5G support is now expected when you buy a new smartphone, but Nokia is already looking to 6G and predicting it will arrive around 2030.
As Business Insider reports, Nokia president and CEO Pekka Lundmark used a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to make some bold predictions about 6G adoption and what it means for how we communicate. And just like Huawei stated last year, Nokia says 6G will hit the market around 2030.
Lundmark believes that by the time we get to 2030, "the smartphone as we know it today will not anymore be the most common interface." Instead, he believes the maturing of quantum computing combined with the physical and digital worlds growing together, means we'll interact through the metaverse and users will be used to entering virtual worlds where their actions are reflected in the real world.
If Lundmark is right, then the smartphone would need to be replaced with worn objects that allow for a natural interaction with virtual worlds. The most obvious device for that is a much more advanced version of the smartglasses we see appearing today, perhaps with a neckband?
While there is no question that 6G will launch, the time frame for it launching is going to have to be flexible. Lundmark said networks will need to be hundreds or thousands of times faster than 5G in order to support massive scale virtual world interaction. There's less than eight years until we reach 2030, and the world is just coming out of a pandemic and left with serious supply chain and manufacturing problems. Is a shift to 6G in or around 2030 realistic?