By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe
I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line?
From the hardware side, extremely precise. Most discussions assume the sweet spot for ISAC is in "Frequency Range 3" (7 - 24 GHz, decent penetration and range, very good resolution), and in that range you can pin down objects with millimeter precision (both position and velocity). So, not only can you detect people walking down the street, you can detect them breathing when they stand perfectly still.
This, of course, requires 6G base stations to be spaced pretty tightly (hundreds of meters apart) and to feature sophisticated phased array antennas. But both can be assumed in cities (they're planning to completely replace WIFI with 6G, so every current WIFI access point will become a 6G micro cell). Walking humans can be detected much easier, but radar SNR is funny, that only gives you 4x-6x the detection range.
Software (signals processing) for all that will be... a lot of difficult work. Object separation/tracking, multipath reflections, clutter suppression, ect.
Although this is a preprint it shares some discussion and ideas on how to mitigate potential privacy challenges of ISAC.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069
I suspect while not individually, it will provide another data point that can be collaborated.
One should never underestimate the power of combining data sets.
Thank you, this deserved a link. I was being lazy.