How Long for 5G Before 6G

It sometimes is a good idea to pay attention to researchers who make a living trying to create the future. On one hand, Nokia, Huawei and the International Telecommunications Union already are starting to get organized for 6G standards work.

On the other hand, Marcus Weldon, Nokia CTO says “5G is going to have an unusually long lifetime." Precisely how long is anybody’s guess, but every mobile generation has had a decade-long run, with additional time in the ramp-up phase and the wind-down phase.

The issue now is whether 5G will last longer than that in the limelight, for several reasons.

There would appear to be few 5G capacity or latency advantages relevant to businesses or consumers that are obviously deficient. With the release of huge blocks of new spectrum--an order of magnitude more physical spectrum plus other developments that might represent two orders of magnitude effective bandwidth increases, there are few conceivable applications--including artificial reality, augmented reality and artificially-intelligent apps-- that really are constrained either by bandwidth or latency.

So it is conceivable that 5G’s run might be longer than usual.

Also, keep in mind that we soon will bump up against physical limits, in terms of radio spectrum.

Every new mobile platform has brought the use of new bands of spectrum, so 6G might well be based on frequencies at the almost-impossibly high 95 GHz and above bands.

What is significant about that is that radio spectrum ends around 1,000 GHz, after which electromagnetic radiation takes the form of light. So radio communications are limited to the region below 1 THz. In other words, we are approaching the point where our ability to use radio spectrum literally ends.

We can use light, but that is an entirely-different transmission medium, better suited for waveguide communications such as fiber optics or point-to-point infrared.

Also, in the applications and use case domain, 5G could be longer lived simply because use cases might not become exhausted so quickly in the 5G era. Latency cannot go much lower, and capacity-boosting tools will be many.

It might not be incorrect to suggest that 6G will likely be about use cases almost too-experimental to be commercialized in 10 years, which is about the time when the next-generation mobile network would be expected. Weldon also suggested new chip platforms might well be needed as well.