The 6G standardisation has started, but topics such as spectrum and regulation remain a subject of dispute. These are some of the conclusions that the GSMA published in its latest report on the 6G progress, released in late May.
The GSMA’s May 2026 Progress Report, put together by its 150-member 6G Community Task Force, provides an overview of 3GPP 6G standardisation activities across several TSG SA, TSG RAN, and TSG CT this year.
“The GSMA 6G Community continues to track and synthesise these developments, with two further white papers on 6GSystem architecture and 6G terminals planned for launch at MWC Shanghai 2026,” the document reads.
Clock Ticking for 6G
One of the advancements the document mentions is that the recent meetings have set clear timeframes for the upcoming 3GPP releases.
Architecture work must be substantially complete by March 2028. The technical specifications that device and chipset makers will build from — the ASN.1 and OpenAPI freezes — are targeted for March 2029. That would leave roughly a year for manufacturers to prepare, with the first commercial 6G deployments expected from 2030.
According to the report, the proposed timeline mirrors the 18-month cycle the industry has grown used to, which would give vendors and operators a rhythm they know how to work with.
But not everyone is comfortable with this pace. Players raised concerns about whether a March 2029 freeze gives manufacturers enough runway. Some delegates suggested pushing the specification freeze to June, or convening a dedicated technical session in January of that year.
The Spectrum Compromise
Another practical outcome of the meetings is a definition for the 6G radio channel width.
Chipset vendors argued that supporting uplink bandwidth of 400 MHz would be, in their words, “potentially infeasible” in handsets. Operators pushed back: their future spectrum allocations might offer up to 400 MHz of contiguous frequencies, and they wanted every megahertz used, according to the GSMA report.
In the end, delegates agreed on 400 MHz for the downlink and 200 MHz for the uplink, where the phone bears the cost. The door is left open to revisit uplink capacity in future releases, as chipset technology matures.
“However, as 6G may initially start with uplink limitations, there will still be a significant amount of specification work required, based on lessons learned from 5G, to enhance uplink performance towards downlink levels,” the report reads.
Satellites and the Terrestrial World
The use of terrestrial spectrum for Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) has been under discussion for some time, the document notes. It’s widely accepted that the integration of NTN and terrestrial networks (TN) will be crucial for 6G to fill coverage gaps, enable maritime and aviation connectivity, and ensure resilience in disaster scenarios.
However, delegates were “still far from reaching consensus as the coexistence issue between NTN and terrestrial networks when NTN is using terrestrial network spectrum has not been done in 3GPP.”
“There is a lack of ITU-R coexistence conclusions and regulatory uncertainty remains across various regions,” with decisions expected only after the ITU’s World Radiocommunication Conference in 2027.
On a faster track is satellite voice. Operators have pressed hard for the ability to carry voice calls over geostationary satellites in Release 20 — the generation before full 6G — and standards bodies have been asked to prioritise the work. An ultra-low bitrate voice codec, optimised for the constrained bandwidth of satellite links, is a key piece of that puzzle.
Migrating From 5G to 6G
One of the major concerns for operators is how to move customers from 5G to 6G without disruption, and how the two generations coexist during the transition.
The SA2 architecture study has agreed on frameworks for “single and dual registration” — mechanisms by which a device can maintain simultaneous connections to both a 5G and a 6G network during handover. Multiple migration architectures are on the table, including various forms of dual connectivity between 6G and 5G base stations. The final selection is due by September 2026.
What Comes Next
The June 2026 plenary in Singapore is the next major checkpoint. By then, the industry expects to settle fundamental questions about 6G’s physical-layer design: the waveform that will carry data over the air, the channel coding scheme that protects against errors, and the interface between the radio access network and the core. These are decisions that will shape what chip manufacturers design, what spectrum regulators allocate, and what networks ultimately look like.
