It’s Time To Rethink 6G

It’s Time To Rethink 6G

It’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.

Yet present-day consumer usage appears set to throw a spanner in the works. Typical real-world 5G data rates today achieve up to 500 megabits per second for download speeds (and less for uploads). And some initial studies suggest 6G networks could one day supply data at 100 Gb/s. But the demand side of the equation suggests a very different situation.

Mainstream consumer applications requiring more than 1 Gb/s border on the nonexistent.

This is in part because mobile applications that need more than 15 to 20 Mb/s are rare, while mainstream consumer applications requiring more than 1 Gb/s border on the nonexistent.

At most, meeting the demand for multiple simultaneous active applications and users requires hundreds of Mb/s range. To date, no new consumer technologies have emerged to expand the bandwidth margins much beyond the 1 Gb/s plateau.

Yet wireless companies and researchers today still set their sights on a marketplace where consumer demand will gobble up as much bandwidth as can be provided by their mobile networks. The thinking here seems to be that if more bandwidth is available, new use cases and applications will spontaneously emerge to consume it.

Is that such a foregone conclusion, though? Many technologies have had phases where customers eagerly embrace every improvement in some parameter—until a saturation point is reached and improvements are ultimately met with a collective shrug.

Consider a very brief history of airspeed in commercial air travel. Passenger aircraft today fly at around 900 kilometers per hour—and have continued to traverse the skies at the same airspeed range for the past five decades. Although supersonic passenger aircraft found a niche from the 1970s through the early 2000s with the Concorde, commercial supersonic transport is no longer available for the mainstream consumer marketplace today.

To be clear, there may still be niche use cases for many gigabits per second of wireless bandwidth—just as there may still be executives or world leaders who continue to look forward to spanning the globe at supersonic speeds.

But what if the vast majority of 6G’s consumer bandwidth demand ultimately winds up resembling today’s 5G profile? It’s a possibility worth imagining.

Consider a Bandwidth-Saturated World

Continue reading:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/6g-bandwidth