Now that 5G has arrived with an advertising onslaught from operators like EE, what else could there be for the telecom industry to work on but 6G? Due out around the end of this decade, 6G would keep wireless communications on much the same time scale set since 3G first appeared. But questions are now being asked as to whether these generational shifts are working out the way the industry intended.
One of the early aims for 5G was to bring cellular wireless to a bunch of industrial applications that could not use its predecessors. Although 4G made some attempts to cut the round-trip latency for delivering packets over the air, 5G was designed to cut that to a millisecond or so. In principle, this makes it possible to coordinate robots without having to cable them up, assuming you do not try to have the control systems for those robots running in a data centre overseas.
In practice, the wireless operators are, as with 3G and 4G, pushing new phones to...