8 ms·

If 6G becomes just 5G+ we’ll have made a big mistake

36 points by ystad 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
What about coverage? If you happen to live in a place where cell carriers choose not to cover (E.g. go 200 miles west from the east coast) and you are stuck with a landline you’ll find a scarlet letter that says ‘PROBABLE SPAM CALL’ on the CallerID of anybody you call. This is unacceptable. The last G is fiber optics and it is about time.
auggierose 5y ago
No thank you. Just give me even more reliable and even faster transmission. I don't really want machines to make best effort guesses what is happening at the other end of the communication pipeline, because the connection is now so bad compared to previous technologies that it has to. The rest can be done by software / hardware on top of that, if one wishes so, I don't see why that has to be integrated into the communication pipeline itself.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  100%. If I want missing packets to be inferred, I'd rather it happen on hardware I control than otherwise.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Right? If the video is lagging because there's not enough bandwidth, don't drop packets for me; let my video software choose a different bitrate. I don't want my ISP messing with my packets.
- nine_k 5y ago
  This. My wish list: * Shorter delays for voice traffic, closer to the copper wire experience from 30 years old. At least for local calls. * Better voice quality throughout. We have great codecs and lots of bandwidth, we can talk at hi-fi quality. I'm fine with the speeds 4G gives me.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Sometimes is just impossible (physical laws or limitations of the current technology). I can't have 40 ms ping time with a game server on the other side of the world no matter what and my 4G connection slows down when it snows. Ok, I should pay somebody a relatively huge sum to lay a fiber optic cable to my home :-) An AI to fill in the blank of a video call (degenerate case: a still picture) is OK for me. Sending me a summary instead of a book, a trailer instead of a movie does not. By the way, AIs were filling in the blank of video calls when bandwidth got low in a Fire upon the Deep. The calls were between far away spaceships, probably very superluminal transmissions because of how physics work in that book.
foxhop 5y ago
I prefer wired connection and WIFI for the "last mile".
fennecfoxen 5y ago
It looks like the general premise of this article's 6G is "semantic" technologies where the transmitter knows things like the fact that it's transmitting video, and can do smart things (prioritize, infer missing portions, and the like). Problem 1: So much for the OSI model. You're putting application-level knowledge in the link layer. Ugh. Not that it's entirely unprecedented, but there are reasons the layers are separated: heterogenous apps need to work together on heterogenous hardware stacks that have radically different lifecycles. The coordination problem of just rolling out IPv6 has been hard enough, and is simple by comparison. Problem 2: I don't actually want the transmitter to know much about what it's transmitting. I want encryption. This doesn't kill the deal, but it does make it a lot harder, and it means you definitely 100% need explicit protocol-level support for all of the semantics (and can't just throw deep packet inspection at the problem to solve any of it).
- eptcyka 5y ago
  If the link layer knows that the encrypted bits are actually transporting video, then an attacker might have an easier time decrypting the traffic.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Perhaps – but well-compressed video is hard to distinguish from noise. You should already be assuming the attacker knows that kind of thing; googlevideo.com doesn't serve much other than video, for example.
    - salawat 5y ago
      No. That's implying your hardware has knowledge of cultural or human constructs. Your ascribing a set of qualities to a hunk of silicon you darn well have no business doing. Besides which, say googlevideo.cim flubs the Domain renewal and I snap it up and start serving a Slackware mirror for instance. The Stack below the application layer should neither care nor assume anything other than "take this, send here" with maybe some wiggle room where I have the option to tell it "best effort is okay" or "make it reliable". Anything else is biasing certain uses for certain endpoints, which strikes me as digital fiefdom carving. No thanks. Dumb pipes, generously provisioned, thank you very much.
bullen 5y ago
I think the article should be: "If 6G is centralized, we have failed again." Add decentralized radio to phones now, or we will build our own phones: http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org
- syedkarim 5y ago
  Why doesn't the radiomesh.org website have any real details?
  - rolph 5y ago
    mesh communications are a real thing and the recipies are common, a quick DDG and : https://www.academia.edu/2487377/Making_a_mesh_router_gateway_from_a_smartphone_Is_that_a_practical_solution https://www.academia.edu/2487377/Making_a_mesh_router_gatewa... https://www.ab9il.net/crypto/serval-project.html https://www.ab9il.net/crypto/serval-project.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220626953_Making_a_mesh_routergateway_from_a_smartphone_Is_that_a_practical_solution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220626953_Making_a_... http://servalproject.org/ http://servalproject.org/
qwerty456127 5y ago
> When the wireless industry deploys 6G networks around 2030, they hope to usher in an era in which everything, not just our phones, is sensed, connected, and intelligent. And every tiny detail of everyone's life tracked in real time. What a horror.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Is it really a horror? I personally don’t care.
