It’s Time To Rethink 6GIt’s not more bandwidth that users need
by
William Webb, spectrum.ieee.org, 10 Feb. 2025
Is the worldwide race to keep expanding mobile bandwidth a fool’s errand? Could maximum data speeds—on
mobile devices, at home, at work—be approaching “fast enough” for most people for most purposes?
These heretical questions are worth asking, because industry bandwidth tracking data has lately been revealing something surprising: Terrestrial and mobile-data growth is slowing down. In fact, absent a dramatic change in consumer tech and
broadband usage patterns, data-rate demand appears set to top out below 1 billion bits per second (1 gigabit per second) in just a few years.
This is a big deal. A presumption of endless growth in wireless and terrestrial broadband
data rates has for decades been a key driver behind telecom research funding. To keep telecom’s R&D engine rooms revving, research teams around the world have innovated a seemingly endless succession of technologies to expand bandwidth rates, such as 2G’s
move to digital cell networks, 3G’s
enhanced data-transfer capabilities, and 5G’s
low-latency wireless connectivity.