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A veteran telecommunication industry expert said upgrading to 6G is too costly and impractical at the moment despite the ongoing discussions of the technology, adding that 5G remains the current focus of the industry.

"Each generational upgrade of wireless technology is immensely costly for society and it will ultimately be the consumers who foot the bills for such upgrades," Ge Qi, vice president at cloud robot system provider CloudMinds, told the Global Times on Saturday at the 8th Sanya Forum in Sanya, a coastal resort city in South China's Hainan Province.

Ge, who was a former senior executive at the Global System for Mobile Communication Association, made the remarks when commenting on 6G. 

Some experts have said that China, which has been a leader in 5G commercial deployments, could become the foremost leader in 6G amid an ongoing and increasingly intense technology competition with the US.

Development of 5G is just in its preliminary stages. So far, a total of 22 countries and regions have commenced 5G commercial services and the current global user base for the new technology has expanded to 5 million, which accounts for about 0.1 percent of total global mobile services users, according to Ge. 

South Korea, which first launched commercial 5G services, has 4 million 5G users. However, in South Korea, users are using only 28 gigabytes (GB) per month on average while buying up packages offering at least 100 GB of data services. 

"The technological 'hard' upgrade for telecom carriers or the industry as a whole, which comes every10 years or so, costs so much that I would prefer the age of 6G to dawn on us at a later timing," Ge said.

Meanwhile, Ge said attention should be focused on using "soft" approaches to address people's needs for telecommunication. 

Such an argument is supported by the evolving theory of people's basic needs, which now tend to include rights to telecommunication service access, and the facts that linking up the still unconnected world's population will need to be low-cost, economically sustainable solutions. Worldwide, there are 2 billion people that don't have telecommunication services.