Mobile industry companies, academic institutions and governments have started to think about what 6G may look like, and how to influence that. Some big vendors and intellectual property powerhouses, such as Qualcomm and Nokia, have set out high level roadmaps from 5G-Advanced (the next three releases of 3GPP standards) to 6G, drawing on the new use cases and experiences that they assume will be prevalent by 2030 or thereabouts. Specialist R&D into certain elements of next generation mobile networks, such as sub-terahertz spectrum or new modulations, is beginning to yield interesting results. But the most difficult task goes to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which has to pull together all these strands and achieve an overall consensus about what…