Do We Need To Prepare For 6G? Technically, no. But think about operational possibilities.
Do We Need To Prepare For 6G? That’s an excellent question.
Presently 6G is nothing more than a conversation about the next generation of wireless telephony that will begin to be defined later this year, with deployment slated for 2030 in 4 phases.
In some ways, 6G is a wishlist containing everything that 5G can’t do, but these imaginings make nailing real-world functionality extremely difficult. For instance, 6G is meant to deliver a data rate of 1000Gbps with double the spectral efficiency, but how that will happen affordably is anyone’s guess. Another contradiction is that always-on 6G will be intensely power-hungry, but the aim is to be half as demanding on battery life.
Do We Need To Prepare For 6G?
On the technical side, 5G uses frequencies up to 100GHz and for 6G it seems researchers are thinking about modulating data onto waves in the terahertz range. The benefit is that aside from local scanning solutions, there’s nothing much in the THz range, so there’s loads of space. The downside is that THz signals are so teeny tiny they are interfered with by everything – even humidity gets in their way. THz signals also have very short ranges and are lossy during propagation. There’s talk about vast arrays of minuscule antennas installed very close together, but that sounds horrible to us.
Other things planned for 6G include split channel frequencies and time slots, which could double spectrum efficiency, and the implementation of mesh networking instead of the hub architecture we see with 5G. This seems to be an admission that THz ranges will be short and that the network will need to support itself. 6G is also hoping to achieve a latency of less than 1 ms to allow near real-time virtual video communications without local processing, but no one is sure how.
Additional fantasies include real-time holograms, physical-to-cyber fusion, smart clothing that detects health issues, self-managing industrial facilities, connected robotics, and plenty more. Some of the ideas seem awesome, others smack of shark-jumping, and a few are just plain scary. If you thought 5G was a cyber security risk, 6G is at another level altogether.
So, do we need to prepare for 6G? No, not yet. Concentrate on getting the best performance from existing technologies. But keep the operational possibilities of 6G behind your mind.
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