MatSing's lens antennas cover 70% of NFL stadiums – but massive MIMO blocks the bigger field

MatSing's spherical Luneberg lens antennas now hang in roughly 70% of the stadiums used by the NFL, plus racetracks and concert sites including Coachella in Indio, California — yet the family-run company remains nearly invisible in the wider 5G radio market, where Ericsson and Nokia's massive MIMO doctrine still dominates operator spending.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2005 by Dr. Serguei Matytsine and his sons Leo and Michael, builds antennas around a concept the scientist Rudolf Luneberg proposed in the 1940s: a spherical, refractive lens that sends out many independent beams without the interference that plagues conventional panels.

The problem MatSing claims to solve is real. Most antenna panels rely on a passive component called a Butler matrix, which fires multiple beams to support device connections. Angle those beams left or right and they suffer "squint" — the beam distorts and intrudes on neighboring beams, like a passenger leaning into another as a car takes a bend.

How did a lens company end up in stadiums?

It did not start there. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Matytsine family's attention was caught by the intergovernmental project that became the Square Kilometre Array, a planned giant array of antennas to receive weak signals from space.

"Somebody said there's this technology called a Luneberg lens that actually has quite a few advantages compared with dishes because it can see a wider field of view," said Leo Matytsine, co-founder and executive vice president. "You can have multiple independent beams."

The hard part was materials. "Nobody previously was able to find a material that would be suitable, and traditional materials don't work so well for communications," he told Light Reading. A lightweight metamaterial invented by his father became MatSing's core innovation, first drawing the company into satellite tracking before the move into terrestrial networks.

Stadiums — with tens of thousands of fans in dense crowds — proved the natural market. Earl Lum, founder of analyst firm EJL Wireless Research, describes the antennas lodged in stadium steel skeletons as looking like beach balls. "Lenses are ideal for multiple beams, and multiple beams are perfect for sectorizing and therefore producing high capacity from a single antenna," said Matytsine.

Who is chasing the same business?

Competition has arrived. Amphenol, which reported sales of more than $23 billion last year, acquired the Andrew unit from CommScope for $2.1 billion in July 2024 and now markets a metalens under its CleanBeam brand that appears to work on similar principles. Canada's Galtronics offers a panel-based alternative; CEO Leighton Carroll claimed in September: "We have a product that weighs half as much as an equivalent MatSing, and, when we launched, cost a quarter to a third of the price."

Matytsine points to more than 60 filed patents covering the metamaterials themselves. "It's not electrical engineering, it's material science, and our patents cover a lot of these key new materials we've invented," he said. "It's possible to use alternate materials, but the question becomes what kind of performance you'll get out of that." He also claims violations: "We've seen companies, primarily in China, that are straight up copying our patents, and trying to replicate, and trying to push those products outside of China as well."

MatSing is not synonymous with spheres, he insists. Its first telecom products in 2011 were cylindrical, and newer designs look more like standard panels — a response to customers mounting spheres on rooftops to cover busy streets, which sometimes forced changes to planning permissions in the US.

Can it break massive MIMO's grip?

The bigger obstacle is incumbent RAN vendors. "Look at the companies that are rolling out massive MIMO – they're very entrenched with the customer," said Matytsine. "They want to sell the whole package." He concedes massive MIMO delivers superior throughput, while his passive antennas excel at capacity; MatSing products can pair with basic 4T4R radios from any vendor, plug-and-play style.

Some support comes from an unexpected quarter. Former Nokia CTO Marcus Weldon argues massive MIMO underdelivered: "Massive MIMO said it was going to get eight times the throughput... The practical reality is that because it's so hard to do, it's two times... you might as well just deploy more spectrum on another band."

The caveat: Ericsson and Nokia profit little from commoditized 4T4R radios, as Lum has noted, giving them little reason to champion MatSing's approach. The company's bet is that later-stage 5G or 6G projects will surface exactly where massive MIMO falls short — and that stadiums prove the concept works at scale.