By Naveed Malik
6G: What It Is & When To Expect It? It seems a little early to talk about 6G when 5G networks are still being set up around the world and many places are still using 4G and even 3G networks. After all, what good are 6G networks if only a small number of people can use 5G networks?
Still, technology is always getting better and standards take a long time to develop, so we’ve always been headed toward a world with 6G. The fact that 6G is already being talked about so early in the development of 5G just shows how fast this technology moves forward. Since we’ve gone from 1G to 5G in such a short amount of time, 6G is just the next step toward faster and better wireless connections.
Even though it makes sense for 6G to come after 5G, it may never be called “6G.” If not something like 5G Enhanced or 5G Advanced, we might just say “connected” one day instead of all the numbers and names.
Eventually, whether we have 6G, 7G, or another “G,” we’ll have speeds so fast that, at least by today’s standards, we won’t need progress bars or wait times for any normal amount of data. We won’t have to keep coming up with new words to describe things because everything will be available right away.
When will 6G be available?
About once every 10 years or so, a new mobile network standard has been at the center of attention. That means that 6G networks might start up around 2030 (or even a little earlier in Asia and other places that got 5G first), or at least that’s when most telecom companies will be running trials and phone makers will start teasing phones that can connect to 6G networks.
But it’s common for work to start up to a decade before a new network technology is actually used. This could be why you’ll hear about 6G before you even get your hands on a 5G phone.
But change won’t start and stop all at once. 6G networks won’t come out as quickly as we’d like for the same reason that 5G networks are slow to roll out. There are frequency bands to talk about, spectrum licences to buy, physical towers to build and make sure everything works together, and rules to deal with.
Even though 6G is coming in less than 10 years, not many companies are really looking into it right now. However, 6G research is expected to pick up speed as we find out where 5G falls short. The next network type will fix 5G’s flaws and limits, so it won’t be long before the powers that be start figuring out what to do next.
6G Benefits
Everything you do now with a network connection will be much better on a 6G network. Literally, every improvement that 5G makes will be even better and more advanced on a 6G network.
With 5G, we’ll have more powerful VR and AR systems, as well as smart cities and farms that are connected to each other, AI at our fingertips, smart robots working in factories, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, and more. 6G will keep supporting all of these areas and make them even stronger. It will also give us even more bandwidth, which will lead to even more innovation, maybe even in areas we haven’t even thought of yet. Think about more immersive virtual reality apps and hologram video calls that look and feel like real life.
For example, Marcus Weldon of Nokia Bell Labs says that 6G will be a “sixth sense experience for humans and machines” where biology and AI meet.
NTT Docomo, a Japanese phone company, thinks that 6G will make it possible to “sophisticate cyber-physical fusion,” which a document says will be needed in the 2030s. They say that this will make it “possible for cyberspace to support human thought and action in real time through wearable devices and micro-devices mounted on the human body.”
The low latency of about 4 ms is a big part of what makes 5G so great, but 6G networks might bring this down even more, maybe to the point where we can say there’s almost no latency. Movies, TV, and games can start as soon as the screen turns on, and video calls can be as clear as if you were standing right next to the other person.
As we’ve seen with 3G, 4G, and now 5G, as a network’s capacity grows, so do its applications. This will have a great effect, making it possible to build new products and services that make the most of 6G’s bandwidth and other improved features.
What’s the difference between 6G and 5G?
The main difference between 6G and 5G will be speed and latency. This is what makes the difference between 5G and 4G in terms of speed, so we can also expect 6G to be a lot faster than 5G.
If early goals are met, 6G networks should be able to handle 50–100 times as much data as 5G networks. Also, while 5G must support 1 million devices per square kilometre, 6G may support 10 million devices per square kilometre.
How fast is 6G going to be? Right now, we don’t know, but even with 5G, we see speeds of up to 1 Gbps in the best cases. That will be beaten by 6G, but by how much is still unknown. We could see speeds of several hundred gigabits per second or even terabytes. Samsung Electronics tried out 6G technology at 50 times the speed of 5G.
