Ericsson has committed $100 million to integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and expects a commercial product within two years, as the technology moves from laboratory demonstrations to stadium trials, US Department of War contracts and a proposed Los Angeles test tied to the 2028 Olympics.

ISAC turns cellular networks into sensors by analysing radio signals reflected from objects, allowing them to detect, track and identify targets much as radar does. Over the past year it has been demonstrated at a stadium, written into a DoW contract and proposed for a Los Angeles trial ahead of the 2028 Olympics.

Dr. Tom Rondeau, principal director of the DoW's FutureG programme, said denser 5G and 6G networks, edge-based AI compute and greater access to commercial spectrum are making network-based sensing viable. "We have a network that covers 70% of the landmass of the United States and about 98% of the population," he said. "That's what we're trying to use this for, to kick off the value proposition of ISAC."

What problem does sensing solve?

Rondeau named drone swarms as the immediate military focus. The aim is to find, fix and track potentially thousands of devices, including in dense cities where conventional sensors struggle. "It's one thing to have a missile defence system or a drone defence system that gets to look up and out into open airspace," he said, "but it's another to track it in downtown New York [City] or downtown [Washington] DC."

Network density could compensate for the short sensing range of individual sites. At the power levels involved, a single base station might reach only a few kilometres, but sites spaced every half kilometre could extend coverage across much of the network.

Rondeau pointed to Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb, in which drones smuggled deep into Russian territory and controlled over Russia's cellular network reportedly destroyed roughly a third of its strategic bomber fleet. "That tells us that we can no longer think of border security as just looking out of our geographical borders," he said. "We have to be able to look across our entire nation."

He also cited civilian uses, drawing on DARPA emergency-planning work around Hurricane Katrina, when evacuees did not go where planners expected. "It's not like we're going to redirect them to where we want to be," he said, "so why don't we redirect the resources to where they actually are."

Where have trials already run?

• AT&T and Ericsson ran a drone-detection demonstration near AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, during the FIFA World Cup.
• In nearby Dallas, Verizon and Samsung tested a crowd-density heatmap at the World Cup FanFest to help fans find shorter queues and organisers manage foot traffic.
• In July, Cohere Technologies won a $28 million FutureG Office contract to build a multi-waveform radio access network prototype that uses commercial cellular infrastructure to detect drones and other aerial threats.
• Ericsson and Finland's state-owned Erillisverkot ran live demonstrations at a Helsinki cargo harbour, using sensing data from several network points to detect small, low-altitude drones.

Verizon CTO Yago Tenorio drew a commercial line between the two US venue trials. "That was a crowd sensing for the FanFest area, which is completely different to detecting drones," he said. "It looks like a business-to-business opportunity that you can monetise."

He noted ISAC raises fewer privacy concerns than cameras because it returns shape, movement and rough size rather than identity. It can distinguish "a pedestrian from a bicycle and a drone from a bird", though not one person from another.

How does the technology compare?

At Qualcomm's San Diego campus, Verizon tested 100MHz to 400MHz of millimetre-wave spectrum across four synchronised transmission and reception points. The system mapped the position and velocity of an airborne target and moving ground vehicles while keeping a ground user connected over standalone 5G. Tenorio said millimetre wave was the only spectrum with sufficient bandwidth, and bandwidth rather than frequency determines sensing accuracy. "The precision of the positioning and the radar image... is proportional to the bandwidth of the signal," he stated.

Huawei appears to hold an early lead in deployments. Ericsson Federal CEO Christopher Ling said the Chinese vendor has reportedly more than 300 ISAC-capable systems operating, though he cautioned the figure might not be exact. He linked the lead to China's early nationwide shift to standalone 5G.

Architecture divides the two vendors. A monostatic system has one tower transmit and receive its own reflection, indicating an object's presence and direction. Ericsson, as far as Ling knows the only company using a multistatic configuration, has other sites receive the reflected signal, enabling more precise location and tracking. A monostatic system might show an object is off to the left; the multistatic setup used in Arlington placed targets 1,500 metres away, measured speed and tracked them to within eight to 10 metres.

Ling stressed Ericsson is focused on 5G sensing rather than a fully integrated system, since turning a 5G network into a radar remains a significant technical challenge. Micro-Doppler signatures from spinning propellers could let the system identify drone types, and the resolution may eventually support targeting without costly military radar. "You've got a drone that costs $30,000 and we're shooting it down with a million-dollar missile," he said. "This starts to bend the cost curve." Ericsson has held discussions with European countries bordering Russia and sees growing Middle East interest in infrastructure protection.

What comes next for 5G and 6G?

Tenorio framed current ISAC work as a step towards 6G: vendors are squeezing sensing into 5G and 5G-Advanced while preserving capacity, whereas 6G would build the capability in natively. Verizon has made ISAC one of two anchor themes of its 6G Innovation Forum, expanded in September.

The carrier has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a one-year experimental licence covering 4.8GHz to 4.9GHz — part of the 4.4GHz band the NTIA is studying for 5G and 6G — to test Ericsson hardware and software in an outdoor private network within a five-kilometre radius around its LA lab, separate from commercial networks. The application is pending. Verizon has also applied to the NTIA's Mission 6G 28 programme, which will showcase 6G technology around the 2028 Olympics. "LA will be an important opportunity for us to display not only what 6G is about... but where we are in terms of advancing the technology," Tenorio said.

AT&T Business's Shawn Hakl sees value where cameras and sensors are impractical or the assets belong to someone else, from public safety to spotting an unplanned obstruction on a city street. Ling went further: the military case may ultimately rest on sensing rather than connectivity, since a customer that would not buy a 5G network for communications alone could still need the infrastructure to obtain 5G sensing. With Ericsson targeting a commercial product within two years, and the standards debate set for the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, the timetable for ISAC now runs through LA's Olympic showcase.