Author: Soda, Original Article
On July 27 local time, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that the United States, along with 24 other countries including the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, and France, will jointly launch a global cooperation initiative to accelerate the development of secure 6G wireless networks and prepare for future 6G commercial deployment.
The participating parties have reached a consensus: future 6G networks must be open, interoperable, secure, resilient, and AI-enabled. The countries will also establish communication channels to share technical information, coordinate policies, and strengthen cooperation in areas such as standards, R&D, market access, security, and spectrum.
In terms of timing, this initiative was launched quite early. Currently, 6G is still in the stage of forming standards and technical solutions. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has established the IMT-2030 framework, and the 6G standardization work of 3GPP has just officially begun, but it will still take several years before the complete standards are frozen and large-scale commercialization is achieved. According to general industry planning, 6G is expected to enter the commercialization stage around 2030.
So, why is the U.S. so eager to form a coalition right now?
If we carefully examine a few details of this initiative: the initiator is a government department, not an industry consortium; the intervention time is before the 6G standards are finalized, not right before products hit the market; and the scope of cooperation extends beyond the laboratory straight to market access. One will realize that this is not an ordinary R&D collaboration, but a premeditated strategic layout of rules.
More Than an R&D Alliance: A Systematic Rehearsal of Rules
Over the past few decades, the mobile communication industry has basically followed a single path: enterprises invest in R&D and submit proposals to standards organizations such as 3GPP; after the standards are frozen, the industry chain follows up; operators complete commercial deployment; and the government plays more of a regulatory role.
This time, the U.S. has chosen to break away from this path.
The reason is not hard to understand. In the traditional communication equipment sector, the U.S. lacks a domestic system-level vendor capable of competing head-to-head with Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia. This shortcoming was fully exposed during the 5G era. Moving into 6G, rather than catching up at the equipment level, it is better to redefine the competitive arena. Starting from chips, software, AI, satellite communications, and allied markets, the coordination of policy positions and industrial ecosystems can be completed before the standards are formed.
In terms of content, this cooperation actually attempts to build a complete chain: joint R&D — standards alignment — spectrum coordination — security certification — market access.
Standards Alignment: Communication standards are ostensibly determined by technical performance, but in reality, they also reflect industrial support capabilities. If the 24 countries coordinate their 6G vision and technical principles in advance, their enterprises will more easily form a synergy in international organizations such as the ITU and 3GPP. A solution endorsed by the policies and markets of 24 countries will naturally find it easier to prove its value for global deployment.
Spectrum Coordination: Which frequency bands 6G will use is not just a technical issue; it also involves the existing spectrum arrangements, regulatory policies, and interests of the military and public safety departments in various countries. If alliance members adopt similar spectrum planning, chips, modules, and terminals can form a larger unified market, directly accelerating industrial maturity and diluting costs. Spectrum coordination is paving the way for future ecosystem advantages in advance.
Security and Market Access: Once the alliance promotes mutual recognition of security certifications, it may form common supply chain requirements in government procurement, operator bidding, and infrastructure construction. Certification, standards, and spectrum coordination will ultimately be transformed into the "entry ticket" for whether enterprises can access the markets of member countries.
The basic unit of 6G competition is showing a trend of evolving from individual enterprises to an ecosystem composed of governments, standards organizations, industry chains, and markets.
"Open" 6G May Also Form New Industrial Boundaries
Notably, the initiative repeatedly emphasizes on the one hand that 6G needs to be "open" and "interoperable," while on the other hand highlighting "security," "trustworthiness," and allied cooperation. There is a noteworthy tension between these two sets of keywords.
Technological openness does not necessarily mean that the market is open to all enterprises. The "openness" mentioned here is more likely to point to software-defined architecture, modularity, and multi-vendor interoperability. Networks will no longer be highly dependent on a single vendor's closed hardware and software systems; equipment and software from different enterprises can be combined through standard interfaces, thereby enhancing supply chain resilience. However, even if an enterprise meets the technical interfaces, it may not necessarily gain direct access to the relevant markets. Its products may still need to pass security reviews, supply chain assessments, and data compliance certifications, and prove that their software sources, vulnerability management, and long-term maintenance capabilities meet the requirements.
Similar trends have already emerged in the existing IoT security field. In recent years, countries and regions such as the U.S., the EU, Japan, and Singapore have successively promoted IoT security labels or conformity assessment systems, and sought mutual recognition among different certification systems. Some certification programs that are nominally voluntary have gradually become de facto thresholds for products to enter the market when jointly adopted by government procurement, leading retailers, and mainstream platforms.
If the 6G alliance further promotes mutual recognition of security certifications and market rules, it may amplify this effect, thereby forming a market landscape of "one set of basic standards, multiple trust systems": equipment can be interconnected at the technical level, but at the commercial level, it needs to enter specific certification and supply chain systems.
These Rules Will Ultimately Fall on Every IoT Terminal
If standards, spectrum, and security principles are the top-level design of 6G rules competition, then IoT terminals are where these rules are ultimately implemented.
