Nokia Bell Labs’ Peter Vetter is not only optimistic about 6G; he’s confident that the next generation of mobile communications will bring even more financial return to players – as long as we start planning accordingly.

In this interview with 6GWorld ahead of the 6GSymposium Fall 2024, Vetter shared Nokia’s advancements in research, the main challenges down the road, and more. Check out the video below or follow the transcript.

6GWorld: Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Caio. I am a journalist at 6GWorld and today I have the pleasure of talking to Peter Vetter, who is the president of Nokia Bell Labs Core Research. He has more than 30 years of contributions to the telecommunications industry and he is also the mind behind the 6th Year Research at Nokia. So, Peter, thank you so much for joining us today.

I wanted to get started with this question. There is a feeling that the excitement for 6G has been cooling down a bit recently because of concerns about the monetisation of 5G. If we cannot monetise 5G, how could we monetise 6G? Do you think this is a good reason to slow down the development of 6G?

Peter Vetter: I understand the concern about the monetisation of 5G, but I actually think, on the contrary, 6G is an opportunity to re-architect the network so that we create more value out of the network. Let me explain that a bit more. Everybody agrees that AI and cloud are two important pillars of the future of the digital economy, and there is actually a lot of money in AI and cloud. But the network is an essential third pillar.

We need to re-architect the network in a way that we can better monetise and tap into that value chain and create what we call application programming interfaces so that multiple parties, application developers, and different types of businesses can use the infrastructure as a platform so that we really move from the bit pipe thinking to more platform thinking. I think that is the way to go to better monetisation of the 6G infrastructure.

6GWorld: Now that we got past this problem, what are the technologies required for making 6G a reality? Why can’t we just have more 5G, for instance?

Peter: Every new generation is typically defined by a new technology, a new spectrum, a new architecture and a new capability.

In the case of 6G, I think everybody agrees that AI is the new technology that should redefine the network so that we can better leverage the benefits from AI. Very fast evolving fields, so we really have a framework to benefit from the advantages in terms of network automation, but also in terms of better channel capacity.

We’ve actually shown with the first proof of concept that you can get to 30% better capacity. So that is the new technology and that in itself is a very important reason to rethink the network.

The second one is new spectrum. We’ve seen over the decades that approximately with every generation, with every decade, capacity goes up by an order of magnitude, by a factor of 10.

Sometimes it’s a bit slower, sometimes it goes a bit faster, but over the years it’s about a factor of 10. So, by the end of the decade, the 5G network will run out of steam. We need new spectrum to allow for high capacity. And this is another reason why we should do this in a new way with the 6G technology to design it in an energy-efficient way.

We cannot allow the energy consumption of the network to go up by the same 10x as the traffic. On the contrary, we pledged that we wanted our consumption to go down by 50%. So then there’s a new architecture. I already hinted at it in your first question. We want that architecture to really be able to be deployed as a platform.

The new architecture in 5G was cloud. Now let’s go to cloud-native design to exploit the flexibility and scalability of cloud to its fullest for the network. But then also have the open application programming interface so that multiple parties can benefit, so that we can monetize that 6G infrastructure in more efficient ways.

And then the new capability. You can use the ubiquitous radios that will be all around us also as sensors. It’s a kind of radar capability. It’s not that we are reinventing the radar, but we can reuse the same base stations also as a sensor to detect movement of people, movement of cars, or drones.

There is a whole bunch of new applications that we then can think of in terms of traffic security in urban areas, security or safety in factories, and drone detection, for example.

6GWorld: I remember back in 2023 at the MWC Barcelona, when we met there, some of the technologies you just mentioned were already in progress. They were already being developed by Nokia. These technologies you mentioned, what’s the progress being made by Nokia in their development?

Peter: You remember very well. Actually, already last year at Mobile World Congress, we have demonstrated a first AI air interface.

We can really do an app comparison of capacity throughput, and we’ve shown that you can do 30% better than the existing digital signal processing techniques. So that was one. In the meantime, we made progress in that field also to make these solutions more energy efficient and work with partners like NTT Docomo or SKT to test these concepts.

One that we’ve shown at Mobile World Congress is joint communication and sensing, the use case that I explained earlier on. In the meantime, we’ve been working with a partner, Bosch, to see and test that out in an experimental factory in Arena 2036 in Stuttgart, Germany, and really think of possible use cases and so on.

An additional thing that we have done in collaboration with Qualcomm is the interoperability of those AI concepts. Because how do you enable interoperability between a base station and a handset or multiple handsets from multiple vendors with that new AI paradigm shift? And you don’t want to share the AI models, because that is a bit of differentiation and a secret source of different vendors.

We’ve shown that you can actually do this in collaboration with Qualcomm. We made significant progress very often in partnership with industry players.

6GWorld: That’s fantastic. We have just talked about the progress, and I want to address the challenges. When we talk about 6G, we’re not talking about tomorrow. We’re talking about 2030, 2031. What are the barriers that we have to overcome by 2030 to realise 6G, to make 6G a reality?

Peter: I think there’s a number of challenges still ahead in order to be ready by 2030. As an industry, we have an agreement on a timeline that is around 2028 and 2029 to have the first specification in 3GPP ready. We have started interacting with our peers in the industry on that. That is one important challenge.

For that, we need to think of what are the day-one capabilities that we really want to nail down for that first specification. There are lots of options and research concepts out there, but now we need to start getting serious.

Step one is new spectrum specifications, [more specifically] 7 to 8 GHz. The World Radio Conference last year decided this is an important candidate spectrum band. We need to secure that spectrum and then get ready with the system definition.

Step number two is to make that platform ready for AI. And even though maybe some of these innovations are further out, at least we should have the framework ready so that the 6G network is ready for a decade to come on innovations because AI is such a fast-moving field.

Then, the API readiness. So, these application programming interfaces have the architecture ready for that. And then also have a smooth architectural evolution from 5G. Keep it simple. In 5G, we had some seven options for an evolution from 4G. Let’s keep it simple with one architecture option.

Finally, we have the energy efficiency and the security in mind. These are the day-one capabilities that we want to have on security, especially being ready for the quantum era and post-quantum encryption.

6GWorld: Let me ask you a more personal question. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen a lot throughout your career in terms of mobile technology and mobile communications. What’s next for you in the 6G research?

Peter: In addition to these day-one capabilities that I mentioned, I think we need to further mature the concepts within the framework of that day-one specification. What are the innovations beyond day one? And then also making sure that we have the right system capabilities like the items with the long lead time, the ASIC innovations.

I’m actually standing here in an ASIC design and test lab. I think it’s about really thinking of a new concept in that space so that we continue to innovate on that. And then also at the network software and the network system level, there’s a lot to be done on the encryption side.

I mean, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. There are new ways of hacking with quantum computing, with AI. How can we also make our systems more crypto-agile?

6GWorld: Peter, before we get to the end of this interview, I wanted to ask you one more question. You have attended several editions of the 6G Symposium and we will be having another one on September 23rd and 24th in Washington, D.C. What are your expectations for the next 6G Symposium? What are your expectations for the topics you want to discuss and the discussions you want to hear?

Peter: I like this every half a year cadence in Europe, US, meeting people and exchanging visions on where we are going with 6G.

Specifically on this one, I’m looking forward to engage on discussions and that’s also the panel that I’m on, on 6G use cases. And again, back to the question with which you opened it, how will we monetize that future 6G network?