After 5G technology, there may not be 6G base stations! Why do you say that?

When the 4G technology standards were announced, many people thought it was amazing. With the announcement of the 5G technology standards, some people looked at the technical indicators and felt that there was already a problem of oversupply, and believed that by 2030, when 6G technology appears, it may be even more powerful in terms of bandwidth and time delay.

If we look at the development of the past few generations of networks, we will find that mobile communication technology is not limitless. In the 2G era, a base station built in an ordinary town may cover community users within a radius of several kilometers. When the 3G and 4G technical standards came, the number of base stations built did not decrease, but increased. By the time of 5G, the construction of base stations has been divided into indoor and outdoor. Even the millimeter wave technology route of the United States cannot be used in the Chinese market.

In the current 5G spectrum, the ideal high-frequency spectrum has very strong transmission capabilities, but the penetration ability is very poor. If you use a high-frequency spectrum mobile network indoors, you may not be able to find the signal and the network may be disconnected. In addition, for mobile telecommunications service providers, the higher frequency spectrum has high transmission power, which increases the cost of purchasing equipment on the one hand, and the increase in electricity expenses also invisibly increases the operating costs.

Consumers no longer demand network speed for mobile communication networks. For example, the fiber optic network currently used has an actual flow rate of 1M/S most of the time, while 10M/S or even 20M/S is difficult to use even for watching high-definition TV series. The only situation where high broadband speed can be used is when downloading large files, and in such situations consumers can often endure the torment of long download times.

The speed of 5G mobile technology is faster than most optical fibers, and ordinary users cannot perceive whether the time delay is high or low, and the large capacity of the equipment is not what ordinary users care about. For everyone, the pain point is not the speed, time delay, jitter and other issues, but whether the cost can be reduced. Compared with 4G, 5G has become an electricity tiger, and the signal penetration is not too strong, so it is difficult for users to feel the actual effect of the network upgrade.

The use of spectrum by 5G technology has reached its physical limit, and any higher spectrum may involve signal loss. At present, some mobile telecom operators are more interested in low-spectrum construction rather than high-spectrum networks when building base stations. The effect of increased network speed is proportional to the cost, which is likely to kill not only telecom operators but also mobile users. Therefore, it is difficult for the 6G technology standard to attract users by relying on network speed.

Therefore, when 5G technology is deployed on a large scale, 6G may no longer appear in the future. On the contrary, in order to reduce costs and avoid the increase of base stations and power consumption, telecom operators' demand for equipment will be more towards latency, jitter, and deterministic transmission. Even if the network transmission speed is increased, it will increase the utilization rate of the existing spectrum, improve the penetration ability of the signal, and reduce the cost of maintaining base station operations. Those millimeter waves and even terahertz spectrum will only be used by niche consumers, rather than becoming a technology widely adopted by mobile operators.

Although many countries and companies are developing 6G technology, it is generally believed that it will be born in 2030. The editor believes that with the development of 5G technology and the successful application of the iterative concept in the mobile phone business, even if there is a 6G technical standard in the future, it will most likely be swallowed up by the 5G technical concept. In other words, even if there is a 6G technical standard in the future, traditional telecommunications equipment suppliers and operators have the motivation to blur the concept and turn it into a new 5G, rather than tearing down 5G and rebuilding 6G base stations.