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    It won't matter until you're banned from places and services for having low social credit score
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      People with low social credit score have it for a reason. Maybe you shouldn't be a jerk in life if you want to enjoy it.
      - orangepurple 5y ago
        Do you think the technocrats who rule over you have a high social credit score? NO. They gamed the system and will work to suppress upwards social mobility to protect their moat.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        You don't have to be a jerk to have low social credit score. There are many things which are obviously normal (like being gay) or even beneficial (like particular psychoactive substances or uncensored books) but are outlawed in certain countries. Did you know having smoked some weed in Arizona (where it is legal), which you could have done even for a scientifically-backed medical purpose, automatically makes you a criminal in South Korea and you will be thrown in a prison if you then travel to there and their officials find out, even if you are not their citizen and have done the "crime" years ago and fairly far from their soil?
adfgdfhaerheq 5y ago
This is using strange terminology, but it sounds like 'layer B' and 'layer C' are literally higher layers in the network stack. Why would those things be locked in to '6G'? Why not use them with existing 5G hardware or on my home fiber connection? Consider the following paragraph: >Including level B technologies would look something like each video call participant locally predicting and rendering any missing portions of the video data if a glitch or network hiccup happens. Currently, we allocate significant amounts of time, energy, and computational resources to ensure very high transmission reliability. But instead, each participant’s machine—whether it’s a laptop, phone, or something else—would “fill in the blanks” by inferring what was missing based on what had arrived. On a deeper level, machines would be able to reconstruct data with the same meaning as what was sent, even if it’s not the same on a bit-by-bit or pixel-by-pixel level. The machine learning techniques to do this already exist, though they are still relatively new: Two examples are variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks. The latter in particular has gained attention in recent years because of its ability to develop deepfake images. The author is talking about video codecs. Certainly codecs can be much improved based on a higher-level understanding of the content. What does that have to do with networks?
throwaway74737 5y ago
5G seems to me like planned obsolesence of 4G with only an incremental improvement. 4G was supposed to be "Long-Term Evolution". I had thought that meant forward- and backward-compatibility for decades. Granted, latency is much lower. Did I get taken by marketing? With 6G deployment already being projected, when I don't even know anybody with a 5G handset, it also seems like a make-work technology. Deployment of a new wireless technology throughout a national wireless carrier, let alone all carriers in a country the size of the US, or in the world, is such a huge undertaking in terms of environmental resources, that it seems almost irresponsible unless there is a significant improvement. 2G was a quantum leap over 1G analog networks. In 2G networks like GSM, the digital communications stack was so tightly integrated, and as optimized as a 1990s video game, that even everyday layman users knew stories like "I could send an emergency SMS from the middle of nowhere even when there was no signal". It seems like that kind of robustness is missing the more abstract and higher-level these wireless generations go.
- hencoappel 5y ago
  Just staying on 4G doesn't sell new phones.
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    5G doesn’t sell phones either. I don’t know anyone who cares about it whatsoever.
    - rolph 5y ago
      i care about it a lot. my phone worked fine, reliably and im not in an area where bandwidth is a problem yet ATT deactivated my phone shipped out a "new better model" i get a 5G googlized flipphone from them, thats not all. i get about 2 and ahalf or three bars reception at best, my phone now drops connections, and drops network, and i only have to charge it twice a day 5G brings obvious improvements, just ask the airline industry, they have some things to say as well
      - 5y ago
msackmann 5y ago
I don’t get the benefits of the articles vision of 6G. There is a good reason for why we use the OSI Mode and separate problems that appear at the physical layer from those that appear at the application layer. I think of it as a powerful and universal interface specification. I couldn’t find a single argument in the article that even justifies mingling some general machine learning with the actual physical data transmission. Please, 6G people, more bandwidth and lower latency is all we want.
yalogin 5y ago
The one thing we need is a legal agreement that company ee and service providers don’t water down the phrase “XG”. They use it as a marketing term rather than a technology. So the moment they start spending money on it and they want to sell it even if it’s not fully baked. Other than that I don’t think we want semantic understanding of communication at the link layer. There is no positives there with the current state of security and privacy. Of course that could usher in new research in security and privacy preserving techniques and it could make for some interesting stuff.
Zigurd 5y ago
