6G Gets an Early Launch Date

Did the promises of 5G ever happen? I don’t know. 5G is fine. It seems mostly mature at this stage and our wireless networks in the US are all pretty good. T-Mobile’s network wins awards, Verizon’s does too, and AT&T’s is right there with both of them. I see “5G UW” all of the time in Portland and my network connections always seem pretty stable. Did we make leaps of awesomeness over the peaks of 4G LTE? Ehhhh, maybe? The download speeds are pretty nice at times, for sure.

But hey, we’re done talking 5G. 6G is coming, even if there probably isn’t a need for it. The companies need something to hype and to sell each other on in order to make all of the billions on top of the billions they already make. 5G is old or tired in the way of fun (and profits), so 6G has found a date.

As a part of Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week, Qualcomm has stepped forward to commit towards commercialization of 6G starting in 2029. Actually, let me be more specific – “AI-Native 6G” could show up in 2029. Why did we need to attach “AI-Native” to 6G? You know why. Here’s to hoping AI is dead by 2029.

Qualcomm and its friends in the industry are trying to define what 6G should be and so far they have settled on three key pillars: connectivity, wide-area sensing, and high-performance computer. They explained what those mean by saying that the next generation of networks “will feature new and advanced capabilities, including intelligent radios with integrated wide-area sensing capabilities, virtualized and cloud RAN with high-performance and energy efficient compute, AI-based network autonomy, as well as edge and centralized data centers for entirely new AI workloads.”

What does all of that mean for you? Well, Qualcomm says it “will enable higher levels of efficiency and performance for telecommunication applications, new agentic consumer and enterprise devices, and new classes of AI-enabled services, ranging from context-relevant data, low-altitude aerial and terrestrial traffic management, data insights and analytics at scale, and many more.”

All of that mostly boils down to a, “Trust me, bro, it’s going to be awesome because of AI even if what we just said is a jumbled mess of a potential future tech speak.”

As of today, Qualcomm and its partners want to launch spec-compliant pre-commercial devices and networks in 2028 before rolling things out officially in 2029. A couple of years isn’t that far off. Will we hit these dates?

// Qualcomm