6G Cautiously Proposes Service Innovation, but the Industry Is Still in Shock from the 5G Enterprise Letdown

During 2025, formal discussion of 6G shifted from conceptual vision-setting toward regionally-driven trial activity led by major mobile operators, such as SoftBank and Vodafone and their primary infrastructure vendors, including Nokia and Ericsson. These efforts have been deliberately concentrated on wide-area public mobile networks rather than enterprise, campus, or localized deployments. The technological focus was primarily on the operational characteristics of upper mid-band spectrum and cloud-native Radio Access Network (RAN) architectures that provide an evolution path from existing 5G-Advanced networks without requiring significant infrastructure replacement.

The way that these activities are positioned indicates a fundamental shift in industry attitudes and behavior. Operators no longer position 6G development around significant increases in peak data rates or new service categories, instead viewing the rollout of 6G as providing incremental improvements in the ability to consistently provide coverage in high-frequency spectrum bands, as well as providing greater efficiency in the use of the overall available radio resources. Technological capabilities related to Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled orchestration, integrated sensing, etc. are being included in operator technical roadmaps; however, they are still limited to trial implementations rather than commercial stories. This limited positioning shows that the industry is continuing to respond to the limited Return on Investment (ROI) from the 5G enterprise initiatives where the technology and business model for private networks, network slicing, and ultra-low latency applications had difficulty getting past pilot phases.

As for 2026, the expectation is not a sudden expansion of 6G service definitions, but a continuation of this trial-driven approach, with deeper technical validation aimed at proving that evolutionary upgrades can deliver measurable economic benefits before broader commitments are made.

While 5G significantly enhanced the mobile broadband experience, the emphasis placed on 5G as an important factor in the digital transformation of the enterprise sector has resulted in the emergence of underlying issues that include a fragmented ecosystem, high integration costs, and the inability to establish repeatable monetization and revenue generation models. These issues continue to limit how 6G is being pursued and developed today.

Capital discipline has emerged as the dominant force shaping the 6G trajectory. Rather than pursuing a generational reset, operators are focused on extending the economic life of existing assets through software-defined upgrades, selective hardware evolution, and cost-aware spectrum strategies. Within this context, AI is not positioned as a standalone revenue driver, but as a tool to address the operational inefficiencies exposed during the 5G cycle.

For that reason, AI technology is currently being used predominantly within a narrow range of functions that have an immediate impact on commercial profitability. Some specific functions of AI technology being used in telecommunication operations include optimizing radio parameters automatically, allocating spectrum dynamically, identifying and predicting faults, forecasting network traffic, and assisting with managing energy efficiently in cloud-based RAN environments. Collectively, these AI-driven functions will help lower operating costs, improve utilization of telecommunications infrastructure, and thereby extend the time between capacity growth requirements.

Many more speculative uses of AI, such as providing advanced sensing-driven services for a more rapid, integrated orchestration of functions across domains, are likely beyond the immediate ROI window. An important question that must still be addressed in 2026 will be whether the gains from AI can be realized on general-purpose compute platforms currently in use or whether there will be a need for developing additional specialized acceleration and denser edge computing. In addition, if additional specialized acceleration and/or denser edge computing is required, then the capital intensity risk associated with scaling capacity will continue to be high and thereby reinforce the industry’s ongoing watch-and-see approach to experimentation.

The initial developments of 6G technology will be focused primarily on proving that operators and vendors can discipline themselves so that they do not repeat the same mistakes made with 5G. The expectation is that operators and vendors will continue to resist the hype surrounding 6G for the next few years and instead work together to show how 6G will provide additional value with more efficient operational and fiscal networks.

Early capabilities when deploying 6G should be closely related to the capabilities of AI, with a focus on creating macro-networks that utilize AI to achieve quantifiable benefits such as lower cost per bit, lower outage durations, increased energy efficiency, and higher spectrum utilization. Any evolution of service should be directly linked to these benefits, with benchmarks that differentiate between theoretical performance gains and material profitability gains.

Additionally, the growing number of 6G technologies, ranging from cloud-native RAN to AI-based orchestration and integrated sensing, presents new challenges of interoperability. The increasing involvement of multiple vendors, standards bodies, and regional initiatives leads to many different paths of development; however, without co-operation, such fragmentation will lead to fragmented solutions. Co-operation across all vendors to develop common interfaces, predictable software upgrades, and compute abstraction layers is imperative. Global alignment will also be critical to ensure that 6G features will be scalable for use across all vendors and geographic areas, while maintaining compatibility and delivering value (operationally and economically).

Ultimately, the success of 6G will be determined more by the ability to generate verifiable and sustainable financial benefits from AI-assisted evolution of the network than by the speed at which features are introduced. The primary metrics that will be used to demonstrate that 6G has a credible path forward as an evolutionary step, and not just a new cycle of unmet expectations, will be through the use of measurable OPEX per gigabyte savings, improved automation in network operations, and a high level of infrastructure/spectrum reuse when compared to 5G-Advanced.