We’re pleased to announce that SCF has recently launched a 6G Taskforce to complement our broader work agenda.

SCF has always taken a pragmatic approach to the telecoms industry and as such the primary focus of the forum remains on supporting our members, and the broader sector, to successfully monetize 5G and recoup the investment made in 5G StandAlone and 5G Advanced.

However, with work now being undertaken by the standards bodies to define 6G, now is the time to start looking ahead to what may come next. As a forum we are keen to positively influence discussions about the next generation of mobile, with a specific emphasis on how we can learn some of the lessons around 5G, from avoiding two-stage deployment pathways to closely aligning capabilities to recognised industry sector pain points, and ensuring disaggregation through approaches like Open RAN is built into the first releases of specifications.

Critically, our ambition here is to not create a 6G vision in isolation, but to collaborate with those standards bodies that are already leading this work, in order to effectively influence and shape the emerging view of what 6G will be.

As such, the taskforce is exploring two areas:

1. In the short to mid-term our efforts will focus on where to align with 3GPP and the O-RAN Alliance in order to influence and establish a pre-market position. Specifically, we are:

• reviewing O-RAN Alliance’s 6G papers and identifying the touchpoints for densification and small cells
• considering implications for 3GPP with a view to developing messaging around small cells for a submission as a Market Representation Partner

2. Longer term we have ambitions to create a positioning paper around the role and importance of small cell networks, systems and products in the 6G era

Find out more about our work here.