While 5G is still being rolled out across India, telecom companies are already exploring the development of 6G, which is expected to rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI). Industry experts anticipate that 6G networks will be autonomously driven by AI algorithms.
“In the last few years, we saw a massive deployment of 5G in India, probably one of the fastest globally. New use cases are being discussed in the 5G space and several telcos are yet to roll it out; they are still building their 5G infrastructure. While two players - Airtel and Jio, have a large deployment base, others are catching up. 5G deployments are still a work in progress,” said Sajan Paul, Managing Director & Country Manager, India & SAARC, at Juniper Networks.
Talking about 6G, he said that the purpose of defining new standards around it comes from higher capacity and lower latency. “These are two major metrics people will use for radio technologies so that capacity-sensitive applications like imaging can work better; wireless broadband can be taken to the next level. However, 6G is still in the development phase, and the frequency spectrum is still under work,” said Paul. He added that this may be the first time the spectrum will go beyond gigahertz to terahertz.
“Standardization is still happening, and any commercial launch will be towards 2029-30. The technology is under development and use cases are being developed and tested as we speak.”
Last month, the Ministry of Communications announced that the Bharat 6G alliance formed strategic partnerships with 6G IA of Europe and the 6G Flagship of Oulu University, Finland to drive innovations in the space. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will supposedly allow India to connect EU and Indian R&D companies, academia, and research institutions, align R&D efforts in 6G and related technologies, promote joint research initiatives, conduct pilots of 6G technologies and use cases, and collaborate on 6G technology development and contribute to standardization efforts at global forums.
Bejoy Pankajakshan, EVP, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer of US-based OpenRAN provider Mavenir, said, “India, US, China, and Europe all have 6G initiatives because they anticipate it will play a big role in economic growth. Every country wants to be the leader there. While earlier, people projected that 5G will grow the economy by trillions, 6G will have an even bigger impact. AI is also playing a big role in how the sector evolves.”
He added that from a standardization perspective, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is going to build the specifications, recently published the framework for the development of standards and radio interface technologies for 6G.
“3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the actual body defining these specs, will start working on it in 2025-26, so the first set of specs will be out in 2028-29; service may go live in around 2030,” said Pankajakshan.
However, since the telecom sector usually operates in cycles - from 2G to 3G, and then from 4G to 5G - before 6G, there will be 5G advanced. “New services will be launched - higher throughput, lower latency, and supporting more IoT devices in the same square kilometre area. There will be more data density and user-density use cases, lowering the cost and ways to monetize with AR, VR, and XR services. I still see 5G to 5G advanced to 6G as an evolutionary path. 5G advanced specs are defined and products are already being supported or will be the short term, but 6G is further out,” he said.
Nitin Bansal, MD, India, and Head-Networks, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and India, Ericsson, said, “Last year, we launched the India 6G program by forming a 6G Research Team at our Chennai R&D Center. This team, collaborating with our research experts in Sweden and the US, is developing technologies to deliver a cyber-physical continuum, ensuring critical services, immersive communications, and seamless IoT integration. Our India 6G research team is leading projects including Channel Modelling and Hybrid Beamforming, Low-energy Networks, Cloud evolution & Sustainable compute, Trustworthy and bias-free AI algorithms, Integrated sensing and communication functions, and Compute offload to Edge-Computing cloud.”
He added that Ericsson has partnered with Indian institutions to drive 6G research. “AI Research is important since the 6G networks would be autonomously driven by AI algorithms. We are collaborating with IIT Kharagpur on AI, compute, and radio research, developing novel AI and distributed compute technology crucial for 6G networks,” said Bansal.
According to an Ericsson report, about 160 million 5G subscriptions were added globally in the first three months of 2024 - bringing the total to more than 1.7 billion. Almost 600 million new subscriptions are expected in 2024 as a whole. In India, 5G subscriptions are expected to grow from 119 million at the end of 2023 (about 10 percent of all mobile subscriptions) to about 840 million (65 percent) by the end of 2029.