• Swedish telco Telia has initiated a ‘major’ outdoor 6G trial in partnership with Ericsson
• The race to be seen as a 6G leader is hotting up 
• T-Mobile US has boasted that it will be first to launch 6G in the US, where the pressure is on to show off the country’s prowess during the Summer Olympics in 2028, but it will face strong competition

If recent months are anything to go by, we should brace ourselves for a 2027 awash with 6G one-upmanship as governments, telcos and vendors vie to get ahead of rivals and, much more importantly, figure out just what 6G will bring in terms of service capabilities and an improved customer experience, with Sweden’s Telia and Ericsson the latest to wave the pre-standards 6G flag.

While acknowledging that the commercial rollout of 6G will take place in the 2030-32 timeframe, the partners have launched a “major” outdoor 6G trial as “part of a new joint roadmap for 6G development in Sweden, under which Telia and Ericsson aim to position the country as a global leader in secure, sustainable and AI-powered digital infrastructure,” Telia announced. 

The new outdoor trials will see Telia and Ericsson evaluate 6G coverage, signal performance, uplink capacity, reliability and latency, “with the goal of optimising how 6G networks are designed and deployed”. Telia added that the trials will “tap Ericsson’s pre-standard 6G capabilities in the upper 6 GHz frequency band.” The partners will “also assess future spectrum requirements, including the 6 GHz and 600 MHz bands, to support the projected capacity and coverage needs of 6G networks. In addition, Telia intends to bring together stakeholders to help define a national 6G security architecture for Sweden, in which cybersecurity and resilience are embedded from the outset.”

To mark the announcement, Ericsson, which started this year by boasting a 6G “world first”, hosted a launch event in Stockholm that included “one of the Nordic region’s first over-the-air demonstrations of pre-standard 6G technology in the upper 6 GHz frequency band – spectrum that will be widely utilised in the 6G era”. 

Ericsson noted in this announcement that the demo highlighted “the spectrum’s potential to support wider channels, high-capacity connectivity and stronger uplink performance for future AI-enabled applications and real-time video.”

In addition, a separate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) demo “showed how a network can detect and track a drone. Using modified 5G radios, the system is capable of detecting and tracking multiple drones in real-world scenarios. The network generated real-time target metrics, including location, velocity and elevation. The system will support continued development and testing of pre-standard 6G capabilities.”

Separately, Ericsson also announced the launch of its new ISAC System. 

The Telia/Ericsson trials are building on other Swedish initiatives that include 6G as part of their R&D efforts. First, Digital Arena Sweden which, having been announced five months ago and which boasting Ericsson and Telia among its founding members, is about to host a series of events at Ericsson facilities in Lund that will encourage enterprises to experiment and interact with new AI- and API-enabled applications. And second, the NorthStar innovation programme, launched by Telia and Ericsson in 2023, which expects to offer the initiative’s partners “initial 6G capabilities” starting in 2029 (ahead of commercial 6G availability). 

As such, the new outdoor trials are as much about positioning Sweden as a 6G innovation hub as they are about putting the participants in the spotlight: The Nordic region has always been at the forefront of major cellular developments (along with Japan, South Korea, China and the US) and Finland – home, of course, to one of Ericsson’s main rivals, Nokia – has long been a hotbed of early 6G research, so Sweden will not want to be perceived as a relative laggard.

Anders Olsson, head of Telia Sweden, stated: “Our investments in robust, secure and comprehensive 5G networks serve as a natural stepping-stone towards the next generation of connectivity: 6G. We are now bringing together industry, academia and the public sector to ensure Sweden takes a leading role in 6G development, based on the needs of society and businesses, and to contribute to a more secure and competitive Sweden.”

The news came just days after T-Mobile US CTO John Saw boasted during the operator’s third-quarter earnings call that “T-Mobile will be the first with 6G in this country with new applications like integrated sensing and communications”. 

Saw will face competition for that particular feat from his main rivals, of course, with both AT&T and Verizon also investing time and efforts to develop radio access network (RAN)-enabled sensing applications: Indeed, Verizon’s CTO, Yago Tenorio, recently told TelecomTV that he had learned a lot about ISAC from trials conducted during the FIFA World Cup, which was held in North America earlier this year, and that those trials, involving large crowds at a sporting event, lay the ground for Verizon’s plans for the Summer Olympics, which take place in Los Angeles in July 2028. “These are early days” for 6G use case trials, “but we have LA 2028 coming…” noted Tenorio – see Verizon’s CTO senses a 6G opportunity.

Verizon also recently took another important step in its pre-6G testing programme by “successfully completing the first pre-standard 6G field call in the 7GHz [spectrum band]” using Ericsson 6G proof-of-concept technology deployed at one of the telco’s commercial network sites in Concord, California. 

For more on 6G developments, check out TelecomTV’s recent free-to-download editorial report, The AI-Native Path to 6G, view the panel discussion that followed the publication of the report, and bookmark our dedicated channel, Defining 6G Networks. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV