T-Mobile chief technology officer John Saw has boldly claimed that the carrier will win the race to launch 6G in the US.

Saw made the comments during the carrier's third-quarter earnings call this week, as the mobile operator reported that service revenues grew 6 percent year-on-year (YoY).

While discussion was heavily centered on AI's increasing impact at T-Mobile, as covered by DCD's sister publication, SDx Central, here, the topic of 6G came up too.

When asked about how T-Mobile is preparing for data traffic in the upcoming years, Saw took the opportunity to point out T-Mobile's 6G expectations.

"For 2030, we plan a traffic profile that’s still downlink heavy, I think, but increasingly uplink rich, driven by the rise in AI usage, AI wearables, AI agents, and also the explosive growth by then of physical AI devices like humanoids, robots, delivery drones, vehicles, and factory machines, etc," said Saw.

"2030 will also see 6G networks being built, and T-Mobile will be the first with 6G in this country," he added.

Saw didn't provide a timeline for when T-Mobile expects to launch its 6G network, though the technology is widely anticipated to launch around 2030.

If T-Mobile is to win the race as Saw suggests, it would be a change from the previous generation. Verizon won the race to launch 5G in the US in 2018. T-Mobile, however, was first to market with 5G Standalone (5G SA) in the country, doing so in 2020.

Saw added that applications such as integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) will come to the fore with 6G.

"I think 6G will be the first G where the base stations and radios behave as radars, as sensors, unlike the previous Gs. So that opens up a lot of new use cases with remote sensing, etc., that I think is going to drive a lot of usage as well," said Saw.

He referred to radio uplink as a key focus for 6G, especially with the growth in physical AI and a lot of AI agents.

"This is why 5G Advanced matters. This is why we roll out the country’s first and only 5G Advanced network with uplink enhancements like uplink carrier aggregation, uplink MIMO, transmit switching, diversity, and higher power uplinks."

Upcoming C-Band (next year) and 2.7GHz band (2028) spectrum auctions will enable T-Mobile to bolster capacity for 6G and to boost uplink bandwidth, Saw added.

For the quarter, T-Mobile reported that its service revenue grew by six percent YoY to $19.4 billion, while postpaid service revenues were up by 9 percent to $16.3bn.

The carrier added 274,000 postpaid net account additions during Q3, up three percent YoY.