‘Next TMT Talks
When did you say 6G was going to be ready again?

The bones and sinews of 6G are being put together now. It will still be something like 40 months before telecom executives will be able to drag their cellular creation from the lab and jubilantly scream: “It’s alive!”  

You wouldn’t know it from all the hype but the next major cellular standard, 6G, is still around four years away from being commercially deployed and available. There are plenty of articles - and even AI slop videos - extolling the virtues of the next G, well before we know much of what the standard will actually contain. From buzz about data speeds, talk about frequencies and chatter about new capabilities.

In fact, people and companies are actually now deciding what technology the 6G specification, the next major cellular standard, will actually contain right about now. There has been a 3GPP plenary meeting going on in Singapore last week to lay down some of the technologies that will be used in the new standard. 

The 3GPP has now said that “6G Package Approval” is expected in March 2027, with the functional freeze of the initial Release-21 6G expected in December 2028. It typically takes 12 to 18 months to go from that stage to commercial 6G devices and infrastructure.

Gabriel Brown, senior principal analyst, mobile networks at Omdia explained that chipmakers, cellular network vendors, operators and other companies working with the 3GPP standards consortium are thrashing out the technologies that will be in 6G through 2026 and into 2027.

“It hasn’t quite fully come into focus yet,” Brown said. “It’s getting there, every month, every meeting, it’s becoming a little clearer.”   

His colleague Guang Yang, senior principal analyst at Omdia said on LinkedIn that - as expected - the 3GPP will use much of the physical layer base developed for 5G in the new standard. “It seems that the basic design of the 6G physical layer, such as waveform, channel coding, numerology, etc., will inherit much of its foundation from 5G New Radio, indicating a strong industry desire for ecosystem stability, cost-effective migration, and backward compatibility,” Yang stated.

Meanwhile, Brown noted that, at its base, 6G will be a so-called AI native technology. “Establishing an AI-native air interface for 6G networks means replacing blocks in the signal processing chain on the physical layer with trained machine learning models,” Testing company Rohde & Schwarz said in a blog.

The testing firm didn’t reveal a timeline for the AI-native 6G air interface. It did, however, state that it would be a 3-stage development process. This will involve replacing the radio frequency (RF) frontend with machine learning (ML) algorithms. The German company said that universities actually started researching this back in 2020.

The RF Frontend is typically designed by one vendor, Rohde & Schwarz noted. This phase will be easier to realize because all necessary data for training neural networks is in the hands of one single vendor.

Phase 2 of developing an AI-native 6G neural receiver involves replacing signal processing blocks such as channel estimation, channel equalization and demapping with a trained ML model, the company said.

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The final phase will involve end-to-end (E2E) optimization of the air interface. This will involve ML being used to optimize the transmitter, receiver, and baseband processing of the interface. Rohde & Schwarz didn’t reveal how long this might take, but it is clearly a major part of the 6G development work.

Brown was also confident that 6G sensing, which is known as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), would be part of the specification. Vendors are already hard-selling the virtues of ISAC, which will combine the communication network with radar-like sensing and the spatial location of passive objects on the same network.

As I have reported before, however, it would likely cost billions to deliver the kind of network densification that would be needed to make high-resolution ISAC viable on a 6G network. This won’t make operators, who have been expecting 6G to be cheaper to deploy than 5G, very happy. 

Brown still said that ISAC would be one of the fundamental technologies included in the 6G specification. We’ll have to see how deploying ISAC infrastructure will actually play out in the next decade.

Of course, there many academic and government agencies that are also still involved in 6G development. From China, to Finland, to the Trump administration in the United States, there are plenty of organizations in the running to have an influence on 6G.

NYU Wireless and UT Austin are among the major universities doing 6G research in the United States. The University of Oulu in Finland is one of the major 6G research organizations in Europe, while the University of Surrey is a 6G pioneer in the United Kingdom. Tsinghua University is considered one of the major 6G researchers in China. 

As Ookla lead analyst Mike Dano referenced on the Next TMT Networks podcast last week there will be particular events that will be key for public perception of 6G. One of these will be the Los Angeles summer Olympics 2028. Dano noted that there will be “6G” or “pre6G” infrastructure and devices shown off around the event.

As I reported back in March 2026 the Trump admin is very keen on promoting 6G at the Olympics. “The U.S. government is very interested [in 6G], they have asked us to work so it will launch in 2029 with three commercial devices ready to go for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles,” Qualcomm’s SVP of global government affairs and public affairs, Nate Tibbits said at an event at the time.

That clearly can’t happen, however, because the 6G standard won’t even be frozen until December 2028, after the event has taken place. Perhaps they can rebadge some left-over Trump T1 phones!

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Apple, of course, has its own 6G ambitions, as I have previously reported the company is planning to develop a 6G modem ahead of the standard. This is probably because of the problems Apple has had with Qualcomm and started its own developing 5G modems. It wants to get ahead of the pack with 6G.

