November 8, 2026 — 10:06am

Oulu, Finland: 5G was sold as the network for cloud gaming and driverless cars. More than half the phones in Australian pockets are now on 5G plans, and most of their users use them to stream the footy and send photos of the kids, much as they did on 4G.

Now the industry is preparing to sell the next generation, with the first 6G phones due around 2030.

Matti Latva-aho, founder of the world’s first 6G research program.

Today’s technology has arguably failed to live up to expectations, both for consumers who were promised the future and for telcos banking on lucrative new revenue streams.

The founder of the world’s first 6G research programme, at the University of Oulu in northern Finland, has a one-line verdict on what 5G delivered: “For consumers, data transfer speeds are somewhat faster than in 4G, but that’s kind of it,” Matti Latva-aho says.

At the same university, radio engineering professor Marko Leinonen showed us an early 5G radio head built for 28-gigahertz spectrum.…