Don’t ignore 5G lessons for 6G planning, urges NGMN chief

• The NGMN Alliance has set out how it is preparing the industry for 6G
• CEO Anita Döhler stressed the industry must learn lessons from the 5G era’s deployment and ROI challenges
• Focus on software and disaggregation, plus future agentic AI roadmap

While operators are still searching for ways to boost revenues from their hefty 5G investments, early conversations about the shape of 6G are well underway. To succeed, the industry must act on the lessons learned from 5G as it plans for the next generation of cellular technology.

At the core of this is ensuring that 6G is AI native and that the next generation of mobile networks are simpler to build, easier to operate and less expensive to evolve. These lessons, according to Anita Döhler, CEO of the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance, are born directly from the 5G era.

“NGMN was founded because operators wanted to have a stronger voice,” explains Döhler. “Solutions were increasingly being handed to operators that were more difficult to operate or made it harder to achieve a decent return on investment."

NGMN, a global alliance of leading mobile operators, exists to ensure next-generation networks are designed based on operator requirements rather than vendor roadmaps.

Currently, the alliance splits its focus across three core areas: Mastering the route to disaggregation, green future networks, and 6G. Speaking to TelecomTV at DTW Ignite in Copenhagen, Döhler explained how the NGMN is providing guidance and key requirements for design considerations and network architecture evolution​ for 6G. Part of this, she adds, involves learning lessons from 5G.

The NGMN stops short of outright condemning how 5G architectures were developed and deployed, but Döhler acknowledges the strength of feeling among many operators. “5G non-standalone [5G NSA] is considered by many markets in the industry as a big mistake,” she noted.

For many operators, NSA blurred the industry’s 5G story while leaving them with a more complex network architecture than anticipated. The transitional architecture left many carriers managing additional complexity, extending their dependence on 4G infrastructure while complicating the migration to cloud-native standalone networks, she argues. This frustration, she adds, is shaping discussions about 6G.

The NGMN is trying to establish clear migration principles before standards are finalised. The alliance wants the transition to 6G to reduce operational complexity rather than create another decade of technical debt.

Simplicity isn’t just about radio architecture; it’s also about where innovation happens. Another element of this is the focus on cloud and AI-native networks – or what, in the past, might have been called the ‘softwarisation’ of the network.

“Hardware, of course, is still important, and the operators have no doubt that it will be needed to refresh the market,” explained Döhler. “But what the operators want to avoid is being forced into a hardware upgrade [when] there is a strong belief that, at the moment, most innovation can also come from software, and that’s why the focus is on moving to cloud-native architectures and achieving interoperable cloud-native solutions.”

In June, the NGMN released two new industry publications urging the telco ecosystem to learn the migration lessons from 5G, and to agree to prioritise simplification to unlock the potential of 6G.

The goal is to help operators identify the most appropriate migration choices early when it comes to simplifying networks, reducing complexity and ensuring smooth and scalable deployment, Döhler says.

Both publications were released in conjunction with the 3GPP plenary meeting in Singapore, which took place at the beginning of June.

The NGMN hopes to present clear guidance at its September strategic plenary, conscious that 3GPP’s Release 21 timetable leaves only a limited window for operators to influence fundamental architectural decisions.

Looking beyond migration, the NGMN’s next major area of work will examine how networks should evolve to support agentic AI. But before the industry gets there, Döhler believes it first needs to agree on the architectural foundations that will define 6G for the next decade.

Döhler said: “We are trying to provide guidance for the September meeting because it is strategically important to make decisions now. Then we will start work on network [evolution] for agentic AI. This one is still in the pipeline.”

While the 5G era delivered remarkable technical capability, many operators would argue it also left them managing far greater complexity than they had anticipated. For the NGMN, avoiding a repeat of that outcome has become one of the defining objectives for 6G.

  - James Pearce, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV