Skipping 5G, the United States starts working on 6G: Apple, Google and others join the "Next Generation G Alliance"

Apple’s 5G iPhone has just been launched, and it’s already preparing for 6G.

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The American Telecommunications Industry Solutions Alliance (ATIS) recently announced the establishment of the "Next G Alliance".

Last Thursday, the alliance announced the addition of 11 founding members, including technology giants such as Apple, Google, VMWare, HP and Cisco.

In a statement, ATIS said, "The NextGen Alliance aims to lay a vibrant market foundation for future mobile technology innovation in North America and establish North America's preeminence in 5G and 6G development."

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ATIS is more than just an industry organization for holding conferences. Its work will cover the entire life cycle of R&D, manufacturing, standardization and market preparation. Its goal is to upgrade North America's mobile communication technology to 6G or even higher levels. It now has 150 member companies, and its businesses involve multiple fields that are strongly related to communications, such as 5G, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence.

In addition to newly joined Internet giants such as Apple and Google, there are also traditional telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

5G has not yet been fully implemented, but the "Next Generation G Alliance" has already arranged 6G

Whether in the United States or other countries, 5G is still in its early stages of exploration.

The next generation of 6G communications will create more new industries. Its faster data transmission speed and low latency can greatly improve communication quality.

Although the three major US operators are providing nationwide 5G services, they are still using low-frequency signals, which can be transmitted over long distances, but some data transmission speeds are not as fast as LTE. It was not until the mid-frequency and high-frequency mmWave signals that speeds began to increase. Therefore, the current high-speed 5G is still in its early stages in most areas.

However, 6G is indeed urgent to consolidate future technological dominance.

6G-related research has been infiltrating the American academic community for some time, and many visionary scholars have already begun exploring key 6G technologies.

Last year, Ted Rappaport of New York University (an early supporter of 5G in the millimeter wave spectrum) published a paper on 6G at frequencies above 100 GHz. Also last year, the FCC voted to approve experiments in spectrum above 95 GHz. These studies and policy support will lay the foundation for 6G in the United States.

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Rappaport

The National Science Foundation has also launched a Spectrum Innovation Initiative, advocating for a new National Wireless Spectrum Research Center (SII-Center) that will "go beyond 5G, the Internet of Things, and other existing or emerging systems and technologies to develop a trajectory to ensure U.S. leadership in future wireless technologies, systems, and science and engineering applications through the efficient use and sharing of radio spectrum."

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5G has made the technological competition between China and the United States fierce, and the road to 6G will not be smooth sailing. In 2019, Huawei's 5G experienced multiple rounds of bans and had a bumpy road.

But Huawei has not stopped its pace of progress and has begun research on 6G, including "air interface technology, new network structure, and key enabling technologies".

In addition to Huawei, Chinese universities and research institutions have also made remarkable achievements in 6G, quietly sending the world's first 6G test satellite into space.

China launches its first 6G test satellite, US researchers: Communication is the real foundation

On November 6 of this month, the world's first 6G experimental satellite "University of Electronic Science and Technology of China" was successfully launched at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on the Long March 6 Yao-3 carrier rocket.

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The satellite integrates terahertz technology designed and developed by the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. It will establish a transmit and receive link in space and conduct terahertz payload tests, becoming the world's first technical verification of terahertz communications.

Compared with the technology used in 5G, terahertz communication has more abundant spectrum resources and a huge advantage in transmission rate. It is likely to dominate the world's sixth-generation mobile communication technology (6G).

Nandagopal, a researcher at the National Science Foundation, explained to The Washington Post that the 6G experimental satellite has a very high frequency band and must be tested in space.

Exactly how fast these bands will be is unknown, but Nandagopal estimates they will range from 100 to 500 gigahertz, which would be 100 times faster than 5G. To understand how fast this is, it's helpful to compare 5G's progress over 4G.

We can already see and touch the speed of 5G. A newest iPhone can download a high-definition movie in 8 seconds and 1,500 high-definition photos in less than a minute.

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According to Professor Tommaso Melodia, director of Northeastern University's Wireless Internet of Things Institute, 6G will cover everything from communications to telemedicine to national security.

As 6G technology develops, a host of new products and services will inject tens of billions of dollars into the global economy, just as 5G brought Uber and Netflix.

Nandagopal believes that the technology being developed by NSF will ultimately define 6G in a few years, and the United States will not be late in the technology race, "but Americans need to remember the importance of communications research."

We should not indulge in the "false prosperity" of AI, and 6G should be placed in a more critical position

What is 6G? There is no precise definition yet, but people will be working on it in the next decade.

The transmission speed of 6G far exceeds that of 5G, the latency is close to zero, and the connection density is as high as 10 million devices per square kilometer, which means that all kinds of intelligence can be transmitted through the air in an instant.

Future 6G phones will be able to detect allergens, explosives or toxic chemicals in the surrounding air and determine whether food is safe to eat.

Just as mobile phones have replaced independent cameras, watches, and wallets, 6G mobile phones will bring more possibilities, such as real-time map construction, more accurate direction positioning, wall-penetrating vision, etc.

There is still a lot of room for imagination in 6G. We cannot indulge in the "false prosperity" of application software such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing. This year's epidemic also shows that the entire social economy depends on basic communication research, so we must place communication technology in a more critical position.