US leadership is key to winning the 6G race against China

The U.S. has demonstrated that it has the ability to seriously handicap Chinese companies, as in the case of ZTE, which almost collapsed after the Commerce Department banned it for three months in 2018 from buying American technology. Similar moves could hamper Huawei’s 6G ambitions.

Washington has already started to sketch out the 6G battle lines. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, a U.S. telecom standards developer known as ATIS, launched the Next G Alliance in October to “advance North American leadership in 6G.” The alliance’s members include technology giants like Apple Inc., AT&T Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Google and Samsung Electronics Co., but not Huawei.

The alliance mirrors the way that the world has been fractured into opposing camps as a result of 5G rivalry. Led by the U.S, which identified Huawei as an espionage risk — an allegation the Chinese giant denies — countries including Japan, Australia, Sweden and the U.K. have shut the firm out of their 5G networks. However, Huawei is welcomed in Russia, the Philippines, Thailand, and other countries in Africa and the Middle East.

The European Union in December also unveiled a 6G wireless project led by Nokia, which includes companies like Ericsson AB and Telefonica SA, as well as universities.

Next Arms Race

The lack of trust in Chinese companies like Huawei is unlikely to abate with 6G. Democracies are growing increasingly worried about how 5G technology is being used by authoritarian regimes, with fears that 6G could enable technologies such as mass drone surveillance. China is already using surveillance cameras, AI, facial recognition and biometrics such as voice samples and DNA to track and control citizens.

“Currently China seems to be doing everything in terms of surveillance and suppression to make sure that they lose future markets in the U.S. and Europe,” said Paul Timmers, a senior adviser at Brussels-based think tank European Policy Centre and former director of digital society and cybersecurity at the European Commission. “This indicates that the technical approach to 6G cannot be trusted to be decoupled from state ideological objectives.”

While commercial 5G was introduced around 2019, countries are still rolling out networks and developing applications that could attract businesses and turn the technology profitable. Likewise, 6G may not reach its potential at least 15 years from now, said Gandhi of Frost & Sullivan. Only about 100 wireless carriers worldwide offer 5G services in limited areas right now.

But researchers have an ambitious vision for what the next-generation network could offer. At a potential rate of 1 terabyte per second, 6G is not only much faster, but also promises a latency — which causes lags — of 0.1 millisecond, compared to 1 millisecond, or the minimum for 5G. To achieve that, scientists are focusing on the super high frequency terahertz waves that could meet those speed and latency requirements, though there is not yet a chip capable of transmitting so much data in a second.