Picture a family reunion where every generation shows up. Grandpa 1G (1980s) could only make voice calls, on a phone the size of a brick, with the battery life of a mayfly. Uncle 2G (1990s) learned to text. Aunt 3G (2000s) brought the mobile internet, slow, but revolutionary. Cousin 4G (2010s) made video streaming and app stores normal; it's why ride-sharing and social video exist. Sibling 5G (2020s) added serious speed, low delay, and the ability to connect factories, cars, and millions of gadgets.

Now the family is expecting a new arrival around 2030: 6G. And like every new kid, it's expected to do everything the older ones did, plus things they never dreamed of: sensing the physical world, running AI natively, and connecting everywhere, including from space.

Marketing teams would love to slap '6G' on anything. Fortunately, there's a referee: the ITU, a United Nations agency. The ITU publishes a framework defining what the next generation must achieve. For 6G, that framework is called IMT-2030 (published in 2023). Think of the ITU as the Olympic committee: it doesn't train the athletes, but it defines the events and the qualifying standards.

The 'athletes' are trained by 3GPP, a global partnership of carriers, phone makers, and chip companies. 3GPP writes the excruciatingly detailed engineering recipes (standards) so that a phone built in one country works on a network in another. No 3GPP, no roaming, no interoperability, just chaos.

The ITU's 6G vision is usually depicted as a hexagon: six capability areas. Three are upgrades of 5G's promises, three are genuinely new:

• Immersive communication (upgraded): richer XR, holograms, telepresence; Module 3.
• Hyper-reliable, low-latency communication (upgraded): remote surgery-grade dependability.
• Massive communication (upgraded): billions of devices, including battery-free ones; Module 4.
• Ubiquitous connectivity (new): coverage everywhere, including via satellites; Module 8.
• AI and communication (new): AI built into the network's DNA; Module 7.
• Integrated sensing and communication (new): the network as radar; Module 2.

Wrapped around the hexagon are cross-cutting goals every 6G design must respect: sustainability, security, resilience, privacy, and connecting the unconnected; Module 9 covers the first two in depth.

3GPP publishes standards like a train that departs on schedule, batch by batch. Each batch is a Release. Here's the stretch that matters for 6G:

• Rel-18 & Rel-19 (2024–2026): branded '5G-Advanced', 5G's final glow-up, plus early 6G homework (like ISAC channel studies).
• Rel-20 (2025–2027): the formal 6G study phase; committees explore what's feasible before promising anything.
• Rel-21 (~2027–2029): the first 6G specifications: the actual buildable recipes.
• ~2030: commercial 6G launches, aligned with the ITU's IMT-2030 timeline.

Within 3GPP, work is divided among Technical Specification Groups (TSGs) and their Working Groups (WGs): think of them as departments and teams. When you hear an expert say 'RAN1 is debating the waveform,' they mean a specific working group arguing about a specific recipe ingredient.