Daily Dose of 6G

The document RAN wrote for the ITU

TR 38.914 is the first completed 6G study on the radio side, and it is not a smaller version of SA1’s requirements report. It answers to a different reader — ITU-R Working Party 5D — and that single fact explains its shape, its vocabulary, and why it refuses to print the numbers everyone wants from it.

Transcribed from 3GPP’s published Release 21 timeline (© 3GPP 2026). Highlighted row: TSG#112, Singapore, where TR 38.914 v1.0.0 was approved on 14 June 2026.

A different reader, a different document

Editions 03 to 05 followed SA1’s thread: TR 22.870 collected use cases, and TS 22.270 is turning them into normative service requirements. That thread answers to operators and service designers. TR 38.914 — “Study on 6G Scenarios and requirements”, TSG RAN, rapporteur Xiaoran Zhang, China Mobile Communications Corporation — answers to somebody else entirely.

The study was approved at RAN#106 in Madrid on 12 December 2024, co-signed and supported by “over fifty companies from diverse countries and regions”, with a stated aim to “investigate a candidate set of items for minimum TPRs based on the Recommendation ITU-R M.2160”. TPRs are technical performance requirements: the figures a radio technology must demonstrate before ITU-R will accept it as an IMT-2030 radio interface. 3GPP is not writing this report for itself. It is assembling a submission.

That is why the report reached v1.0.0 at TSG RAN#112, Singapore, on 14 June 2026 under document RP-261565 and was immediately sent onward to ITU-R as a contribution to the IMT-2030 process. It has kept moving since: the portal record shows version 20.0.0 uploaded on 7 July 2026, the version number tracking the release rather than a fresh round of drafting.

The five dimensions — and who actually wrote them

The taxonomy most often quoted for TR 38.914 organises deployment along four axes — density, coverage, mobility and infrastructure domain — and collapses them into five scenario families. It is a genuinely useful frame, and this newsletter has used it. It is also, on the evidence available, a secondary synthesis rather than 3GPP’s clause headings, and this edition corrects the record on that.

That five-family framing, together with the six design drivers often listed alongside it — extreme performance, massive scalability, ubiquitous coverage, native intelligence, sustainability and energy efficiency, and integrated sensing and communication — is set out in an April 2026 arXiv survey by Victor Monzon Baeza (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja) and Symeon Chatzinotas (SnT, University of Luxembourg). The authors present it as their unified taxonomy drawn from Release 20 material. Treat it as a good map of the territory, not as text you can cite into a contribution.

Why a requirements document would refuse to print numbers

For anyone who lived through 5G, this is the surprise. TR 38.913, the equivalent 5G-era study one number earlier in the same series, is remembered precisely for its table of targets. A 6G scenarios report that leans qualitative looks, at first glance, like a report that has not finished its job.

The likelier reading is sequencing. The minimum TPRs for IMT-2030 are ITU-R’s to set, through its own M-series process; 3GPP’s study feeds candidates into that process rather than pre-empting it. Committing numbers in a 3GPP TR before ITU-R fixes them would create two authorities and one inevitable reconciliation exercise. Holding the scenarios firm and the figures open is the cheaper order of operations — and it leaves the numeric fight where it belongs, in TR 38.760-1, where waveform and coding choices have to be defended against something.

One consequence worth internalising: if you are looking for the 6G equivalent of “20 Gbit/s peak, 1 ms latency,” TR 38.914 is not where you will find it, and a vendor deck that says otherwise is quoting ITU-R’s framework or its own modelling, not this report.

Where it sat in the queue

The study was around 90% complete at the close of TSG#111 in Fukuoka (9–13 March 2026) — the same plenary that approved SA1’s TR 22.870 and launched the four CT protocol studies. Three months later it landed. Two further details from the portal record are worth carrying: the work item acronym is FS_6G_RAN_Scen_Req (work item 1060079), and the specification record still shows the report as initially planned for Release 19 before moving to Release 20. That is not an error in the record. It is a fossil of how early RAN started positioning for 6G — before the two-track Rel-20 split had a name.