I’m flattered. I have just been added to a Google Group Special Task Force for 6G Mobile Technology, by its founder, professor Willie Lu of Pebble Beach California.
According to its web page, the group is “bringing together world-class experts and executives in redefining mobile communication technology for the next decade, in the era of 6G or 5G++.”
I don’t know professor Lu but he is certainly an eminence in the world of wireless, according to his personal web site, http://willie.lu. It says he and his partners have invested $US5m in 6G Labs to “redesign mobile devices.” He has also launched the Task Force for 6G Mobile Technology. Unfortunately the web site is only in Chinese, so offered me no indication as to what Lu and his colleagues are doing on 6G.
But that’s a good question. The hard work on 5G has been done over the last several years, the standards are largely finalised, much investment has gone into implementing these standards in products and now it’s a matter of rolling out networks and persuading people to pay for all the new capabilities that the industry has been talking up.
However innovation never stops, and although we’ve heard little about it to date there is no doubt that the boffins and Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and others, and those in numerous university labs are looking at what the next big thing in cellular will be.
I put ‘6G’ and ‘cellular’ into a Google search and got more than three million hits, the first three of which were
Get ready for upcoming 6G wireless, too (NetworkWorld June 2018)
Beyond 5G: The Roadmap to 6G and beyond (Cablefree July 2017)
and
5G: what it means and why there will never be a 6G (Carphone Warehouse June 2015).
“No need for 6G” Really!
That last one concluded. “It is clear that 5G will be more than a new mobile network infrastructure. It will use multiple forms of connectivity and if done right there will never be a need for a 6G.”
“Need” of course has nothing to do with it. In the early 1940s, IBM’s president, Thomas J Watson, reputedly said: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”
Several generations of that technology later Kenneth Olson, founder of mini computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation, is supposed to have declared “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
More recently, as the first portable cellphones hit the market, demand was consistently underestimated. Telecom Australia (Telstra) launched its cellular service in 1987 forecasting that it would have 200,000 users within a decade. It reached the 250,000 mark in 1991.
And of course what really drove those number a few years down the track was all the other things we could do apart from making phone calls.
You can’t put a brake on innovation and some of those innovations might disappear without trace because nobody wants them. Others will change the world.
So what’s coming over the horizon that might deserve the moniker 6G?
Bandwidths in the tens or terabits
The NetworkWorld article referenced the Center for Converged TeraHertz Communications and Sensing, an arm of the US-based Semiconductor Research Corporation. It’s worth repeating the contents of its home page, which talks about wireless technologies beyond 5G, and few other innovations as well.
ComSenTer will develop the technologies for a future cellular infrastructure using hubs with massive spatial multiplexing, providing 1-100Gb/s to the end user, and, with 100-1000 simultaneous independently-modulated beams, aggregate hubs capacities in the 10’s of Tb/s. Backhaul for this future cellular infrastructure will be a mix of optical links and Tb/s-capacity point-point massive MIMO links.
“These mobile links will support cm-precision localization, supplementing GPS, and will use imaging techniques to locate communications partners. This intelligent immersive infrastructure will support low-latency virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and seamless telepresence.
“The Center seeks to drive a revolution in transportation, supporting autonomous vehicles and intelligent highways. Wideband inter-car links will communicate data and measure vehicle locations to cm-precision; these will anticipate and manage interactions, and avoid collisions. Unparalleled high resolution imaging, compact enough to fit on a car, will let drivers see through extreme fog and rain as well as our eyes can on a clear day, while low-cost, lightweight “whisper radios” will replace wire harnesses in vehicles.
The CableFree article offers no real insights into what 6G might entail, but another, With 5G Still in the Works, 6G Is Already Taking Shape, PCMag April 2018, reports: “The Academy of Finland yesterday announced the funding of ‘6Genesis’ an eight-year research program to conceptualize 6G under the auspices of the University of Oulu’s Centre for Wireless Communications.”
The 6Genesis home page, helpfully, offers a video “Discover how 6G will change our lives.” Titled, “6Genesis vision for 2030, it’s very slick and clearly unpinned by a lot of thought and research into what might be possible.
The 6Genesis Flagship, usually referred to as 6GFlagship is based at the University of Oulu and was only launched this month. It “focuses on the development of future near-instant, data-driven, immersive wireless technologies as well as on services and applications built on them.’”
The core research areas include wireless connectivity, devices and circuit technologies, distributed computing, as well as service development across verticals.
Perhaps not surprisingly none of the big 5G vendors are saying a peep about 6G yet. They want all the attention to be focussed on 5G to make it a big success.
However there is one reference, from Ericsson back in 2016. A video on Facebook 6G: The Internet of Goats. Nothing to do with 6G really, or goats for that matter.