Hatfield: Too Many Unknowns Remain on 5G and Network Reliability

FCC Technological Advisory Council member Dale Hatfield raised concerns Thursday about whether the U.S. is on track to deliver reliable 5G networks within a timeframe and at a cost that reflects “the urgency and criticality” the situation. “Put another way,” he asked, what’s the “economic impact” of creating networks that are available 99.999% of the time? Hatfield said he took a deep dive into peer-reviewed and other “trusted literature” seeking answers, but came away empty-handed.

TAC held a quarterly meeting on Thursday, hearing updates from its 6G, advanced spectrum sharing and AI/machine learning working groups. Hatfield’s questions came following the 6G WG update. He said he hoped the final 6G report would take his questions into account.

“My concern is heightened by the inherent openness of wireless systems and their susceptibility to malicious jamming and spoofing attacks at the physical layer,” said Hatfield, former chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology and former acting NTIA administrator. There’s also a lot of “hype” around 5G and 6G. We shouldn’t let hype “cloud our vision of what is economically and practically achievable.”

“Our nation is making an enormous bet on the ultimate success of 5G and future 6G networks not only to protect our economic and social well-being” but to bolster public safety and homeland security and “protect the nation’s sovereignty and influence in an increasingly hostile world,” Hatfield said. “We dare not lose that bet.”

The 6G WG working group isn't market oriented and hasn’t gotten caught up in industry “hype,” said co-Chair Abhimanyu Gosain, senior director of the Institute for the Wireless IoT at Northeastern University. “We are at the formative time of defining 6G requirements,” he said, adding that 99.999% network reliability, which means just five minutes of downtime annually, remains an “an exorbitant goal.”

From the beginning, the WG has focused on “not getting us all taken in by a hype cycle,” said TAC Chair Dean Brenner, a former Qualcomm executive. Every new “G” “always comes with a lot of hype” and TAC’s job “is to do everything we can to cut through that,” he said. Brenner asked WG leaders about the current expected timing for 6G.

A 6G start date of 2030 is “pretty well fixed,” said WG co-Chair Brian Daly, AT&T assistant vice president. The ITU has outlined a plan to have evaluations and specifications done in the 2030 timeframe as part of its International Mobile Telecommunications-2030 initiative, he said. The unknown is when 6G equipment will be available and carriers will start to deploy, Daly added.

There was a big push to get 5G deployments started around a similar 2020 target date from the ITU, Daly said. “A lot is dependent on the operator investment cycles -- what’s going to be actually required as we move toward 6G,” he said. “The performance requirements haven’t been released yet from the ITU,” Daly added. “For right now, the IMT timelines are intact” and 3rd Generation Partnership Project timing is “getting settled.”

3GPP Release 18 was officially declared complete recently, Gosain said. As such, gear vendors, he said, can now offer carriers Release 18-compliant equipment. The problem is carrier networks “are still running two releases behind.”