Apple is still looking for plenty of 6G engineers now. We’ll see how Apple’s 6G approach develops over the next 3 or 4 years.

In the meantime, Apple definitely does have plans for AI and the Siri virtual assistant on its iPhone smartphone. The company held its WWDC26 event last week and announced its latest Apple Intelligence software for Siri. This comes after the September 2025 launch of the latest iPhone 17

“Apple is one of the largest companies in the world and it has one of the largest digital ecosystems in the world,” Avi Greengart, lead analyst at Techsponential stated in a conversation with Next TMT Networks. “It’s hard to be Apple just sort of sitting on the sidelines, which it has done for the last few years.”

“Has it affected to this date? No. Will it affect it eventually if it didn’t do this? Yeah,” the analyst said. To that end, it is starting to deliver on the AI commitments it initially made a couple of years ago.

“Apple is starting to deliver on the promises it made 2 years ago for what Apple Intelligence could be,” Greengart said. Apple actually started with its Apple Intelligence AI push with the Apple iPhone 16 launch in 2024, with some commentators predicting an AI supercycle after the debut.

That didn’t happen, although as Greengart points out, Apple still shifted plenty of iPhone 16 smartphones. “Is Apple pulling ahead of Google and other AI companies?” Greengart questioned. “Hardly,” he said. “They’re just catching up with what they already promised.”

Greengart thinks that this time out Apple has likely hit its stride with its AI software. “In terms of what Apple is offering, it matches up well with what consumers want to do,” Greengart said. They’re looking for more interactive and more helpful AI, he noted.

“They’re not necessarily ready for - or even understand - some of the agentic capabilities that Google is talking about in its operating systems,” Greengart said.This involves things like agents independently monitoring Gmail and other apps for requests and updates, as well automatically triggering actions on a user’s phone.

Apple is basically playing catch-up at this point, but from a position of strength. Greengart pointed to Apple’s current sales of its iPhones. “They didn’t have any of this stuff and they’re setting records,” Greengart noted.

“It’s pretty hard to look at iPhone sales over the past year and say Apple is doomed because they're behind on that,” he commented.

Basically, Apple needs to establish AI table stakes that the company can support as it takes on AI competitors like Amazon and Google. “It is absolutely necessary that they reach baseline proficiency, do they need to lead? Clearly not,” Greengart stated. “At least not at this stage.” He noted that the Google Gemini AI app is very popular on Mac OS.

“Apple's trying to strike a middle ground between giving consumers what they need right now while maintaining distinct levels of privacy and security,” Greengart said.

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SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering (IPO), which has now raised $85.7 billion, made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire - at least on paper - but there is much more work to do on Elon’s space adventures.

As Next TMT Networks has covered before SpaceX and Starlink Mobile will need to sign a deal with a major network operator (MNO) - or more likely multiple deals with major operators around the world! - in order to be able to deliver satellite direct-to-device (D2D) services in towns and cities across the world.

None of the 3 of major MNOs in the United States - AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon - are willing to a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal with Elon and his low-earth orbit (LEO) buddies, which would give Starlink access to a 5G network in towns and cities, without having to build their own network.

That shouldn’t stop SpaceX, suggested Wolfe Research, just ahead of the IPO last week. The research group suggested that SpaceX should buy T-Mobile or one of the other major U.S. operators to fix its urban issue. Otherwise, SpaceX/Starlink Mobile will have to build the 4th U.S. Mobile network.

“A better outcome for everybody, from a profitability perspective, would be that that doesn’t happen and a way for that not to happen is to actually buy a network,” suggested Wolfe Research’s senior analyst Peter Supino.

Next TMT Networks thinks this is unlikely to happen. If it does, however, the last two and half years of Trump regime are the ideal time for an ultra-rich satellite company to buy a major operator...for reasons. The admin doesn’t seem keen on enforcing strict anti-trust strictures against its allies, which Musk would certainly count as. 

To that end, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a super-swarm of 1 million satellites to operate as data centers in space. SpaceX proposes a network of modular, sun-synchronous satellites designed to handle space-based AI compute. The application is still in its early stages right now.

Still imagine the space junk if the application is approved! Starlink already has approval to put over 19,000 satellites already. It will share the night sky with Chinese constellations like Spacesail and China Satnet, as well as Amazon Leo and the upcoming European IRIS constellation, which is expected to start deploying in 2029.

One thing to consider with Starlink is that the satellites have a limited lifespan of 5 years or less in orbit. That isn’t ideal if these vessels are being deployed as either mini orbiting base stations or data centers!

One of other major reasons that Starlink’s data center plans have limited viability. Diana Goovaerts said in February that Ookla data from December 2025 showed Starlink offered download speeds of 129.72 Mbps, upload speeds of 22.59 and latency of 39 milliseconds. 

SpaceX said it would connect its data center satellites via its 200 Gbps laser mesh and community gateway sites to earth. The satellite pathway, however, is inherently lossy compared to fiber. So, space data centers won’t be able to serve markets like high-frequency trading and more, where proximity is everything.