T-Mobile has been placing a focus on its 2.5GHz 5G rollout lately, with coverage recently expanding to 81 new cities and towns. And now T-Mo has announced a new achievement using 2.5GHz spectrum.

T-Mobile teamed up with Ericsson to achieve a peak cell throughput of 5.6Gbps using a single 100MHz channel of 2.5GHz spectrum. The demonstration included a 16-layer multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) setup.

In the test, T-Mobile connected eight OnePlus 8 5G phones to the same 5G radio and used MU-MIMO to reuse the same radio resources for many users on the same cell at the same time, as well as beamforming to direct the streams in specific directions.

There were 16 unique streams of data being transmitted at once and each one was able to hit more than 350Mbps. Since there were two data streams going to each device, some devices were able to hit more than 700Mbps. T-Mo says the eight OnePlus 8 5G phone averaged speeds between 650-733Mbps.

T-Mobile also touts that this trial showed “phenomenal” spectral efficiency. Typically you see single digit efficiency, but in this test, T-Mo was able to achieve 50+ bps/Hz of spectral efficiency.

“The reason why this is so significant, the more we can squeeze out of the spectrum, the more users we can serve and the more data each user can use,” explained Egil Gronstad, T-Mobile’s senior director of Technology, Development, & Strategy.

“At scale, this technology means T-Mobile could connect massively more devices to the same cell infrastructure and still deliver blazing fast speeds to all of them without compromising performance and that means wireless companies will be able to deliver even better 5G performance to even more people,” T-Mo added.

T-Mobile says it aims to begin deploying this 16-layer MU-MIMO technology in 2021. Until then, you can hit the link below for a video showing T-Mo and Ericsson’s trial in action.

Source: T-Mobile