The speeds presented are already staggering for this draft 6G technology.
There’s a lot of talk about 5G, but don’t count on engineers to slow it down. Not on Samsung, in any case: the Korean giant, in collaboration with the University of California Santa Barbara, has cracked an impressive technical demonstration. On the program: a technology that closely resembles a proof of concept for 6G.
The research team thus demonstrated the feasibility of an end-to-end wireless link of 140GHz. The observed speed: 6.2 Gbps, all wireless and fifteen meters away !
Impressive performance
A considerable step, knowing that frequencies in the terahertz range will certainly be at the heart of 6G technology. According to the communicated of the team, the main interest of using this frequency band is the “huge amount of spectrum available”: Concretely, all the space remains to be taken on these immense almost unoccupied bands. “This could potentially offer a way to achieve speeds of the order of terabits per second.”, Says the press release. An absolutely insane speed, when the majority of the general public still reason in megabits per second… ie two orders of magnitude lower. For comparison, even the WiFi 6 standard only allows a theoretical maximum of around 10 Gbps.
In addition to these staggering speeds, this technology should also benefit from lower latency. The press release even speaks of a latency ten times lower than that of 5G! By way of comparison, the average latency measured in 4G is between 25 and 50ms (according to various sources including DigitalTrends). The 5G, it claims to go down to 10, even 1ms in optimal conditions. Suffice to say that with an even 10x more responsive 6G network, we are almost in the realm of snapshots.
“The hyper-connected experience for all”
By combining these speeds and latency times, we get the type of system capable of supporting what Samsung calls “The Hyper-Connected experience for all”. A slogan that we have already heard in the era of 3G, then 4G, and so on… but which this time seems very close to reality. Holograms, instant communications and services, autonomous systems… It’s for tomorrow.
This technology is obviously still far from being marketable. But the proof of concept is more than impressive, and it will be interesting to observe the first concrete applications of these state-of-the-art systems.
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