The new 5G mobile communications standard, which can transmit larger amounts of data in a shorter time, has not yet been fully rolled out.

Nevertheless, experts in Germany should already be researching how communication technology could develop based on this.

The Ministry of Research is now mobilizing up to 250 million euros to set up four research networks (“hubs”).

"6G will be the mobile high-performance data technology of the future and will revolutionize our communication once again in the next decade," said Research Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU), according to a message available to the FAZ. "6G is expected to form the central nervous system of our networked life as early as 2030 and make it possible to transmit data more than 100 times faster than with 5G, with higher energy efficiency and reliability at the same time."

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Open6GHub), the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (6G-RIC), the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (6GEM) and the two Technical Universities of Dresden and Munich (6G -Life) coordinate.

According to the Ministry of Research, a total of around 50 partners from science and industry are involved.

"Must be technologically superior"

While the mobile radio standard 5G, which is now increasingly usable, is primarily intended to enable machines to communicate with one another within industrial production - keyword "Industry 4.0" - one field of research for further development is the ongoing interaction between man and machine. To this end, scientists are striving for even lower latencies and an even lower failure probability of the corresponding systems. This in turn places new demands on the software, but also on possibly new materials for antennas and cells. Explicitly, the researchers should also look for ways to decouple energy consumption from the amount of data to be transferred.

The new funding program is not least the result of the 5G discussion, which showed that basically the whole world is dependent on a few network equipment providers, such as the two European manufacturers Ericsson and Nokia and the Chinese provider Huawei. The aim of the German government is to ensure that there are sufficient skills in this country to be able to compete internationally in this area. “Our digital future and our control over the data transmitted in the network crucially depend on our being at the forefront of the development of communication technologies right from the start. We have to be technologically sovereign here in particular, in order not to become dependent on others, ”says Minister Karliczek.