China claims it has stolen a march on 6G with colossal patent portfolio China's State Intellectual Property Office has proclaimed the nation already dominates the world in development of patents pertinent to sixth-generation mobile networks. The Office (CNIPA) chose World Intellectual Property Day (April 26th) to assert China’s 6G dominance, telling state-controlled media that its analysis of …
I read a book about rise and fall of Blackberry (RIM) a few years ago. When the RCMP were moving into a couple RIM's former research centres they discovered all kinds of spy stuff hidden in the building. They think it was feeding back to China and helped them accelerate their "research".
Well, as developments over the last decade have shown: in order to have an industry, you need to be involved in developing the technology. Remember Nortel, Lucent, Motorola? Huawei, ZTE and others have been producing great equipment for years – Huawei particularly should be singled out for developing low power base stations – that we nearly all use.
I barely noticed the "upgrade" from 3G to 4G. At some point people must realise that this stuff is just a data pipe.
The limiting factor is "how much are you going to charge me for this?" It's not a technology problem.
Apple, Microsoft and Google should get together and agree on replacing phone numbers with Skype/Facetime/whatever. Then phones will be dead and 6G just another Internet protocol.
I don't see the point of 6G, after we have all been infected with 5G borne covid, had our brains riddled with 5G borne cancer and then operating smoothly under the 5G mind control system, what is 6G going to be for?
Maybe it can reach the last hold outs by penetrating their tin foil hats and Faraday suits.
Can't wait to see what the tin foil hatters have to say about 6G.
6G will be wonderful! The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together. And all the cops will have wooden legs. And the bulldogs all will have rubber teeth. And the hens will lay soft-boiled eggs. And the farmers' trees will be full of fruit
And yes, there will be hookers. And blackjack.
Given China's long standing and utter disdain for intellectual property rights, why should anyone here give two hoots about patents held out there too?
Shipping costs and rising wages (even with an artificially suppressed currency) mean that producing in China isn't as appealing as it used to be anymore.
Given China's long standing and utter disdain for intellectual property rights, why should anyone here give two hoots about patents held out there too?
It's we in the West who put our faith in "Intellectual Property". The Chinese are surely well aware that the wheels started to come off the patent system in the late 19th century and that it is now a vast swamp of (intentionally) incomprehensible documentation presided over by hordes of vicious and insatiable lawyers.
The Chinese want to sell to us stuff. A lot of stuff. Patents are one of the things they will need. So they have patents (in our system BTW). Lots of patents apparently. quelle surprise
I think your two sentences are related pretty strongly. China didnt care about patents when it was a basket case from the good old socialism days, but in a short amount of time it has managed to catch up to a more civilised and world participating country.
When they didnt actually create anything intellectually valuable it didnt care about stealing and was too poor to be creative. Now is a very different country.
*Btw good comment, upvote from me
So the West will develop its own competing 6G standards with its own patent portfolio to provide the gravy train.
An intellectual-property-free global open standard for talking to each other is just gonna have to wait.
You know, if China ate more of its own dogfood I might buy into a bit more this taking-the-Western-capitalist-bastards-down-a-peg-or-two shit.
Has anyone noticed just how much battery increased mobile data rates take, and for what?
When I'm travelling and possibly not near a power supply for a while I limit my phone to 3G. Email and messages still come through fine, but battery life increases dramatically. I wonder if with 6G you would actually make it out of the room where the charger resides. Hence the titel of this, er, œuvre :).
However, what I AM a big believer in is the demise of roaming data limits other than for people taking the mick by piping torrents. I am presently using a subscription with unlimited EU calls and roaming data, and it really changes the way you work.
So let's fix some fundamentals first before we give mobile phone companies yet another excuse to up their rates for "investment", especially since 4G is as yet not everywhere, let alone 5G.
The anti China comments, while justified in other cases, here seem akin to the old conspiracy theories that Ancient Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids without outside help.
The reality is that Chinese companies and the Chinese government invests a lot more on research than Western companies and governments. In the West we tend to focus on more concrete results (figuratively and literally).
In the West, 6G is mainly viewed by companies as a new product opportunity by manufacturers and a marketing point and justification for rate hikes by telecom providers.
Those conspiracy theories about the pyramids were/are only propagated by loonies. Nobody with any kind of real scientific background believed/s them.
"The reality is that Chinese companies and the Chinese government invest a lot more on "borrowing" research from Western companies and governments."
FTFY (Or perhaps you can point out several new innovations made by the Chinese in the last couple years? Personally, I can't think of even one, unless you include new ways of selling schlock to idiots "innovative marketing".)
"In the West, 6G is mainly viewed by companies as a new product opportunity by manufacturers and a marketing point"
Of course. That is what companies do. Even Chinese ones.
"and justification for rate hikes by telecom providers."
