By Stephen Douglas, Head of Market Strategy, Spirent. Now that 5G is in its maturation and densification phase in many places across the world, the race has begun to hit the next stage of telecommunications technology: 6G. 5G is already doing much – boasting lower latency, lower IoT device complexity, and the ability to host up to a million densely packed connections over small areas – however, that won’t be enough to bring about the “world of tomorrow” IoT technologies that we are so often told are just around the corner. Transformational developments like smart city scale digital twins, holographic / immersive telepresence, collaborative autonomous drone swarms and ubiquitous coverage across land, air, sea and space will all need 6G to be realised. 5G is unfortunately still held back from those possibilities by a number of hard technical limits which 6G plans to overcome. Latency 5G doubtlessly provides a huge latency improvement when compared to 4G. The best that 4G could muster was a latency of around 10 milliseconds, although under real-world conditions that number likely climbs to between 30 and 50 milliseconds. For 5G, latency is about 1 millisecond one-way and ranges from 10 to 20 milliseconds in the consumer world, and in the low single-digit milliseconds in private 5G/Edge deployments. In the grand scheme of things, the difference might not seem that big – but it is vitally important for the IoT use cases that 5G meant to advance. That includes industrial robotics, which generally require latency of less than two milliseconds, in order to coordinate the thousands of communications between the robots and their controllers that happen per second and to avoid them stacking up behind one another. The same is true of live broadcast production, where camera feeds, audio, and remote camera control need consistently low