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?”
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