R&D projects aim to put meat on the 6G bones

So what is 6G, then? According to Ericsson, the “vision for 6G… is built on the desire to create a seamless reality where the digital and physical worlds as we know them today have merged”.

Er, OK then. In an attempt to add some substance to these aspirations, governments and industry have been scrambling in recent years to set some clear parameters for the next generation of mobile technology.

According to one survey published earlier this year, $2.7 billion had been committed to 6G investments in the US and $2.9 billion in the EU.

Recently, the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), a partnership jointly led by the European Commission (EC) and the 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association (6G-IA), awarded €127 million in funding to 16 projects that are focused on 6G (or “beyond 5G”), taking the total amount awarded to date by the SNS JU to €507m.

The SNS JU was just one of the projects featured in our round-up of 6G R&D, a key part of our recently updated 6G Dossier. At the national level in Europe, there are projects like Finland’s 6G Flagship and Spain’s UNICO I+D 6G.

Other big investments are being made in China, India, Japan and South Korea. In Japan, for example, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (also mentioned in the R&D section of the dossier) has just selected NTT, KDDI, KDDI Research, Fujitsu, NEC and Rakuten Mobile “to conduct new research into innovations beyond 5G and 6G”.

Find out more about the full scale of the investments poured into 6G in our 6G dossier, fully updated for 2024. It is now available to Spectrum Research Service Subscribers.

• 6G R&D