The 6G Reset (with Dean Bubley)

Dean Bubley and a group of industry colleagues made a proposition to reset 6G. neXt Curve could not resist but to bring Dean on to chat about the intent behind this call to arms of sorts.  

Dean joins Leonard Lee discuss the need to reset 6G and Dean's proposal that we take a “maximum usefulness” approach that prioritizes addressing customer needs, improving coverage, reducing energy consumption, and making 6G more inclusive and affordable.Dean Bubley or Disruptive Analysis joins Leonard Lee of neXt Curve to 

Dean & Leonard discuss the following topics regarding the proposal to reset 6G:

• What's wrong with 6G? (2:03)
• The 5G digestion issue - a contributing factor? (3:15)
• The 3 ideologies of 6G (4:06)
• The argument for maximum usefulness (6:09)
• The ITU vision of 6G: IMT 2030 - pros and cons (9:06)
• Dean's grading of the IMT 2030 vision (13:07)
• The "everyone and their dog" problem of 6G (16:25)
• 5G cans kicked down the 6G road (20:33)
• What's the deal with the Reset 6G? (23:43)

Connect with Dean Bubley at www.deanbubley.com.  

Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout - https://nextcurvepodcast.buzzsprout.c... - or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.  

Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter.

Chapters

• 2:03 What's wrong with 6G?
• 3:15 The 5G digestion issue - a contributing factor?
• 4:06 The 3 ideologies of 6G
• 6:09 The argument for maximum usefulness
• 9:06 The ITU vision of 6G: IMT 2030 - pros and cons
• 13:07 Dean's grading of the IMT 2030 vision
• 16:25 The "everyone and their dog" problem of 6G
• 20:33 5G cans kicked down the 6G road
• 23:43 What's the deal with the Reset 6G?

Transcript

Leonard Lee: 0:01

Next curve. Hi everyone. Welcome to Next Curve's rethink webcast. I hope you like my new voice, um, courtesy of a little bit of a bug I had over the weekend, but, um, yes, we cover the tech and industry topics and happenings that matter. And I'm Leonard Lee, executive analyst at Next Curve. Today I'm joined by the famously notorious. Is that good this time famously notorious?

Dean Bubley: 0:35

I'll take that one. Notoriously famous. You can do it. You can do it.

Leonard Lee: 0:38

I don't know. Maybe that's like overloading it. Usually notorious people are pretty famous, right? But

Dean Bubley: 0:44

my apologies for the reflections in my glasses. Sorry, I'm not wearing contacts today. And I realized that they, my screens in front of me. That's giving me a funny, distracting look with the way I've got the camera set up. So, yeah,

Leonard Lee: 0:57

everyone can read the teleprompter notes that you have running in front of your face. But anyways, yes, this is Dean Bubbly. Disruptive analysis. How's it going my friend? It's been a while

Dean Bubley: 1:11

It has been Yeah, pretty good a little bit of a lot of events recently a few other bits of travel some more coming up over the next few weeks some interesting things just Doing my first conference in asia for a while in november, which i'm looking forward to

Leonard Lee: 1:26

Yeah Nice to cruise on over there, but Welcome, Dean, and in this episode, everybody, and I'm talking to everybody, not you at the moment, Dean we will be talking about resetting 6G. And before we get started, remember to like, share, and comment on this episode and subscribe to the Rethink Podcast. Here on YouTube and on Buzzsprout, take us on the road and on your jog, and on your favorite, listen to us on your favorite podcast platform. And with that Dean, you're stirring up trouble. What's this I hear, what's this I hear about resetting 6G? What's wrong with 6G?

Dean Bubley: 2:03

Uh, well, what's wrong with 6G? Okay, so I've been following the evolution of 6G pretty much since, the discussions kicked off halfway through discussions about 5G, we were already talking about the next thing. I'll be honest, I've been slightly concerned about the directions of some of what I've heard discussed. It just seems to be that we haven't learned the lessons from 5G of what went well, what didn't go well, what we over promised, what we under delivered, what took time. Who was involved in the conversation, what the objectives were, the predictions, and so together with a couple of others, so you may be familiar with William Webb, or Professor William Webb, who writes a lot of books on wireless technologies, and Jeff Hollingworth, who's had various roles, but currently works with Rakuten, but this is all on his own. his own time. We put together this sort of three of us noodling on it for some months as to how do we help the industry help itself? You read my stuff and part of my role seems to be to pointing out the elephant in the room. And I think there's a whole herd of them in the six G room at the moment.

