The core problem — R&D was outsourced and never replaced. After the 1984 Bell System breakup and liberalization in Europe and Asia, operators pivoted to customers, spectrum, deployment, and operations, while Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Qualcomm, ZTE, Samsung, and a long tail of suppliers took over most technology development. Operators became buyers of innovation rather than creators of it.

The Bell Labs model that produced the transistor, information theory, Unix, and modern AI is gone. That institution ran on an economic engine that no longer exists: in 1974 AT&T booked about 1.4% of US GDP, with Bell Labs alone spending roughly 2% of revenue on nonmilitary R&D — over four cents of every AT&T dollar. That stable, massive funding let researchers pursue problems that wouldn’t become products for fifteen years. Expecting a vendor like Nokia (€19.9B annual sales) to recreate that under today’s competitive economics ignores the financial logic of modern telecom. The contraction is visible: Marcus Weldon estimates Bell Labs research staff has fallen from over 1,200 to roughly 600 since he left the labs.

The industry is capex-heavy but R&D-light. Telecom invests more in capital expenditures than almost any other sector — over $350 billion per year — yet only the top 10 technology providers collectively spend around $50 billion annually on R&D. The capex money flows into deploying networks, not inventing or researching new technologies.

–>Yet in 2025, Huawei invested $27.5 billion in R&D.   That was ~22% of its total revenue for that year.

The next cycle looks even more disciplined. Analysts expect 6G RAN capex to ramp only toward the end of the decade, with cumulative 6G RAN revenue in the first six years projected 10–20% lower than the comparable 5G period. Nearly 400 organizations are investing in 6G R&D, but venture-backed startups barely participate in a material way, leaving innovation concentrated among incumbents.

The takeaway: a $1.3 trillion industry funds only a fraction of the innovation it needs because its institutional R&D engine was dismantled decades ago and never rebuilt — operators spend on capex, vendors own the R&D, and the pipeline of disruptive new entrants is thin. That’s why “whatever comes after 6G” may arrive with far less foundational research behind it than the generations that preceded it.