Authors: Jeff Andrews, Professor, UT Austin & William Webb, CEO, Commcisive
The 2025 Marconi Advanced Wireless Forum was my first Marconi event, but it will not be my last: it was an intimate gathering with many thought leaders and featured substantial discussions and debates on 6G and the future of wireless. I learned several concrete things while also solidifying some high-level views, most of which are consistent with the hypotheses laid out in my paper from early 2025: “6G Takes Shape”.
So, what were my takeaways? First, at a high level, there is quite a bit of angst in the cellular industry, as new sources of revenue and growth are needed to sustain innovation, network improvements, and certainly the development and roll-out of a new 6G standard in the early 2030s. This is nothing new, but it does seem to me that 6G standardization should proceed cautiously until there is a key new use case or mode that cannot be supported by 5G. 5G, after all, was designed to be highly forward compatible – meaning flexible, and could even support new spectrum deployments and Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) in principle with a new release.
One novel growth area that was discussed a lot was in national defense applications, which have been brought front and center by various aspects of the wars in Ukraine and Israel, which are, to a large extent, electronic and information wars, along with the actual human fighting. For example, jamming of both communications and navigation signals, the importance of Starlink, the heavy use of drones (which require navigation and communication signals), and the need to sense and track drones, all are matters of urgent interest, particularly in Europe. It is expected that the terrestrial cellular network, as well as the emerging LEO networks, can and must play a vital role in some of these functions, as military networks (both sensing and communication) can never approach the scale and ubiquity of commercial networks. Thus, the interest in 6G cellular networks being much more secure and resilient, as well as supporting new functions like drone detection, are of considerable commercial interest.
A further agreed upon growth area is Fixed Wireless Access, while there was considerable disagreement as to the role of AI in 6G: will it reduce or increase the amount of data traffic? Will the 6G network need to do anything new and different to support AI applications? If so, what exactly? These important questions were debated thoughtfully but without clear resolutions. I look forward to the 2026 event in San Francisco.
