Daily Dose of 6G

Capabilities without numbers

Part two of TR 38.914. The report describes what a 6G radio must be able to do and declines to say how fast — and the reason is written into a calendar that belongs to ITU-R, not to 3GPP.

Transcribed from 3GPP’s published Release 21 timeline (© 3GPP 2026). Highlighted: TSG#115, Q1 2027 — where the Rel-21 6G work items are approved and Stage 1 freezes. It is the month the ITU-R submission window opens.

What the report says it did

3GPP’s own one-sentence summary of TR 38.914 is worth reading closely, because the order of its clauses is the structure of the document: “The first study — to identify typical usage scenarios for 6G radio technology and the required capabilities for each scenario — is complete.” Scenarios first; then, per scenario, the capabilities the radio must have. Not a target table — a mapping.

The study is FS_6G_RAN_Scen_Req, work item 1060079, rapporteur Xiaoran Zhang, China Mobile Com. Corporation. Version 1.0.0 was approved at TSG RAN#112 in Singapore on 14 June 2026 under RP-261565; the portal record now shows v20.0.0, uploaded 7 July 2026. Its two content pillars, in 3GPP’s wording, are “6G Deployment scenarios” and “6G Requirements and technical principles (KPI, architecture and migration, operational requirements, new and existing services, testing and conformance)”. Edition 06 covered the first pillar. This is the second.

Capabilities without numbers

Note that KPI appears inside that second pillar — and then note what the academic reading of the report says about it. The Monzon Baeza and Chatzinotas survey, which is the most detailed public account of the TR’s contents, states that “rather than defining fixed numerical targets, these requirements are expressed as qualitative dimensions that guide the design of future 6G systems.” The authors give two reasons: 6G’s requirements are heterogeneous enough that they create inherent trade-offs, and earlier generations struggled against “overly rigid quantitative targets.”

The contrast with the same slot one generation earlier is stark. TR 38.913, “Study on scenarios and requirements for next generation access technologies”, is the 5G-era occupant of this position in the 38 series, and what practitioners remember of it is a table of numbers — peak rate, user-plane latency, connection density. Nobody will remember TR 38.914 that way, and that appears to be deliberate rather than incomplete.

The six design drivers — and whose they are

The framing most widely repeated about this report groups its material into six design drivers. Edition 06 withdrew the claim that these are 3GPP clause headings, and the correction stands: they are the authors’ own synthesis in an arXiv survey by Victor Monzon Baeza (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja) and Symeon Chatzinotas (SnT, University of Luxembourg), 8 April 2026. The paper says so plainly: “Rather than summarizing the standard, the goal is to extract and organize the most relevant elements into a coherent perspective.” The drivers are a good map. They are not the territory, and they are not 3GPP wording.

The calendar the report is written against

Approving TR 38.914 “aligns the work to ITU-R’s 6G Framework (M.2160)” and lets it be “shared with ITU-R as a contribution to the IMT-2030 process”. That process has its own dates, published by ITU-R, and this newsletter has never printed them. Here they are.

M.2160’s six usage scenarios — immersive communication; hyper-reliable and low-latency communication; massive communication; ubiquitous connectivity; AI and communication; integrated sensing and communication — are the vocabulary TR 38.914 had to speak in. Read that list against SA1’s six use case families from Edition 03 and the family resemblance is obvious. Two of 3GPP’s six are near-verbatim ITU-R.

Two calendars, one lock

Set the two schedules side by side and the coupling is hard to miss. ITU-R’s submission window opens in February 2027. 3GPP approves the Rel-21 package and freezes Stage 1 in March 2027 — the highlighted row above. ITU-R’s final deadline is February 2029; Rel-21 Stage 3 freezes in December 2028, two months earlier. A submission needs a specification behind it, and that is the margin 3GPP has left itself.

This is the answer to why TR 38.914 carries no numeric targets. The minimum technical performance requirements for IMT-2030 are an ITU-R deliverable, finalised in draft in February 2026 and due for Study Group 5 approval in December 2026. A 3GPP study that published competing numbers in June 2026 would have been picking a fight with the body it was writing for. Describing capabilities qualitatively and letting ITU-R set the thresholds is not a gap in the report. It is the report knowing its audience.