The telecom networks originally built to carry phone calls and packets of data are in the midst of a dramatic shift. The past year saw early steps toward networks becoming a more integrated data fabric that can measure the world, process and sense collaboratively, and even stretch into outer space.

The following list of key *IEEE Spectrum *telecom news stories from 2025 underscore the evolution the connected (and wireless) world is today going through. A larger story is emerging, in other words, of how networks are turning into instruments and engines rather than just passive pipes.

And if there’s a clear starting point to watch this shift happening, it’s in the early thinking around 6G.

1. Capacity Limits in 5G Prompt a 6G Focus on Infrastructure

Source image: Nokia

Unlike previous step-changes in telecom’s evolution (especially the bandwidth upgrades from 3G to 4G and 4G to 5G), the key equation for 6G isn’t “5G plus faster downloads.” Nokia Bell Labs, whose president of core research Peter Vetter sat down for a conversation with Spectrum in November, is starting to test and test-deploy key pieces of 6G’s infrastructure five years before 6G devices are expected to come online. And time is tight. Because, as Vetter explains, downlinks for the must-have consumer tech of the decade ahead may not be the network’s key crunch point for too much longer. Your phone’s ability—and your future smart glasses’ ability—to download streaming video and other content is increasingly not telecom’s hardest problem. Rather, if the Internet of Things scales up as predicted, and smart home and smart city tech takes hold, before too long everything everywhere will be dialing in to 6G infrastructure for more and more sizable uplinks. And that kind of traffic surge might break telecom networks of today. Which is why smart money, beginning with but certainly not limited to Nokia Bell Labs, is on solving that massive uplink problem before it might emerge.

2. Terahertz Tech Sets Stage for “Wireless Wired” Chips

Oliver Killig/HZDR

There’s a range of electromagnetic spectrum between 0.1 and 10 terahertz that has historically been very difficult to harness technologically. Radio waves and microwaves on one side of the “terahertz gap“ and infrared light on the other each have their own types of electronics and waveguides to manipulate photons and translate them back and forth to electrical signals in integrated circuits.

But this past year has seen progress in closing the terahertz gap. In a story from October, *Spectrum *contributor Meghie Rodrigues chronicled how a new breed of chips are being developed to unlock bandwidths in the tens and hundreds of gigahertz—well beyond 5G’s range and coming up just shy of that long-puzzled-over terahertz gap. Crucially, the new chips can be operated at or near room temperature and on standard semiconductor substrates. To make big progress on telecom’s challenges to come, this kind of tech will be important to scale up and out and into devices that can meet 6G’s uplink and downlink demands.

3. Hollowing Out Fiber Speeds It Up and Keeps Signals Moving

Seyed Reza Sandoghchi and Ghafour Amouzad Mahdiraji/Microsoft Azure Fiber

While the promise of terahertz data links looms on the horizon, the world today also can’t wait for technologies that might, in 2030 or beyond, be able to fulfill their early promise. Some communications engineers have been leaning on a fundamental rule from physics that fiber optic lines haven’t fully tapped into yet: Light travels some 30 percent faster through air than it does glass. Fiber optic lines, in other words, could be substantially sped up if they weren’t solid glass but rather tiny glass tubes sheltering an air core.

*Spectrum *contributor John Boyd in September reported on research from a team at Microsoft and the University of Southampton in England that is testing the practicalities of hollow-core fiber links for extremely low latency applications like finance tech, cloud interconnects, and sensor networks. Hollow-core fiber isn’t expected to become the new fiber standard anytime soon, to be clear. But if the manufacturing challenges facing hollow-core lines can be overcome, both higher capacities and cleaner signals (with fewer of glass’s nonlinear distortions) could be part of fiber’s future.

4. Over-the-Air Lasers Aim to Solve the Internet’s “Middle Mile”

Taara

Some researchers are investigating where and when fiber connections are even needed at all. To that end, the Google Alphabet spin-off company Taara is rolling out point-to-point laser data connections. Taara’s tech is not meant to span every gap in tomorrow’s networks, but laser data links do potentially solve some difficult “middle-mile” problems. Taara’s CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy spoke to Spectrum in July about the company’s near-term goals. Their tech, Krishnaswamy explained, can enable gigabit-per-second speeds across kilometers.

It is weather sensitive, however. Fog and rain, for instance, can scatter the beam. So it’s not perfect for every application, but the company is now providing crucial connectivity in some sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian settings. Free-space optical (FSO) tech, in all, is fast to deploy and high-capacity. On the flip side, FSO doesn’t work without line-of-sight connections between sender and receiver. So where fiber connections may be expensive to make (think rivers and ravines, for instance), or where permitting is very challenging, FSO could provide just the solution.

5. Fiber-Optic Network Spots Spacecraft’s Return to Earth

Elisa McGhee

Beyond simply transmitting data, what other possibilities are emerging for tomorrow’s networks? In March, Spectrum contributor Charles Choi investigated fiber optic cables pulling double-duty as sensor networks. Los Alamos and Colorado State University researchers reported finding identifiable acoustic signals in fiber cables when the NASA OSIRIS-REx space probe returned to Earth to deliver its capsule of asteroid samples in September 2023. The proof-of-concept research revealed a potential for nearer-to-home applications such as railway intrusion alerts, earthquake early warnings, and perimeter security. Best of all, no new fiber cables need to be installed to realize the acoustic-sensing capabilities that the world’s high-capacity data lines may now contain.

6. Quantum Messages Cross Germany Using Conventional Fiber

Mirko Pittaluga, Yuen San Lo, et al.

In April, Choi reported on a Toshiba team in Germany that transmitted quantum cryptographic keys across 250 kilometers. That’s a big deal, because nobody’s quite solved the quantum signal repeater or quantum signal amplifier problem yet. (Choi reported on that topic for us in 2023!) So any qubits traveling from point A to point B need to do so along a stretch of fiber with no tech in between. As the story notes, governments and financial institutions will be some of the earliest customers for high-security, quantum cryptographic applications.

7. More-Sophisticated Codes to Track Deep-Space Probes

Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library/Alamy

How far are new networking technologies prepared to go? In September, contributor Michelle Hampson reported on new and sophisticated deep-space communications codes that could extend terrestrial networks out to 180 million kilometers away. That’s equivalent to 1.2 times the distance between the earth and the sun. NASA, ESA, and commercial players like SpaceX and Blue Origin are looking at expanding and hardening networking protocols for the trying rigors of space communications.

While 6G phones may not be expected to quite be up to the task of linking lunar or Mars missions to Earth, the communications technologies being developed today are expanding networks’ range of possibilities in the years ahead. Networking technologies are no longer just about connecting people and their devices. They’re increasingly about building a sensing and computing data fabric that spans across Earth and extends far beyond into the solar system.