As the world gathered for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 in Barcelona this week, EE Times returned to Oulu, Finland, to catch up with people involved in the 6G Flagship program that started in earnest back in 2018. The timing couldn’t have been better as 10 governments signed a joint statement endorsing a set of common shared principles for research and development of 6G wireless communication systems.

EE Times interviewed Lulu Ranne, Finland’s minister of transport and communications, as she returned from her first ever MWC event. In addition, we chatted in depth with Professor Mehdi Bennis at the University of Oulu to learn about progress on their 6G research, plus what he sees as a need for an alternative complementary vision for networks beyond just faster communications at the link level.

Mehdi believes that while modern and future networks are looking at robust data transfer with 99.999% operation, we need to be looking at some of the overlooked aspects of the noisy-channel coding theorem—otherwise known as Shannon’s limit. This means looking at communication semantics of data rather than just transmitting raw data itself, plus the need for network interoperability and resilience. You can watch the full interview below.

 ----Form EE Times