Almost all of 5G that has actually been deployed comes under the header of an evolution, over the long term, of what was called "Long Term Evolution" (LTE), before it was rebranded "4G" to make 5G look like a fundamentally new product. That includes an all-IP core network, full-duplex radios, IP voice, etc. All of that was in the LTE specs. What's really different in 5G was, predictably, difficult and expensive to deploy, and it remains very challenging. On top of that, it is much more complex to operate in a way that extracts the most advantage from things like beam steering, while avoiding pitfalls like poor penetration of mmwave bands into buildings, or even cars. Until what's called 5G Stand Alone (SA) is mastered and widely built-out, it is difficult to say what is buildable in 6G and what is a lab demo. On top of that, it is difficult to find real world use cases that are uniquely enabled by even the most complete deployment of everything 5G claims to be able to do. If you have a 5G phone, what have you been able to do you can't do on a wifi network? It's just more bits. Which is nice. As an evolution of the network.
todaystechworld 5y ago
Impressive guest article.In my opinion there is huge telecom cold war and giants like China and S. Korea is more focused on just winning this battle rather than the quality of tech.
ksec 5y ago
>At the University of Oulu in Finland, where I am a professor and head of the Intelligent Connectivity and Networks/Systems group, we’re working on a new research vision called VisionX. This pretty much sums up the narrative and incentive of the article. The paper [1] is linked in the article, but for included here for those who might want to take a look at it. There is nothing wrong with so called dumb pipe other than the name. Because networks in 21st century is anything but dumb. That is especially true in Wireless / 5G network. Both semantic and efficiency is fundamentally tied to another factor known as cost and QoS (I dont see how that Semantics is any different to QoS ). Which 6G development are well aware of. And network vendors are already complaining about the complexity of 5G. I still remember there was some debate in ~2019 that they should try and simplify everything in 6G. And unless there are some killer apps requirement, i think 4G / 5G transition will be the point where it hit the end of S curve, being good enough for 80% of people. As a matter of fact, I know a lot of people are already happy with their 4G. They just want cheaper 4G, not faster and more expensive 5G. In terms of cost per Data usage 5G will provide exactly that, but it is sort of counter intuitive for most consumer that 5G is actually cheaper. Nor will MNO price them as such. [1] https://export.arxiv.org/abs/2108.05681 https://export.arxiv.org/abs/2108.05681
Nursie 5y ago
All of this fanciful stuff is just at the wrong layer. > "making it possible for a device to infer missing video data based on context clues" Great, can't wait for your video streaming app with AI inference > reduce the bandwidth, data rates, and energy consumption required for transmitting data OK, love to see your work on the compression standard that's going to be used in this codec you're designing, sounds great. This all sounds great. Stick it in your application. But it's nothing whatsoever to do with the network layer, which is going to continue to benefit from lower latency, lower overhead and higher bandwidth.
1970-01-01 5y ago
>Including level B technologies would look something like each video call participant locally predicting and rendering any missing portions of the video data if a glitch or network hiccup happens. Currently, we allocate significant amounts of time, energy, and computational resources to ensure very high transmission reliability. But instead, each participant’s machine—whether it’s a laptop, phone, or something else—would “fill in the blanks” by inferring what was missing based on what had arrived. So this is called interpolation, and it has probably been set to "enabled" inside the video menu of your HDTV for a decade. Prediction is also part of the video compression standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_(computer_graphi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_compensation
clavicat 5y ago
The most important application to consider when developing the next generation of wireless communications technology is to ensure that 6G will have the robustness and reliability needed to deliver on the promise of doubling Zuckerberg’s net worth by making his portable VR pr0n world into a reality. Users should be able to strap on a VR helmet anytime, anywhere and partake in Metaverse activities that far exceed the imagination of even the most crazed Roman emperors.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Actually delivering on that would be impressive. And I'm not a Facebook property user.
dr-detroit 5y ago
yk 5y ago
So just 6G, but add at the end of the specification "All data needs to be json encoded with a >>Semantic fingerprint<< tag." I mean there may well be semantic network ideas beyond just QoS that are actually interesting, so far it's just that no semantic network proposal convinced me that the right problem description is "do the bit pushing really, really well."
karmakaze 5y ago
Don't build content formats into communication tech. Imagine if tcp could only send text and gifs, or http only send html and images. Sure you could try to have 6G define everything all the way up, but why? Instead, understand how to decompose characteristics such as latency, or multicasting, detection and reporting of missing data, etc. and build those mechanisms. Have the content use those capabilities to send, receive, reconstruct whatever using their own evolving formats and algorithms. On top of that to mention the privacy/security issues if Huawei or whoever hardware vendor not only had the bits but also all the semantic information.

