Although 5G connectivity is still beginning to be rolled out, and has not yet reached much beyond the main cities in the main countries of Europe, North America and Asia, 6G networks are already being talked about a lot. The operators are already planning its deployment, and fixing its characteristics. But the general public still has many doubts about 6G, which promises to be among the star themes of the next Mobile World Congress. On the one hand, they wonder when it will arrive. On the other, what will she offer.
Each generation of mobile networks consolidates the use cases offered by the previous one, and offers new functions, in a cycle that lasts approximately 10 years. 2G, which arrived in 1990, opened the door to digital voice calls and SMS. 3G arrived around 200 and added web browsing to smartphones. 4G arrived in 2010 with faster browsing speeds that, among other things, enabled mobile video.
5G, which started to appear around 2020, is offering even faster mobile browsing speeds, and with lower latency. This will enable the development of use cases ranging from the Industrial Internet of Things to digital twins and autonomous vehicles. Without forgetting smart homes and buildings and cities. Also remote healing.
6G will be the next generation mobile communication network after 5G. More specifically, from the connections known as %G Advanced, developed based on the 3GPP Release 18 standard. This standard is expected to be ready by mid-2024, and network and device support for advanced 5G is likely to arrive sometime in 2025.
Advanced 5G will already bring great improvements to the Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality sectors, which will allow the arrival of highly intelligent network solutions and which will be able to support even more use cases. Every improvement in 5G and 5G Advanced network connectivity that reaches the end user will be perfected with 6G.
When will 6G arrive?
If the development of 6G follows the terms of previous networks, which have more or less respected a cadence of 10 years between each one, we can expect the arrival of the first commercial 6G networks around 2030, according to Zdnet. In some regions, such as Asia, where 5G networks were rapidly deployed, they may arrive before that year.
They aren’t talked about much right now, but they may be turning up more and more in all sorts of conversations and events as their requirements and standards develop. Also when their frequency bands are defined and assigned, RANs are ready, AI-powered backbone networks are rolled out, and the first 6G-enabled devices hit the market.
In theory, the data transfer peaks for 5G will be 20 Gbps upload and 10 Gbps download. Its user experience rates give download rates of up to 10Mbps and upload rates of 50 Mbps, with a latency of between 1 and 4 milliseconds, and connection densities of up to one million devices per square kilometer. And although the requirements for 6G are yet to be defined, in theory its data download rates could reach up to one terabit per second (1000 Gbps), with latency measured in microseconds. If it truly achieves these results, it will enable a much wider variety of use cases than 5G.
In addition to evolving the enhanced mobile broadband, high-reliability, low-latency communications, and mass communications services brought by 5G, 6G next-generation mobile networks will help deliver more immersive extended reality experiences, as well as achieve new capabilities in wireless positioning and remote sensing, among other advances.
The standards that will define 6G, and the spectrum it will use
The current focus of 3GPP is to finalize the Release 18 standard for 5G Advanced and decide the content of Release 19, which is expected to happen by September 2023. Groundwork on 6G specifications will start with Release 20, in 2025. In As for Release 21, it will be ready and ratified by 2028, in time for the launch of commercial 6G networks in 2030.
6G will be compatible with all frequency bands used by 5G: Low band less than 1 GHz; medium band, between 1 and 7 GHz; and mmWave wave, between 24 and 100 GHz. To these it will add two more bands, which are currently not used by mobile network operators.
The first of these two bands is the one that goes from 7 to 24 GHz. It is currently used for communications, but not for mobile phone communications. It is used for fixed wireless links and military, satellite, maritime and scientific services. However, advanced, dynamic and AI-powered frequency sharing mechanisms should make it easier for 6G networks to exploit the network spectrum just mentioned, which will be primarily responsible for offering additional capacity for wide-area broadband.
The band with frequencies below terahertz, between 100 and 1000 GHz, can offer very high data transfer rates, as well as low latencies. However, they present a problem in terms of coverage, mobility and device power consumption. Among the potential use cases for this band in terms of communications are fixed wireless networks for homes, very high precision positioning or radio frequency sensors.
All of this goes to show that 6G will bring a host of advances and improvements in many areas, but its benefits won’t be noticeable until at least 2030. And for most people, even several years later. In the meantime, the rollout of 5G networks will continue, which have yet to extend their coverage to many areas beyond the main cities.
