What you should know:
- The convergence of advanced wireless, AI, XR and computing technologies is transforming how we interact with the digital world, enabling more intuitive and immersive experiences and services.
- 6G is the wireless innovation platform for the next decade and beyond, and it’s being designed to meet evolving connectivity and computing needs, aimed to deliver unparalleled user experiences.
- We’re at the forefront of 6G innovation, driving continuous advancements and industry-wide progress. Our goal is to enable the next-generation of user experiences and services at scale.
At Qualcomm Technologies, we’re leading the charge in cutting-edge innovations. Whether it’s wireless technologies for ubiquitous connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI) for the new user interface (UI), or extended reality (XR) for immersive experiences, we’re driving critical technology advances to enable intelligent computing everywhere.
Wireless connectivity is a cornerstone of this future. Today, we’re focused on unlocking the full potential of 5G by driving the ecosystem toward 5G Advanced. At the same time, we’re pioneering 6G — the next-generation wireless platform that will be the innovation foundation for the next decade and beyond. We’re excited to be leading the global mobile ecosystem in establishing a global 6G technology standard with other leaders in 3GPP.
A transformation in user experience will create new opportunities
The rise of agentic AI is reshaping user behavior — from traditional, app-based, user-initiated content consumption to seamless, context-aware interactions across a network of AI-enabled devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, glasses and earbuds. These devices will increasingly operate in concert, delivering more natural and intuitive user experiences.
This transformation is also expected to alter network traffic patterns. While networks are currently dominated by downlink-heavy traffic, we now anticipate a growing share of uplink traffic, driven by persistent AI agents that continuously monitor and respond to user context, as well as use cases like “see-what-I-see” streaming.
The proliferation of AI agents will also increase the demand for robust connectivity across a diverse set of devices beyond smartphones, unlocking new opportunities for device subscriptions and innovative services. On-device AI will play a central role in enabling real-time, context-aware intelligence. When this intelligence is shared with the network, mobile operators can dynamically optimize network efficiency and user experience, while offering personalized, tiered service pricing.
We envision that 6G and AI will jointly enable and scale three broad categories of experiences and services. In this blog post, I will explore that vision in depth and highlight the enabling technologies that will drive the transformation of user experiences in 2030 and beyond.
Delivering agentic AI and extended reality experiences
Delivering next-generation experiences will dramatically increase the demand for both wireless connectivity and computational resources. For example, a personal assistant that provides real-time responses to video and audio queries could consume over 40GB of data per month, even with modest uplink and downlink speeds of 2.5 Mbps and just 40 minutes of daily usage. Similarly, a “see-what-I-see” use case — streaming live data from smart glasses — can generate more than 50GB of mostly uplink traffic per month, with only 20 minutes of daily use. Data intensive use cases like real-time graphics rendering can saturate current 5G network capacity with just a few active users, underscoring the need for additional 6G spectrum.
To support these wide-area services at scale, new paradigms in computing and connectivity are essential. Our recent research focuses on two key architectural areas to address this challenge.
Collaborative communication enables smartphones, smart glasses, watches and other peripherals to work seamlessly with the network, allowing for efficient and resilient traffic routing that meets system requirements. For example, traffic splitting can reduce the load on small-form-factor devices, helping manage thermal constraints, while path diversity can mitigate issues such as signal blocking.
Distributed computing further enhances performance by offloading computationally intensive tasks — like graphics rendering, perception and generative AI — to both the network and devices. This approach not only extends device battery life but also improves user experience by enabling opportunistic access to larger models. For instance, real-time rendering can leverage edge servers when cellular connectivity offers good throughput and falls back to on-device processing when network throughput is limited.
Our simulations and over-the-air testing demonstrate significant gains in application coverage and system capacity, and we continue to collaborate with industry leaders to showcase its benefits.
Enabling intelligent context-aware communications
Another key area of our 6G research focuses on enhancing user experiences by leveraging on-device contextual information — including application requirements, user intent, and the operating conditions of wireless networks and devices. By gaining deeper insight into the context of users, applications and devices, the end-to-end 6G system can more effectively optimize both performance and efficiency.
6G is envisioned to be AI-native, enabling devices and the radio access network (RAN) to collaborate across all protocol layers through predictive and adaptive intelligence. For example, a device using on-device AI might infer that the user is engaged in a low-latency application, has less than 30% battery life and is experiencing suboptimal performance. This contextual information can be shared with the network, which can then respond by adjusting network parameters, QoS settings, resource allocation and compute offload support to meet the specific needs of the use case.
Our over-the-air performance tests of AI-native protocols on low-latency applications such as cloud gaming have demonstrated significant improvements in user experience.
Introducing AI-enhanced network efficiency and new services
Beyond fueling next-generation user experiences, 6G will also bring innovations that enhance wireless system efficiency and enable new network operator services. These include digital twins, integrated wireless sensing and compute services. Here is a closer look at them.
Digital twin is a virtual replica of the real-world network that accurately mirrors its functionality, including end-user radio conditions and performance metrics. It can ingest real-time data from network-connected devices — such as RF and sensing inputs, telemetry and 3D maps — to stay synchronized with its physical counterpart. By continuously updating with live data, a digital twin enables operators to identify optimal strategies for enhancing and optimizing network systems, including the rollout of new services. For example, a network digital twin can support energy savings by dynamically powering down carriers or cells based on real-time usage patterns. It can also improve cell-edge performance through smarter mobility management and beamforming. A network digital twin empowers operators to meet user demand more effectively and unlock new efficiencies, as shown in our MWC’25 demo.
Wireless sensing is emerging as a powerful technology that opens new service opportunities for network operators. By leveraging radio frequency signals to interpret the surrounding environment — and augmenting this with vision and other sensor-based technologies — operators can enable new use cases like drone detection and real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure, leveraging on existing network deployments.
Compute services is another unique opportunity for operators, as a diverse range of devices — including IoT devices, smart glasses, watches, PCs and robots — integrate AI agents and rely on network connectivity to access larger models. Operators can enable secure and privacy-preserving workload offloading that also helps extend device battery life.
By enabling tiered inferencing across devices and the network, powered by context-aware intelligence, operators can deliver a low-latency, responsive network that significantly enhances the end-user experience.
What’s next?
We hope this gives you a clearer view of the exciting advancements we’re making to elevate user experiences and services through 6G and AI. As we’ve explored, 6G is not just about faster speeds and lower latency — it represents new paradigms, fusing compute, AI and connectivity to deliver exceptional experiences and real value across the ecosystem, from end users and mobile operators to society at large.
We’re energized by the future of 6G and look forward to sharing more of our ideas and progress as this journey unfolds. For further details on our work, please explore the links below.
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