- "We don't see 6G as a reset," the T-Mobile SVP told Fierce
- The operator talked up 5G-Advanced at this year's Mobile World Congress
- While the operator detailed AI network management for Storm Fern this year
Moving from 5G standalone (5G SA) to 6G will be a progression for operators — and not a revolution says T-Mobile’s senior vice president of field engineering, who talked with Fierce at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
6G and the LA28 future
“We don’t see 6G as a reset, where we’re going to start from scratch, we see it as an evolution,” said Salim Koudiri at the show. “When we talk [about] 6G, it is a better version of what we’re currently working on.”
T-Mobile was the first operator in the world to move to pure 5G with a 5G SA network in August 2020, enabling promised features like 5G voice, network slicing and enabled the rollout of 5G wearables, like Apple 5G watches, over the last few years. This led to T-Mobile launching 5G-Advanced “nationwide” last year, Koudiri said.
Ookla mentioned at MWC that the summer 2028 Olympics games in Los Angeles (LA28) will be “a big deal” for 6G, as it expects operators to show off early 6G networks and demos at the games. T-Mobile didn’t comment on that, but Koudiri said that the operator was “super thrilled about being retained as the strategic telecom partner for LA28, that was a huge win for us,” he stated.
“I think what they saw was...our ability to consistently demonstrate that we have a very strong 5G proposal with capabilities to enable their operations but also their partners operations,” Koudiri said.
This will include enabling broadcasting, photography, event management and ticketing point-of-sale (POS) for the event, he said. “All the things we were talking about being the nation’s only 5G-Advanced network,” Koudiri intimated.
“We’re in the middle of preparation right now,” he said. We can expect more news from T-Mobile as the games draw near.
How AI is being used to protect network during severe weather
Most recently, Kourdiri said, Winter Storm Storm Fern gave T-Mobile’s AI-based self-optimized network (SON) tools a workout.
Talking about how T-Mobile has been using AI in the network recently, Koudiri said that T-Mobile has been using an AI-based network optimization tool to help it manage the networks during the recent storms across the Northeast and much of the United States.
“We have an AI infrastructure that enables us to compensate [when cell sites go down] with ones that are still up,” Koudiri said. “It's a dynamic way of looking at what’s down, what’s up and then doing some calculator to automatically up-tilt a nearby cell site that can capture the traffic that was lost because of that missed site.”
He said that the SON tools had performed close to 30,000 changes within three days during the storm. “Now, changes are very dynamic because a site that was down could be restored the next day...and then maybe another site goes down,” Koudiri said. All these layers are being rebalanced to the point that “to the end user...the impact is felt much, much less,” he said.
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.