5G Has Years to Run; 6G Planning Needs to Start: Experts

5G will take years to deploy, but industry should start thinking now about what 6G will look like, experts said Tuesday at the Brooklyn 6G Virtual Summit. Speakers said 6G is likely to be commercial by 2030, matching the consensus on the summit's first day (see 2110180065).

6G should mean ubiquitous, seamless coverage, said Ray Ozzie, former Microsoft chief technology officer. The wired internet “has enabled us to stop thinking about servers and bits and bytes and thinking about the information and think about the things we’re doing with it,” he said. In the wireless world, we still “have to think about wireless too much,” he said. Ozzie said people shouldn’t have to think about getting off a cellular network and on Wi-Fi every time they enter a building: “I just want to be connected. I want to accomplish what I want to do.”

“I just want ubiquitous, global connectivity with zero configuration,” Ozzie said. “We think we have the coverage problem solved,” he said: “We could do better.”

The National Science Foundation is focused on convergence of wired and wireless and communications and sensors, said Thyagarajan Nandagopal, deputy director of the Computing and Communication Foundations Division. “We are going to be seeing a convergence of heterogeneous networks, whether it’s 6G, satellite networks, Wi-Fi, IoT,” he said. “We are also at the forefront of a paradigm shift where we’re seeing a hardware-based network slowly morphing and becoming a software-based network.”

NSF is looking at next-generation communications, which is “much, much more than 6G,” Nandagopal said. It’s not just 6G or wireless or a single set of standards, he said. New networks will enable “ultra-low latency” at a level beyond anything available today, he said. “It’s going to unleash a whole new paradigm of machine learning, machine-to-machine communications” and “new use cases that we haven’t dreamt about,” he said: It will mean augmented, virtual and extended reality.

5G Infrastructure Association Chairman Colin Willcock said that “5G doesn’t mark the end of the story. Clearly, there will be further evolution and looking far to the future there will be a need for 6G.” Start thinking about 6G even if it’s 10 years in the future, he advised. It’s important to “fill in what the technological solutions will be,” Willcock said. “We need to create those fundamental technological blocks, those concepts for 6G, and that research needs to start now so that we can standardize, prototype, demonstrate and then have the technology ready.”

New research shows use of THz frequencies for wireless is possible and “the channels are really not that different above 100 GHz,” said Ted Rappaport, New York University electrical and computer engineering professor. In the U.S., four unlicensed bands are now available above 100 GHz, with three in the U.K., he said. “Products are being made, licenses are being applied for, not just for Wi-Fi but for sensing, position location,” he said: “It’s a very exciting opportunity as we get these huge spectrum bandwidth swaths available for the first time in the mobile industry.”

Research shows channels up to the 900 GHz range are usable for outdoor communications, Rappaport said. “Carrier frequencies well above 100 GHz will be available both indoor and outdoor,” he said: Free-space path loss, atmospheric loss and rain “combined together still give you cellsites out to a couple of kilometers.”