6G India 2023 held in the Capital

The 6G India 2023 International Conference & Exhibition was held at Le Meridian, New Delhi on May 9 and 10, 2023.

Organised by Bharat Exhibitions, with Communications Today as its exclusive media partner, the inaugural session was on Network evolution beyond 5G & India’s vision for 6G.

Some excerpts

Tilak Raj Dua, Director General, DIPA
“Even as the 5G rollout continues worldwide, leading research consortiums and mobile companies are busy working on their sixth generation mobile connectivity. 6G network aims to connect physical and virtual worlds through faster M2M communication and better support for immersive technology. Organizations and institutes know about the working and importance of 6G network to prepare for the future and fully use the wireless infrastructure.”

Dr Issam Toufik, Director, 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre
“At this stage there is consensus within the technical community and within the industry, that 6G, like 5G, also needs to be a global solution. The industry does not want to have different production lines for different 6G solutions. The customers do not want to go back to the early days of cellular communications, when they had to change the phone instrument every time they visited another country. There is consensus that 6G would need to be a global standard.”

VJ Christopher, Wireless Advisor, DoT, Ministry of Communications
“In the year 2020, ITU-R released the IMT 2020 framework,, which gradually developed into 5G. Work is in progress and innovations are going on in ITU for the next generation of IMT, the IMT 2030. And we hope that that will evolve into the 6G that we are talking of today.

The 39th edition of World Radio Conference that is scheduled for October-November, this year, will in all probability decide on some of the spectrum bands for 6G, among other radio communication services. And also the study cycle for the different applications and services in the next four year cycle, that is 2024-2027, until the next WRC 2027. This is very critical for the development of 6G.”

Brigadier Sanjay Rawal, Signals, Indian Army
“With India’s vision on 6G, where exactly do the defense forces pitch in? Control and ability to defend one’s network and damage those of the opponents, will be extremely potent in case of future escalation of conflict. There’s a war going on over 5g. And the 6G arms race has already started out, We will have intelligent swarms, a cross domain mobile warfare, AI base, space contradiction and cognitive control system, cognitive words, the intelligence and a lot of battlefield information. This information will be processed, and decision making take place. And 6G will enable these operations.

High speed, mass data transfers, applications encompassing autonomous vehicles, Virtual Reality, AI powered command and control systems, these are the opportunities. So, what are the changes. The changes are expected to have the transformative effects on doctrine or operations or battlefield conditions. Conditional logistic, joint fires, joint all domain command and control and the key last bullet is the information advantage.”

Lt. Gen. Dr SP Kochhar, Director General, COAI
“My request to the government and the industry at large is do not miss the woods for the trees. Look at the country’s benefit, and see that the government and industry have to stand together as partners, and roll out a robust telecom network, which can be utilized by the other sectors.

By looking at telecom only as a golden goose may not be the correct approach. The approach would be to look at it long time and see how much more benefit will come if the other sectors- automobile, medical, agriculture, etc all have applications. And the way they will grow, the way their productivity will grow, and increase the country’s GDP and contribute to the coffers of the government is something we must look at.”

Amit Marwah, Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs, Nokia
“There are two very interesting pillars in 6G, network as a sensor and extreme connectivity.

6G networks will be able to sense their surroundings, allowing us to generate highly-realized digital versions of the physical world. This digital awareness would turn the network into our sixth sense. By bouncing signals off objects, the network will determine what’s there, how things are moving – and potentially even what they’re made of. The network becomes our sixth sense, extending our awareness beyond our immediate surroundings. This sensing capability can be used to map a digital version of the physical world. By interacting with this ‘digital twin’, we could extend our senses to every point the network touches.

6G wireless technology will reproduce the latency and reliability of dedicated cables. Powered by new subnetworks, these invisible wires have profound implications for life-critical services. We call these extreme-connectivity systems in X-subnetworks.”

Ravi Gandhi, President, Chief of Public Policy & Regulatory, Reliance Jio
“At the moment, re 6G, the vendors have to develop technology and provide to the operators when it is matured, so that it can be deployed for the consumers.

As far as present networks are concerned, the 5G network is being rolled out very, very fast, fastest amongst the world. And we expect that a lot of use cases, including the manufacturing use cases or M2M, or private network use cases would come in. Private network is a term which is very loosely used. There is nothing like a private network. Earlier, there was cloud over the network. Now it’s a network over the cloud. So how can there be a private network over the cloud, the cloud itself is a public cloud?”

Eva U Ulicevic, Director of Architecture, Strategy and Analytics, Telefónica, Germany
“Within the Telefonica group, we believe that 6G is not going to be only terrestrial, but also a space and airborne network. That is why we are playing a leading role in the digital transformation. In 6G-TakeOff, we are helping to enable innovations and the convergence of information and communications technologies of future 6G technologies, taking into account industry-specific requirements, as well as enabling technology transfers through demonstrators and testing. We are focusing on enabling seamless integration of space and airborne infrastructure.”

CT Bureau