In 2026, the communications industry reached a critical historical inflection point in the generational evolution toward 6G. From a policy perspective, the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan incorporated 6G into the category of future industries for forward-looking layout, while also deploying satellite internet construction within the new infrastructure sector. The 2025 Government Work Report further explicitly proposed “cultivating future industries such as 6G,” marking 6G’s formal elevation to a national strategic industry.
On the technical front, on July 10, the Long March 10B carrier rocket completed the world’s first sea-based networked recovery test. China has officially mastered the complete recovery capability for the first stage of heavy-lift rockets, significantly reducing the cost of single orbital launches. The networking speed of low-Earth orbit satellite constellations has also been substantially improved, laying a solid infrastructure foundation for the 6G integrated space-terrestrial network.
At the operator level, China’s three major operators have all obtained satellite mobile communication operating licenses, and direct-to-cell satellite connectivity has moved from trials to large-scale commercial use. On the standards front, 3GPP Release 20 fully launched 6G technology pre-research, and the timeline for Release 21 has been formally locked in. The curtain has officially risen on 6G’s transition from the “research stage” to the “standardization and implementation stage.”
Against this industrial backdrop, the commercial rollout of U6G (n104 band, 6425–7125 MHz) has become the true “outpost” in the 6G commercialization process.
In April 2026, the United Arab Emirates launched the world’s first commercial U6G network, marking the formal transition of this “golden spectrum” with 700 MHz of continuous ultra-large bandwidth from technical verification to large-scale deployment. The special value of U6G lies in the fact that it is both a core frequency band for 5G-A and a core candidate frequency band for 6G. This “generational reuse” characteristic ensures that today’s network investments will not need to be torn down and rebuilt in a few years, but can instead evolve smoothly to 6G through software upgrades.
