The vital role that technology plays in connecting communities and powering almost all aspects of our daily lives has been drawn into sharp focus during the pandemic.

Digital transformation has gathered pace, with the global population now working, learning and socialising remotely on a scale never seen before.

We have seen huge wireless network enhancements in recent months as a result of shifting traffic patterns, increasing connectivity requirements and changes in consumer behaviour.

Many creative and dynamic startup companies and small businesses have been helping to drive this movement through the remote delivery of a range of product and service offerings to businesses and consumers across the world.

To step-change the future of innovation and facilitate the next generation of pioneering startups, we will need to see a corresponding evolution in terms of wireless network capabilities.

A new generation of tech

5G represents a new generation of network technology that will power tomorrow’s most innovative companies.

The new network is much faster and more reliable than existing networks like 4G, meaning digital content and services of all types can be delivered quicker and at higher quality levels. 5G also has significantly reduced latency – the delay in transmitting data – enabling futuristic real-time applications such as autonomous cars, AR, VR and remote robotics. It is also far more efficient in terms of utilising network spectrum and available capacity, meaning that more people can do more things at the same time.

The new network’s significant improvements in speed, latency, capacity, reliability and overall wireless performance mean great things for how the startups and small businesses of the future will operate. 5G will result in positive and productive changes in terms of customer experience and the delivery of enhanced products and services that not only weren’t possible before, but likely weren’t even conceivable.

Levelling up the capabilities of 4G

So many of the activities, technologies and applications that we now rely on in our daily lives were only made possible because of the development and deployment of 4G. Everything from the rise of smartphones and tablets, to mobile video calling and streaming, to secure online transactions and more would have been both unachievable and unthinkable with older generations of mobile networks.

The same is true of the businesses providing those products and services. Where 5G promises to integrate itself into people’s lives in an even more profound way, it also promises to level-up the capabilities of startups and small businesses in ways that haven’t even been considered today.

Today, the mobile industry is already preparing for innovative concepts that could well be rolled out on 5G networks in the near future – from autonomous vehicle technology, to smart connected cities and infrastructure, to widescale industrial IoT applications, and more. But 5G is also a blank canvas for the innovators of tomorrow.

The range of applications, equipment, products and services that exist today are built and designed around the speed, latency, capacity, reliability and coverage capabilities of today’s network.

5G promises to revolutionise what is possible for businesses of all sizes. What might be possible for the innovative companies of the future? We won’t quite know for sure until we get there.

source: techround

Connected machines and digital twins will help drive 6G networks, Samsung says.

Samsung has started to publicize its direction for 6G, the next generation of wireless networks likely to supercede 5G sometime in the next decade.

The company  joins Nokia and a few other organizations that are exploring the upgrade.

Connected machines and artificial intelligence will feature prominently in future use-cases, as will digital twins, hi-fi mobile holograms and immersive extended reality (XR), the company says in a white paper.

6G features will include better spectral and energy efficiency and a requirement for trustworthiness that, “addresses the security and privacy issues arising from the widespread use of user data and AI technologies,” Samsung says in an associated news release.

Faster data rates

From a technology standpoint, Samsung says it will be aiming for peak data rates of 1Tbps and latency less than 100 microsec, "fifty times the peak data rate and one-tenth the latency of 5G." 6G will use terahertz frequencies, which are well above microwave and millimeter wave, along with optimized antennas.

Spectrum sharing enhancements and more sophisticated duplexing will be used to better utilize wireless frequencies, Samsung says.

Reliability also is mentioned as a focus. But it’s the projected megatrends that Samsung says will propel 6G that are most interesting.

6G will connect machines

While legacy products like voice may still be a feature, it will be vehicles, robots, construction machinery and factory equipment that will become prime “connected machine” users. “Smart sensors installed in various infrastructures” will be a part of that, Samsung says.

In terms of new use-cases, Samsung thinks that a combination of virtual reality, artificial reality and mixed reality called XR will be set in motion by 6G.

Roadblocks to XR include hardware limitations, in particular processing power, and battery performance, but also wireless capacity. Samsung thinks 6G will solve these issues. An example: AR alone needs 55.3 Mbit/sec to support 8K displays, Samsung says, and XR needs even more.

With enough bandwidth, holograms could display gestures and facial expressions in real time, but with a peak data rate of 20Gbps, 5G is too slow, Samsung says. Holograms of 19.1 gigapixels, for example, require 1Tbps throughput, which would be Samsung 6G's top speed.

Digital twins, too, could enter mainstream usage with 6G, Samsung says. Industrial uses could include detecting problems in sensors remotely. “A user could physically move within a remote site by controlling a robot in that space entirely via real-time interactions with a digital-twin representation of that remote site,” Samsung says.

“Increasingly, machines will need to be connected by means of wireless communications,” Samsung says.

source: networkworld