All mainstream network operators in New Zealand are steadily deploying 5G across the country. While we explore the scale of innovation and growth that 5G offers in almost all sectors of life, researchers around the world are already working on 6G – the sixth generation of mobile phone technology. This obviously raises at least six basic questions:
Do we really need 6G? That largely depends on the trend of how much data we, the users, exchange using our mobile devices. A network can only handle a limited amount of data sent or received by the users, which can be roughly packaged as ‘user demand’. In 2012, Ericsson predicted that user demand would increase exponentially over the next five years [1] – a prediction that later proved to be true. Interestingly enough, that exponential trend in growth will continue to be witnessed through to at least 2030, according to International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) report on traffic estimates [2]. Future generations of mobile phone technology, like 6G, will add new capacity to the network for meeting the ever increasing user demand.