Next G Alliance

The Next G Alliance is an initiative to advance North American wireless technology leadership through private-sector-led efforts. Further, it is a private-sector partnership to develop 6 generation (6G) wireless technology, encompassing the full lifecycle of research and development, manufacturing, standardization, and market readiness. Next G Alliance was founded in 2020 by parent company ATIS.

The Next G Alliance initial focus was on three strategic actions:

• Develop a 6G national roadmap that addresses the changing competitive landscape and positions North America as the global leader in research and development, standardization, manufacturing, and adoption of Next G technologies
• Align the North American technology industry on a core set of priorities that will steer leadership for 6G and beyond to influence government policies and funding
• Identify and define the early steps and strategies that will facilitate and lead to rapid commercialization of Next G technologies across new markets and business sectors and promote widescale adoption, both domestically and globally

The founding members of the Next G Alliance, other than parent company ATIS, include AT&T, Bell Canada, Ciena, Ericsson, Facebook, InterDigital, JMA Wireless, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, TELUS, Telnyx, T-Mobile, UScellular, and Verizon.

Next G Alliance has four types of membership: Full Members, Contributing Members, Government Members, and Strategic Members. All members of Next G Alliance are expected to support the mission and goals of Next G Alliance.

Full Members include companies that directly provide products, services, software, or applications for use in US commercial, private, or government networks, or companies that otherwise operate communications networks, provide multimedia, or provide cloud services in the North American market. As Next G Alliance has a focus on developing North American leadership in wireless technologies, any company barred from federal contracts by agencies within the US government cannot joint as Full members.

Full Members are entitled to

• nominate a candidate and vote for Full Member Group (FMG) and Working Group leadership
• participate in FMG and SG meetings and in FMG and SG decision-making
• nominate a candidate and vote for Steering Group leadership
• designate a representative to participate in Steering Group meetings, including decision-making
• other benefits, rights, and privileges as the FMG may designate

Contributing Members include organizations that provide products, services, software, or applications for use in US commercial, private, or government networks; companies that operate communications networks, provide multimedia, or cloud services in the North American market; and academic institutions, research and development services, and laboratories in North America. Representatives from Contributing Members are expected to be experts with knowledge of applied research topics, future development, standardization, and market needs.

Contributing Members are entitled to, as part of their membership

• nominate a candidate and vote for Chair and Vice-Chair of the Working Group
• participate in Working Group meetings, including decision making
• other benefits, rights, and privileges as the FMG may designate

Government Members include departments, authorities, or agencies of a North American federal government with expertise, knowledge, and a mission relevant to government networks. The FMG can permit North American state, provincial, and local government entities to join as Government Members once those departments and agencies have demonstrated they are capable of contributing significantly to the goals of the Next G Alliance. Government Members do not have the right to participate in decision making and may only serve in leadership positions with the approval of the FMG. Otherwise, these members are entitled to participate in Working Group meetings.

Strategic Members are any organizations, such as industry associations, research consortia, or academic consortia, that have relevant knowledge or experience to the working area of one or more work programs. These members have to be approved by the Full Member Group to participate as non-voting members in one or more working groups, or where considered appropriate.

Next G Alliance Working Groups are different member groups working to develop the possible roadmap to the development and implementation of 6G technologies, and how to put North America as a leader in this role. This includes addressing key and strategic areas essential to the development of future generations of wireless technology. The Working Groups include six groups: applications, Green G, National 6G Roadmap, societal and economic needs, spectrum, and technology.

The Next G Alliance Applications Working Group works to explore new opportunities expected to be promoted through the development and application of 6G. This can help organizations in North America to plan for changes in market and technology dynamics. The Working Group is headed by Chair Ki-Dong Lee from LG Electronics, Vice-Chairs Andrew Herson from Verizon and Mitch Tseng from ITRI, and Carroll Gray-Preston from ATIS. The use cases behind the applications and markets are summarized by the Working Group into four foundational areas:

• Living—how 6G can improve the quality of everyday life
• Experience—how 6G and future wireless technology can improve the quality of experience in areas such as entertainment, learning, and healthcare
• Critical—how future wireless technology can be used to improve the quality of critical roles in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and public safety
• Societal goals—how to use wireless technologies to attain and improve on high-level societal goals

As the name suggests, the Next G Alliance Green G Working Group has a working mission of developing technologies or systems to minimize the environmental impact of future generations of wireless technology. This includes addressing and reducing energy consumption and environmental impact and involves assessing environmental impacts, such as water and materials consumption, while further exploring the use of renewable or ambient energy and investigating how the ICT industry can help related industries reduce their environmental impact. The Working Group aims to develop an environmentally friendly focus into next generation wireless standards and technologies for the global telecommunications industry. The Green G Working Group is led by Chair Marie-Paule Odini from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Vice-Chairs Micaela Giuhat from Microsoft and Colleen Josephson from VMware, and Ian Deakin from ATIS.

