Apple joins industry group working on 6G in North America
Apple and other prominent technology and networking companies have joined an industry group that's working to advance cellular technology in North America to 6G and beyond.
Credit: Andrew O'Hara, AppleInsider
The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) on Thursday announced the addition of 11 Founding Members, including Apple, Charter, Google, VMWare, HP, and Cisco, among others.
"Designed to set the foundation for a vibrant marketplace for North American innovation in future generations of mobile technology, the Next G Alliance is named after its primary goal: to establish North American preeminence in the 5G evolutionary path and 6G development," ATIS said in a statement.
According to the group, its work "will encompass the full lifecycle of research and development, manufacturing, standardization and market readiness."
The new group added that it would be holding its first meeting on Monday, Nov. 16. In that meeting, members will set the group's overall direction and strategy.
Apple, for its part, has only just released its first batch of 5G-compatible iPhone models in October. All models of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro lineup support mmWave 5G in the U.S., and sub-6GHz 5G elsewhere.
In September, AT&T CEO Jeff McElfresh revealed that the carrier is already working on 6G technology, though it's likely that the new generation of wireless connectivity won't be available for years to come.
Credit: Andrew O'Hara, AppleInsider
The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) on Thursday announced the addition of 11 Founding Members, including Apple, Charter, Google, VMWare, HP, and Cisco, among others.
"Designed to set the foundation for a vibrant marketplace for North American innovation in future generations of mobile technology, the Next G Alliance is named after its primary goal: to establish North American preeminence in the 5G evolutionary path and 6G development," ATIS said in a statement.
According to the group, its work "will encompass the full lifecycle of research and development, manufacturing, standardization and market readiness."
The new group added that it would be holding its first meeting on Monday, Nov. 16. In that meeting, members will set the group's overall direction and strategy.
Apple, for its part, has only just released its first batch of 5G-compatible iPhone models in October. All models of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro lineup support mmWave 5G in the U.S., and sub-6GHz 5G elsewhere.
In September, AT&T CEO Jeff McElfresh revealed that the carrier is already working on 6G technology, though it's likely that the new generation of wireless connectivity won't be available for years to come.
Comments
*Advertised speed is never met and due to my coastal environment there are reliability and outage issues. There is a truck on my 1/4 mile dead end road multiple times per week and there are only 40 houses. I thought about switching because it was cheaper, but I'll take reliability over speed every time.
Hoping sometime of cellular internet access will make it our way.
5. The up-front investment in people and money is affordable compared to the large investment that will come later on, when the technology is rolled into products. Think of the things Apple is doing now as an advanced scouting team.
The US got caught with its pants around its ankles on 5G and flayed around in trying to stop competitors advancing.
The Chinese have already launched a 6G satellite for testing of some elements. The likes of Huawei are already working on 6G advances, as well as what it calls 5.5G.
The only way you can have a say in the future is by sitting on standards boards. This is Huawei got polar codes approved.
The results of this move will take years to come to fruition and Apple has traditionally had zero expertise in the field but they started hiring a lot of Qualcomm engineers and they will no doubt play an important role.
That's my perspective, which is biased towards international standards. I guess if you want to be very precise you can say that the scope and validity of a standard only extends to the scope defined by the standards organization that sanctions the standard. If you can get your "standard" sanctioned by Joe's Barber Shop and feel that this buys you some level of credibility, I'm not going to argue the point. Your standard is only as good as the standards organization that backs it.
I recently threw away an expanded memory board that was backed by the Lotus-Intel-Microsoft (LIM) standard. Take that standard to the bank and see what it's worth.
I mentioned the importance of standards board participation in the case of polar codes.
Wired has just put up a fascinating read on the subject :
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along. For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the Chinese government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones. (In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.) With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market. Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of stolen intellectual property, a charge the company denies. “If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group. But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.” More recently, in February, the US Department of Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.” The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing. One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada. But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying. Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been downloading hundreds of documents from the company. “There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says. Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up."
Not exactly a self made company.
I mentioned polar codes but could have mentioned anything where standards are important. It was pure coincidence that this article came out now.
You made it something else entirely by focusing on something completely different.
That's a bit sad but I'm sure most people will find the read interesting and informative all the same.