When is it enough?
Our digital age already delivers high-quality streaming video, as well as personal AI assistants, through our phones and tablets. Smart cars share data with sensors installed across city streets, helping us avoid traffic en route to our destinations. Pushing a few buttons lets us order dinner, get a taxi, and turn on the air-conditioning in our living rooms when we’re getting close to home.
Why would we need even more connectivity than this? If anything, shouldn’t we log off once in a while, just to ‘connect’ with the non-digital world? Or is there some benefit to going even further down this digital path?
The tech industry certainly thinks there is. From their perspective, we are still at the very beginning of a massive digital era — and the merger between real life and the internet is just getting started. A new revolution is on the horizon, from self-driving cars and virtual reality to neural implants, robot companions, and superhuman AI. If this future is truly on the way, it will need to operate alongside a new generation of digital infrastructure.
Enter 6G.
Speed is everything
The sixth generation of cellular communication technology, or 6G, is currently in development and expected for wide release around 2030. Each of its predecessors has represented a major leap forward from earlier versions, and 6G will be no exception.
Its main features include incredible download speeds — up to 1 terabit per second, or roughly 100 times faster than 5G connectivity — matched with far lower signal latency (0.1 milliseconds of delay, compared with 1 millisecond under 5G). This near-instantaneous communication capability will be further enhanced by the ability of 6G to support more devices at a time. Whereas 5G networks can support up to 1 million devices per square kilometer, 6G will be able to handle 10 million.
6G will also operate within a wide range of cellular frequencies that are less vulnerable to security issues such as eavesdropping and signal jamming.
The technical aspects of 6G technology are extraordinarily complex, which is why a few more years are needed to develop, refine, and mass-produce 6G systems ahead of their global launch.
So what will we actually use 6G for, when it arrives on our devices at the end of this decade?
Our digital future
We currently find ourselves at a stage where a number of technologies are good but not great. 6G may turn out to be the missing piece for several types of applications.
For example, surgeons can operate remotely by donning VR glasses and a digital glove, with a robot on the other side of the world performing the same actions on a live patient. But the lower latency of 6G will greatly improve such procedures, making movements as well as visual cues precise and virtually instantaneous.
6G systems can also launch a new generation of home entertainment. Whereas video streaming already works well with current technology, truly immersive VR-streaming requires more bandwidth that many people currently have access to.
The increased density of connected devices can also open the door to major improvements in agriculture, by enabling farmers to put sensors on plants. The data they collect will enable micro-targeting by farmers, so that each plant gets exactly what it needs, when it is needed — thereby growing more efficiently and reducing waste generated by mismanaged crops.
Self-driving cars can also improve their video processing capabilities through 6G systems. Companies like Tesla have millions of cars on the road, each of which has several cameras onboard that collect data continuously. Much of this data is currently sent to a centralized computer system at Tesla for processing, in order to refine the autopilot algorithm.
In the future, however, Tesla and its competitors may find it more efficient to pool the processing capabilities of the entire fleet of cars that are sitting idle at any given moment. This ‘hive mind’ of computers will be able to download other cars’ video streams quickly over 6G networks, convert the data into usable algorithmic packets, and then upload those into the company cloud for rapid integration into the autopilot software.
Similarly, personal robot companions that Tesla and others are developing will also be able to crowdsource their compute. This is achieved when difficult computational tasks are shared across a group of networked processors, so as to pool available resources and solve these tasks more quickly. The benefit of such a network is that each individual robot’s onboard computer need not be so expensive, because it can draw on the resources of its peers.
In such ways, a fleet of robots can function as proprietary nodes in a 6G-connected network. Today’s internet lets us access a collective mind; tomorrow’s internet will open the door to a collective AI mind.
The way forward
New technology is painstaking to design, expensive to develop, and difficult to produce. More research and regulatory agreements, followed by on-the-ground infrastructure installation in the form of signal stations and antennas, will be needed before the first consumer-facing 6G product can be manufactured and sold.
So will 6G be worth the wait? Probably.
Will it usher in an even more futuristic digital economy? Almost certainly.
Will it add meaning to our everyday lives? No — only we can do that. Let us always remember that computers are the vehicle, and not the destination. In the future, our cars may all be on autopilot; but we shouldn’t be. 6G will connect us to the network, but each of us must stay connected to the world.
