Welcome to 6G Futures
Thanks for reading and welcome to 6G Futures. As the name implies, we are covering the development of 6G technologies and services for the global telecoms industry. Commercial deployments are unlikely to happen before 2030 but the various stakeholders involved in defining, creating and using 6G have already started the planning and research process. If you need to follow early developments, then this is for you.
About me
I’m Guy Daniels and I have been writing about the telecoms industry since 1991 and the dawn of GSM (aka 2G). I spent the first ten years of my career working on trade publications dedicated to telecoms technology and businesses. I then co-founded TelecomTV, which was a pioneer of online news and streaming video (at 56kbit/s!), and am still working there with my colleagues and co-founders.
I bring considerable experience to the coverage of 6G. I was there for the emergence of GSM and the uncertainties around its future (who remembers the cry of ‘God Send Mobiles’?). I was editor-in-chief of the leading mobile publication when the US-based CDMA supporters (with the PR and lobbying skills of the CDG) muscled in on the established TDMA industry to influence the 3G standards. Ten years later we moved on to 4G and LTE, with the associated crazy spectrum auctions. And then we saw the hype get pushed even higher with 5G, which promised the world but was always going to fall short of unrealistic expectations.
Now we come to 6G. What will happen in the run up to 2030, when the standard is expected to be complete and the first commercial rollouts begin to appear? How will it be marketed (or mis-marketed?). Which companies will be the winners in the standards process and benefit from their patented technologies? Many questions and, inevitably, there will be many spurious claims and unsupported facts in the process.
Why a newsletter?
Firstly, why not run all of this on TelecomTV? Because 6G is still something of a distraction for operators, many of whom are still trying to monetise their 5G investments. TelecomTV covers a very wide range of topics related to telecoms, and 6G is currently only a small part. I will be cross-posting some highlights when appropriate, and obviously will be including relevant TelecomTV coverage of 6G here.
A dedicated newsletter-based publication is focused, with no distractions. There will also be no commercial sponsorship (which is TelecomTV’s business model). In addition, the Substack community is huge and I am hoping that a whole new audience will discover 6G - the real 6G, not the PR-spun versions and widely inaccurate reports that have already started to appear.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. I will strive to deliver a weekly email round-up of the most important news and developments. The frequency and format may change, depending on the feedback I receive from all of you.
I will also be adding a modest paid subscription element, and will deliver additional content to those subscribers.
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