36 points by ystad 5y ago

What about coverage? If you happen to live in a place where cell carriers choose not to cover (E.g. go 200 miles west from the east coast) and you are stuck with a landline you’ll find a scarlet letter that says ‘PROBABLE SPAM CALL’ on the CallerID of anybody you call. This is unacceptable. The last G is fiber optics and it is about time.

auggierose 5y ago

No thank you. Just give me even more reliable and even faster transmission. I don't really want machines to make best effort guesses what is happening at the other end of the communication pipeline, because the connection is now so bad compared to previous technologies that it has to. The rest can be done by software / hardware on top of that, if one wishes so, I don't see why that has to be integrated into the communication pipeline itself.

BobbyJo 5y ago
100%. If I want missing packets to be inferred, I'd rather it happen on hardware I control than otherwise.
colejohnson66 5y ago
Right? If the video is lagging because there's not enough bandwidth, don't drop packets for me; let my video software choose a different bitrate. I don't want my ISP messing with my packets.
nine_k 5y ago
This. My wish list: * Shorter delays for voice traffic, closer to the copper wire experience from 30 years old. At least for local calls. * Better voice quality throughout. We have great codecs and lots of bandwidth, we can talk at hi-fi quality. I'm fine with the speeds 4G gives me.
pmontra 5y ago
Sometimes is just impossible (physical laws or limitations of the current technology). I can't have 40 ms ping time with a game server on the other side of the world no matter what and my 4G connection slows down when it snows. Ok, I should pay somebody a relatively huge sum to lay a fiber optic cable to my home :-) An AI to fill in the blank of a video call (degenerate case: a still picture) is OK for me. Sending me a summary instead of a book, a trailer instead of a movie does not. By the way, AIs were filling in the blank of video calls when bandwidth got low in a Fire upon the Deep. The calls were between far away spaceships, probably very superluminal transmissions because of how physics work in that book.

foxhop 5y ago

I prefer wired connection and WIFI for the "last mile".

