Not likely — but Wi-Fi offload might
The 6G network is coming, and the telecommunications industry has no shortage of ambition: higher performance, “implantables,” tighter integration with AI, and increasingly seamless connectivity across environments.
And yet, one of the most persistent challenges in mobile networks remains unresolved: reliable indoor connectivity.
This isn’t a new problem, nor is it a marginal one. Its persistence raises a useful question: why does indoor connectivity remain so stubbornly difficult to solve, even as network generations advance? The answer has less to do with radio technology itself and more to do with the economic and organizational structures that shape how networks are built, funded, and maintained.
Samian Kaur, vice president of wireless network engineering at Comcast, recently called out the lack of ambition around indoor reliability in current 6G thinking, noting that once baseline performance is achieved, reliability and coverage matter more to users than incremental gains in peak speed. Most mobile data originates indoors, and most moments of failure (dropped calls, stalled applications, unavailable emergency services) also occur there. These are not abstract metrics; they are binary experiences that shape trust in networks.
Historically, networks have been optimized around what is easiest to measure, standardize, and market. Peak speeds are visible, comparable, and headline-friendly. Reliability, by contrast, is contextual, situational, and harder to quantify. Optimization tends to follow incentives, and incentives tend to follow what can be cleanly measured and attributed. Yes, that focus has driven generations of innovation in speed and coverage breadth. But it’s also revealed the limitations of those metrics when it comes to delivering reliable, always-on connectivity indoors, where users spend most of their time.
Indoor environments sit at the intersection of multiple stakeholders (mobile operators, neutral hosts, enterprises, landlords, municipalities, and device makers without fitting neatly into any single ownership or accountability framework. Traditional approaches such as distributed antenna systems (DAS) were designed for a different era of networks and business assumptions. As those systems age and underlying technologies are phased out, responsibility for upkeep becomes diffuse. Investment slows, not because the need has diminished, but because no single party clearly owns the outcome, while incentives continue to favor short-term, easily measured performance gains over durable solutions to a real-world connectivity problem that’s persisted for years.
In that sense, indoor connectivity has become something of a structural orphan. It is essential to user experience, public safety, and regulatory compliance, yet poorly aligned with existing drivers of capital expenditure for wireless infrastructure. While everyone benefits from improved indoor coverage, no one is eager to absorb the full cost of delivering it. The result is a familiar cycle of partial solutions like outside-in coverage, selective upgrades, and Wi-Fi offload filling gaps, none of which fully resolve the underlying reliability problem. This is precisely the gap Wi-Fi offload projects seek to address, by treating it not as a stopgap, but as a federated layer of indoor connectivity aligned to real-world usage, shared economics, and measurable performance.
The cost of this deferral extends beyond consumer frustration. Regulatory mandates increasingly require precise indoor positioning for emergency services. New classes of applications, including always-on AI assistants and location-aware services, assume persistent connectivity across indoor and outdoor environments. Buildings themselves outlast multiple network generations, while the infrastructure inside them often does not. Each generational reset compounds technical and economic debt rather than clearing it.
This is where the idea of “federated” approaches to connectivity becomes useful, not as a specific solution, but as a lens. Federation already works well within domains. Cellular standards bodies have succeeded in coordinating global interoperability at a massive scale. Wi-Fi ecosystems have developed their own mechanisms for roaming, trust, and shared access across independently owned networks. In both cases, federation enables participation without requiring a single owner of the entire system.
Indoor connectivity, however, does not belong cleanly to either domain. It lives in the seams between them — where ownership is fragmented, access technologies mix, and accountability is unclear. Buildings are not exclusively cellular networks or Wi-Fi networks; they are environments where multiple systems overlap. That overlap is where federation breaks down today, to the point that even indoor coverage teams working for the same company compete for contracts at the same locations out of self-interest rather than to offer the best customer user experience.
If the persistent indoor gap is not primarily a failure of technology, then it is a failure of alignment. The industry has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to push the boundaries of radio performance. What it has struggled to do is design durable economic and organizational models for environments where responsibility is inherently shared.
As 6G ambitions continue to take shape, indoor connectivity keeps resurfacing, not because it is newly important, but because it has never been structurally resolved. The question facing the industry may not be whether it can federate, but whether it can federate across the seams that indoor environments expose, technical, organizational, and economic at once.
