According to a vision statement released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, India is preparing to roll out high-speed 6G communication services by 2030 and has established the Bharat 6G initiative to discover and support development and implementation of the next-generation technology in the nation.
The project will be implemented in two phases, 2023 to 2025 for the first one, and 2025 to 2030 for the second. Phase one will support exploratory concepts, riskier pathways, and proof-of-concept experiments. Ideas and concepts that exhibit promise and the potential to be embraced by the global peer community will be given the necessary support to be fully developed, to establish their benefits and use cases, and to produce implementational IPs and testbeds that will enable commercialization in phase two.
Besides this the government has created an apex council to oversee the project and concentrate on matters like standardisation, identifying the spectrum for 6G usage, developing an ecosystem for systems and devices, and allocating funds for research and development.New technologies which would include terahertz communication, radio interfaces, tactile internet, artificial intelligence for connected intelligence, novel encoding techniques, and waveform chipsets for 6G devices will be a major area of concentration for the council.
The role of apex council would be to support and finance 6G technology research and development by Indian universities, businesses, research organisations, and startups. By identifying priority areas for 6G research based on India’s comparative advantages, it would help India become a leading global supplier of intellectual property, goods, and solutions of inexpensive 6G telecom solutions.
In October 2022, Modi publicly introduced 5G services and declared that India should be prepared to introduce 6G services during the next ten years. 6G promises to provide extremely low latency with rates up to 1 Tbps, in contrast to 5G, which at its best can provide internet speeds up to 10 Gbps.
The vision document outlines the application cases for 6G, which include remote-controlled factories, constantly communicating self-driving automobiles, and intelligent wearables that directly receive input from human senses. The majority of 6G supporting communication devices will be battery-powered and can have a considerable carbon footprint, so while 6G offers expansion, it will also need to be balanced with sustainability, the study added.