Success Story
Wupatec wins the MWC Innovation Award 2026
Irene de Gruijter represented Wupatec at the MWC Pitch Contest in Barcelona (and won!). A recognition rooted in a concrete engineering challenge: managing frequency transitions at the edge of 5G and 6G.
MWC 2026: The context
Mobile World Congress is the largest mobile technology event in the world, showcasing the next frontier of connectivity and global digital transformation. In this edition there were:
- 2,700 international exhibitors
- 100,000 visitors and 205 countries represented
This year, Wupatec was present as part of the Mission Nationale France 6G within the Business France Pavilion. Stéphane Dellier and Irene de Gruijter represented the company throughout the week.
On that Wednesday, Irene participated in the MWC Innovation Pitch Contest and won the 2026 edition. She presented our latest product, the FR3 extension board, as a technical bridge from 5G to 6G. The jury included Hervé Naudin, from Orange Innovation, and Agnès Le Meil, General Delegate of InfraNum. In charge of the contest presentation and coordination was Fadwa Belhadj from Business France (responsible for strategic partnership & global account manager at Business France).
What the pitch was about: a hardware gap at the heart of the 5G-6G transition
The wireless industry is at a critical inflection point. As it moves from 5G-Advanced toward 6G, it is confronting what Irene de Gruijter described at the MWC Pitch Contest as a « spectrum crunch »: the lower frequency bands are crowded, and the high mmWave bands struggle with range.
The answer, as the industry increasingly converges on, lies in the FR3 spectrum: a band that offers the capacity of mmWave while retaining the coverage characteristics of lower bands. The problem is that most current hardware does not cover it. There is a significant gap between the communication modules available today and the spectrum where tomorrow’s systems need to operate.
The solution: a plug-and-play 5G/6G transceiver
A transceiver is the module that sends and receives signals, converting data into radio waves when transmitting and radio waves back into data when receiving. It is the core component of base stations, satellite communications, and radar systems.
Wupatec’s innovation is a high-performance 5G/6G transceiver designed to bridge exactly this gap. Its plug-and-play architecture is built for flexibility, enabling manufacturers and researchers to prototype and validate systems in the FR3 band without waiting for purpose-built infrastructure that does not yet exist.
"Time-to-market is the most expensive metric in telecommunications. By providing a single transceiver that bridges the gap between today's 5G and tomorrow's 6G, we enable manufacturers and researchers to prototype and validate systems in weeks instead of months."
If you are working on systems that will need to operate in the FR3 band and would like to understand what the transceiver enables concretely, we are available for a technical discussion!
Otherwise you can check our FR3 board product page here.
