The 2024 Brooklyn 6G Summit took place Oct 23-25 at NYU. The Summit is jointly organized by Nokia and the NYU WIRELESS research center with a theme this year, “6G – From vision to action.” The summit focused on a wide range of 6G topics, including AI/ML, new mid-band spectrum, energy efficiency, security, the integration of Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks and more. As usual, most of the key people in the industry participated including executives from Nokia, T-Mobile, DoD, Nvidia, Echostar, NTT DOCOMO, Qualcomm, SKT, Dell, MediaTek and more.

Some highlights from my perspective (check out our video coverage here):

American Tower noted the evolution of the tower equipment pointing out that there are outdoor cabinets that were used for disaggregation that could be pivotal for edge computing and other applications.

The DoD speaker, Dr. Tom Rondeau, emphasized advanced open RAN and COTS for their projects and initiatives (I thought open RAN had hit the pause button since it seems to have faded quite a bit).

NVIDIA has noted that they have GPUs running RF simulation and OTA testing routines and have seen them in demos with Keysight and R&S for AI/ML implementations. The noted that their Aerial Data Lake is a data capture platform supporting the capture of OTA RF data from vRAN networks.

T-Mobile loves FWA and is enabling their 5G SA networks. They see this as a differentiator in the market and pushing hard in this area.

Joe Madden gave a great presentation on the costs of 5G and projected costs of 6G networks noting that the current margin between cost and price is getting smaller so not sustainable. He showed how NTN could start to become cost effective (see graph).

Skylo has the first NTN in operation today and first 3GPP rel. 17 compliant network. They are offering SMS services and expanding into other areas. Not hardware changes are needed to utilize their network making them unique in the market.

Echostar is the largest GEO company but quickly expanding into LEO. They currently have NTN-IoT services with GEO satellites and coming online with NTN-NR with LEO satellites.

Ted Rappaport always organizes a great event with Amitava Ghosh from Nokia. It was another great summit and already looking forward to the next one.