Oh great, here comes 6G

Tech Report Mobile Oh great, here comes 6G We could be in for some wild stuff come 2030. But is this the 5G hype industrial complex all over again? by Allison Johnson Mar 2, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC It’s like 5G, but one more. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Part Of LIVE MWC 2026: all the phones, gadgets, and announcements from Barcelona see all updates Allison Johnson is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview. It brings me no pleasure to say this, but friends: The next G cometh. The standard formally known as 6G is still being established, but it’s going to be a major topic of discussion at Mobile World Congress 2026, which gets started today in Barcelona. 5G arrived back in 2019, but also, did it, entirely? You may have noticed a distinct lack of the robot surgeons and streets dominated by autonomous vehicles that standard was supposed to enable in your daily life. Like the Gs that arrived before, 5G continues to evolve through new “releases” every few years — a case of incremental progress that couldn’t possibly live up to all that hype. That 5G icon in the corner of your phone screen was never meant to signal the full arrival of 5G, but the hype around it sure made that point confusing. Nevertheless, a new hype cycle looks to be brewing. This time, you’ll hear a lot about seamless connectivity between satellites and smartphones, wireless networks that can sense things in the physical environment, and naturally, AI — both helping to run the network and inside the network itself. Exactly what 6G encompasses is still being defined by a specialized agency within the United Nations; it’s not a fully formed resource that’s been discovered and studied It’s all still a long ways off, but the communications industry orients itself around these 10-year increments, so that’s why we’re all going to start hearing about 6G even t...