As a practical matter, mobile infrastructure providers and service providers are compelled to argue that the next mobile platform will bring new capabilities that solve more problems and generate more revenue. If not, governments will not allocate new spectrum and service providers will not buy new networks.
That is true of 6G, no less than was true for 4G and 3G, and will happen with 5G as well.
Also as a practical matter, the next-generation network is necessary for a simple reason: bandwidth demand keeps growing, and there are only so many things service providers can do to increase capacity in affordable ways, without additional spectrum.
That driver exists whether or not new use cases and applications actually develop. Historically, new use cases and revenue drivers have emerged with each new digital platform, even if not in the ways many proponents had argued.
It also takes time for robust use cases to develop. Martec's Law explains why there is a gap. Martec's Law states that technological change is exponential, while human organization change is linear. One practical implication is that humans can predict vast changes, which seem stubbornly slow to develop. So we overestimate the early impact.
Then disillusionment sets in, and we discount the potential impact, as we do not seem to reap the expected benefits. Then, at some point, there is a catalyst, or a change in adoption rates, that shifts behavior beyond the incremental pace we had come to expect.
That would help explain the “less change than you expect early, more impact than you expect later” phenomenon.
As humans change in a linear way, so our expectations about the future oscillate between overly-optimistic early expectations and linear extrapolations when big changes are not seen early on.
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