Leonard Lee: 3:15

Yeah. I would agree. I've been following, I myself probably about the same time you're attracting all this stuff. Pretty much when the 6G early phases of the 6G conversation were happening, I was tuning in. Quite frankly, I started tuning out because it just became really far departed from where I thought the problems really were. Coming off of what we were witnessing with 5G, right? I think it boils down to a digestion problem and the technology may be getting ahead of itself, but I don't know. I want to get your take, but just wanted to share I guess it does some early disillusionment has been with 6G and then with now this, the framework coming out is a lot of head scratching for me. But. Yeah, that's where I am now with this stuff, right?

Dean Bubley: 4:06

The way I characterize it is I see there's three possible ideologies or philosophies to 6G. There is the first one, which is almost like the sort of maximalist of approach of dial, turn everything up to 11, maximize throughput, Expand the spider diagram on all axes, come up with a new set of fantasy use cases. So we had in the 5G hype era, we had autonomous vehicles and robotic remote surgery. And for 6G, we're getting cyber physical systems. And I'm not joking. I've seen this on a slide. The internet of nano bio things. Obviously lots of immersive this and metaverse the other. You can date some of the six G hype to alignment with the metaverse cycle. I've seen people talk about Ertz spectrum and can we make it walk, work under water and all sorts of things which are nothing really to do with the mission of what ultimately is a mobile technology. So I stereotype that rather unfairly is the sort of metaverse for Dolphin's vision. And that's the sort of a mix of some of the vendors talk that up. And also there's a fair tranche about academia in that camp as well, where clearly they want to do research on the cutting edge of stuff that hasn't been researched before. So it's understandable. On the other side, I think increasingly I'm seeing a lot of the mobile operators having the digestion problems you mentioned before. They're almost like thinking yeah, maybe if I can take some antacid tablets and we'll come back to it a bit later. The line I heard from one CTIO in Europe was, I want to have this for the Brisbane Olympics, not LA. And I want it to be essentially a software upgrade. And so that's the sort of gentle evolution of 5G. Don't change the status quo. Leave it for the existing ecosystem and mobile operator concept. And, that to my mind is dialing it right down. I'm almost like putting the mute button up.

Leonard Lee: 6:08

Yeah.

Dean Bubley: 6:09

So what we're the three of us, and we all got slightly different views on bits of this, but we're all fairly aligned on the main principle is what I refer to as maximum usefulness and actually go out to whether it's to essentially ask customers, users, but also governments, other stakeholders like enterprises, What problems should 6G be fixing? What are the things that 5G hasn't done? What do we want to have improved in the future? And so it's things like, better coverage, whether that's in rural areas or indoors at decent cost on day one, not as an afterthought. A lot of other things. So 5G, the indoor 5G is being focused on now, but that's 10 years too late. Yeah, for rural that might mean satellite or high altitude platforms. There's, it might be more use of network and infrastructure sharing to change the economics. It should also be lower energy, not some spurious metric like energy per bit, but actually lower absolute energies. Ideally affordable for developing world. If we're serious about the sort of connecting the unconnected messaging. Let's be honest. 5G hasn't connected the unconnected. Yeah, pretty much everyone who's got a 5G phone today has previously had a 4G or 3G one. An awful lot of people are buying 3G and 4G. And the other side of it is to make it more inclusive in terms of stakeholders. So we've seen this variety of private networks and enterprises in, shared networks that are run by, could be tower companies or infrastructure companies or neutral hosts. And it's almost like to democratize 6G, rather than start with the principle of, it's just, it's going to be MNOs. And then maybe the rest is an afterthought. So that's the type of philosophy that would say maximum usefulness.

