Ericsson maps out the road to fully commercial 6G networks at MWC 2026

Commercial 6G networks will arrive “towards the end of this decade”, Ericsson’s head of 6G operations said on the opening day of MWC 2026. And that will see us move from 5G networks that can carry intelligence, to 6G networks that are intelligence.

Speaking on stage at Qualcomm’s EUnion and The Rise of Personal AI event, Marie Hogan explained that the current increase in AI models, data centers, distributed autonomous agents in cars, wearables, and robots has placed a “dramatic impact” on mobile networks.

In particular, the rise of AI agents and intelligent AI-native devices has placed a lot of demand on mobile infrastructure.

“It is not enough just to add more compute; we need more advanced networks,” Hogan explained during her speech. “We need to add more uplink – a lot more uplink, in fact”.

It’s no secret that we are living in a data and information era, and with 5G advanced technology we are starting to see networks that are AI-powered.

For example, last month, Ericsson launched AI-capable radios, built with its own silicon and neural network accelerators as part of a wider AI-first approach.

These remote radios are engineered specifically for higher downlink efficiency and uplink performance.

“We continue to build hardware that’s planning for and enabling AI, but we also are starting to add intelligence to selected functions in the networks,” Hogan said.

“And this is a stepping stone towards the fully capable AI networks that we will see when it comes to 6G. Towards the end of this decade, we will see commercial 6G networks.”

The difference with AI-native 6G

There is a fundamental difference in how networks will be built; with 6G or AI-native 6G, as Hogan called it, AI will be built as a fundamental principle of the network for the first time.

“We will see AI embedded in every layer of the network, from the physical layer all the way up to autonomous control, all the way up to service orchestration, for example,” Hogan said.

“We will see a network architecture that will bring together compute, connectivity, and sensing. What we’re aiming to do is to build architecture is both intelligent and enabling the fabric of the world around us.”

Essentially, the idea is to have an intelligent network with 6G that can interact and understand the world around us, so that it can optimize accordingly.

“As we move from 5G, you can see it as a network with 5G that can carry intelligence to a network in 6G that actually is intelligent,” Hogan said.

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Make sure to follow ITPro on Google News to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, and reviews.

You can also follow ITPro on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and BlueSky.