It’s been a busy week for 6G-related news this week. Here’s a round-up of some of the items that caught our eye:
Open and Profitable 6G
6GSymposium in Washington DC created a stir with remarks from FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks emphasising the co-evolution of 6G and Open RAN. The FCC is committing $900 million in incentives for Open RAN deployments.
“While 6G service may be some years away, carriers installing Open RAN radios may ultimately have the ability to upgrade those units via 6G software updates rather than costly hardware and replacement efforts that way,” he observed.
EVP & CTO at EchoStar (Formerly DISH) Eben Albertyn backed up that sentiment in a discussion on building profitable 6G, commenting that “For at least 75% of 6G outcomes, we can have a good shot at with Open RAN 5G.”
Albertyn was speaking in a conference session underlining the need for approaches to 6G which emphasise creation of value for the industry. In the same session, moderator Ken Figueredo, Founder of More With Mobile, introduced a research white paper “Making 6G Profitable” which brought together critical issues and ways forward for creating a better outcome for 6G than we have seen so far for 5G.
6GWorld will provide full access to the 11 conference sessions plus additional material over the coming weeks, so moving on in this digest…
A US Priority
Sticking with the USA, Congress passed the FUTURE Networks Act with strong cross-party support. The bill requires the FCC to create a 6G Task Force of government and industry experts and public interest groups. The Task Force will have to report on the role of standards-setting bodies in 6G; potential uses for 6G technology; potential threats; and interagency coordination to promote its development.
Representative Doris Matsui, who co-sponsored the bill, said “We stand at a crossroads for the future of global innovation leadership – networks are converging, consumer demand is skyrocketing, and global competition is heating up. The economic and national security stakes in the race to 6G couldn’t be higher.”
From Policy to Technology
At the EU Microwave Week this week, testing company Rohde & Schwarz was bringing photonics and electronics together in a proof-of-concept demonstration of a tunable system for wireless data transmission in THz frequencies. A photodiode takes laser pulses and turns them into an electrical signal which an antenna then puts out as a THz wave. As well as for data transmission, these frequencies are effective for sensing and imaging functions.
The demonstration is part of a German-funded project called 6G-ADLANTIK which aims to develop components for devices using THz frequencies and which combine both electronics and photonics.
While not specifically a 6G issue, there is a broad push to expand the role of photonics within telecoms networks for a variety of reasons; for example, to reduce the latency and energy usage involved in converting electrical signals to optical in the fibre network, back to electrical in different components and so on.
Learning for 6G
Professor Jyh-Cheng Chen at Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), has led an academic team in proposing an open-source “Federated Learning Platform-as-a-Service Framework” (EdgeFL) which would serve future networks in 6G and beyond.
Existing federated learning frameworks are primarily focused on specific use cases or academic research and cannot incorporate mobile smart devices or hierarchical learning architectures with edge computing. As a result, these can’t work effectively with the kind of flexible, disaggregated networks which are likely to support advanced 5G networks and beyond.
Chen’s proposal instead uses multi-access edge computing (MEC) resource nodes for hierarchical model training, leveraging the strengths of future networks rather than having them as an obstacle.