Compared with previous generations of mobile communications, the connection objects of 6G will expand more deeply from "humans" to "things." Industrial modules, robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, satellite terminals, and passive sensing tags—these devices will constitute the largest access group in the 6G network, and their quantity and types will far exceed those of mobile phones.
IoT Think Tank previously proposed that IoT terminals in the 6G era will no longer be just connected devices, but will gradually become intelligent nodes integrating communication, sensing, computing, and AI capabilities, capable of completing inference and decision-making locally.
This also means that the security consequences of 6G terminals are completely different from the past. If a camera is attacked, it leads to privacy leakage; whereas if an industrial robot or an autonomous vehicle is attacked, it may directly affect personal and production safety in the physical world. Given the growth of applications such as embodied AI and industrial agents, the decisions made by terminals will increasingly act upon production equipment, transportation systems, and urban infrastructure, and the security consequences will far exceed those of traditional Internet devices.
Against this backdrop, the outline of future 6G terminal access rules is gradually becoming clear:
Device Identity and Hardware Trustworthiness: Each terminal possesses a unique, verifiable device identity, and a chip-level root of trust ensures the integrity of critical programs, preventing large-scale access of counterfeit terminals to the network.
Software Lifecycle Management: Manufacturers specify the security update period, terminals support secure OTA upgrades, and the sources of software components are traceable. The lifecycle of IoT devices can be over a decade, and the responsibility for security maintenance cannot end at shipment.
AI Models and Data Governance: For terminals with reasoning capabilities, it is also necessary to ensure that the sources of model updates are trustworthy, the scope of sensor data usage is transparent, cross-border transmission complies with data protection requirements, and the responsible entity can be clearly identified after erroneous decisions occur.
Mutual Recognition of Certification: Products must not only prove that they "can connect to 6G," but also pass tests by laboratories recognized by the target market and obtain certifications or labels accepted by the alliance member countries.
Communication capabilities determine whether a product can connect to the network, while rules compliance determines whether it can enter the market. The weight of these two factors will tend to be equal in the 6G era.
What Chinese IoT Enterprises Need to Cope With Is More Than Just Replacing with a 6G Module
Faced with this situation, China's IoT industry has both advantages and real challenges.
The advantages are concrete. China possesses the world's leading scale of IoT connections. The scale and complexity of scenarios such as the Industrial Internet, smart grids, connected vehicles, low-altitude economy, and smart cities are difficult to replicate globally. The large-scale commercial experience of NB-IoT, RedCap, passive IoT, and satellite IoT (IoT-NTN) also represents genuine technological and scenario accumulation. In 3GPP, the patent contributions and standard participation of Chinese enterprises can no longer be ignored.
The challenges are equally concrete.
First, shift from "tracking standards" to "defining standards with scenarios."
The cost, power consumption, coverage, security, and O&M issues accumulated in the above scenarios are themselves important bases for standard formulation. Chinese enterprises need to translate scenario requirements into technical proposals and use large-scale applications to prove the feasibility of the solutions, rather than adapting products after the standards are frozen.
Second, front-load security compliance into the product design stage.
In the past, some enterprises regarded security certification as an additional task after product completion. Entering the 6G era, device identity, data protection, remote upgrades, and vulnerability management are highly likely to become basic product capabilities, requiring responsibilities to be clarified at the very beginning of chip, module, operating system, and platform design. Especially for IoT enterprises planning to go global, security capabilities are not just a cost item, but a core competitiveness for obtaining market access.
Third, establish certification capabilities for the international market.
As IoT security regulations and label systems in various countries continue to be implemented, the overseas costs for enterprises will not only come from hardware R&D, but also include security testing, data compliance, supply chain proof, and long-term software maintenance. Large enterprises should participate in the construction of international standards and certification systems in advance; SMEs need to leverage industry alliances, public testing platforms, and third-party institutions to reduce compliance costs, avoiding situations where products have price and performance advantages but cannot enter the target market due to certification issues.
Fourth, transform industry chain advantages into ecosystem organizational capabilities.
6G competition does not only look at the number of patents; it also requires synergy among chips, equipment, operators, terminal enterprises, testing institutions, and application industries. A technology with only a standard proposal but no chip and product support is hard to become mainstream; similarly, a product with advanced technology that fails to meet overseas certification and operator requirements is also difficult to scale. China already has a relatively complete IoT industry chain. The next step to improve is the capability to organize technology, standards, testing, certification, and industry applications.
Conclusion
The U.S. joining forces with 24 countries to launch 6G cooperation has a deep intention that goes beyond merely accelerating the laboratory progress of a certain technology. It lies in taking advantage of the period before 6G rules are finalized to complete the systematic layout of standard positions, spectrum coordination, security certification, and market access in advance.
It is not yet possible to assert that the global 6G market will definitely move towards fragmentation. 3GPP is still maintaining a single standard framework, and the core demands of most major economies are also interoperability rather than closed ecosystems. However, the possibility of forming different "trust domains" around security certification, supply chain origins, and market access is rising. This is not alarmism, but a structural variable that needs to be incorporated into strategic planning in advance.
In the future 6G race, the true test is not just whether one can build a faster network, but who can write technology into standards, turn standards into rules, and then get terminals complying with these rules into the global market.
This competition has already begun.