5G is old stuff, let’s look at 6G!

Roberto Saracco April 27, 2018 Blog 3,338 Views

Don’t think 5G will be the end of the line. A few people are already looking into 6G … Image credit: PC Mag

As marketeers are busy extolling the virtues of 5G as the ultimate wireless system filling all of your needs and all of your dreams (and Operators are busy deploying and upgrading 4G!) a few people are already looking at a new generation aiming at “filling the gaps between 5G promises and reality!”.

Any G generation takes about 10 years from the inception to the market and then 10 more years to fully consolidate followed by 20 years of “normal” operation. 5G is now approaching the first steps to the market, we can expect to see 5G smartphones in 2020, wireless dongle already in 2019, so it is about time for researchers to start looking at the next generation. As usual they are starting from some generic needs and since the hypothetical performances of 5G are such that whatever you need it will be accommodated in the 5G wishful list they are looking into how filling the likely gaps between promises and reality (to the horror of marketeers!).
At university of Oulu, Finland -a Country that is rightly associated with wireless technology-, a team of researchers have created a Vision 2030, fitting the time window for the first presence in the market of a new G generation. Take a look at the video, it is interesting!

The basic assumption is that artificial intelligence will dominate both in the delivery area -in the core and at the edges of the network(s)- and in the fruition area -devices like smartphones and things (super IoT) and in the application space.

As you will see in the clip, Augmented Reality will become pervasive. It is not clear what technology -or technologies- will support this. Smart materials might allow any surface to display information, holographic projectors might become available…
However to reach the sort of ubiquity suggested in the clip I feel that we will need to have images created directly in our eyes, using electronic contact lenses, chip implant or brain implant (BCI). All of them are unlikely to be available, in the mass market, in that time frame, my bet is we will have to wait till the following decade for electronic contact lenses and much more for implanted chips and direct brain interaction. Notice that we might have some trial sooner (we actually have some very rough prototype already today) but getting to the mass market is a different story.

I also have the feeling that some images shown in the clip, like holographic objects floating in space, will only be possible through electronic contact lenses (or chip or BCI). It is also a matter of cost: it will be cheaper to augment humans to become able to receive and visualise bits than augmenting the any ambient to display them.

Clearly, assuming that every surface is a screen it follows that a huge bandwidth is required. However, different architectures may shift the bandwidth burden from the network to the edges, to the ambient, to the devices and eventually to the human and things augmentation (unlimited local memory).

It may also be that in 20 years time communications demand will be created by objects, like autonomous systems, both as external communications (towards other autonomous systems) and internal communications (among symbiotic autonomous systems), with human needs already fulfilled by the 4th and 5th G generation….