo artist can’t use an ordinary Ethernet port. There’s an amusing facts-optional hand wavy desperation in the rhetoric I always find highly entertaining.
Here in reality, over-hyping comes with a cost. By over-promising on what this kind of tech is capable of, they wind up associating the terminology in the minds of consumers not with innovation and utility, but with mindless hype.
Another problem is that consumers don’t really want to spend more money for 5G. U.S. wireless data is already some of the most expensive in the developed world thanks to industry consolidation. Every single consumer survey reveals that the thing U.S. consumers want the most are lower prices.
Efforts to charge even more for 5G haven’t gone well. Verizon had to back off plans to charge $10 extra for 5G after nobody wanted to pay. AT&T’s currently trying to charge people $7 extra for “turbo 5G,” which I suspect will fare roughly the same.
Given U.S. wireless competitive, consolidation, and regulatory capture issues, the “race to 5G” was always more of a waddle to nowhere. It’s also a race we didn’t really win by any meaningful metric, with everybody from France to China offering broader 5G coverage for significantly less money. That’s not really something the dutifully patriotic U.S. tech press usually wants to discuss.
I’d like to hope that the 6G hype cycle isn’t quite as bad as the 5G hype cycle. But most of the financial incentives lean toward over-stating the technologies capabilities in press and policy. More reliable, faster networks aren’t sexy and don’t grab headlines. So I suspect “AI” hype and 6G hype will fuse and morph in entirely new ways that, at the very least, will be amusing in their absurdity.
Comments on “Having Learned Nothing From The 5G Hype Cycle, The 6G Hype Cycle Begins In Earnest”
There was one benefit of 5G
5G was finally fast enough to do wireless for home use. You might not get 5 Gazillion Bits per Second speeds and download the entire contents of the Library of Congress in mere seconds, but getting 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps does allow it to compete against our cable monopolies.
Instead of a single home Internet provider, we now have three: Verizon, T-Mobile, and our cable provider. My cable internet bill dropped by 60% and I allegedly get twice the speed. Even stranger, a second cable monopoly is coming to our area.
5G may not have changed cell service. Download speeds of 200 Mbps rather than 40 Mbps haven’t made using a cellphone all that different. But, I do appreciate the major effects it had on my cable bill.
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A cable duopoly? You’re living the dream!
In all seriousness though, I’ve found T-Mobile’s 5G plays hell with our WFH VPN due to some voodoo in their modem/routers. If you can “shibboleet” your way to one of their engineers though, they’ll fix the routing.
Salesmen bonuses are based on hype words they can put on a Scrabble board.
Then they use AI to generate random sequence of theses words to produce slogans.
Once all ads are online, about 20% of salesmen get fired for their good work.
Finally, the Chief Sales Officer buys a new sedan at the end of the quarter.
Repeat for 7G, 8G, 9G… until the end of the world.
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This is why CEO’s get paid so much. They come up with brilliant ideas, like 6G. Who cares if it’s smoke and mirrors? I can’t wait until the next CEO comes up with something brilliant, like 7G, wouldn’t that be AMAZING? I bet we’ll be able to time travel with our phones when that happens!
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Recently read an article which posited that a CEO could easily be replaced with AI.
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That’s an insult!…to AI.
So when do we get Justin Bieber to tell us how great 6G is?
Chip or No Chip? (sarcasm)
Will 6G finally enable the mind control chip that Bill Gates included in my COVID vaccination? I’m tired of having to do all the thinking and planning on my own…
6G work started in 2017/2018 or so. I remember seeing some of the early work on the Vision 2030 document around that time. That is the ITU requirements document for 6G. Once it was finished 3GPP started work on the 6G standard to meet those requirements.
In theory each generation is 10 years. In practice it takes longer than 10 years for all of the features in a generation to roll out. There always is something that takes much longer to develop that expected. So we will continue to see new 5G features arriving till the early 2030s.
One of the biggest change in 5G receives almost no press. 5G has a completely new backend (i.e. everything behind the cell tower). The early 5G deployments had the 5Gnr radio but the old LTE/4G backend. The new backend is still being deployed (varies by operator and country). It does offer much lower latency and is a much simpler design than the 4G system. So it should be more reliable. And cheaper to deploy since there are fewer distinct boxes.
Another big change in 5Gnr was how many devices could be in a single sector. There were many places where phones were unreliable simply because there were too many of them in a small area (e.g. crowded stadium for a game or concert).
What had governments interested is support for high reliability wireless for use by fire/police/emergency services. Which is another feature that doesn’t get a lot of press. It is still being deployed, replacing existing government radios will take decades.
And then there were the silly claims about using 5G to replace Ethernet or WiFi in factories. The operators are convinced that if they try hard enough they will convince everyone to drop WiFi and use their paid services instead. Which leads to some interesting spectrum allocation fights.
based on the claims for 5G, we can safely assume:
From the suppliers: 6G will bring your grandma back from the dead. You will gain superpowers and be able to magically fly at supersonic speeds as well as summon ice-cream on demand in 15 different flavors.
From the nutcases: the magetic power will get even stronger, and anyone with a 6G phone will pull airplaces screaming from the sky straight into their upturned faces. Also the microchips 6G puts into your blood will be faster than an RTX 5090ti and you’ll be able to render anything you want, like a star trek replicator just by blinking.
Just wait
You won’t believe what comes after 6G
For those who care the 6G overview:
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/study-groups/rsg5/rwp5d/imt-2030/Pages/default.aspx
This is a document from the ITU (UN). Partially written by diplomats, partially written by people from the various companies. So of course it is full of marketing speak.
A more general view of communications going forward:
https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/backgrounders/Pages/connect-2030-agenda.aspx
It’s funny how so much of the ITU’s documents talk about connectivity for everyone. And so many of it’s members do everything they can to block access to all or parts of the internet.
Everything is marketing hype. Your network service doesn’t live up to the standard? Call it 5G anyway! Your product has wheels and doesn’t actually hover? Call it a hoverboard anyway! Your LLM just predicts the next word in a sentence rather than actually being sentient? Call it AI anyway!