6G - a generation too far? [News - analysis

Abstract

Now that 5G has arrived with an advertising onslaught from operators like EE, what else could there be for the telecom industry to work on but 6G? Due out around the end of this decade, 6G would keep wireless communications on much the same timescale set since 3G first appeared. But questions are now being asked as to whether these generational shifts are working out the way the industry intended. One of the early aims for 5G was to bring cellular wireless to industrial applications that could not use its predecessors. Although 4G made some attempts to cut the round-trip latency for delivering packets over the air, 5G was designed to cut that to a millisecond or so. In principle, this makes it possible to coordinate robots without having to cable them up, assuming you do not try to have the control systems for those robots running in a data centre overseas. In practice, the wireless operators are, as with 3G and 4G, pushing new phones to consumers and, by all accounts, are not doing that badly at it. Both 3G and 4G suffered from false starts and so took a while to get out of the gate. 5G was somewhat luckier and may have had a boost from the pandemic and the shift to remote working, and living. At the recent 6G World Symposium, Andreas Müller, general chair of the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation and head of corporate-sector communication and network technology at Bosch's corporate research centre, said there is still some work to do on the standard to get it ready for factories. “The problem for industrials is that a lot for them only comes with Releases 16 and 17,” he said. The 3GPP group's Release 16 or 5G Phase 2 was finalised last summer, two years after the initial Release 15; Release 17 is due to become a finalised standard next year.