On September 7, 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) unveiled the <15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Information and Communications Industry>, marking a historic moment where "the timely initiation of 6G commercialization" was explicitly included in a national industry blueprint, igniting excitement across the sector. The plan outlines a clear roadmap: accelerating research and development (R&D) in core 6G technologies, advancing the creation of 6G base stations and core network infrastructure, and fostering the development of 6G-enabled smartphones. This is no longer a vision confined to laboratories but a concrete action plan enshrined in national policy. 6G, a concept once relegated to academic papers and futuristic videos, is now transitioning from science fiction to reality at a pace that outstrips most expectations.

01. Policy Acceleration: Propelling 6G into the Fast Lane

If 6G was previously navigating uncharted waters in an exploratory phase, the policy landscape has now become unequivocally clear as we enter the <15th Five-Year Plan> era. On August 26, at a press conference themed "Launching the <15th Five-Year Plan>" organized by the State Council Information Office, Liu Yulin, Director-General of the MIIT's Department of Information and Communications Development, declared 6G a top priority for the period. The MIIT is committed to expediting core 6G technology R&D, conducting rigorous technical trials and standardization efforts, and promoting industrial maturity and ecosystem construction to lay the groundwork for 6G commercialization.

In this newly minted industry plan, 6G has been elevated to a strategic pinnacle, demanding breakthroughs not only in key network technologies such as native AI integration, sensing-computing-intelligence convergence, and token-based communication but also in core wireless communication domains like ultra-large-scale antennas, integrated sensing and communication, and satellite-terrestrial integration. Simultaneously, the plan advocates leveraging the IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group to establish a comprehensive testing and verification platform that caters to the full spectrum of 6G technology industry needs, facilitating joint R&D and interoperability testing among domestic and international stakeholders. From technological innovation to standard formulation, from equipment development to ecosystem cultivation, a well-defined path to industrialization has been charted. The industry chain has responded with alacrity. The plan envisions the creation of 6G smartphones and operating systems based on open-source platforms like HarmonyOS, enabling intelligent agent communication and environmental sensing. It also promotes the collaborative optimization of new terminals such as smart glasses, smart home hubs, and brain-computer interfaces with communication networks. This signifies that 6G-era terminals will transcend smartphones, embracing a vast ecosystem of wearables, smart home devices, and in-vehicle terminals.

02. Technological Breakthroughs: China's Accelerated Pace

Behind these policy initiatives lies the formidable strength of technological advancement. Over the past year, China has achieved a series of milestones in key 6G technologies, paving the way for industrialization. In June 2026, the China Telecom Research Institute, in collaboration with Shanghai Telecom, Tsinghua University, and Shanghai Qingshen Technology, successfully completed a technical trial of high-orbit, medium-orbit, and ground-based collaborative networking for 6G, leveraging the real-star access verification capabilities of a cloud-network integration pilot platform. The results were showcased at MWC Shanghai 2026. The trial utilized the 36,000-kilometer high-orbit "AsiaSat 9" satellite and the 20,000-kilometer medium-orbit "Smart SkyNet 01" satellite to establish a multi-orbit collaborative communication link. Notably, the cross-orbit handover delay was dramatically reduced from 363 milliseconds to 26 milliseconds using a time-condition-based handover scheme, ensuring seamless and stable connectivity in remote regions without interruptions due to orbital coverage gaps.

This achievement represents an early realization of 6G's vision of "integrated space-terrestrial communication." At the hardware level, in May of the same year, the National Information Optoelectronics Innovation Center unveiled its independently developed ultra-broadband photonic chip, setting a global benchmark with a bandwidth of 250 GHz. Leveraging this chip, the single-channel transmission rate for wired fiber optics exceeded 512 Gbps, while the wireless terahertz single-channel rate reached 400 Gbps. This diminutive chip, measuring less than 1 centimeter in length, is providing the foundational hardware support for 6G's "air-space-terrestrial integrated" communication. The field of integrated sensing, computing, and intelligence has also witnessed a surge of successes.

The 6G Network Collaborative Sensing Platform, jointly developed by the Zhongguancun Pan-Linked Mobile Communications Technology Innovation and Application Research Institute and China Mobile, employs an endogenous fusion architecture and integrated sensing-communication design. With less than 1% overhead in sensing resources, it achieved an 80% improvement in outdoor test positioning accuracy and enables high-precision tracking of moving targets' continuous trajectories. This implies that 6G networks will not only transmit data but also perceive the world around them, sensing environmental changes, identifying object movements, and supporting scenarios such as low-altitude economies and vehicle-road coordination.

