MIMO

It also disclosed that they're going to be using 64T64R radio heads.

So they're going to be doing massive MIMO on these radio units, which should improve capacity with limited spectrum and improve coverage.

But it's a macro cell, so it's very much not the femtocells and microcells and other small cells that they were referring to in the past.

which isn't really much of a surprise because I didn't really believe that to begin with.

They're going to have to also, I think.

that they're going to deploy will probably be two gigahertz.

And then they'll have to layer the 800 on top of that because you don't really need massive MIMO for 800.

You really want it for mid band.

So that means that you have to operate during shutdowns and kind of first gas scenarios that doesn't give you give you necessarily the same capacity.

So you really have to rely on quality of service, because when you start shutting down some part of the network due to active components, like, for instance, the mass in MIMO they do on 4G, 5G, you have to rely on passive component that doesn't give you necessarily the same capacity.

So if you don't have quality of service underneath, the service will suffer.

So that's a very key component now when we build sustainable coverage both over the sea and also into the structure.

Right before I was head of R&D at Rakuten Symphony, it's a Japanese company.

Uh, and, um, and so I would say like my, my two focus has been around, uh, on the signal processing side, it's this, this technology called MIMO.

If you've seen a wifi access point with multiple antennas, that's what's MIMO.

I was at the very early stage of that technology 25 years ago, um, working side by side with the, among the pioneers of the technology.

And then more specifically later, I developed an extension of the technology called distributed massive MIMO, where you have distributed antennas, they cooperate with each other to, instead of creating interference, they actually take advantage of interference to increase the connectivity speed.

And so now used for 5G, more broadly for 6G networks.

And then the other innovation that I worked on was more on the virtualization of cellular networks.

This would be, of course, in a direct aim at being a competitor here by blending that ground infrastructure with the satellites.

And under this agreement, Qualcomm's Dragon Wing cellular platforms, so these are the QRU-100 and QDU-100, will be used to supply massive MIMO radio and distributed unit processing for tens of thousands of planned cell sites across the U.S. with rollouts set to begin as early as next year, 2027.

By pairing ground towers with low Earth orbit satellites, SpaceX intends to deliver a fully integrated hybrid network designed to eliminate dead zones nationwide.

So can't buy it.

Wait, what's D-R-A-G-O-N-W-I-N-G? Dragonwing, launched in February 2025, is Qualcomm's brand for its industrial, networking and infrastructure silicon, the chips that go into things other than phones.

The Dragonwing toolbox, the deal announcement names the QRU-100 and QDU-100 platforms specifically, component what it is where it lives QRU-100 radio unit platform supporting 64T64R massive MIMO, 64 transmit, 64 receive paths, up on the tower, behind the antenna QDU-100, X100 distributed unit layer 1 baseband platform.

Its card form, the X100, is an inline PCIe accelerator, 35W max, that slots into ordinary Dell or HPE servers in a cabinet at the base of the tower or a nearby edge site QTR transceivers the RF transceiver chips that turn bits into radio waves and back inside the radio AI features plus RAN automation suite AI beam prediction, uplink tuning and factory calibration built into the platforms, plus a separate network management suite everywhere, apparently.

because it's 2026 this gear has been deployed before, though not at this scale.

mostly found in stadiums and press releases 2. denser modulation every radio symbol encodes bits through combinations of amplitude and phase since 3gpp release 17 5g's downlink supports up to 1024 com meaning 10 bits per symbol but only when the signal is clean enough It's like a crowded restaurant, the quieter the room, the faster you can talk.

3.

Massive MIMO and Beamforming This is the big one.

An old 4G antenna is a flood light.

I think, again, I draw the analogy as a 2G start.

If you just roadmap out where 2G was, single antennas, wasn't even discussion of in MIMO, but where we are now, we're in the massive MIMO phase.

And I think 10, 15 years down the line, you're going to have satellites with massive MIMO and very high-density beams.

Now, obviously, the one advantage you've got with satellites is they drop out of the sky every 8 to 10 years.

So you've got an automatic technology upgrade in the plan.