INTERVIEW: Cohere Technologies CEO Ray Dolan (pictured) told Mobile World Live (MWL) the company’s universal spectrum multiplier (USM) software would be in place with one of the world’s largest RAN players by year-end.

The vendor previously claimed its USM product has the potential to improve 5G capacity by up to 50 per cent by providing spectral efficiency to relieve congestion across lower frequency bands.

He told MWL Cohere Technologies has spent around a year fine-tuning USM and is now “close to finishing up”. He highlighted that USM improves 5G capacity without the need to rip and replace gear in an operator’s network.

“By the end of this year, we will have inserted our solution along with one of the largest mature RAN players in the world,” he explained. “And that will be done in a way that ports nicely to all mature RAN players.”

Dolan describes USM as a software product that works in a greenfield open RAN architecture and “now can be proven to be consumable in a closed RAN mature architecture”.

Cohere Technologies conducted a field test with Vodafone Spain earlier this year that resulted in a 50 per cent boost in spectral efficiency, but Dolan told MWL the results were actually a little higher.

He noted the company has ongoing tests in Toronto with Bell Canada, which he stated are being observed by a number of operators

“It generated fabulous results, and those results have been shared not just with Vodafone, but with a number of operators around the world,” he said. “So, there’s a broad operator consensus that’s being built.”

Dolan noted there will be some additional steps to scale USM with RAN vendors ahead of deployments with operators “but it will be relatively straightforward beyond that end of year through point”.

In the short term, the CEO stated his company has enough cash on hand through the early part of 2026.

“We do plan to fund off of the success of what we’re doing right now in Canada because we’re really getting pretty strong support from operators.”

Once USM becomes commercially available, Dolan stated there is at least a $100 to $500 billion revenue opportunity for Cohere Technologies.

Telstra, Bell Canada, Intel, Juniper Networks, and VMware have invested in Cohere Technologies, while former Vodafone Group CTO Johan Wibergh joined its board last year.

Click here for the full interview.