5G has just arrived, but where is 6G?

In 2019, after years of expectation, 5G wireless networks and devices finally became a reality. Even then, it took a while for the technology to change into widespread, well, common in some parts of the world akin to america and China. But now I can finally take a look at my phone screen, see the little 5G icon within the corner, and feel good.

To state the plain, 6G doesn’t exist yet, but that doesn’t suggest people aren’t already wondering the right way to make it a reality. 6G, short for the sixth generation of wireless technology, guarantees to be incredible. The numbers that come out as industry leaders theorize about what could do that are astounding. Numbers like download speeds of as much as a terabyte per second and latencies of 0.1 milliseconds.

Mainly, the thought is that devices will have the opportunity to transfer a ridiculous amount of information with almost no lag. That is great news should you’re a mobile gamer and lag keeps losing you matches.

The probabilities that 6G opens up truly belong to the realm of science fiction. The 6G network could support life-size holograms, allowing a distress call to finally be sent to Obi-Wan Kenobi. It is also how chips implanted in our brains communicate with other devices, akin to artificial limbs or remotely controlled avatars in hazardous environments. It could connect a network of smart devices, not only a phone and a smartwatch, and possibly augmented reality glasses.

One vision of the 6G future involves flexible screens placed in every single place, from tables to clothes to water bottles. Each of those small devices wouldn’t only use the 6G network to operate, but could actually constitute the network itself. As an alternative of the system we use today, where our phones connect with towers in a hub-and-spoke model, each of those small smart devices might be a node in a mesh network. Their proximity and ubiquity would enable data to be transmitted at terahertz frequencies, which cannot transmit very long distances.

Experts consider that because of the quantity of unused bandwidth available on this terahertz range, this might be the key sauce to realizing all of 6G’s goodness.

But that is in regards to the only thing we’re sure of immediately, as work on exploring 6G’s capabilities is within the very early stages, with the technology not expected to reach until around 2030. Heck, the standards for 5G have only just been tapped out.

Like 6G, 5G requires using much higher frequencies than older networks to appreciate its potential. The 5G network uses or no less than plans to make use of the range from 24 GHz to 100 GHz. These frequencies have wavelengths measured in millimeters and might enable download speeds of as much as many gigabits per second. But the identical frequencies that allow a lot data to maneuver don’t travel very far and may be blocked by windows and even leaves on a tree.

For that reason, and our reluctance to eliminate all of the windows and trees, millimeter wave networks have only been deployed in dense urban areas where they supply the best return on installation costs, and even then they cover only small areas.

One report from the primary few months of 2021 found that users of the three largest US networks with compatible phones took full advantage of 5G capabilities only 0.5% to 0.8% of the time. The remainder of the time they get performance almost an identical to or sometimes barely worse than 4G.

So if the rollout of mobile technology operating at a maximum frequency of 100 GHz has been slow thus far, you may imagine the obstacles that can arise once technology using terahertz frequencies is introduced. But that is a really distant future. Mobile phone circuits that might even use this spectrum don’t yet exist. Nor does it apply to mathematical models of how best to route data through a mesh network.

For telecom corporations, 6G continues to be a distant problem that they usually are not focusing much on as they struggle to deliver on 5G guarantees now. And when that day finally comes and all phone and carrier ads feature an enormous number 6, remember how 5G initially began as an incremental change, and prepare for the subsequent generation to follow the identical pattern. If you ought to understand how we got to 5G, watch Amanda’s episode on it here. So what about you? Have you ever noticed a difference with 5G yet?