First-borns are supposedly insecure screw-ups, victims of the parental blundering that Philip Larkin wrote about in one of his most famous poems. With the subsequent offspring, the mistakes are said to be fewer and the product more stable. This is almost how parts of the telecom industry have come to think about the various generations of mobile technology birthed by the world's standards bodies. Odd generations are the experimental screw-ups. Even generations work.

It seems to hold true. The barely remembered 1G was essentially a practice run for the voice-based 2G, perhaps the most successful of all the Gs so far. Then came the multi-billion-dollar wastrel of 3G, the first attempt to transfer the Internet experience to mobile gadgets. Telcos nearly bankrupted themselves on spectrum licenses, gadgets were unusable and networks disappointed until 4G provided a fix. 5G is the lost generation, wandering and purposeless.

If the pattern were to last, it would augur promisingly for 6G. Just as 2G took mobile voice into the mass market, and 4G cleaned up after 3G's data communications mess, so 6G could learn from 5G's mistakes and succeed where that has failed. Right? The trouble is that no one can really say (at least, not succinctly) what 5G was designed to achieve, other than being a supercharged version of 4G. This differentiates it from 1G, the original mobile voice standard, and 3G, the first real mobile data effort.

Evidence of a 5G identity crisis can be found in the UK Competition and Markets Authority's ruminations on a proposed merger between Vodafone and Three. According to third-party feedback on aspects of the deal, 5G "standalone," the version with the boost of a new core network, "remains a nascent technology that has yet to develop widespread use cases," it said in a detailed paper. Consumers might not be able to tell the difference between that and 4G, wrote the CMA.

Build it and they will come

Yet starting with a use case for 6G and working backwards through the technology specifics would be wrong, says Jan Ellsberger, appointed director-general of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) earlier this year. Now just several months into the top job at ETSI, which feeds regional 6G submissions into the 3GPP umbrella group, Ellsberger reckons history is a useful guide in this area.

"With 3G, we actually had the experience of how wrong it is to try to pinpoint a silver-bullet application that drives the technology development," he told Light Reading. "3G was, in the early days, designed to provide video telephony. That was the first 3G release. But video telephony was a failure in the market, and it was Internet connectivity instead that was the key application. The industry learned that we should not try to identify use cases that drive the technology development. It is rather the other way around."

To critics, however, designing technologies without a vision of their purpose is risky and explains why 5G has not produced any material growth in sales for its operators. 1G at least had voice as a basic parameter, and 3G had data. The challenge for ETSI, as a standards body, is that it must coordinate inputs from numerous parties and different countries over many years before a standard eventually crystalizes. Predicting the use cases of the early 2030s sounds much riskier than just steering mobile technology along a realistic improvement path.

Nevertheless, there are signs of telco apathy toward 6G after the capital-intensive and underwhelming experience of 5G. Last year, the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), a club of big operators, published a position paper that said "6G must not inherently trigger a hardware refresh of 5G RAN [radio access network] infrastructure." Where possible, said the NGMN, operators must be able to introduce the new technology via "software-based feature upgrades of existing network elements."

Apparently sympathetic to that stance, Ellsberger agrees 6G is likelier to be an evolution of 5G than a revolutionary change. "Yes, I think that is the sentiment right now. That is most likely how 6G would be developed – improvements to 5G and securing that we deliver on the opportunities that are part of the 5G discussions already." From a use case perspective, 6G, like 5G, might have more relevance for certain industries than it does for individual consumers, he thinks.

But on the technology side, he does not anticipate a radical departure from systems such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), integral to the air interface used in 4G and 5G. "My prediction is that we will continue to carry on with the same type of base technologies but enhance them with new advanced modulation methods, maybe coding schemes, waveform design, also maybe even more advanced MIMO [multiple input, multiple output] configurations," he said.

If the NGMN's wishes are realized and 6G – driven by software upgrades rather than hardware replacement – necessitates less capital expenditure than its predecessors did, it could further squeeze revenues for ailing manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia, the big European contributors to the Gs. But it would not alter the role of ETSI and other standards bodies as the effective guarantors of interoperability, says Ellsberger.

He also brushes off talk of Europe falling behind in standards development. "The tech players we have in the industry have a global market and are not serving only the European operators. They are serving globally," he said. "From that point of view, in technology innovation and standardization, we are still the leading region in the world in this space." If there is a technology lag, it is in the deployment of 5G and caused by the fragmented nature of the European industry, as far as Ellsberger is concerned. It is a view that senior executives at Ericson and Nokia would share.

On open RAN and China

Unless 6G does mark a break with some of those foundational mobile technologies, the main contributors to the standard-essential patents seem likely to be the same players that figure prominently in 5G. This would mean big roles for Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, the dominant 5G kit vendors, despite efforts by some telcos to nurture alternatives. But Ellsberger says it is difficult to speculate on the patent opportunities for relative newcomers.

ETSI, maintaining impartiality, now features the names of more than 900 organizations on its membership pages, including the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel and Microsoft through their European arms. The influence of these IT players on the development of mobile networks can be seen in technologies like virtual and open RAN, which aims to improve interoperability between kit vendors. The formation of the telco-led O-RAN Alliance effectively took specifications work in that area outside ETSI and the 3GPP, but Ellsberger thinks it could be reintegrated with 6G.

"I mean, that would be a natural, logical evolution of that work," he said. "That would probably be the best approach to incorporate those specifications into this 3GPP scope." The O-RAN Alliance, he feels, is addressing a discussion the mobile industry has had for about 20 years on how to "open" the fronthaul interface between radios and compute.

Huawei is also a member of ETSI, even though the controversial Chinese equipment maker is now banned from selling its products in various European markets. The growing geopolitical rift between China and the West, marked by US efforts to cut China off from advanced chip technologies, would seem to threaten the very existence of a global standard. But Ellsberger says he has not seen this happening.

"If you look at the 3GPP, you have China, South Korea, Japan, India, the US and Europe all parties to that, and all those regions and organization partners are fully committed to drive 6G and 3GPP as a global effort," he said. "We have not seen any signs of fragmentation when it comes to 6G standardization – not at all."

He agrees it would be damaging if it did happen, casting his mind back to the days when international travelers needed multiple handsets or expensive dual-mode devices to communicate outside their own regions. "The larger the market you have, the more economies of scale you can offer and the more room you have for technological innovation and providing competitive products," he said. "If there would be a fragmentation or regionalization, of course that would damage the whole industry."

Notwithstanding any such rifts in future, 6G development is on track, from Ellsberger's perspective. Scheduled for March next year, a 3GPP workshop is the next big stage in the process. Studies on requirements and technology elements will follow before the standard formally takes shape and the 3GPP finally delivers its technical specifications as a 6G candidate to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). That must happen in advance of 2030, under the ITU's timetable, which would mean services going live in the early years of the next decade. What they will be is still anyone's guess.