The telecom networks originally built to carry phone calls and packets of data are in the midst of a dramatic shift. The past year saw early steps toward networks becoming a more integrated data fabric that can measure the world, process and sense collaboratively, and even stretch into outer space.
The following list of key IEEE Spectrum telecom news stories from 2025 underscore the evolution the connected (and wireless) world is today going through. A larger story is emerging, in other words, of how networks are turning into instruments and engines rather than just passive pipes.
And if there’s a clear starting point to watch this shift happening, it’s in the early thinking around 6G.
Source image: Nokia
Unlike previous step-changes in telecom’s evolution (especially the bandwidth upgrades from 3G to 4G and 4G to 5G), the key equation for 6G isn’t “5G plus faster downloads.” Nokia Bell Labs, whose president of core research Peter Vetter sat down for a conversation with Spectrum in November, is starting to test and test-deploy key pieces of 6G’s infrastructure five years before 6G devices are expected to come online. And time is tight. Because, as Vetter explains, downlinks for the must-have consumer tech of the decade ahead may not be the network’s key crunch point for too much longer. Your phone’s ability—and your future smart glasses’ ability—to download streaming video and other content is increasingly not telecom’s hardest problem. Rather, if the Internet of Things scales up as predicted, and smart home and smart city tech takes hold, before too long everything everywhere will be dialing in to 6G infrastructure for more and more sizable uplinks. And that kind of traffic surge might break telecom networks of today. Which is why smart money, beginning with but certainly not limited to Nokia Bell Labs, is on solving that massive uplink problem before it might emerge.
Oliver Killig/HZDR
There’s a range of electromagnetic spectrum between 0.1 and 10 terahertz that has historically been very difficult to harness technologically. Radio waves and microwaves on one side of the “terahertz gap“ and infrared light on the other each have their own types of electronics and waveguides to manipulate photons and translate them back and forth to electrical signals in integrated circuits.
But this past year has seen progress in closing the terahertz gap. In a story from October, Spectrum contributor Meghie Rodrigues chronicled how a new breed of chips are being developed to unlock bandwidths in the tens and hundreds of gigahertz—well beyond 5G’s range and coming up just shy of that long-puzzled-over terahertz gap. Crucially, the new chips can be operated at or near room temperature and on standard semiconductor substrates. To make big progress on telecom’s challenges to come, this kind of tech will be important to scale up and out and into devices that can meet 6G’s uplink and downlink demands.
Seyed Reza Sandoghchi and Ghafour Amouzad Mahdiraji/Microsoft Azure Fiber
While the promise of terahertz data links looms on the horizon, the world today also can’t wait for technologies that might, in 2030 or beyond, be able to fulfill their early promise. Some communications engineers have been leaning on a fundamental rule from physics that fiber optic lines haven’t fully tapped into yet: Light travels some 30 percent faster through air than it does glass. Fiber optic lines, in other words, could be substantially sped up if they weren’t solid glass but rather tiny glass tubes sheltering an air core.
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