6G: The app developer's G
It’s an assault on the dreamer’s delicate heart when in the same late hour they come across an article from Light Reading on how Asian 5G users are disappointed their new network didn’t come with new apps and experiences [1], an article from ZDNet on how the best of 5G is yet to come because the most exciting applications haven’t been dreamed of yet [2], and a white paper on the European vision for the 6G network ecosystem with admirable goals (see above), with programmable being most relevant to this post, but that radar chart on the right which everyone will surely gravitate to, at the risk of ignoring everything difficult but actually transformative on the left. [3]
Build it and they will come!
I dearly believe in this saying. What’s implicit in it though, something that seems to get overlooked every G in the zeal to boldly go where no cellular standardization community has gone before, are a few important things.
You do need to build doors to let them in and go back out. You’re building an attraction, not a fort or a prison. Application programming interfaces (API), where each letter in that acronym is a non-negotiable ingredient of the minimum viable product, should come before the code, the details of the attraction you’re building or the system you’re standardizing. That’s how I was taught in university as the right way to architect software - define the building blocks and the interfaces between them before coding the blocks.
If done right, a good standard should eliminate roadblocks for developers wanting to create apps for whichever G is being built, to help them focus on actually delivering the revolutionary experiences we wish they would. For starters, the standard should be written in a language developers understand and have come to expect from best practices in their world, which isn’t usually the one RF experts live in. If we want the next G to be the platform society builds on, we're going to have to speak the language of the builders. The throughputs, latencies, network capacities, device densities, energy efficiencies, and location accuracies can be realized along the way, as the apps get built.
References:
[1] Light Reading: 5G consumers unhappy at lack of new services – study
[2] ZDNet: The most exciting applications of 5G Edge Cloud haven’t been dreamed of yet
[3] The 5G Infrastructure Association: European Vision for the 6G Network Ecosystem
Founder - TelcoLearn | Driving Innovation in 5G/6G Technologies | 5G/6G Expert | Open RAN Advocate | Passionate Educator & Mentor | Building the Future of Telco Training
3 年Amazing Write up Pratik Das . In a way, I feel that 5G is being hyped beyond what It can achieve (or will take long time to achieve) and that may be one major reason for disappointment
Product Technology Chapter Lead at Telstra
3 年Interesting write up and I'll respond with a long one ?? You mention the disappointment in Asia of 5G. To me there has been a large disconnect between what 5G is marketed as and technically what is possible. Where "Gs" were originally around a large technical standard uplift, ie a generation, that may deliver new or enhanced capabilities (eg 4G RAN is defined in the 36 series 3GPP specification, 5G RAN is in the 38 series), it has also has become increasingly about marketing. The initial 5G has been the most incremental of changes compared to a previous generation of technology (5G could not be launched without 4G) yet in some part has been made out as the most revolutionary. I agree that in the longer term some more vision may be realised, just as early visions of 3G were possibly delivered a decade later with high speed 3G and 4G, however there has been a rush to put a 5G badge on everything, it's likely to lead to disappointment. Talk of 6G is this stage I really feel is getting on a marketing hype bandwagon (you can't afford not to be on it now) and is a result of 5G-wasn't-realised-like-we-said-so-let's-talk-about-6G, it's a compensatory measure to make up from the disconnect and disappointment between engineering and marketing on initial 5G rollouts. There is so much of the 5G standards that hasn't been realised, programmability being one, and it is very exciting but often only realised if there is a huge capital injection into networks which is a commercial issue, not technical - it becomes a chicken or the egg problem at this point, build-it-and-they-will-come business cases are not easy to get off the ground. At some stage some operator will say they have a "6G network" as a marketing term, just as we've seen technology based on "3G" standards marketed as 4G, and 4G capability as 5G (ie the "fake 5G" debate).? Your point though on standards being written for developers though I couldn't agree more with. There is a very large difference with how the "IT world" and "Telecoms world" has standards developed, with developers you're referring to in the former camp. Both have their pros and cons. Standards around the web have been incredibly successful through a distributed approach to standards whereas a more centralised European approach to standardisation has been very successful in wireless telecoms networks and killed off all the American based mobile technologies (CDMA, WiMAX). Hopefully we can see the best of both worlds in the future...or should I say 6G ??
Director Product Marketing and Industry Relations at Litmus | Ex-Elastic, Apple, Qualcomm | MBA | PMA Certified Sales Enablement, cert_0xc54gb4 | Certified Digital Marketing Professional
3 年Great outside-in outlook as we start discussing 6G.