India is the planet’s biggest 5G market and owns barely a scrap of the patents behind it. This week in New Delhi, it started trying to change that for 6G.
What happened
The 10th India Mobile Congress ran October 7–10 in New Delhi, with 6G and “AI-native networks” as the headline theme and the third International 6G Symposium folded in. Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Ericsson and Nokia used the stage to show where networks are heading. Jio demoed a “Jio Call Agent” — an AI voice assistant built into the network itself, tuned for Indian languages and run with user consent — and said it has started filing pre-6G patents. Airtel launched IQ Gateway, which folds SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and business voice onto one control plane, plus a “Silent Authentication” feature meant to replace one-time passwords. Ericsson ran a 6G demo with warehouse robots; Nokia said it is rebuilding its mobile core to be “AI-native.” Underneath the product theater sat a government number: India wants to hold 10% of the world’s 6G patents, a target set in its 2023 Bharat 6G Vision and pushed by the Bharat 6G Alliance.
Why it matters
India’s telecom story so far has been about scale, not ownership. It rolled out 5G faster than almost anyone, has hundreds of millions of users and some of the cheapest mobile data on earth — but the standards and essential patents underneath 5G belong overwhelmingly to a handful of foreign firms: Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung. Every handset and tower pays, in effect, a licensing toll on someone else’s intellectual property. 6G is still years from a finished standard, which is exactly why the window to shape it is open now. Patents filed and standards-body seats won before the rules are frozen are worth far more than anything filed after. India’s bet is that, this time, its scale as a market can be converted into leverage over the rulebook.
The crux
Strip away the warehouse robots and the AI voice agents and the real contest at IMC wasn’t about 6G at all — it was about who gets to set the terms of it. “AI-native network” is part genuine engineering and part marketing varnish; most of what was demoed is 5G-Advanced with a language model bolted on. The honest question is whether India can move from the demand side of telecom to the supply side of its intellectual property. Scale alone won’t do it — China had scale and built Huawei; the US has the chip designs; Europe has Ericsson and Nokia. A 10% patent share is a stretch target, not a forecast, and the distance between a vision document and a granted, standard-essential patent is enormous. But stating the goal out loud, while the standard is still wet clay, is the cheapest leverage India will ever have.
What to take away
- Watch patents, not demos. The number to track over the next two years isn’t which carrier has the slickest AI assistant — it’s how many standard-essential 6G patents Indian firms and labs actually file and get granted. That figure, not the keynote, tells you whether the ambition is real.
- “AI-native” is a claim, not a spec. When a vendor says its network is AI-native, ask what merely runs on the network versus what has genuinely been rebuilt underneath it. Today, most of it is the former.
India has proved it can use the world’s networks. IMC 2026 was its first serious argument that it can help build the next one — an argument, not yet a result.