MediaTek and Ericsson have completed a multi-vendor pre-6G over-the-air (OTA) field trial with T-Mobile US, which the companies describe as the world’s first, using 400 MHz channel bandwidth.
Conducted in September at the T-Mobile 6G Innovation Hub in Bellevue, Washington, the trial demonstrated the potential for peak download speeds of more than 5Gbps, upload speeds of more than 2Gbps and end-to-end latency as low as 4 milliseconds.
The companies said initial pre-6G trials have typically used closed, single-vendor setups. This trial combined MediaTek’s pre-6G User Equipment (UE) Proof-of-Concept (PoC) platform with Ericsson’s pre-6G radio infrastructure over T-Mobile’s network. It used a 400 MHz contiguous spectrum block and 200MHz UL channel bandwidth. MediaTek said its platform demonstrated support for 400MHz bandwidth DL and 200MHz UL, aligning with 3GPP RAN Plenary direction on 6G device capability.
The partners pointed to physical AI, real-time XR/AR communications and connected devices as potential applications for the demonstrated performance. Dr. Mingxi Fan, corporate vice president at MediaTek, said the trial highlighted the importance of interoperability between silicon and network infrastructure to accelerating 6G commercialization.
Ericsson said the demonstration marks the start of its journey with ecosystem partners toward commercial 6G.