Leonard Lee: 7:54

Yeah, and I think it also has to be balanced. It has to. Okay, so here's 1 of the impressions I got is as I was looking at what they were doing with the I guess you call it the use case diagram. And it's something that you've marked up as part of the 16 reset is that it seems to be losing a bit of its focus on what let's say what's the technology quote unquote technology is not really. It's collection of technologies, right? And then it's ideally progressing mobile wireless. Infrastructure in a new direction and hopefully forward, not backwards, but it seems overloaded with a lot of stuff. Things like security sustainability. Are you going to are we delaying this stuff until 6G or isn't that just a treatment or some priorities that we that are more near term and are detached from the technology evolution and, the evolution of the infrastructure itself, right? These are like givens that we should have today. I don't know your take was there.

Dean Bubley: 9:06

I would agree. And certainly, I think 1 of the things when you look at the document framework document is worth here, slightly different. There's slightly different problems with the sort of ITU vision of what they call IMT 2030. Yeah. And then what gets done for whether it's in 3G PP or other organizations to create technology standards that then are submitted to ITU for ratification as IM 2030. official or compliant technology. It's worth saying that the keeper of the G's really is the ITU, but 3GPP was a bit sneaky in the 5G era and called its proposed technology 5G NR. So it's Yeah, almost like stole the G branding a little bit. So ITU version now ITU is obviously it's a UN agency. And so they have to sit around the table with 190 countries or however many people were in working parties. And so there's a fair amount of diplomacy and geopolitics that go and compromise that come into the, go into that document. And yeah I wasn't there, but I've got a fair, a certain amount of insight into some of what was discussed and some things which were controversial and the trading points. And so I accept that, clearly the people who put it together had a very difficult balancing act to come out with something that was at least half acceptable to everyone in the room. But but luckily I have the privilege of not having to negotiate with 190 countries, I can say what I think. And so I can criticize bits of it that I like and that I don't like. I think that some of the things there that you mentioned, yes, sustainability and security ought to be a given, but that comes, there are a few things that are specific, so you want to have maybe quantum safe encryption. It's an obvious spot for security, which people do talk about for 5G, but I quite like it designed in to 6G up front. Same thing for sustainability for 5G. It was this sort of metric of energy per bit, and I really don't like it. The per bit metrics, whether it's cost a bit or energy per bit, because there's too much when you double click on that, the sort of obscure is what's really going to a great event and someone put up a straw man up discussion saying, well, why don't we just divide 6G as being 5G, but using half the energy? I just leave it at that, and actually that would be good. But obviously there's other stuff where I really disagree with some of the stuff on the ITU wheel is that this focus on immersive and XR, that, that was temporarily cool about three, four years ago and all this was starting to be discussed, but it's now looking quite niche. And if we did it today, we would probably say, Oh, actually it's going to be, Generate gen AI centric or whatever it is, and I'm sure by 2030, there's gonna be something else. So I think that this sort of XR is an interesting set of use cases and problems, but I don't think that should be central to any vision of 6G. The other one, which I'm I really disagree with is this idea from some in that. That community that it will define the future of computing and distributed computing and that's a bit of a sort of edge compute or mech on steroids approach where essentially the mobile industry is turning up to the distributed computing party late and trying to say hey we're going to sort all this out for you and that Compute and cloud industries is looking at it and going You're the customer not the supplier or defining what the future of computing is. Thank you anyway So I think that yeah, there's a bit of mobile industry hubris baked into that. Yeah, I say I'm sure people can take issues with individual things I put, I pointed out, but I just thought that as a starting point, we've got this diagram. I think I haven't seen it. If you can get it in the ITU. Yeah, yeah,

Leonard Lee: 13:07

I have it up. Yeah. Just speak to it. So you've gone and you've labeled each of the elements of this wheel of the real world, as they call it, or is that what you call it?

Dean Bubley: 13:22

What I've called it, it's what I've called it. Yeah reset, he's basically saying, Yeah, I've essentially graded the various bits on that. And I think it's a big document behind it. And I go through it line by line and critique it, but this is the first part and I've just categorized it into yeah, refined review and reset or green, yellow, and red. We all know what that means. Yeah, and it's a starting point. It's there for discussion. And if what I would say is that the whole premise behind 16 reset is it's the sort of evolving and almost like it's the minimum viable Organization and it will evolve over time. It's very much taking some of the sort of software type thinking of let's put something out there, test it against everyone and refine and iterate as necessary, rather than trying to find everything in one goal and then realize you got it wrong later on. And so it's an initiative, but it's a fluid thing. And this was a stake in the ground and I'm quite happy to go into various aspects and revise over time.

