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You’ve seen the progress on your phone’s screen over the years: 3G followed 4G, and now, perhaps more often than not, your phone connects via 5G. Always on the nearer horizon, you guessed it, 6 grams.
Unlike the Gs before it, 6G has been flying under the radar. It’s not so much a source of consumer hype as it is a point of discussion about the telecom industry and the networks that depend on it.
But that’s not quite the whole story.
During his keynote speech at Web Summit on Tuesday, Cristiano Amon, CEO of chipmaker Qualcomm, hinted that… 6G networkswhich is scheduled for a US release in the early 2030s, may have something exciting to offer us after all.
“6G is designed for artificial intelligence,” he said at the event in Lisbon, Portugal. It will boost communication speed and sense our surroundings, providing context to events Artificial intelligence agents Who come to do things on our behalf.
After that brief and interesting comment, I was keen to learn more about what 6G cellular technology could do for the medium Smartphone user, so I asked Amon to explain what we can expect from this next-generation network technology.
Each generation of networking technology was a gateway to a new experience, Amon said. 2G was about making sure everyone in the world could have a mobile phone, 3G was about connecting phones to the Internet, and 4G turned our mobile devices into computers. 5G has allowed us to have critical connectivity and unlimited data.
So, what can 6G offer us beyond what we already have?
Cristiano Amon said at the Web Summit that 6G “solves the connectivity problem in the age of artificial intelligence.”
The obvious answer: faster speeds and lower latency. This is especially important given the coming shift in how we interact with our AI-enabled devices, Amon said.
One of the big benefits of the more advanced large language models we now use – the underlying technology behind them Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence Like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot — is that they can understand our natural speech, making voice the easiest and clearest way for us to chat with our AI agents.
“Voice will matter again,” Amon told me. “We’ll be using voice to communicate with the agents and all the different devices, so it’s going to improve response time even more, and it’s going to give you a faster connection.”
6G will lead the “always-on sensor network”
Qualcomm has been an early proponent of the potential of AI agents, which can autonomously perform tasks for you. Its chips have already begun powering mobile agent experiments, Wearable devices, Computers And cars.
If we rely on our voices to interact accurately and confidently with agents, who may make a payment or email a customer on our behalf, completely seamless communication will be crucial to ensuring nothing is lost in translation. This is where 6G technology will come in, according to Amon.
“The devices we interact with will understand what we say, what we hear, and what we see,” he said. “6G will provide context.” He added: We will be surrounded by a “permanent sensor network” that will allow our customers to predict what we will do and what we need next based on what is happening around us.
On stage, Amon gave the example of applying artificial intelligence to radio – 6G, like its predecessors, is a wireless communications technology – so that it can detect disturbances in the radio frequency environment of a room. It can, for example, detect changes in a baby’s breathing while in bed without the need for a wearable monitor. Another, and perhaps less attractive, example is large-scale facial recognition, which would allow simultaneous identification of every person in the room.
“I know it sounds a little scary,” Amon said. He added that 6G’s understanding of our context will be key to enabling AI agents to operate.
With at least five years to go until 6G launches in the US and with artificial intelligence continuing to develop at a rapid pace, it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen when the two technologies finally collide. But one thing is certain: 6G will support new experiences, some of which may not have been invented yet.
Disclosure: Katie Collins traveled to Lisbon as a guest of Web Summit to serve as a panel moderator. Her reporting on the event was independent of this role.