Nortel Networks Ltd. said it has reached what it described as a milestone in a demonstration of OFDM and MIMO technologies, with speeds that transcend current third-generation capabilities.
The company said the combined technologies can support twice as many subscribers as OFDM alone, adding it is “proposing OFDM/MIMO as its evolution vision beyond HSDPA/HSUPA and CDMA 1x EV-DO into 3GPP and 3GPP2 wireless standards.”
OFDM is the base radio technology used by Wi-Fi and WiMAX, while MIMO is an advanced antenna and space-time processing technology, explained Nortel.
The wireless supplier said the combined technology demonstrated large transfers with peak data rates at 37 megabits per second over a standard 5-megahertz PCS mobility band.
“The test network showed that with OFDM and MIMO, wireless subscribers can download a 128 MB file in approximately 30 seconds-four to 10 times faster than today’s 3G wireless networks,” said the vendor.
Nortel said it has been working on this technology for the past six years. In 2001, it demonstrated MIMO in London within an urban setting. In February 2003, it demonstrated OFDM and MIMO peak data rates of 20 Mbps over a 5-megahertz band.
“The recent Ottawa demonstration nearly doubled that speed,” said the company.
The company expects this speed to facilitate such applications as large file transfers, streaming video and mobile gaming.