Assumes facts not in evidence. In the roughly half century that I have been making money in this field, the trend has always been faster and cheaper.
The only real improvement of 5G over LTE is reduced latency. Given the same spectrum, 5G is no faster than LTE, and even if you use denser QAM constellations the improvements at this point are marginal (and you'll pay for it with range, because Shannon's Law)
The only reason 5G is (or rather will be, eventually) capable of achieving the very high speeds its backers bragged out is by using very wide swathes of spectrum - which means going way up in frequency where range is short and almost anything can block it. That's fine if you want to outfit a stadium or Times Square with fast cellular, but it is useless in most places.
From the sound of the article, 6G will go even higher in spectrum into terahertz range, to find even bigger swathes of spectrum to enable even higher speeds. So what's the use case for that, given that 5G using mmwave will be able to exceed 10 gigabits? Nevermind who the hell can use that in a phone, no one could ever use that much to their home. Heck, most office towers probably couldn't use that much even if everyone is on a Zoom call at the same time.
"So what's the use case for that"
Well, I can create documents and spreadsheets and databases to run a business using Wordstar and Lotus and dBase on DOS 3.3 and a 486DX33 + dial-up modem easier (and quite a bit faster!) than on more modern Office 355 and the latest Tiger Lake processor + 5G. Imagine what improvements Redmond and Intel will bring us in the next 30 years!
Mom says I'm entirely too sarcastic. In this case, I think I lowballed it.
Jake, I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but think about your analogy for a moment. Creating documents and spreadsheets is a baseline capability these days. How would your DOS-based 486DX33 fare, say, playing a 1080p video stream, or transcoding that stream to h265? Go ahead, try it, I'll wait :)
Or to put it another way... "I don't see the point in these new cars. I can trundle the mile-and-a-half once a week to the village store at 15mph just as well in my Model T Ford as in any new car..."
My businesses don't require transcoding 1080p to h265. Do yours? If so, purchase the correct tool for the job. If not, save your money.
Most of my vehicle fleet is pre 1971, and I intend to keep it that way. The Model T and Model A can both do considerably more than 15 MPH. See this post from ten years ago. If I want to go into town at a leisurely pace, I'll take the Buckboard. Clyde (the Percheron) enjoys it, too. If you care, he gets around 35 miles on 3 flakes of oat hay and one of alfalfa, plus all the spring greens that he wants to eat and unlimited fresh water. (Note that he's a 14 year old, and in really good shape. Your horse's mileage may vary.)
Life's short. Step off the treadmill once in a while. Relax, have a homebrew.
Patents, in this case, are less "original practical inventions", and more "techincal standards". But the standards can only become standards when agreed upon but sufficient number of players. The whole concept of patenting technical standards is absurd. (In fact China did not start that absurdity.)
If China domestic infrastructure commits early to a certain standard of 6G, that only makes it easier for a competing group of countries to standardize to a slightly different standard leaving China in the lurch having to manufacture to two different standards. I believe something like that happened to various Japanese technical standards back in the day.
On the other hand China is much bigger and more aggressive player than Japan ever was. If China keeps accumulating manufacturing capacity in high tech while the west sheds its own, then maybe everybody will just go along with it, because high tech manufacturing is so much less important than manufacturing financial instruments.
Upfront: I am Canadian, white. and widely traveled. That said, I do not agree. or support, the political regimes in many Far Eastern countries. Sure, China imprisons prisoners of conscious, I have seen the many daunting prisons in NanNing - but the USA is the world leader in prison populations.
Back in the day everyone CLAIMED the Japanese exploited world markets by copying designs, then it was TaiWan - now the world's leader in semiconductor production - doing the same. Now it is China!
True, all three were / are guilty of plagiarism but the truth is all three have put other, Western, 'leading' countries to shame by their own efforts, home grown efforts.
And, I presume, Western entities don't copy other Western companies or Far Eastern companies? I have worked in Western companies where competitors products were torn apart looking for ideas.
The fact is the Western world couldn't enjoy it's high standard of living without Far Eastern countries. India sources almost ALL the generic pharmaceuticals of the world. Where could Apple, et al, assemble their products in the West.
Why is it that Foreign-born individuals are sought after by Western countries? The WOMAN leading the US Mars lander program hails from Burmese (Myanmar) heritage. And who is running Microsoft? Foreign-born Nadella from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. Yet more Foreign-born talent from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India runs Alphabet (Google) .
If it isn't racism, it must be elitism causing all these accusations. Jealously, too. The fact is certain cultures are better suited for certain types of work than others.
I design electronic devices for government and commercial use but most every design is reviewed by optimization companies in China, the physical design and the circuitry are analysed by separate unrelated companies, to avoid copying. I know our products are great.
If the commenters are so talented, let them produce products in the West!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
