In 2019, engineers from telecommunication companies around the world sat in a large conference hall in Geneva, trying to conceptualise how people will live and communicate in a decade’s time.
They were gathered at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN specialist agency, attempting to formulate the basis for what the sixth generation of network technology would look like — even before the fifth generation had fully proved its value.
“It’s about identifying that gap between what consumers want and what a network can do,” says Magnus Frodigh, head of Ericsson’s research division. “We are . . . guessing what these gaps will be.”