Telstra and Ericsson to jointly research and test 6G

Telstra will join its long-term equipment partner Ericsson in a program of reciprocal development and testing of 6G technology.

The two companies have signed a letter of intent “to progress joint work on 6G research and trials to drive momentum towards the launch of 6G, including collaboration on 3GPP standards evolution,” they said in a statement.

This will take place both in Ericsson’s 6G testbed in Sweden and at Telstra’s innovation centre on the Gold Coast.

The Australia-based testing will examine “how 6G operates in different geographic conditions”, Telstra said.

Similar “real-world” tests were run by Telstra and Ericsson for 5G, at one stage also involving large enterprise customers.

Telstra’s group executive of global networks and technology Shailin Sehgal said 6G is “the first G which is AI-native”.

The telco indicated it is wanting to test 6G’s capabilities around “advanced network connectivity, and new network-as-a-product innovations such as the ability to sense the environment around the network.”

Network-as-a-product was conceptually floated by Telstra last year. It describes telecommunications products that users can customise attributes of, and could lead to different customers paying different prices, based on their individual needs. 

Sehgal said that potential use cases could include “public safety, agriculture, weather detection and more,”

Again, there are some parallels in this thinking with the testing of 5G technologies years ago.

At the time, Telstra had been keen on exploring a technical capability known as “slicing”, which virtually segmented the network into “slices” that could be tuned for specific use cases and differentially charged.