6G Geopolitics: 6G Is Years Away, but the Power Struggles Have
Already Begun Equipment manufacturers and device makers are
squaring off
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When
wireless researchers or telecom companies talk about future
sixth-generation (6G) networks, they're talking mostly about
their best guesses and wish lists. There are as yet no widely
agreed upon technical standards outlining 6G's frequencies,
signal modulations, and waveforms. And yet the economic and
political forces that will define 6G are already in play.
And here's the biggest wrinkle: Because there are no major U.S.
manufacturers of cellular infrastructure equipment, the United
States may not have the superpowers it thinks it does in shaping
the future course of wireless communications.
While many U.S. tech giants will surely be involved in 6G
standards development, none of those companies make the
equipment that will comprise the network. Companies like
Ericsson (Sweden), Nokia (Finland), Samsung (South Korea), and
Huawei (China) build the radio units, baseband units, and other
hardware and software that go into cell towers and the wired
networks that connect them.
As one example, equipment manufacturers (such as China's Huawei
and ZTE) will probably push for standards that prioritize the
distance a signal can travel, while minimizing the interference
it experiences along the way. Meanwhile, device makers (like
U.S. heavyweights Apple and Alphabet) will have more stake in
standardizing signal modulations that drain their gadgets'
batteries the least.
How such squabbles might be resolved, of course, is still an
open question. But now is arguably the best time to begin asking
it.
6G is—and isn't yet—around the corner. When the Global
Communications Conference (Globecom) begins in Madrid this
December, attending researchers and telecom executives will find
it features no fewer than five workshops devoted to 6G
development. Compare that to the 2020 iteration of the IEEE
Communication Society's annual conference, which—pandemic not
withstanding—included nothing 6G related beyond a 4-hour summit
on the topic. And if you step back one year further to Globecom
2019, you'll find that 6G was limited to a single technical
talk.
Cellular standards are developed and overseen by a global
cellular industry consortium, the 3rd Generation Partnership
Project (3GPP). Past wireless generations coalesced around
universally agreed-upon standards relatively smoothly. But early
research into 6G is emerging in a more tense geopolitical
environment, and the quibbles that arose during 5G's
standardization could blossom into more serious disagreements
this time around.
At the moment, says Mehdi Bennis, a professor of wireless
communications at the University of Oulu, in Finland, home of
the 6G Flagship research initiative, the next generation of
wireless standards is quite open ended. "Nobody has a clear
idea. We maybe have some pointers."
To date, 6G has been discussed in terms of applications
(including autonomous vehicles and holographic displays) and
research interests—such as terahertz waves and spectrum sharing.
So for the next few years, whenever a so-called "6G satellite"
is launched, for example, take it with a grain of salt: It just
means someone is testing technologies that may make their way
into the 6G standards down the line.
But such tests, although easily overhyped and used to set
precedents and score points, are still important. The reason
each generation of wireless—2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G—has been so
successful is because each has been defined by standards that
have been universally implemented. In other words, a network
operator in the United States like AT&T can buy equipment from
Swedish manufacturer Ericsson to build its cellular network, and
everything will function with phones made in China because
they're drawing on the same set of agreed-upon standards.
(Unfortunately however, you'll still run into problems if you
try to mix and match infrastructure equipment from different
manufacturers.)
5G and its predecessors have been successful because they've
been universally implemented. 6G still has time to congeal—or
not.
In 2016, as the standards were being sorted out for 5G, a clash
emerged in trying to decide what error-correcting technique
would be used for wireless signals. Qualcomm, based in San
Diego, and other companies pushed for low-density parity checks
(LDPC), which had been first described decades earlier but had
yet to materialize commercially. Huawei, backed by other Chinese
companies, pushed for a new technique in which it had invested a
significant amount of time and energy that it called polar
codes. A deadlock at the 3GPP meeting that November resulted in
a split standard: LDPC would be used for radio channels that
send user data and polar codes for channels that coordinated
those user-data channels.
