Etisalat, UAE’s leading telecom operator, announces 6G plans

ABU DHABI — Etisalat, a leading telecom operator in the United Arab Emirates, announced on Wednesday its foray into the next generation of the mobile network with considerable efforts toward 6G realization, conducting research and developing international standards, the main building blocks for the 6G ecosystem.

Haitham Abdulazzak, Chief Technology Officer at Etisalat, shared these insights during his address at the session titled “Setting the roadmap to 6G” at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona; the annual trade show dedicated to the mobile communications industry being held from 28th June until 1st July 2021.

The announcement was made at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, an annual trade show dedicated to the mobile communications industry.

“Advancement and development of new mobile technologies has become much more rapid than ever”, said Haitham Abdulazzak, chief technology officer at Etisalat.

“The excellent achievements by Etisalat today in 5G coverage, cloud-native, slicing, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) development, AI and automation platforms, as well as high fibre penetration, which stands at more than 99 percent of UAE populated area coverage, is a result of the long-term strategy paving the way towards 6G.

The promise of 6G is in the transformation of use cases targeted by 5G into a full integrated autonomy, enabling the move from science fiction to reality, robotic humans operation, sophisticated human to human, human to machine and machine to machine relationship.

6G is expected to be even faster and to support applications such as augmented and virtual reality, as well as AI infrastructure.

“As part of our vision and future technology planning, 6G is going beyond earth networks into space to enable a new era of services and usage scenarios with terabyte data traffic resulting in extraordinary human to machine interaction,” said Mr Abdulazzak.

“Etisalat is upgrading tools and capabilities of its R&D centre to enhance the contribution towards 6G global standardisation within the international fora and alliances.”