By the mid-2020s more than 15 billion IoT devices were generating traffic patterns that 4G was never engineered to handle. At the same time mobile video grew to over 75 percent of all wireless data, flooding macro cells with sustained high-bitrate flows. LTE peak rates and spectral efficiency simply cannot keep pace with the compound growth of connected sensors, wearables, and streaming endpoints. These two megatrends together form the demand-side case for a fundamentally new radio interface and packet core architecture capable of scaling throughput, density, and efficiency by an order of magnitude.