Huawei publishes a book on 6G
Rotating
Chairman of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, Eric Xu Zhiju, has
teased a new book published by his company that says 6G will be
ready by 2030.
That’s not an especially risky prediction, as new wireless
generations tend to emerge at the start of each decade. Rather,
this feels like Huawei (and by extension China) putting down a
marker to the rest of the world on 6G. It’s effectively saying
‘we’ll be going ahead as planned with 6G whether the rest of the
world cooperates or not.
“Huawei will define 5.5G and research 6G at the same time in the
next few years, and it is a test of the whole industry’s
imagination and creativity whether 6G can surpass (5G and 5.5G
technologies),” Xu is quoted as writing on Huawei’s online
community by Chinese government-controlled news site Global
Times. Google Translate wasn’t up to the challenge so we’ll just
have to hope that translation is accurate.
Tellingly the Global Times piece then bangs on about what a
great job Huawei has done of handling all the stuff the US has
thrown at it. “The US ban has hurt Huawei’s business to some
extent, but has not been able to hurt it fundamentally,” it
quotes ‘independent’ analyst Xiang Ligang as saying in the
piece. “Backed by China’s vast market, Huawei managed to
maintain its capital, staff team and research capabilities,
which I believe will empower the company to push forward
next-generation technologies and reinforce its lead in the
global telecom industry.”
There doesn’t seem to have been any talk of a standard split,
but Xu did stress the danger of creating impediments to global
cooperation. “Whether the industries can achieve satisfying
results (in 6G development) around 2030 largely depends on such
factors as if the process of defining 6G is open enough, whether
the participants are pluralistic, and if the communication is
thorough enough,” he’s quoted as saying.
Telecom veteran expert Fu Liang, interviewed by the Global
Times, was less reticent. “If political tensions worsen, it’s
also possible that 6G will have two sets of standards instead
one like in the past, but of course that will increase the costs
of connectivity and bring losses to global companies,” he’s
quoted as saying.
One
probable innovation in 6G will be the basic radio-wave
technology,
with Dr Ronny Hadani, Chief
Scientific Officer at Cohere Technologies, keen on something
called
OTFS. “4G and 5G
are both based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
waveforms,”
he said in an emailed
statement.
“However, 6G is
going to require a waveform that offers better performance and
supports extreme and high mobility scenarios – a problem
identified by several standards bodies and forums. Subsequently,
one of the first major specifications for 6G is likely to be
that it uses Orthogonal Time Frequency and Space (OTFS) as the
basis for a new waveform. OFTS’s waveform is oblivious to
distortion and therefore can offer much better performance and
spectral efficiency. This will enable a whole range of
high-mobility use cases already being associated with 6G.”
Sound good, although it should be noted the Cohere has been
sniffing around this tech for some time. If we assume Hadani is
right, might there be more than one way of going about OTFS? Or
will there be some equivalent of the space race, with the first
country to crack it claiming some kind of bragging rights over
everyone else? It seems almost inevitable that 6G will be the
most politicised mobile standard yet, but maybe that might also
pull the US and China beck from the brink in this new cold war.
Scott Bicheno -
Telecoms
Orthogonal Time Fequency and Space |
