6G VISION

• The government has indicated that it wants to accelerate India’s wireless data consumption and assume leadership in setting the standards for 6G in the coming years
• This may involve everything from encouraging local manufacturing of telecom gear to supporting Indian companies and engineers in international discussions around standardisation
• Another key motivation is the delay in previous generations of telecommunication technology rolling out in India  5G started rolling out in India years after countries like South Korea and the U.S. had already blanketed their major urban areas with high-speed wireless connectivity
• Frequencies generally increase in newer generations of networks, but the lower the frequency, the longer a cell signal can travel
• With increasing data usage, lower frequencies in 4G networks may not physically be able to keep up with the demand for traffic
• Right now, the spectrum is congested, particularly in the low and mid-bands where the propagation characteristics are favourable
• More data can travel in higher frequencies, which is the basis for 5G architectures where base stations with low coverage took the place of a single larger cell tower
• Beyond encouraging greater participation in standardisation discussions, the vision document says the government will financially support “research pathways” where breakthroughs are most likely to advance connectivity goals, leveraging talent in academia and companies
• Some indicative goals are to guarantee every citizen a minimum bandwidth of 100Mbps; ensure every gram panchayat has half a terabit per second of connectivity and blanket the country with over 50 million internet hotspots, with thirteen per square kilometre

• For consumers, websites will load faster, videos will look better, and files will download faster, as has been the case with every new generation of technology
• But we may be hitting the ceiling on how noticeable these improvements can get
• Latency, which is the time taken for a data packet to move from one place to another (as opposed to speed, which is the number of such packets that can travel on a connection each second)
• is not far off from the speed of light itself on existing networks
• Businesses and governments are still on the verge of how best to leverage 5G to reap the benefits of high-precision low-latency applications with these new connections
• According to the vision document, satellite constellations will join telecom towers and base stations, integrating networks and extending them to rural areas
• Some of the innovations that the government envisions as 6G-powered connectivity boosters are solutions that already exist in other forms
• Satellite internet in remote areas is a solution that the government can instantly approve by granting firms like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Bharti Airtel-backed OneWeb the administrative clearance to begin offering their services
• Like DTH satellite dishes, setup is minimal as the satellites are already in the sky. However, administrative clearances lag behind
• At least two parts of India have already relied on satellite internet for decades. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands relied on a 1Gbps link to connect to the outside world, which is comparable to a single expensive home connection in many Indian cities today
• The situation improved vastly after the islands were connected to Chennai by an undersea cable in 2020
• While satellite internet speeds have improved, thanks to innovations like constellations, connectivity goals have as much to do with satellites hundreds of kilometres overhead as they do with the cables beneath the ground and on the seabed

• As early as July 2021, South Korea planned 220 billion KRW (almost Rs 1,400 crore) in investments into “super performance, hyperspace, and super precision standards,” according to the country’s Ministry of Science and Information Technology
• Countries have already started working together, with Japan and Germany planning a workshop in April to work on everything from “fundamental technologies to demonstrations”
• The Indian 6G Vision paper cites Europe’s equivalent of the document, saying that “The overarching Vision is to ensure leadership in strategic areas and establish secure and trusted access to key technologies making Europe a sovereign, independent, and reliable source for 6G public and private network solutions and services.”