Telia and Ericsson Sign 6G MoU, Demo Upper 6 GHz and Drone Radar

Telia and Ericsson have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly research and develop 6G technology in Sweden, and marked the deal with two live demonstrations: an over-the-air trial of pre-standard 6G in the upper 6 GHz band and a radar-style drone-tracking test built on modified 5G radio equipment.

The partnership aims to position Sweden as a European leader in next-generation mobile connectivity. Work will cover real-technology trials, use cases, network requirements, and connections with universities, industrial partners, start-ups and government agencies. The companies unveiled the project at Ericsson Studio in Stockholm, with Telia President and CEO Patrik Hofbauer and Ericsson President and CEO Per Narvinger presiding. Patrick Johansson, Ericsson's head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Anders Olsson, head of Telia Sweden, also attended, alongside government officials, academic partners and business leaders.

What did the demonstrations show?

The first demonstration pushed large spectrum channels in the upper 6 GHz band, spectrum widely expected to sit at the core of the 6G era. The trial showed higher data capacity and faster uplink speeds. Both matter for data-intensive AI applications and high-definition live video streaming.

The second demonstration concerned Integrated Sensing and Communication, or ISAC. Engineers modified existing 5G radio equipment so it worked as a radar-like detector. The test detected and tracked several airborne drones, collecting performance data including location, speed and altitude. Ericsson regards this radar-sensing approach as the basis for testing further 6G sensing functions.

Neither company disclosed throughput figures or trial locations beyond Sweden.

How does the commercial path run?

The MoU sets out concrete joint work. Telia and Ericsson will:

• conduct live trials to gauge 6G performance and assess commercial application possibilities;
• build solutions focused on cyber security, network reliability, wide geographical coverage, signal performance and energy efficiency;
• collaborate with regional innovation partners, including university researchers, private industry leaders and government agencies;
• supply technical input to global standards bodies and policy guidance on spectrum allocation, workforce training and testbed facilities;
• join the national research environment, including Digital Arena Sweden, to encourage regional adoption.

The new deal builds on existing 5G technologies: 5G Standalone, 5G Advanced, network APIs and AI automation systems. Both companies frame the move to 6G as a natural progression rather than a drastic change, since upgraded 5G technologies will carry the increasing bandwidth that AI systems demand.

That framing deserves scrutiny. It is vendor-and-operator positioning as much as engineering fact: a smooth 5G-to-6G continuity story serves vendors selling modernization roadmaps. The demonstrations themselves remain pre-standard, and no 6G standard yet exists to measure against.

Why Sweden, and why these two?

Executives from both organizations stressed that Sweden and the Nordic region have a long record of early mobile adoption. Heavy 5G investment, they argued, prepares the ground for 6G while sustaining the region's competitiveness and technological security.

The history supports the claim. Telia and Ericsson jointly launched one of the world's first automatic mobile networks, NMT, in 1981, followed by GSM in 1991, Sweden's first 3G network in 2004, the world's first commercial 4G network in Stockholm in 2009, and Sweden's first 5G network in 2020.

What does this change for operators and vendors elsewhere? Little immediately. The MoU is a research agreement, not a deployment contract, and its outputs — trial data, standards contributions and policy input — will land over years, not quarters.

The upper 6 GHz band, however, is already a live regulatory question across Europe, and technical evidence from trials of this kind typically feeds spectrum-allocation decisions. Standards work on 6G is expected to firm up toward the end of the decade, which sets the real clock on when these demonstrations translate into commercial networks.