White House Committed to U.S. Leadership on 6G

The White House is focused on 6G and wants the U.S. to lead the world, Caitlin Clarke, special assistant to President Joe Biden, said during the 6G Symposium Tuesday in Washington. “We need to think about where we need to be now, before the technology is in place -- we cannot catch up,” Clarke said. Other speakers warned that the U.S. is falling behind (see 2409230053).

The administration is “really focused” on 6G because of the “lessons learned on 5G,” Clarke said. “We are in a strategic competition on technology, and we need to be positioned before 6G comes out to be in a leadership position,” she said: “We need to have the technologies, we need to have the companies and … the standards to lead.”

Whoever is ahead on 6G “can lead … in a congested battlefield environment.” That country will “lead in the digital infrastructure and the critical infrastructure that we’re building for a cleaner economy,” she said: “All of that rides on our telecom infrastructure.”

Other nations that seek 6G leadership are subsidizing industry; “there’s not an even playing field,” Clarke said. The U.S. must focus on how government can “set up” the private sector “for success,” she said: “How do we align our research and development programs, our grant programs toward a common outcome so that we have a marketplace and vendors who can succeed in a 6G market?”

Clarke stressed the importance of open networks. “6G needs to be open from the get-go so that we can have more players in the technology.” The U.S. also needs to participate in standards bodies so that U.S. industry's “voice” is heard. “Those who shape the standards can help shape the technology, and we need to be leading on all of that.”

The big question for any wireless generation is whether carriers make money, said Ray Dolan, chairman and CEO of Cohere Technologies. Operators will increase their profits if they can move entire industries to their networks, he said. “If it’s not profitable for the operators, it’s not going to work,” he said: If carriers make money “it was a great 'G,' if they didn’t, it wasn’t so great.”

Carriers won’t support “another massive hardware upgrade,” Dolan said. They must “leverage” the open architecture becoming available in 5G “and allow the continued virtualization of the network to drive through software into 6G and beyond.”

Software, cloud and AI are "where right now the U.S. has a strategic advantage," Clarke said. “We need to put our foot on the gas and continue to accelerate in those areas,” she added. “Don’t look behind, just keep moving."

What 5G did was break open “the edge of the network,” said Tom Rondeau, principal director at DOD’s FutureG & 5G Office. 4G was more like a wireless Ethernet plug, “you didn’t even tie the applications into the network,” he said. With 5G you “get a window into the application and the network, and they fuse together right at the edge.”

DOD has spent $600 million on 5G test projects, Rondeau said. Industry spends $100 billion globally annually on R&D. What DOD has spent is “a drop in the bucket,” he said. “We’ve got to be really smart about how we use our money and where we invest.”

Mischa Dohler, Ericsson vice president-emerging technologies, is increasingly worried about availability of spectrum for 6G. “Let’s just be very clear here -- no spectrum, no 6G, as simple as that,” he said. “We need to get our act together.”

Dohler said the wireless industry is “overselling” what AI can do for the network, but “underselling” what generative AI could mean for traffic going over the network. Also worrying is the “imbalance of cash flow” among the carriers, he said. In the U.K., one major carrier is “very healthy” and a second isn’t. “Market forces dictate acquisition and the regulator says, ‘No, you can’t do it.’”

The most exciting thing about 6G is the potential for a richer ecosystem of devices and additional use cases, said Chris Christou, senior vice president at Booz Allen. Moving beyond 5G developments, new technologies like ambient IoT and reduced capability (RedCap) technology (see 2303270060) will mean “differentiated types of devices, more than just your smartphone and tablet,” he said.

It has been “really tough” to get new types of devices in play, Christou noted. In some cases, chipset manufacturers have developed them, but original equipment manufacturers vendors “don’t have them implemented.” Christou said: “The ecosystem has to continue to evolve” and the biggest concern “is just the upgradability of … networks” and integrating new technologies into the radio access network.