Description
Looking beyond fifth generation (5G) cellular towards sixth generation (6G) technology is challenging, particularly as the former is not yet (fully) commercially launched and the latter is in the R&D stage. However, investigating the 6G technology market is just what Mind Commerce has done the past few months and what we have uncovered is both exciting and concerning.
The excitement stems from what is possible with 6G technology, which is nothing short of amazing in terms of both the high-tech lifestyle it may engender as well as the positive impact on many different industries. The concerns have to do with the impact (or lack thereof) for 5G as well as the disintermediating economic effects of the anticipated 6G technology market.
6G Technology Market Dynamics
One of the overarching insights from this research is that 5G technology (and resulting apps and services) are anticipated to be largely a stepping stone to the 6G technology market. Stated differently, just as 3G did not add substantive value, largely a bridge to 4G/LTE, we also see 5G acting as a catalyst for the 6G market. Mind Commerce sees this as the case for a few key reasons including:
- 5G will have minimal effect in the near-term for the consumer segment with the exception of driving down overall broadband prices
- Advanced 5G and edge computing supported private wireless solutions for enterprise and industrial sectors will facilitate innovation in smart buildings, smart factories, and automation in general
- 5G will pave the way for expansion of immersive technologies (AR, VR, and haptic Internet), but a truly rich user experience will not come until the 6G technology market is fully developed.
We also see the 6G technology market facilitating substantive improvements in the areas of sensing, imaging, presence and location determination. Higher frequencies will enable much faster sampling rates as well as significantly greater accuracy, down to the centimeter level. 6G networks will evolve to include communication and sensing co-design in which radio signals will have a simultaneous purpose – communications and sensing the environment with the latter including identification of object shape, distance, movements and more!
The 6G Market will Evolve to Require Communication and Sensing Co-design
This will have big implications for many government and industry solutions in public safety and critical asset protection such as threat detection, health monitoring, feature/facial recognition and decision making (as in law enforcement, social credit systems, and other areas), air quality measurements, gas and toxicity sensing, and much more. Accordingly, Mind Commerce sees the 6G market making a big impact on the private wireless market as solutions will emerge that support the unique business needs for short range wireless communication and sensing.
Building upon advances in 5G radio frequency innovation in which the new radio component leverages millimeter wave in the microwave spectrum, the 6G market will leverage the terahertz frequency range, which is located between microwave and infrared light. This frequency can transmit far greater amounts of data than previously conceived RF systems. Accordingly, technologies beyond 5G will have much greater data throughput potential, facilitating a broad array of new capabilities such as real-time machine control, 8K to 16K video streaming, 3D mapping, wireless transport of holographic images/videos, and many more improvements for consumer and business usage.
6G radio networks will provide the means of communications and data gathering necessary to accumulate information, but a systems approach will be required for the 6G technology market as a whole involving data analytics, artificial intelligence, and next generation computation capabilities via High Performance Computing (HPC) and quantum computing.
The aforementioned transition will be both exciting and painful, depending on the timing, readiness, and position within the value chain for ecosystem participants.
The 6G technology market will represent yet another large expenditure for communication service providers (CSPs). However, one of the transformative aspects of 6G is that will support a highly distributed service provider environment, meaning that the market will not be so reliant upon incumbent CSPs with licensed spectrum.
In fact, one of the ways in which 5G is laying the groundwork for 6G solutions is the many private wireless implementations involving evolved LTE, 5G, and edge computing for enterprise and industrial customers. Next generation 6G networks will take this one step further with a web of communications providers, many of which will be self-providers, much in the way that PV solar has engendered co-generation within the smartgrid.
The 6G technology market will also be a major facilitator of many new innovations, across a wide variety of industry verticals. However, due to the highly strategic nature of certain 6G capabilities, sovereign nations will likely be most interested in the 6G technology market for government wireless applications. This may very well make the “arms race” for 5G supremacy look like a warm-up for the main event, which will be a race to see what countries can dominate the 6G technology market and related applications, services, and solutions.
