T‑Mobile Achieves more than 5.6 Gbps with MU‑MIMO
September 13, 2020

T-Mobile and Ericsson teamed up on a 16-layer multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) demonstration, showcasing peak cell throughput of more than 5.6 Gbps! That’s on one channel of the 2.5 GHz spectrum.

During the test, engineers connected 8 separate smartphones to the same 5G radio and resources and, thanks to MU-MIMO — a fancy term for reusing the same radio resources for many users in the same cell at the same time — and beamforming — focusing a wireless connection in a specific direction — were able to achieve more than 700 Mbps on each device.

Technical Terms:

Using a commercially available massive MIMO radio with 64 antennas from Ericsson and the OnePlus 8 5G smartphones T-Mobile sells, 16 unique streams of data were transmitted — each stream capable of hitting more than 350 Mbps.
And with two data streams for each device, that’s 700+ Mbps for each smartphone, all using the same radio resources at the same time.

In tech terms, with 100 MHz of total 5G spectrum in the demonstration, T-Mobile was able to achieve an astonishing 50+ bps/Hz in spectral efficiency. That is much higher than the single-digit efficiency typically experienced today. 

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