5G: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH!

Vol 57: Do You Hear What I Hear? A Benchmark Study of 6Rx Performance in a Commercial Smartphone

03/29/2026 | 36 pages
Price: $1,795.00

SRG just completed its 57th 5G benchmark study. For this endeavor, we used two Motorola razr fold 2026 smartphones to evaluate the relative performance impact of 6 receive chains (6Rx) in a smartphone. We used the T-Mobile 5G SA network (Band n41) for the study with Nokia providing the infrastructure.

Highlights of the Report include the following:

Our Thanks. We did this study with the support of Accuver (XCAL5 and XCAP) and Keysight Technologies (Umetrix Data). We used XCAL5 to collect chipset data and we used XCAP to post process and analyze those logs. We used Umetrix Data to generate the data traffic, including both TCP (short, bursty transactions) and extended-length full-buffer UDP traffic.

The Scope. Using software, we intentionally disabled 6Rx in one of the smartphones so that we could do apples-apples comparison testing of 6Rx versus 4Rx. We did both drive tests and stationary tests involving cell sites with 10 Gbps backhaul. We also used ADB commands to disable USB charging so that we could look at the impact of 6Rx on current drain during the tests. The analysis included both spectral efficiency (Mbps per RB) and overall performance (Mbps per RB per mA).

More Details. We analyzed Mbps per RB as a function of RSRP and SINR, as well as distributions of throughput using geo binned data. We also looked at the root causes for the performance differences that we observed, including the number of MIMO layers and MCS allocations. We also included the impact of battery current drain since we hypothesized that the use of additional receive chains would increase the battery current. For this analysis, we looked at the RB normalized throughput (Mbps per RB), combined with the current drain, or Mbps per RB per mA. In total, we downloaded approximately 1.6 TB of data, including both short bursty TCP data transfers and multi-minute UDB data streams.

The Results. Without giving away the farm, we conclude that 6Rx will become a fairly common feature in 5G / 6G smartphones, in particular for the higher tier smartphones that generate a disproportionate amount of the data traffic in a cellular network.