6G Communications Will Succeed When it Vanishes
6G Communications will launch in 2030 after billions of dollars of initial investment. The necessary first stage will involve very expensive, ugly, single-purpose hardware too expensive to serve more than 15% of the Earth’s surface or very much above or below. The transmission frequencies up to 100GHz then rising to around 300GHz maximum will demand a lot of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces enhancing the propagation path – extra hardware in a street near you. Those frequencies will not meet all of the promised metrics.
To the rescue will be heeding what Mark Weiser said in 1991, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
Invisibility and benefitting the host
For 6G there are two important aspects to this – invisibility and benefitting the host into which it vanishes. For example, a transparent smart window and façade overlay will be more acceptable to the owner of a high rise building if it is not just invisible. It may both cool the building and provide rental income. Indeed, there are plans for the huge UM-MIMO base stations to vanish into high rise buildings and High-Altitude Pseudo Satellite HAPS solar drones loitering for years out of sight in the stratosphere. Further, you contain the cost of 6G reconfigurable intelligent surfaces everywhere by needing fewer when they have 360-degree all-round coverage. Call it Simultaneous Transmission and Reflection STAR-RIS, now a strong research sector. Transparency again, and the possibility of making them vanish into glass buildings.
Vanishing 6G client devices
Some 6G material needs and toolkit showing importance of many optical functions. Source: Zhar Research report, “6G Communications: Optical, Optronics and Aerospace Materials and Devices Markets 2025-2045” www.zharresearch.com. And www.gii.com.
Most of the 6G client devices may vanish into everything from surgical implants to robotics communication underwater and in the new unmanned deep mines. Indeed, it is possible that 6G will mainly pay back when used for data and not be primarily human-interface centric. One example may be the Internet of Things becoming more than a cynical renaming of things we had already. It may meet its original definition of things collaborating with things for our benefit and without human involvement at the time. That could involve tens of billions of self-powered, self-healing IOT nodes embedded for decades out of sight in nature and human structures. Long life beats the circular economy any time.
Providing superlative performance, fit-and-forget out of sight
One thing is certain, manipulating near infrared and visible frequencies will increasingly provide the highest 6G data rates, client density, coverage and other performance metrics. Optical wireless communication OWC with next-generation fiber optic intermediary. In embedded 6G infrastructure and client devices, the self-powering may be triple junction photovoltaics and the solid-state self-cooling layers may be passive daylight radiative cooling PDRC or similar.
New reports analysing the surge in research in 2024
It is all analysed and forecasted in new reports at www.zharresearch.com examples including, “6G Communications: Optical, Optronics and Aerospace Materials and Devices Markets 2025-2045” and “"6G Communications: Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface RIS and Reflect-array Materials and Hardware Markets, Technology 2025-2045". Thank you Mark Weiser.