by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 15, 2026 This morning, Verizon and Ericsson announced the first pre-standard 6G field call in the 7 GHz band, completed at a Verizon commercial network site in Concord, California. The confirmed result is an outdoor call on a 400 MHz carrier using a… Read More »Ericsson’s 6G Field Call: Standardization’s Hardware Reality Check
Ericsson and Erillisverkot demoed 5G ISAC drone detection at Helsinki’s Vuosaari Harbor. The number that matters is not detection range but the installed RAN asset base it monetizes.
Nokia today announced Mobile Core Early Access, a live, hosted environment that lets telecommunications providers and enterprises evaluate the software behind AI-era mobile core networks before committing to deployment. The program launched in June with a select group of 30 companies; with today’s announcement, registration is now open to the… Read More »Nokia Opens Its Mobile Core Early Access Program to the Whole Industry
We attended the ZTE User Conference and Analyst Meeting in Milan, Italy, this week. The company is celebrating its 40th anniversary. On the first day, many customers presented and shared various insights about their operations; the operators’ insights primarily related to AI, 6G, and European mobile over-competition. On the second… Read More »ZTE User Conference in Milan: AI and 6G at the Forefront
We attended the 5G Americas conference this week and came away with few themes we felt were impactful: NTN, more spectrum lobbying, 6G, environmental sensing, and Sliced Services. We think the most important of these themes is Satellite NTN/D2C as it has the greatest potential to disrupt the mobile market… Read More »Top 5G Americas Wireless Operator Event Themes included Satellite and 6G
Last year, when Mavenir parted ways with John Baker, its Open RAN evangelist, it was pretty clear that Mavenir hadn’t met its plans for its RAN business. This week, it announced a $1.3 billion debt and equity restructuring, and today we learned of its plans to save $400 million per… Read More »Mavenir’s Restructuring Reflects RAN Industry Woes, Retrenching to Telecom Core
Internet Services and Satellite Services will clash with Telecom Services in the coming years, causing changes to equipment demand. Hyperscalers and Satellite services companies are more vertically integrated (they make more of their own equipment) and, in the future, will deliver more services that compete with Telecom services. Our forecasts,… Read More »Telecom Disruption in Optical and RAN Showing Growing Importance
T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert and SpaceX Founder Elon Musk shared the stage at SpaceX in Texas to announce plans for a 2023 beta service to allow T-Mobile customers to roam to Starlink satellite service using existing phones. Without saying it explicitly, it appears that SpaceX has a US-territory exclusive… Read More »SpaceX and T-Mobile US Announce Roaming Partnership Setting Stage for 6G
In a briefing with Rakuten Mobile today, we learned two neat things: It is experimenting with 3GPP on satellite, and it hopes to announced a full-stack Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) customer as early as next quarter. The company also shared some plans that it has for improving coverage to 96%… Read More »Rakuten Mobile Reveals Future plans
