ISAC Moves into Formal 6G Standardization, but the Commercial Reality Is Becoming More Focused

Within the last 6 months, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has transitioned from a research radio topic into formal 6G system design. After Release 19 completed its efforts in developing sensing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and channel modeling, Release 20 has continued to develop ISAC across all relevant 3GPP Working Groups (WGs), such as SA2 (architecture), SA3 (security), SA5 (charging and management), and SA6 (application enablement). These developments indicate that ISAC is finally being recognized as a network service that requires orchestration, exposure, and monetization.

Another major milestone was achieved with the transition from the RAN1#124 (April 13-17, 2026) to RAN1#125 (May 18-22, 2026) meeting. The discussions in RAN1 have become less abstract in terms of vendor implementation strategies and are starting to push vendors to make a permanent choice of an architectural approach for sensing waveforms, reference signals, and resource allocation. In particular, there is a growing divergence of vendors’ positions on waveforms for sensing. In this regard, Huawei’s position is oriented toward more sensing-focused waveform and architecture solutions backed up by very good evaluation results and ISAC experiments, whereas Ericsson’s position focuses more on deployment aspects of waveforms and is more concerned about practical implementation issues such as interference and self-interference. Here, Nokia offers analysis of waveform designs, which balances sensing performance and practical deployment considerations. During the study phase, different technical approaches were possible at once, while the work item phase calls for consensus, reducing the number of possible options.

Meanwhile, vendors' demonstrations are starting to move out of lab validations. Huawei conducted commercial ISAC tests on a live 5G network in China, while Ericsson, Nokia, and several operators extended their industrial/public safety demos. While these still represent mostly Proof of Concept (PoC) deployments, collectively, they suggest that the industry is starting to validate deployment models, rather than just proving sensing performance. This suggests that standardization is moving from the question of whether ISAC works to the question of how operators can realistically incorporate sensing into their future networks.

Beyond the technical work, Release 20 is reshaping the commercial role of ISAC. Early 6G visions frequently positioned ISAC as a universal sensing platform that would enable autonomous transport, smart cities, ambient intelligence, healthcare, monitoring, and more for consumers. However, the ongoing standardization is positioning sensing more as a managed operator capability than an open sensing platform.

The development of Release 20 into architecture, security, charging, and service management shows that 3GPP is designing ISAC to work within the current operator’s infrastructure, rather than developing its own sensing ecosystem. This favors deployment scenarios in which the operator controls both the radio environment and the result of operations. Hence, commercially viable deployments are becoming increasingly aligned with industrial automation, ports, airports, utility companies, logistics nodes, critical infrastructure, and public safety. All of those environments have predictable radio conditions and clearly measurable outcomes, making a good case for integrating communication and sensing services together in one managed service. By comparison, many of the grander visions for a consumer-oriented 6G world, such as ambient intelligence and smart homes, are increasingly hard to justify both technically and commercially, highlighting how 3GPP is now focusing on tangible use cases for ISAC.

Release 20 shows that the biggest problem faced by the industry is no longer sensing performance. This was mostly resolved with Release 19 proving that practical sensing could be done in a lab environment. However, the bigger issue today is running sensing as a scalable business service. Sensing is a continuous task and requires ongoing signal processing, AI inference, orchestration, and increasing use of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-accelerated computing, which increases network costs. While traditional connectivity services do not require these continuous processing workloads, sensing workloads do and there is no clear revenue model to cover those costs.

Instead of driving national network deployments, ISAC may appear gradually in dense enterprise scenarios when operators can control the radio environment and monetize resulting gains through improved productivity in terms of industrial safety, monitoring, and drone detection. Much like network slicing, ISAC looks like something that will not grow the connectivity market, but will segment the enterprise connectivity market into an infrastructure layer with combined communications, positioning, and sensing services provided as managed services.

ISAC should be built around operational outcomes, rather than sensing capabilities. Most commercial value won’t be delivered through selling ISAC as just one more high-end network offering, but through combining sensing into end-to-end vertical solutions. There is a strong case for industrial automation, airports, logistics centers, utilities, ports, and critical infrastructure as verticals where sensing brings direct benefit to operations in terms of improved efficiency, resiliency, and safety. Consequently, operators need to offer ISAC along with private networks, edge computing, positioning, and AI analytics as an operational platform, solving business-specific challenges, not selling sensing separately. This is how ISAC can deliver Return on Investment (ROI) without any unreasonable expectations about being a 6G mainstream offering.

Vendors must prioritize their development efforts less on enhancing sensing capabilities and more toward simplifying operations. The future value proposition lies less in improving sensing accuracy than in automating the deployment, orchestration, and management of sensing in live networks. The emphasis should be on the native AI orchestration of dynamic allocation of sensing capabilities, coordination between the Radio Access Network (RAN), Core, and Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) systems, and optimization of sensing workloads in response to changes in the network environment. Without this degree of automation, ISAC will continue to be a costly and manual system limited to enterprise deployments, irrespective of improvements in radio performance.