5G came with many promises. Remote surgery, where surgeons operate thousands of miles away from patients; driverless cars talking to each other and autonomously navigating highways; new killer apps that would change the world as Uber did.
But the cellular technology that succeeded 4G LTE didn’t live up to the hype. At least Netflix loads a bit faster.
The networking tech brought real benefits to the world, from improved latency—reducing the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another—to broader and faster coverage in dense urban areas. But most people likely won’t point to 5G delivering a meaningful change in their lives like many carriers suggested as they tried to justify mass spending on their infrastructure build-outs.
Well, get ready to hear that aspirational, forward-looking, and sometimes maybe deluded language again—this time in the lead-up to 6G, which is being paired with “AI” to create a marketing bingo bonanza. Even if the tech won’t deliver a night-and-day difference to average folks like us, the industry is moving the goalposts.
Last week at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, key players like Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Nokia kicked off the hype about the next G of mobile networks. It’s still early days, but here’s what to expect.
Four Years to Go
Mobile networking technology evolves every 10 or so years, says David Witkowski, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He says we can expect 6G to be deployed globally by 2030, though some carriers could launch it in specific regions a year or two earlier.
Technical discussions are already underway by industry leaders, including the mobile broadband standards body, the 3GPP. As blueprints take shape, the official requirements for 6G performance will be set by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), which will be called International Mobile Telecommunications-2030, or IMT-2030. (Following the decade-long upgrade cycle, 5G was IMT-2020, 4G was IMT-2010, and 3G was IMT-2000.)
The rollout will start with new radios on cell towers and buildings and the build-out of the computer core that orchestrates interactions between the network and the public internet. Naturally, devices will need to support 6G—so you’ll eventually have to upgrade to a 6G phone the same way you needed a 5G phone.
“Every generation of cellular attempts to do two things at a very broad level,” Witkowski says. “It attempts to overcome the limitations of the previous generation, and it attempts to add new functionality that’s considered to be important.” Did 5G succeed with these premises? Witkowski says it depends. “If your goal was simply to have your phone perform better and get faster speeds, then 5G is a success because your phone now is typically getting in the range of 100 to 200 megabits of downlink.”
That’s why it’s pretty easy to load up a YouTube video when you’re out and about today. But where 5G had to cut corners was the uplink, and this will be a big focus of improvement with 6G. The goal is to make upload speeds symmetrical with download speeds. Even so, you can expect the usual improvements in download speed as 6G may tap into the Terahertz (THz) spectrum—higher than millimeter wave used in 5G, though with even shorter range—and, like with every new generation, the number of devices served by a cell tower will also go up.
Up and Up
Uplink is the data you send to the network. Demand for faster upload speeds has been growing for a few years, especially after remote work became the norm during the pandemic and we all came to rely on videoconferencing. Today, increasingly large files are being sent to cloud servers for AI processing, from security camera footage to generative AI photo and video editing. The demand for faster uploads will continue to grow as companies trot out new kinds of mobile devices, like smart glasses, smartwatches, AI wearables, and earbuds, that plug into the cloud.
“We are uploading a lot more to the network now because of AI,” Witkowski says. “We’re shoving unparsed, unanalyzed raw data to a cloud and hoping that AI will figure it out. If you think about it in a mobile context, then you have a problem of how much is being uploaded to the network—was the network architected to account for or handle that level of performance on the uplink?”
5G also expanded Fixed Wireless Access around the country, with carriers providing 5G home internet instead of fiber optic or cable connections. That will expand with 6G; it’s another reason why upload speeds will become a main focus.
Outside of uploads, you’ll likely hear a lot more about AI being “integrated into the network.” It’s not the same as AI managing the 6G network itself—though that’s a separate talking point. Take streaming a movie as an example. You’re typically not receiving that stream from your streaming provider’s servers, like Netflix. Instead, it comes from a content distribution node, hosted by your internet service provider. ISPs have public distribution nodes all over the network, so if someone in New York City wants to watch an episode of Mindhunter, it’ll come from a nearby node without much delay rather than traversing to a distant server Netflix owns somewhere else.
Now take that paradigm and map it to AI. When you’re talking to your AI chatbot, usually your request is sent through your provider to your chatbot company’s data centers far away, then it comes back to you, likely with a bit of a delay. With 6G, Witkowski says, we may see “AI nodes” in the cellular network, which serve specific regions, distributing the load so that there’s not one data center handling millions of requests, a process called edge compute.
“If we ever get to the point where we have, say, self-driving 18-wheelers, the smart thing to do would be to put the 6G network along the major highways so that at any given time, the self-driving truck is only talking to an edge device that is along the highway,” Witkowski says. “They don’t have to clock out into the network; it cuts down on load, and the network can speed up response time.”
Making Sense
Another big feature you’ll hear around 6G is “sensing,” also called joint communications and sensing, or JCAS. Think of a network functioning as a radar system, where it can infer the presence of objects and people as high-frequency radio signals bounce back to towers. This could allow operators to know precise locations of objects, their shape and size, how fast they’re moving, and what kind of materials they may be made of.
“There’s a lot of discussion around using the 6G infrastructure when it’s deployed to detect the presence of drones flying through the air, vehicles on the ground,” says Richard Burbidge, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. “I wouldn’t say everyone is convinced of the business at the end of the day, but some operators see there’s going to be business in offering that kind of sensing information to third parties for whatever applications it could be used for.”
Naturally, there are significant privacy implications for a network that can precisely detect people, objects, and movement without the need for a camera—a similar parallel we’ve seen with Google’s Soli technology, which can detect human movements using radar alone.
There’s plenty more on the horizon for 6G, whether that’s improving power efficiency so that the cell network doesn’t consume a large chunk of the global electrical grid or more deliberate integrations with satellites to plug the coverage gaps in terrestrial networks. Over the next few years, we’ll see these goals ironed out.
4G LTE is still in use today in conjunction with 5G, so don’t expect 5G to disappear once 6G starts rolling out. That said, Jaydee Griffith, managing director at the Next G Alliance, says carriers have made it clear that they want 6G to stand on its own two legs, without the kind of previous-gen dependence that we saw with 5G. “It does get more expensive to operate when you stack G’s,” Griffith says.
Hype and Health
With 6G already an early focus at events like Mobile World Congress, we’re seeing companies hyping it up just like they did 5G. Qualcomm’s 6G blog says 6G “represents new paradigms” and suggests new use cases, such as “hologram telepresence, collaborative robots, human augmentation, and deeper immersion to the digital and virtual worlds.”
But Griffith says there are a lot of lessons learned from the marketing hype of 5G and that a big part of 6G will be a focus on the practical, not the fabulous. “We see that with every generation,” he says. “Especially the earlier in the process, the more hype there is, because the world is our oyster. We’ll build a network that can do everything: flying cars, remote tele-surgery.”
Witkowski dejectedly points out that we’re also likely to see yet another wave of unfounded health fears surrounding 6G. Every decade, when carriers apply for permits to build towers, there are objections to the process from communities that believe that cellular technology is dangerous, even if there’s plenty of evidence that it’s safe.
“I’ve been down this road before, where every 10 years we have to go back, and we have to re-fight the fight,” Witkowski says. “It keeps me employed, but I prefer that we not be living in this sort of anti-science mindset all the time. It would be great if people would accept that this stuff is safe within the limit that is set by the IEEE standard and adopted by regulatory agencies like the FCC.”
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