Professor of the University of Tokyo: Insufficient 5G development affects Japan's 6G strategy

After ignoring electric cars in the field of new energy vehicles and focusing on hydrogen-powered cars, Japan's "radical" strategy in the field of mobile communications has also been criticized by domestic experts and scholars.

The background of the matter is that in order to get rid of the passive situation in the development of 4G and 5G mobile communication technology, the Japanese government launched the "Beyond 5G Promotion Strategy", a roadmap towards 6G in 2020, proposing to establish key technologies in sequence from around 2025, and start providing 6G communication services beyond 5G around 2030.

Just recently, four operators including Japan's NTT docomo announced that they have cooperated to develop wireless equipment suitable for the 100GHz and 300GHz bands in the Asia-Pacific Hertz frequency bands, and achieved ultra-high-speed transmission of 100Gbps per second in these two frequency bands. They said that this achievement is expected to promote related research on 6G.

In this regard, according to Xinhua News Agency, Tomoo Marukawa, a professor at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, believes that Japan's overall 5G infrastructure is still relatively backward, and operators have not launched attractive 5G services. If 5G is not fully developed, the development of 6G may be affected.

A good 5G & 5G-A foundation is a prerequisite for the development of 6G

Tomoo Marukawa said that Japanese companies only account for 5% of 5G standard technology, and Japan does not have a dominant position in the field of 5G technology. In addition, the high cost of 5G equipment has affected the enthusiasm of operators, so the number of base stations is insufficient. 6G technology is more difficult than 5G. 6G base stations require a higher density, and perhaps one must be set up on each floor.

He believes that although the Japanese government is vigorously promoting the development of 6G, the reality is that 5G is still far from being popularized. For example, he said that the probability of receiving 5G signals in downtown Tokyo is relatively high, but in many places in the suburbs, 5G signals are almost unavailable and people can only make do with 4G.

He also believes that consumers must have new services and products that are attractive enough to use 6G. 5G has been in use for several years, but Japan's 5G-enabled autonomous driving is still in the trial stage. Similarly, if 6G is used, but the way people use their phones remains the same as it is now, smart consumers will choose the cheaper 5G.

In short, in Marukawa Tomoo's view, Japan's backwardness in standard technology, basic network, user perception, application ecology and other dimensions in the 5G era will affect the development and advancement of 6G. Coincidentally, the current mainstream view in the mobile communications industry also believes that the premise of developing 6G is a good 5G & 5G-A foundation, which has been fully proven in previous generational evolutions.

5G has realized its market share and is evolving towards 5G-A

Taking 5G as an example, public data shows that, except for a few "lost markets" like Japan, most of the leading countries and operators in the 4G/LTE era have actively embraced and vigorously developed 5G networks, have realized the dividends of the new generation of technology, and responded to the ever-changing market demands. They are evolving towards 5G-A networks and are steadily preparing for 6G.

In the Middle East, 5G FWA has achieved great success. By 2023, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries will have developed a total of 1.8 million FWA users, surpassing the development speed of optical fiber; the FWA business revenue of benchmark operators has increased by more than 20% year-on-year, becoming a new engine of operator revenue. At present, operators in the region such as stc Group, du in the United Arab Emirates, Oman Telecom, Zain in Saudi Arabia, and Zain in Kuwait have launched 5G-A commercial pilot networks, accelerating the move towards the 5G-A era.

In Asia Pacific, as of the third quarter of 2023, South Korea has built 230,000 5G base stations, setting a global record of 41.5 5G base stations per 10,000 people, and the 5G user penetration rate has reached 50%. At the same time, 5G terminals account for 82% of the Korean market, making it the country with the highest 5G terminal penetration rate in the world, and the DoU of 5G terminals in the entire network is as high as 29GB, making the traffic share of 5G terminals reach 80% of the entire network.

In China, the number of 5G users will reach 805 million in 2023, accounting for 51.3% of the total number of 5G users in the world, becoming the world's largest 5G user market, with a 5G penetration rate of 46.6%. Research institutions estimate that China's 5G will directly drive a total economic output of 1.86 trillion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 29%. In terms of 5G evolution, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, China Mobile Hong Kong, Macau Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, Hutchison Telecommunications, etc. have gradually entered the trial commercial/commercial deployment stage from the 5G-A technology verification stage. Among them, China Mobile plans to launch the world's largest 5G-A commercial deployment in more than 300 cities in 2024.

According to GSMA's forecast, as more operators deploy 5G and leading operators migrate to 5G-A, the number of global 5G connections will grow from 1.5 billion in 2023 to 3 billion by 2026, and the global 5G penetration rate will reach 30%. It will surpass 4G to become the dominant mobile technology in 2029. It can be seen that the transition from 5G to 6G is far from a "one-hop journey", but requires continuous evolution and hard work.

"Gigabit for Everyone" and "Digital Intelligence Integration"

It is worth mentioning that from the above points that Tomoo Marukawa focused on, it can be found that whether it is 5G or 6G, network coverage, user perception and application ecology are KPIs that cannot be avoided. This requires operators to evolve from 5G to 5G-A and plan the layout of 6G by continuously building a thick, solid and resilient 5G network and deeply integrating it with technologies such as AI, big data, and cloud computing to meet the ever-changing and continuously deepening needs of the ToC and ToB markets.

Once upon a time, there was a view that 5G-A networks did not need large-scale coverage, but only needed to focus on the special needs of specific scenarios (such as ultra-low latency industrial control). However, in reality, the 5G networks of the world's leading operators still follow the principle of "Gigabit for everyone" and "digital intelligence integration" when evolving to 5G-A networks with more functions, better performance, greener and more intelligent.

Taking the practice of Chinese operators as an example, according to the data of the "100 Cities" special evaluation, the average downlink rate in key areas of the top 10 cities in terms of mobile network quality (such as large shopping malls, administrative centers, tourist attractions, etc.) has reached a gigabit, and Shanghai, Hangzhou and other places have achieved downlink rates exceeding a gigabit through 3CC (generally reaching 4Gbps); some operators have launched 5G-A packages based on this to meet the emerging needs of extreme experience such as high-definition VR live broadcast, holographic communication, video transmission in seconds, naked-eye 3D, and cloud phones.

summary:

Looking back, from 1G to 5G, the development of each generation of mobile communication technology has relied on the evolution of the previous generation of core technologies and introduced emerging revolutionary technologies. There is no precedent for skipping the "foundation" and directly building the "building". As Marukawa Tomoo said in the report, "Japanese companies are now targeting 6G and want to gain technological dominance in the 6G field as soon as possible, but whether such a strategy will succeed is unknown."