In terms of 6G market availability, Mind Commerce anticipates technologies beyond 5G will be in the R&D stage through 2028, with 6G commercial deployment starting as early as 2028, but more likely in 2030 on a wider scale. Samsung plans on releasing 6G in 2028 and has created a set of requirements, including speeds of 1,000 Gbps and latency of less than 100 microseconds. NTT DoCoMo plans to launch commercial 6G by 2030.
6G Technology Market Report
In its third year of analyzing the emerging 6G market, Mind Commerce is the leading market research company focused upon emerging 6G technologies, capabilities, solutions, applications and services. This latest report edition expands upon previous analysis focused primarily upon emerging 6G technologies and capabilities. This edition evaluates 6G technology development including funding and R&D, prototyping and testing.
The report also assesses 6G market commercialization including opportunities for infrastructure development and equipment deployment as well as realization of applications and services. The report also analyzes 6G market use cases by industry vertical. The report provides 6G market sizing for 2022 through 2030, with the lower end of the range focused primarily on technology development, and the later end of the range focused on 6G market commercialization.
Mind Commerce 6G market findings include:
- Significant amounts of Data will be Created: With higher frequencies associated with the 6G technology market (95 GHz to 3 THz), there will be significantly faster (than 5G) data speeds, which also translates into massive amounts of data. This data will require big data analytics technologies as well as artificial intelligence to identify context and to render into usable information.
- Considerable Catalyst for HPC and Quantum Computing: Due to massive amounts of data created, and the need for processing from next generation applications, there will be a great general need for High Performance Computing (HPC) and quantum computing solutions. In addition, there will be specific apps supported by hyper-low latency 6G technology market in the areas of imaging, sensing, positioning and others that will require HPC and quantum computing platforms.
- Substantial Disintermediation: While highly beneficial for enterprise and industrial solutions and private networks, we believe that 5G will never quite live up to the hype for mass-market services. It’s hard to fathom now, but 5G will be looked back upon ten years from now in a similar sentiment as 3G is considered a necessary stepping stone to LTE. Mind Commerce sees 6G solutions benefitting greatly from the trail blazed by 5G. Millisecond latencies will pave the way for much greater interest for next generation applications and will catalyze mass market appeal for the same apps (and many new ones) with a substantially improved user experience due to 6G technology market micro-second latency apps.
- Fundamental Improvements in User Experience: The combination of much greater throughput, substantially lower latency, and confluence of digital technologies and physical systems (including cyber-to-biological integration) translates into dramatic improvements in user experience (UX). In fact, the improvement in UX from 5G to 6G based apps and services will render many currently emerging services such as extended reality unappealing and trite in comparison to the rich experience in store for end-users. For example, Mind Commerce sees hyper-reality achievable as the 6G technology market leverages artificial intelligence and next generation user devices for an immersive experience that is not just indistinguishable from reality but rather transformative in a way that redefines reality.
- Unprecedented Impacts on Industry Verticals: Whereas 5G will have a great impact on business users, and a substantively smaller impact on consumers, the 6G technology market will transform the way virtually every human lives, works, and plays on the planet. Again, it is due partially to the path made by 5G (including small cell coverage, satellites, and improvements in radio access network technologies), but largely due to the confluence of a few key technologies including 6G merging with other areas such as bio-medical, imaging, acoustics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and computing including greater accessibility to HPC and quantum computing.
In terms of 6G technology market impacts on specific applications and services, Mind Commerce see 6G supporting substantial innovation in the field of immersive solutions, such as holographic communications and extended reality including virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Whereas 5G represents the initial impetus for untethered VR/AR/MR solutions, 6G will facilitate truly anytime, anywhere immersive experiences.
We also see 6G making a positive impact on the digital twins market and other forms of physical-to-cyber convergence. Along with both of the aforementioned areas, we see 6G accelerating the adoption and usage of tactile/haptic communications, as 6G becomes a pervasive means of short-range communications for virtually every type of device and equipment.
Those interested in this report will also be interested in the following related areas: 5G Applications Market, 5G Security Market, 5G Smart Antenna Market, and the Multi Access Edge Computing Market