Your wireless carrier may still be rolling out some of 5G’s key features, but the wireless industry needs people to gear up for 6G. Yes, already.
At MWC Barcelona, a parade of industry executives showed up to herald the advent of 6G and its ability to infuse AI throughout a wireless network. “If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at the keynote that opened the second day of the conference. “Resistance is futile,” he joked.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
He sketched out a rapid march forward: beginning formal 6G studies this year as part of the upcoming Release 20 of the industry group 3GPP’s set of standards, formalizing 6G standards in Release 21 from 2027 to 2028, demos of “pre-commercial devices” at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and finally, commercial service “launching as early as 2029.”
Amon touted 6G support from a long list of US and international partner firms, including Aitel, China Mobile, Google, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Xiaomi. Qualcomm’s smaller-chipset rival, MediaTek, was not on that list, of course, but it had its own set of 6G demos at MWC.
AI giant Nvidia also used MWC to announce its commitment to 6G and the firms it had lined up to develop AI-first network systems: BT Group, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, SK Telecom, and others. Both Qualcomm and Nvidia could have also cited backing from President Trump, who issued a Dec. 19, 2025, “Winning the 6G Race” memorandum that declared: “It is the policy of the United States to lead the world in 6G development.”
What Is 6G, Anyway?
Where 5G’s sales pitch emphasized using that platform to bring computing power closer to customers, the 6G concept is so AI-centric that you almost can’t spell “6G” without “AI.”
First, 6G networks will have AI models constantly tweaking coverage and signals for individual devices, which Amon says would make a difference even in the 7GHz bands now eyed for 6G use. “You’ll have the ability to operate with a very weak signal,” he said. “Higher frequencies will not come with the traditional coverage trade-offs.”
Second, individual cell sites will be able to provide AI computing resources to customers in an upgraded version of 5G’s “mobile edge compute” feature. Said Amon: “You’re going to have computing at every single stack.”
Third, 6G cell sites will integrate wide-area RF sensing. This Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) technology will both help with hyperlocal network fine-tuning and allow carriers to provide value-added services.
“You’re going to have a 3D map of the entire city,” Amon said. “You’re starting to see a whole different set of services that you can have.”
Qualcomm booth at MWC 2026 (Credit: Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The prospect of more reliable service on a phone showing only one bar of signal could be appealing to consumers, but the consumer devices that come up most often in 6G slide decks aren’t phones but augmented-reality glasses and other wearables.
“If all you think of is a smartphone, that’s not the way to think about it,” Durga Malladi, EVP and GM for tech planning, edge solutions, and data centers at Qualcomm, said in an interview at MWC. He called AR glasses “a runaway success,” describing them as “consumer devices that are really doing well.”
T-Mobile’s chief network officer, Ankur Kapoor, endorsed that vision in an interview at MWC: “It’s XR, VR, glasses, automation.”
But the lack of an only-on-6G feature comparable to 5G’s ability to deliver unlimited data to homes may be a problem. “6G doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up,” Leonard Lee, executive analyst at neXt Curve, emailed after MWC. A 6G sales pitch amounting to ISAC plus “faster speeds and feeds” struck him as uninspired.
To be fair, 5G’s original sales pitch, centered on sci-fi scenarios like self-driving cars and metaverse headsets, also flopped. The payoff with that technology turned out to be much closer to home: fast fixed-wireless broadband with unlimited data that has freed millions of Americans to fire their cable internet provider.
Finding Frequencies
Whatever use-case arguments carriers can bring for 6G, they will first need to find spectrum for it. And that has gotten vastly harder over the last decade. The only spectrum that could plausibly be freed up for early 6G deployment is in higher-frequency bands that offer shorter range than today’s mid-band and C-band 5G frequencies. And it’s already occupied by incumbent users, including multiple US military agencies.
The 7.125-7.4GHz band cited most often does, however, have political backing, including a stipulation in that Trump memorandum and support from FCC Chair Brendan Carr.
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A sign at Ericsson’s booth advertises ‘A sn6gk peek into what’s next.’ (Rob Pegoraro)
“That makes it feel a lot more real,” Ookla analyst Mike Dano told me at MWC. “Politically, certainly Brendan Carr and the rest of the administration are pretty interested in freeing up spectrum for 6G.”
He added that the idea of a limited showcase of 6G in 2028 in one US market would ease migration for incumbent users. “Those kinds of concerns have a chance of being addressed—particularly in one LA location,” Dano said.
This 7GHz strategy seems far more realistic than the suggestions of employing sub-terahertz bands that 6G advocates were throwing around four years ago. Relying on even higher frequencies than millimeter-wave would have almost certainly meant coverage even worse than what 5G users have seen with mmWave.
In other countries, carriers may also roll out 6G on 6GHz spectrum that the US is reserving for unlicensed Wi-Fi use.
6G could also ride on bands today used for 5G via an airwave architecture called multi-RAT (radio access technology) spectrum sharing that imposes less overhead than the dynamic spectrum sharing systems used for 5G. Ericsson’s MWC exhibit featured a demo of that, set up as a collaboration between that firm and Apple.
Carrier and Customer Concerns
Carriers themselves may have to write large checks for new wireless infrastructure, depending on how much their recent moves to cloud-native network management and software-updatable radio access networks reduce the need to send a crew with a forklift to every cell site.
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T-Mobile’s Kapoor said his employer’s early deployment of 5G Advanced technologies left it well set up for that transition. “The training wheels for 6G will be 5G Advanced.”
But carriers seem anxious overall about what 6G might cost them. “There is a general sense that operators are somewhat reluctant to make a heavy financial investment into 6G hardware, due to their current financial situation,” Dano said.
“The industry has learned a hard lesson: longer rollout cycles, higher capital intensity, and weaker monetization mean that business cannot plan on 10-year generational resets anymore,” Dario Betti, CEO of Mobile Ecosystem Forum, a UK-based trade group, wrote in an emailed statement. “Operators simply do not have the financial headroom for another cycle defined by massive up-front spectrum spending followed by a decade of uncertain returns.”
Andre Paul Ferreira, solutions director at NTT Data, predicted that the ambitious 6G rollout schedule would run afoul of design and manufacturing delays before the technology is ready for carrier deployment. “You’re not going to see anything outside of a lab until 2030,” he said at MWC, pointing to the slow uptake of past 3GPP standards. “All of our private networks are at best Release 16.”
Among consumers, meanwhile, 6G’s sensing capabilities may not land in the way that 6G advocates presumably hope when they say things like Amon’s plug for ISAC in his keynote: “You can also map every single road, every single car, every single cyclist, every single pedestrian.”
Dano’s take: “I am struggling to see what the purpose of that technology is.”
Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had harsher words in an email. “Technology is not politically neutral, and in the hands of an authoritarian government, this feature could be used to help build a surveillance panopticon which could be used to squash dissent and violate human rights,” he wrote.
“The designers of 6G should focus on ways to protect the privacy and security of mobile users, while also working to improve latency, bandwidth, and reliability for the mobile network, instead of building new surveillance tools,” Quintin added.
Mapping is not the same as identifying—but considering how 5G’s rollout caused certain people to lose their minds with 5G conspiracy theories, the potential downside here could be non-trivial. Unless people latch onto some entirely new crackpot conspiracy theory about 6G.
The near-instant response of Qualcomm’s Malladi when asked what that might be: “Oh God, no.”
About Our Expert
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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