You can not stop progress. The popular formula applies wonderfully to new generations of mobile telephony. While the deployment of 5G continues in France, the major Tech players have been working on 6G for quite some time now. In a fascinating article, the Financial Times took stock of the benefits of this new technology and wondered whether it was really essential.
First of all, it should be remembered that the development of mobile networks has traditionally taken place over periods of ten years. Thus, 1G relied on a voice-only service during the 1980s. 2G introduced SMS and picture messaging. 3G then gave us the opportunity to connect more comfortably to the Internet on mobile, while 4G guaranteed connection speeds up to 500 times faster. When it comes to 5G, carriers are now promising us lower latency and even faster connection speeds.
Possible applications in the metaverse
And then ? While 6G is due to see the light of day in 2030, some are already wondering aloud: is it really essential technology for the general public? Quoted by our colleagues, Santiago Tenorio, director of network architecture at Vodafone, does not beat around the bush: Nobody needs 6G “, he believes.
He pursues : ” The industry should make 6G a no-G. There is hardly anything we miss in a hypothetical new generation. We would be much better able to improve services and applications ».
Others disagree, and the Financial Times to cite a few innovations which, let’s be clear, sound like science fiction. This is the case with “The Internet of the Senses”, on which Ericsson is working. Concretely, this would allow users to “ smell, feel, and taste things in the digital world ».
Another innovation mentioned by professionals: the cyber-physical continuum. This is an evolution that would be closely linked to the metaverse. The idea being that the virtual world would merge with the physical world. While any physical object would have a digital twin, the inhabitants could thus “ create models in real time and go back in time in the digital world. So there would be the possibility of understanding what went wrong or simulating what might happen in the future.
All of this actually seems quite remote and unrelated to our daily lives. The future will tell if these projects see the light of day, but we must of course beware of any hasty judgement. The digitization of the world has happened at an incredible speed over the past thirty years and in the early 90s no one could have predicted such a future.