Leonard Lee: 14:20

Yeah, no, it's good stuff. I might disagree with a few of these things. So it seems like Dean, you're picking on some of my research, which is maybe I think, maybe some folks might take on the opportunity to have you and I on stage and battling it out on some of these things. I think it would make for great. pay-per-view entertainment. I,

Dean Bubley: 14:42

I I'll be up for that. Things like the other one, the massive iot, we've had, we're essentially, we're still using the 4G view version of iot. Yeah. Things like mbt. We've just got red cap coming into view for 5G. The idea, I've suddenly seeing forecasts again, oh, there's gonna be trillions of connected devices. We are gonna add in every RFID sensor or sensor in there. I'm like. Those aren't going to be using mobile technology. Yeah, some of them aren't even going to be wireless. Yeah, if you've got a connected device in a factory, if it needs power for example, it's a complex sensor or it's a something with a moving part, you'll probably use power over ethernet or USB because you need electricity as well as as well as connectivity. Yeah, again, it's just this seems to be the mobile industry trying to do everything and I realized that there's this clamor of everyone who's got stuff in R& D at the moment, and there's thousands of possibilities and everyone's shouting me, me, me, me, me. Yeah, put my thing in the standard for obvious reasons, and we're gonna have to funnel it down. But I would probably say that the funnel needs to be a bit sharper.

Leonard Lee: 15:52

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think at the moment, when I look at this diagram, this wheel, the IMT 2030 6G wheel, it's too complex. It's too much for folks to digest I don't think it helps to shop to do exactly what you're talking about sharpen the conversation. And I think, yeah, definitely prioritization is going to be an important next step. And I think just driving things from the. Operator

Dean Bubley: 16:25

everyone on their robot dog has had some input into this and as so can we can we add in, high altitude platforms in the strategy? Oh, yes, I think that's interesting and useful. It could play a role, but you don't necessarily need it in the main 6G standard the same way. Luckily on this, it hasn't got the underwater communications, but you know, there's a few specialist use cases, but you don't put that in, it's in the main standard by all means added on afterwards, but even then, now, this is ITU, if I look at what 3GPP has done, I'm literally this afternoon gone through 5G advanced or various versions of 5G and looked at all the new stuff in there All of the things aimed at particularly use cases or vertical. So there's various things for drones, for V2X, for device to device, for different sorts of IOT, for time sensitive networking, for obviously we know satellite. All these things how many actually have been commercialized? And it looks like 3GPP just churns out endless specifications in each iteration of the standards, and almost none of them actually seem to see the real world.

Leonard Lee: 17:37

Right, right. I mean, I think it goes back to the digestion issue, right? I think one of the things that you've mentioned, everyone's talking to me right now is there's a few operators who have made the transition to 5G standalone, right? Most operators still technically on 4G, right? And so a lot of these features are in the pipeline. The good news, is that the technologies are there. They're waiting. It's just that the operators much slower and taking up these technologies and as you say, commercializing them and getting any kind of ROI to. Have them come back to the well to take on the next release, right? I mean, it's really challenging.

