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Despite press releases, governments will not be the ones doing the hard work of developing 6G
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Analyst John Strand points out that Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei as well as 3GPP and ITU will take over the standardization and research and development for 6G.
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In the meantime, many countries will try to catch 6G waves
You could call them wannabes. Reacting to the news that the US and Sweden are collaborating on 6G, John Strand, CEO of Strand Consulting, told Fierce, “The number of countries that dream of becoming leaders in 6G is very large.” However, he noted that it is actually the companies that will be doing the heavy “real” work when it comes to the next generation of mobile.
The list of 6G hopefuls includes “countries like Germany, the UK, the US, India, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Romania and most recently Sweden,” said Strand. He added: “After Xi’s visit to Moscow, China and Russia have declared that they will be leaders in 6G” and, in addition, the European Union has great ambitions regarding 6G.
In the real world, however, countries will have little influence on the next generation of mobile communications standards.
“Politicians who want to appear as people who are making their nations leaders in the digital world can sign such press releases with their names,” Strand said. “Personally, I think that many of these people are revealing that they are not clear about the reality of things.”
The real work of 6G
The real work of creating a new mobile standard – and the next G – is being done in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as well as at companies such as Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei, Strand noted.
The agencies handle the standardization work and also take care of the backward compatibility of the new standards. Meanwhile, companies “spend billions on research, but also spend a lot of money buying companies that develop new technologies,” Strand said.
“These companies are not only developing the new standards, but they are also the ones filing patents, patents that are linked to the patents they already own – here comes the magic word ‘essential patents,'” he said. That means the companies have a vested interest in making sure “that the next standards are based on the technologies they have developed and patented,” Strand noted.
In short, all the fuss about 6G is “identical” to what happened with 3G, 4G and 5G. But ultimately, it is the companies, not the governments, that are in the driver’s seat.
