China Mobile 6G Base Station Doubles as Radar

China Mobile has shown a prototype 6G base station that doubles as a radar, at the 2026 Internet Light Expo in Wuzhen. The demonstration, presented on 2 November under the expo theme of a smart internet and a smart future, points to a network that does more than carry data: it senses the world around it. The prototype works in millimetre-wave and terahertz bands, with ten times the bandwidth of 5G, and it turns the base station itself into a sensor.

A base station that senses

The key idea is integrated sensing and communication, usually shortened to ISAC. Instead of treating radio waves only as carriers of data, the base station also reads their reflections, which reveal objects and movement nearby. In city management, the demonstration showed the station monitoring traffic in real time and spotting illegally parked vehicles. The same sensing principle, applied at larger scale, is what lets a network notice things in the air as well as on the ground.

The network as a super brain

China Mobile describes the 6G network as a super brain, in which base stations and terminals collect and process data together rather than sending everything back to a central point. The network can run distributed artificial intelligence training and inference across its own nodes, so sensing and decision-making happen close to where the data is gathered. The company also presented a three-dimensional network with full coverage and no dead zones, extending sensing and connectivity above the rooftops as well as across the streets.

The wider show

The expo itself drew 671 exhibitors showing more than a thousand technologies, and the 6G prototype was one of its headline exhibits. Also on show was a high-altitude communications airship, designed to fly at 18 kilometres and stay aloft for months, carrying connectivity to places ground networks cannot reach. Together, the exhibits sketch a network that covers the ground, the air and the sky in between.

Why it matters

The direction of travel is clear, and it is the same direction Ericsson has taken with its ISAC system, which turns 5G networks into drone detection sensors. Networks are becoming sensors in their own right, and that changes the economics of detection: coverage that already exists for communications can also watch the low-altitude airspace. For drone detection and counter-drone planning, the question is no longer only which dedicated sensor to buy, but how much sensing the communications network itself will provide. The Wuzhen demonstration suggests the answer will be a large part of it.

Source: Tide News (Chaonews)