Dean Bubley: 18:24

The other thing is that you don't just have to go to stand alone. You have to make sure it's available everywhere to everyone at the point. And so do you think about that is how do you get 5g stand alone working? And I use this example, someone with a virtual reality or an engineer with an augmented reality headset. Fixing an elevator, implied a concrete lift shaft, right? I'm pretty sure that's not going to be using real time 5G AR to the outside world and server if you're inside the core of a building in the lift shaft. That's an extreme example, but it could be your autonomous vehicle in an underground car park. It could be the mine. It could be agriculture in a remote area. It could be someone monitoring the maintenance for a power line going over a mountain range. There's not going to be public 5G SA with good performance in those areas. So then you think, well, where can I rely on that? And it, maybe you'll get specific places. It could be a sports stadium, maybe the sort of main urban core, the sort of square mile or kilometre of the business district. But that is very constrained, or it could be an enterprise if they build a private 5G network. But yeah, those are quite constrained. And I think that a lot of the suggested use cases need, if not ubiquitous coverage, then at least very good coverage indeed. Then you've got the timing issue, is that we're only now getting, let's say, to standalone. And this is release 15 standalone in a lot of cases. Yeah. And so in theory, you then got releases 20, and then 6G is supposed to be released 21. Some of the features will come in release 20, in 20 rather than 21. What's the cycle time between each of those? Or are we just going to pick and choose and we do, oh, Redcap's in release 17. We'll have some of that. Maybe there's something in 19. We'll, we'll add that in. And so do we end up with this sort of buffet style? Bits and pieces of the different releases and standards that have some sort of harmonization. It doesn't make sense to me.

Leonard Lee: 20:33

Right. No, I agree with you. To me, it seems like 6G in its current form it has an identity crisis. Up against 5G, right? And it seems like when my first impression of this is, it's just a bunch of 5G advanced 5, 5G, 5. 5 point 5. 5 G cans kicked down the road, that was my initial impression to a large extent. I think it's true. But I know that. In your prelude toward, setting up a 6G reset, you were pretty harsh on 5G as you have been up to this point. But, 5G,

Dean Bubley: 21:11

I viewed it as a moderate upgrade. Yeah, it allows more capacity. It's it's more efficient in some ways. I just don't think that a lot of the fancier features and services that were being pitched or certainly not all this sort of, ah, trillions of dollars of GDP up there. It's just massively overhyped.

Leonard Lee: 21:29

Yeah, I agree with you on the hype. I think the technology, however, is there, there's definitely a Let's say a penetration that a minimum penetration that has to happen markets to unleash a lot of what you described before in terms of coverage and ubiquity that definitely has taken a lot longer. But I think that's what we suffer with each of the quote unquote generations of mobile wireless technologies. Right? I think it's just at this time. It's much more the promise was in the hype was much more expansive. And I think everyone really just went nuts with it. But, yeah,

Dean Bubley: 22:10

including politicians and regulators as well. And I think that the industry, it overlooked the coverage issue, it also overlooked just how much of a heavy lift it was to go to a cloud native standalone core. I think there's a whole bunch of the sort of cloud bit of this, whether it's the security, the automation, the platforms. public cloud, all of that stuff. And at the same time, people then started layering on stuff like open RAN and desegregation. So you ended up with three or trying to do three or four very complicated things. Oh, within the interdependencies between them all. And you were, you're throwing in new spectrum bands that reduce your propagation or increase your energy consumption. It was basically too much with too many interdependencies and yeah, surprisingly ground to a halt in some cases.

Leonard Lee: 23:03

Yeah. Okay. I generally agree with you. Not on everything, which is fine, because you and I sometimes don't see eye to eye and that's okay. I think that's perfectly okay.

Dean Bubley: 23:17

So what we're trying to do with 6G Reset is try to sort of start beta with You know

Leonard Lee: 23:23

what, you're reading my mind. It's really creepy. I was just about to ask you that. You're a very strange person that I, it must be true. I am The Dean bubbly on the other side of the pond. We must have some quantum entanglement going on there, Dean. Excellent. Go ahead.

