The Global Coalition on Telecoms (GCOT) has published principles for the security and resilience of 6G networks at Mobile World Congress 2026.
Established in 2023 by Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US, with Sweden and Finland announced on Tuesday as new members, GCOT aims to ensure secure, resilient, and innovative telecommunication networks.
The newly launched principles, the coalition says, should serve as the base for the development of 6G standards, covering resilience to cyber and physical attacks, supply chains, and reliability.
“The security and resilience of 6G networks are critical aspects of that wider picture. 6G networks – both public and private – will come to play a vital role in the everyday life of people around the world, with much of our lives reliant on their efficient and secure operation,” GCOT notes.
Per the coalition, 6G networks are expected to implement security and resilience capabilities preventing threat actors’ propagation through the network, protecting user data, maintaining data integrity, ensuring service availability, and complying with relevant national regulations and legislation.
“The 6G system should be developed with security as a foundational principle – considered at all stages, from development to deployment and ultimately operation. The 6G system must be consciously designed to be more secure than previous generations, and manage legacy vulnerabilities where it relies on existing systems,” the coalition notes.
Per the outlined principles, next-generation networks should implement granular security controls, continuous security monitoring, and robust authentication and authorization, and should ensure the security of external networks, subnetworks, and other systems.
Furthermore, 6G networks are expected to leverage AI to combat cybersecurity threats and ensure resilience during disruptions, should deploy AI systems in a safe manner, and should support quantum-safe cryptography from day one.
GCOT also notes that 6G networks should be engineered with resilience by design, should implement safe failovers to maintain connectivity, should implement complementary and augmentative non-GNSS PNT systems to reduce disruption risks, and should enable Open RAN architecture and principles.
“The technological innovation anticipated from 6G, twinned with its central role in national infrastructure (as with current mobile networks), will require fundamental protections and mitigations to be considered from the outset. That will require action on the part of governments, telecommunications providers, and those supplying the systems they rely on, including cloud and data infrastructure,” the coalition notes.
As of March 2026, 6G remains in the research and pre-standardization phase, with key industry groups pushing AI-native designs and targeting initial commercial rollouts in 2029-2030.
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