New world. In the Orange labs, we are already preparing 6G

While the deployment of 5G has barely started in France, the telecoms world is already looking to the future. The operator Orange recently organized its Research Week. The opportunity to discover several innovations in preparation.

Franceinfo: what will 6G look like?

Nicolas Demassieux, Orange research director: 6G will not arrive until 2030. We are thinking about several things. What will our societal needs be in 2030? We may not need more speed but rather a more resilient network, more capable of coping with today’s different climatic circumstances and networks that will adapt in real time to our connectivity needs. ambient. Just what we’ll need when we need it.

What is ambient connectivity?

It starts from an observation. Today, connectivity has become very important to us for our private and professional lives and we need connectivity to communicate, which is what humans do. So that connectivity has to be there all the time, when you need it, with the quality you need. This concerns humans but also objects, which will also be more and more communicative. For example, temperature, pressure, noise reading, etc. This ambient connectivity must be fair, consume little energy and be adapted to the needs of men and machines.

What is the “digital twin” that you have developed?

It is a concept that is developing in the industry. For example, in a factory that manufactures mechanical parts or in a city, objects are moved or change state, break down, etc. The idea of ​​a digital twin is to have a synchronized digital platform, like the game Sim City, that represents the state of the physical world in real time. This makes it very easy to find parts in a warehouse or a car in a factory parking lot (sometimes you lose a badly parked vehicle for weeks). And, if a street light fails, for example, technicians can be notified immediately and easily locate the equipment for repair.