- The wireless industry is attempting to combine sensing and communications for 6G
- Known as ISAC, this would bring capabilities from private 5G and IoT networks to the macro 6G environment
- ABI Research said ISAC won’t be a reality anytime soon
What do you get when you take key capabilities from private 5G and IoT networks and spread them across the macro 6G environment? ISAC, of course.
Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is one of the most touted prospective features of future 6G networks. But when and where ISAC applications will be supported is still very much up in the air.
“Conventional networks have treated sensing (radar, localization, environmental monitoring) and data transmission as distinct operations, but ISAC amalgamates them into unified radio-frequency (RF) front-end,” the IEEE explained in a recent paper. ISAC systems are intended to serve in an integrated fashion in 6G the kind of functions that have already started to be delivered in private 5G and IoT networks within the current 4G and 5G ecosystem.
Use cases span industry 4.0 smart factories, intelligent healthcare and autonomous vehicle networks. Indeed, all of these are served by private networks today.
Private networks were partly developed to serve automated guided vehicles (AGVs) far better than the Wi-Fi networks that supported factories before that. Private 5G networks, however, are dedicated networks for industrial uses that often don’t support voice calling for more than one operator, without adding in neutral host or distributed antenna systems (DAS).
The difference between private 5G networks and ISAC for 6G is that the new cellular standard is expected to help autonomous systems sense their environment with the same waveform that is used for communication.
6G spectrum speculation
The 6G radio standard isn't expected to be finalized until late 2029. But there's already plenty of speculation about what spectrum bands will be used for 6G and how.
The first European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) report on ISAC use cases was published in April 2025 and covers indoor, outdoor and mixed environment uses for people, vehicles, drones and robots. The report expects that “sensing strategies” will incorporate low (sub-6 GHz), mid (~7–24 GHz) and high (millimeter wave and terahertz) frequency bands, most likely combining them with non-RF sensors such as cameras or environmental detectors.
Current terahertz (THz) radios—like Zigbee or Z-Wave IoT radios—can support distances from 10 to 50 meters, depending on whether the radios are used indoors or outdoors. These networks tend to use mesh networking to extend their coverage areas. The terahertz (THz) networks that 6G is expected to deliver will, like 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) networks, deliver blazing data speeds over short distances. This will make them flashy but perhaps somewhat useless for certain use cases.
Hence, operators are already favoring sub-6 GHz and 7 GHz bands in early talks about 6G.
Making ISAC work
ETSI noted that some porposed ISAC use cases like outdoor health monitoring rely on a large existing network of mobile stations to work. “The 6G base stations are already configured with the requisite capabilities in a given service area to support sensing and communication,” ETSI stated.
As well as widespread 6G base stations, ISAC will require sensing data from non-6G sensors as well as wireless video cameras to fully enable sensing applications. This means that there will need to be a lot of work done before most ISAC-related sensing applications can actually be implemented, even as 6G becomes a real commercial reality in the 2030 timeframe.
“Mainstream deployment of cellular ISAC is expected to occur long after 2030 and it will not likely be included in the initial 6G rollouts,” ABI Research’s senior research director Dimitris Mavrakis recently wrote.
Much like the period of time before 5G came along, which lauded self-driving cars and remote surgery being enabled by the forthcoming 5G standard as the future, talk around 6G will favor the most extreme elements of the 6G, which will likely take a long time to actually come to pass, if they ever do.