fennecfoxen 5y ago

It looks like the general premise of this article's 6G is "semantic" technologies where the transmitter knows things like the fact that it's transmitting video, and can do smart things (prioritize, infer missing portions, and the like). Problem 1: So much for the OSI model. You're putting application-level knowledge in the link layer. Ugh. Not that it's entirely unprecedented, but there are reasons the layers are separated: heterogenous apps need to work together on heterogenous hardware stacks that have radically different lifecycles. The coordination problem of just rolling out IPv6 has been hard enough, and is simple by comparison. Problem 2: I don't actually want the transmitter to know much about what it's transmitting. I want encryption. This doesn't kill the deal, but it does make it a lot harder, and it means you definitely 100% need explicit protocol-level support for all of the semantics (and can't just throw deep packet inspection at the problem to solve any of it).

eptcyka 5y ago
If the link layer knows that the encrypted bits are actually transporting video, then an attacker might have an easier time decrypting the traffic.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Perhaps – but well-compressed video is hard to distinguish from noise. You should already be assuming the attacker knows that kind of thing; googlevideo.com doesn't serve much other than video, for example.
  - salawat 5y ago
    No. That's implying your hardware has knowledge of cultural or human constructs. Your ascribing a set of qualities to a hunk of silicon you darn well have no business doing. Besides which, say googlevideo.cim flubs the Domain renewal and I snap it up and start serving a Slackware mirror for instance. The Stack below the application layer should neither care nor assume anything other than "take this, send here" with maybe some wiggle room where I have the option to tell it "best effort is okay" or "make it reliable". Anything else is biasing certain uses for certain endpoints, which strikes me as digital fiefdom carving. No thanks. Dumb pipes, generously provisioned, thank you very much.

bullen 5y ago

I think the article should be: "If 6G is centralized, we have failed again." Add decentralized radio to phones now, or we will build our own phones: http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org

syedkarim 5y ago
Why doesn't the radiomesh.org website have any real details?
- rolph 5y ago
  mesh communications are a real thing and the recipies are common, a quick DDG and : https://www.academia.edu/2487377/Making_a_mesh_router_gateway_from_a_smartphone_Is_that_a_practical_solution https://www.academia.edu/2487377/Making_a_mesh_router_gatewa... https://www.ab9il.net/crypto/serval-project.html https://www.ab9il.net/crypto/serval-project.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220626953_Making_a_mesh_routergateway_from_a_smartphone_Is_that_a_practical_solution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220626953_Making_a_... http://servalproject.org/ http://servalproject.org/

qwerty456127 5y ago

> When the wireless industry deploys 6G networks around 2030, they hope to usher in an era in which everything, not just our phones, is sensed, connected, and intelligent. And every tiny detail of everyone's life tracked in real time. What a horror.

l33t2328 5y ago
Is it really a horror? I personally don’t care.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  It won't matter until you're banned from places and services for having low social credit score
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    People with low social credit score have it for a reason. Maybe you shouldn't be a jerk in life if you want to enjoy it.
    - orangepurple 5y ago
      Do you think the technocrats who rule over you have a high social credit score? NO. They gamed the system and will work to suppress upwards social mobility to protect their moat.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      You don't have to be a jerk to have low social credit score. There are many things which are obviously normal (like being gay) or even beneficial (like particular psychoactive substances or uncensored books) but are outlawed in certain countries. Did you know having smoked some weed in Arizona (where it is legal), which you could have done even for a scientifically-backed medical purpose, automatically makes you a criminal in South Korea and you will be thrown in a prison if you then travel to there and their officials find out, even if you are not their citizen and have done the "crime" years ago and fairly far from their soil?

