Korean Government to Launch Pilot 6G Project in 2026

The Korean government plans to launch a pilot project for 6G mobile services in 2026.

The Korean government plans to launch a pilot project for 6G mobile services, which are 50 times faster than 5G services, in 2026. It aims to commercialize 6G services between 2028 and 2030.

Prime Minister Chung Se-kyun finalized the government’s strategy to promote R&D for future mobile telecommunication at a meeting of science and technology-related ministers on Aug. 6. The strategy consists of preemptive development of next-generation technologies, securing standard and high value-added patents, and laying R&D and industry foundations. To implement this plan, the government will invest 200 billion won for five years from 2021 to secure high-risk basic 6G technology.

The government will first push for 10 strategic tasks in six key areas (hyper-performance, hyper-bandwidth, hyper-precision, hyper-space, hyper-intelligence, and hyper-trust) to preemptively secure next-generation technology. It aims to achieve one-terabyte-per-second data transmission speed, which is five times faster than 5G mobile services and reduce delay time to one tenth of 5G services — 0.1ms for wireless services and 5ms or shorter for wired services). It also set the goal of making 6G communication services available up to 10 km above ground.

Once these technologies are secured, the government will launch a pilot project to upgrade existing telecom network to 6G beginning 2026. The government selected five major areas for the pilot project: digital healthcare (remote surgery, biometric encryption through quantum cryptography technology), immersive content (long-distance real-time non-face-to-face hologram meetings), self-driving cars (flying cars), smart cities (smart transportation without traffic jams), and smart factories (touch-based real-time precision control).