NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced that this month it began testing an experimental Super 3G system for mobile communications. With this experiment, DoCoMo will seek to achieve a downlink transmission rate of 300Mbps over a high-speed wireless network.
For people who are unaware, LTE is being branded as Super-3G as this term is more appealing as compared to LTE which would mean nothing to ordinary people.
DoCoMo will begin with an indoor experiment to test transmission speed using one transmitting and one receiving antenna. The company will then expand the experiment to examine downlink transmission by employing up to four Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas for both the base station (transmission side) and mobile station (receiving side); the goal is to achieve a downlink transmission speed of 300Mbps. MIMO is an antenna technology for wireless communications in which different data streams are spatially multiplexed using multiple antennas for both transmission and reception on the same frequency. Also to be examined is the "handover function" — switching of the connection between two base stations.
NTT DoCoMo's Super-3G timetable is available here
The reason i am calling this setup as Super-FOMA is because going back to when 3G was being introduced, DoCoMo wanted to be the first with 3G. As a result, they adopted a 3GPP Release version that wasnt stable and released it as FOMA. Now they are doing the same with LTE. LTE wont be stable in that timeframe so they might end up with Super-FOMA instead of Super-3G.
The company has also been aggressively pursuing 4G system development. In late December, the carrier came close to hitting a 5Gbit/sec. data transmission speed from an experimental 4G system to a receiver moving at 10 kilometers per hour.
Possibly it may be the first one with a 4G system and it might end up as Hyper-FOMA :)
