CmWave: an essential enabler of 6G
The 7-8.4 GHz spectrum range, together with the upper 6 GHz, are expected to serve as a key enabler of 6G networks, enabling wide-area, high-capacity support of future 6G use cases. These include existing use cases deployed at scale, such as video communication and streaming, gaming, and Generative AI, as well as new future use cases such as extended reality, massive digital twinning, and network sensing.
The essential range: 7 – 8.4 GHz
With relatively large bandwidth and wide coverage capabilities, the 7 – 8.4 GHz range is expected to play a pivotal role in enabling the explosive technological possibilities of 6G – from smart and sustainable cities to high-definition, immersive experiences.
It will also be key to addressing a critical shortfall of wide-area spectral capacity, enabling the continued growth of mobile data traffic beyond 2030.
- Combines good coverage with reasonably large bandwidths.
- Supports wide-area coverage through the use of massive MIMO technologies.
- Unleashes large amounts of spectrum for cellular usage.
- Deployments in the 7 – 8.4 GHz range, immediately adjacent to today’s “classical” mid-band, allow for reuse of the existing grid and reduction in the number of new sites, costs, and power consumption, allowing a faster time to market.
- Enables higher capacity due to massive spatial reuse.
- Enables continued evolution and growth of mobile broadband and AR/VR applications, such as holographic communication.
7 – 8.4 GHz use cases: Good capacity with wide-area mobility
cmWave spectrum will be essential to realize the capacity-demanding use cases of future 6G networks and to enable their mobility both indoors and outdoors. While Wi-Fi will continue to offload some indoor traffic, mobile networks remain key to wide-area mobility and low latency beyond confined spaces. The cmWave range is ideal spectrum: it pairs the capacity of higher bands with propagation good enough to sustain coverage across a wide area.
AI will be native to 6G networks and set to become one of the largest new sources of mobile traffic. AI-enhanced personal assistants and sensory augmentation will become part of everyday life, working seamlessly wherever the user goes and drawing on processing distributed between the device and the network edge to protect privacy and conserve battery. Alongside this, image- and video-driven generative AI is emerging as a major new source of traffic. Both make AI an always-on, uplink-heavy workload that must be served across the whole coverage area, not just in hotspots.
Extended reality, mixed-reality collaboration, spatial gaming and other immersive shared experiences, are set to be the next paradigm shift in how people interact with digital content. To feel natural, XR has to keep high-resolution content precisely aligned with the user in real time, which calls for high data rates in both directions and very low latency. Because users are mobile, this experience must follow them across a wide area rather than stay tied to fixed installations.
6G will turn the network itself into a sensor. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) lets the same infrastructure that carries traffic also perceive its physical environment, estimating the position and speed of vehicles, supporting traffic-safety and environmental-monitoring applications, and feeding spatial-data and digital-twin services. Because sensing accuracy improves with wider bandwidth, cmWave spectrum is ideal for delivering it with wide-area, mobile coverage rather than only at isolated sites.
Digital twins build high-precision, continuously updated 4D models of the physical world. In smart cities they aggregate data from an enormous number of sensors; each sensor's data rate is modest, but their sheer number challenges aggregated capacity, and this traffic is heavily uplink-oriented. Radio-based sensing complements the sensor data with measurements taken by the network itself, tightening the link between sensing and communication.
Spectrum required by these use cases
Taken together, AI, XR, sensing and digital twinning cannot be served by today's available spectrum. The GSMA's Vision 2040 study estimates that a global average of 2–2.5 GHz of mid-band spectrum will be needed in high-demand areas by 2035–2040. Higher demand countries will require up to 3.3 GHz. Two GHz will be required already by 2030. As most countries have only around 1 GHz today, that means 1–2.3 GHz of new spectrum — from the mid-bands and the cmWave ranges as the latter is well placed to meet this need: the new bands under study toward WRC-27 combine the wide, contiguous channels required for high capacity, low latency and high-resolution sensing with the propagation needed to provide good capacity with wide-area mobility.
Learn more about 6G spectral requirements in our 6G spectrum white paper and about the 6G use cases in our Top use cases article.
Technical challenges: What to expect
It is anticipated that the 7 – 8.4 GHz frequency band will initially be deployed on the same grid as "classical" mid-band, maximizing the re-use of the existing network grid. For this, many different architectural choices exist to implement the larger antenna array, each of which will need to strike a balance between challenges of complexity, flexibility and energy efficiency.
Learn more about example deployment scenarios in our cmWave blog post.
The road to 6G spectrum and cmWave
A common and harmonized framework of frequency bands to be used for 6G is expected to be agreed globally, or at least regionally, for economies of scale. Discussions are currently on-going towards World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) 2027, where the 7-8.4 GHz range is under consideration, together with the mid 4 GHz and 15 GHz bands.
Following a decision at a WRC, it is common practice that national regulators proceed with their national decisions.
It is estimated according to the Spectrum for the future of mobile connectivity - GSMA Vision 2026 report that that future 6G use cases will require additional of 1-2 GHz wide-area spectrum. It is beneficial to have this spectrum as close as possible to the “classical” mid-bands which implies that the 7-8.4 GHz range, together with the upper 6 GHz, is ideal. To avoid the high complexity of non-contiguous carrier aggregation and also to enable meter-precise positioning and sensing services, it’s important that spectrum is allocated in contiguous blocks of not less than 200 MHz.
Learn more about the 6G spectrum timeline in our 6G spectrum white paper.