ISAC Today vs. ISAC Tomorrow

Towards the beginning of the month, Cohere Technologies announced work with the US government to support a “multi-waveform RAN prototype for mission critical ISAC.” A $28M contract might not seem like big money, but it’s clearly a big deal for Cohere; visit the company’s website and the first thing you’ll see is a red, white and blue quote from Tom Rondeau (Director of the US Department of Defense FutureG office) on the importance of ISAC and a need to, “execute rapidly.” 

In no uncertain terms, Tom and Co wanted, “a clear path that we could move on immediately.” 

The day before that announcement, we posted a blog asking whether ISAC timelines need to be accelerated. (Complete coincidence. I promise.) Pre-6G ISAC. OCUDU. Defense applications. Cohere’s Multi-G positioning. They were all in there. The news even featured in Episode 6 of our Intelligence and Noise podcast where I posited that this might be a move to get network incumbents like Ericsson and Nokia to pay more attention to FutureG’s ISAC requirements. 

Cue Ericsson’s work with AT&T to demo ISAC over 5G, with a done detection use case. 

Announced on July 10^th, the demo took place outside AT&T Stadium in Texas. “During one the largest sporting events in the world,” AT&T and Ericsson were leveraging massive MIMO and a multi-static configuration to detect, locate and track drones. Real time target metrics were generated (location, velocity, elevation). Sensing and comms were both supported. Promises of TCO benefits with nationwide coverage were made. 

While we can safely guess at the unnamed sporting event (D2 baseball, right?), the announcement still leaves us with no shortage of other things to ponder. And, since my track record has been pretty solid, I’ve got some thoughts…

• Can 5G ISAC deliver precision, efficiency and granularity on par with 6G ISAC? (I sure hope not, or what’s the point?)
• Will Cohere claim that its Pulseone tech bests what you can get from 5G and possibly even 6G? (probably, let’s hope it comes with proof points)
• Is this all a message? A response from Ericsson that ISAC is available in the here and now? (unlike the timing of our earlier blog post, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence) 
• Beyond drones, do we need more ISAC use cases? (yep, no question)
• Will we get those soon? (I sure hope so)