National 6G initiatives are launched in Europe.
- In June 2023, the UK government allocated more than EUR120 million to accelerate 6G research (and 50 million EUR to 5G). the work will involve three UK universities and major telecom companies. The DCMS is also funding projects including REASON (EUR14 million), TUDOR (EUR14 million) and YO-RAN (EUR5.6 million). A R&D partnership between South Korea and the UK on Open RAN has also been launched.
- Launched in 2018, the 6G Flagship Program in Finland is led by the University of Oulu. The 6G flagship project Hexa-X is coordinated by Nokia with participation from Finnish technology universities. The first 6G testbeds are expected by 2026.
- The 6G program was launched in Germany in 2021. The Government earmarked 700 million EUR of public funding. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, 6G research hubs and industry projects started in 2021-2022 (EUR 380 million)
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- Five 6G research hubs were settled with EUR 180 million: the 6G platform (Platform for future communication technologies and 6G) promotes harmonization with international regulation and standardization and welcomes participation by society and industry, 6G-RIC (Research and Innovation Cluster), 6GEMA, Open6GHub, and 6G-Life.
- With EUR 182 million of funds, 17 industry-led projects started in 2022 including 6G-ANNA. Since July 2022, the Nokia Germany-led 6G-ANNA (6G-Access, Network of Networks, Automation & Simplification) has been developing a holistic design for 6G, what includes a closed end-to-end architecture. 6G-ANNA is part of the larger “6G Platform German” national initiative.
- In France, the government earmarked EUR750 million for future networks. In July 2023, it created a “France 6G” platform, for the rollout of 6G scheduled for 2030. It also announced the launch of the PEPR program (Networks of the Future) funded by EUR65 million over 6 years (as part of France 2030) and 10 major projects targeted. The PEPR program is steered by three major French research entities (CEA, Institut Mines Telecom and CNRS).
- The national initiative on 6G in Spain is a part of the Digital Spain 2026 initiative started by the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation as a part of the country’s digital transformation roadmap. Within this roadmap, several plans have been launched at the national, regional and local level. Initially the ‘España Digital 2025’ initiative was launched in July 2020, but in July 2022 it was updated to ‘España Digital 2026’. For Research and Innovation (R&I), additional bottom-up funding in all digital areas is made available by the Ministry for Science and Innovation in the context of the Spanish ‘Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation 2021-27’. In both cases, the initiatives launched are synchronized by design with EU strategies / programs. For ‘España Digital 2026’, indicative overall Budget (2021-26) is up to EUR 31.8 billion, and comprehensively covers most relevant digital areas from different perspectives: R&I, technology uptake, deployment, skills, regulation and other investments. However, this report only focusses on the national developments with regards to research and innovation in 6G as well as certain expansions of the 5G technology.
Late in 2021, the Spanish Government approved to allocate EUR95 million to 5G and 6G networks as part of the EUR1.4 billion in 2022 from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, earmarked to improve connectivity in Spain (EUR1.362 million of which 631 million for the development of 5G and 736 million for the further roll-out of high-capacity broadband networks). In 2022, Spain offered an extra EUR 116 million in funding for new R&D projects. Early 2023, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation announced EUR 60 million for the UNICO 5G Sectorial program 2023 for the development of 5G projects that promote driving sectors of the Spanish economy. The experimental projects associated with 5G should have with a medium degree of maturity both for the creation of prototypes and for its testing and validation or demonstration.
