Beyond 5G: 5G coverage is still sparse throughout the US, but that hasn't stopped some phonemakers – namely Huawei – from looking even further into the future. The Chinese tech firm announced on Monday that it plans to launch 6G-ready devices and networks in 2030, which is just nine years away.
Though it's odd that Huawei is focusing on the tech this far in advance, nine years is hardly an impossible timeline to get 6G up and running. The first 4G LTE smartphone, Samsung's Galaxy Indulge, released on February 10, 2011, and the first 5G smartphone, the Galaxy S20, released 9 years later on March 6, 2020.
While the past is not always a perfect tool to predict the future, it's at least not unreasonable for major generational leaps to happen in under a decade. Of course, 6G will never take off if nobody even knows what it is – and that's the situation we're in right now. Most of us are still struggling to wrap our heads around 5G (and its variants), so anything more powerful than that isn't even on the radar.
However, Huawei hopes to change that. Sometime "soon," the company will release a white paper describing what 6G is to both the public and the rest of the communications industry. We're not sure what sort of details will be included, but we hope for information on potential speed increases and use cases for the tech, at the very least.
Some communications experts predict data transfer speed boosts of around 50x (up to 1,000 GB per second) compared to existing 5G networks, but that's the sort of claim we'll have to see to believe.
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