Etisalat has announced its plans on developing 6G networks. The company is in the process of conducting research and developing international standards for the 6G ecosystem.
Haitham Abdulazzak, Chief Technology Officer, Etisalat shared the insights during his address at the session titled ‘Setting the roadmap to 6G’ at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The advancement and development of new mobile technologies have become much more rapid than ever. The introduction of new features, capabilities, and use of millimeter frequencies seen in 5G is a result of this advancement, which is expected to be complemented with terahertz spectrum in 6G, the company said.
“The excellent achievements by Etisalat today in 5G coverage, cloud native, slicing, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) development, AI and automation platforms, as well as high fibre penetration which stands at more than 99 percent of UAE populated area coverage, is a result of the long term strategy paving the way towards 6G,” said Haitham Abdulazzak, Chief Technology Officer, Etisalat.
He further added “We are committed to bringing the latest technologies to the UAE market to enable digital societies. As part of our vision and future technology planning, 6G is going beyond earth networks into space to enable a new era of services and usage scenarios with terabyte data traffic resulting in extraordinary human-to-machine interaction.
Etisalat is upgrading tools and capabilities of its R&D centre to enhance the contribution towards 6G global standardization within the international foray and alliances.”
The company further added that the promise of 6G is in the transformation of use cases targeted by 5G into a full integrated autonomy, enabling the move from science fiction to reality, robotic human operation, sophisticated human to human, human to machine and machine to machine relationship.
The 6G technology requires agile communications governance and increased collaboration across multisector stakeholders. The technology is seen as an enabler of new coverage dimensions in space and maritime in addition to the terrestrial dimension.
