5G is so passé

The race to build 6G is on — or, at least, the race to start selling the idea to Washington.

If you have a 5G phone (or even if you don’t!) you could be forgiven for wondering why we need to worry about 6G already.

The 5G network is still being rolled out, and is still only used by about a tenth of mobile phone users around the world (U.S. figures are comparable). It will take years for 5G to come into more widespread use.

But it also takes a long time to negotiate what techniques will be implemented in standards, so telecom industry types are already looking to the next generation: 6G.

Each new generation of wireless technology has relied on devising increasingly intricate ways to share limited radio frequencies among the millions of radio transmitters and receivers — that is, mobile phone and other cellular devices — that the vast majority of adults around the world carry around in their pockets.

New ways to share spectrum are not just technical novelties — they change, in a fundamental way, what a radio…err, phone… can do.

6G will be capable of handling more data, more quickly than 5G, as 5G was faster than 4G, and so forth. Each generation so far has been transformative, even if the industry’s more lavish promises have been slow to materialize. Video calls became possible, then routine. So did playing video games that rely on low latency — meaning that once a data spigot is turned on, data starts flowing quickly.

The contours of 6G already matter, if not to consumers, to the companies that intend to build out the network. Patents that are deemed “standards-essential” can be worth millions (if not billions) to the companies involved, and standards also have substantial “soft power” as they are deployed around the world.

The Next G Alliance, a year-and-a-half-old group involving large companies like Apple, AT&T, Google and Intel is trying to get Washington thinking about its needs early. In a new report published this week, the group attempts to lay out what technologies will need 6G in order to work well, so that engineers can work backwards to figure out what capabilities to design into the standards.

The Next G Alliance says there are some major new areas for which 6G will be important, including robots and autonomous systems, truly immersive virtual reality and a physical world full of sensors.

The importance of 6G depends on how important the above categories end up becoming — and conversely, the success of things like distributed virtual reality and autonomous cars depends in part on the efficacy of 6G.

There’s also a national-competitiveness reason to think about 6G early. Huawei, the large Chinese tech company, has played a large role in setting 5G standards, and China has already declared 6G dominance a major policy goal and begun touting breakthroughs. One provision in a sprawling competition bill that looks likely to become law would establish a 6G task force at the Federal Communications Commission.

Mike Nawrocki, an electrical engineer who’s helping to helm efforts at the Next G Alliance, said that in coming weeks the group will also release top 6G research priorities — about 100 different topics the alliance wants policymakers to focus on.

“There’s a lot of money being spent on research right now, both government funded and industry,” Nawrocki said. “I think it’s really important if we can align at a national level around a set of research goals. What are we trying to achieve with 6G? How would it impact other industries? How would it impact society?”

But wireless analyst Roger Entner, who watched similar claims being made about 5G several years ago, said he fears this new industry report just trots out the same promises.

“If you replace the number 6 with the number 5, you would not be able to tell the difference — because it’s nothing new in there,” Entner told me. “That’s what they pitched 5G on. … I almost felt like that white paper, I would compare it to fan fiction of a Star Trek novel — putting it somewhat in the future, not having the imagination to actually come up with something mind-blowing.”

biggest little blockchain

Reno, Nevada is putting its history on the blockchain.

Mayor Hillary Schieve this week announced that BlockApps, a blockchain software company, has digitized the city records linked to around a dozen properties and placed them on a blockchain. While the pilot is relatively small in size, Schieve said she hopes to extend the technology to other city services to make it easier for residents to access public records and track the progress of municipal projects.

“I think as a mayor, it’s important to open those doors and help foster that creativity in City Hall,” Schieve said in an interview. “Government does need to be aggressive with technology because – quite honestly – government was left behind with Web 2.0.” — Sam Sutton

afternoon snack

At the birth of this newsletter, we talked about the seeming pointlessness of fast food in the metaverse. Now, the all-too-frequent antecedent to fast food consumption (and video gaming, for that matter) has also arrived in the virtual world: cannabis use.

Pot marketers increasingly view the metaverse as valuable real estate, hoping to not only hock their wares to smoke-friendly gamers, but also skirt moderation policies on traditional digital platforms like Facebook that ban cannabis advertising. (That’s not to mention kid-centric metaverse-like spaces such as Roblox, which have enough issues of their own with adult content already.)

It’s easy to understand why the promoters of real-life, non-simulatable products like fast food or cannabis would want to put up their digital billboards in a headline-grabbing space like, for example, Decentraland, where storefronts like Kandy Girl will direct you to their website where you can order the real thing through good old Web 2.0.

The subject gets a little more thorny when you consider the unwieldy patchwork of cannabis regulations that still dot the U.S., despite its legalization for recreational use in 19 states. Cannabis e-commerce startups have raised serious money, but there are just as seriously unanswered questions about the continued federal ban (and the various questionably legal workarounds cannabis businesses currently use to sell to consumers in states that have legalized the drug.) Once again, the storefront might be virtual, but the regulatory hurdles are very real. — Derek Robertson

The Future In 5 Links

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Konstantin Kakaes ([email protected]); and Heidi Vogt ([email protected]).

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