In the race to roll out 6G, the UK and Europe are caught between technology’s superpowers

Even as the rollout of the 5G network continues around the world, the race to design and build the sixth generation of mobile infrastructure has begun.

The new, global 6G network represents a fundamental shift in what a mobile network is built to do. Where previous generations were designed primarily as pipelines for transporting data between devices, 6G’s ambition is to treat the network as an intelligent system.

This means it is designed to be “AI native”, with artificial intelligence at its core from the outset. An example is integrated sensing and communication: radio waves that also act like radar sensors, detecting movement without the need for cameras. Real-time data collection and connectivity will be another important application in the management of largely automated urban environments.

The problem is that someone has to create 6G first – and pick up the bill. And this next technological cycle is inheriting many unresolved issues from 5G, in a technology landscape fractured by geopolitical tensions and public scepticism.

The development of 6G relies on a global conversation shaped by institutions such as the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a global collaboration of telecommunications standards organisations. Together, they have established the official 6G rollout plan, with the aim of creating the first technical standards by 2028. This would lay the groundwork for the release of the first 6G commercial networks around 2030.

As telecommunications shift from physical hardware to cloud software and AI, traditional mobile operators will find themselves reliant on the tech giants – in particular, massive cloud providers such as Amazon and Google – for storage capacity and data processing they cannot build themselves.

Yet this convergence raises some important questions. Can national infrastructure remain sovereign and secure when running on foreign cloud platforms? And how easily can governments cooperate across borders when the digital infrastructure underpinning their societies is controlled by a handful of private corporations?

A new 6G alliance

In late July, the US government announced a new 24-country 6G coalition, including the UK and 15 other European countries, India, Canada, Australia, Korea and Japan. Its stated purpose is to counteract the Chinese digital infrastructure industry under the banner of “6G leadership and security”.

This announcement takes the politics of 6G to a new geopolitical scale. This US-led bloc says it envisages 6G as the engine and heart of “technological competitiveness, economic prosperity and national security”.

The allies have only one real competitor, China, and one important lesson: not to repeat the strategic mistakes made during 5G’s development.

These were, primarily, the lack of a coordinated industrial policy, and underestimation of the complexity of the agreements that underpin this global network. Such missteps gave China a headstart on hardware, enabling its companies to dominate 5G patents and be the first to market a lot of 5G equipment.

The newly established 6G coalition has already set goals to solidify connections among governments, industry and academia within a few months. These links should evolve into a comprehensive strategy to support a secure global 6G network for the long term.

A key moment in this story will come in October 2027 – in Shanghai, China, of all places. At the ITU’s World Radiocommunication Conference 2027, governments will negotiate on how to allocate the multi-layered radio wave spectrum required for 6G. This should lay the foundations for infrastructure standardisation the following year.

But for the UK and Europe, this represents a serious dilemma. They do not possess the industrial scale to fully replace Chinese infrastructure. But they also fear escalating dependence on US big tech with the advent of 6G.

Europe’s dilemma

The EU’s flagship initiative Hexa-X and successor Hexa-X-II, funded by Nordic mobile giants Nokia and Ericsson, was conceived as a blueprint for a European 6G to tackle these issues. The primary aim is to produce technologies that can operate autonomously, outside both US and Chinese hardware and software.

In the UK, the recent dissolution of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and migration of the digital infrastructure portfolio to the new Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, created weeks of uncertainty across the UK tech sector. This came at a crucial time for determining what the future looks like for 6G research and development nationally.

Local UK mobile operators are still decommissioning legacy 2G and 3G infrastructure, and are close to decommissioning traditional telephone landlines. They are also striving to reap the benefits of the 5G network. It is not easy for the UK to assert leadership in mobile networks abroad while wrestling with all these issues at home.

Right now, the core values of the 6G technology that will define the next decade are already being decided. Future AI-native networks will come with a higher energy bill, so one key challenge is how to minimise energy consumption and maintain a path towards a sustainable technology.

Deploying new infrastructure also risks reigniting the intense public anxieties seen during the 5G rollout. Fears about electromagnetic radiation and surveillance quickly escalated into conspiracy theories linked to a history of health concerns about wireless technologies, and the tendency to exclude citizens from infrastructure design and deployment.

Getting 6G right demands a broader approach to building this new global network – as most participants agree. Including citizens in this process could be a powerful tool, demonstrating from the outset that infrastructure is never just a technical or engineering endeavour. It is also a political and social issue that will shape all our futures.

Natalia Orrego Tapia receives funding from the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.