Is 6G’s fate to repeat the failings of 5G wireless?

Will the telecom industry embark on another costly wireless upgrade? Telecom consultant and author William Webb thinks so and warns that it risks repeating what happened with 5G. 

William Webb

William Webb published the book The 5G Myth in 2016. In it, he warned that the then-emerging 5G standard would prove costly and fail to deliver on the bold promises made for the emerging wireless technology.

Webb sees history repeating itself with 6G, the next wireless standard generation. In his latest book, The 6G Manifesto, he reflects on the emerging standard and outlines what the industry and its most significant stakeholder - the telecom operators - could do instead.

Developing a new generation wireless standard every decade has proved beneficial, says Webb. However, the underlying benefits with each generation has diminished to the degree that, with 5G, it is questionable whether the latest generation was needed.

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Is network traffic growth dwindling to a trickle?

“Network capacities are sufficient, and with data usage expected to plateau in the coming years, further capacity expansion is not needed. We have reached the end of history for communications.”  

Willian Webb, The End of Telecoms History

William Webb has pedigree when it comes to foreseeing telecoms trends.  

William Webb

Webb wrote The 5G Myth in 2016, warning that 5G would be a flop.

In the book, he argued that the wireless standard's features would create limited interest and fail to grow revenues for mobile operators. 

The next seven years saw the telcos promoting 5G and its capabilities. Now, they admit their considerable investments in 5G have delivered underwhelming returns.

His latest book, The End of Telecoms History, argues that telecoms has reached a maturity that satisfies the link speeds needed and that traffic growth is slowing. 

"There will be no end of new applications," says Webb. "But they won't result in material growth in data requirements or in data speeds."  

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Europe's first glimpse of a live US baseball game

It is rare to visit a museum dedicated to telecoms, never mind one set in beautiful grounds. Nor does it often happen that the visit coincides with an important anniversary for the site.

La Cité des Télécoms, a museum set in 11 hectares of land in Pleumeur-Bodou, Brittany, France, is where the first TV live feed was sent by satellite from the US to Europe.

The Radôme protecting the vast horn antenna

The Telstar 1 communications satellite was launched 60 years ago, on July 10, 1962. The first transmission that included part of a live Chicago baseball game almost immediately followed.

By then, a vast horn radio antenna had been constructed and was awaiting the satellite's first signals. The Radôme houses the antenna, an inflated dome-shaped skin to protect it from the weather. The antenna is built using 276 tonnes of steel and sits on 4,000 m³ of concrete. Just the bolts holding together the structure weigh 10 tonnes. It is also the largest inflated unsupported dome in the world. 

The antenna continued to receive satellite transmissions till 1985. The location was then classed as a site of national historical importance. The huge horn antenna is unique since the twin antenna in the US has been dismantled.  

The Cité des Télécoms museum was opened in 1991 and the site is a corporate foundation supported by Orange. 

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Nvidia's plans for the data processor unit

When Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, discussed its latest 400-gigabit BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) at the company’s 2021 GTC event, he also detailed its successor.

Companies rarely discuss chip specifications two generations ahead; the BlueField-3 only begins sampling next quarter.

BlueField-3 die. Source: Nvidia

The BlueField-4 will advance Nvidia’s DPU family. It will double again the traffic throughput to 800 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) and almost quadruple the BlueField-3’s integer processing performance.

But one metric cited stood out. The BlueField-4 will increase by nearly 1000x the number of terabit operators-per-second (TOPS) performed: 1,000 TOPS compared to the BlueField-3’s 1.5 TOPS.

Huang said artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will be added to the BlueField-4, implying that the massively parallel hardware used for Nvidia’s graphics processor units (GPUs) are to be grafted onto its next-but-one DPU.

Why add AI acceleration? And will it change the DPU, a relatively new processor class?

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Marvell's 50G PAM-4 DSP for 5G optical fronthaul

• Marvell has announced the first 50-gigabit 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) physical layer (PHY) for 5G fronthaul.

• The chip completes Marvell’s comprehensive portfolio for 5G radio access network (RAN) and x-haul (fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul).

Marvell's wireless portfolio of ICs. Source: Marvell.

Marvell has announced what it claims is an industry-first: a 50-gigabit PHY for the 5G fronthaul market.

Dubbed the AtlasOne, the PAM-4 PHY chip also integrates the laser driver. Marvell claims this is another first: implementing the directly modulated laser (DML) driver in CMOS.

“The common thinking in the industry has been that you couldn’t do a DML driver in CMOS due to the current requirements,” says Matt Bolig, director, product marketing, optical connectivity at Marvell. “What we have shown is that we can build that into CMOS.”

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Marvell exploits 5nm CMOS to add Octeon 10 DPU smarts

The Octeon family has come a long way since the networking infrastructure chip was introduced by Cavium Networks in 2005.

Used for data centre switches and routers, the original chip family featured 1 to 16, 64-bit MIPS cores and hardware acceleration units for packet processing and encryption. The devices were implemented using foundry TSMC’s 130nm CMOS process.

Jeffrey Ho

Marvell, which acquired Cavium in 2018, has taped out the first two devices of its latest, seventh-generation Octeon 10 family.

The devices, coined data processing units (DPU), will feature up to 36 state-of-the-art ARM cores, support a 400-gigabit line rate, 1 terabit of switching capacity, and dedicated hardware for machine-learning and vector packet processing (VPP).

Marvell is using TSMC’s latest 5nm CMOS process to cram all these functions on the DPU system-on-chip.

The 5nm-implemented Octeon 10 coupled with the latest ARM cores and improved interconnect fabric will triple data processing performance while halving power consumption compared to the existing Octeon TX2 DPU.

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Nokia shares its vision for cost-reduced coherent optics

Nokia explains why coherent optics will be key for high-speed short-reach links and shares some of its R&D activities. The latest in a series of articles addressing what next for coherent.

Part 3: Reducing cost, size and power 

Coherent optics will play a key role in the network evolution of the telecom and webscale players.

The modules will be used for ever-shorter links to enable future cloud services delivered over 5G and fixed-access networks.

Tod Sizer

The first uses will be to link data centres and support traffic growth at the network edge.

This will be followed with coherent optics being used within the data centre, once traffic growth requires solutions that 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) direct-detect optics can no longer address.

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