MUNICH, Germany-Technology company Siemens said it tested a mobile communications network that could transmit up to one gigabit a second, or about 1,000 megabits per second. In comparison, today’s GPRS and CDMA 1xRTT networks transmit around 50 kilobits per second, while some Wi-Fi networks can transmit up to 50 megabits per second.
Siemens said it used an “intelligent antenna system” to reach the blazing speeds. The setup consists of three transmitting and four receiving antennas using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing technology. The antenna system uses multiple antennas simultaneously transmitting different flows of data over one radio channel and frequency band. Siemens said the test network operates in the 5 GHz band and has a bandwidth of 100 MHz.
“Future mobile communication systems will have to utilize the frequency band as efficiently as possible, with the lowest possible transmit power,” said Christoph Caselitz, president of Siemens’ Mobile Networks Division. “With our experimental system, we’ve been able to demonstrate how powerful intelligent antennas can be in combination with OFDM. In doing so, we’ve created a major module for future mobile communication systems.”
