Tejas Networks and Qualcomm demo 6G ISAC sensing on a live 5G network — what it does and doesn’t prove
At India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2026 in New Delhi, Tejas Networks and Qualcomm Technologies are jointly demonstrating Integrated Sensing and Communication (6G ISAC): the use of ordinary 5G radio signals to detect and track objects such as moving vehicles and drones, without any dedicated sensing equipment. Tejas, a Tata Group company listed on the BSE and NSE, announced the demonstration on 8 October 2026; Qualcomm is showing it at its IMC booth until 10 October.
Both companies describe it as a step towards 6G. The demonstration is real and technically substantive, and it sits squarely on India’s national 6G agenda. It is also a pre-standard demonstration on 5G hardware, not a 6G system and not a product — and the harder problems in ISAC now appear to be commercial rather than technical.
What it actually demonstrates
The setup combines Tejas Networks’ 5G base station with Qualcomm Technologies’ Radio Unit (RU) and Distributed Unit (DU) chipsets, supported by low-power compute and AI inference. According to Tejas, the demonstration detects and tracks objects in the surrounding environment — moving vehicles on city roads and drones in “strategic areas” — using communication signals, so it doesn’t need separate radar or sensing infrastructure.
Qualcomm frames the demo as “wide-area sensing on live 5G infrastructure,” part of its broader “Connectivity Plus Compute” showcase at IMC and its work on AI-native 6G. The two companies were to have begin a 6G development coalition earlier in 2026, aiming at commercial 6G systems by 2029.
It is important to be precise about what this is. It is a technology demonstration at a trade event, using a commercial 5G base station. No product, price, customer, deployment or independently measured performance figure has been there.
How ISAC works
Integrated Sensing and Communication uses the same spectrum, radio hardware and signals for both communication and sensing. In simple terms, a base station transmits its normal 5G waveform; when that signal reflects off an object, the network measures the returning echo — its delay, frequency shift and angle — to detect, locate and track the object. It is radar out of a mobile network, sending signals anyway.
The industry describes several configurations — monostatic (one site transmitting and receiving), bistatic and multi-static (separate transmit and receive sites, or involving devices) — and the “AI-driven analytics” in this demo are what classify the returns, for example distinguishing a drone from other moving objects. The attraction of 6G for ISAC is physical: wider bandwidths and larger antenna arrays improve range and resolution, and fusing sensing data can support a real-time “digital twin” of the environment.
None of this is easy to do well. Because a sensing network must effectively transmit and listen at the same time, ISAC raises hard engineering problems: self-interference, power control, and separating the faint echoes of small objects from background clutter. The standards work reflects that difficulty — 3GPP’s study covers full-duplex-capable transmit points, and ETSI’s reports list interference mitigation and sensing-signal design among the open challenges. How well any deployment senses are will depend on spectrum, site density and the objects tracking. That is why independent measurement, rather than a trade-show demonstration, is the real test of maturity.
What “6G” means for a pre-standard demo
ISAC is one of the six usage scenarios in the ITU-R IMT-2030 framework — the international definition of what 6G means. That makes the “6G” label legitimate as a direction. But almost none of it is yet specified.
The standards timeline is concrete. 3GPP Release 19 produced the ISAC service requirements (TS 22.137) and an agreed channel model for sensing evaluation. Release 20, running roughly from 2025 to 2027, is studying the radio aspects — sensing reference signals, measurements, waveform enhancements on a CP-OFDM baseline — together with the sensing architecture. Normative 6G ISAC specifications will come only from Release 21, in the 2027–2030 window, with a functional freeze date of December 2028. In parallel, ETSI’s ISG ISAC has published pre-standardisation reports on use cases, channel modelling, architecture, and security; IEEE has standardised WLAN sensing in 802.11bf.
So what Tejas and Qualcomm are showing is ISAC on 5G-Advanced-era infrastructure — a genuinely useful proof that a commercial network can sense — while the 6G standard that will define how sensing is specified, orchestrated and charged is still being written. The demonstration is a step towards 6G, not an instance of it.
The commercial question analysts are asking
The most important independent insight comes from ABI Research, which argued in July 2026 that ISAC is being standardised as a managed network capability rather than an open sensing platform. That shapes which uses are realistic. The viable early deployments, ABI found, cluster where radio conditions are predictable and outcomes are measurable: industrial automation, ports, airports, utilities, logistics nodes, critical infrastructure and public safety. Grander consumer visions, such as ambient intelligence and smart homes, are “increasingly hard to justify.”