adfgdfhaerheq 5y ago

This is using strange terminology, but it sounds like 'layer B' and 'layer C' are literally higher layers in the network stack. Why would those things be locked in to '6G'? Why not use them with existing 5G hardware or on my home fiber connection? Consider the following paragraph: >Including level B technologies would look something like each video call participant locally predicting and rendering any missing portions of the video data if a glitch or network hiccup happens. Currently, we allocate significant amounts of time, energy, and computational resources to ensure very high transmission reliability. But instead, each participant’s machine—whether it’s a laptop, phone, or something else—would “fill in the blanks” by inferring what was missing based on what had arrived. On a deeper level, machines would be able to reconstruct data with the same meaning as what was sent, even if it’s not the same on a bit-by-bit or pixel-by-pixel level. The machine learning techniques to do this already exist, though they are still relatively new: Two examples are variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks. The latter in particular has gained attention in recent years because of its ability to develop deepfake images. The author is talking about video codecs. Certainly codecs can be much improved based on a higher-level understanding of the content. What does that have to do with networks?

throwaway74737 5y ago

5G seems to me like planned obsolesence of 4G with only an incremental improvement. 4G was supposed to be "Long-Term Evolution". I had thought that meant forward- and backward-compatibility for decades. Granted, latency is much lower. Did I get taken by marketing? With 6G deployment already being projected, when I don't even know anybody with a 5G handset, it also seems like a make-work technology. Deployment of a new wireless technology throughout a national wireless carrier, let alone all carriers in a country the size of the US, or in the world, is such a huge undertaking in terms of environmental resources, that it seems almost irresponsible unless there is a significant improvement. 2G was a quantum leap over 1G analog networks. In 2G networks like GSM, the digital communications stack was so tightly integrated, and as optimized as a 1990s video game, that even everyday layman users knew stories like "I could send an emergency SMS from the middle of nowhere even when there was no signal". It seems like that kind of robustness is missing the more abstract and higher-level these wireless generations go.

hencoappel 5y ago
Just staying on 4G doesn't sell new phones.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  5G doesn’t sell phones either. I don’t know anyone who cares about it whatsoever.
  - rolph 5y ago
    i care about it a lot. my phone worked fine, reliably and im not in an area where bandwidth is a problem yet ATT deactivated my phone shipped out a "new better model" i get a 5G googlized flipphone from them, thats not all. i get about 2 and ahalf or three bars reception at best, my phone now drops connections, and drops network, and i only have to charge it twice a day 5G brings obvious improvements, just ask the airline industry, they have some things to say as well
    - 5y ago

msackmann 5y ago

I don’t get the benefits of the articles vision of 6G. There is a good reason for why we use the OSI Mode and separate problems that appear at the physical layer from those that appear at the application layer. I think of it as a powerful and universal interface specification. I couldn’t find a single argument in the article that even justifies mingling some general machine learning with the actual physical data transmission. Please, 6G people, more bandwidth and lower latency is all we want.

yalogin 5y ago

The one thing we need is a legal agreement that company ee and service providers don’t water down the phrase “XG”. They use it as a marketing term rather than a technology. So the moment they start spending money on it and they want to sell it even if it’s not fully baked. Other than that I don’t think we want semantic understanding of communication at the link layer. There is no positives there with the current state of security and privacy. Of course that could usher in new research in security and privacy preserving techniques and it could make for some interesting stuff.

Zigurd 5y ago

Almost all of 5G that has actually been deployed comes under the header of an evolution, over the long term, of what was called "Long Term Evolution" (LTE), before it was rebranded "4G" to make 5G look like a fundamentally new product. That includes an all-IP core network, full-duplex radios, IP voice, etc. All of that was in the LTE specs. What's really different in 5G was, predictably, difficult and expensive to deploy, and it remains very challenging. On top of that, it is much more complex to operate in a way that extracts the most advantage from things like beam steering, while avoiding pitfalls like poor penetration of mmwave bands into buildings, or even cars. Until what's called 5G Stand Alone (SA) is mastered and widely built-out, it is difficult to say what is buildable in 6G and what is a lab demo. On top of that, it is difficult to find real world use cases that are uniquely enabled by even the most complete deployment of everything 5G claims to be able to do. If you have a 5G phone, what have you been able to do you can't do on a wifi network? It's just more bits. Which is nice. As an evolution of the network.

