A six-beam Galtronics antenna paired with a basic 4T4R radio delivered more than twice the capacity of a 64T64R massive MIMO unit in C-band spectrum, according to a trial Galtronics attributes to a Tier 1 North American operator. Downlink speeds in that comparison were more than 200% faster, the company claims.

The numbers come from a company paper, not a published operator trial, but they anchor a growing commercial story. Galtronics, a US antenna specialist owned by Canada's Baylin Technologies, has converted Deutsche Telekom from trialist to full commercial customer. Its white panel antennas appeared among the conventional masts at last year's Glücksgefühle Music Festival in Germany, an event attended by 250,000 people that Deutsche Telekom documented on YouTube. Operator customers also include American Tower, Arium (formerly Crown Castle), AT&T, Boldyn, Orange, SFR, Telecom Italia, Verizon and Vodafone, according to CEO Leighton Carroll. He says Galtronics panels featured at most venues of the recent soccer World Cup hosted in the US.

The company's pitch is a direct attack on the massive MIMO orthodoxy that Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia have promoted since the arrival of 5G. Massive MIMO crams dozens of transmitters and receivers into each active antenna unit and uses beamforming to direct signals at individual devices. Marcus Weldon, Nokia's former chief technology officer, says the technology has underdelivered. "Massive MIMO said it was going to get eight times the throughput, because we'd do beamforming that concentrated the energy," he told Light Reading. "The practical reality is that because it's so hard to do, it's two times."

Weldon argues the economics do not stack up. "Two times is good, but it's not worth the cost and expense – you might as well just deploy more spectrum on another band," he said.

Galtronics takes a different technical route. A single passive panel generates multiple beams, each pointing in a different direction across a coverage zone. Rival multibeam vendors include MatSing, whose spherical Luneberg-lens antennas hang in the steel frame of the AT&T Stadium in Dallas, and Andrew, the Amphenol-owned brand created when Amphenol bought CommScope's antenna division for $2.1 billion last year. "Originally, with a passive antenna, you had one beam," said Earl Lum, founder of EJL Wireless Research. "But now CommScope and others are coming out with multibeam antennas."

Carroll says Galtronics' patented panel design avoids the drawbacks of both approaches. Lens products, he argues, are "large, heavy, and expensive", while Butler-matrix designs suffer from beam squint. "Our technology is not based on Butler. It's not based on Luneberg," he said. "Our product is not round. It looks just like a panel because it is just a panel, but it effectively does the same thing as the lens products in a panel-based format." At launch, he claims, the product weighed half as much as an equivalent MatSing antenna and cost a quarter to a third of the price.

Scale remains the obvious constraint. Baylin Technologies reported revenues of just $38.1 million for the first half of 2026, against roughly $10.2 billion for Ericsson over the same period. Big telcos have largely stuck with the big RAN vendors since 5G launched, and buying antennas separately from other RAN components requires integration work. "Nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM," said Carroll, comparing that vendor loyalty to the grip Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung hold on the market.

Minya Gavrilovic, who left Galtronics' CTO role three years ago to run Andrew, shares the skepticism about massive MIMO's dominance. "Honestly, a lot of it, I believe, is that it just seems easier," he said of massive MIMO adoption. "You just plug it in, and it works."

So far, multibeam deployments have concentrated in stadium-style, high-density settings rather than the macro network. Whether that changes depends on operators proving Galtronics' capacity claims in their own trials and accepting the integration burden of a smaller supplier.