Samsung released a white paper that lays out the company’s vision for securing global frequency bands for 6G, the next-generation communications technology. The paper, titled “6G Spectrum: Expanding the Frontier,” discusses ways to obtain the spectrum needed to achieve the company’s 6G vision introduced in a white paper released earlier in July 2020.

“We have started on our journey long ago to understand, develop and standardize the 6G communications technology,” said Sunghyun Choi, Executive Vice President and Head of the Advanced Communications Research Center at Samsung Research. “We are committed to taking the lead and sharing our findings to spread our vision to bring the next hyper-connected experience to every corner of life.”

6G would require a spectrum with ultra-wideband contiguous bandwidth ranging from hundreds of MHz to tens of GHz to enable new services such as high-fidelity mobile holograms and truly immersive extended reality that are characterized by ultra-high-speed communications and a large amount of data. There is also growing demand for greater coverage. In response to these requirements, Samsung proposes considering all available bands for 6G, from low-band under 1 GHz, to mid-band in the 1-24 GHz range and high-band in the 24-300 GHz range.

It also highlights the importance of securing new bands for commercial deployments of 6G, as 5G networks will still be operational when the 6G deployment starts. The mid-band within the 7-24 GHz range is a candidate that can support faster data speed and reasonable coverage. The sub-terahertz (sub-THz) band in the 92–300 GHz range is being considered for support of ultra-high-speed data rate.

The white paper also mentions the refarming of existing bands used for 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to 6G operation as another way to obtain all the spectrum necessary for 6G. In addition, it notes that research on forward-looking regulations and technologies on spectrum utilization is essential to provide efficient and flexible support for 6G and other services with the limited spectrum. Along with the release of the 6G spectrum white paper, Samsung also highlights its research findings on some of the 6G candidate technologies.