Frankfurt, Germany, 26 September 2023. Today, the NGMN Alliance (NGMN) published the “6G Position Statement: An Operator View”. With this essential publication NGMN guides a course for the future of communication networks by taking a proactive stance and emphasising the needs for a new paradigm for graceful evolution and successful value creation and delivery.

“Our publication provides a clear statement of intent from the Network Operator community, that the traditional way of introducing a new technology generation must evolve,” said Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “NGMN is committed to ensuring that 6G delivers tangible benefits to end-users, simplifying network operations and ensuring sustainability, while offering compelling new experiences”, he added.

“Whatever 6G might become, it will be built on the foundations of 5G. This publication shines a light on the challenges our industry faces in delivering compelling new 6G services and capabilities for end-users”, said Luke Ibbetson, Member of the NGMN Alliance Board and Head of Group R&D at Vodafone. “Simultaneously, as we embark on this journey towards the 6G era, we are actively steering network disaggregation and an open, interoperable cloud native architecture“, he stated.

The publication serves as a comprehensive guide, outlining how Network Operators envision the realisation of a successful evolution to 6G and issuing a call to the industry to embrace this transformative direction. The publication covers an operator position on such key requirements and design considerations as network simplification, absolute energy reduction, network AI transformation & predictive network management, safe and resilient infrastructure, global 6G standards, software upgrade to 6G, no intrinsic need for hardware refresh, no compromise to existing services (Voice) and access across mobile, fixed and non-terrestrial networks.

Following the NGMN publications “6G Use Cases and Analysis”, “6G Drivers and Vision” and “6G Requirements and Design Considerations”, this latest publication “6G Position Statement: An Operator View” marks the next step towards guidance for E2E requirements for 6G.

“With this “6G Position Statement” we continue focusing on providing guidance and requirements to the industry in the areas of our three strategic focus topics, which build on each other. It is another valuable example of joint global MNO efforts within NGMN which will continue working on 6G E2E requirements, by collaborating with our entire Partnership for the benefits of the ecosystem and end-users”, said Anita Doehler, CEO at NGMN Alliance.

The full 6G Position Statement can be downloaded here.

About NGMN

NGMN is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices willmeet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.