Sixth Generation Wireless by 6G Tech Development (Investment, R&D and Testing) and 6G Market Commercialization (Infrastructure, Deployment, Apps and Services), Use Cases and Industry Verticals 2024 - 2030

USA, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and United Kingdom to Cooperate with 6G Wireless Development

In its sixth year of analyzing the emerging six-generation wireless market, we are the leading market research company focused upon emerging 6G technologies, capabilities, solutions, applications and services. This report edition expands upon previous analysis focused primarily upon emerging 6G technologies. This edition evaluates 6G development including technology investment, R&D, prototyping and testing.

The report also assesses 6G market commercialization including opportunities for infrastructure development and equipment deployment as well as a realization of applications and services. The report also analyzes 6G market use cases by industry vertical. The report provides 6G market sizing for 2024 through 2030, with the lower end of the range focused primarily on technology development, and the latter end of the range focused on 6G market commercialization.

Select Report Findings:

• 6G communication services will achieve initial commercialization in 2030
• Pre-commercial 6G infrastructure and testbeds market will reach almost $5 billion by 2030
• The Asia Pacific region will lead 6G core and RF investment, followed by the USA and Europe
• 6G technologies are best characterized as ultra-secure, ultra-fast, ultra-reliable, and ultra-short-range oriented capabilities
• Network optimization beyond 5G will rely upon smart surfaces with solutions for 6G networks and devices reaching $16 billion by 2035
• Post commercialization investment in 6G technologies will be dominated by short-range wireless use cases as well as peer-to-peer networking
• 6G wireless will drive a new wave of electronics innovation including device power management, miniaturization, networking, and edge computing
• Communications with 6G will depend on device peering for short-chain connectivity for short-range communications and long-chain connectivity for front-haul and back-haul

6G Wireless Technologies

A battle is underway to influence the standards of 6G amid concerns by Western countries and their allies that authoritarian regimes could gain further control over the internet in their countries. The governments of the U.S., Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the U.K. released a joint statement saying that by working together, "we can support open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, resilient, and secure connectivity."

Expanding upon the trend started with technologies supporting 5G capabilities, 6G will be integrated with a set of previously disparate technologies. Several key technologies will converge with 6G including AI, big data analytics, and next generation computing. 6G networks will extend the performance of existing 5G capabilities along with expanding the scope to support increasingly new and innovative applications across the realms of communications, sensing, wireless cognition, and imaging.

Whereas 5G leverages mmWave in the microwave frequency range, 6G will take advantage of even smaller wavelengths at the Terahertz (THz) band in the 100 GHz to 3 THz range. While the impact to the Radio Access Network (RAN) for 5G is substantial, it will be even bigger with 6G networks, which is driven largely by a substantial increase in frequency, which will facilitate the need for antennas virtually everywhere.

Just as there have been, and will continue to be, many challenges with 5G, so will there be many new challenges with 6G. One of those challenges will be developing commercial transceivers for THz frequencies. This is largely an area in which electronics component providers must innovate. For example, semiconductor providers will need to deal with extremely small wavelengths and correspondingly small physical size of RF transistors and how they will interwork with element spacing of THz antenna arrays.

6G wireless will also exploit some completely new RAN approaches to increasing bandwidth and reducing latency, such as sub-THz radio frequencies and visible light spectrum, as well as leverage enhancements to existing radio methods, such as advanced MIMO technologies to increase spectral efficiency. This will include some innovative methods such as angular momentum multiplexing, combining multi-RAT and 3D multi-link connectivity, along with ultra-dense radio access point deployment such as hyper-extension of the small cell concept in a HetNet environment.

Terahertz Radio Propagation for 6G Communications

There will be many new technologies and solutions approaches to enable terahertz-level radio. For example, ultra-fast radio chips will be required to achieve frequencies up to 20THz for next generation 6G communications. The metastructures are etched and patterned at sub-wavelength distances onto a semiconductor made of gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride. These allow electrical fields inside devices to be controlled.