The Societal and Economic Needs Working Group works to identify and characterize societal demands and economic needs to be addressed for a sustainable 6G business development. This includes identifying demands, market needs, operational necessities, and strategic imperative and to recommend how these identified needs should influence the research and development and deployment priorities of 6G. The Working Group is led by chair Jessamine Chin from VMware, vice-chairs Scott Migaldi from T-Mobile and Jeremy Nacer from Verizon, and Carroll Gray-Preston from ATIS.

This graphic explores how the Working Groups identified needs were informed by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

The approach taken by this Working Group is informed by Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) materiality assessments. Which involved taking a base inventory of social and economic issues, grouped into common outcomes, and connected to needs as identified by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. These needs, identified by Next G and its Working Group, include digital equity, trust, sustainability, economic growth, and quality of life.

Next G Alliance's Spectrum Working Group has a stated mission of proactively addressing the possible spectrum issues of future generations of wireless technology. This is based on the already increasing demand of the spectrum from 5G technologies, and working to better understand and influence spectrum access, management, policy recommendations, standards, and long-term needs in the area, as well as working to identify potential spectrum opportunities. The Working Group is led by Chair Andrew Thiessen from MITRE, Vice-Chairs Reza Arefi from Intel and Pascale Dumit from T-Mobile, and includes ATIS's Tom Anderson.

Next G Alliance's Technology Working Group's mission is to define the specific technologies required to fulfill the vision set in the National 6G Roadmap. This includes new air interfaces; network architectures; spectrum access; x-haul; trust, privacy, and security platforms; 6G Mobile-Network-Cloud Fabric; and sensing technologies. The Working Group is also working towards coordination amongst Next G Alliance Policy Committee to work with government agencies to initiate development of next generation wireless technologies, work with stakeholder groups on how to fund these developments, and identify areas not yet addressed in the promotion of North American leadership for 6G and future wireless technologies. The Working Group is led by Chair Eddy (Hwan-Joon) Kwon from Qualcomm, Vice-Chairs Jeongho Jeon from Samsung and Stephen Hayes from Ericsson, and includes ATIS's Iain Sharp.

Perhaps the defining Working Group, Next G Alliance's National 5G Roadmap group works to create the 6G vision and map the steps to achieve it in order to put North America at the forefront of wireless technology leadership. This includes addressing the full wireless technology lifecycle from research to commercialization, and partaking in a diverse ecosystem of operators, vendors, hyperscalers, research groups, and government agencies. The Working Group is led by Chair Amitava Ghosh from Nokia, Vice-Chairs Marc Grant from AT&T and Dough Castor from InterDigital, and includes Mike Nawrocki of ATIS.

As part of the work of the National 6G Roadmap Working Group, the group developed a framework for a North American 6G vision, known as the 6G Vision Framework, which works to address the Next G Alliance stakeholders needs at three levels:

• National Imperatives—this encompasses the societal, economic, and governmental factors that drive toward achieving future North American wireless leadership; including setting a bold and clear vision to understand the change possible with 6G and the unique North American needs and leadership opportunities therein.
• Applications and markets—this includes key markets and use cases enabled through 6G as well as co-dependencies with adjacent industries and groups.
• Technology Development—this works to identify the technology areas needed to achieve success of each objective, and explain why those objectives cannot be achieved with 5G; and includes key performance indicators to establish a success criteria for technology objectives.

In order to define what leadership in wireless technology and future generations of that technology requires the organization to set up specific goals. These goals are intended to guide future global standards, as well as deployment, product, operation, and service recommendations for the future networks. These goals include the following:

• Trust, security, and resilience—such that future networks are fully trusted by people, businesses, and governments, as well as ensuring networks are resilient, secure, privacy-preserving, safe, reliable, and available. This includes a defense use of these networks to protect countries, as network technology pervades elements of critical infrastructure, including national security.
• Cost efficiency—this includes all aspects of the network architecture, including devices, wireless access, cell-site backhaul, distribution, and energy consumption and improvements therein to deliver services in a variety of environments while supporting increased data rates and services.
• Enhanced digital world—this includes multi-sensory experiences that can use future network technology to enhance forms of human collaboration and human-machine interactions, as well as machine-machine interactions, and to offer life-improving use cases in economic value creation.
• AI-native future network—such that AI can increase the robustness, performance, and efficiencies of the radio network against diverse traffic types, ultra-dense deployment topologies, and other spectrum challenges.
• Distributed cloud and communication systems—this includes building on cloud and virtualization technologies to increase network flexibility, performance, and resiliency in key use cases, such as mixed reality, URLLC applications, interactive gaming, and multi-sensory applications.
• Energy efficiency and the environment—which puts environmental concerns and the need for energy efficiency of these networks and devices at the forefront of decision-making throughout the lifecycle, including advances to fundamentally change how electricity is used to support communications and computer networks, and strengthening the role of information technology in the protection of the environment.