The article in the July 2023 issue of IET Member News regarding the ‘Why 6G?’ conference held earlier this year got me thinking. As a former chief engineer at Nokia Networks, I am 100 per cent supportive of research and development into mobile communication technologies. What concerns me is the growing gulf between R&D and deployment.
Where I have retired to in rural Wiltshire, there are vast areas where the best mobile communications technology available is 3G, not even 4G let alone 5G.
The planned switching-off of 3G – indeed, Vodafone has announced it will start switching off 3G from July this year – will leave most of the rural areas I drive through as mobile data ‘not spots’ with only 2G coverage. I’m not counting GPRS and EGPRS as credible mobile-data technologies in 2023.
The gulf between research into 6G and increasing areas of the country not having 3G, 4G or 5G coverage should be...