Brooklyn 6G Summit Connected future Overview
The Brooklyn 6G Summit brought together around 250 of the most creative minds in the business for one of the most distinguished gatherings of the communications industry. Hosted by Nokia and Th e NYU Wireless research center, the summit included a series of keynote addresses, lively panels and physical demonstrations showcasing this year’s theme of “the path to 6G.” Release 21 is still a number of years away. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards body just completed Release 17 of the 5G standard in March 2022.
In fact, Smee and many others at the event don’t expect to see any commercial 6G networks or devices until 2030. Despite this, quite a few vendors are already talking about extended reality (XR), the metaverse, and other amazing technologies that 6G will enable.
It’s a metaverse
Multiple speakers at the summit talked about 6G as a platform for the metaverse. The metaverse started life as a science-fiction term but for many vendors is now business jargon that seems to mean a digital world interlaced with virtual reality.
5G-Advanced
Research into 5G-Advanced has already commenced, although the standard won’t be commercial for several more years.Release 18 is expected to be fully frozen in March 2024, so commercial 5G-Advanced devices could arrive 12 to 18 months after that, either in the middle of 2025 or early in 2026.
6G beginnings
Smee said that part of the vision of 6G will include expanding the framework of cellular standards so that XR can be used in both business and gaming environments. In part, that will involve how much artificial intelligence there is on-device, Smee said. He predicted that the role of compute at the edge of the network and in devices is going to substantially change in the next five years.
Brooklyn 6G Summit Connected future
With that definition, the industry won’t truly be at 5G for two or three years, and obviously operators are already launching 5G. But the early days of 5G are about enhanced mobile broadband; the more advanced low latency and machine-type communications are not there yet. And for that matter, more 5G specifications are coming down the pike in 3GPP Release 16 and 17.