In a very recent accomplishment by LG Electronics, they have successfully deployed 6G from the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute building to the Berlin Institute of Technology in Germany across a distance of 100 meters (328 feet).
Regarding the achievement, the president and CTO of LG Electronics, Dr. I.P. Park, said, “The success of this test demonstrates that we are ever closer to the successful application of terahertz radio communication spectrum in the upcoming 6G era.”
He added by saying, “Our successful partnerships 65with local and global research institutions and organizations to advance the development of 6G capabilities have been very rewarding.”
Meanwhile, in LG Electronics’ recent announcement, they did not go into complete details about how much data was transmitted, but we know 6G is going to be blazing fast, and that’s a given because 6G signals will exist in the currently unused terahertz spectrum, past 100 GHz (5G signals exist in a frequency range up to 40 GHz) and across a wider bandwidth of frequencies, resulting in less wireless traffic to deal with.
However, there is just one problem with the terahertz frequencies, and that is they currently have a very limited range and tend to lose a lot of power when passing through antennas used for transmission and reception. So, instead of simply adding even more cellular towers across the country to bridge the gaps, the ideal solution will be to find ways to increase the distance of the 6G broadcasts.
LG Electronics conceived of a new power amplifier as well as an adaptive beamforming technology that could make 6G viable. On August 13, the new amplifier was used to successfully transmit a 6G signal between two buildings. It might not seem like much and 6G is still a decade away, but it’s a strong start toward super-fast transmission and reception.
Additionally in June, it was Samsung that touted a new record for 6G wireless transmissions using hardware, a 140GHz transmitter, that was first developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2017. The researchers back then had successfully transmitted the data at a rate of around 775 MB every second (6.2 Gbps) across a distance of about 50 feet. However, the speed record before that, was set by Nokia and Turkey’s Turk Telekom back in March, that had topped out at around 4.5 Gbps.
Moreover, back in November of 2020, it was China who had successfully launched what has been described as “the world’s first 6G satellite” into orbit in order to test the technology.
