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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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  • 0

    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

  • 0 in reply to mapj1

    The nth Gen mobile will be driven by the next big thing. We went from basic phones to Text messaging to photo exchanging to video conferencing, and so the persuit of the next big thing that will sell more phones, gain more engagement, etc. will continue.

    At the moment here in mountain Scotland we're having a rear guard action against ridiculous phone masts in wild areas where there are zero residents in the covered area. Apparently we need to encourage inexperienced instagrammers to 'navigate' into these wild areas they be rescued by the volunteer rescue teams.

    You can't win!

  • 0 in reply to Philip Oakley

    Hello Philip:

    For US rural locations the solution is/will be LEO satellite systems such as Space X "Starlink". directly linked to 5G phone service provided by T Mobile.

    Peter Brooks

    Palm Bay FL

      

  • 0 in reply to Peter Brooks

    Space X "Starlink" has a Whiff off Elon Musk.  After the stupid salute he did I will not touch it with a barge pole.  There is no place in society for Nazi salutes or similar.  Thus Tesla will never be on my radar either. 

  • 0 in reply to Sergio Fernandez

    Hello Sergio:

    Yesterday Google launched the first batch of their Leo satellites into Space.

    You will just have to wait another 5+ years for them to catch up to Space X.

    Peter Brooks

    Palm Bay FL 

  • 0 in reply to Sergio Fernandez

    Well eventually to cut out the North Americans, there may be a commercial arm to  IRIS, but for now it is concentrating on air traffic control,  for now you have a rather immature  Eutelsat (carrying OneWeb), SES, and Hispasat to consider - but these are all currently courting telcos, so the business model is that one village or town has a very high bandwidth ground-station, rather than selling lots of budget receivers at the level of householders.

    Starlink's currently unique point is that you take the receiver with  you, so you can set up anywhere on the planet that Starlink don't geo-fence, that is not too far north, and apply power and you are off and away.
    So ideal for installation into sea-going vessels, and vans that drive into the middle of open fields and deserts and so on.
    Mike.

Reply
  • 0 in reply to Sergio Fernandez

    Well eventually to cut out the North Americans, there may be a commercial arm to  IRIS, but for now it is concentrating on air traffic control,  for now you have a rather immature  Eutelsat (carrying OneWeb), SES, and Hispasat to consider - but these are all currently courting telcos, so the business model is that one village or town has a very high bandwidth ground-station, rather than selling lots of budget receivers at the level of householders.

    Starlink's currently unique point is that you take the receiver with  you, so you can set up anywhere on the planet that Starlink don't geo-fence, that is not too far north, and apply power and you are off and away.
    So ideal for installation into sea-going vessels, and vans that drive into the middle of open fields and deserts and so on.
    Mike.

Children
  • 0 in reply to mapj1

    Hello Mike

    My daughter lives in a rural part of Florida and does remote work from her home using Starlink. The original connection point was Atlanta but was recently changed (without any notification) to Miami.

    Once set up she has had no problems with the system.

    Peter Brooks

    Palm Bay FL  

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