GENERATION GAP

5G has not yet fully lived up to its promise. Will 6G find enough use cases to go where 5G hasn't?

- SURAJEET DAS GUPTA

The last few days, 3,000 delegates from 190 countries have been immersed in discussions at New Delhi's swanky Bharat Mandapam convention centre to hammer out a global consensus on the standards that will determine the next big mobile technology: 6G (short for sixth generation), future spectrum bands, and use cases that will power the new technology.

But for users across the world, the question is why and what will the World Telecommunications Standardization Assembly (WTSA), whose 10-day session ends on Thursday, offer through the new technology that would be different from 5G.

The promise is big: 6G will be 100 times faster than 5G, provide a 10th of its latency, will be more spectrum-efficient, enable haptic communication, integrate artificial intelligence in the network, and make satellite and terrestrial communication seamless. Latency is the time a data packet takes to travel from origin to destination.

The enthusiasm for 5G was about massive capacity, low latency, and massive broadband. Now, 6G adds in three new dimensions: It will be a network driven by artificial intelligence (AI), it will have network sensing capability, and it will offer ubiquitous coverage.

Industry 4.0 to 5.0

Telecom companies, or telcos, admit that many of the use cases promised by 5G have not taken off as expected. Take, for instance, Industry 4.0. It was expected to usher in automation, machine to machine connectivity, and smart manufacturing through integration of sensors and devices. But most companies, due to lack of a clear cost benefit analysis, did not go beyond pilots.

The hope is that 6G will resolve the issues with the newly packaged Industry 5.0.