The binding constraint, in ABI’s reading, is no longer whether sensing works — Release 19 largely settled that — but whether operators can run sensing as a scalable business service. Sensing is a continuous workload: it requires ongoing signal processing, AI inference, orchestration and increasing GPU-accelerated compute, all of which raise network costs. Without a clear revenue model to cover them, ABI warns, ISAC remains “a costly and manual system limited to enterprise deployments.”
That is precisely the bet Tejas’s chief technology officer, Dr Kumar N. Sivarajan, is describing when he says ISAC lets operators “generate and monetize spatial intelligence,” extending their role “beyond high-speed connectivity to providing real-time environmental insights.” The framing is plausible. The revenue model, as the analysts note, is unproven.
Who else is doing this
Tejas and Qualcomm are not first to demonstrate ISAC on live infrastructure. Huawei has conducted commercial ISAC tests on a live 5G network in China, and Ericsson and Nokia have extended industrial and public-safety demonstrations. Within India, Qualcomm, Tejas, Reliance Jio and Nokia are all working on pre-standard 6G. The significance of this demo is therefore less about novelty than about position: it places a Tata Group equipment maker alongside a global chipset leader in the deep-tech co-development tier, at a national showcase.
Where India fits
IMC is jointly organised by India’s Department of Telecommunications and the Cellular Operators Association of India, and 6G is a stated national priority. The government’s 6G Vision Document, published in 2023, targets commercial deployment by 2030, and official ambitions include capturing around 10% of global 6G patents by 2030 and contributing to a large projected economic impact by 2035. These are targets, not outcomes, and should be read as such.
A Bharat 6G Alliance white paper on ISAC, published in October 2026, is more specific about where India should concentrate: reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted ISAC, disaster and environmental sensing, sensing along rail, highway and drone corridors, and India-specific channel measurements for standards input. It also warns that India should link its funded ISAC projects to the open items in the 3GPP Release 20 study, so results become standards contributions while the specifications are still open. That is the strategic test for demonstrations like this one: whether they convert into standards influence, not just trade-show footage.
The Tejas angle
Tejas Networks designs and manufactures wireline and wireless networking products for telecom operators, ISPs, utilities, defence and government customers in more than 75 countries, and is majority-owned within the Tata Group through Panatone Finvest. Its strategic logic for the ISAC showcase is clear: it is an engineering-led move up the value chain, from equipment maker to deep-tech co-developer.
The financial context is more sober. Market coverage describes the company as carrying high research-and-development and inventory costs and operational losses, while executing large domestic rollouts — including a reported ₹1,537 crore letter of intent from TCS for RAN equipment across BSNL’s 4G network. For investors, the ISAC demonstration is a credibility signal about future capability, not a revenue event; the release disclosed no financial consideration, order value or guidance. The company’s task is to convert pre-standard research into near-term execution without losing control of costs.
What to watch
For operators and enterprise buyers, sensing-as-a-service is not something to procure yet: there is no product and no standard. The milestones to watch are the outcomes of the Release 20 study, the Release 21 functional freeze (December 2028) and the first normative 6G specifications. For India’s 6G programme, the question is whether these demonstrations feed standards bodies such as 3GPP and TSDSI and shared testbeds, as the Bharat 6G Alliance recommends. For everyone, there is a governance question: ISAC sensing can reveal human presence and movement, and both 3GPP and ETSI have dedicated privacy and security workstreams for it — which matters most for the defence and public-safety use cases the release emphasises.
What the demo does and does not establish
It establishes that a commercial 5G base station, paired with modern chipsets and AI inference, can perform environmental sensing — a meaningful, visible step on the road to 6G, and a credible one for India’s ambitions. It does not establish a standardised 6G capability, a commercial product, or an independently verified level of performance.
The open questions are the ones that will decide whether ISAC becomes a real business: how precisely and reliably it senses, what it costs to run at scale, and who pays. Those are not sensing problems. They are standards, economics and governance problems — and they are still being written.
Editor’s Note: This article draws on the companies’ announcement and publicly available documentation, plus independent standards documents, analyst research and reporting. The demonstration’s performance has not been independently tested or verified. No interview, booth visit or demonstration was conducted for this article. See the source list in the publication package.