Confidentiality in networking is entirely possible and rolling out such a system would make carriers instantly liable for every phone and internet connection they fail to wiretap.
5G has redesigned several core identifiers to make it harder for middleboxes to MitM/intercept traffic for a specific target. This has led to slowdowns in 5G rollout all over the world, as carriers needed their suppliers to figure out how to wire tap their customers now that they couldn't uniquely identify a customer by a static identifier anymore.
Carriers may have the best intentions for the security and reliability of their customers, but they're legally obligated to deliver plaintext dumps of phone calls on their network somehow. Same goes for other unencrypted side channels such as SMS.
If 6G redesigns the entire network to be fully E2EE, it's essentially illegal to roll out as a carrier. This isn't an engineering problem as much as it is a legal problem.
There are also financial challenges in a secure system. You need to know who to bill for long international three-way calls. That sounds easy, but because of backwards compatibility and many different ways to do roaming, doing billing for mobile phones is an entire industry in itself.
5G has redesigned several core identifiers to make it harder for middleboxes to MitM/intercept traffic for a specific target. This has led to slowdowns in 5G rollout all over the world, as carriers needed their suppliers to figure out how to wire tap their customers now that they couldn't uniquely identify a customer by a static identifier anymore.
Carriers may have the best intentions for the security and reliability of their customers, but they're legally obligated to deliver plaintext dumps of phone calls on their network somehow. Same goes for other unencrypted side channels such as SMS.
If 6G redesigns the entire network to be fully E2EE, it's essentially illegal to roll out as a carrier. This isn't an engineering problem as much as it is a legal problem.
There are also financial challenges in a secure system. You need to know who to bill for long international three-way calls. That sounds easy, but because of backwards compatibility and many different ways to do roaming, doing billing for mobile phones is an entire industry in itself.