With 5G networks still being deployed around the world and 4G and even 3G networks still in use in many parts of the world, it seems premature to throw the word 6G out.

That said, technology is always moving forward, standards take a long time to mature, and people are always on the road to a 6G world. The idea of ​​6G being brought up in the early days of 5G development just shows how fast the technology is developing. People have managed to upgrade from 1G to 5G in a relatively short period of time, so 6G is just a natural progression towards faster and better wireless connectivity.

While 6G makes sense as a successor to 5G, it may never actually be called "6G." If it weren't for something like 5G Enhanced or 5G Advanced, it might one day stop using all the numbers and names and just say XXX high speed network is connected.

Ultimately, whether it's 6G, 7G, or some other "G," today's networks will be so fast that any normal amount of data won't require progress bars or wait times, at least by today's standards. Everything will be available immediately...people don't need to keep inventing new terms to describe it.

When will 6G come out?

New mobile web standards come into the limelight every decade or so. That means 6G networks could roll out around 2030 (or even earlier in Asia and other regions where 5G was first introduced), or at least most telcos will be experimenting by then.

However, it's common to start working a decade before any new networking technology is actually implemented, which is probably why you're starting to hear about 6G before you even get your hands on a 5G phone!

But progress doesn't start and end overnight. For the same reason, 5G rollouts have been slow, and 6G networks won't roll out as fast as we'd like. There are frequency bands to discuss, spectrum licenses to buy, physical towers to build and coordinate, and rules to deal with.

Even though 6G is less than 10 years away, the next network type is expected to improve on the unavoidable weaknesses and limitations of 5G as people identify where 5G fails.

6G benefits

Anything that people use to connect to the internet today will be vastly improved on 6G. Literally every improvement that 5G brings will appear as a better enhanced version on the 6G network.

already destined to have a stronger

5G virtual and augmented reality systems, as well as connected smart cities and farms, artificial intelligence at your fingertips, smart robots in factories, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, and more. 6G will continue to support all of these areas with greater strength, while also delivering more bandwidth, which will ultimately expand innovation even further, perhaps even into areas that people haven't even considered yet. For example: more immersive virtual reality applications and lifelike holographic video calls.

Much of what makes 5G so great is its low latency of around 4ms, but 6G networks could reduce this even further, perhaps even to the point where people can safely say latency is practically zero. Movies, TV and games start times will be limited only by the time it takes for the screen to turn on, and video calls can be as clear as standing in front of each other.

6G vs 5G: What's the difference?

Speed ​​and latency will be the most obvious differences between 6G and 5G. That's the performance difference between 5G and 4G, so one would also expect 6G to be several times faster than 5G.

If the early goals are finally achieved, 6G networks are expected to have 50-100 times the capacity of 5G networks. In addition, while 5G must support 1 million devices per square kilometer, 6G is recommended to support 10 million devices.

How fast will 6G be? The jury is still out, and speeds of up to 1 Gbps are currently seen under ideal conditions using a 5G environment. 6G will definitely surpass that, but how much is still the question.

It's still up in the air as to how 6G will be faster than 5G, but it can be assumed that it will involve the use of ultra-high frequencies (millimeter waves) of the radio spectrum.

The bandwidth capacity of 5G is that it uses high radio frequencies; the higher the radio spectrum, the more data users can carry. 6G could eventually approach the upper limit of the radio spectrum and reach extremely high frequency levels of 300 GHz or even terahertz.

However, as now seen, the superfast 5G network variants are extremely localized due to the inherent limitations of mmWave, and the same issues will be present in 6G networks. For example, the range of terahertz radiation is about 10 meters, which is too short for important 6G coverage.

Perhaps by 2030, new methods of amplifying the signal far enough will be developed to avoid building thousands of new 6G cell towers. Maybe better ways to transmit large amounts of data will be found, such as these researchers using a new type of transmitter in 2022 that produces a focused beam (vortex millimeter wave) to carry more information; moving in a second 1 TB of data.

Do we really need 6G?

5G is designed to make the internet more accessible to more people and improve everything from entertainment to healthcare. Is there room for improvement in these areas after 5G - hence the need to use something better like 6G.