That Huawei managed to take polar codes from a relatively
unknown mathematical theory and almost single-handedly develop
it into a key component of 5G led to some proclamations that the
company (and by extension, China) was winning the battle for 5G
development. The implicit losers were Europe and the United
States. The incident made at least one thing abundantly clear:
There is a lot of money, prestige, and influence in the offing
for a company that gets the tech it's been championing into the
standards.
In May 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security added
Huawei to its Entity List—which places requirements on, or
prohibits, importing and exporting items. Sources that IEEE
Spectrum spoke to noted how the move increased tensions in the
wireless industry, echoing concerns from 2019. "We are already
seeing the balkanization of technology in many domains. If this
trend continues, companies will have to create different
products for different markets, leading to even further
divergence," Zvika Krieger, the head of technology policy at the
World Economic Forum told MIT Technology Review at the time of
the ban. The move curtailed the success Huawei originally saw
from its 5G standards wins, with the rotating chairman, Eric Xu,
recently saying that the company's cellphone revenue will drop
by US $30 billion to $40 billion this year from a reported
$136.7 billion in 2020.
As fundamental research continues into what technologies and
techniques will be implemented in 6G, it's too early to say what
the next generation's version of polar codes will be, if any.
But already, different priorities are emerging in the values
that companies and governments in different parts of the world
want to see enshrined in any standards to come.
"There are some unique, or at least stronger, views on things
like personal liberty, data security, and privacy in Europe, and
if we wish our new technologies to support those views, it needs
to be baked into the technology," said Colin Willcock, the
chairman of the board for the Europe-based 6G Smart Networks and
Services Industry Association, speaking at the Brooklyn 6G
Summit in October. Bennis agrees: "In Europe, we're very keen on
privacy, that's a big, big, I mean, big requirement." Bennis
notes that privacy is being built into 5G "a posteriori" as
researchers tack it onto the established standards. The European
Union has previously passed laws protecting personal data and
privacy such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
So how will concepts like privacy, security, or sustainability
be embedded in 6G—if at all? For instance, one future version of
6G could include differential privacy, in which data-set
patterns are shared without sharing individual data points. Or
it could include federated learning, a machine learning
technique that instead of being trained on a centralized data
set uses one scattered across multiple locations—thereby
effectively anonymizing information that malicious actors in a
network might otherwise put to nefarious purposes. These
techniques are already being implemented in 5G networks by
researchers, but integrating them into 6G standards would give
them more weight.
The Washington, D.C.–based Alliance for Telecommunications
Industry Solutions launched the Next G Alliance in October 2020
to strengthen U.S. technological leadership in 6G over the
course of the next decade. Mike Nawrocki, the alliance's
managing director, says the alliance is taking a "holistic"
approach to 6G's development. "We're really trying to look at it
from the perspective of what are some of the big societal
drivers that we would envision for the end of the decade,"
Nawrocki says, citing as one example the need to connect
industries previously unconcerned with the wireless industry
such as health care and agriculture.
If different regions—the United States, Europe, China, Japan,
South Korea, and so on—find themselves at loggerheads about how
to define certain standards or support incompatible policies
about the implementations or applications of 6G networks, global
standards could ultimately, in a worst-case scenario,
disintegrate. Different countries could decide it's easier to go
it alone and develop their own 6G technologies without global
cooperation. This would result in balkanized wireless
technologies around the world. Smartphone users in China might
find their phones unable to connect with any other wireless
network outside their country's borders. Or, for instance, AT&T
might, in such a scenario, no longer buy equipment from Nokia
because it's incompatible with AT&T 's network operations.
Although that's a dire outcome, the industry consensus is that
it's not likely yet—but certainly more plausible than for any
other wireless generation.
This article appears in the December 2021 print issue as
"Geopolitics Is Already Shaping 6G."
Michael Koziol -
IEEE Spectrum
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About TACS
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