Bad news for Elon Musk as China beats Starlink in 6G race, achieves 100Gbps with…, plans to deploy 6G tech by…

In a setback for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, China has reportedly beaten his Starlink satellite service in the race for 6G technology, becoming the first to achieve a high-resolution space-to-ground laser transmission, as per a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

According to the report, Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co, a commercial satellite company in China, claimed it successfully transmitted data at 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), a speed ten times faster than its previous record, from one of its Jilin-1 constellation satellites to a truck-mounted ground station.

While Starlink is not official working on developing 6G technology, the Chinese company’s head of laser communication ground station technology, Wang Hanghang, claimed they had surpassed the Elon Musk-owned aerospace giant in race for 6G technology. “Elon Musk’s Starlink has revealed its laser inter-satellite communication system but hasn’t deployed laser satellite-to-ground communication yet. We think they might have the technology, but we’ve already started large-scale deployment,” Wang said.

According to Wang, his company successfully transmitted data at 100Gbps, which translates to downloading 10 full-length high-definition movies in just one second or upgrading a single-lane highway to thousands of lanes.

Wang said that while the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and NASA’s TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system have also achieved laser transmission in upwards of 100Gbps on previous, his system is bigger and heavier, weighing 20 kg. Apart from this, the system does not need an an observatory, and instead has a truck-based ground receiving unit, “making it mobile – an option that could lead to faster applications”.

Wang said his company plans to deploy all satellites in the Jilin-1 constellation by 2027.

What is 6G technology?

6G refers to the sixth-generation of wireless communication technology, which will surpass the current 5G tech by leaps and bounds in terms of speed, connectivity, and global coverage.

6G is envisioned to be a much more integrated network than 5G, and will likely terrestrial, aerial, and satellite communications to achieve global coverage. The next-gen communications tech will have data speeds exceeding 1 Tbps with latency as low as 100 microseconds, and will likely operate on higher frequency bands than 5G, including the terahertz (THz) spectrum.

Notably, the report about China successfully testing a 6G-based tech comes a day after Beijing claimed to have established the world’s first mobile 5G base station, which is said to ready for battlefield deployment. As per a SCMP report, the 5G mobile station is capable of providing high-speed, ultra-secure and low data transmission to 10,000 users within a 3-km radius.