According to Business Korea, the government anticipates that commercial 6G could be commercially available as soon as 2028 – 2030.
With 6G networks promising speeds 50 times faster than 5G, its unclear of what the use cases of the new technology, but South Korea’s interest in hardly surprising given its operators were the first to launch commercial 5G in 2018.
The government of Korea is expected to spend approximately KRW 200 billion ($169 million) for five years, 2021 and 2026, to develop this technology and includes securing patents and laying forming R&D and industry foundations for the new technology.
Reports say that the government will focus on ten specific tasks in six key areas of development: hyper-performance, hyper-bandwidth, hyper-precision, hyper-space, hyper-intelligence, and hyper-trust. All of which within five key verticals: digital healthcare immersive content, self-driving cars, smart cities and smart factories.
Additionally, the pilot aims to achieve 1Tbps in data transmission speeds, which is roughly five times faster than 5G and will reduce latency to one tenth of current 5G services.
But South Korea is not the only ones eying 6G, the US’ FCC, AT&T and Verizon today announced that it would hold one of the industry’s first big conferences to map the way to the sixth generation of mobile. The 6G symposium is being organised by mobile technology research and development company InterDigital.
In addition, China’s ZTE and China Unicom confirmed in May that it would collaborate on 6G technological innovation and standards while “actively promoting the in-depth integration” of 6G with satellite networks, IoT, the Internet of Vehicles, and the Industrial IoT.
While all the way back in 2018, The University of Oulu, close to the Arctic Circle, in Finland started research on 6G mobile networks. This was further supported by claims that the European Commission had made plans to overhaul its industrial sector with a number of investments in new technologies, including 6G.