todaystechworld 5y ago

Impressive guest article.In my opinion there is huge telecom cold war and giants like China and S. Korea is more focused on just winning this battle rather than the quality of tech.

ksec 5y ago

>At the University of Oulu in Finland, where I am a professor and head of the Intelligent Connectivity and Networks/Systems group, we’re working on a new research vision called VisionX. This pretty much sums up the narrative and incentive of the article. The paper [1] is linked in the article, but for included here for those who might want to take a look at it. There is nothing wrong with so called dumb pipe other than the name. Because networks in 21st century is anything but dumb. That is especially true in Wireless / 5G network. Both semantic and efficiency is fundamentally tied to another factor known as cost and QoS (I dont see how that Semantics is any different to QoS ). Which 6G development are well aware of. And network vendors are already complaining about the complexity of 5G. I still remember there was some debate in ~2019 that they should try and simplify everything in 6G. And unless there are some killer apps requirement, i think 4G / 5G transition will be the point where it hit the end of S curve, being good enough for 80% of people. As a matter of fact, I know a lot of people are already happy with their 4G. They just want cheaper 4G, not faster and more expensive 5G. In terms of cost per Data usage 5G will provide exactly that, but it is sort of counter intuitive for most consumer that 5G is actually cheaper. Nor will MNO price them as such. [1] https://export.arxiv.org/abs/2108.05681 https://export.arxiv.org/abs/2108.05681

Nursie 5y ago

All of this fanciful stuff is just at the wrong layer. > "making it possible for a device to infer missing video data based on context clues" Great, can't wait for your video streaming app with AI inference > reduce the bandwidth, data rates, and energy consumption required for transmitting data OK, love to see your work on the compression standard that's going to be used in this codec you're designing, sounds great. This all sounds great. Stick it in your application. But it's nothing whatsoever to do with the network layer, which is going to continue to benefit from lower latency, lower overhead and higher bandwidth.

1970-01-01 5y ago

>Including level B technologies would look something like each video call participant locally predicting and rendering any missing portions of the video data if a glitch or network hiccup happens. Currently, we allocate significant amounts of time, energy, and computational resources to ensure very high transmission reliability. But instead, each participant’s machine—whether it’s a laptop, phone, or something else—would “fill in the blanks” by inferring what was missing based on what had arrived. So this is called interpolation, and it has probably been set to "enabled" inside the video menu of your HDTV for a decade. Prediction is also part of the video compression standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_(computer_graphi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_compensation

clavicat 5y ago

The most important application to consider when developing the next generation of wireless communications technology is to ensure that 6G will have the robustness and reliability needed to deliver on the promise of doubling Zuckerberg’s net worth by making his portable VR pr0n world into a reality. Users should be able to strap on a VR helmet anytime, anywhere and partake in Metaverse activities that far exceed the imagination of even the most crazed Roman emperors.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
Actually delivering on that would be impressive. And I'm not a Facebook property user.

dr-detroit 5y ago

yk 5y ago

So just 6G, but add at the end of the specification "All data needs to be json encoded with a >>Semantic fingerprint<< tag." I mean there may well be semantic network ideas beyond just QoS that are actually interesting, so far it's just that no semantic network proposal convinced me that the right problem description is "do the bit pushing really, really well."

karmakaze 5y ago

Don't build content formats into communication tech. Imagine if tcp could only send text and gifs, or http only send html and images. Sure you could try to have 6G define everything all the way up, but why? Instead, understand how to decompose characteristics such as latency, or multicasting, detection and reporting of missing data, etc. and build those mechanisms. Have the content use those capabilities to send, receive, reconstruct whatever using their own evolving formats and algorithms. On top of that to mention the privacy/security issues if Huawei or whoever hardware vendor not only had the bits but also all the semantic information.