6G News and Announcements from MWC 2024

NGMN, the forum led by mobile network operators, has been saying unequivocally that "6G is the graceful evolution of communication networks" and it may be too soon for the hype but that hasn't stopped anyone from talking about it. Last year I did a summary of 6G announcements from MWC which was very popular and I was glad to see that it made it in the top 10 posts for 2023. Here is 

NGMN held a Press and Industry briefing (as always), the press release, presentations and photos are available here. I am hoping that the videos will be available soon. Analyst Gabriel Brown nicely summarised it on Twitter as follows, "At the @NGMN_Alliance press event at MWC operators presented a united front on 6G. Broadly, they want a "graceful" evolution of 5G and seem to want to take some of the hype out of the development cycle."

Qualcomm was showing a 6G Giga-MIMO prototype in cmWave spectrum (7 to 16 GHz). A video from their channel provides a good explanation and is embedded below:

Ericsson were showing a 6G UE prototype. You can see pics on Twitter here and here as well as a video below:

Spectrum was a big topic of discussion for 6G at MWC. I saw something at Ericsson booth but not able to recall right now. SK Telecom were showing a "Deployment Scenarios for AI based 6G Simulator". Unfortunately I didn't see it and not able to find much info except for the one shown in Tweet below.

An MWC session on "How Much Spectrum is Needed for the 6G Era?" is available to see here. Analyst Stefan Pongratz from Dell’Oro Group has written an article on '6G and The Long RF Journey Ahead' in Microwave Journal here.

China Mobile was showing 6G Timeline. OPPO released two 6G whitepapers to coincide with MWC, '2023 OPPO 6G White Paper' and 'OPPO 6G Security White Paper'. GSMA released a 6G Terminal Vision whitepaper with HONOR here. 

Nokia, SKT, NTT and DOCOMO have teamed up to implement AI in the 6G air interface (AI-AI) as announced in their press release here.

NTT Docomo had a lot of focus on 6G on their stand. Most of their demos were extremely busy. The videos from the demos can be seen in the Tweets above and below and their presentations are linked below. You can see details on their MWC page here.

  • Research and Development for 6G Wireless & Non-terrestrial Network
    • Research and Development for 6G Wireless - 6G simulator and future network technologies (presentation)
    • DOCOMO Touchable Network Concept - Non-terrestrial network (NTN) for extreme coverage extension (presentation)

There were 25 SNS JU projects present as well at MWC but I didn't get a chance to see any of them. In the end you realise that even after spending four days at the show floor, you just didn't see many things.

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