AT&T is still in the midst of a multi-billion-dollar 5G network build, but as with the rest of the telecommunications industry, is starting to look at what 6G will bring and how it will be used and monetized. That last part is important as operators struggle through monetizing their ongoing 5G investments.

Chris Sambar, EVP for technology at AT&T, during a keynote speech at this week’s Brooklyn 6G Summit laid out a half-dozen 6G use cases the operator expects the next wireless technology iteration to support. This includes a trio of “communication-based scenarios” and three "beyond communications.”

The first three were quickly rattled off as immersive communications, massive communications, and hyper-reliable, low-latency communications.

“To me, those translate to the most likely use cases in the consumer world are extended reality (XR), the metaverse,” Sambar said. “There's a company spending billions on that hoping that it's going to work out for him someday.”

Sambar went on to describe a more pointed potential XR use case that involved training soldiers or first responders to deal with real-world scenarios. This included a demonstration of Sambar himself putting on an XR headset and going through the use case.

“The problem was it took a team of engineers to set it up, a lot of compute. They literally had a rack of computers in that room to enable this, and it was a pretty small room,” Sambar said. “Being able to do that in a 6G world, in an open-air environment; being able to give soldiers some goggles so they can go out and into an urban training scenario and train; being able to get police officers that same thing, I think that's an incredible use case and something that 6G is going to bring us in time.”

Sambar’s three other use cases focused on expanding the reach and ability of wireless communications systems.

The first was to help bridge the digital divide, something that is top of mind for the U.S. government and the basis for its $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Sambar during his keynote pointed to AT&T’s work with satellite providers to expand the reach of its network. This included a recent 5G milestone in which the carrier worked with Vodafone, Nokia and AST SpaceMobile to successfully beam voice and data services between a pair of unmodified smartphones linked by AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite.

AT&T has a deep working relationship with AST SpaceMobile, which includes leasing valuable spectrum assets to the satellite provider, though Sambar did note the carrier was keeping tabs on the “horse race” that has shaped up from a network architecture standpoint between AST and Elon Musk’s Starlink program.

“If you're not following that and the decision on whether putting an eNodeB on a satellite at 17,000 miles per hour around the Earth (Starlink’s plan) or putting the eNodeB on the ground (AST SpaceMobile’s plan), and they each have different theories on which one's going to work better: one is less than 100 satellites to cover most of the earth (AST SpaceMobile) and the other you need thousands of satellites (Starlink), so we'll see which one wins the race,” Sambar said with just a hint of sarcasm. “We're going to ride a little bit of both horses, but we're really in the AST camp and we think they're going to do a great job.”

The second “beyond communication” use case was integrated sensing in communications. Sambar pointed to current work using self-optimizing networks (SON) that today is “essentially an algorithm.”

He explained a recent scenario where he was at a large outdoor soccer complex and AT&T’s network “wasn’t performing very well. SON was trying to fix that situation, but it wasn’t fixing it.”

“We need networks that are more intelligent that can help us fix that more quickly and provide a great experience to our customers,” Sambar said.

This bled into the final 6G use-case scenario focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help manage networks. Sambar used an example of wanting the network to know where a particular high-value customer was located at all times and using AI and ML to make sure that their device or devices always had a strong connection.

“I think that with artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning in 6G networks we can make that happen,” Sambar said.