M. Danger, S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld, "Two Birds, One Stone: FR3 as 6G Golden Band? Analysis from Measurement-Calibrated Ray Tracing," in IEEE International Symposium on Measurement in Networking and Communications (MNC), Naples, Italy, July 2026.

Future 6G networks must support highly heterogeneous services with conflicting requirements in coverage, capacity, link stability, and deployment efficiency. The established frequency ranges, Frequency Range 1 (FR1) and FR2, represent two operational extremes, providing either wide area robustness or very high peak data rates, thereby exposing the fundamental trade-off between coverage and performance. The upper mid-band, FR3 (7 GHz to 24 GHz), has therefore attracted growing interest as an intermediate solution. This work develops a measurement-calibrated ray tracing framework based on extensive FR1 and FR2 measurements in a large-scale industrial environment, enabling cross-frequency predictions for FR3 with a propagation modeling error between 3.11 dB and 4.79 dB (RMSE). Furthermore, a device-specific mapping from received power to achievable data rate is derived from the measurement data, enabling consistent performance comparison across FR1, 2, and 3. The results highlight frequency-specific trade-offs, showing that FR3 balances coverage and capacity effectively in the considered industrial indoor scenario. In a second, highly cluttered warehouse environment, coverage evaluated at 99 % of the configuration-dependent maximum Uplink (UL) data rate reveals that FR3 exhibits favorable infrastructure scaling behavior, requiring fewer transmitters than FR2 while enabling higher data rates than FR1. These findings indicate that FR3 can appropriately be referred to as 6G golden band, achieving an efficient balance between coverage and capacity. Yet, comprehensive field validation and regulatory guidance on upper mid-band allocation remain crucial to assess its practical viability without compromising existing radio systems.