Ericsson's outgoing CEO Börje Ekholm steps down this week having described 6G as a mere "evolution" of 5G — a framing that reflects operator dissatisfaction with 5G returns and is now shaping how the industry's standards bodies are designing the next generation.

Ekholm, who led the Swedish vendor's turnaround ahead of the 5G rollout, made the remarks in early 2025. His successor, Per Narvinger, may come to regret them. Until 5G, every new mobile generation justified its cost with a dramatic break from its predecessor: mass-market voice and texts with 2G, basic internet with 3G, a new waveform and high-speed video with 4G. Casting 6G as an incremental network improvement — akin to bigger screens or longer-lasting batteries in smartphones — risks dampening the upgrade cycle that has sustained equipment vendors for decades.

The comment was arguably a response to customers in no mood for another generational splurge. Before launch, 5G was marketed as the technology for remote surgery and self-driving cars, and US politicians argued it was too critical to allow Chinese vendors near it. In practice, operators got new spectrum and extra capacity on congested networks. The telcos that spent billions on it are unhappy with the returns.

Standards shift in Madrid

That operator pressure is now visible inside the 3GPP, the umbrella group for the world's standards bodies. A recent plenary meeting in Madrid focused on the practicalities of introducing 6G into networks run by operators who have soured on generational change. Stakeholders appear to have agreed on a rollout "baseline" built around multi-RAT spectrum sharing (MRSS). The approach would let operators deploy 6G in existing 5G spectrum bands, dynamically allocating frequency between the two generations.

"Because it's dynamic, you can reuse your 5G spectrum as 6G or 5G, depending on how many devices there are," said Gabriel Brown, a principal analyst with Omdia.

Telcos worry MRSS could repeat the experience of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), the 4G/5G mechanism heavily criticized in its early versions. "The problem with DSS was that when you put 5G in the 4G band in the first versions, it increased the amount of signaling overhead a lot, and that used up resource blocks and so you had less capacity," said Brown. "It was inefficient."

The MRSS test results shared in Madrid point the other way. Multiple vendors measured the additional signaling overhead at a low single-digit percentage — low enough, in Brown's view, for MRSS to work effectively, and far below what early DSS achieved.

The software upgrade question

A bigger unresolved issue is whether operators can introduce 6G by upgrading software on equipment already in the field. For some of the western world's largest telcos, avoiding hardware replacement is the whole point. "If you look at the fundamental rationale for doing this, it's to avoid the need to go and replace radio infrastructure," said Luke Ibbetson, Vodafone's head of R&D, in a recent interview.

A software-upgradeable 6G sits uneasily with vendor economics. Even if services and software are more profitable activities for Ericsson and Nokia than box-shifting, a generation that requires no new radios would leave a large hole in revenues. It also cuts against Nokia's current strategy, midway through a pivot from Marvell Technology's custom silicon to Nvidia GPUs in its RAN portfolio. Nokia insists current GPUs will support 6G software for many years, unlike today's ASICs — but no commercially deployed 5G network yet includes a GPU for RAN compute, making an initial hardware outlay look unavoidable for its customers.

Ericsson is equally non-committal about its installed base. "Hopefully, quite soon, we can say which of the hardware that's in the field before 6G will be 6G-ready, so then you could have a software-upgradable introduction on certain hardware," said Marie Hogan, Ericsson's head of 6G portfolio strategy, speaking at the company's Stockholm headquarters over the summer.

One possibility, according to Brown, is that only later generations of 5G equipment prove 6G-compatible. "We don't really understand where the cutoff point is going to land," he said. Vendors cannot give assurances until the specifications are final.

Ibbetson acknowledges the constraint. "We've got multiple generations of hardware from multiple vendors, and some of the hardware is going to be older than other bits of hardware," he said. "A six-year-old radio that we might be trying to upgrade in three years' time might not be worth upgrading to 6G because it wouldn't be compatible with the software. It wouldn't have the horsepower to run it."

Modest gains, difficult spectrum

There is also concern the upgrade itself may deliver little. As an evolution of 5G, 6G is expected to reuse much of the same underlying technology, including the OFDM waveform. Even with efficiency gains, operators may struggle to notice the difference once MRSS signaling overhead is factored in. "Are you going to get any extra features that would be highly noticeable? I don't think it would amount to a whole lot," said Brown.

But judging MRSS on user-visible gains misses its purpose, he argued. Operators deploying new 6G radios in new spectrum will still need their older frequencies for coverage and signaling. "MRSS lets you add the new band and then gradually reuse some of your other spectrum at the same time," said Brown. "MRSS helps you introduce 6G, and that's why it's a migration path."

The migration runs into a spectrum problem. Higher bands identified for 6G — 6GHz and above — support faster connections but cover less ground. Brown described 3.5GHz midband as "really good when you're indoors, rubbish when you're outdoors" for some customers. Lower frequencies travel further and penetrate walls, but they are already heavily occupied.

Ericsson and Nokia are optimistic they can map 6GHz coverage onto existing 5G midband grids, sparing operators new sites. The approach depends on more advanced massive MIMO, packing even more antenna elements into each radio unit, alongside beamforming. The economics are questionable: Marcus Weldon, Nokia's former CTO, told Light Reading that "massive MIMO has sort of dropped out of sight a bit, because the costs of the radios and the complexity of managing that beamforming didn't prove in reality to be manifestly better."

The rollout precedent is sobering. Ericsson's latest Mobility Report, published in June, put 5G midband coverage at just 60% of Europe's population more than seven years after the region's first 5G launch. Few industry watchers would be surprised if 6GHz coverage falls below that at a similar stage of 6G development.

"Will 6G move as quickly as 5G has? We don't know," said Brown. "At the moment, there is not really any application we can think of that can't be satisfied with 5G." With 3GPP specifications still unsettled and vendor hardware cutoff points undefined, operators and their suppliers have months of hard negotiation ahead before the 6G baseline hardens into a standard.