KT and LG looking to ‘take the lead’ in 6G

The two Korean firms say they are cooperating ‘in order to take the lead in 6G mobile communications technology and strengthen global 6G standardization leadership’. They intend on doing this by developing next-generation transmission technology, full-duplex communication technology, collaborating on global standardization, and discovering ‘differentiated 6G application services.’

Full-duplex capability enables uplink and downlink data to be simultaneously transmitted and received over a single frequency band, explains the release, ‘potentially increasing frequency efficiency by up to two times.’ The difference is the traditional method splits uplink and downlink data over time or frequency, we’re told.

KT and LG aim to develop wideband full-duplex gear operating in candidate 6G frequencies, and build compatible transmission and reception devices, as well as complete performance verification tests.

“Through this 6G research and development collaboration with LG Electronics, KT expects to lead the development of 6G mobile communication technology and strengthen its global standardization leadership,” said Lee Jong-sik, executive director of KT Network Research Institute. “We will do our best to secure innovative network technology and capabilities for providing differentiated services.”

Je Young-ho, executive director of LG Electronics C&M Standard Research Institute added: “LG Electronics has been proactively leading research and development to discover core 6G technologies since 2019,” and added, “Through our collaboration with KT, we expect to contribute greatly to not only leading 6G standardization but also discovering core services.”

The release notes that technology standardization organization 3GPP has decided to complete the standard specifications required for the development of 6G base stations and terminals by 2029 – but there have been plenty of related R&D corporate tie ups projects cropping in the telecoms sphere already.  

Singtel and SK Telecom announced a partnership last month to collaborate on 6G research, including new network slicing capabilities, a fully disaggregated network, and new telco APIs based on Open Gateway.

Earlier on in the year, Samsung and Arm began conducting joint research into parallel packet processing technology, which it described as one of the ‘key software technologies in next-generation communications’ to accelerate 6G software development, while Nvidia launched its 6G Research Cloud Platform, which includes a

a digital twin that can simulate 6G systems, a software-defined, full RAN stack that researchers can play around with the Nvidia Sionna Neural Radio Framework which enables developers to use Nvidia GPUs to generate and capture training data.

Of course the specificities of what 6G will entail are yet to be defined, but for a wider look at what the next generation of mobile tech might bring, check out our deep dive What is 6G?