is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
It brings me no pleasure to say this, but friends: The next G cometh.
The standard formally known as 6G is still being established, but it’s going to be a major topic of discussion at Mobile World Congress 2026, which gets started today in Barcelona.
5G arrived back in 2019, but also, did it, entirely? You may have noticed a distinct lack of the robot surgeons and streets dominated by autonomous vehicles that standard was supposed to enable in your daily life. Like the Gs that arrived before, 5G continues to evolve through new “releases” every few years — a case of incremental progress that couldn’t possibly live up to all that hype. That 5G icon in the corner of your phone screen was never meant to signal the full arrival of 5G, but the hype around it sure made that point confusing.
Nevertheless, a new hype cycle looks to be brewing. This time, you’ll hear a lot about seamless connectivity between satellites and smartphones, wireless networks that can sense things in the physical environment, and naturally, AI — both helping to run the network and inside the network itself.
Exactly what 6G encompasses is still being defined by a specialized agency within the United Nations; it’s not a fully formed resource that’s been discovered and studied
It’s all still a long ways off, but the communications industry orients itself around these 10-year increments, so that’s why we’re all going to start hearing about 6G even though the emergence of 5G feels like a recent memory. Right now 6G is in a “study phase,” with commercialization planned for 2030. That’s worth bearing in mind, and something I found myself running up against every time I asked a researcher or analyst, “Can 6G really do that?” The answer is an unsatisfying “Maybe.” Exactly what 6G encompasses is still being defined by a specialized agency within the United Nations; it’s not a fully formed resource that’s been discovered and studied. It’s evolving, and will continue to do so well beyond 2030.
But whether we’re ready or not, 6G is indeed taking shape, and it’ll be upon us just as fast as you can say “2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.” Here’s what you can expect.
Wait, what do the Olympics have to do with it?
More than one expert that I talked to brought up the Summer Games in LA as a key stage to demonstrate 6G to the world. Qualcomm’s VP of engineering, John Smee, says that the company “will be heavily present at the LA ’28 Olympics.” Ian Fogg, a wireless network research director at CCS Insight, also sees the timing of the Olympics driving companies to prep now for pre-commercial activities. “People like showing off,” he says. Is this desire to demo 6G here guided by the same minds that brought us the nonsensical “race to 5G”? Probably. Does it make any sense to orient technological progress around an international sporting event? I don’t know, man. Just consider yourself warned.
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