- SRG President Mike Thelander says spectral efficiency – not network slicing – may be the real payoff from moving to 5G SA
- Thelander tested Verizon’s 5G NSA and 5G SA in downtown St. Paul and found the spectral efficiency for the 5G SA smartphone was 2.2x higher than the 5G NSA smartphone
- The transition from NSA to SA isn’t simple, but the study shows a compelling reason for making the switch
Forget about network slicing, arguably the most ballyhooed feature to come from 5G standalone (SA).
The real star of the 5G SA show is spectral efficiency, according to Signals Research Group (SRG) President Mike Thelander, and he’s got the real-world tests to prove it.
Well, in Thelander’s case, the actual star of the show might be Charlie Brown and his friends, as the tests were conducted in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, where statues commemorate the old stomping grounds of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.
But it just so happens to be the same place where Verizon deployed 5G SA, alongside its precursor, 5G non-standalone (NSA), which uses 4G LTE as an anchor tenant. Thus, it made the perfect site to compare and contrast the old vs. new – and it’s not that far from Thelander’s home base.
It was more or less happenstance that the gear he tested was Verizon’s: “The results are not operator specific, by any means,” he said.
In fact, Verizon was not aware of Thelander’s tests until after his report was published; ditto for Ericsson, which provided the infrastructure for Verizon’s St. Paul market.
“I knew there would be strong gains in the uplink, but I had never gone out and quantified it,” he told Fierce.
2 smartphones: 5G NSA and 5G SA
To do that, Thelander used two Motorola razr fold 2026 smartphones to test one phone locked to the 5G NSA network and the other locked to 5G SA. He walked 9.8 kilometers around the neighborhood and transferred about 25.5 GB of data between the two smartphones to capture the results.
In this geographic area, Verizon’s 32T32R Massive MIMO radios support both LTE (Band 66) and 5G (Band n2), which, generally speaking, correlate to the 1900 MHz and 2 GHz spectrum range.
“Based on this analysis, it is evident the spectral efficiency for the 5G SA smartphone was 2.2x higher than it was for the 5G NSA smartphone,” he said.
“There’s a lot of stuff operators can do today to increase their uplink performance and going to SA and adopting uplink MIMO in smartphones is the obvious choice,” he added.
SRG’s test results are specifically tied to FDD spectrum, which is where operators have a lot of LTE deployed. FDD stands for frequency division duplex, whereas TDD is time division duplex.
Most smartphones do not currently support uplink MIMO in FDD bands while it is becoming more common in TDD bands, Thelander said. T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, for example, is TDD.
Incentive to move to 5G SA
Plenty of operators have complained about the lack of ROI on their 5G network investments. They put a lot of money into 5G upgrades without a “killer app” akin to some earlier generations; namely, the Ubers and DoorDashes of 4G LTE.
Most operators migrated to the NSA version of 5G first and parked there for quite a while, in part because NSA falls back to LTE, which is fairly well deployed where 5G isn’t as widely available.
T-Mobile in the U.S. was a rare exception; it leapfrogged the competition to be the first to go nationwide with 5G SA and then went on to nationwide 5G Advanced.
Verizon and AT&T followed and by the end of 2025, they were declaring their networks nationwide with 5G SA, with a caveat: not all end-user devices support 5G SA. That would take time.
Nowadays, most of the more advanced handset chipsets support UL-MIMO in FDD, but it’s up to handset manufacturers to enable it, and that’s where additional costs come in.
“Operators are starting to push handset manufacturers to support it, but that’s what needs to happen. The handset manufacturers need to support it and be incentivized to do it.,” Thelander said.
Still, you’d be hard pressed to find the average consumer shopping around for “Massive MIMO” in their next handset’s specs.
“The everyday consumer doesn’t know what Massive MIMO is,” Thelander acknowledged. “Even if you read the specs, I don’t think they go into that level of detail …It’s not that they’re trying to hide it. It’s just a level of detail that most people don’t care about.”
AI traffic expectations
One thing people do seem to care about: AI. There’s been a lot of talk in the wireless industry about how AI will generate a great deal of traffic on mobile networks, including via the traffic generated by consumers using AI on their smartphones.
Thelander hasn’t seen that yet. “Is AI having an impact? Yeah. Is it as bad as people are claiming it is or going to be? I’m not convinced yet,” he said.
Next up: Thelander has a report coming out in September that examines what’s possible with downlink/uplink multi-user MIMO in 5G FDD spectrum. No spoilers, but according to Thelander, even greater spectral gains are on the horizon.
Read more stories about 5G:
T-Mobile gets a lift from Nokia’s latest 5G MIMO tech — SRG
AT&T makes it official: 5G SA is nationwide
Verizon 5G SA spotted in California
5G SA paves way for more 5G voice, slicing: analyst
Here's a 5G SA update on the Big 3 US mobile operators
Article updated to reflect that most advanced handsets chipsets today support UL-MIMO in FDD.