Through ecosystem alignment, early system validation and a focus on an AI-native approach, Qualcomm is pushing 6G toward rollout in 2029
As it has with previous generations of cellular, Qualcomm is working toward 6G commercialization through coordinated progress across spectrum, standards, infrastructure and ecosystem development. That message was highlighted at Mobile World Congress when the company announced a broad industry coalition focused on a milestone-driven 6G roadmap, including pre-commercial demonstrations in 2028 and initial global commercial rollout from 2029 onward.
In an interview with RCR Wireless News, Qualcomm Senior Director of Technology Ozge Koymen described 2026 as a key inflection point: “This is an exciting year for us.” He said Qualcomm is already active internally with both 6G gNodeB and UE development while also aligning with major infrastructure partners. That work includes Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, and Koymen framed it as similar to Qualcomm’s early 5G collaboration model. “This is the world’s first 6G RF alignment with all the partners…We’re in all the partner labs kicking off our engagements…as we head towards commercialization.”
That partner work is starting at the foundational layer. Koymen said, “We’re starting from the basics. This is really a ground up type of approach.” That includes alignment around spectrum, numerology and channel bandwidths, with Qualcomm and its partners looking at frequencies “from upper 6 GHz all the way to 8.4 GHz” while also syncing with 3GPP priorities. The goal is steady progression from early study items to work items, then into increasingly complete over-the-air system validation.
As Koymen put it, “We’re building up every year, actually every month…You’ll see us build up and get study item[s] aligned, get work item[s] aligned, we’ll go to a full-stack OTA system and have the capability to do some field trials, field testing, all before commercialization.”
Qualcomm is pairing standardization work and partner alignment with a broader infrastructure story around the evolution toward AI-native 6G. On the 6G infrastructure front, the company sees 6G requiring a new class of power-optimized telco servers and radio gear designed for distributed AI workloads, particularly in brownfield operator environments constrained by existing site, cabinet and power considerations. Qualcomm is also emphasizing Giga-MIMO for emerging 6 GHz to 8 GHz spectrum, alongside heterogeneous compute spanning CPUs, NPUs and RAN accelerators.
Koymen said Qualcomm is already validating that future with internal prototype systems that include both base stations and UE. The test system currently supports a 400 megahertz channel bandwidth SBFD setup with 300 megahertz downlink and 100 megahertz uplink, supporting features like probabilistic shaping modulation along with higher-order constellations. Some of those features are being evaluated early within Qualcomm and discussed in 3GPP and partner engagements, giving the company a way to connect research, ecosystem development and productization.
The commercial payoff, in Qualcomm’s view, comes when those technical building blocks translate into scalable user experience gains. Koymen said the longer-term aim is an air interface that improves “not only the capacity and the throughput but also the coverage, especially uplink…and efficiency.” Looking toward the 2028 to 2029 window, he added: “We’ll see how those two can support each other — how those user experiences can now be enjoyed by everyone, deployed in the system efficiently and at scale with the 6G platform that we’ve developed.”
