Having already made a name for itself as a pioneer of 5G, Huawei already has its eyes set on a potentially bigger prize – 6G. Hailed as the successor of 5G mobile networks, little progress has been made on 6G so far, with most of the efforts coming as a courtesy of telecom companies like Nokia and Ericsson. Huawei hopes to enter this exclusive club, but more importantly, it hopes to be the first to pioneer this technology on a wide scale too.
5G networks have been all the rage nowadays, be it their official launch in Pakistan by Zong, or be it their inclusion in smartphones by companies like Samsung and Huawei. However, it has barely established itself, largely due to scant connectivity and not a whole lot of users.
Since 5G networks are not yet available on a global scale, and there are no obvious applications right now that warrant the use of this technology, it makes sense to invest resources in building it up for now. However, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei has already started thinking about 6G and his company’s role in it.
“We have parallel work being done on 5G and 6G, so we started out 6G a long time ago,” Ren said during a panel discussion on Thursday. According to him, the technology is in its infancy and it still has “a long way to go”. For one, every network technology needs to conform to a set of standards, but these haven’t been decided as far as 6G is concerned. For another, much like with 5G, it is still not clear how 6G will be different.
Even though the Chinese smartphone manufacturer is focusing largely on 5G nowadays – it has signed more than 50 commercial 5G contracts so far. The fact that even a premature level of research has been initiated by the company on 6G means that we can expect a very competitive playing arena for this technology.
And the world will definitely be all the better for it.
