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 pre-standard 6G stack. We think this is the most load-bearing 6G data point of the quarter: the first live 6G trial was in Plano, Texas in February, also centimeter-wave in the 7 GHz range with the same 400 MHz carrier, and the arc from Plano to Concord is Ericsson moving from the lab to a live site with an operator partner.
The base station sits in the site shelter; the user equipment lives in a 12-by-8-foot “small house on wheels” with varied wall and window materials for outside-in coverage testing. Testing spans coverage, throughput, latency and stability across line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight paths, including penetration through different glass and building materials. The choice of a commercial site is the quiet signal: 6G is entering site-acquisition economics, where coverage maps, permits and backhaul feasibility decide the timeline. If we were planning a 6G build, we would anchor on sites Ericsson has already tested before the standard hardens, and we would note that 5G, the last transition at this scale, took roughly a decade to go mainstream from 2019 — suggesting this outdoor call will be remembered as the day 6G left the lab, even though commercial service remains outside this demonstration and the standard is not expected before the 3GPP first release in 2028.
650 Group researches several of the technologies we covered in this blog, including Service Provider / Outdoor, Data Center, Co-Location, and Cloud, and more.
