SEOUL, South Korea — A joint team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Finland's University of Oulu has demonstrated a 6G wireless link achieving a sustained 1 terabit per second over 100 meters — roughly 50,000 times faster than a typical 5G connection. Published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, it is the first time the 1 Tbps barrier has been broken in an outdoor field test.

The demonstration used a 140 GHz transmission frequency in the terahertz gap — historically too difficult for communications due to extreme atmospheric absorption. The team solved this with "holographic beamforming" using 256 independently steered antenna elements, with an onboard AI processor analyzing environmental reflections and scattering patterns in microseconds.

Professor Kim Young-soo, who led the Korean side, cautioned that commercial 6G remains 6-8 years away. "What we showed is that the fundamental physics allow this. The engineering challenge of making it cheap and reliable for a smartphone is completely different." Samsung, Nokia, and Ericsson all maintain active 6G programs, and the ITU expects to finalize the IMT-2030 standard by 2028, with first commercial networks potentially around 2030.