Editor’s note: Qualcomm provided travel, lodging and other accomodations associated with Snapdragon Summit.
MAUI—Qualcomm CEO Cristiano laid out his vision of the near-term future today in a keynote speech at the Snapdragon Summit. Considering the idea of AI-imbued personal devices creating an “ecosystem of you,” and discussing how the edge-cloud continuum will create new agent-centric experiences, he highlighted the criticality of connectivity in that emerging paradigm.
Amon described a “dynamic, adaptive network of intelligence…That’s incredibly exciting.” So is this next part: he said 6G will provide connectivity and perception (based on highly-contextual sensor data, eg your constellation of personal devices) and that, “It’s sooner than you think…We are ready to have pre-commercial devices with 6G as early as 2028.”
Qualcomm is a key player in the cellular standardization process that plays out within 3GPP, as well as the fundamental research that informs the standard-setting process. This gives the company a huge amount of credibility when it comes to calling its shots — and appending specific timelines to those shots.
3GPP kicked off 6G study earlier this year; Release 20, covering 5G-Advanced capabilities and 6G study items, is tracking for a functional freeze in early 2027. Release 21 will contain the first 6G standards and it doesn’t currenlty have a firm timeline. That said, the consensus is to expect standards-based commercial 6G around 2030.
Also of note, Qualcomm is a member of the recently established Verizon 6G Innovation Forum alongside Ericsson, Meta, Nokia and Samsung. Read more about that from my interview with Verizon CTO Yago Tenorio, but the takeaway is that Tenorio stressed that 6G has to come to market with meaningful, new use cases.
Also note here Meta’s involvement — Qualcomm is supporting Meta’s ongoing development of connected, smart glasses. To bring that thought together, one of the use cases Amon spotlighted in his keynote was around glasses as an input/output mechanism for an agentic system capable of basically running your life — calendar management, personalized recommendations (and actioning those recommendations; booking a restaurant reservation, for example), sending emails, etc…
Amon said, “For the age of AI, connectivity is evolving so it actually can deliver on this vision.” He said 6G is “designed to be the connection between the cloud and the edge devices.”
Agent-centric experiences was one of six trends Amon tied together during his keynote. The others were “AI is the new UI” — an idea the company seeded at this event last year — fundamental shifts in compute architectures (see earlier comments on the edge-cloud continuum), the hybridization of AI models, the increasing relevancy of edge data, and future, perceptive 6G networks. More on all of that as the event continues.
Check out this report I recently published for a deep dive into 6G spectrum, standards, use cases and more. And read this profile of Qualcomm Vice President of Technical Standards Juan Montojo-Bennassar to get an understanding of what the work of standardization actually takes. Spoiler alert: “Innovaiton doesn’t come for free.”
