- Eridan is pitching distributed MIMO as a scalable, lower‑risk alternative to massive MIMO
- The company says its digital radios deliver significantly higher throughput, especially at the cell edge
- Eridan sees its radio architecture extending beyond networks into physical AI and future 6G devices
Radio startup Eridan is using hard performance numbers and a clear architectural argument to challenge one of the wireless industry’s biggest assumptions: that massive MIMO is the only viable path to scaling capacity.
Instead, the company is betting on distributed MIMO built from smaller, fully digital radios that can be deployed incrementally and coordinated through software.
At Mobile World Congress 2026 last week, Fierce interviewed CEO Omid Tahernia and CTO Doug Kirkpatrick. The latter said Eridan has demonstrated distributed MIMO, our buzzword from Day 2 at MWC, by combining multiple 2×2 radios to behave like a single 4×4 system, enabled by precise time synchronization and an all‑digital design.
“With massive MIMO, you’re committing to a big footprint up front,” he said. “With distributed MIMO, you can scale as you need to.”
That distinction matters, the CTO argued, because massive MIMO deployments often force operators to make large capital and power commitments before traffic demand is fully understood.
“You’re putting a lot of hardware on the tower, consuming a lot of power, and hoping the traffic shows up,” Kirkpatrick said. “With distributed MIMO, you deploy what you need, where you need it, and add more only when the demand is real.”
Eridan recently announced a 4×4 radio supported by U.S. NTIA funding, with sampling expected this spring and broader rollout later this year. Verizon is both an investor and a development partner, alongside Rakuten and KDDI, which are expected to serve as early deployment customers.
Efficiency is central to Eridan’s pitch. The company says its 2×2 radios run at roughly 40 watts of direct current power, allowing outdoor deployments with power profiles closer to indoor systems. Field tests, the executives said, show aggregate throughput gains of more than eight times compared with conventional radios, particularly at the cell edge where performance typically collapses.
“Most radios fall off sharply as you move toward the edge,” Kirkpatrick said. “We’re seeing sustained performance much farther out, and that changes the economics of the cell.”
Looking ahead, Eridan sees its radio architecture extending beyond traditional network infrastructure. The company is working to miniaturize its transceiver technology into chip‑scale designs that could be embedded into drones, robots and autonomous systems—bringing the same uplink and downlink advantages directly to physical AI devices.
“The technology isn’t limited to the network side,” CEO Tahernia noted. “You can take it to the sensor side, where physical AI and 6G start to intersect.”
For Eridan, that convergence represents both a near‑term opportunity in private wireless and a longer‑term bet that future networks will favor flexibility and efficiency over brute‑force scale.
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.