03. Global Competition: The Race for Dominance

The 6G race has never been a solitary endeavor. From the United States forging partnerships with Swedish telecom giants to accelerate 6G experiments to South Korea's "Hyper-AI Network" strategy aimed at securing global market share, major economies worldwide perceive 6G as the ultimate battleground for technological supremacy in the coming decade.

Industry analysts observe that the global 6G industry has evolved into a development pattern characterized by "China and the U.S. leading, Europe steadily advancing, Japan and South Korea collaborating, and India actively positioning itself." In this competitive landscape, China's first-mover advantage is substantial. According to a patent survey of nine core 6G technologies conducted by Nikkei Asia and Japan's Network Innovation Research Institute, China leads globally with 40.3% of patent applications, followed by the U.S. at approximately 35.2%, Japan at 9.9%, Europe at 8.9%, and South Korea at 4.2%. Data from the National Intellectual Property Administration further reveals that global 6G-related patent applications have surpassed 38,000, with Chinese applicants contributing over 13,000, nearly 90% of which are invention patents.

The pace of standard development is equally unambiguous—3GPP initiated research on 6G international standards in 2025, with the first version of 6G international standards expected to be finalized by 2029 and commercial readiness by 2030. China is transitioning from "keeping pace" in 5G to "leading the charge" in 6G.

04. The Trillion-Dollar Market Vision

Market enthusiasm for 6G is equally palpable. While projections from various market research firms vary in methodology, they all converge on a common theme—explosive growth. Mordor Intelligence data indicates that the global 6G market was valued at approximately $260 million in 2025, projected to skyrocket to $3.88 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 72.6%. Meanwhile, The Business Research Company forecasts the global 6G market will expand from $9.48 billion in 2025 to $34.04 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of about 29%.

From a Chinese market perspective, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology projects that the scale of China's 6G core industry will grow at an average annual rate of 35%, reaching 800 billion yuan by 2030. Following large-scale commercial deployment by 2035, it is anticipated to spawn a trillion-yuan-level 6G industry and application market. Behind these figures lie tangible application scenarios. The IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group predicts that by around 2030, 6G will support emerging business scenarios such as intelligent agent interaction, communication-awareness, and inclusive intelligence. By 2040, the number of 6G terminal connections is expected to reach 121.6 billion, over 30 times the 3.4 billion in 2022. In factories, tens of thousands of devices could operate collaboratively through "sensing-computing-communication" integration; on roads, vehicle-road-cloud coordinated autonomous driving will become a ubiquitous reality; and in operating rooms, doctors could precisely control robots for remote surgeries. 6G will evolve from 5G's "Internet of Everything" to an "Intelligent Internet of Everything."

05. Challenges Persist, but the Future is Bright

Of course, the journey to 6G is not devoid of challenges. While terahertz spectrum offers massive bandwidth, it also introduces formidable obstacles such as propagation loss and beam misalignment. The escalation in antenna scale and bandwidth implies a significant surge in energy consumption. Challenges like coordinated deployment of high-, mid-, and low-band spectrum resources, deep integration of communication and AI, and seamless interconnection between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks remain daunting. Operators, having experienced the financial strain of large-scale 5G investments, are adopting a more cautious stance towards capital expenditures. Yet, it is precisely these challenges that render the 6G race so captivating. From top-tier policy design to continuous technological breakthroughs, from enthusiastic industry responses to forward-looking capital deployments, 6G is forging an unprecedented innovative synergy. As the industry consensus affirms: 6G has entered a pivotal phase of transitioning from laboratory concepts to industrial implementation.

When the MIIT's plan explicitly mentions "6G smartphones" and "6G base stations" in official documents, when China Telecom's trial reduces cross-orbit handover delay from 363 milliseconds to 26 milliseconds, and when a photonic chip measuring less than 1 centimeter supports a 512 Gbps transmission rate—6G is no longer a distant "next generation" but an emerging "current generation." While it may still be a few years before it reaches everyone's pockets, its footsteps are already resonating loudly. - End -