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Leila Al-Khatib

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  • Both the Abu Dhabi and Qatar races are confirmed and sold out.
  • Formula 1 will make a final call on the season’s end by mid-September.
  • If Middle East tensions do not clear, the closing rounds would move to Europe.
  • The cancelled Bahrain Grand Prix shifts to Malaysia from October 2 to 4.

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix tickets are already gone, and Formula 1 says the season finale will run on schedule despite unrest across the Middle East. Stefano Domenicali, the sport’s President and CEO, told reporters the race stays on the calendar. A final decision, he added, comes by the middle of September.

What Domenicali confirmed

He said: “For us today, the races in Qatar and Abu Dhabi are confirmed. By the way, they are already sold out. That is an incredible sign of how much the sport is bigger than the problem that our world is living.”

Speaking after the Hungarian Grand Prix, with the season now in its one-month break, Domenicali said Formula 1 stays in contact with other championships about the end of the year. The plan is simple. Take the maximum time, watch how the situation develops, then decide at the right moment. That call will not come before mid-September.

For now, the races in Qatar and Abu Dhabi are confirmed. Abu Dhabi is set for 3-6 December, with the main race on Sunday, 6th of December 2026. Both have sold out. Domenicali called that a sign of how the sport has grown bigger than the trouble the world faces right now. Demand tells its own story. Fans searching for Abu Dhabi Grand Prix ticket prices found nothing left to buy.

The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix tickets question

Yas Marina Circuit has closed the F1 season almost every year since 2009. The track runs a twilight race that starts in daylight and finishes under floodlights. That finale slot is exactly what the September decision puts in question.

If tensions do not ease the way Formula 1 expects before mid-September, the plan changes. Domenicali was clear on the backup. The end of the season would move to Europe instead. Such a shift would reshape the closing weeks of the F1 calendar and pull the traditional finale away from Yas Marina Circuit.

Worth knowing if you hold a seat for the Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: a sold-out race gives the event weight, but the September check still decides where the year ends. So the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix tickets you already hold come with a date the sport has yet to lock fully.

Bahrain race finds a new home

One race has already moved. The Bahrain Grand Prix, cancelled after unrest in the region, will now run at the Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia from October 2 to 4. It slots between the Azerbaijan and Singapore rounds.

Bahrain’s race was meant to be the fourth stop of the year, set for April 10 to 12 at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir. That plan fell through, and Formula 1 also dropped the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah the week after.

Domenicali thanked the Kingdom of Bahrain and Malaysia for making the switch work. He framed it as cooperation and as thinking wider than others might. Malaysia brings back a track that carried the championship in years past.

What it means for the F1 season finale

For fans, the picture is clear enough. The F1 season finale in Abu Dhabi is confirmed and sold out, and so is Qatar. Yet the mid-September call could still send the year’s final rounds to Europe. Anyone holding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix tickets should watch that date. Your seat stays valid for the day printed on it, but that day is not yet fully fixed. Formula 1 says it will decide when the time is right, and not a moment sooner.

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  • Abu Dhabi, Formula 1, Sports

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6G band in the UAE
  • 6G

The case for the 6G band in the UAE rests on a small number: two to five percent. That is how far an Upper 6 GHz signal falls behind today’s 3.5 GHz C-band in reach. The modelling covered city centres, towns, suburbs and open country. Higher frequencies normally travel less far, and shorter reach normally means more towers. A gap this narrow points the other way. An operator can hang the new radios on masts and rooftops it already owns.

The figure comes from a white paper titled “The Golden 6 GHz Band.” Four names sit on it: TDRA, the telecoms regulator, e& UAE, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, and NYU Abu Dhabi. Its release comes with a decision to move the 6G band in the UAE out of trials and into commercial service. The industry calls it the golden spectrum.

Where the threefold figure comes from

Two gains sit behind the headline claim, and they multiply. The first is a gain in spectral efficiency of about 1.5 times. It comes from a 256TRX Giga-MIMO antenna array, which has far more transmit and receive paths than a standard 5G unit. Beamforming and scheduling across the array do the rest. This gain holds regardless of the channel width. The second is width itself. Set 200 MHz of Upper 6 GHz spectrum against a 100 MHz C-band carrier and the channel doubles. One and a half times two comes to roughly triple the capacity per cell. The authors say the result lines up with work by independent analysts.

Coverage comes out of the same hardware. Signals at higher frequencies lose strength faster, and the array’s beamforming makes up for the loss. In the hardest case the team modelled, indoors in a dense city, reach stays within about three percent of C-band.

A caveat travels with every figure. The results come from models, not field tests, and rest on assumptions the paper lists. Live performance, it says, will depend on where the radios go, which spectrum they get and what the devices can do. Bayan Sharif, provost of Khalifa University, called the 1.5 times gain “achievable under well-conditioned assumptions.” The method went out with the findings, he said, so others could check the work.

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How regulation shaped the 6G band in the UAE

Policy moved before engineering on the 6G band in the UAE. In 2023, the World Radiocommunication Conference identified 6425 to 7125 MHz for mobile service across ITU Region 1. The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) moved earlier than most of its peers and wrote the whole range into its national frequency plan. Within it, e& UAE holds 6425 to 6775 MHz, as much as 350 MHz in one unbroken block.

With the allocation settled, the operator committed to a commercial Giga-MIMO deployment built for peak downloads of 10 Gbps. Launch is planned between July and December 2026. Tariq Al Awadhi, TDRA’s executive director of spectrum affairs, drew the line himself: “Regulatory certainty is what turns research into infrastructure.”

Money follows the coverage result. The white paper treats Upper 6 GHz as a capacity layer laid over e& UAE’s current 5.5G network. It shares towers, rooftops, power and transport links, and backhaul gets an upgrade where needed. Fewer new sites can mean a lower cost for each bit carried as demand grows. Marwan Bin Shakar, chief technology officer at e& UAE, framed the customer side as higher speeds, more capacity and a steadier connection in crowded areas.

What the network is meant to carry

The paper groups planned uses under three headings: Connect Home, Connect Industry, and Connect Consumer and Vehicle. Those cover home broadband delivered over the air at speeds close to fibre, heavy-bandwidth uses for companies and public bodies, AI-driven services in the home, and connected cars.

The work extends earlier UAE research, including TDRA’s national 6G roadmap and two e& UAE papers written with the same universities. TDRA has described the band as a resource for 5G-Advanced services and a foundation for 6G. Abroad, over 60 companies, from operators and vendors to chipset suppliers and device makers, have signed a GSMA statement on the band’s readiness.

One piece sits beyond any operator’s control. A band is only useful to people whose phones and routers can tune to it. TDRA plans to add Upper 6 GHz, known in standards as n104, to national type-approval rules, with the first devices due from September 2026. How fast those handsets reach shop shelves will decide when the 6G band in the UAE turns from a modelled result into something a customer can measure.

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