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A panel of industry experts differ on how rapidly the industry should move to 6G amid the gradual roll out of 5G standalone.
Dawn Bushaus
Should telcos stay the course on 5G SA or shift focus to 6G?
During TelecomTV’s The Great Telco Debate in December, a group of communications service providers (CSPs), vendors and analysts grappled with a critical question for the telecoms industry: Will the success of 5G Standalone (SA) postpone the need for 6G? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the question wasn’t answered definitively.
Taking part in the spirited debate were:
In addition, Graham Wilde, Head of 5G Business Development, Three Group Solutions, presented an argument for the “motion” of staying the course on 5G SA, while Chris Lewis, Founder of Lewis Insight and The Great Telco Debate, argued for shifting focus to 6G.
Wilde underscored the slow adoption of 5G SA and warned against premature talk of 6G. “Only 9% of all mobile customers in the world are connected to a 5G SA network at the moment,” he said. “91% of people do not have 5G SA, and we’re already talking about throwing it away and going on to 6G? Come on.”
Wilde added: “We’ve got to recover the return on investment on 5G. … We cannot progress as an industry unless we get the money back for the for the investments that we made.”
Cohen staunchly agreed, calling 6G “still kind of a pipe dream”. “5G needs to really become more robust and add network slicing, which we’ve been working on for I don't know how many years, and we still don't have a standard,” she said. “So, we need to be more robust about 5G infrastructure that the telecoms have invested literally billions of dollars into.”
And Cohen pointed out that consumers don’t care about “G’s”. “What’s ironic about 5G in general is that it’s been a tremendous success in terms of solving the last mile problem, cutting costs, delivering more efficient networks, higher bandwidth,” she explained. “But the average user...they have no idea. They don’t care that it’s running on 5G, 4G, 6G.”
NGMN's Döhler said that while 5G SA lays the groundwork for 6G, it is lacking important features.
“5G Standalone is paving the way for the future…and it paves the way through setting the ground for cloud-native networks,” Döhler said. However, “some of those features 5G Standalone most likely will not be able to deliver,” she added, citing higher uplink performance, handling of new traffic patterns driven by AI, and achieving full automation and AI-native operations as examples.
Tanaka emphasized that operators need to master 5G SA and cloud-native operations before chasing the next generation. He warned against treating cloud-native as a mere checklist item, saying too many operators “spend millions, hand over everything to the vendors, and end up living with really complex, really costly systems which they cannot even evolve without writing another check.”
Tanaka challenged the narrative that 6G is an immediate requirement, but he also made it clear that 6G is the future. “The industry’s demands clearly require resiliency, AI, energy efficiency,” he said. “[5G] SA is the minimum ticket for this, but 6G will elevate to raise the bar for this.”
Nokia's van de Velde also sees 5G SA as the foundation for 6G, and he lauded 5G overall as a success story.
“During my speech, 3,500 5G subscribers will be added. We are adding, this year, 600 million subscribers, and we are going to reach 2.9 billion subscribers on 5G – 8 billion by 2029,” van de Velde said.
“It’s an amazing success. It’s probably the most successful technology – although I will sound like Trump now,” he joked.
But van de Velde quickly tempered his own optimism with a reality check that the telecoms industry has delivered on only one third of its original 5G vision. While enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) is here, ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (MMTC) remain elusive, he explained.
Van de Velde argued that one of 6G’s most transformative changes will happen at the radio layer. Today, devices at the cell edge often fall back to lower modulation schemes like 64 QAM because the signal quality deteriorates. With 6G, he envisions AI-driven receivers and base stations that can maintain higher-order modulation even under weak conditions, boosting throughput and efficiency.
This approach will not only improve coverage but also cut device power consumption. “You will be saving probably two hours of battery time per day with 6G,” van de Velde said.
Standards emerged as a flashpoint in the debate, with panelists saying that 5G specifications are too rigid. This has led to integration and interoperability headaches.
“If you look at the 5G standards today, they have been defined in a perfect standard silo, in a single system silo,” said van de Velde. “So, we have the EPS (evolved packet system) standards today, and we have the 5G SA, and the interworking is very badly specified.” This makes roaming “an absolute pain” compared to the seamless experience in 5G Non-standalone (NSA), he added.
“That has to change for 6G,” van de Velde said, explaining that the next-generation core should be designed from the outset to support both 5G and 6G access within a single “standard, well-defined core network function”.
Van de Velde added that it’s critical to avoid embedding "fashionable technology" like agentic AI inside core network functions, a path he warned would “destroy the compatibility” needed for multi‑vendor operation and roaming.
Audience member Neil McRae, former BT Chief Architect and new CTIO of UK fiber operator CItyFIbre, amplified this, noting that 3GPP overreached in 5G by prescribing architecture – notably virtualization – rather than stopping at functional requirements.
The consequence was an industry “panic” and deployments that struggled because standards were too prescriptive, McRae said. “Someone decided they were going to define the architecture for how we run 5G,” he said. “…There was one massive problem with that. No one could make it work… Please don’t define the solution for us.”
NGMN’s Döhler highlighted other standards challenges such as migration complexity and backward compatibility. For example, in migrating from 5G NSA to SA, operators had to maintain dual connectivity between 4G and 5G during the NSA phase, then upgrade to a completely new 5G core for SA.
They faced challenges with different vendor implementations and interoperability, and there wasn’t just one migration path. While some operators upgraded radios first, others started with the core. The result was significant operational complexity and added cost.
"One of the requirements we put out already last year is that we want [standards] to be backwards compatible, and most important also that there should be really no such complexity, which we had with migrating from 5G non‑standalone to standalone, when it comes to the future generation of networks.”
Döhler emphasized the need to consolidate operators’ views and feed them into 3GPP, especially as AI technology evolves.
“What is really needed to be part of the releases, and what comes with software-driven innovation, with open source and other topics?” Döhler asked. “So, when you look at the development of AI, the question is, can we cope with this as an industry which is really dependent on standards? Which parts need to be standardized, and which parts will maybe not be standardized by 3GPP but will be important also to enable interoperable solutions?”
In the end, the debate underscored just how divided the industry is. While it’s likely that telcos will need to find a way to maximize return on their investment in 5G SA, there are clear limits to the technology that demand they look ahead to 6G. Standards, migration complexity and the role of AI are all critical issues they will have to address.
