Monday, May 13, 2024 – Updated Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Reading time: 5 minutes
• In its new white paper on mobile communications for the decade 2030-2040, the Orange Group argues that society needs to be a stakeholder in the design of future networks.
• This approach is part of the global rationale for sustainability.
• Marie-Hélène Hamon, Research Programme Manager, will explain the drivers of innovation in mobile network technologies, the importance of social dialogue and some of the anticipated technological developments.
Major advances in software, cloud and artificial intelligence technologies will significantly accelerate innovation in telecommunications technology in the coming years. Orange and its partners are actively working to shape the future of telecommunications through research, standardization and open source communities, with the aim that networks will bring sustainable value to our customers and society at large.
The 2030-2040 network must be designed to deliver sustainable value to society.
As 5G continues to evolve, the telecommunications ecosystem is preparing for the standardization of mobile network technologies by 2030-2040, commonly referred to as 6G. The impending standardization phase will be crucial to define a common technology on a global scale – one that will be interoperable between different devices from different providers. The first 3GPP workshop on post-2030 use cases, to be held in May 2024, will herald this period of intensive discussions. On this occasion, Orange presents the group’s vision for tomorrow’s mobile networks in its white paper on the evolution of mobile network technologies beyond 2030. The document highlights the goal of delivering value and supporting sustainability, while questioning the validity of the label “6G”.
Paradigm Shift
Since the launch of 2G in 1991, players in the mobile network ecosystem have referred to the next “generation” after each major technological evolution, which occurred on average every decade. But 5G changes the game. “We currently prefer to avoid this nomenclature, because instead of major technological breakthroughs every decade, we expect a more gradual and continuous evolution in the future,” explains Marie-Hélène Hamon, research program manager at Orange. “Furthermore, up until 4G, each new generation of mobile networks was accompanied by the emergence of new types of services, such as Internet access on mobile devices, popularized with 3G, and the use of video with 4G. 5G has brought great advances, especially in terms of improving energy efficiency while handling increasing traffic, and of course increasing speeds. 5G standalone, as it is currently deployed, also offers the ability to control latency and the overall quality of service, which is very useful, for example, in industrial applications. However, these improvements are not necessarily visible to individual consumers, who mainly use video streaming and social networks. This can lead to misunderstandings about the benefits of the next generation.”
Continuous innovation
While it may be tempting to stick with established terminology, the reality is that the terminology no longer aligns with network changes. “The current naming conventions imply that very little happens between two major developments, but this is not the case,” continues Marie-Hélène Hamon. “3GPP works with updates and new versions defined in 18-21 month cycles. This is a gradual and continuous evolution, rather than a sudden move to a completely different technology every decade.” This continuous evolution must be focused on innovations that improve network sustainability and new services that bring value to users.
Social dialogue
Identifying user needs and expectations requires a dialogue with stakeholders in society. This approach is taking us in a new direction and needs to be generalized in the telecom ecosystem. Until now, mobile network technologies have been designed by operators and “must evolve towards a transformation driven by customer needs and expectations in the period 2030-2040.” How? By directly involving operators in the research phase. “Orange Innovation has already used this method by organizing workshops in different cities to identify the expectations and constraints of both corporate and private users.” Orange is also developing this approach with partners in the Hexa-X-II European project.
Environmental, social and economic sustainability
This reflection on social dialogue contributes to work on the sustainability of future networked technologies. The white paper argues that this sustainability should be one of the main goals guiding the design. Sustainability should be divided into environmental, social and economic themes.
The white paper emphasizes that future standardization work must take environmental aspects into account. The future will demand doing more with less. “5G is highly scalable, so innovations can be integrated without changing the technical foundation, and the development of software network functions allows the equipment to last longer,” says Marie-Hélène Hamon. In concrete terms, this means prioritizing software updates over hardware changes, which should only be made if the benefits justify the impact of the change, especially from an environmental point of view. “To achieve environmental goals, we must aim to save energy and reduce our carbon footprint at all levels, which includes limiting the need for new equipment.”
Meanwhile, social sustainability means that the networks are inclusive, meaning that everyone has access to digital services, the security and confidentiality of information is guaranteed, and this information can be quickly restored in the event of power outages, cyber attacks or natural disasters. And finally, economic sustainability refers to the economic viability of these networks.
Value Index
The concept of value must be central when defining the networks of the future. “We need to define new mechanisms to capture this concept of value in addition to criteria traditionally assessed in technical specifications, such as speed and latency.”
Innovation that contributes to sustainability
From a technological perspective, cloud-native architectures and artificial intelligence will play a key role in future networks, for example by optimizing energy consumption and improving resilience with the ability to automatically transfer services to another network node in case of failure. Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) with satellites and high-altitude platforms are one potential way to address the issue of territorial inclusion.
As mobile networks expand, new frequency bands are also being considered: “New opportunities have also opened up in the 6 GHz to 15 GHz bands, which are slightly higher than current bands but much lower than some of the bands originally planned for 5G. These bands are particularly interesting because they allow us to reuse current radio sites to improve their capabilities.”
Various ways are being explored to ensure the future mobile sector can accommodate changes in usage, in particular increased traffic, whilst reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and Orange believes this needs to be one of the main objectives of future standardisation.