We don’t know how 6G will be faster than 5G yet, but we can guess that it will use the radio spectrum’s ultrahigh frequencies (millimetre waves). 5G can handle a lot of data because it uses high radio frequencies. The higher up the radio spectrum you go, the more data you can send. 6G could reach frequencies as high as 300 GHz or even terahertz in the future. This would be near the top of the radio spectrum.
But 6G networks will have the same problem as the very fast 5G networks do now: they will only work in very small areas because millimetre waves have their own limits. Terahertz radiation, for example, has a range of about 10 metres, which is much too short for 6G coverage.
Maybe by 2030, we’ll have found new ways to boost signals so much that we won’t need to build thousands of new 6G cell towers. Or, we might have found better ways to send a lot of data, like these researchers did in 2022 when they used a new type of transmitter that created focused beams (vortex millimetre waves) to move 1 TB of data in a single second.
6G: What It Is & When To Expect It?
5G wants to make the internet easier for more people to use and improve everything from entertainment to health care. Yes, there will be room for improvement in these areas after 5G, so they will need to use something better, like 6G.
But while it might be fun to think about a time when 5G is considered slow and 6G runs the world, if 5G works as planned or slowly improves over time, we might not need a new next-gen network.
The idea of 6G could be avoided if manufacturers, regulators, and telecommunications companies keep making improvements to 5G. If all of 5G’s problems could be fixed on a regular basis, new products could keep coming out to take advantage of the new technology that is always changing and getting better.
The newest 6G news
Here are some signs that 6G development has already begun:
2022
Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) opens the country’s first lab for developing 6G technology.
LG has made a big step forward in connectivity by sending 6G THz data at a frequency range of 155 to 175 GHz over 320 metres outdoors (up from 100 metres a year prior).
The Prime Minister of India says that his country is “getting ready to launch 6G by the end of this decade.”
Viavi says that its 6G Forward programme will help fund 6G research in universities and businesses around the world. It has already helped three universities: Northeastern University and the University of Texas in the US, and the University of Surrey in the UK.
Around the middle of 2022, NEC, DOCOMO, and NTT began testing 6G in the field.
Finnish groups joined together to make Finland more competitive in 6G.
Samsung’s first 6G forum, called Samsung 6G Forum, was held.
The US Department of Homeland Security did a study on how 6G started to develop.
VMware showed its plans for 6G technology.
Minister of Vietnam Nguyen Manh Hung said that the country needs to start 6G research in 2022. By 2028, frequency licencing should be in place.
In one second, Chinese researchers can send 1 terabyte of data over 3,000 feet. That’s the same as downloading all of Wikipedia (about 20 GB) faster than you can blink!
At the beginning of 2022, the government of Catalonia, Spain, gave the go-ahead for 6G research and development.
2021 & 2020
Ericsson and KAUST announced a research and development partnership at the end of 2021 to work on 5G and 6G technologies in Saudi Arabia.
In the middle of 2021, a “6G Strategy Meeting” was held by the Ministry of Science and ICT in South Korea.
Early in 2021, Apple started looking for engineers to help make 6G.
Terahertz waves in the 300-GHz band were used as a way to send information by researchers at Osaka University. This lets 8K UHD video with a data rate of 48 Gbps be sent wirelessly at a data rate of 48 Gbps.
In late 2020, China put a 6G satellite into orbit to test terahertz waves at very high speeds.
Late in 2020, ATIS launched the Next G Alliance to help North America move forward toward “6G and beyond.” Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Apple, Google, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and other companies are all part of the group. Here is their white paper about what they want 6G to be like in North America.
Japan wants to start 6G by the year 2030.
2019 & 2018
Shortly after China launched 5G in 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced that they would start research and development on 6G with the help of government departments, research institutes, universities, and businesses.
In 2019, Virginia Tech will start researching 6G.
Early in 2018, the University of Oulu in Finland announced that their 6G Flagship programme would be getting funding to study materials, antennas, software, and other things that will be needed to launch 6G.
The FCC took the first steps toward opening up the terahertz wave spectrum (the frequencies between 95 GHz and 3 THz), saying that it will “speed up the deployment of new services in the spectrum above 95 GHz.”
