6G how differs from 5G technology?

6G Technology overview:

With the conclusion of the fifth-generation (5G) spectrum auction earlier this month, India is set to roll out the first phase of 5G services later this year. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shed light on sixth-generation wireless (6G) plans for the country. Last week, at the Grand Finale of an event called the Smart India Hackathon 2022, the PM announced that the government is preparing to launch “6G by the end of this decade.” 

But what exactly is 6G?

As the name suggests, 6G is the successor to 5G cellular technology. 6G networks supposedly use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher bandwidth and lower latency. Latency is the time taken by a data to travel from a source to the end user, while bandwidth is the amount of data that can travel over the network at a time.

While 5G aims to deliver 1ms latencies, 6G internet aims to support one microsecond latency communications. One microsecond is 1/1000th of a millisecond.

According to Mahyar Shirvanimoghaddam, a wireless communications expert at the University of Sydney, “6G speeds could reach 1 terabyte (TB) per second — that’s 8,000 times faster than 5G.”

How is 6G different from its predecessor 5G?

5G and 6G both use wireless spectrum — the data-bearing frequencies that enable wireless communications — of higher range as compared to 4G, 3G, and 2G networks.

However, even between 5G and 6G, the former is allocated for low-band and high-band frequencies — sub-6 GHz (Gigahertz) and above 24.25 GHz respectively. 6G, on the other hand, uses 95GHz to 3 terahertz frequencies.

On paper, 6G will provide higher performance than the newly deployed 5G networks. It is expected to deliver a peak data rate of 1,000 gigabits/second. In terms of network speed, 6G speed is expected to be 100 times faster than 5G.

Why do we need 6G?

With 5G bringing significant performance improvements in speed, capacity and latency, one may wonder why we need 6G in the first place. Experts believe that 6G will drive the adoption of 5G use cases at scale through optimisations and cost-reduction, especially at the enterprise level. Besides, it will enable new use cases by bringing together the human, physical, and virtual environments, as Harish Viswanathan, Head of Radio Systems Research at Nokia Bell Labs said,

The Next G Alliance, an initiative to advance wireless technology in the U.S, believes that 6G and 5G will coexist for a long period of time, as future 6G systems will be an evolution of 5G and not a replacement technology.

What are the perceived technology risks with regard to 6G?

Data processing, threat detection, traffic analysis, and data encryption are considered the most critical issues in 6G networks. Experts, however, think that the security issues due to massive traffic processing can be solved using decentralised security systems, in which the traffic can be handled dynamically and locally.

The advent of 6G technologies will also require massive expansions of the regulatory structure around wireless spectrum.

What could be 6G’s use cases in the future?

While 6G can boast of a plethora of use cases, many are yet to emerge as we move closer to 2030. By the time we get to 6G, there will be requirements to support trillions of embeddable devices and provide trustworthy connections that are available everywhere.