The deployment of 5G has been gaining ground globally, and yet rollout remains far from complete. Unlike previous generations of mobile technology, 5G is an entire technology stack – of which, so far, only a portion is being productively used. Edge networking, service virtualization, and function chaining are some of the features that will come to fruition with software integration as individual use cases are realized. We expect to see the technology stack continue to advance until the end of the 2020’s, at which point a further evolutionary step will replace it with 6G.
Even the current 5G technology makes it a game-changer for many industries, with the enablement of peak data rates of up to 20 Gbit/s, with up to 1 million devices connected per square kilometer and highly reliable data transmission. 5G combines a variety of standards with features on multiple layers. This includes improving mobile broadband, optimizing machine-to-machine communication for massive arrays (Massive MIMO), and providing ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC) for time-critical use cases. Latency times of only around one millisecond are possible, enabling highly critical use cases such as the provision of modern healthcare services in a connected ambulance carrying a critically ill patient to hospital. Use cases in which every millisecond counts. The full operational force of 5G – as the prerequisite for countless innovations, products, and services – will allow complex futuristic use cases to be brought to reality.
While deployment and integration of the current technology stack will continue for the rest of the decade, discussions are already underway as to what its successor – 6G – will be capable of. We will see advances in the capacities, capabilities, and efficiency of future iterations of mobile network technology. These will be driven by the needs to serve connectivity for use cases like increasingly high-resolution digital twins, and still-to-be-developed technologies, such as Holographic-Type Communication (HTC), which is set to enable hyper-realistic virtual medical consultations and the beaming of a 3D holographic representation of a participant into a face-to-face meeting. Then there is the possibility of ubiquitous global 3D mobile coverage for 6G, integrating high-altitude platforms and LEO satellite constellations and providing truly global coverage on land, at sea, and at altitude. What’s more, research is being carried out into enabling sensing capabilities in the 6G mobile network, which would make it possible for the network to sense physical objects in its environment, thus transforming approaches to use cases like autonomous driving. But beyond such deliberations, we will just have to wait and see what ends up in the final standardization for 6G.
Current discussions in the research and technical community envisage goals for 6G that significantly expand on the 5G roadmap. Thus, 6G would be designed not only to be more energy efficient, but also to enable peaks data rates in the terabit-per-second range, a massive increase on 5G. Air-interface latency would drop even further, down to between 10 and 100 microseconds. Connection density would increase to 10 million devices per km2, and we can expect 5 times higher radio spectrum efficiency. However, further enabling technologies – including but not limited to terahertz (Thz) communications, visible light communications (VLC), and 3D network architecture – need to be developed before these goals can be realized.
But long before we see the deployment of 6G, an intermediate evolutionary stage, '5G advanced', is planned for rollout in 2025. This new network will bring a range of enhancements to current 5G capabilities, such as Wireless AI for greater levels of network automation and intelligence in the network, and will lay the foundations for the sixth generation mobile network technology stack.
Well before the end of the decade, the evolving 5G stack will have found its way onto every city street and highway: the technology offers the basis for safe navigation and communication between autonomous vehicles. Given the need for passenger safety, autonomous mobility comes with the highest requirements, not least in terms of latency. Vast numbers of 5G antennas and a significantly denser set of interconnected data centers will be essential to power the roads of the future. We’ve already seen the first examples in testbeds and around the world, and in the city of tomorrow, remote controlled or self-driving vehicles powered by 5G and 6G are likely to become ubiquitous. For a smart city to function, a massive amount of information will need to be exchanged between vehicles, servers, systems, and urban infrastructure – from traffic control systems to public transport, to electricity grids, the water mains, and so on – and these will need to be interconnected.
But the potential doesn’t stop there: On a connected construction site, a 3-D model of construction progress can be continuously updated to reflect the status quo, providing greater insight for the purposes of planning and controlling. For this, a large number of cameras and sensors are necessary which will regularly transfer data to the headquarters. The structural integrity of bridges can be monitored with the aid of a 5G network, and this is likely to become standard for large-scale construction projects. In agriculture, soil sensors transmit real-time data to the farmers, who can then better plan how and when to fertilize and water their crops, leading to greater yields and better-quality produce. Intelligent, autonomous agricultural machines, connected via 5G, can till the land and harvest crops.
High-performance mobile communication technologies have enormous potential for secure and efficient digital use cases in widely differing branches, as well as in our private lives. For these advantages to be realized, it will depend on the construction of infrastructures in the next few years that will enable and facilitate ever larger volumes of data to be transferred in high bandwidth and low latency, both wirelessly and through the Internet backbone. The required infrastructure ranges from antennas to fiber optic backhauls, and on to new decentralized data centers. The establishment of Internet Exchanges in increasing geographical density will also be needed to connect mobile networks to fixed-line and satellite networks, and to content, applications, and clouds – everywhere around the world. Because, for all the value of a 5G or 6G network for a high-performance island or last mile, that network – and the multitude of connected devices within it – requires high-performance, robust, and secure connectivity to the rest of the world before any use case can unfold its full potential.
