“Do we really need to go up to the millimetre wave for 6G?” This question would hardly have been asked in 2019 when studies about the feasibility of the next generation of mobile internet started.
Five years later, Thomas Rondeau, Principal Director of the US Department of Defense’s FutureG Office, makes a strong case for lower bands. “I always baulk whenever people say something like ‘What’s a millimetre wave for 5G? Let’s go to terahertz for 6G’,” he confided during the 6GSymposium Fall 2024.
According to him, the advancement of 5G networks shows solid promise for developing future technologies. Even if consumers have not realised that yet. “I wouldn’t argue that 5G is a failure. We have more data flow through a 5G network than we know what to do with. We have more capacity and more resources in these 5G networks. The question is: What do we do with those?”
The answer, for the director, seems straightforward: applying these new capabilities to 6G.
Specifically on spectrum, Rondeau believes that the FR3 range (7.125 GHz to 24.25 GHz), combined with FR1 (sub-7GHz) and FR2 (millimetre wave), can provide telecoms with capabilities such as joint sensing and communications – something considered for Terahertz frequencies some years ago.
“I think that’s a really exciting opportunity for us. From the DoD’s perspective, there are all sorts of intelligence, reconnaissance, and sensing that we do. That’s a big part of our mission set,” he explained. “From a consumer technology, we look at monitoring drones, drone delivery systems, and drone swarms going over population centres.”
Shifting the Focus for 6G
While Rondeau recognises the importance of technical advancements like speed, he also suggests that the industry should consider other areas that are equally crucial.
“That’s why a lot of the conversations you’ve heard from the US government […] is a lot about inserting our values into standards and making sure 6G represents our society,” the director observed.
“You’ve seen a lot of [talk about] open, transparent, resilient by design [from the US government]. Again, let’s not just rush to increase the technology because we can,” he insisted.
Rondeau also recognised that part of this focus on security and resilience comes from the nature of the Department of Defense’s work – warfighting. He argued that the US needs to be able to trust networks and use the global information infrastructure securely, reliably and readily.
“It’s really important that we lock these systems down and understand what’s happening inside them. It’s important that we create a network full of trusted vendor technologies so we understand the supply chains of where these systems are coming from. We need to focus on those types of things,” he concluded.
