It seemed not so long ago that many wireless carriers were in a race to 5G, touting the speed of their networks to consumers. Now, the successor to that network is in development and could bring a bounty of potential benefits to society and insurers.
Yet, as with some innovations, they often raise as many questions as they do answers. That is the case with a pair of potentially game-changing emerging risks: 6G wireless infrastructure and autonomous trucks. Meanwhile, a third risk with ancient origins presents new liability issues that insurers and the industry should also keep in mind.
Insurance in a 6G Era
A constellation of companies, researchers, and government agencies are hard at work on the successor to today’s 5G wireless network. While that next-generation network is still several years away, it’s not too early to begin considering the possible impacts this new technology may have across insurance lines of business.
Much like all the Gs before it, 6G technology represents a more expansive standard of technological implementation and infrastructure development. One fairly obvious characteristic we might see as networks migrate from 5G to 6G is speed: 6G is expected to support significantly faster data rates than 5G–reportedly up to as high as 200 Gbit/s for 6G vs. 20 Gbit/s for 5G. A future 6G network could also serve up to three-to-five times as much data traffic throughput within a given geographic area versus 5G. Lower latency, greater reliability, and the ability to serve data to more devices on a network are also promised.
Researchers preparing the groundwork for 6G also expect it to open the door to new capabilities, which may prove valuable for insurers. These innovations include integrated sensors that may allow 6G network devices to use radio waves to obtain additional information about their surroundings based on how objects–vehicles, buildings, and people–interact with the waves they send and receive. Sensors may also access networks in more remote locations, providing the potential to make post-catastrophe damage assessment easier and more efficient, and the full extent of such events more immediately apparent.
The use of so-called digital twins–more accurate virtual representations of real property–could aid in underwriting by helping insurers better understand a building’s performance under various catastrophe scenarios. It may also assist in the claims process with real-time data flowing between the real-world object and its virtual twin to potentially assist adjusters in better understanding pre-loss conditions when a claim is filed.
If 6G sensors proliferate, so, too, might the concept of a digital twin–potentially growing the tool beyond single structures and allowing insurers greater analytical visibility on entire neighborhoods and cities, in addition to critical infrastructure and the movements of people and vehicles.
The advent of the 6G era may also support auto insurance, enabling vehicle data analysis from radar-like passive sensing tools that hypothetically hold the potential to more accurately reconstruct accident scenes.
