FROM THE INDUSTRY
It is this intense, foundational workload that is now driving activity in 6G, and projects such as JOINER are a vital component of this early development.
That gives research departments, universities, incubators and anyone else in the innovation ecosystem, approximately five years to ideate, iterate and prototype their uses for 6G. This means that breaking the traditional siloes between academia and industry will be more important than ever to ensure 6G innovations are market ready – regardless of if it is a new O-RAN solution, joint sensing and communication application for legacy systems, or an innovative spectrum sharing system at a national scale. This is especially important for those innovative SMEs who might struggle to gain access to service provider labs. These smaller businesses are typically home to the most creative and cutting- edge developments. At present, such examples include quantum communications, silicon photonics, agritech, cell-free massive MIMO and digital twins. With such diverse applications, JOINER is also set to strengthen the UK’s influence on global standards and international collaborations. These standards are complex and take several years to develop and finalise - and again, demand keen interaction between commercial companies, academics and industry bodies.
This context addresses the questions: “what will be the likely first applications of 6G and when will we see them?” The first point to be made here is that - if the evolution from 4G to 5G is anything to go by, it will be the B2B and enterprise sectors (as opposed to the consumer markets) that drive early adoption. Extended Reality (XR) - the combination of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR), is a likely early use case. The opportunities of a mixed ‘real’ and virtual environment with real-time interaction between users and machines is a potentially huge market. Less immediately obvious but equally impactful could be the incredibly low latency of 6G and its impact on medical technologies, or the self-organisation and self-healing capabilities of a 6G network to support autonomous driving or drone swarming. In terms of a timeline, things are no less complex. There are currently 302 live 5G networks globally and 47 live 5G standalone (SA) networks according to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSMA).That is a lot of capacity to explore and exploit before we move to 6G. But, even with the challenge of making a return on multi-billion dollar investments in 5G, the current expectation is that 6G will commercially launch around 2030.
www.firstnamecommunications.com
46
Volume 46 No.4 DECEMBER 2024
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker