The SAMENA Leaders’ Summit 2026, held on 1 April at Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai, brought together telecommunications regulators, operators, vendors and policymakers from across the South Asia, Middle East and North Africa region for a day of substantive sessions that covered spectrum governance, AI deployment frameworks, operator transformation and satellite network sovereignty — all against a backdrop of active regional conflict that gave the event’s resilience theme an immediacy rarely present at industry gatherings.
The summit, marking SAMENA Council’s twentieth anniversary under the theme “Intelligent Networks for Sovereign and Sustainable Futures,” was inaugurated by H.E. Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Cabinet Member and Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence, under the patronage of the UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority. Huawei served as Host Sponsor, with stc and Zain as Strategic Partners and GSMA as Policy Dialogue Partner.
The day’s most technically significant moment came during the 5G-A and AI Applications for Resilient Economy Forum, which included the formal launch of what organisers described as the world’s first commercial U6GHz deployment, positioning the 6 GHz band’s upper segment as an early marker in the transition toward 5G-Advanced network architectures. The announcement was accompanied by a parallel closed-door 6 GHz Dialogue that brought together spectrum regulators from France, Brazil, India and the UAE alongside operators and vendors. The session concluded with a collective call to action: the next 12 to 24 months represent a critical window for spectrum assignment decisions that will determine the pace and geographic scale of 6 GHz deployment across the region, with implications for WRC-27 preparations already underway.
The summit’s Telco to TechCo Transformation Forum marked another concrete output with the formal launch of the Telco2Techco Paper, a shared measurement framework for assessing operator transformation progress. Anchored by a Huawei keynote on what it termed the TechCo 2.0 model, the session addressed the persistent industry challenge of moving from fragmented digital initiatives toward integrated, AI-driven operating models that generate measurable revenue rather than strategic narrative.
A closed-door Space Sustainability and Orbital Governance roundtable convened participants from Arabsat, Space42, OQ Technology and others to advance discussions on orbital traffic management, debris mitigation and Space Situational Awareness, with participants emphasising the shift from voluntary principles toward enforceable, data-driven governance mechanisms. The Hybrid Connectivity and Direct-to-Device panel later in the day addressed the convergence of terrestrial, satellite and D2D networks, with MTN Group, Earthlink Iraq, ITU and GSOA among participants examining service accountability in multi-layer network environments ahead of WRC-27.
ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan Martin, addressing the opening plenary from Geneva, placed the summit’s discussions in a global frame, noting that 2.2 billion people remain offline and that decisions made now on 6G standards will determine whether next-generation networks extend or replicate the exclusions of previous technology cycles. UAE Cybersecurity Council Director General Mohammed Al Kuwaiti disclosed that the UAE is absorbing 600 to 700 cyberattacks per day, a figure he said is rising and being amplified by AI-enabled attack tools, framing national cybersecurity not as a policy position but as an active daily operational reality.
Closing the summit, SAMENA Council CEO Bocar Ba noted that convening under current regional conditions was itself a signal of the industry’s conviction that digital infrastructure development cannot be deferred. The summit’s outputs are expected to feed directly into ongoing regional and international discussions on spectrum policy, AI governance frameworks and hybrid connectivity investment.
