A Chinese Lab Has Claimed a Major Breakthrough in 6G: 206 Gigabits per Second

While the standards haven’t been set up for this technology yet.

A high-tech lab in Nanjing in the eastern Jiangsu province of China has claimed that it has made a breakthrough in next-generation communications technology, South China Morning Post reported. The lab was working on a special government project on 6G technology in association with Fudan University and the nation's telecom giant, China Mobile. 

The world is yet to see the potential of 5G and how it could change our world. Although the low latency and high transmission speeds are notable features of the technology, there does not appear to be a common world application that could put this technology to use en-masse. The high deployment costs of the technology have also put a dampener on its rollout, with operators opting for a slow pace until usage really picks up, SCMP reported.

This hasn't, however, perturbed the engineers' desire to build the next big thing. Last year, we reported how LG Electronics was working on ushering in the 6G of wireless communication and how China had already deployed a 6G capable satellite back in 2020. The problem, however, is that there is no standard that has been accepted to define what 6G constitutes. 

SCMP reports that 3GPP, a global communication standards-setting organization has still not revealed a road map for 6G and countries haven't agreed to a common framework of standard frequencies, signal modulations, and waveforms that will be used to power the technology. In its absence, anything in the multiples of the peak 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) offered by 5G becomes the next frontier of mobile communication. 

The lab in China called Purple Mountain Laboratories is led by Professor You Xiaohu and has claimed that it has achieved a transmission speed of 206.25 Gbps in the lab environment. While the achievement has not been published in a journal yet, it is a world record for transmission in the frequency range of 300GHz - 3THz that is assumed will be used to 6G technology, SCMP reported. 

Even equipment manufacturers are unsure when the technology will be released. Ericsson expects it to be available starting 2027, while then Huawei chairman Xu Zhijun told SCMP in September last year, "we don’t know what 6G is now" and expects the definition to come through in the next decade. 

Source: https://interestingengineering.com/a-chinese-lab-has-claimed-a-major-breakthrough-in-6g-206-gigabits-per-second