On March 6, 2020, the first-ever all-5G smartphone Samsung Galaxy S20 was released. Since then, 5G towers around the world have been started to be built. 5G is pretty powerful when compared to 4G. It is 4 times faster, after all. But what is 6G?
The Chinese government officially started research on 6G technology in November 2020, with the creation of two working groups dedicated to the development of 6G. It is said, that 6G will operate at 95 GHz to 3 terahertz (THz). At those wavelengths, 6G will deliver speeds 1,000 times faster than 5G. This means, that with 6G all cars on the road could be connected to each other and work together to not get into accidents and to stop traffic jams. You could be downloading 1TB a second! It would be amazing to be able to download a game and play it just a few seconds after watching a video about it!
But, there is a bad side. To use 5G, towers have to use millimeter waves, which are as the name suggests, are a millimeter in size. This poses a problem, as they could be blocked by buildings, so there have to be transmitters all over a city. It gets worse with 6G. 6G would have to use sub-millimeter waves, which are a tenth of the size of the 5G waves. These would be even more easily blocked. We would have to fill cities and buildings with transmitters, just for the waves to be able to get through.
You might think, that all this 6G stuff is just unnecessary, and you would be right. This technology is built for the future. The future, when all is connected. In the future, where we will have a metaverse, where internet of this speed would be necessary. Let’s just hope, that there will be technology to make it possible!