Even as most countries in the world are trying to adopt 5G, UAE’s Etisalat announced it has already started working towards the next generation of the mobile network with considerable efforts towards 6G realisation.
Speaking during the session titled ‘Setting the roadmap to 6G’ at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Haitham Abdulrazzak, Chief Technology Officer, Etisalat, said that the UAE is “conducting research and developing international standards that are the main building blocks for the 6G ecosystem”.
“The excellent achievements by Etisalat today in 5G coverage, cloud native, slicing, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) development, AI and automation platforms, as well as high fibre penetration which stands at more than 99% of UAE populated area coverage, is a result of the long-term strategy paving the way towards 6G,” said Abdulrazzak.
“Advancement and development of new mobile technologies has become much more rapid than ever. Introduction of new features, capabilities and use of millimeter frequencies seen in 5G is a result of this advancement, which is expected to be complemented with terahertz spectrum in 6G. Etisalat is one of the ambitious players making steps towards the sixth generation of the network.
“We are committed to bringing the latest technologies to UAE market to enable digital societies. As part of our vision and future technology planning, 6G is going beyond earth networks into space to enable new era of services and usage scenarios with terabyte data traffic resulting in extra ordinary human to machine interaction.
“Etisalat is upgrading tools and capabilities of its R&D centre to enhance the contribution towards 6G global standardisation within the international fora and alliances.”
While Etisalat has not spelt out any timeline, a report earlier this year by ABI Research forecasts 2028-29 as the early commercial deployment years for 6G.
The report also said that holographic communication and X Reality (a combination of AR, VR, and Mixed Reality) are some of the applications that are possible with the speeds that 6G could provide. Compared to peak data rate of 20 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) in 5G, it will be around 1,000 Gbps in 6G.
