6G Anarchy in the UK – Cambridge Wireless TEC event
28/07/2025July 2025 saw the seventh year of the Cambridge Wireless International Conference. The theme this year was around 6G, with the event called “6G Anarchy in the UK – how does the UK get what it needs in the 6G era?”
Technically, a lot of it (well most of it) was above my head but I wanted to get a bit more insight into the next generation of telecoms as our business was involved with both BCP Council and Dorset Council in their 5G projects during Covid.
There are several things I got out of the event.
We were all oversold the promise of 5G. One of the speakers tore it all apart for us. The telecoms companies felt the brunt of it too, in terms of how much they paid for licences.
Sounds a bit like the promise of 6G is to deliver what 5G in the real world should have.
There were comments about not advancing the generation numbers and just to provide more coverage on 4G. That would have been a more beneficial gain and telcos saying they support 5G, when really it was only a halfway house version of 5G.
Moving from outdoors to indoors 6G, and moving from telephone signals to indoor wifi, as part of a seamless handover of service, across different operators is going to be a big challenge. However, this is what users will want and need.
The word sustainability was bandied around a lot, but distilling down what was said, the main concern was to move to low power equipment. Having been stitched up on the cost of licences and returns that didn’t match expectations, it is now very important for telcos to reduce their energy costs. Equipment in the field drawing power, whilst being under-utilised hurts. Future sharing of infrastructure can help in this area.
Whilst it’s easy to think of everything computing as digital, the cloud, mobile apps and so on, the underlying technology is RF, radio waves. For this we need engineers, to design and install the equipment of the future.
It was said by an older gentleman with white hair that said something along the lines of, looking around I see people like me, old and with white hair. Where are the younger generation?
I believe we must still show that engineering is still a much-needed profession and that if we want to have world class digital services, we should have the engineers to maintain an infrastructure capability within the UK.
My last point would be that the UK continues to contribute to and sit on all the standards bodies and committees.
In doing the video, it’s not meant to be a total recording of the day. There are slides on screen and I suggest pausing and read each one if you are interested.
The event organisers are https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk
Another summary written by the organisers can be found below.