Verizon and Ericsson Complete the First Outdoor 6G Field Call Test

October 16 — The US telecom operator Verizon and Ericsson announced that they have completed the world’s first field call test of pre-standard 6G technology, using the 7GHz band at a commercial Verizon network site in Concord, California.

According to a news release Ericsson published on the 15th local time, Ericsson’s 6G proof-of-concept equipment was deployed on site and validated, taking 6G technology out of the laboratory and into a real environment for testing. The two companies can assess not only outdoor network performance but also how wireless signals behave after passing through buildings to reach indoor locations.

Note: “pre-standard 6G technology” refers to 6G technology whose formal technical standards have not yet been set and which is still at an early stage of research and testing.

The Ericsson 6G proof-of-concept equipment used in the test was located at Verizon’s commercial network site in Concord. The base station was set up inside the equipment room, while the user terminal was placed in a mobile cabin about 3.7 metres long and 2.4 metres wide, able to support both indoor and outdoor fixed wireless test configurations. The cabin had its own power supply and a backup battery and used different wall and window materials, so that indoor signal coverage could be compared under different conditions. The test used a 6G protocol stack that has not yet been formally standardised, with a carrier bandwidth of 400MHz.

The test was not only about the ability of wireless signals to penetrate buildings. The two companies confirmed that they completed an outdoor 6G call test, and also used a more comprehensive proof of concept to study how 6G signal performance changes as it moves from outdoors to indoors. The tests covered network coverage, throughput, latency, stability and the performance of various functions, and took into account line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight propagation, obstruction by vegetation and obstacles, and signals passing through different kinds of glass and building materials.

Both companies stressed that the result is still a proof of concept before the formal 6G standard is issued and does not mean that 6G has entered commercial service. They will continue to analyse the field test data and use what they learn in subsequent technology research, testing and network deployment planning.

In the future, 6G is expected to offer more flexible network programmability, faster response times and the ability to sense the environment it operates in, creating more possibilities for immersive communication, AI-native services, industrial automation and robotics applications.