But again, we do not know when it will come. And I’m not sure if the operators themselves either understand yet or know yet when they will start increasing their investments again. So, this is only – I mean the question is simply being prepared. If then there is a fast recovery, then it’s super good, we have lower cost and then we get the benefits of a recovery. But we feel that it’s better now in this situation where there is so much uncertainty to, in a way, go all in. And then it’s always easier to take then a step back, if for some reason, you have got too much somewhere. But we believe that this, at least 10% is fully doable without sacrificing some of the most important things, which are – which definitely is R&D output. Then your second question, the timing of 6G, I mean there’s obviously a lot of discussions now within the operator community that how that game should be played because they are all now thinking that how do I monetize 5G.
They have been disappointed on their own ability to monetize 5G, and then there is the weak economy and high interest rates and so on. I mean the base case continues to be that that 5G would start – sorry, 6G would start delivering around ’29 and then maybe volumes in 2030. So there would be roughly 10 year difference between 5G and 6G. This is still uncertain. There could be changes, but this is the base case we are working against. I don’t actually think that the number of 5 or 6 is the most important thing. The most important thing is that what will the applications be and what will their demand. If we expect that the data traffic will continue to grow 20% to 30% per year, and then little by little, we will start seeing completely new types of use cases.
For example, driven by augmented reality, various types of immersive use cases for consumers for video conferencing for industrial applications, and so on and so on. There is a lot like this in the pipeline. And you have seen the Apple announcement on the AR device. We believe that there will be a race where there will be a lot of new devices driving bandwidth usage in the coming years. If that happens, we are looking at somewhere around ’26, ’27, ’28 when most of the 5G frequencies will have been exhausted, which means that new frequencies for new capacities will be needed. They must be allocated. And once that is done, the very important thing for everybody, including operators and consumers will be the cost of that bandwidth. How do we make sure that we deliver the services as cost efficiently and with as little power consumption as possible.
And that will require new generations of silicon. It will require new innovations in terms of Massive MIMO in the radio interface. If you want to call that 6G, fine, but I don’t think that matters. The driver is really what the new applications will need. And there, our expectation again is that when we get to ’27, ’28, the capabilities of 5G will gradually start to be exhausted and something – something new will be needed.
David Mulholland: Thank you, Francois.
Francois Bouvignies: Thank you.
David Mulholland: We’ll take our next question, Sébastien Sztabowicz from Kepler Cheuvreux. Sébastien, please go ahead.
Sébastien Sztabowicz: Yeah. Hi, everyone. And thanks for taking my question. On fixed broadband access, from many analysts are now targeting roughly stable market development for the next five years and you have been historically quite constructive or positive on the growth prospect for fiber going forward. Have you seen any major change in market dynamics on fixed broadband access? That would be my first question. The second one is on the mix for next year, how do you see the mix evolving moving into 2024? And what could be the different moving parts to your gross margin moving into 2024? Thank you.
