When commercial 5G was taking its first steps in 2018, China was already talking of the next generation. The Asian giant saw very early that 6G would be a strategic element and got to work to dominate the conversation before its rivals. Because this is not about playing with less latency at a cloud game or download data faster.
It is about having frontier technology before the rival.
Strategic 6G. Since the middle of the last century, China has had something known as the ‘Five Year Plan’. It is a roadmap that sets out the objectives to be developed and achieved over a period of five years. Everything goes into it: energy, economy, society, technology and the environment, and it represents an organizational chart to coordinate policies that make the set objectives possible.
In the 14th Five-Year Plan, the focus was on developing technologies that would allow China to be self-sufficient in semiconductors and digital technologies such as 6G. Time has passed and we have been able to see enormous progress during this time (especially in semiconductors), and now the new development plan has just been published in which we want to strengthen that sovereignty, but where two key objectives are framed: AI and 6G as a lever for economic growth.
Calendar. The new roadmap defines the objective for the period 2026-2030, but the country has been preparing the ground for years. Huawei, already in 2019, He pointed out that they were testing 6G internally and that it was considered that it would not be until the end of the next decade when it would begin to be deployed commercially. The moment is approaching and steps have been taken.
In 2020, China deployed what was considered the world’s first 6G satellitein 2022 experimented with sending data packets of one TB per second from a kilometer away, and in 2023 we learned that military uses were also being analyzed. For example, vibration analysis in water to detect even smaller submarines and drones in the open sea from the air.
In the middle of last year, the state media CCTV commented that China’s objectives with 6G were being met as planned, highlighting, again and as they do every time they make a communication on the subject, the country’s leadership in this field.
And… for what? China wants the world to know that are very actively developing this technology. And the big question is… do we need 6G? And here there is a big mistake: thinking that 6G is a technology for users. Obviously, consumer devices capable of having connections of these speeds will be essential for applications, for example, of artificial intelligence that are not calculated at the local level, but 6G is not so much for mobile phones but for the global network.
From the same CCTV statement it is detailed that “6G is more than a communication technology.” This is something to drive more complex devices, smart terminals and new generations of sensors. Speeds above 100 Gbps are targeted with a delay of less than a millisecond (in 5G, the figures are about 1Gbps) and this will benefit the remote manipulation of devices, the number of simultaneous connections and tasks that require total precision, such as “swarms” of robots working in the field and coordinated by artificial intelligence.
This sounds like science fiction, but recently Samsung presented its plans to transform its factories by 2030. Robots will be the workforce and the brain will be the AI. In its own updated five-year plan, China emphasizes the development of ’embodied AI’, that “robotics with AI” as one of the pillars of the country’s technological development.
Everyone wants to lead. The country detailed that “the future 6G will not only be a mobile communication network, but a new generation of mobile information.” But of course, with all the range of possibilities that something like this opens up, and with how important it can be for an accelerated and massive deployment of robots, Physical AI and even of the remote computing in data centersno country wants to miss the train.
Because China has giants like Huawei, but South Korea has SK Telecom and Samsung. Both have already expressed their intention to start conduct short-term technology tests with an ambitious goal: to have a functional 6G network by 2028. Japan is also in that raceEurope (which missed out on 5G) He doesn’t want things to repeat themselves. with 6G and the United States, whose current president already said in 2019 that I wanted 6G for yesterdayis also in garlic.
A basic problem. My colleague Laura points out in Xataka Mobile that China wants to win the 6G battle before the battle for 6G begins, but although it is evident that they are in it and they lead patent applications worldwide (as has already happened thanks to Huawei with 5G), as users… we say again that the thing will take a while to start. At least in Europe.
In a report last year, Ericsson, which is a communications giant, He pointed out that there is a basic problem: While competitors have deployed the millimeter band, most European countries have prioritized medium and low bands. More coverage, less speed, and although soon it will be time to talk about 6G as a current technology, the 5G has been with us for more than six years, and it is still taking its first steps.
And if Europe wants to be a reference in robotics, AI and new technologies, it will have to start deploying towers as they are already doing in other regions.
Pexels (edited with Gemini)
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