This approach to semiconductor design has already enabled up to 100 gigabits per second at terahertz frequencies, which represents a 10X improvement over 5G communications. Effectively utilizing these high frequencies will also require innovation in smart antenna implementation. For example, there is a need for reconfigurable antennas that can tune properties such as frequency and radiation beams in real-time.

Sub-Terahertz Radio 6G Solutions

While 6G wireless promises dramatically higher data speeds than 5G advanced via terahertz frequencies, sub-THz communication is a very important interim solution area. For example, the frequency range from 7.125 GHz to 24.25 GHz is attracting attention as possible additional spectrum for 6G, and is already being unofficially referred to as FR3. The wavelength is attractive as compared to FR2 frequencies; it is less susceptible to attenuation, simplifying coverage, and includes enough unallocated frequencies to support wider channels than FR1 (100 MHz).

6G and Smart Surface Technologies

As discussed in previous versions of this 6G market report, smart surfaces will be key to the long-term success of 6G wireless. Specifically, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology will provide better control of the electromagnetic waves in the radio propagation channel, which shall dramatically improve performance thanks to leveraging metamaterial properties not found in natural substances.

RIS is crucial for the 6G market, especially at higher frequency ranges, as propagation losses may reach up to 2,000 times higher than that of 5G commercial frequencies. However, current RIS engineering approaches yield up to a 40% improvement as compared to non-RIS based systems. Use of RIS will be critical for 6G in urban environments, especially for indoor wireless for enterprise and industrial solutions.

6G and Artificial Intelligence

While the 6G network will take advantage of 5G’s existing infrastructure, it differentiates itself by using ultra-high radio frequencies to carry more data at faster speeds, and it will have built-in artificial intelligence with machine learning too. Machine learning and AI-based network automation will be crucial to simplify network management and optimization.

With 6G, users can expect to instantaneously transfer data and do away with buffering, lags and disconnections. In a similar way to how 2G gave us text messaging and 4G introduced an entire mobile app system, 6G will enhance machine-to-machine communication, creating greater interoperability in a “smart,” Internet-of-Things era.

In this manner, 6G will provide super communication and ubiquitous information, and converge computing services, thus being the base for an interconnected and converged physical and digital world. 6G will make it possible for applications to “sense” their surroundings, thereby turning the network into a tool for "sixth sense” capabilities.

Ongoing Study of Technologies Beyond 5G and Sixth Generation Wireless

Starting in 2018, we began to formulate a vision for wireless and networking beyond 5G. Working independently, we published our first 6G market research report titled Sixth Generation Cellular: Looking Beyond 5G to the 6G Technology Market in June 2019. This ground-breaking research represented an initial investigation into the upcoming 6G technology market. This research built upon our extensive analysis in LTE, 5G, and computing (core cloud, edge computing, HPC, and quantum), and other related areas such as artificial intelligence and AI support of other technologies.

6G Flagship, an organization funded in part by the Academy of Finland with an overall budget of 251 million Euros to study 6G from 2018 to 2026, published the white paper titled “Key Drivers and Research Challenges for 6G Ubiquitous Wireless Intelligence” in September 2019. We subsequently became involved with efforts at the University of Oulu to develop a set of new white papers focused on various additional aspects of 6G.

This culminated in the publishing of “White Paper on 6G Networking” in June 2020. Written by an international expert group, and led by the Finnish 6G Flagship program, the paper sheds light on advanced features relevant to networking that are anticipated to shape the evolution beyond 5G, ultimately leading to 6G. Gerry Christensen, was one of the authors of the paper and his name is found among the contributors listed on the 6G Flagship website.

The involvement in 6G Flagship’s efforts has both solidified its initial research findings as well as provided an opportunity to network with wireless and networking experts from industry and academia. This makes us the foremost market research authority in the emerging area of 6G technology, solutions, applications and services.

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