Telecommunication operators are in no rush to deploy 6G technology, bucking what has been a historical trend of looking toward the next “G” roughly five years into each upgrade cycle, and perhaps learning from past investment cycle mistakes.

This sentiment was noted by several attendees at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 event in Barcelona, who highlighted the dearth of operator-led 6G conversations at the mega-gathering.

Michael Soper, senior analyst at Technology Business Research, during a post-MWC 2025 webinar stated service providers are “not particularly interested in speaking about 6G at this point,” adding that there was less 6G talk at this year’s event than at last year’s show.

Dan Hays, a partner at consulting firm PwC, concurred, noting this lack of 6G conversation was unlike past upgrade iterations.

“By my math, we're about six years into the 5G cycle, and at this point in most of the previous generations, the leading [mobile network operators] would have been issuing RFPs asking for proposals from network vendors for the next generation so that they could start to secure contracts and start to plan out their builds,” Hays said. “For 6G, that's not happening at this point, which is putting further pressure on a lot of the vendors, whether it's network equipment vendors, tower companies, construction companies, all of which like to see the light at the end of the tunnel in the next generation, but right now it's it hasn't materialized just yet.”

Big investments but little return Operators can be excused for not pressing the point. Many are still absorbing the billions of dollars they spent on spectrum and equipment for their 5G networks, which have so far not provided the expected return on that investment.

According to Dell’Oro Group, operators invested more than $2 trillion in capex between 2010 and 2023. That time span included the full 4G lifecycle and nearly half-a-decade of 5G investments.

However, they have so-far received little return on that investment.

“Everybody that I've talked to … had to give a level set on 6G, and the level set is we've done 4G, we didn't get the return that we needed. We did 5G hoping that it was going to be different, and it wasn't. Why would 6G be any different?,” Chris Antlitz, principal analyst at TBR added during the analyst firm’s webinar.

Antlitz further explained that operators are not exactly flush with disposable income to throw at potential rather than investments with a more direct financial return.

“Even if there's a will to do it, there might not be the capital available to support it,” Antlitz said. “There is a real level set among the telcos around how would we even do 6G, where would it make sense? We have to be much more tactical with it this time around. We need to be very careful and cognizant of ROI before we spend any significant amount of money on it.”

Instead, operators have been investing into either expanding their own fiber builds or spending billions on acquiring fiber-based broadband operators.

This could be bad news for the traditional wireless vendor community, especially those Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors that have come to rely on this regular “G” investment cycle. Large players like Ericsson and Nokia have attempted to maintain some of that traditional momentum, including early trials with some operators, but at most those vendors are in the near term going to rely on mid-G investments.

6G: is it when, not if? That’s not to say that 6G does not have a future. Dell’Oro Group is forecasting that operators will spend $30 billion on 6G RAN equipment by 2033.

TBR’s Antlitz said that 6G will likely lean heavily on non-traditional outlets like enterprise adoption of 6-based private network deployments.

“I think that it's actually going to be enterprises that lead with 6G because they may have use cases that justify investment,” Antlitz said. “So I would be looking at that as a potential catalyst for some 6G spend. It may not be led by the telcos for the 6G, it may be we see 6G featuring prominently in private network solutions. That's a very real possibility.”