After 5G comes 6G: 6 scenarios for the technology of the future

5G hasn’t even really arrived yet, and the next mobile technology is already waiting: 6G. Nokia is the company with the second most 5G patents and also wants to be at the forefront of the next era of the upcoming 6G standard. Nokia Bell Labs has now identified a number of fields in a blog where 6G could shine. Here are six of them.

The largest mobile phone manufacturer for over a decade until 2011, Nokia had launched the first new-generation devices, but then found itself overrun by the smartphone market and eventually had to sell its cell phone business to Microsoft in 2014. But as was revealed at the time, the Finnish company had the most patents worldwide, ahead of Cisco. It has also kept many of them, because in 5G, Nokia is the second-largest patent holder worldwide after Samsung. In 2014, the sale of the cell phone division and the purchase of the remaining shares in the former joint venture with Siemens created Nokia Network, a company that today employs 50,000 people and has annual sales of around 13.8 billion euros. A year later, parent company Nokia Oyj also acquired Alcatel-Lucent, making it the largest network equipment supplier – ahead of Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE. Along with Alcatel-Lucent, the renowned Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs) also became part of Nokia.

And its head of research, Core Research President Peter Vetter, has now revealed in a blog “Nokia’s Vision for the 6G Era” what to expect from the next generation of mobile communications. As he points out in an explainer video, 2G was still reserved for voice and SMS, 3G or UMTS brought broadband data transmission to mobile, 4G or LTE brought video and things like social media, and 5G brought applications like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and interactive video.