New standard from 2030?: The mobile communications industry is already thinking about 6G

Data transfer via mobile phone is becoming faster and faster. The new 5G network has not yet been fully set up, and the industry is already developing the successor. Satellites will also play a role in this.

The expansion of the new 5G mobile network is now progressing. Depending on which provider you ask, 80, 90 or almost 100 percent coverage is promised. However, this means the population that is reached. If you were to look at the area, the percentages would be much lower.

5G is best known as a cell phone network – so for high speed and shorter response times when you’re on the go. However, 5G can also help at home.

When mobile communications achieve more than the fixed network

“In some areas, the mobile phone speed will even be better than what you get over the fixed network, i.e. over DSL or cable,” says Sebastian Luther from the company AVM. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​the manufacturer is presenting a box that is supposed to receive the high-speed mobile network and convert it into an Internet signal for the PC or television at home. The promise: an internet speed of 1.3 gigabits.

So far, no mobile network operator can really deliver the 1.3 gigabits. In the best case, almost half of this is achieved, i.e. around 600 megabits. But even that would be more than most landline connections can handle.

A hundred times faster

The fact that 5G is progressing quickly benefits not only private customers, but also industry. They need a reliable stream of data, as Abdurazak Mudesir, Telekom Managing Director for Technology, explains with reference to the use of robots: “What you don’t want is that the robot suddenly doesn’t work because too many people are surfing the net To avoid that, you need a dedicated network, and that’s what you can offer with the so-called slicing solution.”

“Slicing” means that a part of the mobile network is, as it were, separated and reserved so that the robot in the company does not fail when employees watch videos on their cell phones during their break.

In order to get such problems under control even better, the telecoms industry is already thinking about the next generation of networks: 6G should be 100 times faster.

Artificial intelligence on the web

Thilo Heckmann, who is responsible for new technologies at Telefonica Germany, speaks of an intelligent network that can manage its own capacities – something that doesn’t really work with previous networks. If you want to open a video conference in the future, with the 6G standard, “the application will talk to the network: do you have the resources free?” If that is the case, network capacity is reserved. “This requires artificial intelligence to be introduced into the networks as a control element.”

In addition, 6G needs – in order to achieve the high data speeds – much smaller radio cells than the previous networks. However, since one does not want to set up a mobile phone mast every ten meters, the signals are often to be sent via satellite.

However, 6G is still a thing of the future. It should start in 2030 at the earliest.