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Rethinking 6G - Is the worldwide race to expand mobile bandwidth a fool's errand?

Peter Brooks

The latest IEEE Spectrum magazine (March 2025) had an excellent article with the above title.

It makes the point that the growth of mobile data usage is slowing and will soon fall to zero by 2027.

If the current 4G and 5G services are improved within their existing capabilities then no existing or future consumer applications will require 6G.

6G will just become viable for only special applications and will not provide adequate ROI for wireless communication suppliers.

As an example consider what happened when large screen 3D Television was introduced to the consumer market.

  

   

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    There is also a fundamental problem with radio systems, that the bandwidth vs power trade-off  is limited, and beyond a certain point the only way to increase capacity is to drop power and move the base-stations closer together. (as we did moving from GSM - kilo-metric cell spacing to 3g - base stations a few hundred metres apart in town centres with extra fill-in at hot spots) There is no easy radio equivalent of running another cable or fibre  beside the old one to double capacity and there is a problem of providing power and data backhaul links to all the base stations as you have more of them.

    It may be that 6g is indeed a bridge too far - and the expense of building yet more radios into a handset  may not be justifiable.

    Historically there has been a tendency for software to expand to use all capacity available even if not required - but maybe not in the world of pay by the megabyte or pay by the kilowatt.
    Mike

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    There is also a fundamental problem with radio systems, that the bandwidth vs power trade-off  is limited, and beyond a certain point the only way to increase capacity is to drop power and move the base-stations closer together. (as we did moving from GSM - kilo-metric cell spacing to 3g - base stations a few hundred metres apart in town centres with extra fill-in at hot spots) There is no easy radio equivalent of running another cable or fibre  beside the old one to double capacity and there is a problem of providing power and data backhaul links to all the base stations as you have more of them.

    It may be that 6g is indeed a bridge too far - and the expense of building yet more radios into a handset  may not be justifiable.

    Historically there has been a tendency for software to expand to use all capacity available even if not required - but maybe not in the world of pay by the megabyte or pay by the kilowatt.
    Mike

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