5G spectrum auctions are yet to happen in India, and the brightest prospect for 5G phone service to roll out in our country would be in the second half of 2021, as promised by Mukesh Ambani recently. However, the buzz over the next generation of telecom networks, 6G, is already in the air, with China reportedly even all set to test out its bandwidth in outer space.
So, get set for latency (delay in audio and video) falling to just microseconds, possibilities for no-time lag remote medical surgeries or maybe even a factory worker who can operate his machinery from home or a farmer who can till his land from afar using a robot (WFH indeed!). With 6G you could turn yourself into life-size 3D holograms that could be ''holoported''—that means goodbye to sketchy Zoom calls where you have to keep repeating ''Am I audible?” and hello to virtually being in the presence of someone else at a discussion or meeting or party through your digital twin—even if in reality you are thousands of kilometres away.
Also in the offing would be 16K video streaming, advanced driver assistance systems (navigation) with 4K maps, multi-modal, multi-location AR/VR applications.
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Of course, the earliest one could expect 6G, even as a pilot project, is five years from now in South Korea, as announced by its Prime Minister Chung Se-Kyun recently. It would be safe to say that India need not expect any 6G network any time before 2030, considering that even 5G trials or auctions are yet to happen.
Yet, the buzz has already begun, right from last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the world's biggest tech events, to Samsung releasing a white paper titled 'The Next Hyper-connected Experience for All' where it announces that 6G will be rolled out commercially by 2028, with mainstream acceptance two years later. Network technology companies like Nokia and Huawei are said to be already working on it.
One of the world's leading telecom consultancies, Counterpoint Research, has just come out with a report which further opens the doors to a brave new world. Think speeds 50 times faster than even 5G, and communications moving from Megahertz (MHz in 4G) and Gigahertz (Ghz in 5G) to Terahertz (Thz).
“5G era will...unlock newer connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) use cases encapsulating technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), spatial computing, big data, blockchain and robotics,” points out Counterpoint's vice president (research) Neil Shah. “Near the end of this decade, we would be witnessing another exponential bump in this 'connected infrastructure' with the advent of 6G technology.”
'The benefits promise to be huge, including accommodation of unpowered devices and availability in the air and under water', according to a note by IDTechEx. It's going to be a brave new world, indeed.
