6G: How Is India Gearing up? The 6G network will call for a change in the way communication networks are designed. India has taken a significant stride forward in the field of telecommunications, with the acquisition of over 200 patents for 6G technology

While India has made progress with 5G– the fifth-generation wireless (5G) is an iteration of cellular technology, designed to increase the speed of wireless networks–the country has taken a significant stride forward in the field of telecommunications, with the acquisition of over 200 patents for 6G technology.

The announcement was made by the Communications and IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, during the launch of the Bharat 6G Alliance in New Delhi. The government is ensuring that India becomes not just atmanirbhar in this emerging and vital technology, but a significant contributor to the global good. India is catalyzing the next-generation 6G research and innovation in the country to enable India to be a front-line contributor in 6G technology and manufacturing by 2030. The Department of Telecommunications constituted a Technology Innovation Group on 6G (TIG-6G) on 1st November 2021 with members from various ministries/departments, research and development institutions, academia, standardization bodies, telecom service providers and industry to develop vision, mission and goals for the 6G and also develop a roadmap and action plans for 6G in India.

"India has taken a holistic approach to develop 6G technology by involving various stakeholders in the process. The country takes an early lead in 6G research to reduce its dependence on foreign equipment and create a self-sufficient ecosystem. It will further strengthen its plans to establish itself as a top global supplier of cutting-edge and reasonably priced telecom equipment. These steps bode well for the government's 'Make in India' initiative to promote telecom equipment manufacturing in India," said Charu Paliwal, telecom expert.

"Aligning its 6G research with future technologies, strong infrastructure that accommodates 6G speeds and latency, strong collaboration between the public and commercial sector, robust cybersecurity and more could be the main focus areas," she added.

The 6G network will call for a change in the way communication networks are designed. Multiple key requirements must be reconciled: serve the massively growing traffic and the exploding numbers of devices and markets, while also accomplishing the highest possible standards regarding performance, energy efficiency and strong security, enabling sustainable growth in a trustworthy way, Nokia explains in a blog.

How different is 5G from 6G? In the 6G era, the digital, physical and human world will seamlessly fuse to trigger extrasensory experiences. Intelligent knowledge systems will be combined with robust computation capabilities to make humans endlessly more efficient and redefine how we live, work and take care of the planet. "The role of next-generation networks is the unification of our experience across the physical, digital and human world," said Harish Viswanathan, Head of Radio Systems Research at Nokia Bell Labs.

"Just as the applications of today are built on the foundation of multimedia, we envision future applications to use digital worlds as the framework. Dynamic digital twin worlds would be accurate, high-resolution representations of the physical world and/or representations of virtual worlds," he added.

Ericsson has projected India to reach 700 million 5G subscribers accounting for 57 per cent of the total subscribers by the end of 2028. This means India can be the second biggest 5G market by subscribers, after China. "The market has grown from 10 million 5G subscribers at the end of 2022 to 50 million in March i.e. within six months of the service launch. This accounts for 4.37 per cent penetration in the country's total customer base of about 1.14 billion," Paliwal explained.

Will 5G and 6G co-exist? 5G is a fairly new network and it takes significant investment to deploy new infrastructure. It is expected that 4G and 5G will have a long coexistence period as 5G use-cases are still developing. "Future technologies such as 6G are expected to bring a wide range of development, especially in the industrial environment. It is too early to predict but one can expect 5G to have a long run," Charu added.