By Robert Clark, Contributing Editor
The normally secretive China Mobile has given the world a glimpse of its 6G research work and vision.
The world’s biggest telco by subs recently opened one of its 6G labs to a local reporter, while also setting out its expectations for the new technology in papers filed with the 3GPP.
By operator standards it has a hefty R&D budget, spending 34 billion Chinese yuan (US$4.7 billion) last year to support a research team of 59,000.
Its 6G lab in Changping, Beijing, on the site of the Beijing government’s Future Science City campus, is one part of its 6G work.
The star turn there is a sensing, integrated computing and intelligence test platform that is open to all comers to test out new 6G technologies and applications.
China Securities Journal described it as a public test platform that integrates technologies like communication, perception and AI and supports multiple nodes, frequency bands and air-space-ground communication across multiple stages of the 6G process.
The lab, which also hosts a 6G satellite space-ground test station, has eight sections, including network architecture, air-ground-space networking, optical transmission, RF and 6G cloud.
China Mobile chief expert Liu Guangyi said one of the biggest features of 6G would be the integration of mobile comms with other technologies.
Intense international competition
“We hope that 6G will no longer be just a mobile communication network. It will go beyond traditional methods and provide radar perception, computing, AI, big data and security functions … these capabilities can all serve as content for services provided in the future,” he told the paper.
He acknowledged 6G faced “more intense international competition” than previous mobile generations.
Liu said the 6G lab would create a “more open and systematic 6G R&D environment, with plans to open it to more research organizations and enterprises to allow them to test key technologies.
The operator also set out some of its 6G thinking in a paper presented to the 3GPP workshop in Incheon last month.
It said the new standard should address the problems faced by 5G, such as high costs, high energy consumption and complex O&M.
6G would need to create new value, which meant expanding network capabilities across multiple dimensions and developing integrated technology and industrial ecosystems, it said.
It called for unified system design that could adapt to multiple scenarios.
But it warned that because the new standard required “capabilities beyond communication,” the current technical scope of 3GPP needed to expand.
The 3GPP would need to collaborate with other standards organizations, such as TMF, IETF and ETSI, in order to complete the standard by 2030, China Mobile said.