Dean Bubley: 23:43

Yeah. So I was saying, so what we're trying to do is try to reset six G talk discussion in terms of real world requirements and also what can realistically be delivered. Yeah, obviously we want some aspiration there as well, but essentially rather than having it be led by. The maximalist view or the reduce the risks to the status quo stance is actually say, well, we've got some concrete things we want to do. How do we start from radical idea? Start with the customer. What do people want? What do people want? And actually, if you ask people what the consumers, what they want is they want reliable performance. If you ask enterprises what they want it's probably, it's more control, it's more visibility, it's getting stuff done quickly, because a lot of things, one of the reasons that private networks have taken off is because the public network versions of everything. It's come with a five year timeline and or longer and a, and then getting having to pay extra for the privilege. Yeah, so I think that there's the requirement for multi stakeholderism is very, very. Trendy word, but essentially lots of different types of organizations being involved, whether it's enterprises, governments cities, as well as operators, but also things like infracodes. Sometimes there's complaints about lack of investment. Well, the easiest way to change that is diversify the base that could invest. And so I think it's appeal and democratize the technology and It really is to have honest conversations and to try to get away from the inertia effects. One of the things that I look at is the role of technology lock in either for a specific vendor but also technology families and we tend to have this sort of inertia effect there is often an expectation that you will do an upgrade of existing infrastructure to new infrastructure, which therefore makes it difficult for new entrants to participate. I think we need to think carefully about how we manage that. I think it's looking at different commercial models. I think that governments need to take a view on this as well as to either what do they want for their citizens. But also we're going to have some fairly thorny but we need to be honest about are we going to end up with one version of 6G? I would say there is a reasonable probability 30, 40 percent we're going to see some form of divergence. So there will be a need to use maybe some sort of clever AI glue to create hybrids. I haven't mentioned AI until now, I just realized. Yeah yeah, I think, Yeah, as the thing I pointed out and I'm doing my workshop on it in London in a month or so's time is I think we need to design it for the real world rather than the world we can fantasize about or put up as a sci fi fantasy or just perpetuate the status quo. And the real world is unfortunately more complicated than both of those visions.

Leonard Lee: 26:49

Actually, it sounds more like a Spinal Tap Rocky documentary. Rocky mentary? Isn't that what it is? Did Spinal Tap come up? I mean, you said turning up to 11, so I figured.

Dean Bubley: 26:59

I thought I used the Spinal Tap analogy rather than, I'm not going to default to things like Monty Python, and I'm not sure how. How that, well that internationalizes, but yeah. Oh, it's very

Leonard Lee: 27:10

international, trust me. I grew up on Monty Python, so it would resonate. As

Dean Bubley: 27:16

I want, I'm not 6G, but I once wrote an entire blog post about RCS messaging which was essentially channeling. I rewrote the parrot sketch, the dead parrot sketch line by line talking about RCS. That's for another time, I think. So what we've done is at the moment it's not like a an organization or a membership, and we don't have any funds or sponsors or paid membership. There's a on LinkedIn there, if you look at six year reset, there is both a sort of a company page or organization page, which is the way LinkedIn. Runs itself, but we also have a discussion group, which is yeah, apply for an invitation. And we do police who's involved in that. We try to keep it on the Chatham house rules, but inevitably, we're going to have to recognize that once you get to large enough number of people, people will, people will start sharing information, but it's to be non corporate and to have honest discussions about what can we do How can we take the sort of philosophy of anchoring all this stuff in the real world out into our organizations and events and it's something that essentially it's decentralized pragmatism, I guess,

Leonard Lee: 28:25

decentralized pragmatism.

Dean Bubley: 28:28

I just invented, I just invented that phrase. So I'm curious, you're my beta test on that.

Leonard Lee: 28:35

Wonderful. This is awesome to have Dean bubbly inventing things on my podcast. So wonderful. Dean, thank you so much for your time and thanks for sharing. I'm glad you jumped on and. Explain to yourself,

Dean Bubley: 28:49

thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And if anyone has to reach out to me, I'll say if you want to join six year reset on LinkedIn or have me as well. And I'm more than happy to discuss with people publicly or privately.

Leonard Lee: 29:01

Are you reading something off my glasses? Because you know what? You're like, I don't know if you're moderating or I'm moderating, but you are like, we don't have a script by the way, but you are. You were reading my mind, my friend. This is awesome. Wonderful, and so I might occasionally chime in on your 6G Reset community discussions, and hopefully we can together everyone set goals. 6G in a better direction. Dean, thank you so much for being on again, once again. And Hey everyone thanks for tuning in and listening in on Dean Bubley and his thoughts on a 6G reset. Please subscribe to the Next Curve YouTube channel. The easiest thing to do is subscribe to the next Curve music portal@www.next curve.com for a constant diet of the tech and industry inside stat matter. Steve. Thank you,

Dean Bubley: 29:54

Leonard. Thanks.