Apple wants to own a piece of 6G, not rent it
Apple isn’t working on the 6G standard for nothing, like every other Apple product it wants to make a difference.
Work on the forthcoming 6G standard is accelerating and Apple is investing to make sure it has a seat at the standards-setting table. This investment now includes recruitment of a larger team to work on the initiative, including the recently revealed position of 6G Cellular Modem Systems Engineer.
Apple and the future of mobile networking
The newly advertised role is one in which the hire will, “define and architect system-level features and requirements for next-generation cellular modems, with a focus on 6G evolution and advanced PHY/L1 capabilities.”
While it’s important not to read too much into a recruitment ad, this is part of a multi-year strategy by the company – we can see similar recruitment back in 2023 and beyond. Within that, Apple is now part of the Next G Alliance and has been since 2020. That Alliance exists “to establish North American pre-eminence in the 5G evolutionary path and 6G development.”
Apple was at Mobile World Congress this year where it demonstrated its work on 6G networking performance with Ericsson. They shared insights into their work figuring out how to get 6G and 5G networks to share the same basic bandwidth, letting the standard be deployed more efficiently, and presumably more cheaply.
User experience, compatibility, efficiency
Apple is also part of the 3GPP standards-setting body, which is developing the initial standards proposals for 6G. Working with 3GPP, Apple is known to be evangelizing for 6G to provide good user experiences, stable and consistent networking operations, backward compatibility and energy efficiency.
The company also wants to ensure that 6G on launch is more cohesive than 5G turned out to be – probably in terms of spectrum, rollout and technologies — and of course its work with satellite partner, Globalstar, now Amazon, shows a spatial computing (in the sense of computing in space) edge to its plans.
As satellite links have proved in Ukraine and everywhere show, connectivity at this level is a strategically essential component to future technology, and Apple is deep into building it.
That matters, in part because, unlike 5G, Apple is now a modem maker and has a vested interest in ensuring it contributes and shapes aspects of the technology standard. That gives Apple every reason to push for patents and technical contributions it can own rather than license, given how much Apple and the rest of the industry pay in 5G licensing fees.
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