Samsung Electronics has conducted its first 6G forum with experts from academia and industry to discuss the future of communications technologies, in a bid to lead 6G research and development and standardisation.
“We envision that 6G will provide ultimate experiences for humans and everything through the next level of hyper-connectivity, and this idea serves as the foundation of our 6G vision,” Sebastian Seung, president and head of Samsung Research, said during his speech.
While 5G communication networks are in the process of commercialisation and often face complaints from users about quality and speed, Seung said it was time to start preparing for 6G, reports Yonhap news agency.
Samsung released a white paper earlier, laying out its vision for 6G, characterised as ultra-wideband, ultra-low latency, ultra-intelligence and hyper-spatialisation, and ways to secure global frequency bands for 6G.
6G would require spectrum with ultra-wideband contiguous bandwidth ranging from hundreds of MHz to tens of GHz to enable new services such as high-fidelity mobile holograms and truly immersive extended reality (XR) that are characterized by ultra-high speed communications and large amount of data.
Samsung proposes considering all available bands for 6G, from low-band under 1 GHz, to mid-band in the 1-24 GHz range and high-band in the 24-300 GHz range.
Samsung said the mid-band within the 7-24 GHz range is a candidate that can support faster data speed and reasonable coverage. The sub-terahertz (sub-THz) band in the 92–300 GHz range is being considered for support of ultra-high speed data rate.
The refarming of bands used for 3G, 4G and 5G networks to 6G operation as another way to obtain all the spectrum necessary for 6G.
Senior Vice President Charlie Zhang of Samsung Research America said while 6G technologies are still at an early stage, a few emerging directions are taking shape and gaining momentum in academia and industry alike.
Samsung Research, which formed a research unit dedicated to 6G in 2019, said 6G technologies will enable truly immersive extended reality, high-fidelity mobile holograms and digital replicas, as often seen in science fiction movies. It also expected the performance of telecommunications networks to improve greatly. Also, users will be able to have connected experiences anytime, anywhere.
The South Korean tech giant has been working on developing unified global standards for mobile communications. It was among the first to commercialise 5G in April 2019.
It expected the standardisation of 6G to be realised around 2025, which Samsung said would usher in the hyper-connected world by increasing communications speed and enabling mobile-based virtual reality experiences.
