Arielle Roth, the Administrator of NTIA, made a speech to the American Enterprise Institute that was titled There Is No Such as “Future-Proof” Technology. Her speech was in reference to the upcoming 6G technology.
She made a really interesting observation about 6G that I hadn’t seen before: That lesson is especially timely as we stand at the frontier of AI-native 6G . . . Perhaps the defining feature of AI-native 6G is not simply that it will make communications networks more intelligent. It is that it will make the future of communications even less predictable. Previous generations of wireless networks were designed primarily to move information faster. The next generation promises networks that increasingly optimize, adapt, and derive insight from the information they carry. As intelligence becomes embedded within the network itself, we should become more humble about our ability to know which technologies, architectures, or applications will ultimately prevail.
Obviously, NTIA is on the 6G bandwagon, much like the first Trump administration was on the 5G bandwagon. To some degree, it’s the government’s role to promote new technologies, and this is done for many other technologies outside of telecom.
I have my doubts that carriers are going to build networks that are less predictable, because that sounds rife with risk. I have serious doubts that the big carriers are going to hand off the responsibility to operate 6G networks completely to AI. The industry learned a lesson last year with the big Verizon outage that lasted far longer than it should have when technicians couldn’t figure out how to fix problems in AI-generated software. Everything I’ve been reading is that the big nationwide networks are bringing more human intervention back into the operation and troubleshooting of networks.
The speech then went on to talk about technology-neutrality. Roth said that the government should never favor any technology, since doing so changes the direction of industry by crowding out innovation.
To some degree, it’s hard to argue with that statement since there are many examples in the past where governments stuck with older technologies and ignored innovations. But it’s hard to say that the current Administration is technology-neutral when it favors traditional power technologies over wind and solar.
Roth said that technology-neutrality matters the most in rural areas, where low-Earth orbit satellite constellations have reduced the cost of reaching people. She said satellite has made obsolete the idea that we need to build wireline networks to reach homes.
I don’t think she is going to find very many local governments and people in rural areas who share her vision that satellite technology is superior to fiber networks. I’ve worked with several hundred counties who understand that a fiber network build today puts their county in a good competitive position for the rest of this century. I don’t know one rural county who regrets the construction of fiber networks.
I find it interesting that she brought up rural broadband in the context of touting 6G, because 6G is not coming to most of rural America, just like 5G didn’t. If anything, the transition from using lower frequencies for 4G to higher ones for 5G and 6G means that rural cellular coverage will continue to shrink over time.
Just as an aside, as she has done in the past, Roth referred to the reduction of BEAD infrastructure grants as a savings to the taxpayer – again hinting that NTIA is going to be reluctant to release much, if any, of the BEAD nondeployment funds.